Bay 12 Games Forum

As far as i know, children in df can do anything, what they want. I remember having legendary +5 gemsetter and weaponsmith children in my fort

A child can have a strange mood and gain skill from a mood. But they can't actually do the weaponsmithing or gem setting until they're 12.

If you want a slow and randomly firing repeater, and if you have an immortal animal that does not need to eat you can use the animal as a living repeater.

Make a 2x1 room. On one tile, put a repeater linked to the animal's weight. In the other tile, put an animal. It will randomly move from one tile to the other. The time between moves is random so it cannot be relied upon, but if the animal isn't a grazer and either has no maximum age, or an extremely long maximum age, it can work well. It cannot be a building destroyer or it will destroy the pressure plate.

Note that goblins actually work very well for this. Goblins don't need food or water, and they do not die of old age. Goblins also do not destroy buildings. Build a pit, put a few pressure plates in the pit on repeat and built to detect goblins, and throw a herd of goblins. Their random movements will repeatedly set off the pressure plates.

I like the idea of tornadoes and maybe destroying buildings outside too and the eruptions would be a nice touch too. It would be cool if you took different actions for different disasters like flooding you get to the highest elevation you can or dig down for tornadoes and eruption burns anything wood.

Destroying terrain is probably a no-no at this point. Same with destroying constructed tiles. The ramifications of a destroyed tile are vast. This also makes earthquakes and tunneling invaders extremely problematic.

If it is handled as a weather event that moves creatures around, but only moves creatures around, then you can have dwarves blown off of a cliff or pushed against a wall for injuries. I'd also imagine loose items could be blown around as well, so you could have socks flying around at high speed and they could potentially cause damage.

As far as flooding, there is already code in the game to generate 1/7 liquid upon impact with a raindrop, but this 1/7 liquid only spawns when a rain drop hits a pond tile. If raindrops could spawn 1/7 liquid anywhere, and a rain storm was kept up for some time, including even months, then you could get some serious flooding. Same deal with lava. A nearby volcano could present in fortress mode as a rain of lava, creating a 1/7 unit of lava wherever it hits on the surface.

You can get quite a few ghosts to appear. I've had about a dozen active at one time.

I one time made a haunted fortress intentionally. Tantrums and murders on a regular basis. Corpses were thrown into a big pit. Murderous ghosts would return on a regular basis to cause even more carnage. Migrants were doomed. The fortress was a haunted deathtrap, and the insane and murderous living residents combined with the undead residents would soon do in the new arrivals.

To speed things up I put everyone into the military. They were all off duty, but everyone got weapons and armor. The history of weapons in the fortress were gruesome. So much death caused by so many dwarves.

The fortress was entirely decorated with engravings of weeping dwarves, dwaves exploding, dwarves withering away, and murderous ghosts.

So long as there is no captain of the guard you can safely ignore mandates.

The noble will become unhappy that no one is punished for their insane demands, but if you give the noble a nicely furnished room the unhappy thoughts are trivial, and easily outweighed by having them admire their own fancy furniture. Its also a great use of artifact furniture if you have any.

Natural disasters could be like weather in evil biomes. I think more weather would be a nice feature.

Evil weather does all kinds of interesting things, but if it did even more that could be a lot of fun. A weather effect that throws objects on the surface a number of tiles in a random direction could be a tornado.

A flood could be rain that causes water to appear everywhere, and not only in pond tiles. Maybe a nearby volcano erupts, causing it to rain magma. Every "raindrop" will turn into 1/7 magma upon touching the ground.

There should be some sort of warning as to these disasters though. Perhaps a boxed warning that the sky looks ominous along with a game pause, and then a short time later the effect takes place. Long enough for the player to do something, but too short of a time for a full evacuation to complete.

That'd still leave you to make clothing for the dwarves you can't draft. On the other hand, an emperor's new clothes situation coud be funny.

You can draft everyone except for children and babies. You can even draft nobles. The only catch is that they cannot lead a squad. Have some other dwarf lead the squad. Then put the noble in the squad as a member but not leader.