Bay 12 Games Forum

Personally, I find the list bit lacking. Or it just needs to be worked on a bit. There are several descriptors I confuse ALL THE TIME. To me, the worst part is the midlevel, the titles between Talented and Accomplished (that's 5 titles). I'll never memorize their order. At "Great" I habitually sigh in relief. On the other hand, I'm non-native English speaker (writer). Perhaps this could be a mod if not an official change.


So, I came up with my own list for new descriptors. It retains most of the old words, adds a few negative ones for lower skill levels, and replaces 4 out of 5 Legendaries. I tried to come up with a bigger and smoother scale.



Format: new title (old title)

Unskilled (Dabbling)
Hopeless (Novice)
Lousy (Adequate)
Dabbling (Competent)
Aspiring (Skilled)
Novice (Proficient)
Passable (Talented)
Experienced (Adept)
Competent (Expert)
Proficient (Professional)
Skilled (Accomplished)
Excellent (Great)
Professional (Master)
Accomplished (High Master)
Great (Grand Master)
Veteran (Legendary)
Revered (Legendary II)
Master (Legendary III)
Grand Master (Legendary IV)
Legendary (Legendary V)



Other words I considered including: Chief, Grand, Known. Suggest your own words!
Another random idea I had was to make a list of nothing but negative souding descriptors, starting from something like "Idiot" and ending in "OK" instead of "Legendary".

So I have this superdwarf that I use to do just about -everything-. So, over time he's racked up a nice pile of skills. I have disabled all skill and attribute rusting and degradation at around 15 years into the game. Fort is now 26 years old. The thing is, his agility, kinesthetic sense and willpower have risen superbly, but his strength, on the other hand, seems to have stopped at normal level. He started out as "very weak". I have specifically made him do a lot of strength-related tasks lately, just to see if it'd improve, without success. So, my question is: are there caps for attributes, meaning is "normal" as high as this dorf is going to get? If he had started out as normal strength, would he be much stronger now?

Another thing I was considering: The team of 6 dorfs in this fort are basically vegetarians, so it occurred to me that what if the lack of meat affects strength improvement adversely...?

I've dealt with a dozen FBs so far. But every year 1-3 new ones appear. Does this rate ever slow down? This is a 13yo fort in a freshly generated medium island world. How many FBs have YOU killed in a single game?

They set off some of my cage traps. How do I butcher them? Do I have to drown them in their cages first or what? Won't they fly away as soon as the cage door is opened?

Oh how I wish that dorfs would utilize pack mules (animals) when picking up loot after a goblin invasion
It's total bollocks that each dorf is only allowed to carry one item at a time from the battlefield. It is the bane of any minimal-crew fortress.
I demand a new job designation - item hauler.
An item hauler dwarf would grab a bin or a mule or a horse and he'd collect designated piles of random items, 10 or more at a time, and then deliver each item in its rightful stockpile.
I'm aware of the practice of placing strategic temporary stockpiles near the battlefields. This is impractical, and you know it.
I can already envision a stubborn mule refusing to move once Urist has loaded the animal with items.
Or how an ill-tempered pack horse would run away from Urist, falling down into a river, drowning, taking all the loot along to the bottom of the river.
Fun, no?

Is this something that's been requested dozens of times before?

We all know an individual dwarf likes various things. But what if somehow all those preferences were met for a single dwarf, in form of possessions made out of Preferred Material A, assigned a room with a floor of Preferred Material B, and umm so on, and so on... Do dwarves explode out of happiness? If not then what.

So if I wanted to speed up ALL the creatures while maintaining their relative differences with movement speed, is there a way to do that without having to edit each creature entry separately? I'd be happy with double speed, I think.

EDIT: I sprouted a pair and started modifying the raws manually. This is a copy of the post some ways below, copypasted here for convenience.

Ooookay. Here are the modified raws (22 files) in a zip archive (whole 116 528 bytes). Took about an hour to edit all the files, so it's not ultimately all that arduous task. An hour well spent, in my opinion.
http://www.easy-share.com/1912590073/DF-creatures-speed450.zip

Here's what I did and didn't do to them:
- Added the [SPEED] tag (or is it token?) to all creatures, if none was present, and set it to 450.
- If the tag was already there, I just halved the associated number.
- I noticed that MOST of the time the [SPEED] tag was under the tag [HAS_NERVES], so that's where you'll find the added tags.
- I DIDN'T touch the swim speed, so that's a separate thing.
- No creature was spared from this speedboost treatment. Wagons, horses, bats.. all faster. Hopefully.
- Tested only in very limited fashion - with the current fort, dwarves, cats, dogs and horses seem to move faster, and at about equal speed, after the changes. I did play for few hours, and didn't get any crashes, or other weird behavior. Tested game version 31.16.

Make backups. Extract to anywhere and copypaste the included txt files (aka raws) manually to the relevant folder, which would be something like "C:\DorfFort-3116\data\save\region1\raw\objects"
Use with caution! And use your own discretion. Like I said, limited testing. Plus, I'm not exactly a DF modding expert.

So the king arrived to my fortress. I looked at his list of skills just for the heck of it and apparently he's Great Tracker, among other things. I tried to dig up information about this skill but the results mostly point to bug tracker, nothing about the skill. What's going on? What is the function of this skill? Playing 40d version here.
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/7790/king01.gif