Bay 12 Games Forum

I think something to the style of Lord of the Rings would fit DF quite nicely. There's a grand total of about seven wizards in the whole world, and instead of tossing fireballs they mess around with politics and own towers. There's also a bunch of gods and demons around, and they occasionally bestow blessings, curses and quests. And in the case of demons, control goblin civs. A few magical creatures here and there, dragons and trolls and talking trees and so on. And by far the most visible form of magic is the plethora of magical weapons, armour, et cetera made by legendary craftspeople of old. Magic swords. Magic seeing stones. Magic rings. Magic bottles of starlight.

Anyway, knowing Toady, whatever he finally implements will probably somehow involve procedurally generated content and have world generation parameters and editable raw files to alter its behaviour.

Quote from: Christes on September 03, 2008, 10:33:04 pm

I think cave adaption has to do with a lot more than just sight.

Agreed, I also think it might have something to do with the fact of no longer having a ceiling over them. Think of it, some people get very nauseous from looking down long drops because their brain is used to having a floor beneath them. With dwarves it would be the opposite, they are used to always having a ceiling above them, and then when they walk outside their brain freaks out because it is just empty above them with no ceiling.

And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:

"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!... Look away... Go back... Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses... That cursed, that damnable pit... Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!"

Some elven traders just came, and as I'm fairly low on food and booze, I'm really looking forward to trading some fine rock crafts with them. But they spawned to the corner of the map with the magma pipe, and now they are dancing in circles around it. My guess is that they get repeatedly spooked by the fire imps around there. Nothing wrong with that, I'm sort of scared of them. But the odd part is that the imps also seem to be scared of the elves. Instead of shooting fireballs, they also run around in circles. And the elves aren't getting any closer to my trading depot.

Are there any obvious ways of avoiding this next year, other than killing the imps?

Yeah, sounds like you have a problem. I don't think that has ever happened to me. Try everything: Can the mechanic in question still do other stuff? Link other levers? Build other levers? Does he do things if you enable some more labours? Can other dwarves link the lever to the bridge?

Also, make sure he can actually reach everything relevant to the process. Although if he can't, he should just give up the job and inform you of a pathfinding error, so you still have some other funny thing going on.

Also also, back up the save file in case this turns out to be an unreported bug and Toady wants to take a look at it.

How about washing it? With water? I'm not sure how this would translate into game mechanics, maybe the dwarves could lower it into water in a bucket. Being able to do something like this would be nice. Or just trading for sand.

How about some kind of "tool" item, representing all the tongs, chisels, hammers and files usually found in workshops. Can be imported from the mountainhomes with relative ease or made yourself, if your dwarves are skilled enough. Also make decent trade goods.

Each and every workshop would have a menu where you could designate the amount of tools present in the shop. You could do this at any time, so you if you really liked micromanaging, you could take just a few of them and have the dwarves haul them to whichever workshop you are using at the moment. The number and quality of tools in a workshop give hefty skill bonuses and penalties to dwarves using the workshop. They could also be needed at kitchens and fisheries and the like, representing knives and cheese graters.

This would be abstract enough to avoid excessive micromanaging, while still portraying the simple tools -> complex tools progression. A metalcrafter can make tools, which he can use to make -tools-, which he can use to make +tools+, and so on. Unless you get a fey metalcrafter, you will have to do this for quite a long time to get sufficient metalcrafting skill to get higher on the tool ladder. I think a mediocre no-title skill, the kind you sometimes get from immigrants, should be sufficient to make serviceable tools that allow you to manufacture anything, if at a penalty to quality.

If you don't want to bother, you can import them. They're abundant back at the Mountainhomes, so they would be reasonably cheap to buy. They could be further sold with profit to the elves and humans, who have a greater need for the things because of their less developed industry. Just like Sid Meier's Colonization.

As an added bonus, this method would also be unnecessarily complicated, especially if we have wooden or rock tools for the very early stages of civilization. It is the dwarven way!

Something like this would be nice, make the dwarf check if there will be a route back to some starting point after the wall has been built. Should also be used for channel digging. One problem I can see is that it would create a bunch of new pathfinding tasks, and use system resources. I don't really know enough of the algorithms involved to say if it will actually be a problem, though. Another is choosing a location to path to, what with the possibility of open drawbridges and forbidden doors in the way. And often you will actually want to isolate a part of the fortress with walls, and don't want the mason to pick the wrong side.