Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, I know they don't get an unhappy thought from being naked (It's in the Reqs) because they'd get unhappy every time they changed clothes, so it'd be extremely odd if they got an unhappy thought from worn clothes. If they do, this will probably get fixed when he gets around to the dev item.

I agree that rather than just snapping and killing everyone or going permanently depressed, your dwarves should have a slow descent into despair. For example, you unhappy dwarf might sit around in their room (moping), stand near a large cliff on their breaks, looking out idly and sighing, or break into a tearing mess and run away to their room. These would be the warning signs. If they got too unhappy they'd go into one of the insane moods dwarves go into upon failing a mood, potentially permanently.
I do really like the fortress flavor idea, though. It would be a good way of players measuring their own progress and forming goals, which DF is already about. It could also have an effect on how your fortress interacts with the outside world. For example, if you made your fortress a socialist utopia for the working class you'd get lots of low-skilled migrants but productivity would be increased, but nobles would be unhappy and try to exert more control, sending more administrator nobles to keep the status quo. If you killed all of the nobles off in a communist revolution your parent civ would not be amused and would periodically raid you, but you wouldn't have to deal with the nobles' crazy demands any more. However, if you made it into a noble-controlled hellhole for the working class you wouldn't get many peasant migrants but the nobles' demands would be more outrageous and productivity would be lower. However, your support from your parent civilization would increase, and you would have more control over kingdom affairs. So, it'd be a way of both measuring your own progress and changing your gameplay experience.

Although I support the idea that some races or civilizations should hate each other in theory, I think the whole idea of the Army Arc was that this should happen organically rather than being forced by the player or mod designer. For example, if we wanted humans to fight goblins because they have green skin, pointy teeth, and glowing red eyes, all we need are appearance tags in the raws for the civilization entries and a "tolerance" ethic so that if you gave humans low tolerance for people who look different they'd declare war on them. Everyone knows humans are racist bastards, anyway. I think Toady already mentioned this sort of thing in a dev post, but I don't remember when it was. I can't think of the main reason that elves and dwarves hate each other so much in stock fantasy (other than elves being the arrogant bastards we all build horrible death-traps for know and love), but in the DF universe I can understand elves eating your dead cousin being rather upsetting. This is reflected rather well in crazy zerg-elves being attacked by and attacking every other civilization, so I'd say the current system works rather well. It's just not finished yet. I think it's just a matter of time until territorial conflicts and militarism are covered in the raws, then you'll have many more wars based on territory and resources (probably has to wait for the caravan arc there, too) rather than nebulous philosophical disagreements. So, I'd say a stop-gap measure like this is probably not that necessary in the long run, and would just get removed later when more real reasons for wars are put in. This feature might be useful for experimenting and bug-testing until those features are put in, though. So, in short, I support it if it's a short-term measure but not if it ends up taking away depth from world generation in the long term.

If we somehow ran out of concrete (extremely unlikely, we're basically drowning in the raw materials) we'd probably use steel. The stuff's nigh-indestructible (as long as you paint it so it doesn't rust), recyclable, already has a huge industry devoted to it, and they already make buildings out of it on a regular basis. This is assuming that the government doesn't just allow us to clear-cut forests at ease to "help the economy," if they did then we'd use wood. If we used too much steel, though, we'd start to run out and the stuff would get expensive. Most of the steel we've got is recycled from old cars and stuff, as there really isn't that much iron in the earth's crust in the scheme of things. Aluminum, however, is essentially everywhere. It's just too expensive to refine and electrolyse.
More on topic, the stuff you use to make concrete is some sort of aggregate (rocks and stuff- used as filler and to increase strength) and cement. Cement is basically anything that hardens over time. The most common used today is probably portland cement, which is made of CaO (quicklime- made by heating limestone in a kiln, already in the dev notes by the way) SiO₂ (sand) Al₂O₃ (alumina- extracted from bauxite using lime) Fe₂O₃ (hematite) and MgO (magnesia, found naturally as periclase). Although almost all of these minerals could be made using DF technology, the process to actually make the cement is complicated and tricky, making it extremely unlikely even the industrious dwarves would have figured it out. Roman cement is just pozzolan, a category of naturally found volcanic ash, mixed with lime (from limestone). It should be noted that fly ash - what remains after burning coal - also has similar properties to pozzolan, meaning your dwarves could use the fly ash left over from their smelters to make easy concrete. You can also use chips of fired pottery or pumice stone as a pozzolan, apparently. You can also just heat limestone with a large clay component and hope for the best, but this probably isn't up to dwarven standards. We could assume they could just mix clay and quicklime and automagically get cement that works every time, because they're just that awesome. Another possible choice is calcium aluminate cement, made from limestone and bauxite. It was patented in 1908, but the necessary materials existed long before then. Isn't wikipedia fun? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement

Sorry about the wall of text, I've been thinking about this a lot, in case you can't tell . It's a bit more broad than just first aid and non-magical healing, but bear with me.
Good ideas so far, but I think there's some other stuff that hasn't been mentioned yet.
In terms of long-term care I think it would be good if you had different types of items suited to a specific healing purpose. Potions that heal wounds or speed healing don't really make sense medically, at least until magic is implemented. Convential potions (extracted from herbs) should probably be basically limited to deadening pain and / or treating poison or some illnesses. Suitures (stitches) would decrease bleeding significantly, but probably give your dwarf a REALLY bad thought , a la "Urist McInjured has experienced excruciating pain recently" depending on their toughness, unless you prevent pain in other ways, or have a legendary doctor dwarf. You could have gauze that would decrease bleeding and help prevent infection, but if you had an unskilled doctor it might increase the chance of infection, to say nothing of if it wasn't sterile or even sanitary (same applies for stitches). If you applied gauze your doctor dwarf could also have the option of using a salve or tincture that would speed healing, counteract infection, or deaden pain. You should also probably have some alchemical mixture that could be administered to dwarves to knock them out if your alchemist was skilled enough, preventing bad thoughts from having stitches put in, or getting bad thoughts from pain. It would probably have bad side effects or be extremely addictive (not to mention poisonous or deadly) if your alchemist dwarf was unskilled, but if he was skilled it could be quite useful to have the dwarven equivalent of ether. Even if you had such wonder drugs, surgery's still probably a stretch within the Dwarf Fortress setting, or at least surgery that does more good then harm, but might be a possibility for healing internal wounds faster if your doctor dwarf was legendary and you had said concoction and reasonable sanitation.
In terms of immediate care, Medic dwarves with the healthcare labor could also probably run out to the battlefield to drag back dwarves and give some medical care to the wounded, including applying bandages and setting broken bones before the doctor dwarves could treat them. It's also probably a good idea for adventurers to be able to do basic first aid or possibly even recruit a medic for particularly large groups of comrades. This is assuming, however, that DF players treat their comainions as anything other than meat shields .
Also, If dwarven hygiene is ever implemented if your doctor didn't wash his hands he might increase the risk of infection, too, and possibly make everything worse. This is to say nothing of having your dwarves realize that they can decrease the risk of disease by being sanitary. This of course could vary in degree, as dwarves washing the blood and vomit off their faces is a different thing than washing their hands after going to the bathroom or taking baths regularly. Of course, dwarves could be just so tough that unless they're up to their eyeballs in filth they won't tend to get sick. Having dwarves be disease-resistant might even help to balance dwarves against humans (fast breeding) and elves (immortal) in world generation. How sanitary dwarves will be is really a thematic and mood issue (not to mention realism and period-correctness) anyway and up to Toady.
A related issue is how in-period we're willing or wanting to be in terms of Dwarven medical knowledge. If we were going completely in period dwarves would think that disease was caused by bad smells - "miasma" and that putting pus into wounds would help them heal faster. Your dwarves would be bled or given copious amounts of laxitives in a feeble attempt to counteract infections, and sanitation, even in medical practice, would be unheard of. Yuck . I think that because middle ages medicine was just that horrible we should be less strict. Sorry middle-ages history sticklers . Somewhat useful medicine isn't really that much of a stretch, anyway, as classical civilizations, (Greeks and Romans) as well as other ancient and period cultures outside of Europe had pretty good medicine. Some scraps of knowledge could have survived, and this also creates the rather amusing situation of searching ancient ruins or trading for medical advice. However, the validity of that advice would of course depend on what philosopher you listened to, as some had some really terrible ideas, and the lack of scientific method in that time period let them run wild. Even with that said,  the hippocratic oath- to first do no harm- came from ancient times, and is sworn even in modern medical practice. So, as long as you don't assume a horrible dark age followed the fall of all civilization in every generated world, you have quite a bit of wiggle room in terms of what medicine can really do, even in a "medieval fantasy" setting. In my humble opinion it would be okay to gloss over how horrible medicine really was in a historically accurate setting in the pursuit of making the game fun.
However, the complete opposite viewpoint could be true, and what people thought cured disease in period actually did help in the Dwarf Fortress universe. For example, giving people magic talismans to ward off miasmatic fumes would actually be a valid public health strategy, bleeding people or using leeches would cure diseases, and soap wouldn't really help to prevent disease. This would be a pretty interesting perspective, but in the long term I think the best road would be if both treatments were essentially valid to some extent after magic is implemented. This could lead to awesome things involving reality-fantasy crossover like being able to use magic spells to sanitize a wound or prevent pain, having only really legendary doctors/alchemists/biomancers or artifact medicine able to heal wounds directly, or have strange moods that could create magic golem-like or mechanical prosthetic limbs or organs that would restore (or possibly even enhance) the abilities of your dwarves.
I think a innovative and cool mix of realistic medicine and fantasy healing magic would be awesome, and I think this really fits the mood of Dwarf Fortress. This isn't to say you need 19th century medicine and throw period out completely, but it would be cool if doctors/ healers blurred the lines between magic and medicine, with it actually working. Even though some sort of weird industrial-age steampunk setting would be cool, that's not what I'm suggesting as I don't think that's really in the mood of Dwarf Fortress in the near future.
Yeah, that was kind of all over the place . Hopefully that made some sense to some people. I hope the pain meds aren't messing with my brain too much, as I just got my wisdom teeth out  .