Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarves go crazy fairly easily, so why not have a building specifically to deal with the crazy ones.  While true insane asylums didn't start showing up until well after 1400, people have always had places to care for the insane.  If nothing else, it would be nice to be able to keep terminally crazy dwarves assigned to a bed or restraint, where they couldn't hurt anything and could be fed and kept alive.  This alone would prevent some tantrum spirals.  Besides, I'm fond of the little guys.  Maybe there could be a small chance of recovery over time.  Dwarf therapists are probably out, but would be kind of funny.

And of course, you could always make it into a twisted madhouse/flood the conveniently located crazies with magma, if you so wished. 

with the addition of more z=levels, it would be very handy to have a way to scroll, say, 10 at a time.  Something like pg up and pg down for menus.  My apologies if this is possible, but I looked in the key bindings and couldn't find anything.

Was pondering how df places biomes, and I got to thinking...  In a rough way, the placement of biomes is supposed to reflect the processes in the real world that place said biomes.   So, air and ocean currents cause some areas to be warm, some cold, some wet, some dry.  Plate tectonics shapes continents, and erosion guides the course of rivers.

So when areas of terrain dominated by spheres are implemented, what forces might shape they way they are distributed across the landscape, and how might those be simulated in the game?

For instance, if spheres are produced by deities who maintain there territory of influence through competition and contest, then similar spheres might group together, as like minded deities provide for common defense and exclude different minded ones.  Or perhaps spheres result from gatherings in various concepts, like stars from gas.  So the concept of, eg, war, becomes lumped in one area, forming a war centered sphere.  In this case you would be unlikely to get several war spheres nearby.

So what do you think?  My goal is not to say one approach is better than another, but to come up with lots of interesting approaches and ways to simulate them

So I've been thinking, and I've come up with an idea which could be really awesome or really awful, depending.  Any halfway decent player can wall off their enemies, trap them with traps, or generally avoid closing with them and thus remain safe.  But what if, eg, when you hit the HFS it could effect your dwarves mentally.  There are a couple of ways you could go about doing this.  One is, just breaching the HFS and having clowns around could inspire your dwarves to go crazy/melancholy/whatever.  They could give a strange mood sort of status effect, maybe with some bit about hearing voices. 
As an alternative to just going crazy, they could be subverted and actually try to breach the defenses around the HFS.  This would be pretty difficult to implement AI-wise...but an easy way would be to possibly give a miner a strange-mood equivalent which involves mining  adamantium tiles.  Prevent them from doing so and they go crazy eventually, allow them to and you are asking for FUN.  Bonus points if the likelyhood of going crazy is related to the dwarf's mental traits.

Now, on the one hand, this would be really irritating when your legendary craftsdwarf starts hearing voices and goes crazy.  On the other hand, it would make HFS more dangerous and creepy, and make defenses more difficult.  Bonus points if you can figure out how to apply it to sieges.

So, I'm having some issues getting tower caps to grow in one of my fortresses.  There are no trees anywhere on the map, so I wanted a tower cap farm.  I flooded some stone to muddy it, and waited...and waited....and waited.  Years later, I still have no tower caps.  I have both an underground cave filled with water and an underground river.  At first I thought that perhaps since the tiles were muddied before I broached these two, the tower caps weren't growing on them, but even after I flooded other areas nothing has grown.  I also haven't found ANY other life on this map- there are no critters in the river or the magma pipe, and no shrubs in the green patch on the surface.

I'm currently doing well trading for wood, but I'd still like to have my own.  Anyone got a clue what's going on?