Bay 12 Games Forum

I just realized your still going to have obscuring problems if you allow viewing of objects on lower levels.  Say for example you have a two story tall dinning hall surrounded by walls on all sides.  You could see the two rows of wall in the back and one row in the front but you would have one row of floor 'under' that being concealed.  Theirs really no way to stop that, you projection at least prevents obscuring when your viewing one level which is a marked improvement over Isometric and will handle 90+% of normal game play.

I've noticed that my Jewelers don't really end up doing much, gems are rare (as they should be) and you can easily process all your gems with a single jeweler.  Most of my immigrant jewelers just become de-facto haulers as they have nothing else to do.

I propose the following fixes,

Make the gem cutting and encrusting process take longer but have a higher value production, currently rough gems are a modifier of 3 and cut are 5 which will mean only +8 total value from cutting the lowest quality value 2 gems and at best +120 from cutting the most precious gems.  Raise the cut gem multiplier to at least 7, the large gems could be in excess of 20 multiplier due to their great rarity.  Raising gem material values would help as well.  The difference between rough and cut gem vales has always been very large because of the time and skill required.

Allow Jewlers to make a limited set of metal crafts, at a minimum things like rings, amulets and other jewelry like constructions.  These objects would no longer be built at the crafts shop which is not equipped for such delicate and intricate crafting, goblets, and toys are still crafted their though.  If necessary this activity could be spun off into a new profession 'Jewelery Smith' which would work only with metal at the jewelery shop or a new 'Jewelry smith' shop.

Jewelers or the new Jewel Smiths could only work with metals that have a [JEWELERY] tag associated with them all the alloys of Gold and Silver along with the Pewters and a few other choice metals such as copper which are very soft would have this tag.  No fuel would be consumed to make these crafts because the metals can be worked cold or at stove-top temperatures in very small quantities.  These metals would still be used by the forge to make bulky items like coffins and tables and their might still be a fuel cost their to reflect the fact that these items are so much larger. 

Move coin making from the forge to the jewelry or Jewelry Smith shop (or perhaps its now better to name it the mint).  Coins would be made only from the Jewelery metals (not hard coded though, I'd add a new [COIN] tag to metals to do this).  And again this labor would be performed by the hypothetical Jewelry Smith or as a fall back the Gem Setter.  If someone wanted to implement Iron coins then they would be made at the forge because Iron isn't a [JEWELERY] tagged metal which makes all crafting default to their.

If the goal of your mod is increased difficulty then you should strongly consider adding [SLOW_LEARNER] to dwarves (of what ever race you play as).  I've started using it after reading about it here on the forum and it makes a big difference, moods don't produce legendaries anymore and your seeing a lot slower advancement both civilian and military.

Different crafts should have different failure rates and different chances to recycle the materials used.  This would create more diversity among the crafts and make some more or less 'expensive' in raw materials to train for.

Things like wood, bone and stone crafting all involve removing material from a starting mass that can't be repaired, thus when you break the mass your working on theirs no way to reuse it for the same craft.  Though their is some potential to use it for some bulk non-crafting purpose or for smaller crafts.  Example wood -> wood scraps which can be burned for fuel, stone -> rubble which can be used in construction, bone -> bone fragments which could make bone meal.

Glass and unfired clay tend to be very reusable because their mailable materials when being worked on and any error or breakage just starts the crafting process over again with no real waste.

Cooking involves permanent chemical changes to the ingredients and can't be recycled in any way but the nature of the ingredients mean the product will almost always be edible and thus usable, though simply of very low quality.  Failure tends to take the form or burning the food, leaving out a key ingredient or getting the ingredient ratios wrong and contaminating the food with pathogens.  The first two could result in an obviously poor food item but the third could be a hidden modifier.  Any dwarf that eats the contaminated food barfs a short time later and goes to their room nauseous and looses some otherwise productive time to the nausea as well as getting an unhappy thought hit "Got sick from poor food recently".  This would provide a very interesting non-linear 'cost' to failure and perhapses result in some interesting social interactions between the cook and the victim of the bad meal.

Thanks, too bad its hard coded in that way, hope its made flexible at some point.

Dose anyone know the exact method used to determine the value of plant fiber threads?  Is it based on the raw plant value?  Dose extract value effect it?  I've messed with both and can't tell what the determining factors are, the wiki lacks any explanation as to ware thread value comes from.  I'm trying to balance plant values and how much profit results from growing every plant and need to have a grasp on thread values to do it.

I had my first very minor aquifer mishap recently when building next to a lake.  My initial home stead mining of an apartment complex broke into a layer of Grey mud that promptly flooded it, fortunately everyone got out safely and only one level was effected.  I started a new apartment adjacent to it and eventually grew to fort to decent size then undertook a recovery project.  I mined out a 1x1 plug of rock and a 'slot' for it to fall into that would close the spot I broke the aquifer at, a simple manual cave in did the trick and a short manually powered screw pump stack (one of the screws was legendary btw) emptied the flooded level into the lake by a very pleasant waterfall and the reclaimed area became a large dining room and kitchen complex.

The wiki already mentions both the diagonal and vertical shaft as exploration techniques, both are 100% revealing techniques aimed at finding all gems which is not the scope of what I'm proposing.  The diagonal method has an efficiency of 20% (1/5th of all squares mined) (BTW PG your picture is slightly different then the official method as you spaced the tunnels 5 spaces apart which would leave one unrevealed tile per cube, thats probably worth it though considering how rare a lone crystal is).  The vertical shaft method has an efficiency of 11%(1/9th all squares mined) which is considerably more mining then my proposed 2% solution. 

But it also gives me an idea, it should be possible to combine the two methods and mine in a linear row of shafts rather then a tunnel.  You would mine a + at just one level and then sink shafts every 4 spaces along the legs with the first one 5 tiles from the center of the + for a total of just 16 shafts per cubic area, a mind boggling 0.7% of all rock mined to find almost all veins.