Bay 12 Games Forum

Consider two forts, started at the same time, and on embark sites directly adjacent to one another. They are therefore roughly equidistant from all neighbors, etc.

By the end of the second year, Fortress A has erected a palisade wall around a good-sized chunk of pastureland, housing about 20 head of cattle & sheep. This wall is (occasionally) patrolled by guards, and the whole site is dominated by a tower overlooking the fort's main entrance, rising 8 z-levels over the surrounding landscape.

In contrast, the residents of Fortress B have done hardly anything to disturb their site, and by the time they'd only been there for a couple of months, the only outward sign of their presence has never been more than a single door, tucked behind a bush in a dead end of a box canyon . . . a door made of the same stone as the nearby natural walls.

In the existing game, both of these forts would be "found"--and visited by merchants, and invaded by enemies--basically simultaneously, without regard for any discretion / audacity of fortress design.

I for one would like to see the game consider a third condition when triggering ambushes / sieges / megabeasts: As well as fortress wealth & population, check for outside visibility as well. Things like dwarves & non-native animals walking around outside, aboveground farm plots, large-scale tree-cutting, dug or channeled Outside tiles, and of course especially artificial constructions--with the "penalty" for the latter increasing with relative altitude.

Merchants of foreign civilizations would also be subject to difficulties in detecting your presence, unless you allow the outpost liaison to invite specific nations to come trade with you. Even after they know OF your site, these merchants may still encounter problems actually locating your site--you may find it prudent to send someone to guide them in. Future trade caravans may be asked to arrive Openly (same as now) or Covertly (they stealth like ambushes, sneaking up on your Trade Depot with bins of cloth, but with greatly reduced carrying capacity). Be neighborly if you want your secret kept: Foreign merchants unhappy with their profit margin (and especially outright theft) may actually sell your fort's position to certain other interested parties.

As long as we're discussing papermaking techniques, I'd like to suggest some diversity of use among the underground trees. With the obvious exception of nether-caps, everyone just goes, "Um, they're subterranean, giant, mushroom-type . . . things. Use 'em for wood," and leaves it at that. If the different trees could have different alternate uses, that could make them all a lot more interesting. Tunnel tubes, for example, could be the only source for a very good paper substitute: Cut down a sapling, soak it in a weak acid bath, then cut a shallow groove down the length of the log, and carefully peel away the layers of fiber in one long, unbroken roll. Produces a stack of "tunnel paper", perfect for making scrolls. Other underground trees might be similary given different "flavor".

If magic is everywhere, it isn't really magic anymore.  It's just everyday life with a few brightly colored swirls photoshopped in.

And I wake in the morning and I step outside, and I take a deep breath and I get real high, and I . . .
scream at the top my lungs, "IT IS RAINING BEER!"

Personally, I'm hoping for actual day and night, in relative real-time, like Adventure mode. Days would be shorter, of course, so that an in-game year would not take a real-time month to play, but still long enough that a dwarf could walk the perimeter of a standard 4x4 embark and return home the same day. So, yes, relatively real shadows, so that windows facing east would get noticeably more light in the mornings than windows with a western exposure.

Personally, I like wood. I don't really care (or usually even know) what kind of wood it is, I just like the smell & feel of it, I like working with it. Dwarves have no such broad preferences--they don't like wood, they only like one specific wood. And one type of stone. And one gem. And one kind of metal, one bone, one leather, one cloth material, etc.

I propose a slight alteration: Instead of picking just one item from each list, have the RNG pick a handful of things from any list. You might get a dwarf that doesn't really like any kind of metal, but appreciates 3 different kinds of stone. Or another who likes 2 types of bones & a hoof. These dwarves would have preferences for general types of material, and the game engine should grant them bonuses accordingly: For every preference for a specific material that falls under category X, that dwarf gets a bonus (to quality & perhaps speed) when working with any material from category X. This bonus is equal to 20% of the regular bonus when working with a preferred material. Thus, a dwarf who has preferences for willow wood, mango wood, hazel wood, acacia wood, & cedar wood can go craft a bed out of ANY kind of wood at all, and still enjoy the same chance of creating a masterwork as if they were working with one of their actual preferred materials. (Should this bonus be allowed to go beyond 100%, if the dwarf likes 5 kinds of stone and is actually working with 1 of those 5? What about when the dwarf happens to have 6 or more preferences for the same material category? I haven't formed an opinion yet.)

This would tend to give dwarves a predisposition towards becoming a Mason, or Smith, Bone Carver, Clothier, etc., which seems a likely benefit as it opens up a new way for migrants to be useful.
"Aaaah, it's another damn Fishery Worker . . . but ooh, she likes 4 different metals!"
Taking this idea a bit further, the RNG could use the material preferences as a basis for the item preferences: The more a dwarf likes materials of category X, the more likely they are to enjoy types of items that can be made out of category X.

When randomly assigning preferences, dwarfy materials like stone, gems, and metals should be weighted more heavily than non-dwarfy things like wood and cloth, so that all the newly-added types of plants don't cause an overabundance of budding Weavers & Carpenters.

As a side note, dwarves should probably be able to like particular cuts of faceted gemstone, now that that's a thing. (Liking a jewel cut would have much the same effects as liking a type of gemstone, as far as becoming a Jeweler is concerned.)

I believe this is the one GavJ is referring to.

Nice, thanks. I don't have time to delve into that thread tonight, but I'll bear it in mind.

Combined with my suggestion about actually grabbing dirt and specifically leaving a pile of mud, farming could require a pile, not just the "dusting" that tends to be left by water.  This should provide similar results (that rooftop flower garden, for example) without re-working the code for constructed floors.

Between [constructed dirt + time = farmland], and [hauled dirt + water = farmland], both methods seem realistic, likely to yield identical results, and a strong improvement over the current system, so I really have no preference between the two. True, constructed earth would be the way to go if DF were ever to implement packed/rammed-earth constructions, but that idea isn't really dwarfy enough to merit serious consideration at this time.

That said, I do like the idea of building walls out of earth.  Floors?  I don't know.  In particular, I have trouble envisioning it as strong enough to be used that way, barring implementation of something resembling adobe.

Yeah, I shouldn't have said floors; walls and ramps are quite enough. (With that said, however, walls + mining = floors. But as that's already an integral part of natural soil, we'll just have to wait until Toady implements structural strength and collapse dynamics.) Constructed dirt also shouldn't be immediately fertile: It should take about a season, maybe even a year, before it "goes native" and allows plants to grow.

As for fertilizing, we should be able to plant spores in the soil like cave spores and have animals graze over it.

No need for the "planting" part, as that happens automatically as soon as you have access to spores in the first place. As for pasturing livestock on farmland--it would be a bad idea to have your crops, and animals likely to eat those crops, in the same place at the same time. Which leads to crop rotation, and seasonal pasturing, and Animal Caretakers getting a Herd Livestock labor, making for a nice addition.

Since Toady is unlikely to ever implement feces, having the animals graze would be a good way to handle this.

"Ever"? Personally, I doubt that: While I quite understand Toady's reluctance to make "that game with the shitting, fucking, raping dwarves", it's also true that somewhere along the Push-To-Realism Timeline, there comes a point where the dwarves not shitting will be even more glaringly conspicuous than the alternative. Considering that the game now includes 4 separate varieties of amaranth, we might even already be past that point.

1) Its the underground.  There are no "nutrients" that exist in solid masses of stone that can entirely support a crop capable of keeping a person alive.  That is, unless you want to say that plants are coal-powered now, and have said plants only grow over (and consume) coal reserves.

It's the underground. It hosts a biosphere every bit as dense as the surface world's--although admittedly no longer as diverse, now that the overworld got a bunch of new plants. Therefore, there absolutely MUST be an abundant and rather global energy source to invigorate that biosphere. Arguing for strict realism is commendable in most cases, but not here: Following your "coal plants" argument would lead to making almost all of DF's caverns as sterile as Earth's.
But that's actually beside the point: You posted your response to attack an argument that I had already exposed as being flawed. I was pointing out that even one of the best rationales for the "crops can grow on wet rock" system didn't really hold up . . . literally.

2) You.... you are aware that lichens are A) not plants and B) are entirely photosynthetic.  All forms of lichen rely on the sun as an energy source.  . . .  You could say that DF lichen relies on extremophillic bacteria, but the supporting fungus wouldn't be able to survive the conditions any more than the dwarves could.

Yes--I mentioned them because lichens (and mosses) are among the very few types of flora that actually can live just fine on bare rock. They, as well as dwarves, can "survive" the conditions in the caverns quite well, due to the abundant free energy which is undeniably present.

4) You... don't really understand soil nutrients.  No amount of depletion will turn clay into sand.  Because clay is not sand.  It's clay.

True, but as DF's geology system doesn't currently offer varying levels of soil exhaustion, I went with a path that could be easily represented with DF's existing earth types, as well as understood by the vast majority of readers. As I wanted to convey verdant pastureland being rendered barren through constant mineral depletion, Clay Loam -> Sand seemed to get the point across rather well.

Soil will not just magically regain nutrients when left fallow, either.  I'm mostly thinking about contained indoor farms.  Outside farms that are left to fallow replenish nutrients when grass grows over them, animals die (or at least crap on them).

Yes. There needs to be some form of input, from things like deer/birds/worms, plants that replenish the minerals subtracted from the soil by the last harvest, and/or manual fertilization. Now, suppose we have an enclosed aboveground pasture. A few deer jump the wall (as deer do), eat some tasty plant life, leave some scat as they pass, and then leap the wall again & continue on their merry way. Does the pasture gain a net benefit from this? I suppose that the (possibly difficult to obtain) compounds contained in the deer poop provide enough soil enrichment to more than balance out the energy lost in the leaves that the deer ate (energy which, after all, can be easily be regained through photosynthesis), but I could easily be wrong on this.

As to your main point... it's circular logic.  The underground ecosystem works because obviously its working.

No. "Caverns work because caverns work" is indeed a tautology, but that's not what I said. I said "Caverns work because Toady says so". The act of begging the question is only a logical fallacy when one presupposes that one's conclusion is correct. In stark contrast, the deductive process of "B is true if & only if A is true. We know B=true, therefore A=true" is a completely sound one. Toady One the Great has provided ample proof that the caverns are thriving hotbeds of biodiversity. Such rich ecosystems can only exist with ample (biochemical) energy input. As the biological proliferation of the caverns shows zero correlation with proximity to energy sources such as coal deposits & magma tubes, and alternate sources like methane vents do not exist, we may take it as read that the cavern ecosystems must rely on some OTHER, currently undefined, energy source. I don't know what that source is, and neither do you. But if Toady shows us, time after time after time, irrefutable evidence that the energy source is present, it is not for you or I to dispute it. We can disagree with it, we can even mod it out of existence locally, but ultimately is it not our decision. A desire to maintain DF's attention to real-world geology and biochemistry is commendable, and applicable knowledge of those fields is even more so, but that doesn't change the fact that Toady seems to have decided that having lush caverns outweighs the weirdness of an "underground sun".

Honestly, the best response to keeping the caverns as they are and holding onto a shred of realism is to throw up our hands and say "magic."

Yep. Necromancers raise the dead. Dragons breathe insanely hot fire. Dragons breathe fire at all. Nether-caps have a constant temperature, impervious to the laws of thermodynamics. The same is also true of magma, which evaporates into thin air. The various flavors of Evil weather. The single(?) flavor of Good weather. All of these require "magic", or at the very least the influx of considerable amounts of energy. I don't understand them, in some cases I don't even agree with them. But I can suspend my disbelief enough not to fight them.

This is what we get our panties in a twist over... not that the "magic" exists, but that there need to be rules and limits governing it.  If they are feeding off an alien power source, why are they all producing the same organic compounds (with a distinct absence of toxic byproducts) that dwarves can freely eat as easily as they do beef and turnips?

A word of advice: Don't rely on scientific arguments to back up your views on these topics. These assorted phenomena are, quite obviously, not scientific, and so all of the "but that's not the way it works in real life" citations that you can muster will immediately fall flat on their proverbial faces, because they simply do not apply here. You'd be better off with quasi-emotional appeals like "this doesn't feel very dwarfy", or "DF would be a more complete game if it included X". Even so, I can't recall many instances of Toady changing his mind, certainly not on an issue as major as life in the caverns.

"He is married to Kubuk Lobsterhame. He is the father of Ingish Tradeheats and Asen Dustcastle. He thinks he is the father of Vucar Pageoils."