Bay 12 Games Forum

I went ahead and ported this to Python 3 (some of the deprecated functions were a bit infuriating, especially with such gems in the Python documentation as "return a string which is the concatenation of the strings in the iterable iterable" -- they could have simply said "tuple" or "array"...).

The only subjective change I've made is renaming "mead" from 'honey' type plants to "wine", since we now have genuine mead in the game.  [edit]Fair warning: this means that trees in particular have not been upgraded to .40 compatibility -- the files it spits out are still .34 based.  They're mostly feature complete, but lack some material definitions for .40, and the trees are of course way off because trees are so radically different now.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ovi1hoxbloo0o8l/randomplants.py?dl=0

Also, wow, it's been nearly 7 years since I've posted.  Awesome.  [edit]Fact checked against the wrong page!  It has only been 5 years.  Sigh.

In writing for one of my never-to-see-the-light-of-day game universes, I had a reasoning behind undead.

Ordinary human beings contain spirits that control their metaphysique.  Their attributes (Strength, Endurance, Reflexes, etc.) are a steady progression from physical to mental to metaphysical, with "Fortune" at the far end of metaphysique.

A human body is like a carrier that provides the necessary substance for a spirit to interact physically with the world.  Ghosts and other apparitions are free spirits that can only affect the world metaphysically, meaning that they can instill emotions and feelings, can bless or curse those they encounter, and can cast spells.  A spirit's power, aside from a small amount of energy which it draws from the "Supercosmos" automatically, is based on the number of people who are aware of its existence and believe in it.  (This is the in-game justification for why people become depressed and ponder suicide when they are social outcasts.)

For a spirit to inhabit the body, however, it must be alive.  The body must be able to breathe, pump blood, and otherwise to ensure that the spirit's essence is fully distributed throughout the body.  If the body is not alive, it cannot carry the spirit's essence and the spirit leaves the body; it's a mutual dependence issue.  When a being is conceived under the purview of a deity, one of the deity's followers' spirits is allowed to enter the body as its rightful spirit.  Only during conception can a spirit assume control of a body, although if a body dies and a spirit leaves it, the rightful spirit can re-enter that body if the body is somehow resuscitated/resurrected -- though this requires the spirit to remain present and to choose to re-enter the body.

It is also possible for a body to be manipulated indirectly by a spirit, much like a puppet.  This is what an undead being is.  The body is very dead, but a spirit is very existent.  The type of magic necessary to animate undead essentially involves seeking out a spirit roaming free in the Supercosmos and/or the mortal plane and asking it if it would like to control the body.  More often than not, the spirit animating the body is not the rightful owner of the body, and has no recollection of any history or anything else to do with the body.  The spirit often has motives of its own, so the person beseeching the spirit usually enters into some form of mutual contract that will accomplish the spirit's unfinished business in exchange for the undead's willing servitude.  The "person" beseeching the spirit can also be a deity -- evil deities in particular will raise undead for no other reason than to kill living people so they have more spirits to enslave.

The more powerful the magic used, the more able the spirit is at controlling the body like a puppet.  Zombies run the gamut from lumbering hulks to devastatingly fast and fearsome brutes.  Because they feel no pain, the fastest zombies are easily the match of dozens of mortal men and can slaughter armies of living humanoids wholesale.

Do undead have souls?  Yes, somewhere, off in the immortal plane.  The souls that are controlling the bodies, however, are not the souls that belong there.


The more powerful forms of undead, e.g. revenants, are bodies that have been created from scratch or modified by hostile magic (usually evil deities) before being animated with a spirit.

An interesting concept with digging down is the rate of temperature increase.  Every appoximately 50 m of depth increases the ambient temperature by 1 kelvin (it's actually more complex than this -- a progression in relation to density -- but this is a close-enough approximation).  If we assume that each level is 3 m/10 ft, based on the scale of the most common creatures in the game (dwarves and humans), then it would take many thousands of Z-levels before you start getting uncomfortably hot.  But if we abstract that a bit so every level is a staggering 100 m, we can experience some gameplay-attractive temperature increases on relatively short order -- just 20 levels below the surface and you're already soared an additional 40 kelvin (+72 °F).

When you start approaching the melting points of rocks, they start getting soft and plastic, too, which would be another interesting game-play mechanic.  At 100 Z levels down, for instance, assuming you had some magical protection, it might be possible for the floor to give way and for you to get dumped into a magma pocket.  Ouch!

I believe Toady mentioned it's not really a big issue to allocate additional layers above or below the map in a previous Future of the Fortress thread.

Have a algorithm do a mad lib basically?

No, please!  Mad lib conversations are the height of irritating in all of the roguelikes I've ever seen.  Even the existing "In the morning, consider torture" random quotes are irritating. ;-)

If it's imperative to have topics to discuss, I'd prefer if they were discussed in "excerpt style".  As in, "[You have a conversation with Sacagawea about torture.]"

GearHead 2's mad lib conversations were painful.

One tangential complaint I have with the OP is that in my opinion, DF's elegance is in its current presentation.  I've always felt that graphics dilute the game, forcing you to conform to someone else's artistic vision instead of using your own imagination.  The ASCII graphics aren't a mark of laziness on the part of the developer; they're a mark of making the game unique in its own way.

I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who'd tackle DF if it was graphical and pretty, of course, but I'd rather that more effort was spent on making the game better than making it appeal to the common denominator.  (Toady's opinions might be more grey area than mine, because the more people he gets, the more income he gets.)

Dwarf Fortress haikus
Are innately quite silly
So, please no, dear god.

I don't mind an occasional flame war, be it religious or political or whatever. As long as people stay within the boundaries of politeness and reason.

I think if it stays within the boundaries of politeness and reason, it's a debate, not a flame war.  A flame war is when honest debate degenerates into an argument which then further degenerates into direct attacks on the other person.  (In some cases, flame wars will turn entirely into insult fests, although usually they're still trying to argue the issue amidst the continuous barrage of sexual inferences, intellectual detractions, and racist or nationalist statements.)