Bay 12 Games Forum

Animals eating at all would be a major improvement--I've only ever seen grazers eat. Carnivores should consume (most of) their kills, herbivores should eat appropriate wild plants and even farmed crops that they encounter, certain birds should dive for fish, etc. I once had a Giant Armadillo that sat on the exact same tile for over 5 years, because it was never coded to seek & destroy termite colonies (speaking of which, termite mounds should sometimes appear as multi-tile structures).

Sixofspades, you'll have to expand on the second idea to show what the difference is between the way the manager can check for available regeants every day/week/month and whatever your new system is. Sounds exactly the same to be honest.

Well, apart from not actually requiring a manager and being more user-friendly for those who are more familiar with running things at the workshop level, it gives the player more control over where things get done. For instance, to stick with the galena example, if there's only one Smelter processing galena, that means all the silver is concentrated in one place, not stuck in meta-existing fractional bars scattered all over the fort.

Nest boxes are rather clunky: If you want to preserve some eggs for hatching, you have to wall them off so the dwarves physically can't get at them, or micromanage forbidding the eggs the instant they're laid, etc.
(Seemingly?) simple tweak: Give individual nest boxes the ability to remember a collection cap, set by the user. For example, if the player sets a nest box to have a cap of 2, then every time the hen lays eggs, a dwarf will come by to collect all but two of them, enabling them to hatch & keep your breeding program going.


There should be a "Conditional" job flag in workshops, essentially meaning do this task if and when all materials are available. For instance, telling a Smelter to "smelt galena ore RC" means that the smelter will process galena as it's dug up, and if at any time there is no more galena to smelt, the workshop will not cancel the job, or give a cancellation message. Telling a workshop to perform a task for which you currently lack the reagents (the job is written in red) gives the job the Conditional flag by default. If a job requires multiple reagents, the workshop will not claim any until all are available at the same time.
The drawback of this idea is that continually checking for the presence of reagents is a valid FPS concern. Perhaps checking only once per day would be best?

It's a good thing we're talking about dwarf fortress then, where almost nothing is intended to be random. People often mistake procedural generation for "random". If there were prejudices in DF worlds they would be based on specific events or fears or superstitions or occurances during the creation of the world that civs would have.

Yes, and if the player doesn't know what those worldgen events are, and instead just starts up a game and notices that a certain civ is prejudiced against A, B, & C, while a different civ hates G, H, & I, then as far as he can tell, it might as well be random. Yes, it's better if the disparity is driven by actual important events, no one's disputing that, it's just that that's a facet that seems relatively unlikely to be explored.

A bigger problem is that ALL gods create vampires, not just gods of Death & its related spheres. Gods should be able to apply a wide range of sphere-appropriate curses.

And even bigger than THAT is the fact that vampirism & lycanthropy are allegedly inflicted as punishments, when in actuality they're major buffs. (Well, the lycanthropy is a punishment when you calm back down & realize that you've killed your family, but physically it's still a buff.)

Until those undergo a major rewrite, nitpicking temple zones seems kinda pointless . . . but watch as I go ahead & do it anyway. One item that NJW2000 overlooked was if there's a priest assigned to said temple. Such a priest could get a divine sensation that an abomination was trespassing on holy ground, and then come out be all "This is MY church!!", which would most likely help identify the vampire. True, this could still be "gamed" (there are almost always useless dwarves around that can be appointed priests), but at least we would HAVE priests. The system could be made more effective in single-god temples, so that too could be a delaying factor--I get the impression that even many mature forts have only one Unitarian church.

What drives the demand for in-game bigotry when there are so many other things that need doing?  Is it all Agent Smith of the Matrix, "the perfect human world was a disaster, human beings would not accept the program," as in people inherantly require a degree of dystopia because otherwise they refuse to properly immerse themselves with the setting?

As I see it, the desire for in-game bigotry stems from two very important things: Human nature (at least, as exemplified throughout history), and Fun.

Human Nature: Good vs. Evil, good vs. bad, and right vs. wrong are fun to debate, but they are all artificial constructs of an already-sentient mind. At its very most basic, pre-cognizant level, behavior is determined by two root impulses: Cooperation vs. Competition. Almost literally all multicellular organisms engage in both of these practices, to at least some extent, whether they know it or not, and whether we view a creature as being "good" or "bad" is largely a function of its innate tendency to either cooperate, or compete, with others--and most especially with us. Humans tout their own understanding of such enlightened concepts as Good and Evil, but let's not pretend that Cooperation and Competition aren't lurking just beneath the surface. They drive business, they drive the stock market, they drive politics, they drive culture, they drive war. The point is this: Every person, just as every other creature, has their own desired "level" of Cooperation vs. Competition, what they consider to be a happy medium of Us vs. Them. People who feel that the local sphere has been too competitive lately will try to make it swing back to Cooperation, and vice versa. People who feel beset by conflict will seek to create (or find) peace--and people who cannot benefit from that peace will try to sow strife. That's essentially where Agent Smith comes in, virtually all of humanity cannot be comfortable living in 100% Cooperation Teletubby Land. They will always seek to find or create an Other, someone fittingly challenging against whom to strive. As for whether this Other is a foreign power or a domestic element--history has shown that to be of little consequence, other than developing different names for the types of struggle.

Fun: Not that many people want to play Dwarf Fortress where they embark in 100% Cooperation Teletubby Land. Sure, that's fine when you're just starting out & learning the ropes, but after you've weathered your first few migrant waves and figured out how to make soap, you want to see if your fort can FIGHT something. And that's just Fortress Mode: Adventurers don't just want to randomly adventure, they want to tell a Cool Story. How best to tell a Cool Story, other than defeating a Big Bad? And how can you have a Big Bad in a world that lacks Evil--real, moral, and ideally premeditated Evil? Sure, that's not an argument that there must be bigotry . . . but you can't deny that bigotry would certainly be interesting. And let's not pretend that a game that calculates the exact trajectory of a baby's severed head is set in the nicest of all possible worlds.

Devnotes:
Various possiblities that guide or govern fortress activity: frontier settlement, religious site, prison colony . . .

Yeah, I saw that, I'm just pointing out the difference between "possible" and "actually planned."

I always imagine it more along the lines of being a bunch of convicts deposited in a hostile environment (monster island?) trying to build a new home and survive.

More like Australia than Alcatraz, then? That could work, although it rather blurs the difference between a so-called "prison colony" and a perfectly normal, vanilla DF embark. If the only difference is a bit of flavor text with the liaison, I'm not going to be terribly impressed.

Nor do i like the idea of being arbitrarily limited in what or how I'm allowed to play. Dwarf Fortress is about that, y'know? "Be whoever the hell you want, Do whatever the hell you want" kind of deal. Dwarf fortress really is exactly what you make of it, if you want it to be a power fantasy and play an evil overlord, you should be allowed to . . .

A very valid point, but with something of an inherent conflict with the concept of procedurally-generated civilizations. What if you discover the perfect embark site, and find out only after you arrive there that your civ (the only civ able to embark in this magical place) requires you to denigrate and oppress gnomes/gorlaks/dwarves with cinnamon skin/etc.? Not really an insurmountable difficulty, just add the ability to explore all facets of a civ's culture as part of the Embark window, but that could still easily sour that "perfect" embark for you.
Objection #2: Tying prejudice directly to a Violence slider means players will be unable to control whether they want conflict from within or without their own society. Personally, I don't want to start a game not knowing if I'm going to be fighting goblins, or myself (or perhaps both).
Objection #3: The saga of a certain Meatgod has already demonstrated ample proof that Toady absolutely does not want players to be able to do just whatever the hell they want. Sure, Toady doesn't control mods, but I wouldn't expect him to deliberately build framework for mods that he knows he's not going to like.