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Author Topic: Project Elf Mode: Version 1.06.00 Released! 40.11 Compatible!  (Read 9244 times)

Chevaleresse

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Project Elf Mode: Version 1.06.00 Released! 40.11 Compatible!
« on: August 16, 2014, 04:27:50 am »

Version 1.06.01 is ready for testing! Download it here.
Here's a neat set of tiles by k33n that go nicely with this mod.
As one of the few non-elf-hating members of the community and a fan of elves in general, I've decided to give making elves an actual playable race a go. The main goal of this mod is to provide a fleshed out and distinct gameplay experience for elves without disrupting their role in Dwarf Mode. To this end, several features will be implemented and a few parts of the vanilla experience slightly modified to accommodate Elf Mode. Overall, consistency with the vanilla game will be maintained.
Implemented Features
-Elves appear as a playable civilization, complete with the nobles required for a fort to function
-The heartwood shrine generates wood for your elves to use at a slow rate, allowing a safe, nature-friendly method of building with wood
           -Currently generates featherwood, acacia, stonewood, and sunwood, as well as more heartwood. Uses the woodcutting and strand extraction labors.
-Two new types of wood to build with
           -Sunwood, a magma-safe material that serves as an excellent barrier between your retreat and fiery, tree-killing death.
           -Stonewood, a high-density tree that replaces the dwarven bloodthorns and evil glumprongs in an elven settlement.
-Kill your enemies and eat their corpses! Well, butcher them, THEN eat them. We're not savages.
-Elven professions renamed appropriately
-Create wooden weapons and armor.
-Infuse wood with the properties of metal (and learn why we use linked stockpiles in this mod)
-Summon seeds from nothing, such as the rare sun berry
-Create wooden mechanisms.
Planned Features
I'd gladly take suggestions. I'll probably end up finishing up the basic mod, then maintaining another mod that fleshes out elves even further, going past the original goals of the mod. Actually, I'm going to take a crack at making a version of this for MDF. That'll end up in MDF's forum, and it won't interfere with vanilla.
Known Bugs
-Gauntlets are unusable as they are not marked as left- or right-handed.
-Sunwood is unusable for constructions requiring fire- or magma-safe materials.
-Seed reaction is improperly defined, this fix will be up tomorrow.

Other notes
Like I said before, you should be able to have Dwarf Mode be identical to what it was previously. It'd help me out if you installed the mod and just played as dwarves to see what happened. (The most that should is elves showing up with hammers and the occasional preference for one of the modded trees.
« Last Edit: September 11, 2014, 04:22:56 pm by KingMurdoc »
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Minnakht

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2014, 04:37:42 am »

         -Same for nether-cap
 perhaps with some subterranean creatures.

I object. Give them their own versions of these if you must, but leave cavern stuff to dwarves.
This is merely my personal belief - an opinion, if you will. You don't have to follow it, but I'd appreciate it if you did.
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Chevaleresse

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2014, 04:44:34 am »

For the subterranean critters, I just had that thought based on my experience with another modded (and blatantly overpowered) elven race that I made for myself. Embarking with cave crocs is fun. I was planning on a nether-cap alternative simply because elves have basically no fire-safe material to start out with; I'm still trying to think of a way to give them mining for early-midgame without just handing out picks.

Now that I think of it, the way I'm doing this would tie in pretty well with elves needing biomes that are easy to settle in worldgen. Elves would get massacred in, for example, an evil biome, because everything would be out in the open.
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Minnakht

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #3 on: August 16, 2014, 04:57:37 am »

Personally, at this very moment, I'm modding in plants that only appear on the second and third cavern layers. The dwarven civilization (as far as I know) only starts off with layer 1 stuff, so all that I mod in is completely up to an intrepid player to discover and use. I like this feeling of pioneering, having your fortress be the first place to... do what I said.

That's another reason for which I'm recommending what I'm recommending. Give elves new stuff - stuff that a player coming from dwarves wouldn't recognize, instead of the same old deep-cavern things that both aren't in character and new. That's the point of mods, if you ask me! I don't know if you do.

Since your heartwood workshop thing can generate wood from nowhere, you could even make wood that doesn't normally exist in nature. Go wild with that idea! Give the wood various properties - being very cold, very hot, being tough, very light, contact syndrome (not poison oak), whatever you want, really.
One other idea you could have is similarly have another workshop generate seeds for you - seeds not necessarily found in nature, or found rarely. Conjure up sunberry seeds, valley herb seeds, and whatever you can think of.

Also, if you are looking for ideas... I think 'Conservatory' would be a nice name for the woodsinging workshop, split off from the basic craftself one. Might want to disable the hardcoded 'make wood items' workshops and replace them with that.
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Chevaleresse

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #4 on: August 16, 2014, 05:09:03 am »

Yeah, I was thinking of making a burning wood thing, then I realized that it would sort of annihilate everything in the fort by virtue of the fort being, well, wooden, or be basically useless. At the moment I'm trying to stick pretty close to vanilla, so I probably won't add in anything too outlandish yet. The goal right now is to make the elves as they exist in Dwarf Fortress playable as a fully fleshed-out race while leaving vanilla largely intact; later, I might add another package, so to speak, that includes a bunch of elfy stuff that would affect gameplay as dwarves to a greater degree.
 Thanks for your input, though, I'm not trying to shoot your suggestions down or anything. I'll probably start my work from a fresh set of raws soon.
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Authority2

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #5 on: August 16, 2014, 05:34:23 am »

         -Same for nether-cap
 perhaps with some subterranean creatures.

I object. Give them their own versions of these if you must, but leave cavern stuff to dwarves.
This is merely my personal belief - an opinion, if you will. You don't have to follow it, but I'd appreciate it if you did.
Perhaps a kind of wood that, rather than always being cold, is always warm.

From what I can tell, elves don't sing wood into existence and then make it into things; they sing the wood into things directly. I dunno if this is possible, or more fun, though.
I'd like to suggest not giving them stonewood, and instead having them fight using useless wood weapons for the increased difficulty. Unless you mod mechanisms to be woodcraftable, there's no traps either, which balances out their higher speed.
Are you going to let them dig? It might be more in-character for them to stay always aboveground, especially with the new trees.
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than402

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #6 on: August 16, 2014, 06:04:21 am »

I'd like to suggest not giving them stonewood, and instead having them fight using useless wood weapons for the increased difficulty

i agree.you can import and train many dangerous animals that can do a lot of damage in close combat,but if you want adequate elvish troops you will have to buy the stuff from the humans or the dwarves,or loot it from the goblins.or use bows.
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Rekov

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #7 on: August 16, 2014, 08:05:25 am »

I have been super excited for a playable elf mode, and this is the fourth project I'm now excitably following to see how it turns out.

A couple suggestions:
-Let elves butcher sentient creatures. They're cannibals and eat their enemies, after all.
-Create a motivation to stay above ground, i.e. Cave Depression. The more time they spend underground, the unhappier they become. This is probably difficult to do though.
-You could take a look at things like Ironbark and Steeloak that MasterWork has done for material types. Metal trees, basically.
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Henny

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #8 on: August 16, 2014, 11:16:45 am »

I wish there was a like button.

-Metal forging is possible, but must be either volcanic or lategame as elves cannot create charcoal
Objection! They almost certainly use wood - and by extension charcoal - for heat, it's just that it needs to be ethically grown magic wood. I'm also disinclined towards elves and metalworking early on, but I'm not sure I like that reason. They should be good potters, and potentially glass-makers.
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YAHG

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #9 on: August 16, 2014, 12:16:32 pm »

I wanted the elves to lay wooden log eggs, so it is like the elves are the trees, so obviously they get all pissy when you kill their people. This would be a way to get wood too.

If you want to have the wood generation be nice and slow I would suggest tying the wood skill or other plant transmutation skills to alchemy and lower or remove their skill gain in that skill, maybe you don't ever really get any better at asking the trees to grow you more tools :). From a flavor standpoint elves are not usually industrious people, more of a relaxed in the trees we are all set with what we got for the most part.

I for one think it would be beautiful if the elves built tree villages out of 'grown wood' in the branches and between trees.

If you can dfhack and get it to make the type of the wood from the nearby tree that that would be even more immersive.

IndigoFenix

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #10 on: August 16, 2014, 12:47:01 pm »

This will probably be much better once DFHack updates to DF2014.  Might want to hold off until then...

EDIT: Wait... is that DFHack for 2014 I see?  To the scriptmobile!

BlackFlyme

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #11 on: August 16, 2014, 01:11:45 pm »

There is also the Elf Retreat mod that you could potentially pull ideas from. Though it is quite an old mod, so some parts will likely need updating.

I tried to make a personal mod for elves before, but got bored half-way through, so nothing much ever came of it.

I do wonder if it is possible to make 'grown' items though. I know that the NPC elves can bring them in caravans, but I don't know if the player themselves can make them or not through modding.
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samanato

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #12 on: August 16, 2014, 01:48:17 pm »

I do wonder if it is possible to make 'grown' items though. I know that the NPC elves can bring them in caravans, but I don't know if the player themselves can make them or not through modding.

That might be a problem, since it could lead to a bug with elven caravans refusing your own trade goods, since they only accept grown wood.  Might need DFHack to set all wooden items from the retreat as grown, though not sure, how one would go about that (changeitem?)

I don't really like the idea of elves knowing metalworking.  I suppose, it could be unlocked through tech-trees (starting with trade with dwarves possibly?) but it doesn't really go with the civ's flavour for me.  I would be more inclined for them to make things like Ironbark in Masterwork style - singing trees to produce metal-like wood, leaves, blossoms... (which I actually have in my mod!) which could be used for weapons and armour.  This shouldn't be as easy as dwarves making regular weapons; it would be slower to make, like wood from heartwood.

I would also not let caravans bring wood logs to your retreat.  It would be a massive dick move and also shatter immersion, when the elves still normally trade with them instead of killing them or putting a fairy curse!  You can embargo certain trade goods with a DFHack script.  Barring civs from bringing wood might do funny things with adventure mode towns, general civ resources and suchlike though.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2014, 02:16:10 pm by samanato »
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Chevaleresse

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #13 on: August 16, 2014, 02:21:45 pm »

I do wonder if it is possible to make 'grown' items though. I know that the NPC elves can bring them in caravans, but I don't know if the player themselves can make them or not through modding.

That might be a problem, since it could lead to a bug with elven caravans refusing your own trade goods, since they only accept grown wood.  Might need DFHack to set all wooden items from the retreat as grown, though not sure, how one would go about that (changeitem?)

I don't really like the idea of elves knowing metalworking.  I suppose, it could be unlocked through tech-trees (starting with trade with dwarves possibly?) but it doesn't really go with the civ's flavour for me.  I would be more inclined for them to make things like Ironbark in Masterwork style - singing trees to produce metal-like wood, leaves, blossoms... (which I actually have in my mod!) which could be used for weapons and armour.  This shouldn't be as easy as dwarves making regular weapons; it would be slower to make, like wood from heartwood.

That last part was actually part of the plan. As for grown items, do they actually show up as grown, i.e. you can trade them back to the elves? I'm waiting for 40.x to get a stable version so I don't know if that's changed. I had log generation rather than crafting from nothing for a couple reasons. One, I'm lazy. Modding in a custom workshop that makes logs from nothing is far, far easier than making custom replacements for the carpentry, metalsmith's, and craftsman's shop that allow you to make wooden items for free.
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If you like my work, consider becoming a patron. (Since apparently people think this is a requirement: no, my game(s) are free to play and always will be.

samanato

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Re: Project Elf Mode
« Reply #14 on: August 16, 2014, 02:26:48 pm »

Grown wood really is grown, yes, and elves will accept tradebacks in dwarf mode.

Worth noting, that elven forest retreat sites have "shaping trees", which they use to make grown crafts.  Those are real trees too, taken from the outside and all.  They also live on the trees themselves. 
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