Bay 12 Games Forum

As we all know, if you put enough matter into a small enough space, gravity gets strong enough to pull in light and you get a black hole. So... how much slade do you need to pile into a quantum stockpile before you get a black hole?

I got bored. I was supposed to be studying for finals. I played around with numbers instead. (If I got them wrong, please do correct them.)

First question: How big, exactly, is the maximum possible size of one Urist--one tile of space?

The biggest creature in DF is the giant sperm whale, which is 200 million cubic centimeters in size. A regular sperm whale from the Real World weighs 50 tons and is about 20 meters long; if we assume that the whale is approximately as dense as water, that means it has a volume of approximately 50 million cubic centimeters. Applying the square-cube law, we can estimate that the giant sperm whale should be about 32 meters long.

So if a Urist is a cube of space 32 meters on a side, here's the question: How much stuff do you have to quantum-stockpile before any dwarf that wanders too near gets squished into the resulting singularity?

We want a black hole that fits into a space one Urist wide, or a Schwartzschild radius of 16 meters. The equation for this is simple (R=2MG/c^2), and gives us a target mass of 1.08 x 10^28 kg.

Slade is, of course, the densest stuff anywhere, so we'll set our hapless haulers to dumping slade boulders onto the stockpile.

A stone boulder has a volume of 10000 cubic centimeters, which is 0.01 cubic meter. Slade has a density of 200000 kilograms per cubic meter, or two tons per boulder. (Platinum is ten times less dense.)

So that'd take 5.4x10^24 slade boulders on a quantum stockpile to make a black hole.

Is it possible? Let's say we have a 16x16 embark 150 z-levels deep, made of solid slade, and our industrious dwarves somehow manage to mine it all and pile it all into a single quantum stockpile.

Unfortunately, this still isn't enough mass. We'd need about 7.6 x 10^15 fortresses, all on maximum embarks, all made entirely of slade. And that's only possible if a hundred trillion maximum-size worlds, all made of slade, quantum-stockpile every single boulder into a one-Urist space.

So, unfortunately, those of us who like to weaponize gravity will have to stick to dropping things onto other things, at least for the foreseeable future. And, anyway, if you dropped a goblin into a black hole, you wouldn't get that satisfying squish you get when you just drop the slade onto its head.

Maybe they're just biker dorfs?

I don't see much of a problem with the UI when you take into account accessory programs like Dwarf Therapist. A menu system would probably work better than what we have now, but it really doesn't take that long to learn. I think I had the UI mostly learned within about three days of starting Dwarf Fortress. I had access to the wiki, and that helped, but still--you don't have to be a genius to figure it out. A clumsy UI is a problem, but it's not exactly the end of the world.

DF's main challenge is not the UI. The UI is a minor annoyance that you get past. The main challenge is that everything about it is extremely flexible. Possibilities explode to near-infinity soon after embark. Complaining about the UI is like complaining about the color of the plate at a fancy restaurant.

Do remember that there are ways in-game to make DF run better, such as using DFHack to remove contaminants, turning off temperature and weather, and destroying extra items. Keeping your fort population low, avoiding evil clouds, and not releasing HFS also helps. There are surprisingly many things you can do under those limitations. For example, try making a generation fort: Turn the max population to 1 and survive with just the first two migrant waves. That means you have to protect every dwarf; you'll never be able to overwhelm sieges by sheer numbers, tantrums are truly deadly, you don't have a huge pool of haulers, etc. And FPS stays at 100 unless you play around with liquids too much.

3D would make it worse. Lots worse. As we have it now, the symbols give us an easy-to-read view of exactly what is where, and the organized grid of ASCII or tiles makes designing and building very straightforward. If you tried to make it look more realistic, you'd need lots more space for each tile. Your screen would cover maybe a 20x20 tile area, which is not nearly enough to see a large area of the fort at once; or, if it could cover more, the graphics would be too small to identify effectively, unlike letters, symbols, and simple icons, which are easy to identify even if they are small.

Then there's the problem of processing power. Dwarf Fortress already uses up a lot of processing power without graphics, and most games use up most of their processing power on graphics. In order to increase the graphics in Dwarf Fortress to even 2000s standards, you would have to simplify the game, making it much smaller. No more 100 z-levels on a four-tile embark; now you have twenty. Did you want two hundred dwarves? Too bad; your limit is now thirty. Sure, you could--and probably would--reprogram the game to run on newer machines, but there's only so much you can get out of that. Eventually, you have to start cutting content, removing possibilities. Temperature, weather, and cave-ins would probably be the first to go. Units would have to default to hit points instead of complex skin, muscle, bone, and tissue layers. Contaminants and syndromes would vanish, probably replaced by a generic sickness/poison system.

Yes, you could turn Dwarf Fortress into a high-graphics game; but that's already been done. It's called The Sims, and while it's fun, it doesn't have magma.

As for DF going mainstream--nothing wrong with that. The more the merrier. It's already fairly popular. But not at the expense of turning it into something much less unique and interesting.

No need to atom-smash them after you separate them, if you want to keep them. Same method can be used without the atom-smasher.

Re. eggs: How long until you know an egg isn't going to hatch? These giant python eggs are driving me up the wall. Had the elves bring one mate of the pair and then several years bring the other one... male dies of old age, but not before the female lays eggs. Oh, well, I've got forgotten beasts to kill; no harm in just leaving them there indefinitely just in case they hatch.

Quote from: Facekillz058 on November 07, 2012, 08:30:41 pm

This makes me think.
Will there be good, nice, virtuous, holy clowns in a future update?
Because turncoat demons would be awesome.

Better yet would be angels coming down to pose as gods, which would imply there was a heaven we could invade. The reaction from on high would probably be even more fun than the clown car

I dunno, I think DF gods are probably reality-bender type people who can pretty much make anything happen with a thought... unkillable unless you turn them against each other, and if you do that they'll take the world down with them.