Bay 12 Games Forum

One kind of cool thing that may result from magic in some worlds is "alien geometry", or to be more descriptive, things like rooms or caves that are bigger on the inside (or smaller!), or doors that lead back into the same room, and so on. These videos have some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEB11PQ9Eo8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xFbRecjKQA

You could imagine for instance:

1. A forest coated in perpetual fog, where once you enter you can't get back out again (unless you strike a deal with one of the local faeries to help you get out) because everywhere you turn you end up somewhere else deep in the forest. Bonus points if the fog and weird dimensional stuff is expanding and threatens to consume the continent in this cursed forest.

2. An ancient fortress full of strange apparitions, where you are able to make 7 right turns in a row yet still be entering new rooms each time, or fall through a trapdoor into an incredibly deep pit, but you look up and can simply climb back out a couple of meters (and it may or may not be the same place you fell from!).

3. A tower that looks fairly normal, but if you go inside and start climbing it's literally infinitely tall, and the room at the top can only be reached through its window or via teleportation (can never be reached from the staircase).

4. A really long underground tunnel from the outside, but it's only a few steps long when you go inside (ie it's shorter on the inside).

5. Chests that are far larger inside than out (maybe leading inside a mysterious large building that can't be found anywhere in the world except the chest), or perhaps even lead out of other chests if you climb in (for this to work, obviously climbing into a chest/container would need to be an action one can do).

Prime candidates for this sort of thing would be structures (or locations) made by eldritch/demonic/divine forces, or that are under the influence of such otherworldly beings (or some powerful artifact), or were the epicenter of some magical disaster/accident that may have damaged the fabric of space itself.

This feature would mostly be noticeable in adventure mode, but fort mode would be affected as well when magical disasters occur or reality warping forces/beings start to affect the fort, or if you embark in a region that is already affected, or when remotely viewing raids that occur in such a location (as remote-viewing this stuff is a planned feature).

On a programming level this would be implemented more or less way it is in other games; basically just portals (which are already a planned feature), which would be either leading to other places in the normal worldmap (usually nearby/in the same general location) resulting in weird spatial topology, or to special "pocket dimensions" that may be visually based on/look like the general area they were made from.

But what separates this from "normal" portals, is that rather than having obvious tells/visual effects (like glowing flashy borders or just being solid colors with lightning and stuff), they are seamless, to preserve the illusion properly of it being "weird space" rather than just portals. Also the end location usually (but not always) looks like it "fits in" as part of the locale.

The space that you will reach upon passing through is what should be rendered on the other side, rather than what is *actually* there according to the game engine; for instance, you don't want to be seeing a given room through the weird doorway and then be visually "teleported" to somewhere else, you want to walk in and have it feel seamless, like that's really where it leads topologically speaking. Unfortunately, for many reasons, this kind of rendering will be... Awkward to resolve, outside of adventure mode [1].

Such portals would need to be placed carefully so that you can't see the edges easily (if you can see the "real" room just around the side of the portal this kind of exposes the trick); doorways or corridors or cave entrances, or really any opening with solid edges/walls around it, are the best places to put these things. On the sides of solid walls may also be a decent location for them.

If a piece of the "wall" is mined out, it may be necessary to stretch out/change the shape and size of the portal, because with normal portals having their "gateway" damaged it makes sense to break or disable it (or just have the portal float there in midair), but we're trying to hide that it's a portal.

[1] The problem with fort mode is, say there are 2 doors on top of each other, one of which leads to a normal room, and the other to a large cave somewhere far away; you move up and down between the z-levels; what do you see behind each door during this change? How do you move the frame of reference to the cave so you can move up and down in there?

And how can you see what was actually originally behind the door? Like if you originally built your stockpile room there for instance, but then magical disaster struck and now the door leads dwarves to the caverns instead; how do you actually view the stockpile room itself, given that the game engine probably still considers it to be in the same place, just inaccessible from that angle?

For that matter, take a simple "bigger on the inside" room; say you have a large, open room, with a 3x3 column in the middle, and inside it leads somewhere way larger; how could you possibly render this? The space is already taken up by the normal room. Perhaps holes in the ground that lead elsewhere could be rendered, but anything on 1 z-level/horizontal wouldn't really work smoothly with fort mode because you see the entire level and have no real way to change your "perspective" (fixed top-down graphics really aren't ideal for this kind of thing).

In comparison, adventure mode makes this way easier because of the "fog of war" and limited field of view hiding most of the world, so you explore the cave by going in there, and you have to find the stockpile room by walking into it, and the central column room would render based on your field of view.

There's plans for a siege update of sorts after the steam release and before the "big wait" for myth and magic; this is good, because one of the issues with DF is that despite it's reputation, it's pretty easy to, using the game mechanics, just utterly opt out of a lot of the external threats at any time by using various "easy cheeses", like sealing all entrances entirely (since no enemy can break down walls/raised drawbridges), or using traps to great effect.

It's important I think, that this be solved as much as possible/practical before leaving the game unupdated mostly for several years, and I have some suggestions for it.

Currently, these are the plans of what is on the table for the siege update already (removed one item that will rely on much later updates from the list):

https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

Improved sieges

    Eliminate remaining edge-of-map exploits
    More highly trained attacking soldiers when appropriate
    Many trap exploits are handled above by requiring more to produce a trap, things like cage traps should make more sense vs. large creatures etc. (respect strength/ability vs. material, large cages might be separate object)
    Coming up with a plan to overcome pathing obstacles to reach fortress innards
        Ability to dig (optionally, default on)
        Ability to build bridges/ramps
        Ability to use grappling hooks/ladders/climb
    Learning from mistakes if first attempted assault plan fails badly
        For instance, if many siegers are killed, caged, etc. in a given hallway, they shouldn't generally go that way again, even if that means building/climbing/digging

This is great and definitely gets at most of the major things, but I'd like to recommend a few more, some of which are perhaps less important than fixing the above exploits (and also add a few "notes" about the above).

Tile Breaking

Tile breaking should be do-able not just by "siege miners" with pickaxes, but also wild creatures/monsters like giants, titans, dragons etc. Their ability to break tiles would ideally be based on their size and strength, versus the tile they're trying to break (pretty much anything should be able to smash a featherwood drawbridge down, since it basically has the properties of styrofoam), although this would perhaps be infeasible before a map rewrite of how tile data and pathfinding work, so maybe in the meantime tile-breaking in general could be restricted to beasts with a specific large size/strength (or raw token), and to siege members capable of digging.

Digging/tile breaking in all cases should respect the strength/properties of the tile versus the power of the breaker, in terms of time it takes to break, though "instant" might sometimes be the right speed.

Climbing

Not much to say here, other than that smoothed stone walls generally shouldn't be scalable just by regular climbing without tools (or unless they're a creature with innate wall climbing abilities, like giant spiders), and that one such tool should be special metal "claws" (don't know how to describe it) used to stab into the wall to assist climbing; dual knives would work as well probably. Such climbing tools would make climbing easier even for the less skilled climbers.

Legendary Warriors

Being able to get squads of legendary soldiers in a few short years is a bit absurd both thematically and mechanically; I'm not sure what the solution to this should be exactly, but generally it shouldn't be easy or guaranteed to be able to get legendary fighters, especially in a short time. While a longer-term "skill system rework" may be good, in the short term for this update:

• Some kind of much harsher curve for reaching the higher skill levels.
• Maybe some kind of cap on learning that can be done without actual practice.
• Maybe skill learning rates/curves could be different for different individuals? Like most dwarves just won't really reach legendary even with decades of training, while some incredibly rare prodigies become legendary in only 5 years with a spear (but not with other things).

Doors

I suggest 2 different kinds of door, more or less. Regular, lockpickable doors like we have now, meant to represent personal doors that people use for bedrooms or village houses and such, and bigger, tougher doors meant to represent fortress/castle entrances. The normal doors would be rather quick to break by anything that can break doors (unless it's feasible to allow anything to break a door if the door is weak enough; even a human could realistically break a normal door with an axe) rather than how it is now (doors can be broken, but slow down quite a bit), contingent of course on the strength of the breaker.

The big doors might potentially be multi-tile like current drawbridges, but even if not, they will take slightly more resources to make, and be stronger/take some time to break even for big monsters, time comparable to a wall.

Elven Civs

Elves have a lot of potential in general related to their apparent affiliation with plants and nature magic, and while that potential would likely be explored more in myth&magic, I think a couple of things could potentially be done in the pre-magic siege update as well to make them more interesting, especially since their civ doesn't really have digging tools available to them (so they wouldn't benefit from tile breaking additions).

Elven agents (maybe pretending to be normal elven visitors), may secretly plant "special" seeds in your fortress, which when the time for the siege comes, will be "activated" by druidic magic and instantly grown into plant monsters which attack your fort from the inside. Such seeds may perhaps instead also be grown into special "traps" that function like normal traps (either trapping or injuring whomever stands on them), but are ostensibly made of living plants.

Another thing that might be appropriate for them is enhancing their wooden weapons with syndrome-inflicting fluids smeared on them in case they manage to get a scratch, and for arrows, perhaps attaching their magic seeds to the ends so that they can ensnare targets in vines, or fire the arrows over your walls and have their plant creatures sprout up on the other side.

Specific Creatures

Okay, this and the next point aren't strictly speaking "sieges", but it's close enough to the topic I think.

Hydras should be able to regrow missing body parts (mostly for the sake of the traditional heads, but the other parts make sense too). There's already a syndrome for regrowing body parts, so I suspect this could mostly be done by just adding a way for a creature to have "innate" syndromes that always apply to them (you could do something with a secretion on an internal organ right now, but that's a kind of weird and hacky way of doing it). Undead hydras of course should not heal at all (if anything they should be rotting, not healing!), so there needs to be a way for the syndrome to be disabled when they are turned undead.

Liquid/Gas/Dust Creatures

Forgotten beasts and other things made of non-solid/amorphous matter are pretty weak right now, and there seem to be a few low-hanging fruit options to make them more interesting; these could also make the likes of non-beasts like blood/mud men more interesting to deal with.

I suggested this stuff elsewhere (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=178483.0), but will summarize a few of the points here (if you've read it before, I recommend checking again; the original post has had lots of information added to it/edited since the initial post):

• Liquid/gas creatures pathfind through/move unimpeded through any tiles that water/magma/miasma/smoke can flow through (grates, bars and fortifications and such). Dust/powder creatures could maybe do the same? I dunno, the portrayal is less consistent for them. Since this relates to pathfinding stuff, this might not be doable before the map rewrite, but I could be wrong and it might turn out to be easy enough for the pre-big-wait siege update (so it's worth suggesting just in case).
• Allow all such creatures to escape cages instantly. Glass terrariums/aquariums will still contain them because those presumably don't have bars/gaps. Beasts and titans are already TRAPAVOID, but they can be trapped if they are unconscious or webbed, and this would also affect the likes of blood men while still letting terrariums work.
• Speaking of being webbed, that probably doesn't make sense for at least liquid or gas creatures (dust may be different), so they should be immune to that as well.
• Give them abilities that allow them to suffocate/choke/drown creatures. A smoke monster's punch might not so much as bruise, but it can certainly shove an arm down your windpipe (where you definitely don't want there to be smoke). And a giant blob made of any liquid or dust can surely engulf and drown anyone that will fit inside it (even if you are freed, getting water or sand out of your lungs isn't a promising prospect).
• Immunity or at least resistance to edge damage, since such creatures traditionally are resistant to it; stabbing a puddle just temporarily displaces the water, and not by much; you need blunt force to splash the pieces away from the main body.
• Give them all the innate ability to heal all their tissues very quickly, or even immunity to certain classes of injury beyond just edge damage (what I'm getting at is that you cannot "mangle" or "twist" water, it's amorphous).
• You also cannot "grab" water or smoke.
• Give them the ability to absorb their own removed body parts/pieces that may have been smashed off, in order to fill in missing tissues/body parts. If you smash off an arm, you better make sure you knocked it far away, or they can just absorb and regrow it almost right away. If the blood man touches that puddle of corrupt blood, they can absorb it and fill in whatever pieces of tissue/body parts they are missing.
• Might make sense to let them heal while in contact with ANY substance of the same material as them; water titans being perpetually healed by sitting in a lake for example, or smoke monsters having great synergy with any co-incidental fires that are going on.

A general weakness to water would make sense for basically all of them (it could dilute them out of existence) except for the ones already made of water.

EDIT:

Worldgen

Sort of related to this, and I think it fits; taking more factors into account when deciding the outcome of battles in worldgen. A fuller description/breakdown of this can be found in this suggestion: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=180533.0

There are some classes of potential Steam achievement that a player could get by accident either through modding or just playing the vanilla game with unusual embarks/adventurers, and thus they might feel disappointed like "oh man I didn't earn this, it was too easy" when for example, they earned the achievement for "become legendary at a skill" because they played as a barn owl man that [NATURAL_SKILL:CLIMBING:15]. Or maybe a hypothetical achievement for managing to survive X years even if you embarked without food or drink, obtained by accident because they played as a species with [NO_EAT][NO_DRINK].

So basically, when writing achievements, consider some of the ways that through modding, or future game updates with more procedural content, or even the current vanilla raws (so many animal people are legendary climbers!), someone could plausibly gain them by accident, and do some sanity checks before granting the achievement to prevent this.

Such checks should be used carefully/sparingly though; for example, an achievement for stopping an invasion shouldn't be invalidated just because your species has good NATURAL_SKILL's that gave you an edge. Sure, someone motivated to deliberately cheat could give themselves inflated skills and tissues made of iron, but they could also use third-party tools to command the Steam server to grant them achievements for free (ie call the server and make it think you earned it genuinely). The goal of what I'm proposing isn't to stop cheating (that would be impossible anyway, there's always a way), the goal is to stop people feeling cheated by accidentally getting achievements that were meant to be a challenge.

Future updates to the game are planning to include some controversial mechanics, the most obvious one that comes to mind being siegers digging tiles; this one in particular will be configurable by a config option according to the dev page, but casual audiences (especially paying ones that will be coming on Steam) have gotten angry about this sort of thing before with other games, even when all it takes to solve their problem is changing a config option (one example that sticks in my mind is the "auto-jump" in Minecraft, which pissed a lot of people off because it's on by default even though the majority of people want it off).

So my suggestion; step 1, when the game has an update, show the changelog on the first startup after the update has been installed. Now, that's a common thing many games do with changelogs, but I have an extra idea which AFAIK is less common:

If an update adds config/init options with defaults that are liable to be controversial, show them right there and then as soon as the game is started, right after the changelog, so that people know it can be disabled (and in fact can click the button right there and then to change the setting if they want) and so they will have no excuses/complaints about not knowing it was possible to disable the thing they don't like. Make the checkbox and message about the implications of the option nice and prominent (so they don't just click "ok" without reading it).

Also, to avoid part of the problem Minecraft has with the auto-jump, do make sure that config settings persist between updates (if the option still exists that is); people won't be pleased if they suddenly have siegers dig their way in when they specifically disabled that.

DwarfCrafted - v1.2 [47.05]

NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT PRODUCT. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG.

This mod aims to translate the things unique to the world of Minecraft (creatures, plants, ores etc) into the world and spirit of Dwarf Fortress. This includes spinoffs in the Minecraft franchise, such as Minecraft Dungeons (MCD), to a lesser extent Minecraft Earth (MCE) and Minecraft Story Mode (MCSM), and whatever may come out in the future.

DFFD Download Link Here

Changelog Link Here

This mod will not add anything from Minecraft that exists in the real world (eg, animals), even if Vanilla DF doesn't have it; other mods should be used for real world stuff. The exception to this rule will be if it's strongly tied to a fantasy thing somehow; for example, if cows didn't already exist in DF, I would have added them for the sake of mooshrooms.

This mod was created with the help of the Dwarf Fortress RAW language server extension, which I recommend to anyone wanting to make Dwarf Fortress mods, either for the first time or as a veteran.

Installation

Copy-paste all files this mod's `/objects` folder into the `/raw/objects/` folder from Dwarf Fortress.

Content

Civilizations

• Villagers: a trade-loving, pacifistic civilization.
  
• Illagers: a power hungry and evil civilization, though slightly less chaotic than goblins.
  
• Piglins: a civilization of lawless, thieving hunters who love a good scrap.
  

Creatures from Minecraft

• Creepers: stealthy plantlike quadrupeds with sad looking faces. They explode when they get near.
  
• Testificates: these are the villagers; a species that are essentially identical to humans, but have tall bald heads and massive noses. A little stronger than humans too, and greedier, more singleminded, but somehow less vain.
  
• Illagers: testificates whose skin is sickly and grey thanks to use of dark magic long ago in their past; was it worth the cost? Some among them are born with magical powers.
  
• Piglins: greedy, messy, and not very bright, these piglike creatures come from a hellish plane and are well used to extreme heat, being nearly fireproof.
  
• Ravagers: massive beasts created by illagers to use as beasts of burden and war, and which all seem to have faces suspiciously like those of testificates, humans, dwarves, elves or goblins.
  
• Allays: small, friendly nature spirits who love music and dance.
  
• Phantoms: legless, winged undead reptiles that lurk at night in swarms, generally in places of death and evil.
  
• Silverfish: ugly, swarming, huge bugs (huge for a bug anyway!) with horrid hairy tendrils all over their body. They lurk underground.
  
• Slimes: green cubes made of living slime, found in swamps and the underground.
  
• Mooshrooms: underground-dwelling cows which have mushrooms growing out of their bodies. They come with many different types of mushroom - red, brown, plump helmet, dimple cup, tower-cap, and fungiwood.
  
• Wardens: shhhh! Treat lightly, these things lurk in the deepest darkest caverns, and are blind, but they have excellent abilities to hear and smell to offset that, and are terribly strong.
  
• Shriekers: found in the underground, disturbing these immobile growths of sculk and bone will lead to the appearance of wardens!
  
• Guardians and Elder Guardians: ocean-dwelling artifices made of prismarine; they look like one eyed fish with huge spikes, and they can fire beams of electricity from their eyes that both shock and fatigue you. Their elders can fatigue you just with a glance.
  
• Glow Squids: little squids that live in pools in deep caverns, and glow.
  
• Iron Golems: big golems made of iron created long ago; they are often used by the villagers for work.
  
• Snow Golems: magically animated snowmen wearing mysteriously never-rotting pumpkins. They toss snowballs.
  
• Endermen: mysterious and tall, intelligent creatures from another dimension; they flicker in and out of existence, seemingly trying to go somewhere, but failing.
  
• Endermites: vicious little parasites that tend to appear when endermen "flicker".
  
• Shulkers: mollusks that also seem to have flickering problems and be sort of ill? They can't actually be found anywhere except arena mode because I can't figure out where to put them.
  
• Enderdragons: megabeasts that inflict a matter dissolution syndrome with their breath and their body.
  
• Withers: demonic, 3-headed undead megabeasts dripping with a slick that causes living things to rot and die.
  
• Wither Skeletons: tall, horned undead dripping with the same slick as withers, they are found deep underground and originate from a hellish plane.
  
• Ghasts: gigantic floating, crying heads with tentacles dangling below them. They spit fireballs, and their tears have special healing properties.
  
• Magma Cubes: cubical chunks of living magma with a creamy consistency, surrounded by a rocky crust.
  
• Blazes: floating heads with many solid rods levitating beneath them. They fling fireballs at whatever they see as an "intruder".
  
• Striders: armless bipeds that stride across magma like it's nothing, though in turn they cannot tolerate normal temperatures.
  
• Hoglins: huge piglike monsters with large tusks and a nearly fireproof body.
  
• Vexes: evil spirits summoned by evokers, they are believed by some to be allays whose hearts have been corrupted to evil ends.
  
• Fangs: large sets of snapping fangs summoned by evokers as weapons; their origins are unclear.
  

Creatures from lost mob votes

• Barnacles (Mob A from the 2017 Minecon vote): sea-dwelling monsters with massive 4-hinged maws and a long tongue for dragging prey into the depths.
  
• Chompers (Mob C from the 2017 Minecon vote): huge ambush predators that live underground and in deserts. Their heads are enourmous for their size.
  
• Wildfires (Mob D from the 2017 Minecon vote): floating heads with 4 shields levitating beneath them. They fling fireballs at whatever they see as an "intruder", and can produce a smokey shockwave.
  
• Glares (2021 Minecon vote): small flying clumps of moss with glowing eyes peering out; they're known for their urge to warn people of danger, by means of getting grumpy and assertively grumbling.
  
• Copper Golems (2021 Minecon vote): small little golems made of copper, with lightning rods on their heads.
  
• Moobloom (2020 Minecon vote): cows with buttercups growing from their backs, found only in magical places alongside the likes of fairies and unicorns.
  

Creatures from Minecraft Earth

• Furnace Golems: essentially iron golems, but with fiery furnaces build into their bodies, which nobody knows how to operate anymore.
  
• Melon Golems: magically animated snowmen with mysteriously never-rotting melons instead of heads. They toss snowballs and can spit watermelon seeds as a weapon.
  
• Moolips: a variant of moobloom with pink flowers instead.
  
• Cluckshrooms: underground-dwelling chickens with mushrooms sprouting from their bodies. They come in all the same variants as mooshrooms.
  
• Bone Spiders: gigantic underground-dwelling spiders with a layer of bone protecting their cephalothorax, and the top of their abdomen and legs.
  
• Hyper Rabbits: a hyperactive species of rabbit with long whiskers, messy fur, and an unusual color scheme. Inspired by official concept art that never made it into the actual game.
  
• Magma Cows: cows made of magma, found deep underground. Inspired by official concept art that never made it into the actual game.
  

Creatures from Minecraft Dungeons (including DLC)

• Tropical Slimes (Hidden Depths): cube-shaped chunks of living slime and water, with tropical fish swimming around in their watery layers. They live in oceans.
  

Creatures from Minecraft Story Mode

• Prismarine Soldiers: tentacle-bearded, magically animated statues made of prismarine, made to guard now nonexistent undersea temples.
  
• Prismarine Colossuses: megabeasts which essentially are just much larger prismarine soldiers.
  
• Creeders: horrid abominations that take the explosiveness of creepers, and add arachnophobia.
  

Creatures not canon to Minecraft

• Stalkers: based off early ravager designs, these creatures are much like ravagers in origin, but are taller and lankier, with a venomous spit.
  

Stones & Ores

• Prismarine:  a kind of rare undersea stone that shifts colors between various hues of blue and green.
  
• Netherrack: oddly soft rock from a hellish plane. It can be worked into netherware, much like clay. This stone is found only in some titans and forgotten beasts.
  
• Nether Quartz: a gorgeous white quartz from a hellish plane. This gem is found only in some titans and forgotten beasts.
  
• Glowstone: brightly glowing crystal from a hellish plane. This glasslike crystal is found only in some titans and forgotten beasts.
  
• End Stone: a pale, highly durable stone from another plane of reality. This mysterious stone is found only in some titans and forgotten beasts.
  

Plants

• Giant Azaleas: huge azaleas that grow as large as an oak tree.
  
• Glow Lichen: a glowing underground fungus.
  
• Sculk: terrible plants that grow in veins deep underground. They possess a morbid presence.
  

Interactions/Magic

• Evoker: a caste of illager that summons vexes and fangs.
  
• Iceologer (2020 Minecon vote): a caste of illager that summons either big chunks of ice, or deadly sharp icicles.
  
• Mage (MCD Arcade mode): a caste of illager with telekinetic powers, mostly consisting of pushing things at a distance.
  

Planned Content

Note that the below list is in no particular order, and is subject to change.

Sometimes in myth and fairy tales you get creatures with a bunch of psychological or "legal" limitations/rules that don't make total sense logically speaking, but are still flavorful and interesting. These wouldn't be well suited for all worlds (so this kind of thing should be controllable with some kind of worldgen slider), but for some it could be good.

Broadly speaking, this suggestion is about compulsions to do certain things, regardless of it being really detrimental to the being in question.

- Counting numbers of objects before being able to walk past them. Traditional vampire weakness.
- Cannot enter a home without permission. Also vampires (side note, I saw a show once where vampire slayers defended themselves from an imminent attack by quickly setting up a tiny little tent, and it worked; flexibility in what counts as a home could be fun).
- Must clean up all messes/scattered objects into containers if they see them.
- Compulsively return greetings. Weakness of the Japanese kappa.
- Must answer questions if asked.
- Must answer questions honestly if they respond (not necessarily the same thing as being forced to answer).
- More generally, cannot tell lies at all (even if they weren't asked a question), though they might be able to omit certain important information.
- Cannot break promises/contracts (can be sneaky with the wording/consequences though, or find alternative ways to break the spirit of the promise; for example, one Irish legend has a leprachaun who was forced to reveal the location of his buried pot of gold and tie a hankerchief around the flower above it, and promise not to remove it before the guy came back with a shovel to dig it up; he didn't remove it, but he did put identical hankerchiefs on every other flower in the field).
- Cannot refuse anything offered as a gift, no matter how dangerous it may be to accept it.
- Must obey someone who uses a specially phrased command/instruction/special words. One interpretation of this is the traditional "demons true name" letting you control them.
- Cannot eat/drink certain substances/foods.
- Has a curfew to be in a certain place before a specific time.

Many more types of compulsions are certainly possible, and I encourage others to suggest their own ideas for magical compulsions/rules for quirky magical beings.

As far as I can gather, the [ARENA_RESTRICTED] token exists to prevent spoilers and make those creatures a surprise when encountered. This guess is mostly based on which creatures have this token applied.

But it could be good if they would be unlocked for the arena permanently once you have encountered one in one of the other modes. "Encountering" one would add its ID to a list stored outside the normal save games, and creatures in this list will be added to the arena list even if they have [ARENA_RESTRICTED].

What "ecnountering" means... I'm not sure exactly, since just having one appear on the map doesn't really mean you've "ecnountered" it, as you might not even see it before it leaves the map again. Certainly loo(k)ing at it should count though, or viewing it in the creature/unit list.

However, it may be a good idea to have another thing used for procgenned creatures (especially unique ones like demons) to prevent them being spawned even after meeting them, or to at least prevent their ID's being added to the global list, so that 2 TITAN22 or whatever can't be spawned just because you met a different procedurally generated TITAN22 in another world. Maybe a "save specific encounter list" instead of the global one for such creatures (of course, nothing stopping playings from manually adding TITAN22 to the global list anyway).

For the unique ones that are meant to be super difficult or impressive/mysterious monsters or something, it may be good to also make their addition to even the local save list more strict than just encountering them.

For the Steam release, each save should have an associated image displayed beside it in the list of saves, to make for more distinctive identification of worlds/saves.

Fort Mode

A world/save with an active fort should use a screenshot of the fort (will not include any UI stuff), and this screenshot will be taken/updated every time the game is saved (including autosaves or save/exit).

It will take the image directly from whatever Z-level you were on when you saved (so it won't always be the surface), though it might be a good idea if it took 2 screenshots; one of the surface, one of wherever you were when saving, and these could be swapped between in the save menu on a per-world basis (or maybe it would be better to just have a toggle that switches the save image for all worlds at once?).

Alternatively, maybe the player could set a per-world "snapshot Z-level" to use, so they can identify the fort by what they see as the most distinctive layer (if that layer doesn't change much though, this has the disadvantage of not making backups/autosaves distinct from each other).

Adventure Mode

This is the easiest and most straightforward one, take a screenshot of whatever is on the screen visible to the adventurer (basically what you see in adventure mode, but unobscured by the UI), and use that. By default (without clicking on the save to zoom in to see the whole image at least), the image should be cropped/zoomed in enough to make the adventurer themselves easily seen on the save menu.

World

A newly generated world with no active fort or adventurer in it yet should use a screenshot/image of the world map. It should be possible in some way to select/zoom in on the image to see it at full resolution (even if this is just a matter of selecting the save and seeing the bigger image when clicking).

If worldgen has continued, such as by playing in a fort for several years, the world save image should be updated in case the world map itself has changed visibly (like maybe new sites were founded; those should be shown on the map!).

Even while playing as an adventurer/fort, it should be possible to swap between the world map screenshot and the adventurer/fort screenshot (after all, the save is first and foremost a world, forts and adventurers are temporary!).

Past Forts/Adventurers

It should be possible to cycle the image from the world, through all fortresses/adventurers who are available to be reclaimed/unretired (the most recent save/image for each fort or adventurer will be retained until they are dead or un-reclaimable). At least, this would be possible when no forts/adventurers are active (maybe it should only be possible between the world and the current thing when one is active).