Bay 12 Games Forum

I've been making a world and decided to play with the worldgen parameters a bit.  One thing that never made sense, nor was explained on the wiki, was the exact function of the river settings.

There are two settings.  One is "Rivers pre-erosion" and the other is "Rivers post-erosion".  I've found that setting them both to 0 still gives you rivers, and not only that, they do not erode the landscape around them in the normal manner I've come to call "canyon hell".

Setting "Rivers pre-erosion" to 0, and "rivers post-erosion" to a sensible number gives you a landscape where canyons have been formed, but the rivers have to FIND them (and normally will)

Okay, so Population cap seems to be working wonkilly.  I did a bit of science here and figured out what it would take to have a 20k population, as far as entities go.  They all are weighted and there are certain percentages of each one in the raws and, all told, there should be 20k people in a 30 civ world.

Only that's not what is happening at all.

If I uncap the populations, I will get around 20k people after 1000 years of worldgen (and does it take EVER so long!).  But if I put the pop cap at 20k I never get more than 1000 people at any one time.  If I go to 30k or 100k, I end up getting fractionally more as I increase the number, but until I uncap it NEVER 20k.

I've tried removing megabeasts, night creatures, even demons (since on some seeds I end up with a "Second age of Myth", which AFAIK is caused by everything being nice and calm them BLAMO clown invasion of the surface lands.)  Nothing works except upcapping the population.

So my question is, is it possible that the population cap affects more than just civilization entities? Or maybe not everyone is reporting in?

So I'm trying to make a plant.. a pepper.  A really, really HOT pepper.  I already got a little bit of something out of the random plant generator program (*love* it), but I need a bit of help spicing it up, so to speak.


I know I need to add some temperature info.  I want this stuff to be flamable.  I'm cool with it growing too near to lava pools and exploding. Actually if it released seeds in that manner, that would be ideal... but they probably wouldn't sprout where they fall, would they? But what kind of temperatures sholuld I make that at to give a nice satisfying boom not an extended burn.

Or does this remind anyone of DF in a way.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And grey cock's feather!

Down along the rocky shore,
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.

High on the hill-top
The old king sits;
He is now so old and grey
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkille he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieve League to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.       They stole little Bridget
For seven years long.
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow;
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lakes,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wakes.

By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare
They have planted thorn trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
To dig up one in spite,
He shall find the thornies set
In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And grey cock's feather!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-setting

This technique has been around since the Bronze Age.  Since we have a dearth of iron sometimes in this and presumably later versions, this could be an acceptable alternative to using sub-optimal picks.  Basically the idea is to set a fire at the end of the tunnel, then run away from the fumes.  Once the smoke has cleared (literally), you are left with a soft (warm) rock face.  You can then throw a bucket of water on it for good measure.

The miners could then have at the rock face easilly, cutting through it like butter.  In many cases, this process produces usable minerals and ores without having to lift a pick to the rock's surface at all... rather the stress fractures from the excessive heat that has been applied to the rock causes large chunks (which in DF would be actually mined stones) of the rocks' surface to deeply crack.

Reasons we need it:
Lighting noxious fires underground.  It's so Dwarfy it's not funny.
Iron is often scarce, so finding good picks from your civ can be tricky (there is the workaround but it's not necessary with this)
It could be easily weaponized.  It's a fire... spitting out noxious fumes... underground...
This is what they used before explosives.  Do we really need dynamite in DF?

I don't know about any of you, but I never imagined Adamantium as anything but a dense, silvery-black metal, suitable for armor and weapons.  But in Dwarf Fortress we have Adamantite.  And it's light.  And kinda sucks for armor.  Sure it's sharp, but it's so light it floats.

This shall not pass in my world!

So I got to thinking.  If one were to combine Adamantite with something denser... let's say Steel? In a damascene-type layering? Maybe that would give it the density it would need to become good armor.

What I need to know is how to achieve this in a mod.  I know it should have something in the reactions.txt area.  But I'm not sure what.

Also, I'm up for ideas on what could be alloyed with Adamantite to make it more durable.

My suggestion for the next (or near future) release of Dwarf fortress is:

Have rivers not run uphill... not cut through sheer cliff faces because they can't run up-hill.  I know it would take more processor power to more accurately simulate where the rivers are going, but it's really only once that they need to be generated... I've grown very tired of seeing 15z sheer canyon walls on EVERY river, stream, and brook that goes through the high drainage areas on my maps.

It seems to me the algorithm used for river flows is similar to the one used for drainage: Take a 3x3 grid from the region map, Find the high area and the low area, then run a river in the center area that connects those regions.  It works well enough, but when you're dealing with a map that is not just 16x but (16x48=) 768x more complex than that, it just doesn't look right anymore.  And you get the weird rivers that seem to plow right through anything they touch, uphill or not.

Instead, what if DF took a moment and generated a height map for the top Z layer AS IT WOULD BE SEEN IN ADVENTURE/FORTRESS mode, then ran the rivers downhill on that (ONLY ever downhill or straight ahead, never up-hill even one Z, please!).  Then at the bottom of drainage pits, it could form lakes (as it does now).  Once the lake fills up to a certain point, it could spill over and start flowing downhill again.  This might cause rivers to "back up" and widen out, too... which would be very awesome for lakes to do.

Then once the hydrosphere is set up, the erosion calculations could be computed... and then back to running the rivers downhill again.  This could start over from brooks only, or maybe river sources only.  The water would flow downhill again, and this time take a slightly different path due to the terrain being eroded a bit.  The key here is there should be a maximum of erosion possible.  Rivers should NEVER be able to cut into hard rocks.  It should be computationally trivial to figure out how much sediment is there.

Anyways, that's my 2 bits.  But it seems, Oh Toady One... that you are very much into depth of realism for the worlds your program creates, and in my opinion the hydrological systems need quite a bit of work in the world-gen aspect.  Thank you for your time.