Bay 12 Games Forum

I've never had any trouble with elves, actually. They are insulting and complain when I cut trees, but no fortress has yet been significantly inconvenienced by their antics. And the nobles are annoying sometimes, but they give some objectives to the game once you have gotten past the "fight for survival" phase of gameplay. So I guess I don't really hate either of them.

DON'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN'T DO!

All female dwarves have beards. It's a fact.

Except when they don't. Ha!

In the real world, just walking next to a pool of magma without some kind of heat-resistant space suit will be incredibly uncomfortable and most likely lethal. Adding that to DF might not be a very good idea, messing around with magma is fun, and making your dwarves combust from being near the stuff would seriously limit the applications. But I thought this up anyway and want to share it.

The magma forges (and smelters, and other things) could only require magma somewhere below the building instead of on the level right below the building, much like wells do. The distance would still not be safe, especially since the dwarf would be directly above the magma, but still a lot safer. Magma buildings could require additional construction materials for all those implied structures required to get the magma up. Imps would need some climbing ability to still be threatening.

Having the magma buildings far above the actual magma would also be good if the volcanoes become more active, as I have heard is the plan some day. The magma level could fluctuate a bit without destroying everything.

Hot air balloons are scheduled for the Steampunk Arc, which isn't scheduled at all. I expect trains might fall to that category as well. Some minecarts might actrually really make it to the game once Toady finishes all the other parts of the game from his underground fallout shelter following the Robot War of -86.

And whenever I hear of explosives in DF, I think of the battle of Helms Deep in LotR, where Saruman blasts a hole to the wall with something that was obviously gunpowder in the movie, most likely gunpowder in the book, and seen by those present as just another devious wizard trick wizards can do. Explosives can work in a fantasy setting, as long as they are rarely used, expensive, often not worth the effort and only understood by those already up to their necks in esoteric lore.

So, if explosives get put in the game, there should be some strict system in place to see that not everyone gets them. At the simplest it could require a master-level alchemist. Or, if some kind of technological discovery system gets put in, tracking down old books written by some half-forgotten mercury-crazed alchemists of old and interpreting their secret paranoid alchemy code and experimenting with the formula a bit trying to make it usable, all without blowing your arms off (which might still require a master-class alchemist). Or, just give explosives only to wizards, and restrict them from dwarves altogether. Controlling a wizard tower is one of the far future goals, and giving them access to toys others don't get would be an easy way to establish some uniqueness.

Well, adventurers should probably be able to ride things, and playing as something other than dwarves (and the gameplay actually being different) is planned for the far future. So I guess mounts will be added as a possibility, whether or not dwarves will be able to use them in the vanilla game.

Right after alien invasions and water molecules.

What happens if you leave the infinity part running for three seconds?

How about randomly scrambling all the keys every minute to simulate... Uh... The evolving language making dwarves misinterpret your orders? And instead of crawling past each other in narrow hallways, the dwarves could be trampled to death. And make all dwarves just move around randomly instead of doing whatever they're supposed to be doing.

On the topic of the actual topic, language selection sounds like a fine thing to add, along with the other interface stuff that will arrive some time after the Space Elevator. And making dwarven a selectable language would be just great, if it ever becomes extensive enough for that.

Deon, there might be some cheap-ass way to make it look better. Like combining everything once you're done and giving it some gaussian blur. Or placing some kind of muck layer above everything else, giving the image a unified color scheme. Or just prodding at the seams with the smudge tool. There might even be a special filter for just that.