Bay 12 Games Forum

Will work weapon what is ranged weapon and ammo for self? I want make throwing weapons without dummy.

Sadly, an ammo item cannot also be any other weapon type. An adventurer can stab someone with an arrow or throw a spear, sure, but AI dwarves need clear-cut categories to work with. A Marksdwarf needs a ranged weapon with an associated ammo item.

One option might be to give your "ammo" and "crossbow" identical attack stats - a throwing axe, for example, would work wonderfully in this regard. But you wouldn't be able to use your final "crossbow" throwing weapon as a ranged option except in adventure mode.

The sausage project continues. A lengthy three-year playtest with a relatively mature fort has yielded very useful data.

Sausage and cheese syndromes work great and seem to improve the average mood of the fort, but present a dilemma of abundance; cheese is brought in massive quantities by traders, and bounteous provisions of meat bring with them many stacks of intestines for sausage making. Micromanaging the kitchen stocks to disallow each new sausage type (determined by meat used) is tedious, but removing EDIBLE_COOKED would make it difficult to keep track of them. A simpler "dwarven sausage" template could reduce tedium, but would mistakenly imply cannibalism - which is quite disappointing. Between serrated disc traps, livestock culling, forgotten beast bits and imported foods, my fort of 60 has over 1100 prepared meals and "other" (cheese, sausage) in stock. It feels a bit overwhelming, really.

My considered plan of reducing creature sizes across the board was starting to seem appealing, but I ran into a single massive flaw: Randomly generated beasts and clowns would not respect those rules, and those terrifying titans would become all but invincible if the rest of the world shrinks by comparison. So, for now, it seems there's still no solution to the meat surplus... Sushi, however, remains a pleasant stretch goal; since traders very rarely bring aquatic-beast meat, it's less of a headache than sausage. I think for now I'll multiply the value of cheese again and remove sausage until I can find a less bothersome way to implement it.

Next addition, when I get to it: an optional module for adventurers. Eat the [beating heart] of a megabeast to gain immortality, and maybe an ability related to its powers...

While perusing the wiki to solve the mystery of a drowned fish, I came across this bit:

"Casting a cage in obsidian will not harm the occupants (though the temperature might if the cage is subjected to magma for very long)."

This led me to the question: What about freezing a cage? One winter embark later, here are my results:

I used a meeting zone, a pillar and a floor to cause a minor cave-in, resulting in two trapped dwarves. One, a visiting Mason diplomat, went berserk at the outrage of being attacked. The other, a friendly Engraver, was more cooperative and remained a citizen of the fort - listed as "No Job (Caged)" in the citizen screen.

An aquifer, floodgate and surface-exposed room were used for controlled freezing. Constructing the cages in the appropriate tiles first and then freezing them had an odd result, allowing me to view the cages and see the dwarves' flashing faces despite them existing on top of/inside of an ice wall. Deconstruction of the cages was possible through the ice wall, resulting in the item teleporting to the nearest pathable adjacent tile.

A second method of dumping the cages onto the floor had a better result: solid ice walls with no indication of an item or unit inside, except for their status on my unit screen. With my test subjects incarcerated, I marked the time and began to wait.

While the Engraver died around when a dwarf might have died of thirst, the berserk visiting Mason did not. Not all !!science!! ends in drastic revelations, sadly, but it was nice to conduct an experiment. That said, there are some potential applications here:

-Creatures that can break out of cages might be safely contained within an ice wall.

-Necromancers, Vampires, Werebeasts and Undead could similarly be contained if necessary.

-Gremlins and other mischievous creatures may not be able to access an ice-encased cage.

-Had I a mechanism to run magma under the floors, it would be possible to unfreeze these poor souls on demand, even in adventure mode. I do not know if adventurers can interact with cages, however, and would appreciate any !!science!! information there.

Sadly, my dream of preserving dwarven children as popsicles until they reached maturity was thwarted. But such is the toil of dwarven !!science!!...

After getting sausage working, I decided to re-use the relevant code to add... sushi!
 
The cheese syndrome added some fun to an otherwise pointless element of the game. Why bother with pastures, livestock and buckets when all you get is +1 food? In that same vein, aquatic animals seem useless. They don't interact with your dwarves (though I added CRAZED to sharks and carp to try and change that) and, even if you go to all the trouble of draining the ocean/river to secure fresh fish corpses, aren't any better than yak meat. Hence: sushi.

Big fish have their own STANDARD_FISH_MATERIALS which is identical to the common vertebrate template, but with a cloned MUSCLE definition that can produce sushi via MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT. Like sausage, it's an automatic reaction that should come as a pleasant surprise to the player, rather than a micromanaging chore.

I sat down with a nice seaside embark to test this all out. I built a filter trap lined with cages and glass terrariums, killed everything that moved until a Coelacanth spawned (which took a while) and after some unfortunate savescumming finally got it to flop into my drain trap before it could leave the map. While I had considered keeping it as a pet, it turns out that a bug causes aquatic creatures to air-drown in cages of any kind, while land creatures are immune to the effects of water...

The end result, however, was a meager pile of sushi and a heaping stack of fish organs, still no better than yaks. Perhaps it'd be worth it to reskin/rename some fish organ meats to "flank" or "fillet" to better give the illusion of the all-meat fish feast. Further tweaks will be tried.

EDIT: Single-count stacks of organs aren't worth renaming. Fish fat, however, is something of a contradiction - though tallow can already be cooked, trading fat for the "all-meat-fish" and effectively doubling the sushi count seems like a great compromise. It'll just be a matter of renaming a custom fish fat that gets processed to sushi...

GOOD NEWS: I think I finally cracked what I need to do for sausage. LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT materials that aren't created by butchering, but are created by other reactions, can be added through b_detail_plan_default. So adding [ADD_MATERIAL:SAUSAGE:SAUSAGE_TEMPLATE] lets me define a SAUSAGE_TEMPLATE in material_template_default and use MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:SAUSAGE_MAT:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:SAUSAGE on the various lung/kidney/other organ meats as valid materials to make sausage from.

BAD NEWS: This approach would be indiscriminate, enabling sausage made from giant flies or great white sharks. That could be an issue. Bird sausage, while uncommon due to undercooked-birdmeat-spoilage, has some precedent in turkeys...

To solve this, I would have to clone the organ material templates to make non-sausageable versions and apply a second STANDARD_MATERIALS to large fish (and possibly birds) which is a whole 'nother barrel of work...

On the upswing, defining a separate material list for fish could allow me to rename their muscle meat (Carp sushi, anyone?) and apply an enjoyment syndrome for discerning animalmen palates, as is the case with my VEGETARIAN creatures. Still... not sure if it's entirely worth it.

Can you add syndromes to material templates? Because if so you can affect all cheeses, even those of modded creatures, without too much hassle. Same for any similar things.

Yep - it's how alcohol works. Vanilla-Spice revised currently has SYN_INGESTED perks for cheese, meat, structural plant material and blood (for leech men and their ilk.)

I've been playtesting Vanilla-Spice Revised more, and the addition of a positive thought syndrome to cheese is changing my gameplay in surprising ways.

No longer a prestige goal, cheesemaking is actually a priority in my fort now - because it allows me to target stressed-out dwarves with a happiness boost in the form of cheese stockpiles in their private dining rooms, or to just boost happiness overall. This is a wonderful level of control to have. Also, buying cheese in bulk from traders is suddenly worth something now, as is defending your livestock from invaders instead of shrugging when they're murdered.

With that in mind, I'm debating adding more "cheeses;" specific-effort foods that provide a happiness boost. My first thought is sausage; with intestines being limited, you only get a handful of units per animal killed. Charcoal as a reagent (smoked yak sausage) would be nifty too, and prevent infinite Korean cuisine without surface access like cheese. I'll get that working before I consider anything else; plant-based options might be too easy, though "candied fruit" using sugar and surface plants would require both effort and surface access.

I embarked to a large river in a temperate climate and spawned on the ice; being early spring, a freeze line split the river, with a massive waterfall and live river on one side and the flat ice, with my dwarves and wagon, on the other.

Because the water had nowhere to go, it began to stack vertically and formed a wall as it hit the freeze line - which happened to include my wagon. With the sides keeping my items (and dwarves) safe, I quickly evacuated the items and retreated to the upper shore well before spring hit properly, thawing the entire river and deconstructing my wagon.

However, a full season has come and gone - no trader has come this autumn, nor any migrants, despite an accessible depot and a thriving little roadside inn. I'm beginning to suspect that my destroyed wagon has something to do with it, as my init settings should be allowing for them and my parent civ is healthy and strong. I haven't even gotten the "No liason? How curious..." message.

Can anyone else reproduce this? Am I alone in my madness? I'll get the inn a little more well-established and see whether or not travelers solve the problem; if not, I'll retire and re-embark to see if that fixes anything.