Bay 12 Games Forum

In the la-la land that is the distant future of development, alternate planes have been mentioned.

I wanted to suggest that the plainswalking support not only physical planes, but mental as well.  (That is, you go there, but your body doesn't come with you.)

For Tormy and Dracos

Suggestion for a Suggestion scoring system.

Making a suggestion that's in dev_next -4
Making a suggestion that's in the bloats/dev notes -3
Making a suggestion that's been suggested more than 10 times -2
Making a suggestion that's been suggested before -1

Making a suggestion that acknowledges previous suggestions and modifies/developes them.  +1
Making a truly original suggestion +5
Making a truly original suggestion that generates 3+ pages of commentary discussion +10

Modifiers:
Encouraging a suggestion that has been suggested more than 10 times before -1

So I've decided to do something about the deplorable state of tutorials and the difficulty getting into DF.

I've started writing a tutorial fortress.  The basic thought is to describe my thought processes as I go through the various states of starting up a basic fortress.  It's not intended to be a spoiler or cheat guide, just a simple projects fort that new players can take a look at.  I've already backed up a save at the embark, and once I get the food system set up I'm going to export another save.

My process so far has been to play the game as I normally would, but stopping to describe any projects or decisions I make along the way.  (The first room I dug had explicit instructions on how to designate a dig, but after that I just said 'dig another room'.  I'm taking screenshots as well.

So far I have tackled editing the init.txt (for screen size, tile size, etc), generating a new world (including the seeds), finding a site, embark profiles, and the first season of digging in.  Ideally, I would like to cover the first set of immigrants and traders, and finish setting up the sustainable farming operations.  I might get so far as the initial set of production trees. 

When I get a stable fortress I'll make another save as a 'hard to die stable starting point'.  At that point I'm open for suggestions to what needs to be done next, up to and especially including lending out the fort to let someone describe setting up magma operations, cleaning out the magma pipe, setting up advanced industries, noble acquisition and methods to keep them happy, and a series on breaching the aquifer.

The site I'm at has sand, magma, an aquifer (in some biomes) and is in a temperate climb.  The only downside is the lack of goblins, and I think a second fort in a haunted neighborhood near a goblin fort may be a good tutorial part 2.

We can flesh out the rules later, but I'm pretty sure I'd like to keep it 'do your part and don't really confuse people by mucking around with stuff that's working.'

Upon completion, I'd like to put the text up on the wiki with links to the saves at the various states, and maybe links to the individual topics as they come up.

I'll post the pics and seeds and whatnot when I get a chance.  Any thoughts?

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I'll move this status to the top after the topic gets moving.

Link to Wiki Page :

This needs a lot of work.  I've still got to get the images up and find a home for the save games.  Wikilinks need to be done, and the standard key images should be inserted where appropriate.  Spelling should be good, but the grammar is probably atrocious.  It's complete as far as I've played.  I will post new sections as I get them.

Current Status:

Have:
    Installing the Game and reviewing the ini files.
    Generating a new world from a seed and finding an embark site
    Selecting an embark load-out
    Initial dig in
    Level 0 industries (mining, woodcutting, plant gathering)
    Building Construction (Including blocked squares and menu navigation)

To Do in Current Rev: (After this stuff is set up, I'm going to export a final save for this ark.)
    Farming Production Tree
    Trade Production Tree
    Setting up Dwarf Rooms
    Trading with the Caravan
    Immigrants
    Militia Training

Future Revs: (Stuff that can and should be done on this map)
    Aquifer
    Magma
    Advanced Industries (Cloth and Metalsmithing)
    Power Systems (Mechanical waterfall)
    Kobolds
    Nobles
    The Economy
    Death Traps
    Moods (Hopefully I can get the top stuff done before I get one...)
    Tantrum Spiral

Future Forts: (Stuff that's unfortunately not available on the initial map)
    Sieges and Goblins
    Scary places
    Rivers and Brooks

Don't Want: (Things I don't want to encourage or cover)
    Killing immigrants and Nobles.
    Excessive traps (players can figure this out on their own)
    Perpetual Motion Machines
    Optimizations and Advanced Techniques (make playstyles demos later.  My goal is to have players understand how to play, not preach a/the right way.  More to the point, once a player learns how to read maps and the wiki, there are more efficient ways to do this than a tutorial.)   

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Granite's Law : As the length of any suggestion thread grows longer, the probability of someone tying in one of the most common suggestions approaches 1.

I'd like to collect a list of 'clever' things people have done with the raws. 

When I say clever, I don't mean something that's player creative, more like programmer creative.  The two examples that convinced me to start this was the zombie creatures that drop poisonous parasites after they are killed, and the exploding 'animals'  In short, it's easy to look at the tags and say 'if I add this, it'll do that', but not so easy to add two or three things to get non-obvious effects.

Part of the eventual goal of this is to throw these into the modding section of the wiki, which is sorely lacking in examples of how to accomplish specific goals.

Sex matters.

In some cases a lot.

I'm trying to get all the ways that DF does not currently respect this into one place.  So far I've got

Gender Species differences : There's a big fancy word (sexual dimorphism) for this, but guys have beards, lions have manes, the femal mosquito is the one that sucks your blood, ants have queens, and a host of other cases where the male is physically different from the female

Gender Naming Conventions : Linguistically, there is no 'male names' or 'female names'.  This would be extremely helpful in terms of not assigning girls to the military, etc.

Gender Dress Conventions : Would be nice if me dwarves stopped wearing the Jenny clothes, eh?

Gender Behaviour and Ethics Conventions : Boys play with tin soldiers, girls play with dollies.  (It's ok for guys to be half naked and kill animals but society frowns on chicks doing the same.)  Obviously this will differ by species and civ

Gestation Periods:  Right now, there is no effect of being pregnant.

That's all I've got now.  Anything else?

Largely inspired by the exotic wares discussion...

Winter:

Brings to mind a certain problem that may be coming in the caravan arc.  As it stands, the trading cycle for a single caravan lasts a good part of the season.  At max we could fit 8 caravan in a year, coming and going all the time.

I think, however, that over time we're going to want more.  Sure, we can get a caravan from the human civ's capital and say that it is really the collected goods of the entire civ sent to the capital and travelling out from there.  The problem is that that limits you to trading with a finite number of civs.  Also, how does this work when you are the capital?

Alternately, you can view each caravan as a seperate entity, separate from any given civ.  (I'm thinking of caravans as an entity here that does it's own trading, with wagons and donkeys, guards and merchants).

Once the caravan arc is in, it will be possible for these giant caravans to move from town to town around the map, buying low and selling high, and picking up a little bit of everything.  (This shouldn't replace consignment shipments from the mountainhome though).

Under this system you'd get 1 caravan in the fall from the mountainhome carrying extra expensive things that you asked for, and 0-3 other caravans throughout the rest of the year, depending on where they are on the map.  Depending on how much profit they make and how much they need what you trade for, they'll stop by more or less often.

Ok, now on the the actual suggestion:
Allow the player to do this.  The right answer would probably be a submode of adventure mode, but in the spirit of MoO 2's optional combat, I'd like to think you could play this mode without actually fighting (bastardize the worldgen combat for this, plus sticking to the roads would be pretty safe)  You'd be able to buy wagons and donkeys.  Basic play would be extremely basic, you'd travel from site to site, buying and selling mixing weight and value.  You wouldn't even need to load the actual sites, just skip to a trading screen from the overmap.

Thoughts?

TL/DR  Make caravans not based on civs but actually travelling traders.  Also, let players control a caravan as a play mode.

I'm aware that there's SOMETHING planned in this vein, not sure what.