Bay 12 Games Forum

Just a brief write up...
How about the ability to export data aside from the map?
Fortress stats, population list (with skills and assignments), announcement logs, etc.
Besides being able to provide extra information that the game probably has but doesn't show (how many goblets you've made), you could load your population into a spreadsheet and sort people quickly to see who has what skill or labor.
The announcements thing was an idea I had long ago based on some ideas other people had. It would give bored Perl scripters a chance to try and automate a story out of it, even better if the logs were more detailed than the regular announcements (starts of romances, etc.). (Who's going to write up StarRavingMad's Al Swearagin style from Boatmurdered as a filter...)

Has it struck anyone else as odd how most crops can be grown year round on the surface, but in the underground, where the environment is fairly constant, 2/3 of the crops are seasonal?

Let different foods have different vitamins, say a-k. Dwarves would get their vitamins replenished every time they ate and diminished over time. A dwarf eating only one type of food would eventually get sick.
Bonus points if preparation can destroy certain nutrients. "You can't live on wine wafers. Plump helmets loose vitamin j when you brew them!"

Now I've known SCA guys to make mead in their fridges, but doesn't alcohol take time to ferment? I mean shouldn't wine be aged and all that? Right now it's workshop mechanics, "Pass me that wrench, I'm gonna make a beer."
I'd like to see dwarves setting up kegs and letting them age, like plants need time to mature. Wine racks to be populated with choice vintages for the dwarven king's traders and slurpee cups of sewer brew for the human caravan guards, "That's good bass."
Eventually, I'd like to see the process continued to preserving meat and herbs, but for now I'll be happy not to see insta-beer. Maybe I'm wrong, but for some reason it's been bugging me. I think I just feel my dwarves deserve big ass kegs in the basement.

Can we please get the fps fixed on the Mac? I can't tell when I'm slowing down and when my dwarves are being lazy or geographically illogical.
Thank you.

New idea for dealing with problems in DF, possess the little buggers! Dungeon Keeper let you take over critters, why not take direct control of a dwarf, like a subset of adventure mode and make him move the damn rock if he's too lazy. You wield the power to force the issue! The ultimate in micromanagement, and think of the fun once religion is added.
"The gawds have decreed I move this sock!"
"This sock is holy!"
"Ahhhhhhhhhhahhhhhhahhhhh!"
"It is the sock of the lord!"
"All hail the slightly frayed left pigtail sock."
"Urist Sockkiller must be sacrificed!"
"Yes! I mandate an altar!"
OK, maybe it could get a little Lord of the Flies in there...

I think we should have the option to survey sites we choose.
A "professional surveyor" would go there, look around and tell us how good the site is, how much farmable land, how likely various ores and flux are and in what quantities, etc. before we finalize tyhe embark.
Maybe they cost points and when you arrive, they're already waiting in a shack. Maybe he's managed to reveal bits of the underground and stuff... It's a rough idea based on people not finding things like iron and my wondering what the #$% kind of dwarf goes to built a dwarven hall without checking if it's got iron? For that matter they can see the proper lay of the land and should have an idea where to look and if the grounds stable for tunneling.

I hereby formally request, with due humility to the Toad-like gawds, the implementation of a basic burrow system; a prophetic revelation of what will one day come to pass in it's entirety.

I think if you allow the designation command to have a burrow flag and then preempt pathfinding/jobhunting to first search the current zone, if the dwarf's in one, would give an extra aspect of control to players, and maybe help the framerate, by not searching the whole map and shortening trips.

In the discussions I've contributed to I've usually remarked that zone control would help immensely or alleviate the need/urgency for a feature. Plus the People of the Toad are very clever with expanding the uses of these primary tools.

If I place a zone over a bunch of carpenter shops, bedrooms and stockrooms then the people housed there will use their bedroom, in that zone, the dining room, in that zone, and haul stuff in that zone, first. My doors will be put away! No more cluttered workshops, neglected tasks, etc. No more wandering all over for no reason. Put the broker's office in the same zone as the depot and he'll go there first! It helps set up industry and it's already there in the zones and in the barracks/dining/meetinghall assignments. (Except for the check the zone subroutine at the start of the existing pathfinding code.)

Now, we don't want to take it too far. Dwarves want lunch with their friends and we want peasants to haul elsewhere when work runs out. Crops need to be harvested and depots filled (bonus points if they return to their zone after these tasks). But when they go to bed... They'll be back in the zone and start their work where they should. First thing peasants do on waking is clear out all the workshops, it might take them all day with the craftsmen filling them, but that's their job.

Anyway, I think as a primitive it would be a larger help than task and therefore a positive move and I pray and offer many goblin totems in supplication for the presumption of... well, presuming of the gawds.
(Also check out my suggestion in mining for higher framerates with higher populations, I think you'll enjoy it. This has been an amphibian service announcement.)