Bay 12 Games Forum

The Bay 12 Games Report, September 1st, 2022


Mission Status

  It's all finally coming together.  That which has been gestating can now see the way out.  All tasks up until the announcement of the release date have been enumerated and are ready to be assigned.  The tunnel that once was twisted and narrow has now straightened and shown us the light at the end.  It is because of your gifts that we have made it this far.  We are thankful.  The due date is nigh.

"Congratulations to the generous!" -- ThreeToe


Fun with Numbers

  Thanks to everybody that helped out this month!  Things are continuing to go well.  I did autosaves and ended up restructuring how saves are loaded - things are grouped by world now, and you can branch off new timelines to regroup them, etc.  Lots of new art work has come in, and we have all the music tracks playing in the game now.  We'll be doing a live demo at PAX tomorrow at 4PM our time.  You can see it on the stream at:  https://www.twitch.tv/pax3



August:    $14555.24
July:      $15238.83
June:      $24529.74
May:        $9664.66
April:     $10053.33

Yeah, it would make sense to cut the output (or increase the field sizes vertically or something), though we didn't touch it yet.

Quote from: Doorkeeper

Hillocks have shallow underground farms. Will the changes to soil farming affect crop yields in hillocks? More generally, does the sim now track whether a site has shallow sub farms or deep sub farms, and does crop production for that site correspond accordingly?

upd: upon further inspection the tiles inside the individual hillock structures are actually made of cavern floors... so it looks like they're just deep farming, technically. not shallow farming as implied by location.

Although as you've mentioned in your most recent response, the hill dwarves could have gathered the "improved" soil from the mountainhome. That's my headcanon for now, at least.

How would that work anyway, if you were to add a soil gathering zone? Since soil is a material and is the same regardless of depth, plus cavern floors are currently just rock overlaid with mud. Would the rock/mud gathered from a cavern have a special flag for plot improvement use?

upd2: haven't noticed this before until now, but i've dug out an indoor surface soil layer in fort mode, and the resulting floor tiles are labeled as cavern floor. Wondering if this was also changed as part of the farming overhaul. "Cavern Floor" just indicates that the tile attribute is subterranean, as far as i can tell (it's not displayed if vegetation is growing on it). But still wondering if the changes you've made affect this label since players could read "Cavern Floor" and confuse shallow soil for the cavern surface. I'm also not sure anymore if this means the hillock farm plots are counted as cavern/deep farming, since I initially assumed they were because the tiles were labeled as cavern floors.

Quote from: clinodev

Another "new farming" question: How does a potash fertilized muddied stone/soil plot compare with cavern plots? How about with potash fertilized cavern plots? Some cleverness with the numbers could make potash fertilization useful for more than specialist early quarry bush cultivation.

clinodev: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8386588#msg8386588
Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8386817#msg8386817

Are you talking about world gen production?  Everything there works differently from fort mode, and we haven't updated anything.  There's no production in other parts of the world after play begins.

Yeah, if we went into this further and added a zone, we'd need to clarify further what deep soil actually means, since it doesn't exist currently except as the grass floor of the underground plants, and as the mud if it happens to be in the right spot.  The effect is linked to the natural open cavern layers, so it's not indicated in the floor name but the layers are also kind of hard to miss, at least at first.

Currently, surface is just divided by four.  You can also fertilize cavern plots.

1. When will the development page on the dwarf fortress site be updated.

2 how quickly is progress going on premium and any time frame for it

3 once magic and myth update comes out in what ways can during gameplay can a deity manifest

voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8387665#msg8387665

1. It just hasn't felt like a thing since we are in stasis more or less until we return to the villains release.

2. Things are going well!  Still trying for autumn.  Between the tutorials, art, keyboard stuff, music, and bugses, we have our hands full, but it doesn't feel like there are any Vague Unknown Chunks left anymore either.

3. Ha ha, who knows!  We want the possibility of them being more active and tangible, but that could attach to anything from them having a standard body to them being a weather event or a plane or something, and we'll only hit certain possibilities on the first pass, since there's so much to do.  I'd anticipate bodied ones at least.

Regarding the changes to farming (and I suppose subterranean effects in general); Will there be any changes to the way 'light-dark' tiles are calculated?  Right now, once a tile is exposed to the surface it becomes permanently 'light', even when covered again, meaning you can neutralize cave adaptation without risk.

I haven't changed this, and I'm not really sure how to do it reliably and quickly.  It feels like it would need to investigate the entire area around for suitable materials somehow, to avoid towers or even cottages from becoming subterranean (rather than 'inside').  Just looking at the old subterranean area is insufficient since the player might strip mine for a bit before building their outdoor structures, so it actually needs to understand what's going on somehow.

Will steam version have the option to display water depth as 1-7? Not necessarily numbers but at least different tile image?

Rose: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388327#msg8388327

Yeah, we have this in two ways currently.  The transparency of the depth, and now there's also a button you can press next to the minimap that turns the actual numbers on and off (there's also one to put arrows on ramps.)

I've noticed that custom modded bloodsucker races with their own entities perform bloodsucker purges. I dont think this is a bug since it makes sense for other races to purge bloodsuckers but is them doing it to themselves intended?

Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388357#msg8388357

Ha ha, Eric Blank is correct that we didn't design the game around this tag being used on entire civs.  I imagine there are a variety of problems like this, and as broader civs are introduced, they'll likely work themselves out.

Oh, and I've also noticed many bandit forts being continually declared war on by random civilizations, why is this? Is this to cull bandit populations? Because as far as I can tell it doesnt have a major effect on fort populations and instead results in clutter in legends mode with the 1991th pillaging of a random bandit fort being noted.

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388492#msg8388492
TheFlame52: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388504#msg8388504

No, this isn't intentional, and hopefully it'll be cleaned up at some point.  We were going to sort out some fort issues when we transitioned to the adv side of the villains release, since forts were going to be important for parts of that, but then we had to delay the whole thing.

1. You often mention the famous "Map Rewrite" that will happen... Soon-ish? And although with a name as foreboding as that, it must be very important to the game, what exactly is there to rewrite? What will the map rewrite do/change regarding map/world generation? What will it mean for modders?
2. Regarding culture; symbols and colors don't have the same meaning depending on the culture. For example the color black in Europe is attached to death and grieviances, whereas in China, it usually associated with prosperity and good health. Are there any plans to add cultural differences in DF?
3. Regarding Technology; every civilization seem to have access to the same level of technology no matter what age it is or how far in time the game takes in place. This means that even at the dawn of dwarfkind, they already figured out how to make wacky contraptions, but ten thousand years later, goblins still haven't put one and two together and figured out how to make drawbridges. Do you have any plans regarding technology evolving with time?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389432#msg8389432
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389456#msg8389456
Mr Crabman: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389537#msg8389537
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389577#msg8389577
Putnam: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389593#msg8389593
Quietust: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8390698#msg8390698
BlueManedHawk: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8390710#msg8390710
King Mir: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8390864#msg8390864

1. I think the replies cover this pretty comprehensively and accurately.  There are lots of capabilities we want but don't have.  The editor side of the myth/magic stuff also means that a lot of the map/sites will be available for modders in new ways as well.

2. On top of stuff mentioned in replies (or I might have missed them), there are also randomized positions in human and goblin societies, and humans have randomized values, but yeah, there's a lot to be done here that just doesn't even exist in the game (so it can't be differentiated either.)  The current plan is to address some of this in the entity/scenario/etc. update after the magic stuff.

3. This is similar to the cultural differences, with the somewhat irritating addition that we have all that scholarly stuff that just doesn't intersect with actual game mechanics (except in a few specific and pretty unimportant ways, like the types of books which are available to write).  Ultimately the hope is to have those completely tied together (not that all techs need to be invented by scholars in a library, and of course Prometheus-type critters could also teach/gift people stuff), but this of course would have a profound impact on the game and need to approached in some prudent way, since the only initial effect of it would be to take mechanics away from people.

According to Dwarf Fortress Talk 7, and comments you've made in this thread, artifacts are truly indestructible (if atom smashed, etc, they'll just be "hidden" and scrambled during claim/reclaim or adventurer visits.)

I've been wondering about a few nuances to this:

1. Are books and named items treated in the exact same way as other artifacts? (I reckon so, as the game tends to treat them the same way with the 'L' artifacts screen.)

2. Any changes to how 'hidden' is handled, or how artifacts are scrambled after destruction? I've made 2 attempts at destroying books and finding them again and both have failed. I haven't been able to find a proper artifact that was destroyed either. (Ignoring copies of books, which can be destoryed)

Also a completely unrelated question:
3. When two sites occupy the same world-tile, the 'c' menu will only show one of those sites and the other is inaccessible to raids/missions unless you send a mission for a person/artifact that might be there. Has this been dealt with in the new and upcoming UI stuff?

Thanks to you and the community for any answers to this!

1. There's a flag on them distinguishing "crafted" artifacts from other named objects.  This flag came up later, so it isn't applied everywhere, but it does allow me to draw distinctions.

2. Doesn't look like it.  It's still using the same placement function for hidden objects and artifacts that it expects in the area but which don't have assigned locations.  However, if the item blasting function is called on an artifact, it adds a destruction event, and on top of the hidden flag, the "utterly destroyed or transformed" flag, which should prevent it from coming back - and it looks like it doesn't care if it's crafted or otherwise.  Artifacts being indestructible by default appears to be gone.  The destroyed flag is also added if the artifact is used in a job to make something, for books/scrolls in a world map library that is destroyed post w.g., or books/scrolls in any building that is destroyed in w.g.

3. Nope!  It should be easy to handle with a new popup, but there's never time to do everything.  I can aim for doing it by the time the army stuff makes it much more important to get right.

I have a few questions related to world generation, which turned out longer than I anticipated. Apologies in advance for being so wordy!

As I understand, the prevailing winds are based on the real-life Polar, Ferrel, and Hadley circulation cells, but are they generated to match the pole(s) of the world? Could there be a world generation option to set prevailing winds to be homogeneous across the whole map? Something like the existing option to set a north pole, south pole, both, or neither, but have options for the wind to come mostly from the north, northeast, east, and so on.

What scale do the temperature settings use in the advanced worldgen options? I've heard that the bug with pole-less worlds having extremely hot ""temperate"" biomes is already a known issue, and I know that the actual temperature is affected by rainfall and elevation, but I'm curious what the scale is supposed to be since it doesn't seem to match the ""degrees Urist"" used elsewhere in-game.

Also related to temperature, any rough idea of when we might get more fine-grained distinctions than ""temperate"" and ""tropical""? Maybe even have yearly minimum and maximum temperature values for each region, and have each plant and animal have its own tolerances? At the very least it would be nice to have ""subtropical"" biomes so that we don't have koalas in subarctic climates.

I love that in this game you can generate a world with a very realistic distance/area scale if you have no poles and set a very narrow temperature range. However, there are a few problems that arise when trying to make it as realistic as possible (so as to avoid questions about the geometry and scale of a whole planet the size of even a large DF world, and for the fun of recreating real-life locations), which is why I asked about the wind directions and temperature issues, and my last question is about the vertical scaling.

While it's possible to realistically recreate real places at a 1:1 scale horizontally (a Large DF world is nearly 395000 metres across and could fit Tasmania), you have to either flatten the real elevation range to fit in into DF's 400 2.8m z-levels, or find an area where any salt water is less than 278m deep and the highest elevation above sea level is 840m, and deal with the awkwardness of having the ""mountain"" biome anywhere that's more than 560m above sea level even if there's no big difference in biome IRL. (For reference, Mount Everest is about 9000m above sea level and Challenger Deep is about 11000m below it, or about 3200 and 4000 z-levels respectively.) So basically what I'm asking here is how doable it would be to have deeper oceans and taller mountains. Having a larger world volume to simulate would be a performance issue, but could the map have the same number of z-levels everywhere and have them offset depending on the elevation of the region or something? Isn't that how it already works?

We don't do anything that interesting with winds, but yeah, the directions alternate over the latitudes and depend on the pole settings, and yeah, a no-pole world is treated like a N+S pole world.  The wind direction could be made more complicated, or have additional options, sure, it just hasn't been a priority since nothing really depends on it much right now.

The base world temperature is just an arbitrary scale.  The conversion is local temp = world temp * 0.75 + 10000.  I have little record of how this came about.  I probably started with a 0 to 100 fractal and then adjusted it based on elevation/etc/etc, and then mapped it over to the fahrenheit + 9968 or wtvr scale whenever that came up, with the 0.75 factor added to make it line up better with what I wanted for the biomes.  There are some comments in the conversion function about targets I had for freezing and scorching places, anyway.

Adding additional biomes is complicated, since they are used in a lot of places in various ways.  We were going to mess with them (leaning toward weird magical ones) with the map stuff, and we'll see if it shakes things up.  But I have to be careful about how regional animal populations are created, and it can be slow/expensive to prepare matches with a proliferation of biomes.

It's hard to add more verticality because when there are steep slopes (or places where we would have had cliffs before), it all has to be loaded in memory currently.  Part of the map rewrite is getting rid of this requirement - this means that there'd be areas where no sky is loaded (only the underground with no way to get up to sky), and loaded areas where there are effectively bottomless pits.  Both of these present problems that need to be overcome.  A steep mountain slope or cliffside might have both at once.

Which version of C++ is Dwarf Fortress written in?

Ziusudra: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8391215#msg8391215
Putnam: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392031#msg8392031

Yeah, the responses cover it.  Mishmash, definitely got some mileage out of auto some time after it arrived.

Has any function for right-clicking been implemented?

Right now right-clicking closes stuff.  There are lots of menus opening and closing and it's nice not to have to click Xs or reach for ESC.  The only place I've felt tension with this is where I'd sometimes want right click to erase (say, during designations), but the erase mode works well enough for that.

I'm very excited about the Steam release for many reason but one will be the mods.
There seem to always be "quality of life" mods which come out and I was wondering what the policy would be on if these mods get adopted into the game?
I realize DF is probably a deeply cherished personal project but I also know that the devs have things they'd rather work on.
Has this been given any thought or an answer? Thanks.

Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392565#msg8392565
voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392582#msg8392582
clinodev: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392609#msg8392609
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392872#msg8392872

I think the replies more or less cover this question as well.  We listen to modders when they have questions etc., have set up some memory addresses etc. for DF Hack etc., and modders try fixes for design problems before we have a chance to get to them.  I'm not sure how much things will change - it's not a matter of explicit policy as it is just time and etc., though occasionally there are issues like "spreadsheets vs. no spreadsheets" where we have a different point of view than the community surrounding the mod.  We'll certainly continue adding little improvements, however they come about.

Previously when you had shown the hyperlinks, figures and entities were coloured according to their kind.
Does this colouring carry over to statue and engraving descriptions in fortress mode?
Do functional hyperlinks?

Whether or not legends mode is going to be hooked up to fortress mode is an open question!  There are the concerns about spoiling vampires and such, which we should probably be a little careful about, but there's nothing really wrong with rewarding investigation either (though it does feel a little easy to just be able to open up your fort's history and see the vampire migrant right there with their identity name given away.)  The technical side isn't hard now - the text construction and render code just needs to receive an extra flag to enable everything, and the input would also need to be enabled similarly.  So mostly just a question of time, with a pretty comprehensive payoff in this case.

Just finished reading the spoilerific Zachpost over the main page, I think i got the jist of it. 

Just the nitpicky one thing i want to pick up on though, question directed at Toady or Threetoe in this instance: If the caravan limit triggers have been altered, will suddenly losing the contents before they leave the map still cause as significant a relationship rift or has the tolerance/mechanics behind trade-relations been changed?

Because forcibly-small caravans running aground to adverse conditions and simple wildlife encounters getting too close seems like perfect-storm noob entanglement that's going to cause players issues; when the home civ attacks and ceases further relations for no apparent reason than the loss of traded capital with the fort fronting the blame (many times also hard to diagnose, and taking scripting than any ingame mechanism to fix). Typically a fortress's starting trust relations close to 0'ish in the first caravan is usually vital to direct diplomacy with any nation they interact with in 47.05 and many preceding versions.

2. Is first contact more formal in the planned new release, or can you still send delegations of unwashed dwarves applying demanding tribute missions to contact traders across the continent? The mentioned already used strategy would probably be more effective in the new build because of how better the UI is for trade/caravan mangement in general.

3. And co-joint question on the same topic as trade: does this open back up the path to the merchant nobility returning to the game in more force than just offmap merchant companies?

Probably just me overthinking it, but i am amused by the idea of a spymaster like noble who writes up little scribble money schemes, pays off legitimate hired goons and handles greater money loanlending (if spymaster ever gets completed to compare that imagined role to)

Ill be honest though, some parts of it left me confused and sometimes a tiny bit worried over change of such a vital part of fortress sustainability as my questions probably infer, but im still hopeful the changes are a safe addition to pass over some gripes and cheesy trade tactics.

1+2+3. It's still the same more or less for the next release.  We aren't able to add a lot of new diplomacy features (the ones I can think of are goblin artifact diplomacy and elves being a little different in savage areas, aside from the wagons and end-game stuff), and the capabilities of the player aren't really different, so it doesn't feel particularly worse.

Hello! I have a bit of a difficulty settings question: is there currently a way to tweak how common visits that petition for mercenary/temple/tavern type are? I ask because I really enjoyed having a squad of humans/goblins/outsiders in the prior version and since when merc companies were added to world gen I haven't seen a single mercenary petition. That is something that would be really cool to have an option of having again some day for roleplaying/etc. Thank you for reading

Doorkeeper: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8393980#msg8393980

If I recollect, the chance of a solitary mercenary joining a company also depends on how much of a loner they are, and that might also be skewed too much - this could be another thing you tweak, though it'll impact a few other parts of the game (but shouldn't matter for humans etc. too much.)  But I haven't added an option to alter more general world generation properties.

When might we expect some random properties to be assigned to the divine metals? Any chance of we could see a small update for the divine metals prior to far off Myth and Magic update? Perhaps in a not entirely dissimilar manner to the prototype for magical powers that intelligent undead were given.

The divine metals are pretty boring as they only feature procedural generation which assigns them a name based on their corresponding deity's sphere. And their material properties are always the same.

Without turning this into a suggestion, I think simple things like random numbers for the material properties, and maybe one or two wacky things from a list would go a long way in generating some good stories out these obscure metals. It's certainly difficult for me to say that I would not thoroughly enjoy laying a war hammer of 'whatchamacallitonium', that has a persistent temperature of something like 672 °F, out in an open field with nothing to guard it. And just having the dwarves sit back and watch the results of kobolds and giant kea birds attempts to sneak off with it.

Doorkeeper: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8393980#msg8393980
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8394052#msg8394052

The replies apply to the currently-released version, but divine items make more of an appearance in fort mode in the next release.  I haven't changed anything about their properties yet, they just act as treasures and as equipment with properties between steel and adamantine if I remember.  Certainly there's now a bit more dev potential in that direction with them around more commonly in play.  But I'm not sure what'll happen with so much on the table - the myth/magic update is obviously the place for them to shine.

How much do you worry about accidentally sacrificing gameplay value when pursuing other goals?

Ha ha, you might have to be more specific.  There are a lot of things that need to be balanced.  Mostly we'd been sacrificing usability through the years, and now we've switched gears to bring some of that back, but we haven't had to make many mechanical changes for that reason.

With the steam release's redesign of activity zones, will there be support for activity zones that exist across multiple z-levels? This would be especially useful for outdoor pastures on hillsides, where there isn't enough room on a single z-level to support many animals.

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8394113#msg8394113
Rekov (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8394126#msg8394126

It's not coming for general zones for Steam, since it's a bit too complicated to pull the z variable out of zones or to make zones hierarchical.  Locations (which FantasticDorf mentioned) like hospitals etc. can have subordinate zones, which makes it come for free.  There'll be some solution along these lines, but it'll also need to be respected in the interface, which might look different for the various zones.  I don't know immediately that all 3D rectangular solids dragged out should be treated the same, for instance, between pastures and other zone types.  But the main obstacle is just the lack of a z range in the zone object, and how much code uses the single z height for them (generally, for all 'buildings', it comes up more than 1400 times it looks like.)

I apologize if this isn't an appropriate question for the Future of the Fortress thread, but I've heard conflicting theories over the years and I haven't been able to figure it out in my varied embark attemps.  Though I have seen reanimating biomes quickly fill up the caverns with many reanimated trogdolyte and crundle pieces moving about and getting stuck atop giant mushrooms.

Does discovering the caverns have a negative impact on FPS due to cavern critter pathfinding / flowing water etc.?  Or do those calculations just happen normally regardless of whether or not the caverns have been revealed?

Mr Crabman: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395038#msg8395038

Yeah, Mr Crabman's right that the calculation are generally happening, open or not.  I couldn't think of anything that would be open-the-caverns-specific + very slow, but after the latest interview, this came up in a conversation, and if I remember another element was possibly creatures trying to path through pet-forbidden doors when you open the caverns.  Those doors don't exist anymore, since they caused FPS problems universally.

1.Do you have any favorite generated myths you're willing to share?
2.How is the economy eventually going to work in our forts?
3.After the Magic update, is hell gonna go away depending on the myth?
4.How far away are we from getting fortress mode mounts?
5.Can we reassign war animals in the steam version?
6.Are we ever going to get the option to surrender to a siege and become part of the enemy civ, and if yes, when could we expect that?

voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395048#msg8395048

1. I don't really have anything new to share here, and I think overall the prototype just isn't interesting enough that way.  It's clear it'll work, but it needs more meat on the bone in a variety of ways; I stopped where I did with it since it needs to be integrated with the main code and that will require reworking it.  What you can see in the video and elsewhere I've talked about it is about all the narrative variety you get there.  The first actual release with myths will be much better.

2. Hard to say!  It looks like by the time you get it, you'll be able to start your fort as an actual working magical temple, possibly with an underground sea where the ships sail out from your subterranean docks, with a society where laws and customs can change.  Only then, you'll be able to slap some trinkets on a mule and send a dwarf with it off to a village to make some dwarf bucks (or use the ships, or have god do it or something.)  This order is possibly odd, but this is the order we are currently working with.  Everything is fine.

3. voliol covered this one.  Having an underworld or punishment plane etc. won't be required, but overall that kind of thing should be pretty common.

4+5. I haven't changed anything here that I remember, and I'm not sure when I will.

6. This comes up from time to time, mostly in the context of the scenarios release, which would have the infrastructure needed to make this interesting.  For the army release, if anything happened, it would just involve something like humans sticking a site administrator in your site, and I don't there'd be time with all that's on the table to make that interesting.  On the other hand, if we do all of the villains plots from w.g. in fort mode, which is the plan, we'll end up with coups and other trouble, so who knows where it'll land - we'd speculated about letting you play through those in some fashion no matter the outcome.

How long will it be before attacking armies will have the ability to dig or otherwise enter a walled off fort?

Mr Crabman: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395056#msg8395056

Mr Crabman is correct about this - the army stuff will address this, and the rough order is steam stuff (pre/post launch) -> finish villains -> army stuff, with any mixing where convenience/speed/betterment suggests it, as Mr Crabman mentions.

Regarding animal people, is there any control on how many show up or how frequently? Some people hate them with a burning passion and don't want them at all, afterall

dikbutdagrate: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395210#msg8395210
voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395317#msg8395317

Adding to the replies, depending on the irritation, another possibility is removing [CV_NEW_TAG:LOCAL_POPS_PRODUCE_HEROES] from the animal person creature variation.

Hey T-dog, whats up with this dwarf and soap?

(picture of dwarf made miserable by soap)

Doorkeeper: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395377#msg8395377

No idea.  Bliss and contentment should be the only available outcomes for soap baths.  Misery should only come from confinement, break-ups/divorce, or hated jobs, for certain personalities.

(removed much of the ~July 3 drama as it was continuing to cause problems elsewhere)

The Bay 12 Games Report, July 1st, 2022


Mission Status

  We were in need, and you came through.  We appreciate it, past, present, and future.  You never know when you'll have to use those generous gifts you've saved for a rainy day.  It's gratifying to know you see the value in what we are doing... and was/will-be doing.  You can rest easy knowing we will keep hammering away, and rapidly finishing this phase and moving on to the greater future.

In the Present we are perfecting the game experience and balance.  In the Past we have toiled to bring that possibility into actuality.  In the Days to Come all will make sense and bring joy for untold human-being-hours.  All across, and up and down the Fourth Dimension, we make sure the reality you experience is objective and Beyond Quality.

"Congratulations to the generous!" -- ThreeToe


Fun with Numbers

  Thanks to everybody that helped out!  And that's lots of people!  This is the PayPal chunk, and the Patreon chunk will start showing up next month.  With those together we should be able to cruise on down to the finish line now.  This month we're going to try our best to get out of Stage 2 (usability/tutorials/etc.), though there's always room to improve usability once we start bug-fixing at full speed.  Now let's see if I can get the settings menu completed...



June:      $24529.74
May:        $9664.66
April:     $10053.33
March:     $10183.91
February:  $10297.88

Keyboard stuff:  There was some confusion over in the linked suggestions thread above and elsewhere about hotkeys etc., and generally I should clarify the different pieces of keyboard support and where we are at:

For hotkeys, I'll have to move some of them, since I can't assume we have a numberpad and wasd has to camp out over on the left side of the keyboard forever, but hotkeys for opening and using menus seems pretty easy to support.  We do have to show them to the player somehow.  Tooltips are one typical way, and there could be some layer that draws them under buttons as well (I guess some games have done, like, holding 'alt' for this kind of thing.)

For designations, I think the wasd+mouse combination can handle some things that people aren't giving it credit for (long tunnels etc.), and camera keys also work for doing up/down staircases.  But we've listened to the feedback here, and a cursor mode is easy to support, since most of the code is sitting around for it and we already have cursor graphics.  We just have to make sure new people don't get stuck in there.

For menu navigation, missing the numberpad and our old (sometimes inconsistent and annoying) methods of scrolling put us in a bind in some cases.  Focus and button use etc. probably can't be the same between the various menus, because they are quite different from each other.  Though I think, as with the Classic display and adventure mode, the main issue here is time.  I see the pathway through for Classic/adventure stuff though, so it's easy to commit to doing those in as timely a fashion as possible after launch if that's the way we go.  With a few of the menus, I'm not sure how much work it'd take.

We read through all of the comments and take them seriously, even the negative ones - there's no need to be rude or assume the worst.  We're going to try to address issues and we think things are going to turn out well, but everything just takes time.

Quote from: Su

in all our time on bay12, we don't think we've ever seen zack post to the main page. what brought that about?

Quote from: Inarius

Is there a reason you are going back to giving us twice-a-week instead of once-every-two-weeks news on bay12games dev blog ?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8371175#msg8371175
Putnam: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8371178#msg8371178
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8378420#msg8378420
Inarius (op2): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8378440#msg8378440

We realized late that since Zach has been playing so intently lately, he can start posting his experiences while I was stuck in menu rewrites I was having trouble posting regularly about.  Of course, around that time, my side picked up as well, so now we have a bunch of logs.

1 will prophets have more functions in the myth and magic update depending on who they serve.

2 would it be possible when prophecies come out to proclaim your own.

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8371744#msg8371744
Bloodwarrior (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8371842#msg8371842

Ha ha, this is all very possible.  Gods are going to be a big part of the update, for worlds that have them (and probably those that don't, though not so magically).  The prophecies as they stand are a little strange, since I was using them to test a new language structure, but this is good, since you'll probably end up with something like the image creator to design your prophecy ha ha.

In the past I remember mentions of adventurer-conquerors and government positions as a possible part of the upcoming Army Arc (the later being possible already with a little dialogue trick, but not very satisfying). After a long time and the current developments in the Steam version, my question is:

What can we expect from the Army Arc regarding adventure mode?

The development page is still current here - we're planning to add an adventure mode portion to the army arc, and the dev page currently has "Gaining civ-level entity positions (e.g. baron) by reputation or intrigue", "Basic command of large armies on travel-scale map", "Giving local combat orders to companions", and "Medical improvements".  We haven't hit the details on it yet, and it's going to intersect heavily with the finishing of the villains release part of adventure mode, since you'll be able to command your lieutenants and such there.  What I don't really expect is a lot of site administration - the worldgen sites just aren't that interesting since the economy turns off when worldgen ends.  Some army raising and such, very likely, but not the actual responsibilities of each position - those will have to come in as their mechanics are intersected in later developments.

in your gdc 2016 talk, you showed off the creation myth generator that seemed to be a generally separate program from dwarf fortress proper (assumably to be reintegrated into df when myths starts development). would you be cool with sharing it for the community to get a taste of myths long before it comes out or would this fall under code being shared? i would personally just like to play around with it since worldbuildings fun but i can definitely see how it conflicts with the "no code sharing" policy.

Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8371829#msg8371829
GOTOTOTOE (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8371833#msg8371833

Yeah, don't really have anything to add to Eric Blank's reply here.

Not entirely game related, but I've had this question living rent free in my head since the unfortunate and tragic death of Kentaro Miura, who left us with his unfinished magnum opus.
1. With the arrival of the Steam version and the ever growing list of to-be-added features in the Bay12 Development log, do you still feel like you'll be able to one day complete the game? Don't you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work it represents, or do you really think you have the time to polish it/finish it completely before... Well, anything unfortunate happens to you?
2. If you and Threetoe were to leave the game unfinished, who would take the lead and keep its development? Would you leave DF to the community like ID Software did with Doom? Or will someone else keep developing it, albeit, in a different form?
Don't interpret my questions as mean spirited, but this last decade has been chokeful of artists who left us or abandoned their work without finishing it, so the slow but steady development of DF sometimes worries me. Although don't worry, I have faith in the two of you.

1. I'm not sure I've ever felt like I'd complete it.  Always more to do!  But that means it's not really overwhelming either.  Polish is the same way - the Steam release will represent a big milestone for DF polish, and who knows what the future holds there as we continue to add things, other than a new minimum bar being set that we have to meet.

2. I have no idea, and it's not really up to us unless we specifically bring people on while the source is closed.  There won't be any point making plans about this kind of thing until we see what happens with the Steam release.  It's impossible to decide until we know what the situation is.

What is the "shrouded history" mentioned in the prefstring of kobold bulbs?

Threetoe: "The key word is shrouded."

Is there a matrix/spreadsheet screen planned that has skills in columns with rows being dwarves?  Many city builders based on DF have this type of screen to quickly isolate/find which citizens are the best at things and it would help build initial militaries and finding the best gem setter in the fortress when needed.

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8372390#msg8372390

It's not planned currently.  The work details and other changes are working well enough for most purposes, and I'm not satisfied with a giant 200x80 spreadsheet as something new players have to interact with.  As something players can opt into, it's probably fine, but I won't have time to do anything like that for the first release while so much stuff is outstanding.

Why are fluffy wamblers immune to fevers, despite vermin not getting affected by fevers in the first place?

Ha ha, I have no idea.  Future proofing?  Copy-paste oversight?  If it isn't just copy-pasted, I do try to keep the critters roughly in line with how we think about them, and I certainly don't want fluffy wamblers to be deathly ill, even if I can't stop people from throwing them at megabeasts.

Last December you answered you did not know what would happen with the ASCII intro animation going forward. Has its future been cleared out by now? If not, where does figuring it out land on the road map, roughly?

And also, has the title screen been finished?

Ha ha, you answered your question pretty much - we haven't finished the title screen, but when we do, it'll be in or out.  As usual, many things are just happening to moment they come up, since there's so much to do.

With the map rewrite, will you be taking a stab at improved hydrology? Specifically I'm thinking of tides, oceans that don't freeze solid every night, and perhaps icebergs? Will geysers ever be a feature?

Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8372673#msg8372673
Buttery_Mess (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8372764#msg8372764

Yeah, Eric Blank is correct - we'd really like to get the freezing stuff fixed, and whatever else we can grab would also be nice.  Tides would be cool but it's a hard problem just to have the water move up and down one level smoothly without causing CPU terror, and it's probably just bad all around to try and do it on the fort mode timescale.

I have a question, mostly to do with things that would be beneficial for creating mods, not entirely sure how useful they'd be for normal gameplay though.

Are user-definable clothing items something that might be implemented ?
What I mean by this is... I have a modded beastman race, they have horns. I'd like to be able to create clothing (and/or jewellery) that they could wear on their horns. So, being able to define new bits of clothing with a token like[WORN_ON_BODY_PART:HORN], would be ideal for me.

It would be cool.  It's complicated to make things more details though, and the clothing generally feels sort of silly sometimes, because of the amount of calculation that has to go on just to get people to choose their clothing properly.  I'd like to do something sometime though.  I just noted while playing around the other day that amulets are worn on the head even though we have necks now, and I thought about a simple version of your suggestion, looked at the clothing code and was like, "well, some other time..."  We'll have to see.

Are you more decided on the issue of Adventure/ASCII mode making it in the initial Steam/itch.io release, or is that still up in the air?

For that matter, what about Legends mode? It was also included in point 5 of the roadmap, but as something closer to being finished, with only (?) the maps left to be done. Were those maps among the screens that were done this past month? It would be nice to be able to say ”Fortress and Legends modes, maybe Adventure and ASCII modes” instead of ”Fortress and maybe Legends, Adventure and ASCII modes” when people ask what’s coming in the (initial) Steam release.

The maps are still missing, but Legends mode is fit for its primary purpose.  You can look at all the main pages and pop between them with the hyperlinks, and the age chronology is there.

Currently we are leaning toward a graphical Fort mode release - the community votes went solidly that way (about 2:1 as I recall), and the money situation is now slightly worrying though probably okay.  It seems like a first good fort release then doing followups would be prudent and what people want us to do.  As people know, I'm a big adv mode proponent (it's slowly becoming what the original draglay/armok were shooting for), but I don't think doing a series of releases will hurt anything, and fort mode is plenty of game.  It's just a little weird to not have it there to start, for Boatmurdered etc. purposes.

The ASCII part is theoretically faster to do, and I haven't discounted it as a possibility yet - but if I get stuck in a morass of graphics-ASCII button conversions that are trickier than I imagined, it won't help our current releaselessness and the possible problems it is causing.  It also seems like something we can do after people have a big chunk of game in their hands.

Will there be changes to cart/track physics or build possibilities? e.g. Impulse ramps are a bug, but a wonderful one that'd be sad to lose without a replacement. Lots of current cart engineering relies on deep understanding of derailment and checkpoint effects. (Which has both good and bad aspects.) Will anything change mechanically?

Ha ha, I'm somewhat aware of the oddities and have thus far decided to just leave it since it's possible to get there stuck there for a long while.  When Roadmap Stage 3 (the focus on bugs) begins, we might address some bits but yeah, I generally don't think we should remove fun/useful bugs if we don't replace them with new systems (e.g. quantum stockpiles.)  And adding new systems is more dangerous as we get closer to release.

1. Have the tutorials been finalised? Do they cover everything?

Are starting scenarios/goals incoming in the near or long term?

Does the Steam release include a new intro movie?

Will the Steam release include new music? If so, has the music been made yet?

Will the Steam release include any sound (even if it's just menu clicks or something)? If not, will there be plans to include sounds in the future?

Mr Crabman: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8375491#msg8375491

Mr Crabman addressed much of this.  Tutorials not finalized - I've added a pile of tooltips, I'm going to do instructional popups, and then we'll see if we feel like we need something more interactive or step by step.  Because of the procedural geography of play maps, it's complicated to support in-depth tutorials (we either need a premade map, which has several major issues, or a reactive-to-your-genned-map tutorial, which is probably impossible to safeguard), but if they are needed, we'll have to do something.

Haven't made a new movie.  It's beyond my capabilities to embed something graphical there, even if I had the file sitting there.

Music is in progress!

We have some sounds so far, but not many.  I'm hoping for more, and shouldn't have an issue supporting them if we get them together.

Hey, I was told I could ask a specific science question in this thread if all else failed, so...
How is exhaustion from firing a crossbow calculated? I know it uses attributes but what's the exact equation for what gets added to the counter value?
Many thanks for bringing DF into the world and apologies for the minor derailment

Exertion is just 20 points it looks like, and then that interacts with attributes when it actually has effects like falling over.  The firing delay is 80 but then it rolls several dice, and if they are less than your skill, it takes off 8 points each.  The dice are 0-2,5,7,15,100.

1.Once bows and crossbows will get proper arcs, will modders have the option to keep the current firing lines for things like guns?
2.Will cage traps be nerfed before magic?
3.After the magic update, will there be more generic effects? As an example, could there be a spell that turns you into an animal and lets you pick which one?
4.I remember seeing a generated myth where the goblins were a cursed version of the dwarves. How exactly does that work?

1. Ha ha, I think there'll continue to be support for magical projectiles, so I think that's the case.  And I'm not sure how bows and crossbows are going to work.  Arcs there may end up be flirting with various AI/CPU/interface disasters.
2. This is quite possible, since they intersect very heavily with the siege improvement section of the army arc.
3. This also seems quite possible.  One of the goals is to have more player control of vaguer effects.
4. In the prototype, certain 'evil' critters or categories are designated as possible curse outcomes, and it's generally for some major offense like rebellion against the gods.  I expect post-prototype it will be more complicated.

What gameplay value does it add to have so many different kinds of stone, wood, vermin, gems, etc. when most of them are, for many practical purposes, exactly the same?  How does this help to make the game more fun?

voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8377424#msg8377424
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8377430#msg8377430
BlueManedHawk (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8377487#msg8377487
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8377506#msg8377506

I like having lots of stuff, and I think it helps with player story creation.  I'd like to differentiate stuff more of course, especially the animals, but even without mechanical differentiation, I think it's still positive as long as the interfaces aren't overwhelmed (as they sometimes are.)

When the second villain release is complete, what will the requirements be for a dwarf that dreams of ruling the world to be recognized as their dream having been achieved?

I guess they'd have to rule the world ha ha ha.  Does that mean a successful puppet leading every civ?  Maybe that's pushing it.

Are the settings ThreeToe talked about in this devlog post the same as the ones in init.txt and d_init.txt, but with some more control over difficulty? Or will those settings have their own (in-game) menu?

It depends.  There are three categories currently.  World gen parameters (set before making a world), embark difficulty parameters (set on a per-fort basis, with settings persisting on unretire but not reclaim), and during-play settings from the to-be-written settings menu.

The current thinking is that difficulty triggers and such live at the per-fort level.  Stuff like popcap, weather, temp, etc. that is more related to FPS/tech concerns will be in the during-play settings.  Nothing should require messing with a txt file anymore, though it'll still read from there if you want to mess with it more permanently.  If we have time, we'll add profiles you can save/load as well.

There's some question about whether certain difficulty settings like wave caps are more of a difficulty or FPS concern.  Right now those live at per-fort, but things may get moved around.

When buying off Goblins with an Artifact, do original books count?

They use the villain rules right now, which cut out books.  Hopefully we can have scholarly villans and rulers in the future that emphasize their book collections.  Then it would be amusing to try to pass off a copy, especially if you copy it after the siegers arrive and make the demand.

I can't remember if this has been asked before or not - but in regards to the music, is there gonna be support for situational music changes? I.e megabeast fight or siege in fort mode (maybe different tracks depending on the megabeast or sieging faction, same for adventure mode megabeast/night creature fights), fading out when shifting back to "peace" mode?

There'll be a certain number of triggers, yeah, though I'll probably only have time to add them at first for situations for which the vanilla game has a track.  Once we can say more about the music, we'll know how many vanilla triggers there are, but that's all still in progress as everybody is finishing up their respective stuff.

Are there any factors besides ethical differences that impact the size of a civ's armies and/or war frequency? I've been genning a large humans-only world with multiple civs of differing ethics and I've noticed there seems to be a lot less fighting than what the population of civilizations should lead to, and I wonder if there might be any factors that I'm missing.

As for actual fighting, the personality of the leaders matter as I recall (excitement, confidence, ambition, deliberation), and the differences in population.  They make a risk roll based on those.

Do undead peasants still show up in sieges? If not, why? If so, why dont they outnumber the actual soldiers considering necromancers probably shouldn’t be sending all soldiers when they’re primarily taking hamlets down.

Why do dragons take 1000 years to mature? They don’t typically survive that long in worldgen and actually breeding them in dwarf mode seems… slow. It just seems odd when compared to rocs 20 years to max size.

Are there any plans for minor raw changes before the steam update? Basically stuff like animal men into animal people. For clarity between a porcupine animal men man and a porcupine animal man woman as an example

I haven't changed this.  They just hand out weapons to the undead pops, it doesn't remember any of their professions from real life unless they were a historical figure (and I don't recall if it uses that information.)  And the necros don't have to source their weapons from anywhere, since we don't have economic data yet.

Long, long ago, I vaguely remember running worldgens 1000 years, though perhaps that era ended before dragons even grew.  It's aspirational.  And maybe after mythgen we'll get some longer numbers again, even if we can't run them all year by year.  Of course, procedural dragons are also in there somewhere, then it won't mean anything.

I'm not sure what all I will get to during Stage 3.  Some bugs and issues are more glaring, though I agree with the change, especially since in interviews/logs etc. we always call them animal people and basically never animal men.  It is the proper name.

Quote from: clinodev

There's a pretty good current reddit thread about problems with how necromancers work now.

As you're looking at difficulty options, what changes are planned for necromancers?

Quote from: LuuBluum

On this specifically, would it be worthwhile to both make having any sort of undead affiliation (necromancer and undead both) more implicitly hostile to living entities, and also for living undead/necromancer-created monsters to better purge their preexisting affiliations to be more implicitly hostile? I definitely noticed in my campaigns way too many flavors of undead something-or-others milling about casually, which doesn't seem quite right.

For difficulty we've just adjusted zombies to be more in-line with other siege ramp ups (which were also broken, but not as badly.)  But this doesn't address the worldgen situation, or the adventure mode situation, from your thread.  I'm not sure the former is a difficulty question exactly, and we aren't addresing adv mode yet.  But there could be some more changes with the bug fixes since necros/undead do have various problems.  Haven't looked at that closely yet.

A quick question about world-gen…

Why does the line that says “Forming lakes…” change to “Forming lakes and minerals…”?  What is going on there?  I’ve searched both the wiki and the forums, but I can’t seem to find an answer.

It finishes the lakes, and then adds the minerals bit when it starts making the minerals ha ha.  I guess I ran out of y space or something.

Quick question about the recent devlog

Maybe its too soon to say with the changes to nobles but: Regarding there are 2 types of nobles, [ELECTED] and [LAND_HOLDER] (occasionally a modded instance will mix the two) do [RULES_FROM_LOCATION] & [ELECTED] individuals such as mayors still count towards the caravan changes if you wanted a 'Republic' kind of fortress playstyle or wanted to stall nobles from appearing through conversing with the outpost liason.

The way the dialogue with the liaison works, when you cut off the nobles, you are opting out of ties with your civ, somewhat rebelliously.  We haven't made it more complicated.  You can mod out the nobles entirely and it should be fine.  We'll need to do more complicated diplomacy etc. and really model the relationship to make it better, but we may not have time for that.

Since below-ground farming was changed, will we also see some changes to aboveground farming in a similar vein?

On that same note, do you think there would be enough time to work in seasons for aboveground crops, to keep them on-par with the belowground ones?

Aboveground farming is at least theoretically dangerous or requires the building of a wall, and we figured that was something.  Shallow soil farming allowed you safety for no cost.

Ha ha, I have no idea what the seasons should be for all those plants.  Probably don't have time for the research and data entry.

I feel there will be/is a lot of questions this month, I hope I’m personally not overdoing it...

1. Can you assign non-wearable/non-carryable items to nobles, like furniture, and what happens then? Do they want them in their rooms, or is any deeper functionality left for a more thorough look at nobles at a later point in time (starting scenarios?).
2. Can you assign multiple items to the same position? Like a royal amulet and a royal scepter? Or is the idea that the item is a proof of identity, thereby making multiple items redundant/tricky to deal with?

1. It only lets you pick a sublist of holdable/wearable items, similar to the villian claim list.  The symbolic side of it would only see the items for theft/recovery purposes anyway, so furniture would be wasted there as the code stands.  We've just added a wear/hold function on top of that.  You can always put furniture in their rooms of course.  We haven't incorporated symbols into demands but that's something I can see spreading out into the old furniture demands and such too.
2. Yeah, you can assign as many as you want.  They don't use them for identity purposes, but since faking identities is one of the few lies we are supporting/planning to support in the game, having multiple symbols should be fine as we get further into villainy.

What, exactly, is meant by “irritation” in the most recent devlog?  At first, I read it as “irrigation” but then I noticed it was actually “irritation” and now I’m confused…

Su: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8378287#msg8378287

Yeah, there's an irritation level for every underground feature.  That's been true for a long time, but it was only used by forgotten beasts and there other bits there that made it not matter very much.  Now it matters more tightly for forgotten beasts and also underground animal people.  And there's an aboveground version.

the latest devpost says that the Z-screen has been removed and replaced with a tooltip.

how are keyboard users going to access this information? i'm becoming increasingly worried that keyboard support is going to become a second-class citizen, with controls going unshown and features becoming outright unavailable without the use of a mouse.

on an arguably more positive note - is there an official link to the updated roadmap? it sounds like things are nearing completion.

This may be the case.  For instance, there are no keyboard cursors right now.  People generally wanted 50 keypresses to be replaced by a few mouse clicks, and I don't think there were any general proponents of the keyboard in this case.  There are some specific concerns, like with macros and stuff, but those would probably be better replaced by interactive blueprints etc. as in Factorio and etc.  I'm all for hotkeys of course, and being able to pull up various information and get things selected quickly with the keyboard, but I've been leaning against replacement cursors and haven't heard a case for them.  I've never seen a similar modern game use keyboard cursors, because it requires so many keypresses, something people have hated and mocked about DF for many years.  And once we admit the mouse at all, wealth display being a hover etc. isn't a concern (although arguably it works as a hotkey for speed purposes.)  But perhaps mouse use is a barrier generally for you - I haven't really heard from the keyboard-only side since they were the only side we'd been supporting to this point.

We haven't been updating a roadmap - it's just that one news post ( http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=174112.msg8354566#msg8354566 ).  And we've only just gotten through the first part, with the big question being whether we first release after Stage 3 or 4 or 5 or 6.

What is presented publicly is that generated sites keep track of what they produce every week, such as milking or woodcrafting.  I would like to know details of how this affects the world in general, but particularly:
- Items that adventurers are able to see and purchase in market stalls and shops of human towns, and trade depots of dwarven fortresses.  Do those, and/or the existence of particular shops in general, get affected by such production?
- Caravans received in Fortress Mode.  Are the products of those relevant civs generated spontaneously based on player need, or resource production and availability of the civilization sending merchants?
- Do those weekly production cycles continue post world-generation?  For this question, that includes the 2 weeks between embarks/adventures, during Fortress Mode, and during Adventure Mode?
I imagine a "No" answer to mean that the items that exist at the end of world generation are all that will ever exist in Adventure Mode - that clearing a Mead Hall of items, then playing 10 years of a fortress, then returning to that Mead Hall in a new adventurer would still result in an empty Mead Hall.

For some reason, this loop of world generation regarding production and trade is something that has been keeping me thinking.  If you wish to provide those details, it would mean a lot to learn how it works behind the hood, and what the consequences are for the rest of the game post-generation.

It's a whole huge thing, way too big for what it does, so I can't really go into all of it here.  There's a division of labor, lots of migration, the crops are tracked week by week, town expertise is tracked which results in the various shop divisions, and every resource and product is also tracked, including its source.  This is why people in the market stalls in adv mode can yell about where the stuff comes from - all of those statements are factual.

As I recall, this includes not just all the purchaseable items in towns, but most of the furniture and food in buildings.  If I recall, the dwarf forts only have beds in some of the bedrooms because their bed resource stockpile from worldgen had that many to provide.  But of course there are a lot of cut corners too, especially for newer stuff - shrines for instance, with their statues and dice, are all generated rather than pulled from resource piles, and I believe that's also true of all doors.

Caravans are continuously arriving and new stuff isn't made, and it's a lot more stuff than the typical adventurer will grab, so their stuff all has to be generated.  The goods do take local materials into consideration.

The weekly cycles stop after world gen.  That's basically where I stopped way back during the caravan arc as far as I remember.  Got world gen production in as a model for post world gen, but didn't start post world gen.  And yeah, if you clear out the categories of objects that come from the worlgen stockpiles, they won't return.

Several months ago I asked a question about a tile flag check for adventure mode and got a reply:

Quote

In adventure mode, the visible tile flag is the 5th bit.  It cohabitates with some of the dwarf mode digging stuff to save room.  Since I think the dwarf hidden flag might be if you ever saw it, not if you currently see it, where a new flag was needed.

Would you mind sharing what any of the other overlapping flags are?

Yeah, 4 through 9.  4 is 'lit', 5 is 'visible', 6-8 are that green memory map thing, and 9 is 'original cave', which impacts what name is displayed at the bottom maybe, maybe some placement stuff too though I don't recall.

In dwarf mode, 5-9 are used for designations (digging and smoothing.)  4 is for stockpiles.

Quote from: Eric Blank

so from the 5/30 devlog, if I'm reading it correctly it sounds like there are now settings to explicitly control forgotten beast attacks and what sounds like animal man tribe attacks. Are animal man tribes going to attack in an ambusher style raids, and if so, what are their objectives? To steal items, kill dwarves, or annihilate our fort?

Like goblin sieges, can their demands be satisfied?

And on the topic of goblin sieges, does the new artifact demand happen every time or will they give up on making demands and just attack you after a while?

Quote from: FantasticDorf

Question in a similar vein: 1) Will animal-tribe irritables defined by [LAYER_LINKED] have any soft supportive additions to make them more than a enviromental hazard (maybe even playable on the level of a normal civ)?

2)'ly is the irritation global amongst all underground dwellers, or will the player be taking the Ire of a particular group.

Currently [SUBTERREANEAN LINKED] has mixed pro's & cons, (free layer animals, nobody knows who you are, not even yourself since you're not a civ), I can imagine once the update comes in, modders might want to upgrade the tribe people to less primitive forms (and attempt to emulate them). Its definitely appealing, as the only otherwise thematic entrance of underground dwellers currently appears by a disaster, which is workable for modding means but not always optimal.

Underground animal people want to shoot you with poison darts and stab you and have their mounts and beasts chew you and things.  There's no negotiation or theft as it stands.  They've always been sort of evil and non-specific compared to the aboveground ones.  And we don't have time to do anything complicated with playability or anything.

Irritation is measure for each layer of the fort separately, and I don't think there's more than one civ per layer locally, though I don't recall precisely how they divide space up.