Bay 12 Games Forum

The other day there was a question on the Dwarf Mode board about whether new civs are ever generated, or if existing civs split.  The answer was, of course, no, they don't, they are generated at worldgen and can only go extinct.  But of course, this is silly.  Real world governments have civil wars and secessionist movements and such reasonably often, and  it occurred to me that this would be a perfect starting scenario.

You are a group of malcontent dwarves that have decided to break ties with the mountainhomes and start a new glorious dwarven empire.  This might give you a good reason to start a fortress in, say, a terrifying glacier.  Since you will, in all likelihood, be at war with your parent civ by default, it pays to make your fortress remote and inaccessible.  This would tie in well with another suggestion currently on the front page: fortress visibility.  You could defiantly put your rebel flag on your large and prominent ramparts, get regular migrant waves (malcontent dwarves from all over that have heard of your rebellion), regular traders from civs that are willing to offend the mountainhomes, but get assaulted by the full might of the mountainhomes fairly quickly.  Or you could set out in secret, and carve a hidden fortress for your underground resistance, and get only a few migrants, from members of your movement that couldn't make it in the original party, but few other migrants and traders, and less risk of dwarven invasion until you come out into the open or are revealed by your carelessness (maybe occasional dwarven scouts could enter the map to try to find your fortress, especially if you are making a name for yourself?).

I think this would be a good, plausible starting scenario for what many players want: a hard mode.  A good excuse to embark in a remote and hostile environment, and a strong military opponent with a sound motivation to throw their best at a new fortress.  Dwarves are the only race with steel, and would pose more of a threat than your typical goblin siege, and it would make more sense for the mountainhomes to do its best to crush a rebellion in the early stages than for a goblin civ to throw army after army into the meatgrinder that is a well set up fortress.

This would also tie in well with another current suggestion, by making it plausible that your fortress is the central authority of an expansionistic new empire.

Dwarves would also make plausible digging enemies, if that is ever implemented.  One of the main reasons not to implement it (other than pathfinding headaches) is that many players will be deeply offended if the game messes up the stuff they built.  This would provide a good non init file way to opt out of digging enemies: just don't start a war with the dwarves.

I'm attempting to form a weremammoth corps of my military after I successfully isolated a survivor of the latest attack, but I've had trouble getting candidates to survive the experience.  First try was 4 peasants, no armor.  Due to some mismanagement, they had axes, but were unable to harm the precious weremammoth, or even mount a credible defense before being gored and having their heads bitten off.

I read up a bit on the wiki, and second attempt was a bit better.  Only 2 this time, due to being in a hurry before the full moon and they didn't want to pickup equipment fast enough, but no additional success.  I gave them iron helms and breastplates, and now weapons this time, and put them in a room with the mammoth lined with cage traps, so that hopefully they would get bitten, pass out, and be saved by the cage to hopefully survive til the next moon.  No luck.  Opening attack, the mammoth bit through the breastplate, tearing open lungs and causing heavy bleeding.  Then it did a bit of wrestling and mangled shoulders and hips, and then bit his head off, and then bit the other one's head off too.  Neither helms nor breastplates registered as being penetrated by the head biting, though they were easily penetrated by torso bites.

How do I get dwarves to survive an attack by a weremammoth?  The initial survivor was attacked right before the mammoth turned back, and I could try that, but it might be annoying.  Would steel or adamantine armor help?  I'm not sure it would, since it doesn't seem to prevent direct removal of heads.  Would chain mail maybe protect the neck?  Given an iron breastplate can't resist a bite, I'm not sure it would help much.

Given the new plant raws being added to the game, adding a large number of new kinds of potential dyes and things to dye, as well as the vague talk of someday phasing out the traditional plants and fungi that provide most of the good dyes in dwarf fortress, it seemed like a good time to talk about dyes.

I'm starting a new thread because the most relevant thread I could find on the topic was this one, which is going on 6 years old, and isn't really about the same thing anyways.  I like the suggestions in that thread, especially the bit about there being a distinction between dyeing proteins like wool or leather and dyeing plant based fibers like cotton or linen or rope reed, with silk possibly being universally dyeable.  Technically, I have a feeling that Pig Tail cloth is chitin based and should require different procedures, but that doesn't seem like a distinction worth making.   However, the clothing industry is already pretty formidable, and it wouldn't to be good to add too many weird rules and requirements that wouldn't make any sense to someone who didn't already know that, say, lichen purple is only usable on wool and silk.

I made a post in FotF about this, with several offtopic ramblings, but here are the relevant portions:

To finally actually get to a more or less relevant topic, here are the colors you can achieve from plants currently in the game, with sources for most colors:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

TL;DR: most of the dyes available are some variant of yellow-beige-orange with alum and green-grey with iron, which is pretty typical of any given sampling of plants (that's by far the most common category of vegetable dye).  The brightest yellows are probably from pomegranate husks, mango leaves, and chicory, with alum for all of those, the best green is probably from Chicory with iron, but I know you can get a good green from fennel greens with iron, so I might have to look into relatives of fennel, like carrot greens with iron.  The best orangey color is probably from persimmon, but it's not very bright.  Perhaps carrots or carotenoid rich yams might be made to work.  With a good red, orange could be made from a bright yellow, but aside from beets, I can't think of any in the real world plants we currently have on hand.  Blues can be gotten from black beans, if those can be included under the category of string bean (same species), but we don't have any indigotin sources in game yet, and I think our only good blue is dimple cups.  Purples can be gotten from beets, which doesn't work well, or from lichens which haven't been added, or snails which haven't been added.


Banana sap (and presumably Abaca) - brownish to reddish, from tannins.  The Fe'i banana is apparently used for a reddish dye.  One source suggested it is useful as a mordant for other dyes, which is typical of tannins, though of course they also contribute their own color.

Coffee - browns, from tannins

Guava - pale rosey brown with alum or no mordant, slate grey with iron mordant (as with any iron mordant, this will be destructive to protein based fibers, making them scratchy and brittle) [source]

Rambutan - can be used to dye fiber a sunny yellow, using alum I assume [source].  Iron will give greys or greens.  "Young shoots are used to dye yellow silk to green. A dye     called ayer banyar, made from rambutan leaves and fruits     and combined with other ingredients, is used for dyeing red     silk black." [source]

Tea - has been popularly used to make reddish browns, especially for making paper look old.  Iron mordant will give dark greys

Avocado - beige yellow from fruit skins, beige rose from pits, no mordant [source] or pale rose pink, no mordant [source]

Pomegranate fruit husk and pith - beige brown unmordanted, intense mustard yellow with alum [source], as usual with yellow dyes, darker greys can be achieved with iron, at the possible expense of fabric softness

Cherry bark, also apple, apricot, peach, plum, and any other fruit tree in the rose family - creamy yellow to rose pink with alum or no mordant [source], greys and grey greens from iron

Persimmons (unripe fruit) - somewhat brownish earth toned rose [source] probably grey with iron

Walnut - a very deep intense chocolatey brown, very wash and light fast [source]  This dye was widely used because it fixes very well to most fibers and has the benefit of being somewhat toxic, so it inhibits insect damage (though not at all dangerous to wear)

Black Beans (not mentioned, but a cultivar of Phaseolus vulgaris) - a nice strong blue, like a slightly less intense indigo, alum mordant [source]

Beets - magenta red, more or less what you would expect from the color of beet juices, mordanted with vinegar.  Color can be adjusted by varying pH, but the solution must be acidic for the dye to bind to the fiber. [source] Presumably you could also vary the color by starting with differently colored beet cultivars.  I have my doubts as to the light fastness of this dye, as according to wikipedia, betanin, the primarily pigment molecule, "degrades when subjected to light, heat, and oxygen" [source]

Carrots - I don't know about orange carrots, I don't think it works well, but apparently purple carrots give a very nicely colored purple dye [source], but I have strong suspicions about wash and lightfastness

Chicory - mustard yellow (alum), yellow-green (copper), bright yellow (tin), forest green (iron), creamy biege (no mordant).  There are reports of a blue dye from the leaves, but this seems to be untrue. [source]

Onions - give a nice warm orange yellow from the skins

That's all the new plants, I haven't looked through the old plant list, but I know it has some worth mentioning, like an intense yellow from mango leaves and deep browns and blacks from oaks.  I'm sure I missed lots of stuff too.

I'm going to have to go through the list of real life plants we already had and see what other colors we can get, but I think we're still going to be short on good reds, blues, purples, and saturated oranges from real life plants, and I'm not sure about the green from iron mordanted chicory, as I've never seen it, with the only sources for these colors being dimple cups for blue, hide root for red, and blade weed for green, with there being no sources of purple or orange.

Blue could easily be added with either indigo or woad, as well as a few real life mushrooms (more steel blue than indigo or woad).  Purple could be done with overdyeing of a red and a blue, from many, many kinds of lichen when let to soak with ammonia (more on that later), or from certain kinds of predatory marine snails, like Tyrian purple, which has been suggested before in a neat little thread from 2011.

Red could be gotten from madder, a plant widely used in ancient europe to produce a deep orange red, and was actually the dye used for roman soldier's uniforms (modern reenactments are usually not orange enough, and resemble cochineal, which is from the new world).  It could also be gotten from several scale insects, cochineal in the new world and kermes (origin of the words crimson and carmine) in the ancient mediterranean.  I don't know how producing kermes or cochineal would work in dwarf fortress, bot what would work, and would be much cooler anyways, would be a largeish subterranean insect or mite (also a good source of red dye, though too small and hard to gather to have been used IRL as far as I know) that would be a cavy sized subterranean grazer.  At adulthood, they could be gathered up and piled in a wheelbarrow and hauled off to the screwpress for processing into barrels of crismon dye, or alternately they could be killed and dried and then milled to a powder (I think that is closer to how it is done for cochineal and kermes, and the other DF dyes are already powders).


Of course, not every plant in the game than can be used to dye cloth should necessarily go in as a dye, since most of them are more or less the same (yellow-beige with alum, green-grey with iron), and some of them are clearly better than others (mango leaves and pomegranate husks are both excellent strong yellow dyes when mordanted with alum, while black walnut is the best dark brown), so probably no more than a few of each color to make sure every climate has some dyes available, and some colors being rarer and harder to produce outside of locations with specialized ingredients (purples from wild sea snails being a good example) and consequently more valuable.

Anyways, I have to go to class.  I will expand this post later to flesh out possible dyes with plants that are in or are going to be in DF, possible sources of dyes, real and fictional, that might potentially be added, lichen and mushroom dyes, which are good dwarf appropriate sources of some more difficult colors, like purple, and probably more stuff besides.

Also, tangentially relevant, since linseed oil will very soon be a thing, oil paint is just one reaction away (pigment plus oil = paint), and paints and paint pigments are a long and involved topic that has been suggested many many times.  I'm not sure it merits a new thread, but I'm not sure which of the old threads to necro.  Anyone have any ideas or want to take the initiative?

Any ideas, corrections, flames, etc are welcome.

Is it possible to make a custom reaction to decorate an item with an image?  I specifically want to use some sort of paint (cobalt blue would be nice, and easy to make a reaction for) to put an image on ceramics.  I want to have a fortress based around exporting fine quality ceramics, maybe some amphorae with designs of cheese and elf slaughter.  I want human royalty to dine on the finest dwarven china, and wonder what the hell the designer was thinking, but be so impressed by the superb artwork that they don't even lose their appetite at the grisly illustrations on their plates.

It really annoys me that traditional meat animals, like ducks and cavies, can not be butchered for even a single unit of meat, and I'd like to fix that, but can not figure out how.  Is it just a function of size, or is there some tag that I'm not finding?

I figured out a good way to make a water entranceway sweeper that pushes invaders/caravans/migrants off into a collection bit.  The important bit is the diagonal letting water out the fortifications, which neutralizes pressure, allowing you to have infinite input pressure while keeping the water flowing across the walkway under 7/7.  If the water on the walkway reaches 7/7, any added water will just teleport past, without pushing anything..  I've found that you actually need a kinda ridiculous amount of input flow to get the water on the walkway deep enough to push, you can either use many parallel pumps or a cistern with a vertical dump into the input.