I have 3 main interests for potential modding projects, but not a ton of free time. I am wondering what you players would enjoy the most to help me decide what to actually dive into. Not a literal poll, I care more about contentful commentary.
Option 1) Comprehensive, more challenging and realistic food and industry mods -- The goal is first and foremost making starvation a 14th century-level realistic risk, with it being a rare event for dwarves to NOT be hungry on a regular basis, and needing to devote maybe 40% of your population to agriculture as an ideal goal (meat and eggs and crops etc. all made equally more difficult, no cheating by alternate food sources). Along with much more realistic crops and climate zones of varying difficulty and style. Possibly also updating other industries (wood, metal, ceramics, glass) to have more balanced uses and more challenging and realistic production trees. More details in spoiler:
*Farms might produce 10-20x less food per tile, requiring ideally 20-40% of your population to be farmers is my goal.
*Also modifying every other food source to be equally challenging so you can't easily get around it. Less usable meat, meat can't be eaten raw, spoils much faster, all meat edible animals are grazers, etc.
*Crops are horribly inefficient underground, and only food is available there (no booze, no economic ingredients).
*Much more seasonal and biome-specific above ground crops. Different climate zones act like different difficulty or variety levels. Warm tropical might have abundant, fast growing plants that give various industry goods. Whereas salt marshes give tough, nearly inedible, slow growing foods with almost no other economic uses to serve as a super hard mode.
*Other industries made more challenging and realistic as well
*Clay and sand modded to not be infinite in quantity
*Glass and ceramics both given other additional uses, including hopefully being an attractive option for liquids storage (by nerfing sstone pots, and requiring wooden barrels to have metal hoops and so forth)
*Availability of wood, or amount needed to build things, massively reduced from current levels. And hopefully also adding in steps like needing to saw and dry it (tricky to do, but I think I can figure out a mod method in raws only)
*Iron and steel working more labor intensive, and other metals made more realistic.
*etc.
-- Basically, a 3rd party utility that would simulate an entire world using actual plate tectonics (this happens at a coarse resolution, like 1/4 of an embark tile or something). Then when you embark at a location, the application further simulates the tile-by-tile detail of that site, and completely overwrites the entire embark map using dfhack to make it fit the realistic geology of the greater world. See spoiler for specific details of what kinds of things:
*Realistic rock strata based on semi-simulated actual geologic history, not glued together layers and veins. For instance, iron-bearing ores might all be at a consistent geological strata, corresponding to when original lifeforms began to evolve on your world in the geological simulation (thus producing oxygen and saturating iron into banded mineral formations). Or as another example, an area that is simulated to have been formed as part of an oceanic volcano subduction arc (like the Andes mountains) would show layers consistent with falling and flowing ash and clast over time in their shape and layout, and would be mostly felsic in chemistry. Whereas mountains due to convergence boundaries (like the Himalayas) would be crumpled in their layers, etc. Coal veins are from actual simulated extinction events, where dead biomass would overwhelm bacterial ability to digest it prior to lithification.
*The engine would roughly simulate the whole world, and do more specific simulations as needed, in a way that smoothly tiles. So if you embark on a spot right next to your previous map, it will remember the whole world geological history, and rewrite your whole map again after embark, but do so in a way that meshes smoothly with your adjacent embark. Essentially, DF has its own opinion of what the world is like, I have my own parallel one, and I override DF's right when you start playing at any time.
*Clear evidence of plate tectonics, like rock and mineral strata that bend in 3d planar space as if crumpled from plate impacts, when that is relevant. Fault lines and so forth may also form when the bouyancy of a plate changes and bends a continent. Chemistry consistent with the origina and general history of your landmass as you dig down. Volcanoes where actual volcanoes would be, etc.
*Volcanoes not just random straight tubes in the ground, but actual volcanoes, including subterraneous sills and tubes, and intrusive plutons bubbling up and bending the strata of the landscape above them.
*Metamorphic rocks formed from actual simulated metamorphism, when simulated plates collide, or due to heat from magma intrusions, and so forth. Type of rock decided by means of what the actual parent rock would have metamorphized into in real life under those temperature and pressure conditions.
*Erosion not based on blanket-applied smoothing algorithms, but being done instead in separate passes and different algorithms for wind, water, and glaciation.
*Erosion erodes different rock types differently, as appropriate. Granite is mechanically tough, but chemically weak, for instance. It would resist wind and tectonics better than it resists water. Whereas sandstone
*Caves formed where caves actually would be (drained magma tubes and sills, and chemical decomposition of rocks like limestone), although made more common and bigger than real life, since caves are fun.
-- Working out specific economic principles like supply and demand and survival versus profit goods and trade networks and markets, with an eye toward how a fully implemented economics sytem might work in DF. Then implementing this either as a proof of concept or (if dfhack can do the necessary things) as a plugin that actually makes such a system in game.
Details of this are easier to get a feel for from this thread, if anybody cares that much:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=142045.0Thoughts?
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Topic: "Poll" - Best modding project to work on (Read 4755 times)