Bay 12 Games Forum

Thanks for the answers, Toady. The teaser about ghosts sounds cool.

With the changes to evil regions, is it now easier to tell if an evil region is a reanimator region or can that still only be found out by making a fort and checking if your butchering refuse comes back to life?

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

What are some of the lucky dice roll blessings that you mention in the Steam update?

Item?  Pet?  Healing?  Are those new interaction effects?

Does that mean you can get a permanent (?) weapon or pet as a reward from the divination dice rolls, or did you mean you can get a blessing that will make your weapon more effective in combat?

I'm so happy about the aquifer change. I was hoping for exactly that change, but I never expected to see it implemented so soon.
Here are a couple random questions:

Can zombies raised by a player necromancer mount on a horse (or zombie horse)?

When a necromancer gets kicked out of a site, can they migrate to a player fort?

I heard that the soundtrack for the steam version is already done. Do you know if we can get to listen to some songs from it before the steam release, looking at how long that's still gonna take, or is that just Kitfox' decision?

Is there any chance players will get access to some of your DF debugging tools? They would probably be very useful for modders. Also kinda related to this, being able to take control of any historic figure in adventure mode would be really nice for roleplaying.

Edit: Just found someone wondering about this on reddit:
Does the aquifer speed change also affect the rate at which they are able to absorb water?

Related to the story you posted recently about Ustuth; since obviously assassination plots are now being carried out post-worldgen, do players have to worry about assassin's getting into the fort and killing our nobles? We don't get any special protection from those cases, right?

Assuming that's the case, do they show up hostile, trying to sneak in in ambush from the get-go? Or will we have to screen out other visitors?

I asked about this some months ago:
"Do you plan on making NPC assassin do their deeds secretly in a fort mode fort, like vampires do? What I mean is, will they be able to kill someone and leave the fort, passing by other dwarves without anyone noticing that they are a/ were the murderer?
It would be a bummer if they automatically just turned into "invader" status after the murder because that would mean no assassin would ever leave a player fort alive, like the guys who try to steal artifacts."
Toady:
"I hadn't quite gamed out fort-mode assassination details; I think the way you describe is probably best, as a parallel to the "successful" assassinations from world gen.  Sometimes, the w.g. ones 'fail', but there's still a duel where the assassin wins; this would probably be analogous to the invader version.  Undetected murder probably involves them succeeding in their stealth rolls until they are adjacent to the target, and then rolling a good attack, which it would then fudge and just turn into a murder (like the fell mood) -- if they aren't sneaking (because they are a visitor or a citizen), they'd just need one stealth roll adjacent to the target to simulate the sudden attack, say, and then the good attack roll.  The automatic fell murder strike successes have always needed some sort of additional justification or material check, but we can ignore that for now."

Why do you think none of the community would own Dwarf Fortress on Steam? I imagine at least half of us are going to buy it.

I wasn't talking about one person begging for a mod to be posted at DFFD, I was talking about a group effort (not too much) to let people know that posting a copy of a mod where everyone can enjoy it, is much appreciated and healthy for the community as a whole.

I was talking about individual people from the beginning:
"And yeah, the other problem is that non-steam users will have to use some weird, inofficial steam workshop downloading site to get the mods."
I was just listing some negative aspects of the steam workshop and one of them is that people who buy the game on Itch will either have to use a steam workshop downloading site to get mods or beg for them. It's a pretty big downside to buying games outside steam, if you ask me.

There was another interview with Toady here:
https://kakebytes.com/2019/05/02/ep-25-dwarf-fortress-toady-one-returns/

Post a comment. Steam has comments.

You mean on their profile? I guess that works when they don't have comments turned off or their profile set to private.

An ingame mod browser from which you could download and install mods on any version of the game would be ideal, but that's more resources being spent on something that steam kinda already does, so probably not going to happen.

How would you even contact the modder? You'd have to hope that they accept steam friend requests from strangers. And even then, they'd have to reupload the mod whenever it gets updated.
Using one of those workshop downloader sites is a lot easier, but they don't always function.

Evil ocean could be made murky looking and be given colors like brown, dark-yellow, dark-red for example I suppose, basically what the ASCII graphics do. The mist Japa mentioned also works though. Maybe good areas could have some sort of shiny sparcle effect or a glow.
I agree that it's generally not that easy to see alignment on the map with the ASCII graphics though. Having a map overlay separately that highlights alignment would of course still be useful to have for new players (I guess right now we only really have the search function), but I don't think it should be the only way to see the terrain's alignment on the map.

I was also gonna say that mountains should maybe be increased in size. Right now there seem to be like 4 peaks per tile, which sounds a bit much and makes it look too spikey.

I also agree that alignment should probably be an overlay, but you could also just do what ASCII does and make separate sprites for good/evil versions of all terrain. Evil Forests could be shown as wormy tendrils and eye balls for example.
That would be a bunch of sprites though and would require a ton more once the magic update hits.

@Cruxador: It can be noted that DF displays the color of sand in deserts at the expense of showing the Evilness. It took me a fair while to realize that desert color did NOT represent Evilness but sand color, as opposed to most other biome types.

The wiki says that good deserts are cyan and evil deserts purple, is that not true?
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Map_legend#Biome.2FRegion_key