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« on: February 28, 2009, 11:32:45 am »
(now with 1% less redundancy)
Well, it's been more than six months since my last set of suggestions. A few "play DF" skill increases for me, a few thousand horrible awesome deaths for my poor dwarves, and a couple hundred more ways that I think the best game in the world could be made even better. Bay12Gamers, I present these for your comments.
Renaming Your Fortress: I'd like to have the option of renaming my fortress. Maybe it could require a change of leadership due to an election before allowing this option, but we need it. Maybe I didn't know exactly what I wanted my fortress named when I embarked, but I am NOT living in "Burninganus the Muscular Tunnel". Or maybe "The Blue Canyon" turned out to have piles of Bauxite but no Cobaltite or Microcline.
The party selection screen: Show the Terrain/Biome Data in the party selection screen. Right now, if I forget whether I embarked in tundra or rainforest, there's no easy way to look, and it's important to know if your location has wood available when you're deciding if you need to bring a battle axe. Furthermore, as awesome as it is to be able to save embark profiles, custom nicknames and profession names should be saved with the profile also. Finally, we should be able to save notes without embarking. This would allow for even better sharing of worlds when we find that PERFECT site.
The region finder is incredibly sweet, but it should include a way to cycle through all the locations that match our custom criteria. If there's five different places in the world with everything I want, I should be able to pick between them. Right now it only shows one. Also, I'd like it if "sand" was something we could search for. For that matter, I'd like a more in-depth region finder that let us search for "two layers of marble" or "any Sedimentary rock".
Impossible Locations: Many locations that I'd like to play on the world map (especially most prime real estate high in the mountains) won't let me embark there. I can't see seven determined dwarves not getting to a good site just because of a little thing like two hundred miles of mountain range in the way. Maybe short-bearded humans and pantywaist elves can be stopped by the lack of an overland route, but dwarves shouldn't. Instead of not letting me embark in an idiotic location, it should just warn me that I have chosen an area that caravans and immigrants won't be able to get to.
Options Menu Additions: For extra challenge for advanced players, we should have an option to turn off the "damp stone" and "warm stone" notifications, or maybe have miners below Competent skill level not create those warnings. Also, the Refuse menu should get an Auto Melt option.
Trade Improvement: I'd like an option to tell a particular caravan "Guys, we're going to be so busy building our ten-story walls that we just aren't going to have time to make any trade goods this year. Don't bother coming until the year after next."
Job Manager: We need some kind of Job Management Screen so that we can turn off, say, Item Hauling for 60 dwarves at once, rather than laboriously going to each dwarf's preferences-labor screen and individually turning it off for each dwarf. Likewise, we need a
Status Viewing Screen so that we can easily see which of our sixty dwarves are hungry, thirsty, sad, exhausted, or sprouting crossbow bolts from that latest goblin raid, without checking each dwarf's Wounds screen individually.
Workshop Improvements: Off the top of my head, Masonry, Mechanics, Crafting, and Carpentry ALL need the option to choose which type of material to use. Yes, it's possible to force masons to build doors out of a particular material by various hacky workarounds such as dumping stone next to their workshops and not doing any new mining while the masonry is going on, but I find it appalling that there's not an official function in the game that allows you choose what to use to build stuff, except in construction. Just as we can order "forge steel battle axe", we ought to be able to "create microcline crafts". I'd also like to make Decoration more specific. We should be able to "encrust idols with gems" while leaving scepters and crowns alone if we so choose. Finally, I'd like a way to pull up a list of dwarves that have the relevant skill enabled from a particular workshop.
Stockpile Improvements: Nearly every type of stockpile lets us choose to leave out a particular type of item, but stone block stockpiles are limited to "stone block". I want to put my granite blocks in one pile and my bauxite blocks in another pile. Also, stockpiles should have an Active option just like activity zones do, so we can turn them on and off without completely removing them. Finally, I'd like the option added to turn on "handedness" in armor stockpiles, so I can put my *steel left boots* in one pile and my *steel right boots* in another.
Designations: I'd like a way to designate an area that wouldn't generate cleaning tasks, so I can have my janitors wipe up vomit off of the floor of my greathall, but leave the blood splatters all over my entryway to give those goblin bastards fair warning of what happens to intruders. I'd like a "Claim and Melt" designation that would both claim and melt meltable items, but ignore nonmetals, so that I can clean up all the piles of goblin armor but leave the dirty undies forbidden. Last, I'd like a "Ruler" designation that wouldn't actually do anything in the game, but would tell me the measurements of the area I designate. If I want to make my moat a perfect square 100 squares on each side, I should be able to let my computer do the counting.
Room Resizing: Let us use the umkh interface to resize rooms, not just bigger/smaller. I'd like to be able to designate a 3x10 area for an archery range, even if it's in a 10x10 room.
Let the Hotkey Menu Stretch the way so many other menus do, so we can use longer names for our hotkeys. As it is, the limit is what, eight characters? Let me use names like "Living Area" and "Main Barracks" for my hotkeys.
Cave Adaptation: Dwarves' psych profiles shouldn't say "loves working outdoors and grumbles only mildly at inclement weather" but fail to mention "spews like a seasick sailor at the first sight of blue sky". Cave Adaptation should show up in the personality profile.
I'd like to see an option for More Information on Gems, Minerals, and Ores from the Look screen. A little bit of background information on the elemental composition, what formation it typically runs in, what uses dwarves have for it, stuff like that. Games such as Civilization and Rome are learning experiences as well as video games, Dwarf Fortress should be the same way. Quite frankly, in real life I can't tell Cassiterite from Sphalerite, but Dwarf Fortress ought to teach me the difference. If Toady doesn't want to bother, I will personally volunteer to copy the relevant information off of Wikipedia teach myself enough geology to write a text file for each and every mineral in the game, if it would help.
Merchants' animals shouldn't go melancholy if they're trapped on the map for any length of time. In my opinion, they should revert to "stray mule" or whatever if they get separated from the merchants for too long.
Just as we can mark animals for slaughter, we should be able to mark normally innocuous animals and vermin as "enemies", so we can tell our hammerdwarves to go squash a pesky cave spider if we like.
More Sounds. As far as I can tell, the only time you hear any sounds in Dwarf Fortress is during the introduction, yet the option menu has an entry for sounds. Now, there IS noise that our dwarves can hear, we just can't hear it ourselves for some reason. I think that any noises audible at our cursor's location should be actually audible. You could hear the clink of picks for the sound of mining, hammering or sawing for carpentry, etc. This would not only make the game more immersive, but also help us determine what exactly is disturbing our dwarves' sleep.
Magma Improvements: At the moment, magma doesn't clean things like "vomit covering" or "decorated with hanging rings of larch" off of steel items. In my opinion, it should. Also, dumping two thousand pieces of granite into a magma pit ought to increase the volume of the magma as the stone melts.
