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[Romegypt]

Not a suggestions, but I was wondering what the ideal system for this would be for you guys. Potions made at a still? Can all dwarfs use magic? or only a few?

Let me know!

[Broseph Stalin]

I think magic should be left to the elves but dwarven doctors making tonics to combat syndromes and speed recovery would nice.

[greycat]

Several mods use alchemy, magic, or both.  If that's your thing, you should check them out.

[ArmokGoB]

Maybe brewing acid flasks and alchemist's fire to throw on those pointy-eared bastards?

[Romegypt]

My thing was not that there is no magic, but rather, that toady has said that it will be implimented. I was just wondering what your guy's preferred system for it would be.

[Loud Whispers]

Artifacts = Magic
For example, an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to turn into molten iron. Or a strange mood could fail and an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to to turn into molten iron.

[Romegypt]

Artifacts = Magic
For example, an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to turn into molten iron. Or a strange mood could fail and an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to to turn into molten iron.

Aren't those the same thing?

[RealFear]

Artifacts = Magic
For example, an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to turn into molten iron. Or a strange mood could fail and an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to to turn into molten iron.

Aren't those the same thing?

One seems to be very beneficial, while the other terrifying.
My opinion on the matter?
It was inevitable.

[Alev]

I think the Toad wanted randomized magic... *goes to DFtalk*

Personally, I think a new system for each world would be pretty cool.

I apologise for the infodump.

Here's some:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Toady:   Yeah I don't know ... It's one of those things where it's basically like magic, right? You've got a material that can attract certain classes of other materials. It's one of those things where you wonder how you're ever going to code stuff like that, even with magic, because you have to check all the time whether or not something like this is happening and then you have to throw in specific shortcuts and flags and things to make sure it isn't actually checking all the time. So the more general and vague a system is - and we're going to make magic very general and vague - the more you have to scratch your head and wonder how you're ever going to get it to work. I think there's quite a bit of hope for it but I haven't thought about the specifics that well yet so I can't promise you that you're going to have magnetite that does weird things when you walk into a room and all the silverware sticks to you and stuff.

ainseeker:   Here's more of a specific question; Is magic in [...] Dwarf Fortress ... what are you planning on doing with it? Are you planning on letting people fly with it ... or create trees, or grow things more quickly or maybe create gems in the side of a mountain; generate your own kind of stuff.
Toady:   It's hard to say, because you want magic to feel magical in a way, and if it starts to become this thing where you have 'these are my magic runemaster dwarves and they get a series of powers and I use the powers to make mining easier and I use the powers to make wood' or something, then it's kind of industrial and it doesn't feel like a fantasy world ... it feels more like a sci-fi thing in a way, like how it's become kind of a technological thing that's used that way rather than something that has hidden consequences and stuff like that, or something that seems somehow intangible. I know people have really really varied feelings about magic, it's one of those things where I've avoided the controversy because I haven't started it yet. I know people are going to want to do all kinds of things and they want their dwarves to be more magical in a sense ... some people don't want any magic with their dwarves at all, and other people don't want any magic period. We're just going to go with our original thing there for the stock universe and then whatever support ends up being possible we can start to put in for people that want to do something that's more standardised magical for the dwarves. Our own idea is pretty much to restrict dwarven magic to artifacts and to have the artifacts be magical in ways that you don't really know at first, and that you might have to discover over time as you mess with them. Now, there's a problem with that in the sense that your control is so indirect that it's a little difficult to get at things like that; it's not like you can be an adventurer and just mess around with stuff directly. The reason that the vision on that is a bit unformed is because we aren't there yet, we haven't really thought about the specifics.
Rainseeker:   I can just see it now, a dwarf is erecting his door artifact and the door actually transports people across the map which is really bad because it's in your front entrance.
Toady:   There's all kinds of things, right? You could have a cabinet [such that] when you put something into it and take it out it becomes an improved item, and you might notice that when the guy's doing that with his clothes but you wouldn't really notice because who has time to go 'v, enter' on all of the dude's clothes. So it should be something that's more along the lines of those advisor things we were talking about where the dwarf has something to say to you - like the guy I mentioned having conversations with his dwarves - the dwarf should be like 'hey I just took my shirt out of my cabinet and now it's gold-studded and that's pretty cool and I think I should tell you about that', and it should be a huge thing that the guy can tell you instead of something you'd have to piss around with, and in that way magic can kind of remain magical and it doesn't always have to be little things like that there could be larger effects that are related to it or, if some guy makes a fell mood object and then all of a sudden all the dead bodies in your fortress start to rise up and you have to try [to] dump the thing down to a chasm before you all get eaten alive ... that'd be pretty cool. So there's options
Rainseeker:   Very shocking ...
Toady:   Well it should be kind of shocking, it's supposed to be magic. I'm hoping that that's how it works, I'm hoping that magic would be introduced through artifacts like that and also through the demons and other adversaries that are unique and rare and you'd get this thing where weird things happen or the whole sun is blotted out and the plants start to die or whatever, things get colder, and that could happen and then you'd have to figure out why it's happened; it doesn't tell you. There's all kinds of things that it can do and then the issue becomes ... the other mode of the game is adventure mode and a lot of people probably look forward to being able to use a spell caster, and the thing I've just outlined doesn't really fit very well with the notion of levelled spells and treating it like that where you work at it for long enough and then you can do fireball. But at the same time it's not as if that's a wholly unwholesome way of thinking and it shouldn't be supportable and I don't think it's impossible to have everything work out either way with parameters because it's not ...
Rainseeker:   You could have it even more story based, as people get their powers more in a story-based ways.
Toady:   Yeah, thinking of things like the deals witches make and other ways where people source their magic or how they got it, and they get it from the fairies or blah blah blah, stuff like that. Then you just need to have a starting scenario set up ... is it possible to make your magic still feel magical even though you're the one that knows how to do it, that comes up and how well do you know how to do it? How well do you even understand the things that you're doing? I think there are a lot of interesting questions there that you can explore in this type of setup that have really only been explored properly before in a plot setup, where you might have had magic seem magical but it was going through a game on rails, or you have magic that doesn't seem particularly magical[;] it can be randomised, but it's still just like 'Book One', 'Book Two', 'Book Three' or whatever. I'm not sure what I'm going to be able to do, it'll be interesting to give it a shot. Magic is kind of officially post version 1 material but the artifact arc is pre version 1 material so those are going to have a little tug-of-war I think when we get to working on artifacts to see how much magic actually makes it into version 1.
Rainseeker:    Do you have any plans to make the dwarves have the ability to more easily discover minerals and gems and such?
Toady:   There was originally ... this could have even been up on the dev pages, I don't really remember ... there's this idea for people doing surveyors and stuff like that and then there's ...
Capntastic:   Geologists and geomancers ...
Toady:   Yeah that whole branch of suggestions that are either purely magic based or purely science based or anywhere in between and I'm still not sure what I want to do with that, because it seems like a cop out in a way or something [...] but what problem does [the request] point to? I guess the problem it points to is that people are just having trouble finding stuff, and if that's the problem then maybe more the issue is that the mineral layout ... if you've seen an unhidden screenshot you've seen that the mineral layout is kind of asstacular right? It's like these little ovals and these restricted veins that run all in one z-layer, and I think improving the mineral layout could go a long way to alleviating some percentage of the concerns there. I think the other concerns are people that want to know where features are in advance, features like big open areas and so on, so that they can design their fortress without hitting those places and that's another thing that I'm ambivalent about because I know that some people are really into having a place that looks exactly how they want and then there's the whole idea of the game being about adapting to your circumstances so again it's a completely ambivalent thing there where you'd really want to set that down almost to world generation parameters or something, so that people can have their cake and eat it too. The reason I haven't really moved that quickly on these kind of suggestions is I'd like to find a way to do it that is the best, that addresses all the concerns and can make everybody happy without really compromising what the game feels like. And I think it's possible, I just haven't really hit upon the best way yet.

Capntastic:   So what about herbs and plants being turned into potions?
Toady:   I guess hopefully it would all fall under the same umbrella; it's not chemistry per se, you're not trying to give names to the things, but stuff turning into other stuff that has effects ... We've got the poisons now which are the only example of a material having an effect, and the effects are all over the place even know; they can make you cough blood, give you blisters, cause your body parts to swell up and get compartment syndrome, give you fevers, make you dizzy, and that's a material effect that effects a creature through contract, injection or inhaling the object and so if you start to give beneficial effects or more neutral effects, maybe give it a few more ways that cause the syndrome to trigger - it could just be something that's nearby rather than something that's inhaled or injected - and then all of a sudden what was a really practical grounded real world poison system becomes a system for doing all kinds of fantastic things. So if your herbs, if you say one plump helmet and one newt eyeball is a reaction that you can do in a workshop with an empty flask, and then you use the to container thing that we've got now for reactions to say all that stuff goes into a new liquid in that container called plump helmet newt eyeball juice or something. Then you can define a new material and that material could have whatever properties you want. So the pieces are in place now to make poisons, but you wouldn't be able to do anything with them unless you somehow found a way to get the poison out of the container ... which you could do, if you find a way to heat the thing up, like dropping it in magma and then it turns into a gas you could have creatures nearby inhale. So you could actually set up some kind of poison gas traps, even in the new version. But just in general things like a potion that makes you happy ... there are two obstacles there now in the current system. One of them is that you'd need to have the effect, you'd need to give the modder or vanilla modding control to change the happiness of a dwarf, so it's not just giving blisters or whatever but there's a new effect, and that list is just going to increase over time and hopefully cover the basis. The other problem is to get a dwarf to actually use the thing; to recognise that there's now this flask filled with this juice that when you drink it it makes your happiness one hundred and fifty percent for a week, and having the dwarf know that that's something that needs to be used is a large problem, especially for a modding situation where you make happiness juice that gives you blisters and makes you fly ... when do you drink it? I don't know, it sounds like an adventure mode thing; the adventurer would take that journey, but not necessarily a dwarf craftsman that's feeling a little bummed out. So that's another issue with modding, but it's not that far away now, you can mod in your own poisons and create them and boil them to make them work now and we just need to expand the effects and give things a few more uses. So where are we at ... we're down to soaps and things, I don't know if people would be satisfied. I guess the one glaring smelting metallurgy thing, if people are wondering about alloys and the exact manganese content of their steel. I guess that opens some interesting avenues of discussion, at least stuff where I'm totally confused about how I would do it, like if you take metals ... there are all different kinds of steel, it's like this one's two percent carbon, three percent manganese, and this one is this percent this, and this percent this, and this percent this, and they all have really different properties, but would I have to make a separate material entry for every single one? At this point I would, and you'd make stainless steel using whatever goes into that - I don't remember if its manganese or tungsten or whatever the heck else there is that they put into steel these days, or former days - and I'm just not sure if it's practical. Right now we've got a ton of alloys in the game but they're all broadly defined, like two bars of this and one bar of this makes this.

DFtalk 7.2, magic artifacts

[Loud Whispers]

Artifacts = Magic
For example, an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to turn into molten iron. Or a strange mood could fail and an artifact adamantine breastplate could cause the wearer's blood to to turn into molten iron.

Aren't those the same thing?

Now you see! All along, it was inevitable.

[SixOfSpades]

Personally, I would far rather Today work on improving the realism (Why can't we "build" with soil, creating a tree farm on top of a constructed building? Why can't we burn wooden furniture for fuel? Why can't we grind up crafts made of flux stone in order to help make steel? Why can't we slap the broker around for refusing to do his damn job?) of the existing features, rather than implement new, even game-changing features. Yes, I would love to see golden salve be used for actual medicinal purposes. But that can wait.