Bay 12 Games Forum

Just please, please, for the love of god please give me a faster way to scroll through the units list...

Was reading a syndrome thread, got idea for this. make one of the stone types be radioactive and do bad things to dwarves who mine it.

Ooh. Make it so it goes from solid to gas at like, one degree above room temperature... I think it varies enough for this to make it unstable.

I like the unicorn blood thing, but how would you use it? try to kill unicorns in your hospital? and what if it healed the unicorn, too?

Disease is too hard now, though. we cant even fight stuff that spreads from getting tracked around, how are we supposed to fight real infection?

Well, the unicorn thing would go one of two ways- you'd either have to rig up a *very* difficult system with grates and traps either above your hospital or near it, and hope the blood gets tracked around, or hope Toady does the "Extract" and "Tonics" thing under "Syndrome Mechanics"

Get a breeding pair of unicorns, some cage traps, and a butcher shop. Proceed to farm. Your dwarves now regenerate. Might as well just dismantle the hospital at that point.

Didn't think of that. Ok, make unicorns not be tameable, or make only the adult blood cause regeneration (can you do that?) and make them take a long time to mature. And no, even worst case, you only dismantle the hospital system on maps that *have* unicorns, arleady in the minority.

...or do it Harry Potter style. Unicorn blood heals, but makes you slighty crazier every time you're exposed to it...

Yeah... fighting disease will be hard, I can't deny it. But he could put things in the vanilla that the braver among us could mod to be truly infectious..

Ok, idea/example. An FB has a poison blood effect that causes a dwarf to spew bile once in a while, as per "Cough up *material*". The material causes heavy bleeding, but does *not* replicate itself- so the FB makes the dwarves near it poison other dwarves, but not actually infect them.

Then us happy modders could run through and make truly infectious things, and see how they work... we'd have fun, and when the time came for Toady to make "true" disease, we'd already have some knowledge of Dwarven Disease Vectors, what works and what doesn't, problems with quarantine, etc.

Also, you could make disease fightable with a "Resistance to Syndrome X" sydrome effect, where, after running its course, the syndrome makes the dwarf immune to itself. That way people wouldn't get re-infected.

I like the idea of having a shrine or display case, where such things could be presented, to raise the value of a room and inspire happy thoughts.

Might be nice to have in the magic thread, too... shrine + artifact + dwarves = Fun.

The next big things are the things on the devpages, as far as I know, excepting fixing up the things that were introduced in .31.01.

This probably qualifies as another save-breaker (although it isn't as certain as the "Volume and Mass" thread to do this), so I have no expectation that this will be coming any time soon.

Instead, I'd like to see this as a longer-term arc, which would probably fit in with an economy arc that would follow the caravan arc...  So yeah, this is shooting pretty far down-field.

I like to think in terms of systems, however, so I've never been particularly interested with the small change threads.  I rather prefer things be made open and moddable as much as possible, so that the little suggestions would just go away as they all become possible to add in through mods, with Toady maybe adding in particularly good mods as standard.  That way, Toady can focus on the "Opening up possible new avenues of play/developing the complexity and immersion of systems and new play avenues"

The reason I'm so obsessed with syndromes is that they offer so much to modders- there seem to be places where he could do *very* little, and give modders the ability to take it to incredible places. In particular, if he added just a tiny bit more, the modders could start playing with disease, hammering out how it will work and finding what's needed, saving us all time and effort later on.

Most of the other minor-change stuff doesn't interest me, either... though once in a while something seems to fit in with a larger system. Some small changes, though, seem like they add a lot of complexity and depth to the game, without making the learning curve or system requirements that much greater.

I still feel like DF should have a stored pathfinding system, though I recognize such as difficult- though not that computationally difficult, depending on the fortress design.

Stored "nodes" with pathways between them; you map to your closest node (with some way of knowing what that is, so you don't go all the way through the fortress to get to one on the other side of a wall) and from there the nodes know how to move between them. It would need to be updated as the fortress changes, and probably need to store door-related knowledge, but it still seems like that would be compartmentalizeable. I love that word.

All of the "Leave a note, cell phone, public place" stuff isn't too useful... the first time you meet him in person, he's unlikely to be anything but smiles. The risk comes later on; addicts often have a rush of dedication when just starting new projects or trying to repair relationships, the problem is they regress.

I'd keep him at arms length, myself. Maybe trade emails, stuff like that, at least for a while. It doesn't sound like you really *need* him in your life- that being said, reestablishing relationships can be valuable.

" You don't counter the energy, nor do you dodge it, nor do you just strike back, you... move with it. Encourage it, even, while making sure that while you're still connected to it, it can't hurt you"

I thought of that already. You still take the attack. It is also known as "rolling with the blow"

I was only commenting on that one list of yours... didn't see "Rolling with it" anywhere on it, though it's always possible I'm having a brain far.