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[samanato]

Just for curiousity, I've done some !!SCIENCE!! on the way the new food-rotting system would work.

With the [HEATDAM_POINT:10015] (that is, same as the underground, at 10015°U = 8°C), inside food items will take roughly three weeks to completely "rot" away.  Before that, you'll see the items progressively wear out like xClothesx before disappearing altogether.  They don't all rot in unison, the individual rates appear to be random.  I haven't tested to see, if the [UNROTTED] reaction token also rejects damaged xItemsx. 

Rotting is much faster outside; in tropical climates (10070°U=38.9°C) meat can rot away in all of three days!  The neat thing is that as said before, the rate of decay depends on temperature, even if it's a tiny bit fast.  It makes tropical biomes all the more challenging in early-game, but the abundance of tropical plant foodstuff's in GavJ's conception would balance this later on.

The biggest problem with implementing this is that butchering products are the same as live tissues, and naively changing the HEATDAM_POINT will make creatures die instantly! The only workaround I can think of is setting most creature's HOMEOTHERM to an even lower temperature.  It's a pretty shoddy solution, but it's the least noticeable to the gameplay and there isn't much better if this is done with just raw-modding. 

[GavJ]

You can make animal tissues drop materials other than themselves with the special butcher product tag. Even though its bugged I still have a way to make not-quite-meat that stacks correctly, so animals wont bleed out.

(You could also give them huge insulation and they wouldn't die but it's less elegant)

[samanato]

Isn't BUTCHER_SPECIAL for item types, not materials?

Also, HEATDAM effects are a lot more dramatic in .40.x.  When I tested it, they immediately took heat damage and died upon entering the arena, no bleeding or anything.

[Button]

NUMBER 2 NUMBER 2 NUMBER 2 NUMBER 2 NUMBER 2 NUMBER 2 NUMBER 2

Can I vote multiple times please if you can get #2 working I will be your devoted fangirl

[GavJ]

Isn't BUTCHER_SPECIAL for item types, not materials?

Also, HEATDAM effects are a lot more dramatic in .40.x.  When I tested it, they immediately took heat damage and died upon entering the arena, no bleeding or anything.

Sorry its been awhile. It might be some other detail but I got it to work already and wrote it somewhere.

Faster temperature flow is more concerning though.

[Roses]

I am still not sure how feasible it would be to rewrite the entire map using DFHack.

Guys on IRC channel say that tiletypes in dfhack can change anything about a tile if you know how to use it. Discussion with its writer and reverse engineering should let me figure out all the libraries involved, at which point I should be able to overwrite a whole embark map just as quickly as DF writes the original embark map (couple seconds or whatever). Not sure yet if there'd be weird stability issues, but quite likely not.

(Bonus: if I do that project and figure out all the main code hooks, I can also fix the horrible horrible user interface of tiletypes to make it much more usable for testing stuff and whatever tile changes manually)

The only things I would be unsure about are things like caverns, adamantine and slade spires, and any of the other unique features (underground fortresses). I think altering these things would create stability issues, but you are free to test it out. Also, you are going to have to shuffle around where creatures are too if you change caverns, and make sure that you aren't clipping anything on the edges of the map. If you can get it all to work I say more power to you, but I think that it will be a very long process, although truthfully, if DFHack doesn't cause any stability issues the hardest thing will be writing the geology engine itself since iterative geology engines (IGE) are very complex, and I have yet to find a single one that handles all aspects satisfactorily (some are very good at handling sediment layering and erosion/geomorphological forces, but are poor at dealing with tectonics and volcanism).

[GavJ]

I lean toward geology myself, mainly because it holds other benefits outside of DF player interest, such as being a standalone portfolio item if it works well, and also being applicable to other games existing or future. Plus a decent amount of interest here still.

I think I will probably start on that, and in the quite likely event that it ends up being way too hard, will fall back to #1. Specially since agriculture requires waiting a little while longer for Toady to finish with whatever his fruits and garden things are or whatever, since those are directly relevant and probably imminent.

Roses, are you referring to other game design geology engines, or academic tools? And if you have a link to one or two that do a good job on the volcanism and tectonics side, I haven't come across any that do well on that yet and would love to see.

[Roses]

I lean toward geology myself, mainly because it holds other benefits outside of DF player interest, such as being a standalone portfolio item if it works well, and also being applicable to other games existing or future. Plus a decent amount of interest here still.

I think I will probably start on that, and in the quite likely event that it ends up being way too hard, will fall back to #1.

Roses, are you referring to other game design geology engines, or academic tools? And if you have a link to one or two that do a good job on the volcanism and tectonics side, I haven't come across any that do well on that yet and would love to see.

I was talking academic, I haven't ever looked at game design geology engines, they might have better all around results (academics tend to just be concerned with small aspects instead of all around).

[YAHG]

#3 The Econ sounds the coolest to me, at this point the caravans are mostly useless. I don't want anything they have for the most part, and they just love the crap out of any stupid thing I throw at em  .

I did like

By using heat damage points at around 10,010 or so urists, I can make unpreserved food rot over the course of a week or two if stored at non-refrigerating temperatures

Spoiling food sounds really cool

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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:

Code: [Select]

 
*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.


[ ]
While it is not as comprehensive i.e. I didn't mess with animals etc. I did do a pretty good overhaul of farming (at least on the hardest difficulty it is a LOT harder and you gotta watch your seed stock etc. much more carefully.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1. would be my choice. It would work as a standalone mod, but could also be dropped into the modpack putnam/peridexis are working on.

(Bonus: if I do that project and figure out all the main code hooks, I can also fix the horrible horrible user interface of tiletypes to make it much more usable for testing stuff and whatever tile changes manually)

That would be fantastic. But the less-overpowered farming one gets my vote.

I built it for the modularity and even did a version with facsimiles of those pretty text tags you use in Masterwork so you could change the numbers used in a gui or whatever  .

So far only 2 downloads of that  and not even any of them were me [/ ]

If you go with the food one, I found that 2->1 plants to booze and removing the ability to get seeds back from eating/processing/brewing really kicks farming in the nuts and makes potash/skilled labor much more important.

[GavJ]

If you go with the food one, I found that 2->1 plants to booze and removing the ability to get seeds back from eating/processing/brewing really kicks farming in the nuts and makes potash/skilled labor much more important.

Part of the plan was actually to remove both potash and skilled labor. Potash removal is actually a little bit tricky, but I think possible. Labor can be locked at level 5 by just making natural skill level for everyone be 5, which means assigning points at embark is useless, and then also mod the learning rate for farm skills to zero, so nobody ever gets any better.

It makes it a helluva lot easier to balance everything.  The problem is, if my goal is 40% of the population needing to be farmers, then either it STARTS at that and then with potash + skill becomes like 2% later (yawn), or that's the maximum, which would mean you'd start with 400% needed, and always starve in the first season... Locking them at one place I think is the only way to have realistically huge but possible amounts of the population laboring by necessity.

[Zorbeltuss]

2 while being the hardest seems to be able to include another thing which I've thought about a lot recently, being able to have ground dependent erosion, giving more realistic rivers and canyons, which would be the thing I miss most in dwarf fortress, it might also be able to simulate soil deposition giving natural deltas at the end of big and/or highly eroding rivers.

/Zorbeltuss

[Vattic]

Number two is the most interesting to me. Mostly because I've been implementing my own 14th century metallurgy mod (somewhat based on yours) and realised it was difficult to place certain ores realistically because of a lack of realism in the geology.

[Urist McVoyager]

I'd vote farming. Keep the Potash but lock in labor at level 5, so you can gain an edge but not as much of one as level 10 labor would give you. When you say 40% of the fortress laboring, would you be factoring in breaks and sleep, or everyone working all the time? Because breaks take up a lot of labor-time, and they'd definitely jack up how many people you need working to keep the fortress running.

Another good reason for keeping the potash is to cut down on idle time. Surely with crop growth slowing down, there would be longer down-times between plantings. Sure, a good bit of that would be taken up by processing harvests from previous plantings, but there would still be downtime that could be absorbed with fertilizer. Which would boost the harvests and add work processing bigger harvests. You wouldn't necessarily use fertilizer every single time, but you'd occasionally use it, boost the harvest, and give your fortresses some breathing room.

[mifki]

#2

[Xinael]

Can't say #1 appeals very much to me, for a fairly simple reason:

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

Sounds cool! DF: Heroic mode. Great.

Along with much more realistic crops... crops are horribly inefficient underground, and only food is available there

No way. This is Dwarf Fortress, not Silly Human Fortress. For a society of booze-swilling cave-dwellers to exist, they have to be able to get food and drink down there, so such plants would have to exist. It's the Dwarfthropic Principle - dwarves exist, so those things must also exist by definition. If you take them away, why even bother living in a hole in the ground when you're much more likely to starve to death down there? You might as well just build houses above the earth, and grow twice as tall while you're at it.