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[Tylermon]

Make some random events take place on the world such as:

Earthquakes-Lower building strength and may collapse unstable caves/structures.

Volcanoes: Magma! But it may erupt, creating new land/layers/minerals and spew an ash cloud over the land.

Continental Drift: As years go by, continents slowly drift...What once was a tropical island may eventually become a frozen tundra. Similarly, what once was a glacial cap may become nothing but a big puddle...in turn raising ocean waters across the entire world.

Global warming: Dwarves are not very Eco friendly, eventually that Ozone layer is going to fail with all those furnaces.

Hurricane/tsunami: Add ocean related storms. Or simply expand on the current weather system.

Locusts & similar: Code these events similar to invasions but instead on focusing on dwarves they focus on buildings/food supplies/water supplies.

Plagues: I imagine this would give doctors and hospitals a greater purpose. Possibly even require experimentation in vaccines to cure the diseases.

Meteor/Asteroid Impacts: Leaving craters and potentially collapsing caves beneath impact. May leave ash clouds. May also deposit rare minerals within impact radius. Possibly some new rare space metals? Or more likely iron/miniscule adamantine deposits. And other metals.

Natural Gases: these could be explosive/toxic and serve multiple purposes. There could be things such as helium, ethanol, ect. Stumbling into a chasm releasing toxic gases into a fort could add some new and fun challenges to overcome. I'm sure there are more things to do with gasses and other interesting examples but that's one idea. Similar in function as Miasma/steam however it can be collected by skilled dwarves?

Melting point: We have flammable materials why not make some materials have a melting point where they become liquid at certain temperatures. *Warning: Dwarves may melt at high temperatures, haha*

[Neonivek]

Global warming: Dwarves are not very Eco friendly, eventually that Ozone layer is going to fail with all those furnaces

Ignoring that there isn't enough poluting industry in the medieval era to cause global warming... There is natural heating and cooling of the earth all the time.

But do you really want that?

Plagues: I imagine this would give doctors and hospitals a greater purpose. Possibly even require experimentation in vaccines to cure the diseases.

Not really. The most a doctor has ever been able to do in that time period to fend off a plague was to infect people with a related but less harmful disease (which was done for smallpox)

[SuicideJunkie]

Stripmining mountains for coal and lignite is one thing, but you're also filling a valley with magma whenever you think there might be goblins.

[Corai]

Take note how many furnaces are on the surface, then underground.



The Ozone layer is perfectly safe from dwarves, unless there filthy hippy-dwarfs.

[peskyninja]

Earthquakes-Lower building strength and may collapse unstable caves/structures.

Volcanoes: Magma! But it may erupt, creating new land/layers/minerals and spew an ash cloud over the land.

Continental Drift: As years go by, continents slowly drift...What once was a tropical island may eventually become a frozen tundra. Similarly, what once was a glacial cap may become nothing but a big puddle...in turn raising ocean waters across the entire world.

Global warming: Dwarves are not very Eco friendly, eventually that Ozone layer is going to fail with all those furnaces.

These two make no sense, the world is supposed to be created from literally "Nothing" and it's very new, global warming and continental drift take a very large ammount of time to make changes that we can actually see.

[Neonivek]

Continental Drift would only make sense if Dwarf Fortress had a Prehistory part of history generation.

Even then continental drift wasn't significant even with the ENTIRE existance of human beings.

Then again races that are extremely ancient arn't uncommon. (For example a Sentient Race living along side the dinosaurs)

[Tylermon]

The main ideas behind the continental drift/global warming were that some sort of event could cause a change to the map that the emperature/weather cycles would get thrown out of whack.

And everyone that says those are not possible for that time period--think of a volcano putting massive ash clouds into the atmosphere- blocking sunlight and thus you have an ice age.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[UHaulDwarf]

Earthquakes-Lower building strength and may collapse unstable caves/structures.

Volcanoes: Magma! But it may erupt, creating new land/layers/minerals and spew an ash cloud over the land.

Locusts & similar: Code these events similar to invasions but instead on focusing on dwarves they focus on buildings/food supplies/water supplies.

Hurricane/tsunami: Add ocean related storms. Or simply expand on the current weather system.

Plagues: I imagine this would give doctors and hospitals a greater purpose. Possibly even require experimentation in vaccines to cure the diseases.

All of these sound like they kill your fps, and would be best left in the world generator, if at all.

Continental Drift: As years go by, continents slowly drift...What once was a tropical island may eventually become a frozen tundra. Similarly, what once was a glacial cap may become nothing but a big puddle...in turn raising ocean waters across the entire world.

There is a "Periodically Erode Extreme Cliffs" option in the advanced world generator, So I don' see why we can not have a "Periodically Continental Drift" too.

Global warming: Dwarves are not very Eco friendly, eventually that Ozone layer is going to fail with all those furnaces.

I have to disagree. With magma forges and magma smelters, dwarfs are very eco friendly. Only steel absolutely needs fuel, and even if you used steel for everything, you would not make much of an impact.

Meteor/Asteroid Impacts: Leaving craters and potentially collapsing caves beneath impact. May leave ash clouds.

I don't know about impacted, but meteorites would be nice to see in the game. I can think of uses for them. They could be normal metal or special or even a magical piece metal.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

While I don't think continental drift is noticable enough to make it into the historic part of the game and while dwarf-induced large-scale global warming is probably also unreasonable, I like the rest of these ideas. However, at the current time, I would rather not have them in the game as they would cause great harm to adventure mode. Currently, shops and houses that have been abandoned are not properly reclaimed or demolished, so even now they are pushing living shops and houses out of the towns. With things like plagues depopulating towns, you probably end up with no single usable shop in an averge world due to the towns  being just a keep surrounded by ash and ruins.

As for the global warming thing, I rather like the idea of local weather/nature impact. Heavy industry can have some impact on local climate, for instance increasing the local rain fall (due to high water evaporation), a slight increase in local temperature, or the all-time favorite, namely landslides due to deforestation. Those would certainly add a lot of fun to fortress mode.

Yours,
Deathworks

[Silverionmox]

Earthquakes: We'd need a structural strength system to make that work, with pressure being passed downwards (doesn't suck FPS, it just needs to run once a month or so, random day). Then to simulate an earthquake everything you need to do is temporarily increase all pressure values with 10% or so. Survival of the fittest pillar.

Volcanoes: That would be an FPS disaster too. Nevertheless, less placid and tame magma is truly needed. Fluctuating magma levels are a start, much like ebb and flood now. Then, geisers which implies leaking aquifers too, etc.. It would leave obsidian at best though. Cristallization takes a long time.

Continental Drift: Too slow to matter. Even a supercomputer would crash from all the history generated before continental drift would have a noticeable impact. Instead, allow earthquakes to lower and raise locations a bit on the overland map, and recalculate water levels of lakes and the flow of rivers after that.

Global warming: The ozone layer requires CFC acids to be diluted, so that's probably not coming into play. With that much wilderness, CO2 won't be a problem either. Soot deposits might lessen the albedo of the polar caps, so they might melt more (we can still trace back the Roman period due to their metal industry nowadays). It probably didn't cause noticeably sea level rise, only more precipitation globabally.

Expand on the current weather system: given that supercomputers have trouble modelling weather, I'm going to settle for a heuristic that couples random events to climate. And we'll want them to be triggerable by magic of course.

Locusts & similar: probably in the future agriculture rewrite.

Plagues: bring diseases to the world level, for a start.

Meteor/Asteroid Impacts: Yeah.

[Supersnes]

Earthquakes: We'd need a structural strength system to make that work, with pressure being passed downwards (doesn't suck FPS, it just needs to run once a month or so, random day). Then to simulate an earthquake everything you need to do is temporarily increase all pressure values with 10% or so. Survival of the fittest pillar.

Volcanoes: That would be an FPS disaster too. Nevertheless, less placid and tame magma is truly needed. Fluctuating magma levels are a start, much like ebb and flood now. Then, geisers which implies leaking aquifers too, etc.. It would leave obsidian at best though. Cristallization takes a long time.

This reminds me of a thread I had on geologic events and their lasting effects that could be interesting in the game but you seem to actually have a really good way to implement some of them.

Earthquakes can be determined as you said on pressure and randomly happen but severity and frequency could be dependent on location.  World gen can create areas where there is a rift/boundary, either tangibly in the game or in a"zone", where earthquakes are frequent and vary in intesity.  Much like how the San Andreas Fault gets many small earthquakes this area can have small earthquakes that may be barely noticable while still having rarer large earthquakes that cause severe damage.  Earthquakes if implemented could result in bad thoughts if they were large enough to be noticed by the dwarves.  Hell earthquakes may actually give use to cats and other animals in that they may be able to sense fore shocks and display that in their behavior as "Is in a state of unease/anxiety/etc".

Continental Drift: Too slow to matter. Even a supercomputer would crash from all the history generated before continental drift would have a noticeable impact. Instead, allow earthquakes to lower and raise locations a bit on the overland map, and recalculate water levels of lakes and the flow of rivers after that.

I agree that this would take far to long to gen as well as implement.

Meteor/Asteroid Impacts: Yeah.

Operation Meteor is a go!

[Tylermon]

I agree that continental drift is not all that realistic or rather isnt reasonable to add. I'm just trying to get ideas stirring to see if the community can also think of some similar events they would like to see in the game.

Another Suggestion:

Natural gasses- these could be explosive/toxic and serve multiple purposes. There could be things such as helium, ethanol, ect. Stumbling into a chasm releasing toxic gases into a fort could add some new and fun challenges to overcome. I'm sure there are more things to do with gasses and other interesting examples but that's one idea.

Other Liquids-mainly oil. However there may be other natural liquids that might be interesting to add.

[Belteshazzar]

Occasionally meteor would have 'something' inside of it...

However, yeah continental drift is a bit outside of the game's scope... I mean, we can't even restart worldgen yet, much less consider having a world lasting for more than 10,000 years (SACRIFICE ALL OF YOUR RAM, FOREVER!)

[Jeoshua]

The worldgen system already tries to abstract away things like continental drift by using a fractal heightmap generator.  This generator will spit out things that look like lift plates and trenches.  There is no way that continental drift would ever become signifigant, real life or DF, in any way for a civilization.  Even 10,000 years would not be enough to notice it's effects, other than a few meters in-game, which is far below even one embark square in size.

Earthquakes could be nice, but before that was even an interesting phenomena in-game we would need some kind of structural integrity checker.  As it stands now, you can balance an entire fortress on a block of soap, or hanging floor tile.  IT doesn't even need to be "balanced", and can be on the very edge of that fort.  An Earthquake should, ideally, bring this crumbling down but, then again, "IDEALLY" it should not be possible in the first place.  So it's a cool idea... maybe for another game.

Meteorites can already be modelled by setting up a small soil or sedimentary inclusion mineral, and calling it "Meteoric Iron" or "Meteorite".  A few mods spring to mind.  As far as them falling to the ground and causing devistation, I bring up the time-scales (few signifigant meteor strikes have occured in the past 200 years on Earth.  Tunguska and.... can you name another? I didn't think so.  Tunguska didn't even hit the ground).  So while a planet-wrecking collision is certainly possible, the chances of it happening during the time of a civilization is pretty slim.  Even beyond that, any realistic modelling of a signifigant meteor strike in Worldgen would have it be the DEATH of Civilization, and after a very short time bring about the Age of Emptiness or some similar age in which all civilizations are dead.  Civs can't survive if the sun is blacked out and crops do not grow.

But Natural Gas pockets? Melting Liquids?  Volcanic Eruptions in both Worldgen and Fortress mode?  I wholeheartedly support these.  Especially the Volcanoes in Worldgen.  Insta-ruins of any Dwarf Fortresses on that same tile.  The Biome would change to Basalt Rock Desert, immediately.  Realistic and !!FUN!!