Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, it's nice to get some...finality or closure or something.

Not to be pushy or anything, but a link to my compilation of all these races (see reply #33) would probably be useful for some people, especially as it's a .zip.

Wait, you can change item quality with DFHack?

...Meh, still not going to use it.

Secreting a contact-syndrome fluid that only affects dwarves of that caste.

I hope this gets updated soon; it's starting to get annoying.

"Oh, look, Brightwater's got new posts!...Nope, nothing interesting." The only change is the occasional neat diary entry.

Can we get some kind of list of everyone who's dwarfed, or are we expected to choose a dwarf once it's our turn?

I'm glad you're willing to see reason. So many people aren't.
How would magma be the key to creating sodium? Midieval civilizations had access to high temperatures from charcoal (high enough to shape iron tools, which are magma-safe), and yet no one used the "carbon+rock salt+heat-->sodium" method to make explosives until the mid-1800s. Once we know why, we can figure out if dwarves can make sodium. Right now, I'm guessing it's something like "insufficient knowledge of chemistry and no reason to think that it would be any use at all, plus a lack of spare people and minerals to spend on pointless experiments." The dwarves still lack the knowledge and reason to think that rock salt heated with coal would be remotely useful, and while they have sightly more minerals than European cultures, the danger associated with cavern beasts, goblins, dragons, goblins riding cavern beasts, cavern dragons, goblns riding cave dragons, etc, is high enough that every clever dwarf would be needed to make traps and the like.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 10, 2012, 08:53:22 pm

<--Point here; Comments based on thinking the point is over there --->
My point was that the same rules that tell dwarves not to build in flooding rooms also tell them not to build in rooms with water that's about to be removed.

Ok, but how does that relate to your larger point that aquifers are fine as they are? My point, which admittedly I didn't elaborate much on, was that something that's normal and expected should not cause announcement spam. Digging under the water table is not an emergency.

Where have I stated that "Oh, aquifers are just fine as they are! No need to change! Hur dur!" What I was saying there was "If we took out what makes dwarves cancel jobs in aquifers, we would be taking out what makes them also show a sense of self-preservation around building in flooding rooms."

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Alright, I'll compromise: Humans don't build massive living complexes, with everything from living spaces to workshops to forges, under the water table. Dwarves do. Still apples and oranges, or at least apples and peaches.

How is it so different? Parking garage vs big hole down. Seems similar to me. Anyway, this issue is not how dwarves react to it, but how it behaves. It should behave the same way in DF as in real life.

More like, big pit vs. ginormous fortress. What parking garages do you go to? I'd like to see them. And yes, it should behave as it does IRL, but dwarves building under the water table are a lot different than humans doing the same. We have access to cheap steel and concrete and massive earth-movers and electric pumps and stuff; dwarves have expensive steel (mostly reserved for miltary and magma-moving purposes), stone, picks, and windmills driving usually-wooden pumps. Humans build shallow basements and parking garages and sometimes foundations under the water table that no one ever enters; dwarves build whole, usually self-contained, usually self-sustainable cities. A couple big differences, there; let's get the facts, and see how they apply to DF. How do humans build below the water table?

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"Major?" 99 times out of 100, I can pierce an aquifer easily if I don't make a stupid mistake and lose the pick, and I usually avoid aquifers. That leads to point II: "'Everywhere?' Use the site finder bundled with the embark software to look for a location with no aquifer. I do it all the time! The sites might not have everything you want, but it's not a perfect world, nor is DF supposed to hand you everything on a golden platter."

Major compared to just digging strait down, heck yeah. There's a reason new players are encouraged to avoid aquifers. I'm not saying it's makes the game into a game of chance, I'm saying it requires a lot more attention and work.

Major in the same way goblins are major. I've had lots worse complications due to goblins than aquifers. Hell, even kobolds have screwed over my forts quicker and more efficiently. Dozens of arrows flying at your population is a wee bit more dangerous than a lack of stone. And "requires attention and work?" Describe a single industry in DF that isn't. Explain how dealing with goblins or kobolds doesn't require "attention and work." Explain.

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And, again: You want it to model real-world challenges. Tell me how. What's a realistic way to handle aquifer piercing? Again, like I said at the start of the thread, how to people IRL deal with aquifers? If it so much unlike how dwarves do it?

I did answer this, but I'll add to it. People don't dig smaller holes so that less water flows out. They don't risk drowning by digging in an aquifer. They don't drop a layer of soil from a higher level as a shield against the water. If it is cold enough for water to freeze, it won't flow out of a aquifer. And while you probably would have a pump to get the excess water out, you don't need 4 people working the pump per 1 person digging. You wouldn't even need it to be constantly pumping, IMO.

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Again, the four-pump thing was my most recent example; I've had success with two or even one, although the differentiation of time units in DF lead to currents that dragged my carpenter (or was it mason?) around in the aquifer. And you've listed a bunch of what people don't do, but only one example of how it wouldn't work. Dropping non-permeable stuff into an aquifer with thw soil removed would create a useable "bridge" from surface to stone, even if soil doesn't count as non-permeable. So...have aquifers in freezing climates be like permafrost, and also be frozen if aboveground water is? Also add in some way to make stone/wood walls not collapse once built, to make more realistic (and, incidently, simpler) cave-in plugs? Make dwarves learn how to swim faster, and/or get up through ramps more easily without skill? Make aquifers flow slower? Those make sense. Your original ideas? ...Wait, what were they again?
Ah, right, clustering aquifers instead of having the water flow out to a more-or-less even level.

I just thought of another idea for aquifers. The gist of it is, water could slowly flow into permeable walls (soil, some rock, maybe wood, etc), and the edges of the map at water-table-level would act like the edges of the map at a lake or something (accepting and releasing theoretically infinite amounts of water, given time). The flow out of or between walls would be, say, 1/2 to 1/10 as slow as when flowing from open space to open space and only a somewhat limited amount of water could be present at a time--if you pump enough water out, it'll take a while for more to seep in. This would prevent infinite water creation and absorbtion problems (the walls would "run out of water" or become full), as well as allowing easier penetration of aquifers. Thoughts?
*notices Fancy Admiral's post*
Well, that's similar, but it lacks a couple things. For instance, why would aquifer water not spread out over the whole sub-surface soil system, and instead remain in clusters? Also, it seems a bit less refined, although that could be bias. I think you make a good point about rain. Maybe whenever it rains, 1/7 water would be put into the top layer of soil in a column every, say, 1/10,000 frames on average? Like, this tile is at the surface; there's a 1/10,000 chance that 1/7 water gets added. This leads to all sorts of interesting ideas, like filling cisterns with rainwater (make sure there's a layer of impermeable rock between the sky and the soil) and usualy-dry soils getting all soaked during a heavy rainstorm. The only issue is FPS; that's hundreds or thousands of calculations, every frame, whenever it rains.