Bay 12 Games Forum

I would like new metals as something exceedingly rare and special though; maybe a meteor crashed in worldgen, creating a pocket of 100 or so pieces of random metal in the entire world. It could have mystical qualities, but the sheer rarity of it would make items made from it valuable on par with artifacts.

Thunderbolt Iron? That would be fantastic, but probably best done as an adventure mode thing. Sort of, the top tier of the Smith career, or alternately as something a smith might offer to an adventurer - a quest to get hold of some spacemetal in exchange for something made of the stuff.

It's a reasonable enough placeholder for potion-effects and possibly something like Gnomeblight (or at least have gnomes treat it like booze when it comes to stealing the stuff), but IMO when it comes to potions at least it should be folded into a system for dealing with equipment and belongings outside of clothes and military gear, similar to needing to have jewelery sorted out before artifacts get proper magic effects. Dwarves should be able to claim and use flasks and phials and waterskins of particular substances, and it should be possible to order dwarves to carry/use particular items.

Food is a huge issue, if you keep it realistic.
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Also construction and mining would have to be revamped. Many things players build would take years to build in real life, if you want to keep it realistic you can't have your dwarfs build a defensive wall or a bedroom complex in a few weeks.

I'm sure it's been suggested before but food-as-an-issue is a feature, not a bug, as long as trading gets rejiggered - goblin sieges actually become a thing that has to be dealt with. The "lock the door" method is too easy.

The time problem becomes less so if it's possible to speed up the passage of time. Speed up to focus on production and construction, slow down for defence and trade - but from what more program-savvy sorts have said that'd sort of require less focus on the individual dwarves in production-time unless you wanted to melt your processors.

I think most of the time ghosts should be the negative unhappy-thought-makers they presently are.

 On the other hand it should be possible for the odd ghost to pop up with a good enough reason.

 If vampires start actively recruiting, for instance, and one of the new vampires has a dead parent interred in the fort, their parent's ghost might start haunting the place again until they're killed. If you break off from your civilisation and get attacked by dwarves for whatever reason, a loyal dwarf or two buried before the split might rise up, in addition to other dwarves leaving in outrage before the attack.

Some artifacts might entice ghosts back over the veil under more amicable circumstances as well - appearing when an enemy army starts marching on the fortress, or entertaining in the memorial hall, for instance.

 But outside of that IMO dwarves should only return from their rest for something relatively big, not because their tomb isn't fancy or somebody messed up their engraving.

How about dwarves start getting irritated at dwarves who don't do enough work, rather than having to pay money? If enough dwarves get annoyed they start fistfights and try to force the moocher to leave, assuming migration comes in.

Dwarves who aren't particularly lazy should get more annoyed at being unable to work, as well.

The idea of a bunch of frontierdwarves at the beginning and then moochers, layabouts and nobles at the end is a good one.

The game needs a compromise between the "Start with enough people to have a reasonable chance of survival" and "Yes! I need another miner!", but at the later stages, I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have a huge migrant wave for the player to deal with every so often, just because the fort's become A Fine Place To Live (or the goblins are on the march and the fortress has never yet fallen in battle). It would be perfect if the hardy frontiersdwarves got fed up with all these decadent moochers, beggars and thieves and the new arrivals didn't like the ill-mannered frontiersdwarves who wouldn't know an engraving if they fell face-first into it.


Basically having a big migrant wave or two until the fort hits "Mayor" size and having to either grind your way up to, say, a Barony unless you get lucky, followed by the trouble of coping with huge migrant rushes would be what I'd prefer to see.

Of course losing dwarves should have a way bigger impact than it currently does.

[MegaNecro]

Thinking over this suggestion last night it occurred to me that the real barrier to making rooms-as-workshops work properly is the way manufacturing jobs currently work. Right now, to make, say, a wooden chair, the dwarf takes a log into the workshop and turns it straight into a chair.

With that approach, the big benefit to having a room-based workshop is just that you can mass-produce a bunch of items at one time. That, and put Jewelers' and Bowyers' shops wherever you like.

IMO the people talking about how magma forges should work were on the right track - crafting goods should be broken up into several discrete steps, with specialised furniture useful for speeding up various steps, in much the same way that the cloth industry works right now.

So, here's how crafting should work in room-based workshops.

1) All current one-step craft jobs are broken up into 2 or more steps, depending on what you're making.

At the very least, you have to start by preparing your raw materials and end by putting the whole thing together. Most shops should have an optional final step that "finishes" the item somehow using extra materials, just like you can glaze stone and clay crafts - varnishing your wooden chairs for instance, or polishing metal armour. The final step should improve the quality of the object, and be necessary if you want a masterwork item.

So, say, for carpentry the steps would be 1) Cutting --> 2) Shaping --> 3) Assembly [--> 4) Sanding & Varnishing] ; for forging you'd go Heating --> Hammering --> Quenching --> Polishing/Sharpening, and so on.

2) All of the necessary steps can be performed on one piece of furniture. Additional furnishings speed up individual steps and increase item quality.

At the very least, carpenters, masons and other stage-one workers should be able to make their items on a crude workbench (the proverbial log or boulder), or (if tools are brought in) with just their required tools. But workers should take a long time to build items in crude conditions, and only be able to make items of a given quality. It takes much less time to cut wood on a powered +Large, Serrated Steel Disc+ than with a hand-saw.

As always, certain work just can't be done without the right furniture - you might be able to work bronze with just a forge and a crucible, but iron will take bellows, an anvil and quenching barrels. (To make things easier and remove the need for the Primordial Steel Anvil Tree, you should probably be able to make a crude anvil out of iron bars and a crude crucible from stone.)

3) Dwarves work together to make items if possible; some steps have less impact on item quality than others, and are assigned to lower-skilled apprentices if possible.

Apprentices dwarf the bellows and grab the boulders from the stockpile. Perhaps it's better to say that certain steps are less influenced by skill; I'm not sure whether or not certain finishing touches would really depend so much on mastery, for instance, polishing and the like, though I'm sure it's possible to ruin anything at any stage if the apprentice is inept or unlucky enough.

Either way this enables a proper apprenticeship system and prevents the problem of churning out a zillion wood blocks or whatever while your carpenters skill themselves up.

Ideally dwarf mode's time scale would be made more realistic, with production time and food/water/sleep needs drastically increased, while travel times drastically decreased, but that's for another thread.


tl:dr, by breaking production up into steps and using specialty furniture to speed up particular steps, room-based workshops can be constructed and upgraded logically and flexibly. If some steps are more important than others dwarves can have a proper apprenticeship. If some materials and jobs need specialty furniture, you lower the number of anvil-shaped bottlenecks to having a functional fortress.

Thoughts?