Bay 12 Games Forum

Will printing/scribing eventually be an industry with its own quality of paper, binding and creative content? Or will it be restricted to individual dwarven diaries much like engravings?

Being able to create a fort focused around a dwarven newspaper, generating dwarven propaganda or just making a little poetry publishing house would be amazing.

Better yet, I've seen the idea of community adv. maps with several forts tossed around (and one inactive one I poked through). I would enjoy having non-dungeon as well as various megaprojects on a map for exploration. Pass the map around to let people build, constantly adding new content for exploration. I'm gonna start a thread for it; would it be fine here or should I just go with the community games section?

Community! I'd join it. In fact, I will if I see it.

No I'm not talking about that, I've seen that thread and I've done that a few times for giggles.

I'm talking about the best way to get magma to flow out and spread around (probably only part of) the map without pumps, which likely means digging into the side.  This would be useful for decoration (build magma channels that end off the map for it) or constant-flow magma moats, as opposed to drowning the map in molten rock.

Depends on your style for building imposing volcanic death fortresses: you could have an artificial look with building magmaducts out of stone blocks going down the sides of the tube, or you could just channel your own natural looking magma rivers by digging. Just do all the building/carving out beforehand and then dig out the sides of the 'cano and cackle as the lava flows into the patterns you've prefabbed.

I'd recommend doing both. Make a magma-slide park, goblin admittance only.

Really?  I wasn't aware an adventurer can pick locks?  Of course, that might be the [CAN_OPEN_DOORS] tag that allows creatures to walk through doors...

You've got two options when you meet a door: Bash it down or pick the lock. Both are automatic successes since there's no implementation of lockpicking or forcing objects. Adventure mode is fairly barren right now.

Go into the init and set [ADVENTURE_TRAPS:YES] or something like that.  They're off by default, but when you turn them on they function as normal.  They're currently off, because weapon traps tend to be one-hit kill.  But, some pressure plates and such would work fantastic because those don't have to be instantly fatal.

That should be a must since pressure plates are so useful for big machines in-game. As for weapon traps: a friendly and nice DM could load in nothing but training axes and elven swords, but I've never met one.

Thanks for mentioning these modding tags by the way. I'm an absolute dunce when it comes to the raws.

Discussing this with someone else, we decided to make it score-based, which means becoming meta-game where the game is outside the game.  Every dorfbuck counts for 1 point, so a microcline mug would be like 10 points, and an adamantine breastplate would score you several thousand.  This lets you distribute points very specifically and with flavor.  Gold mugs in the dining hall worth 5,000 combined points?  Loose rock crafts in the peasant's rooms worth a combined 10,000 points?  An un-built statue of the death of the mayor in the main hall worth 2,000 points?  Use of art images, statues, figurines, and specific item types can encourage some realistically placed and environmentally rich dungeons.

That would be the system to use for the thread with people posting their results and tallying it up. Otherwise you're just exploring for fun since 'profit' in Adventure mode as it exists now can be had through selling pebbles. Incentive to explore would need to be multi-pronged, I feel, for the standards I'd want to set in dungeon making: offer up only the most visually interesting loot (strange artifacts and hilarious statues) and give the runner something cool to interact with while they're hunting. A water-park complete with lever-controlled waterslides, for instance, or a giant vault opened only with magma pistons. All of that forty goodness but with rewards to hunt down, and extra good if you can stash the really valuable stuff in places only a madman would try and go. Like the bottom of the ocean.

A dry-run would allow you to set up all of the reward dominos. Runesmith can only really steer critters into X room, right?

I'm following this thread...this makes me want to blow some of the dust off old AD&D or Pathfinder modules and recreate the dungeons in DF. 

Recreating the Tomb of Terrors in DF would be highly appropriate for setting, but you'd need to mod in liches and all kinds of fancypants magical whatnot. I keep feeling like I should wait at least for the next release to really get into making dungeons (bunch of Adventure mode interactions are being added, sounds like) but it looks like Toady'll take a while yet.

My first prototype dungeon didn't work as intended: creatures left in built cages don't remain in those cages (as far as I've seen), but instead seem to find their way out and roam around the ruins of the fort. So, putting creatures around at present is a bit random. I wanted to chain up "encounters" by connecting gobbo cages to the lever that opened the way to the next area but that's out. Including encounters in a dungeon may have to involve gathering up dwarves in burrows and releasing foes upon them wherever you want the monsters to be found once you've switched to Adventure. I noticed that the goblins that I let destroy my fort seemed to be found near where they were when the fortress fell, but that'll require testing unless it's already a known how creatures are distributed post-collapse (I haven't seen info about this on the wiki or anywhere else, so, come at me).

Doors linked to levers don't work as barriers between rooms since the adventurer can just knock them down or pick the lock, but floodgates make for a fine replacement. Floor hatches can't be picked or bashed down by an adventurer so they make for a toggleable barrier across Z-levels.

Bridges can't be hooked up while raised, apparently. It desynchs them from the lever being On/Off, so you can't leave a bridge up without it just being a wall. It'd be nice to be able to turn bridges into some kind of catapult hazard or smashing hazard but since pressure plates disappear, like all traps, in Adventure mode there's not much of a way to work that out. Can't build a lever on a bridge anyway. Bridges mostly just make for elaborate barriers between Z-levels, although they could easily be turned into an offensive weapon for the adventurer if positioned correctly. Unfortunately I'm looking for ways to harm the invader more than anything.

It seems like any trap using the environment to kill will have to suffice for endangering the lives of hardy adventurers: magma, drowning, flooding, cave-ins, FB extract spattered all over a hallway or spread around by water, deconstructing platforms, pressurized magma/water cannons. Perhaps trying to guide flocks of skeletal buzzards into a room involving a one-tile-wide bridge over a deathly chasm and hoping they stick around? Combusting stockpiles of booze in lead barrels and burning lignite death hallways are both going to be necessary for flavour, and I'm pretty sure working a freezing trap that the adventurer has to puzzle out (or guess the right lever) into a dungeon would work. I'm also imagining combat over magma balancing on thin catwalks, then being forced to pull levers to raise floodgates that just so happen to drop cave-in tiles splashing magma everywhere and generating magma mist. Really any trap that can be self-activated and that doesn't require a pressure plate or weapon/cage trap is there to be used against Urist McExplorer.

Leaving rewards in lead bins, of course, worked out fantastic. They stayed exactly where I left them. Lead bins = treasure chests. I packed them full of coins and then remembered that currency is worthless outside of a civ. Artifacts make for good enough rewards, especially if they're weapons/armour. Since fortresses are such a mess post-collapse I'm seeing it necessary to dump 99% of all unnecessary goods from the site just to keep the place clean. It's hilarious to find a dwarven junkyard but it's a damnable eyesore if you're not going for a junk-themed dungeon/temple of doom.

I'm going to start another prototype fort tomorrow and test out some things, namely creature distribution post-collapse and the viability of various traps. This means I'll have to build some very dangerous things I have no experience building at all, so, that'll be Fun. Cordoning off but not killing all titans and FBs will also be part of the deal.

Ah, i thought it was something like that.  Now to properly weaponize it....

Sounds like you've got a nice bullseye for a 20-z thick spear of solid earth right there.

I'm trying to build a dungeon for Adventure mode in Fortress mode, and I'm curious: can I lock a goblin in a room and have it stay there in Adventure mode, or will it get scattered about? How about caged animals, do they remain in place? Will levers reset? Will lead bins really ensure that the goods inside of them remain in place? I know traps don't work on adventurers, but how about pressure plates?

FB shell has properties no superior to any other kind of shell.

That's a damn shame. I hope that changes someday.

What is the message you get when you tell the kitchens to make tallow?

'Needs unrotten MAT-GLOB item.' The 'render fat' option is red anyway, it simply won't let me process it. Maybe the fat is rotten and glitching out, not showing the correct title? I didn't see any miasma, unless fat spoils without miasma.