Bay 12 Games Forum

Traffic designations are more for keeping dwarves away from specific obstacles than just willy-nilly-everywhere. They can help if you're having issues with haulers running through crowded pastures, frequently-used minecart tracks, and the bottoms of fast-flowing waterfalls- but only then because when they get interrupted they have to recalculate their paths again.

I think he's talking about leaving the shrine on repeat and thus not noticing when he snatches something out of the wild; because at that point, you've got a semi-wild animal that hasn't been assigned a trainer and it's steadily getting closer to your fortress' meeting areas when suddenly it reverts to being wild and you get nothing- or worse, it got close enough to your war-animals that they attack it and lower you nature score. Having a higher "knowledge" (general familiarity) stat on the species would help that situation, because you'd have more time to notice and give it training before it reverted. Though frankly, that could be avoided altogether by paying more attention to your Alerts screen, because IIRC it lets you know when you've lured something to the Gnome side of the Force.

they say a picture is worth a thousand words, soo...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

sorry for the big pictures! dont know spoilers yet

Highlight everything you want in the spoiler and select the icon that looks like a radioactivity symbol.

I had a Sky goddess shaped like a dragonfly, she liked cursing people and had over twice as many victims as the rest of the Dwarven pantheon combined by the time I started my first fort on that world.

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As already discussed in the previous threads ad nauseum, yes, that exists, but it's nowhere near capable of generating enough energy to be put into the ecosystem for licking caustic slime off of rocks to plausibly sustain a small city, much less the biodiversity of the cavern system.
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I was more arguing for how magical lifeforms would process material in a way that could translate to agriculture, since it is a given that they're using some nonsensical energy source, it doesn't matter if the real mechanic is low-energy or not.

...We've got the energy source figured out, but there is still the matter of nutrients and moisture to discuss for cavern plants.

I was actually focused on answering this part; it's a deep, dark cavity in solid rock, assuming energy is limitless for sessile organisms, how would a pioneer organism look and function? I went with chemotrophs because it solved three problems with subterranean life, they could make material-food out of what the barren underground has to offer, they could widen the caverns by transmuting solid rock into potentially breathable gasses. It wouldn't matter so much if it were high-fantasy, but since there's a scale to work with I figure this would be fine for low-medium fantasy.

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That sounds good, but why isn't that common in real life if that works?

As noted by NW_Kohaku, chemosynthesis is low-energy and can't carry an ecosystem as well as phototropism can so they get out-competed anywhere sunlight is an option.

Not at all, lots of things in history were/are not explainable by science but they were never magic as a result.  It is not valid to declare something that you do not presently have the means to understand magic simply because you do not understand it.  It was not valid for people to say "the sun burns by magic" during the millenia before people understood nuclear fusion and so it is with the posited magical cavern source.  In a sense for something to be properly considered magical/supernatural/miraculous we must understand the laws of physics well enough to know that said an event could not have happened yet also have evidence that it did.

That effectively means that magic can never be the foundational basis of anything in the natural world.  If something about caverns means that an energy source reliably appears along the lines you described then that *is* part of the laws of physics of that world, whether people are presently able to understand it or not it does not constitute magic; see above point on the sun. 

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there, as we have tons of words for things that never existed so there's no reason to bring up things eventually proven not to be magic when describing magic. That'd be like saying that we have to shrink the definition of a "mermaid" so that it doesn't include anything resembling the Fiji Mermaids or manatees. It's anti-creative to let real-world stuff get in the way of fantasy stuff.

Which can only be told if you savescum   

Presumably artifacts would not be included in the first version of this, but that has potential: use incomplete artifacts to allow for eating/drinking/sleeping while in a (fey or secretive or macabre) mood. I don't think a possessor would know or care about bodily needs, and a fell dwarf cannot rest, lest the stink alert other dwarves to their fiddling about with the bones, hair, and skin of Urist McUnfortunate

An incomplete artifact could be called a %Sampo% for mythological reference points. The Sampo of Finnish myth was a vague construct that the legendary smith, Ilmarinen, tried and failed to make 3 times before he succeeded. First making a crossbow, then a full-sized warship, then a living metal cow; before finally making the mystery machine with which he attempts to impress the girl he liked. (He failed at this also.)

Once when I used the standard embark profile, the Jeweler came with just the worst attitude I had ever seen. He was too lazy to do his job, everyone had a grudge with him after 5 minutes of talking with the ass on his frequent breaks, and near the end of my patience was when he badly injured like 25 people because he hated getting snowed on between the dining hall and the living quarters. But he never actually went berzerk either, it was all tantrums followed by a good mood for having started multiple fights.

So I bricked him into the catacombs with a small store of his favorite wine, Cask of Amontillado-style.