Bay 12 Games Forum

Posting in a new thread, by request:



I like the idea of dead creatures in an evil biome having a chance to reanimate if they are not in a tomb. The corpse turns into a zombie/skeleton of that same creature type. If the zombie/skeleton is "slain" it turns back into a corpse. But the kicker is that the corpse can then get back up again! Make it maybe a 10% chance per month? Something like that, the numbers can be adjusted. This means that if you have a bunch of non-butchered, non-entombed corpses somewhere they will eventually rise up as zombie or skeletal versions of themselves.

A butchered corpse is taken apart into many tiny pieces so thats not an issue. A corpse in a coffin is secured, so thats also fine. Its the things sitting around in your refuse stockpile, or perhaps you don't want to clean up after a siege, which means you'll get some undead goblins rising up from the bloody mess if you don't handle it.

You could even exploit this to create your own undead mosh pit. Toss a bunch of corpses into a pit. The corpses will have a 10% chance per month to reanimate, so eventually all of them will be active again. Toss anyone you don't like into the pit. The undead will tear them apart, and then Urist McUseless will rise from the dead to join the undead. You could even use this as an archery training range. You can't kill something thats already dead, all you can do is knock them down for a while, but the undead have a disturbing tendency to get right back up again unless the corpse is destroyed. Butchering it will do this, but simply putting some crossbow bolts into it won't.

An undead pit would make for a horrific sort of trap. Make your entrance have drawbridges over the pit of the undead. Drop a goblin siege into the pit. See how well they do against the army of the undead! They will of course eventually lose. Even if they win at first, those corpses will stand up again. And again. And again. All slain goblins will also stand up again. And again. And again.

This could be so much FUN. 

 

I have a vision for a fortress that is awesome beyond all others. I know how to build it, piece by piece. It will take decades to build, but it can be done, and it will cause dwarves to tantrum with envy, elves to weep in despair, and humans to bring even more offerings of booze to my trade depots.

It will be a massive obsidian tower fortress, carved into the land itself, surrounded by a surface sea of magma. This grand, dark tower would rise over the landscape, built next to a volcano, with the mountain itself carved to form this mighty obsidian spire turning the surrounding lush forest into a burning, ash covered wasteland. The roots of the tower will go deep into the earth, with the magma sea reaching from the surface to the caverns, draining into the caverns to flood the underworld with magma should I so desire. Not only will the tower be built, block by block, by an army of masons, but at the same time it will also be carved deep into the mountain itself, deep into the ground. Digging down to bedrock, and then digging deeper.



The thing is, such a megaproject would take a very, very long time to build. I'm unsure if I should start now, or wait until the bugfixing is finished for this round. Quite a few of the bugs do require restarts. I'm just worried about save compatibility.

Not that save compatibility should impede progress by any means of course. If breaking saves gets the next version out 1 day faster, do it! Its just that currently the game is in the bugfixing phase, and so the game is still very fluid and unstable. Probably not the best building conditions for a megaproject.

It would essentially involve clearing away about 20-30 entire Z levels worth of rock, smoothing the entire thing, hauling all of those rocks into quantum stockpiles next to mason workshops, and then while I'm carving the bottom half of the fortress into the rock, the top half is being made with the literal mountain worth of stone used from excavating the world from the surface to the first cavern, with the natural stone pillars of the cavern joined by pillars of rock blocks to support the massive weight of that obsidian spire.

I only have two questions before claiming a workshop to produce this:

1) Should I make it now, even though there may be save compatibility issues with the next release, causing me to be stuck with the current sometimes severe bugs? This is the main sticking point, and why I have not been playing very much DF lately. I want my megaprojects! I want bugfixes. I want stability.    I also want a pony and a gold rocket car.
2) Do you think an E8400 OC'ed to 3.6ghz will last long enough to complete such a megaproject before it melts?

Some interesting pictures here. Perhaps they dug too deep and found some !FUN!? 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_west/8646497.stm

I'm not sure I understand whats going on with this.

I understand salt water just fine, you need to run it through one of those magical pumps to purify it.

However I just spent a full year of in game time creating a massive plumbing system. I lined the entire thing with marble block walls and roads (to prevent tower cap growth). The water is pumped in from the surface, where it taps into the brook and then flows down a shaft to my fortress some 30 Z levels below. I then use a diagonal to remove water pressure, and the water flows into my cistern (also lined with marble blocks) where dwarves drink out of the cistern using a well made out of an artifact rope and mechanism in a fully smooth and engraved drinking room.

But the water is stagnant.

Now they're all complaining about the nasty water. 

Any idea whats up with this?

What turns water to being muddy or stagnant?

Has anyone had a fortress up long enough, and stable enough to get the dwarven justice system going?

I know with the new changes, it takes a lot of work to actually kill someone with a hammer. And if you take the hammerer's hammer away its nearly impossible for one dwarf to wrestle another to death. Most likely one of them will just starve first.

Is it worth just modding out demands and mandates so that your legendary armorsmith won't be hammered to death because you couldn't produce a crystal glass item? Or are the punishments, including beatings and hammerings, so ineffective that it doesn't really matter, and also gives your doctors some more practice?

So, I have a very specific need.

I want to take a champion dwarf, and lop off at least one of his limbs but not kill him.

Whats the best way to go about doing this?


Using spike traps or dropping the dwarf a few Z levels will easily cause injuries, but these injuries will heal over time. Removing limbs will not heal, and so that dwarf will remain bedridden forever.

Basically I want a champion to be crippled forever. I then plan on parking his bed next to the entrance, and assigning a squad to him. The squad will be set to off duty so they will happily spar, but if they're not sparring, boozing, eating, or sleeping they will hang out by the front door without needing to assign meeting zones or having to put them on duty.

Just a quick question:


Normally if a military dwarf sees something hostile, they will want to run up to it and stab it in the face. But what about stairs? Can creatures see up and down stairways? I know they can with ramps, but a stair also acts like a floor.

I'm asking because I was thinking of using stairs to lead goblins from my goblin collector right to my army for some sparring practice. I don't want the soldiers to wander off though, I want to keep them all in the same spot and not follow the goblins through the stairwell to a different Z level.

So it would look like this:

XXXDXXX
X.....X
X.....X
X.....X
X..<..X
X.....X
XXXXXXX
There will be a path from the holding pen from the trap to the stairs in the middle of the room. My soldiers will be stationed in the room. The idea is that I can pull a lever to open up the exit to the trap. The captured goblins then attempt to escape the map. The only route from the holding pen to the edge of the map is through that room where the dwarves are waiting with their axes. I want the dwarves to kill the goblins as they stream into the room, fleeing to their doom but I do not want the dwarves to follow the goblins into the stairs because not all of them would go, and so it would be just one dwarf against the entire siege. Not that it would be a great loss, and it would be a worthy challenge for a champion to take on an entire siege, all at the same time, by himself, but its annoying to have to adjust squads to deal with the loss.

One thing I would like to see would be a more automated method of farming lumber. This would be very useful for large, mature fortresses and would also reduce the micromanagement required, thus always keeping your woodcutters busy without having to continually redesignate large areas to be clearcut. And it would mean a steady supply for your wood crafters and carpenters.

Here are two ways this could work, and they should be relatively easy to do:


A)
Tree farms are created much like regular farms. There are no tree seeds, but you can only grow trees that naturally grow in that biome and you can select these trees from a list. Tower caps can only be grown underground if you have discovered a river or lake, and surface trees can only be grown on the surface if that tree is already growing on your map. No growing oak trees in the middle of a glacier. A dwarf will go to each tile of the farm and work for a few moments to plant the sapling. This uses the grower skill.

After several years (or however long the tree takes to mature) a harvest job will be generated. This can only be done by woodcutters and does require an axe. Harvesting the tree produces a stack of logs, just like cutting down a tree normally.

When there is empty space on the farm more planting jobs will be generated. This can be abstracted that the dwarves are clearing away other brush to allow saplings to grow, or transplanting saplings from elsewhere on the map to the tree farm. There is currently no good way to produce tree seeds, but trees are not grown from seeds on tree farms anyways. They are usually grown from saplings that are moved when still tiny and then planted in orderly rows.



B)
Allow an activity zone to have an automatic gather plants and/or cut down trees option.

Each time a mature tree appears it will then be automatically designated to be cut down. A woodcutter with an axe will then head over there and start chopping.

Shrubs could also be designated to be gathered in much the same way. Each time a shrub appears it is designated to be gathered, and a herbalist will head over there to gather up the plants.




Thoughts?