Bay 12 Games Forum

Jackpot!  I didn't think my old account existed.  Never really did much outside of the modding forum... just proving I'm not some completely random guy from the internet.

Thanks,
Me

Uh, I've never had any luck with plants... I was using a similar code as you but creating food instead.
Asked for sun berries, got... rat weed
changed sun berries to cave wheat, got... rat weed
changed cave wheat to pig tails, got... rat weed  

The only thing I think could cause this is rat weed being the only choice under "plants" with no subfield... berries may have a subfield or something so it isn't finding the name I listed, so it gives me the first thing in the field/something generic.  (For berries, you aren't harvesting the entire plant but you can't explain why cave wheat doesn't work)

Trying the same thing with meat I found something interesting...
although we don't have an animal matgloss, I guessed some animal and what do you know? a meat chunk poped out... it didn't list an animal, just said "meat".  The  dwarfs ate my spam and were happy for it though.  

[LARGE_ROAMING][FREQUENCY:2]
What is the actual nature of frequency?  A dragon with frequency of 5 means that it has a 5/(total frequency of animals that could show up) chance of showing up in a given year?  Ratmen have a frequency of 100 for reference.

[POPULATION_NUMBER:2:3]
The min:max number of units that show up?

[CLUSTER_NUMBER:1:1]
I usually see several schools of similar fish on ocean maps... is cluster number the number of herds/schools of an animal?

[MODVALUE:50]
Is this the selling value for one if it is caught?

[GENPOWER:5]
number from 1 to 6(?) which determines general health/endurance?

[DAMBLOCK:8]
Although it seems straight forward... most weapons do damage on the order of 70-130 or so... how is 8 (the highest I've seen) going to change anything?  is it not a raw subtraction but something different?  

[LAYERING:20]
No idea

[MAXAGE:600:1200]
Is this in seasons or years?  Is 600 the mean and 1200 the max?  

[ATTACK:SECOND:BYTYPE:MOUTH:bite:bites:1:2:GORE][ATTACKFLAG_CANLATCH]
DAMBLOCK makes sense if damage was done on the 1-6 scale... min:max right?

[CHILD:12][BABY:1][MULTIPLE_LITTER_RARE]
Is 12 the number of seasons before it becomes an adult?  Where is the frequency control to determine how fast the babies come?

Sorry, the wiki doesn't have this yet to the best of my knowledge...

Thanks

I think sean might be right.  You don't find stacks of bars... so I think it will add everything up till you reach the minimum.  The problem that you would probably run into with either reaction is that you'll probably lose more bolts than you would gain since it wouldn't realize that you want it to use single bolts instead of existing stacks.  If you overshoot, you are going to lose the excess.

Well, there is one way... isn't there?  I've never tested it to this degree, but you should be able to change one of your existing reactions into one that makes the item.  To be on the safe side, only try to change the reagents and products.  Touching the name of the entry might screw it up.  

So, here is a reaction that isn't important (I've never made trifle pewter and you can still make it if you smelt the bars first).

[REACTION:PEWTER_TRIFLE_MAKING]
[NAME:make trifle pewter bars (use ore)]
[SMELTER]
[REAGENT:2:METAL_ORE:TIN]
[REAGENT:1:METAL_ORE:COPPER]
[PRODUCT:100:3:BAR:NO_SUBTYPE:METAL:PEWTER_TRIFLE]
[FUEL]

Change your entry into this... (or something like it):

[REACTION:PEWTER_TRIFLE_MAKING]
[NAME:make trifle pewter bars (use ore)]
[SMELTER]
[REAGENT:1:WOOD:NO_SUBTYPE:WOOD:NO_SUBTYPE]
[PRODUCT:100:30:AMMO:BOLT:WOOD:OAK]
[FUEL]

Make sure you back everything up first just in case... should work though.  I know you can edit existing reactions to some degree during a fort, but I've only edited material tokens so I'm not sure it will work.

So, now that they are growing outside... i don't even need to find the river anymore (never have)?  I can start with my tree farm as soon as I start.  I'll let you know if everything goes well...

Hmmm... so the biome switching might work.  
Since the biome is geographical region dependant... you could switch the biomes for any part of a region you are embarking into.  You could end up have a microcosm region (you can have up to 5-6 geographical regions, right?).  It would be cool to have a little bit of freshwater ocean, little desert, little tundra, and some mountains in the same embark.  Now that I think about it though... the heights and climates for everything have already been determined... you would only be changing the plant and animal life, right?  So if you embarked a desert and changed it into a mountain biome, you would find yourself in a desert populated by mountain creatures.  If you really wanted to do a mountain though... it would still be possible, but the biome tag isn't the only thing you need.  You would need to go ahead and make a complete editor for the height of each unit in the embark map.  

Now that I think about it... you really would need to make a full map editor to get mountain regions working by editing a different region.  However, the converse is not true; if toady has all mountain biomes disabled for settlement... just change the biome tag for the mountain region and you should be able to settle there.  

If you really wanted to find your problem though... start with a desert and start splicing in code from a mountain region until embark is disabled.

[ March 25, 2008: Message edited by: Maher ]

Although I don't think multi year plants work... it would be awesome if one of you guys could test this for me (At college, no time during the week)

[MATGLOSS_PLANT:APPLE]
[TILE:235][COLOR:4:0:1]
[NAME:apple][NAME_PLURAL:apples]
[GROWDUR:6000][VALUE:3]
[DRINK:apple cider:7:0:0]
[DRINKVALUE:2]
[SEED:0:0:1]
[GENPOWER:1]
[LEAVES:20]
[SPRING][SUMMER][AUTUMN][WINTER]
[FREQUENCY:100]
[CLUSTERSIZE:5]
[PREFSTRING:apple tree]
[WET][DRY][BIOME:NOT_FREEZING]

This will generate something strange... a tree that grows in a year and a half (I'd like to change this to 3-5 years, but this is just a test) and has to be processed into bags.  The fruit should be called "apple leaves" but just ignore that, I'm using leaves because it guarantees that you get 20-100 apples from every stack of apple tree.  Longterm high investment.  Downside is that there is only one harvest and we don't have intermediate plants implemented yet    
I want to see seedlings or something instead of going from dirt to fruit in a single instant... my farming mod feels really bare when most of the time I'm sitting looking a empty fields.

If that didn't help out in other people's coding, here is another easy trick i use:
I have lots of plants that I plan on selling uncooked to traders... problem is that I lose all of my seeds and can't grow anything after a year or two.  The solution is to simply add something like this
...
[SEEDNAME  :potato eye][SEED:4:0:1]
[MILL  :potato:7:0:1]
[MILL_VALUE:3]
[COOKABLE_WHEN_MILLED]
[SPRING][SUMMER][AUTUMN]
...
This means that you use the mill as a general processing center (think washing/bagging/whatnot) to prepare your produce for market, while extracting the seeds.  You will need to have a constant supply of bags to keep everything in... but it you typically bag/barrel your goods anyways so it doesn't matter.

You should be able to get plenty of additions to your mod if you can get a couple of creative people to make a bunch of dwarf plants on these basic setups.

EDIT:
Haha, you have no shortage of plants as I can see.

[ March 24, 2008: Message edited by: Maher ]