March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
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News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
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Bah!
Still the same 'ol elves... Likely diluted the beer with cloth.
Urist McPeasant cancels drink: choking on *Rope reed shoe*
My viewpoint on this topic is that Toady's gonna get to it when Toady's gonna get to it, and we, the forum (which is affected by the wiki), don't have any say in the small stuff.
I think elves should be the primary exporters of wood and bone, as well as items made from them. They care so much about the forests and animals within that they collect wood and bone naturally and then use it in order to barter deals with humans and dwarves so that those races don't decimate the wilderness. They shouldn't bring a ton of it every season, but those woodchopping limitations they want to enforce would be a lot more palatable if they could supply you with some wood in exchange.
I would prefer for elves to be actively phytokinetic... they can force trees and other plants to grow any way they damn well please. They use trees as pillars of great airborn cities, their branches knotted together to make floors and walls and huge leaf membranes for windows and skylights. Briarpatches with thorns up to the length of your arm and tremendous, dwarf-eating venus flytraps adorn the bases. The very stuff of life is theirs to command.
Edit: Picture sieging a living castle. That wants to eat you.
Metalcrafters, a job that does very little... VERY LITTLE... in fact, the only useful thing they can do is make goblets. If they couldn't do that, Blacksmiths and armorers would beat them out EVEN WORSE than they do now as far as usefulness to the fort is concerned. Allow me to elaborate:
goblets have an item value of 10 and three are made with each bar
Anvils & platemails have an item value of 100, and each requires three bars of metal to make
So if we take a three bars of iron, a very common metal with a material value of 10, and make 9 goblets out of them, at standard quality, would collectively be worth 900 dwarfins.
If we take those same three bars of iron and instead decide to make an anvil or a suit of platemail, we'll have an item worth 1000 dwarfins at standard quality.
You might argue "But Josh, you can make goblets out of valuable metals like Platinum that you can't make anvils or platemail out of", but that only cripples Metalcrafters even more, because the ore of said valuable metals is usually the same value as the metal itself, stonecrafters can make mugs out of that ore that are worth the same amount, and don't require a piece of fuel wasted or an extra step in the assembly line, ALL this put together with the fact that the rarity of these metals in comparison to iron, Blacksmiths, Armorers, and stonecrafters will forever and ever be better than Metalcrafters.
If you take away goblets, Metalcrafters are ANOTHER vestigial job, replaced completely by Blacksmiths, Armorers, and stonecrafters. So please, consider the poor metalcrafter, he doesn't have alot. He can make valueble mugs, thats all he can do, don't take that away from him.
Dwarven syrup is far, far more broken than quarry bush leaves. They return the same amount, but at an absurd value. Just look up plants on the wiki; extracting syrup from sweet pods gives you a total value of 100, whereas other plants upon extraction/milling only give you 20-25.
Rather than make GCS silk less valuable (do you know how hard it is to harvest that stuff from a GCS?), why not add a rarity value to creatures with extracts? The higher the number, the less likely it is for a dude to show up wearing it.
Toys and Musical instruments always come out 1 at a time. Crafts come out 1 - 3 at a time, randomly, not based on skill at all (afaik). Mugs and Flasks come out 3 at a time all the time. Yes this is a balance issue, but I think Toady is waiting for the caravan arc to fix things like this related to trade goods.
when you look at the above post
Above post? What above post? You're the OP.
when you look at the above points
You may wish to wonder why are kobolds have no use, seeing that they steal stuff on a constant basis. Carp doesn't have a use either, they are clogging up the river, why are they don't help the drawves out. What about the Demons? They don't do any good, they turn your perfectly clean fortress into a bloody mess.true, but the purpose of a kobold IS to be a nuisance. It forces you to protect hard earned dwarven goods. if they steal enough, eventually they will form a small raiding party.
Some races don't have to have inherent uses to Drawves. Maybe they might be, you know, enemies.
Paragraphs please. That's really hard to read.
