Bay 12 Games Forum

So to add to the mystery...

I have a fresh 44.11 fort.  I currently have a population of 10.  In the first year in the Spring, I received an announcement that a cave associated with my site.  In the first autumn, the outpost liaison told me they want us to become a barony.  I had zero exports at this point, because this is the first caravan, and my created wealth is about 10k.

Not really a mystery. You had an economically linked site, which counts as a holding, so the barony was offered. The cave was probably a bandit group, which in .11 are bugged to link up to your fort.

Alright, I PM'd Toady about the landed nobility site triggers. It is no longer based on the raw requirements. It's exclusively based on the number of your offsite holdings.

Yeah, the nobility status is entirely based on the number of off-site holdings now.  Currently 1, 4, 9 (and 9+n*2 for modded higher ranks).  The land holder trigger numbers now influence the rate at which your civilization will send out settlers to found new sites near your fortress.  If you fortress is inaccessible or your civ's population is really low, they won't be able to do it.

So the problem seems to be getting settlers to go about your fort, which hasn't happened yet with my fort. But at least it can be forced through conquest.

The wikis will need the updating.

A first today. I almost always reject entertainer's offers to join the fort since they're fairly worthless. After rejecting another applicant, I noticed they had the blinking blue !, indicating some emotional stress. Thought maybe there was some monster was running around that freaked them out, but no - turns out they were "dismayed". I guess they didn't take the rejection well.

I think your civ will only set hillocks for your fort once you've achieved a landed nobility title (barony).

I think the underlining problem is that dwarves lack any social initiative. And as far as I'm aware, there isn't any system in place to accommodate this, so nothing is technically bugged up.

In real life, you generally find people you enjoy interacting with, and you seek out opportunities to do so. In DF, dwarves will just randomly socialize with whoever happens to be next to them in the tavern/temple/library/whatever. Two dwarves that could have been friends just don't because they're standing on opposite ends of the tavern, instead talking to people that'll be a social "deadend" forever. The chances that they'll both be in the tavern at the same time, and happen to stand next to one another is so slim in a normally functioning fort that it hardly happens.

There's also the issue that very, very few activities actually result in the dwarves talking to one another and building up a relationship. You'd think two miners that have worked side by side for three years would have some relationship with one another, but unless they've hung out in the tavern and stars aligned for their meeting - nope, nothing will happen.

 I think this is also why lovers that could marry take so long to actually do so. Again, these dwarves won't go out of their way to interact. So eventually, after randomly bumping each other over the course of a few years, they'll finally accumulate the social points or whatever to marry.

The best system, in my opinion, is one where dwarves would still randomly socialize, but would devote special time to socialize with dwarves that they actively enjoy interacting with, so passing acquaintances that have the potential to be friendships actually become so. A similar system could be used for lovers.

The starting seven obviously cheat this lack of initiative by forcing some abstract socialization for their relationships upon embark based on their personalities.

The bedrock for socializing and relationships are in place, but it actually needs the finish to work.

edit: it seems that Patriklundell basically iterated my exact thoughts a week ago, whoops. But as Toady said in his fotf reply, there are no short term plans to add more systems. So for now, relationships are just going to be half-baked.   

It's a neat system, but some tweaking I think is in order. I've seen a few dwarves now completely change their attitudes on life because they got rained on once.

Right now, all subterranean water sources are huge pools of stagnant water. With the underground rewrite that's been hinted to occur around the mythgen update, will we see a return of flowing underground cave rivers?