Bay 12 Games Forum

One thing that doesn't seem to have come up yet is varying results in crossbreedings. A stallion and a jenny produce a mule; a jack and a mare, a hinny. Those two are pretty similar.

A lion and a tigress result in a liger, which is larger at adulthood than either of the parent species. A tiger and a lioness yield a tigon, which is not(it has a reputation of being smaller than either, but this is false).

Similarly, the token wishlist doesn't seem to have anything for specific-gender-pairing hybrids, though I may have missed it.

Elemental iodine does indeed sublimate readily, although it CAN, with care, be melted as well. (The lighter halogens are gaseous and highly reactive at room temperature, I don't know about the heavier ones.)

Melting points are actually fairly consistent - they can be assigned a value without being TOO far from reality. They're also referred to as "triple points" - the points at which a substance can be in gaseous, liquid, OR solid state.

Many things do sublimate to some degree, as I mentioned; even things below their melting point can do so slowly(thus "freeze drying"; the freezing process leaches water out of the thing being dried, and the ice is then free to sublimate, though physically removing the excess might help it along - see also frost deposition).

Neat as tracking pressure would be, though, I don't think there IS a good way to do it without ramping up CPU use. Not in any way that'd seriously add to the game, anyway... Similarly, that slow sublimation isn't terribly helpful. For game purposes, it's probably best to stick to simple state changes, but explicitly include the possibility that something doesn't have a liquid state at atmospheric pressure.

Regarding sphalerite - how does DF handle things with only one listed state point? If a substance with no melting point just boils away at the boiling point as normal, that's probably the closest we can hope for. If, on the other hand, its behaviour is undefined or it needs to be liquid to boil away(and since it never melts, doesn't), setting its melting and boiling points one degree Urist apart may make sense.

Those who run on Windows want it to be faster. Fair enough.

Those who don't, just want it to be available. There's no need to be patronizing about it.

When I did have Windows available, before that computer's motherboard died of old age, I never had any reliability issues, and didn't mind waiting a little bit for it to load. Certainly it was far, far less than the issues separating me from it now.

It might be that the dwarf who fell down the stairs did so because he was unconscious, which is something cave-in dust does, I'm pretty sure.

So someone who passes out while on the stairs - or, indeed dies - will fall down. In the latter case this isn't much of an issue, of course...

I've seen that argument before, and it doesn't hold water.

Okay, the long-run plan is to make it not an issue. How far in the future is it going to be, though? If it'd be a relatively quick fix to put in one of these other changes as an interim suggestion, it may be worth doing, just to make things easier until it DOES get put into its "final" form.

Nothing says a feature needs to be changed directly into its ideal state, anymore than it was MADE in that state. Sometimes this is because testing reveals a likely change; sometimes it's as a stopgap. And sometimes testing can reveal a likely stopgap.

Does silk have a subtype? Can you, say, use the creature raws to produce, in that supplementary reaction, not just generic silk, but silk with the subtype SPIDER_CAVE_GIANT?

[PRODUCT:100:n:THREAD:NO_SUBTYPE:SILK:SPIDER_CAVE_GIANT]

I'm not sure if thread should have a subtype, or if that's decided by it having the SILK matgloss.

Edit: This syntax works fine. Replace n with however many silk you want it to spawn, or use SPIDER_CAVE if you don't want to cheat QUITE that outrageously, and add it into your reaction of choice. You could probably make one that's a bit less of a hack - consume a bunch of pig tail thread, spit out a silk thread - if you want something approaching balance and just allowing for silk on a spiderless map(or turn off auto-loom and buy some from the caravan...), but making such a reaction and not attaching it to an existing one would require a world regen.

Most things linked up to a lever are not simply toggled by it. Throwing a lever to the right sends bridges a "raise/retract" instruction, floodgates and doors an "open" instruction; throwing it to the left sends the opposite, no matter what state that bridge/door/floodgate may be in at the time.

The exceptions are one-use triggers like cages and restraints, and gear assemblies(which ARE toggled).

If you want to invert a switch, you could use a system of mechanically-powered pumps and a pressure plate. When the main lever is thrown, it turns on a disengaged pump and puts water on the pressure plate. Throw the lever again, and that pump disengages, and the OTHER pump re-engages, sucking that water off the plate and sending it back to the reservoir. Or something similar. Rig the pressure plate to the things you want in the reverse state.

The bridge vs floodgate system is wonderfully elegant, by comparison. Put a fortification upstream and you can be sure a large creature won't get in to block the floodgate.

You'd probably still want a backup lever somewhere for the floodgate alone, in case it DOES get jammed in the wrong state.