Bay 12 Games Forum

Right now, there's a lot of confusion with weapons being made according to some ambiguous tags in the weapon def and the entity they're assigned to. Maybe allow some more "diversification" with the materials?

This would allow making entity-specific material type and class lists, as well as items restricted to certain materials.

The tags for entities and items would work the same way environment tags work for stones. They would come in several flavors, I guess like [MAT_GLOSS],[MAT_CLASS],and  [MAT_SPEC], accepting a matgloss, a specific tag, or a specific material name. This would, for modding purposes, have to be coupled with adding some tags to the materials themselves - [COMMON] for usual materials that all races have access to, and [EXOTIC] for those that are common, but out of the reach of less advanced races.

This setup would allow making race-specific materials, augmenting specific trades later on - like only the dwarves being able to work adamantium, only the elves being able to make a hard material out of wood (via a special reaction, probably in the smelter. The filter must work in such a way that reactions resulting in the material being created are not available to races that do not use it), and some such stuff.

In this game, to make iron, you need: a smelter/magma smelter, and a piece of one of the three widely available ores.

To make bronze, you need the same smelter, and pieces of both tin and copper ores, that you have to find in the same area. You do get two bars for that, but the required ores are usually harder to find, and you need them both.

As such, taking into account the higher difficulty of bronze making, and the fact that there is at least SOME evidence that bronze may be stronger than iron, I think it should be made so. Bronze can be initially better, but get less advanced with increasing item quality than iron, because iron can be made into a material almost resembling steel with proper crafting, while bronze is always bronze, and only additional materials in its alloying alter its quality. Then, a masterwork iron item will be better than a masterwork bronze one, keeping the generally known progression of copper->bronze->iron, but slightly breaking it with lower quality items.

I think that the game can afford basic parabolic calculations without air resistance factored (air doesn't have mass, density or viscosity in DF universe), that are then just drawn into the tilespace.

And then there are the usual custom stockpiles next to workshops.

But yeah, we need some better way to make something out of a specific stone, while keeping the option of just telling "go make stone mugs". It frustrates me to no end, when an example of a complete-control system, the Jeweler's shop, does not allow to simply say "cut any available gems" or "encrust furniture with any available gem".

I must have tired out everyone with my "worldgen improvement ideas", but maybe since Toady set up the worldgen to follow a specific pattern, he could add some more patterns, like island conglomerates? Although, no. This will not work until ships and seafaring is in...