Bay 12 Games Forum

Yes... but the other 4 dyes are farmable.  These bug dyes would need a massive increase in value to make up for their scarcity.  Either that, or we get massive amounts of it for killing those few "giant golden thrips" that wandered too close to our base. 

That or capture, domesticate, and farm them I guess.

Perched on a ledge over a massive drop when a winged thing fried me with arcs of electric.

Toady answered a question about clay tablets, cuneiform, and similar in a DFTalk episode.

Quote from: Rainseeker

Let me re-explain. I have some email questions! From people! Who probably enjoy the game ... I have one here from Elijah. He says: 'Could Tarn spend some time talking about the possibility of implementing different languages and written works. Is there any possibility of old languages, and what about books made of sheets, metal, paper, papyrus or even clay tablets.

We're into that stuff and it reminds me of the Steles, the big pillars that the Syrian kings wrong all their conquests on and so on, and the translations of those were some of the inspirations for some of the world generation tortures after the towns were taken over, like stretching out skins and sticking them on walls and stuff. We like that kind of thing – not the tortures, personally, for ourselves, but the written languages – so we're all for it, especially when we get to the treasure hunter section where we've mentioned old books and things like that that we'd like to throw in there. It'd be cool to find one of those old libraries they had, I think they had an ancient library with these cuneiform tablets, they looked like little triangles pressed in different configurations on this clay tablet ... to find a library of one of those things would be really cool. The issues that come up – there's a couple of them – one is displaying the language written out. It would be cool to use different symbols for it, and it would be a time to go add some tiles. These are the kinds of tiles that we can actually draw without total failure, doing it ourselves, so it might be possible to extend some language tiles or ... I don't know if that would involve Unicode in any way since we have better font support now. It's not clear to me exactly how we'd go about doing it but we're definitely ... even if it's just adding some symbols like the graphics for creatures currently, you could just add some more symbols, then it would be cool to actually display the words that are written in the books or on the tablets or whatever, and see them there, and then be able to translate them. It might be difficult to ask the player to do that manually, but they could do it based on their characters skill, and translate pieces of the tablet and then reveal them as you translate them. The other issue is if you're having the game randomly generate a language, which is something that we've avoided up to this point, even though you can throw something together, especially with as little structure as our languages have now – we don't really have any grammar for them or anything, it's just here's a word, here's how you write it – the only reason we haven't done that is because we're afraid of getting too many words that are real life words. So for our dwarf language we didn't want the word for 'mine' to be randomly generated as 'pepsi', and have the word for 'dwarf' just be some swear word because of what it comes up with ... so if your name is 'Dwarf Mine' your name would be like 'Poop Pepsi' or something. it's just not what we imagined for the dwarf language.

Considering how mechanisms would have to work, a coil is probably required, anyway.  The technological end date is more thematic than a hardline of technological progress, anyway.  Toady's opposed to steampunk dwarves riding trains and firing guns, but water clocks, dungeons that involve spikes repeatedly springing from the ground based upon gears tied to a minecart, and something like the Antikythera Mechanism is fine, since it "feels Medieval fantasy".

Like I said springs themselves are pretty appropriate and traps are planned to be made more complex. I was just pointing the date out because personally I find the idea of coiled mattresses modern while stuffed ones feel more medieval fantasy. A taste thing I guess.

I don't follow what you said about mechanisms. They are so abstracted to be essentially magical links.

As for "sleeping faster", I think that's probably more a matter of conceptualization.  Surely you've had some places you've slept that are more restful than others.  Maybe you took longer to get comfortable enough to actually start sleeping, or you didn't sleep as deeply? This would be abstracting that tossing and turning phase down a bit.

The alternative to "sleeping faster" would be sleeping to a lower maximum amount of rest.  That is, you only sleep to 20% fatigue, and have to go to sleep again sooner, but, from a gameplay perspective, Toady doesn't want there to be more breaks than there already are, as it interferes with the rest of gameplay.

Of course the quality of bed influences the quality of sleep up to a point. It just seems like an oddly artificial bonus, I'm not even dead set against, just uneasy. One possible repercussion might be that people with better beds are less vulnerable to vampires; I'm not sure how they pick their targets. A similar mechanic might be possible with magic or even the effect of a biome. If we are to be upgrading beds as crafters level up a better system for replacing them would be nice.

From a narrative point of view insomnia might be interesting in it's own right. They may not have Advil, but coffee and tea are possible.

NW_Kohaku: Welcome back and thanks for finding that quote from Toady; I had looked for it more than once without success.

Quote from: Vattic on May 07, 2015, 01:48:44 am

Will animal people who join surface entities learn to speak? I ask because the latest dev post implies they might sing songs.

Wild animal people can already speak. Find some in adventure mode sometime .

Cheers for answering my question. Not sure how I missed that especially as I remember seeing lizardmen/reptile men lisping.

Will animal people who join surface entities learn to speak? I ask because the latest dev post implies they might sing songs.

Woolly rhino and mammoth.

krakens

Always thought that's what the sea monsters were in all but name.