Bay 12 Games Forum

Could be both. Any sufficiently skilled miner would be able to do some prospecting and get a feel for the surrounding rock, but CAVE_ADAPT could amplify it. Some of that amplification could be innate to the race, with a further bonus if the individual in question is fully cave adapted.

It could actually give a point to encouraging adaptation, rather than avoiding it in the entire population by giving the meeting area an open roof.

"Can latch" attacks are often(usually?) bites rather than grips, but anyway - that sort of thing is exactly why I don't think algorithmic hybrids ARE a good way to go.

Some traits in a hybrid turn out to be nonviable combinations. Some of them are nonviable in development, so that such a hybrid spontaneously aborts; others simply hamper it once born.

In general terms, though - there's still a good deal that's not known to this day about hybrid genetics. In addition to needing to know the complete genome of all the animals in question and what every sequence does, there's certain sorts of randomness and errors that show up in biology which aren't the same as those that happen when e.g. polymerizing DNA in the lab.

We can represent what we do know, but we can do that empirically - specify what happens when such-and-such creatures hybridize, by spelling out the hybrid. Doing so procedurally is liable to complicate world gen a tad much, I should think - it's already a complicated process; some more detail will be good for extra realism, but at some point it's worthwhile to save cycles and do things by fiat.

Pitch doesn't sputter around water because of any chemical reaction, or it wouldn't have been used to seal ships.

Pitch is oily. Like any oil, it doesn't mix with water. It is also, even when hot, extremely viscous and even less likely to mix. If water does get into it, that water is going to quickly heat up, and then explode in a steam bubble, which may be what sends the pitch flying.

However, that doesn't give it any special ability to overcome water.

Yes, the heat would weaken a pykrete wall, much more than it would one of stone; but it doesn't magically gain the ability to actually set it afire. Any heat gain in burning the sawdust is more than offset by the energy it takes to melt the ice, heat it to boiling, and vaporize it. A material with this much water in it can't burn violently, and assuming the flames don't get smothered(which is a possibility - as viscous as pitch is, water isn't going to flow through it, or vice versa, as readily as would a more liquid oil, and the sawdust would "thicken" the water in turn - but by no means certain), there's not any great store of wood to get dried out and then ignite all at once. The sawdust would get consumed as it dried - gradually, without contributing much to the flames. Its granularity, which would make a fire MORE worrisome when it's just a pile of sawdust(powdery things, due to their large surface area, often burn with nigh explosive force - look at grain silos), means it wouldn't have a chance to accumulate; any given piece of sawdust would be dried out and ignite relatively promptly once freed of the ice. The water would carry it away; when the water's gone, it'd flare up and be gone in an instant.

To recap: Yes, pitch could melt through a pykrete wall. But it wouldn't ignite it. It's no magic bullet. The pieces of wood involved are so tiny that they might not settle out of the water at all - and any violent reaction between the pitch and the water would send the sawdust flying along with the water. Out of the way.

Is it? Something that acts as both STONE and ROUGH at the same time?

I'm not familiar with any game examples...

Perhaps. Perhaps not; the wood is so thoroughly saturated with and surrounded by water, it isn't exposed to air to burn with. By the time you get enough wood out and dry to burn, you've already melted it away from the surrounding wall.

So, while pykrete would be more vulnerable to heat than stone, it might not catch fire like wooden walls would, even when exposed to burning oil.

I think we're on different wavelengths here. What I'm trying to get at is that - barring some INSANELY detailed genetic modelling of the creatures in question, which could well be beyond current-day knowledge, never mind reasonable constraints of game detail - the results of hybrid breeding aren't always algorithmically predictable.

It's still going to come down to specific cases, a lot of the time. Any given coupling might need so much detail as to which way the inheritance goes(father vs mother, or one species vs the other, or a blend) that it might well be no less effort to do a species write-up in full for the half-breeds.

As far as handling it in-game goes - perhaps animal husbandry could be a function of the otherwise largely-neglected Animal Care skill? Animal caretakers could make a specific effort to get particular animals to breed. Perhaps such pairs would be designated in the Animals screen - for each female, designate one or more potential mates. How effective it is - how many times the animals get checked to see if they conceive, and how good the dwarves are at keeping unwanted breeding from happening(i.e. keeping the ineligible studs out) - could be a function of skill level.

Or at the very least, make dwarves not PREFER vermin.

Please.

PLEASE.

This has probably come up before, yes. But it's extremely aggravating, when I'm attempting to trap fire snakes for liquid fire, that dwarves will dash past the food stockpile which is right next to the dining room, charge to the surface, go past my main animal storage, and race the animal dissector to my fire snake/cave spider/moghopper stockpile to grab the snake that was JUST PUT THERE for a treat.

Either tone down the priorities, or make it so that marking small animals "for slaughter" is necessary to turn them into exotic treats, I beg you.

Same for purring maggots. It's frustrating in the extreme that dwarves seem to prefer economically-useful critters(or, for that matter, aquarium-display fish) vastly to other kinds of food, no matter their food prefs.

Alright, so. There was a siege recently. I lost some dwarves - mostly because they ran out into the open before realizing "Hey, I shouldn't be here - whoops, too late, I'm getting attacked!"

Some of them got safely ensconced in my existing tombs.

Eight more have been dumped in the graveyard. I'd been expanding the tombs already, so installing the sarcophagi didn't take long. The corpses aren't even rotten yet. I got the coffins put in place, and set them to use for burial(NOT made into tombs). Citizens and Pets are both set to Y.

But the dwarves won't do a thing about it.

There are plenty of idle dwarves with the Burial labour enabled.

I've tried turning the use-for-burial off, waiting a tick, turning it on; forbidding the corpses in the graveyard and reclaiming them. The game just will not generate "Place item in tomb" orders.

Suggestions?