Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Marshall Burns on December 02, 2010, 07:07:29 pm

Waitaminnit, HIPPOS are BENIGN? The hell? Hippos kill more people every year than sharks ever have since the history of ever.

Hippos are very territorial in real life and are very brutal killers. But sharks can't walk on land and don't live near people either (besides beaches), otherwise they'd probably close the gap the bit.

Unlikely. Only a handful of all sharks are capable of actually harming humans. Even then, the vast majority of these sharks do not want to eat humans, as our bodies don't have enough meat on them. Supposed killers such as the great white shark only kill humans by accident, mistaking them for tasty seals. Usually they just take one bite and then leave after realizing that it's not a seal. Course that doesn't keep you from bleeding out if its a deep wound.

If sharks lived on land, they would have learned what humans are like and wouldn't mistake them for animals they want to eat. They'd probably go after cows instead.

But why am I trying to bring logic into the idea of a land shark? 

Anyways, if you want killer elephants embark on a terrifying biome and enjoy the skelephants. Or give them the [CURIOUSBEAST_GUZZLER] tag, since some elephants are apparently raiding villages and drinking booze in real life.

Your challenge intrigues me. I shall be attempting it in a terrifying forest. I'm going to allow myself to dig into the caverns for minerals and wood from below, but I will not be using stone. I feel that the real spirit of the challenge lies in only using wood.

Well report about how it goes.

I wouldn't say "harder than making something out of stone", personally. They require a bit of tissue layering (skin/bark -> various fleshy bits), but probably less than a mammal does. Was there any specific aspect you were having trouble with?

I can't figure out the tissue system I guess. I learned most of my knowledge of creautre modding by examining the creatures in vanilla Dwarf Fortress. However, at the moment the only vanila plant creaturea are plump helmet men, and even then their tissues seem strange.

There's one thing in DF modding that has continued to trouble me, and attempts to learn how to do it on my own have failed. I have to ask; how do you make a functioning creature that is a plant? I know people have made plant creatures before, but the process invovled in making them actual plants seems much harder than, say, making a creature out of stone.

Toady made a number of changes to how undead worked. Now, rather than leaving behind corpses they instead vanish. This is probably intentional, as they are supernatural beings.

However, there appear to be bugs involved with this. One, in my experience the undead have become substantially weaker because of this. They vanish to quickly, often being taken down by a few punches. Some undead are still capable of causing serious damage (skeletal muskox wrecked one of my embarks). However, overall they seem much less threatning now.

Second, the game does not properly explain the undead vanishing. In fortress mode, you will never get a message telling you that an undead has vanished. Nobody will be credited with killing them either. This makes it seem like undead vanishing is a bug rather than an intended feature.

Third, sometimes undead don't vanish. My commander killed some zombie mole dogs, and some of them left behin corpses and he got credited for killing them. Why they didn't dissapear is beyond me. The inconsistency of the new undead mechanics makes it seem like they are bugged at the moment.

Part 13 of my DF LP is up.

Not much happened during this update in terms of gameplay, as it was told from the perspective of the outpost liaison. I always imagine the beaneath their calm and polite behavior is a very angry and bitter dwarf. After all, liaison's have a pretty shitty job considering how most Dwarf Fortress players treat them.

Thinking of an explanation for the high price of crutches was actually difficult. I settles for the cave in since that's how most dwarves are injured, though I still don't see why that would require a huge amount of crutches. I guess you can imagine that they somehow managed to collapse the entire slum district of the capital, or some other horrific disaster.

Part 12 of my LP is up.

Not much happened this update, mainly because I anticipate the next update will be a big one that will eat out a huge chunk of my time. I am legitimately concerned about how I'm going to buy anything from the trade caravans. I don't think I have enough mechanisms to get anything beyond a few barrels of drink and food, let alone weapon and armor for Alath. One of the biggest drawbacks to making ocean forts is that it takes forever for me to get the metal industry up and running. This can result in the military be woefully underequiped, which is terrible when the goblins start showing up.

Burrows are your friend. You can use them to order dwarves anywhere.