Bay 12 Games Forum

How will dwarves handle harvesting things from trees? Grabbing everything from every tree on the map would be absurd, but individually designating every item would be annoying as well. Is there going to be a way to flag trees for continuous harvesting?

It might be possible to make a much more general system out of it. Have dwarves like to know that their friends are all right, and worry if they haven't seen or heard about them for a while. Have a worried dwarf ask around about their friend, and generate a complaint to the mayor if they still can't find anything about them.

This would lead to interesting side-effects, like a highly social dwarf who has been working on their own for a while getting anxious and occasionally taking breaks to check back in with society. Loners would tend to handle isolation much better, but could end up dying alone with no one even noticing for months because no one knows them well enough to worry.

How exactly are interactions being handled? Is there a single action that handles all types of interactions, or is there a seperate action for every possible interaction? Will adventurers be able to perform interactions if their species is capable of them?

Construct a giant tree, and have your dwarves live and work in its branches, with mining tunnels serving as its roots.

Bonus points: Pump water up the trunk.

Both of these are different from a quest to deliver serious bodily harm to the kobolds living in the sewers.

Speaking of that, I have to wonder if the cities are going to eventually have enormous explorable sewer systems. Completely unrealistic, but they're a cherished RPG tradition.

Magic doesn't necessarily have to be about production. What if instead, it took the form of subtly altering the parameters of the environment? There wouldn't be wizards flinging around spells, but rituals, events, or just random drifts in the flow of magic could result in properties being overlaid on the fortress.

To draw on the existing ideas of divine spheres, if your fortress worships a god of fire, works with lava a lot, or has a lot of things catch on fire, the land itself might become imbued with the essence of fire, altering the weather and lowering the point at which things catch on fire, but increasing the effectiveness of smelters and forges and making dwarves that like fire happier. If your fortress worships a god of death, or a lot of creatures die, the land might become imbued with the essence of death, making dwarves die more easily and undead appear more frequently, but making butchering more effective and dwarves that like death happier.

That kind of thing would be somewhat subtle but would also have the potential to be quite significant. Depending on how significant drift is, it could also serve as a source of the unpredictable disasters some people like. Perhaps altering a world gen parameter could affect how inherently magical the world is.

Can you just assign them all to be dumped over the edge of a cliff, and let gravity handle everything else?