Dwarf Fortress > DF Modding
FuFo2 Brainstorming Questions
AceSV:
I've been thinking about ways to revamp my Furry Fortress mod. I'm starting to think maybe I should put all the questions in one place. I'm going to keep some of the specifics a secret until it is released, so I can change my mind if necessary.
Wood Alternatives
I want to try making a playabe race that won't use wood for anything, not even "grown wood" like the elves, which I don't think you can produce as a player anyways. Without some modding, this would be completely crippling for the experience. Unlike elves, they would not be restricted from using stone and metal, but there are still some materials that wood is exclusively used for.
Beds - But that's easy enough to fix. Mod in cloth, leather and stone beds. Done.
Fuel - Wood makes charcoal, which is insanely useful if you have enough and don't want to scrape the earth's core for magma. But what else from the 1400s could be burned for fuel? Well, ethanol fuel would be cool and fits into the existing framework of the game, except that logically you would keep ethanol in barrels instead of bars and I don't know if the default reactions would be confused by that. In the modern day, I know that there are various solid fuel bars used for survival, but I don't know what they are or if they would suitable to a fantasy game. Anyone have an idea for this?
Soap - Soap is lye, made from ash, made from wood. I don't usually bother with the soap industry myself, but I'd hate to just remove it entirely. Anyone know of alternatives?
Antman Civ - Solved
Spoiler (click to show/hide)Original
The caste system is set up exactly for an ant-man civ, but the marriage system is not. Ideally, the ant-queen would breed once and be able to produce offspring for her entire life, but in DF, the default state is for a male and female of similar age to pair up for life and produce children every so often when they're not toiling away.
The easy solution is to make them ant-MEN instead of ANT-men. The fortress could have multiple breeding pairs each with dozens of worker and soldier children.
I saw Meph's golem workshop and I wondered if some kind of workshop process could use ant queen eggs as a reagent to produce ant workers and soldiers as the reaction. But as far as I know, the golem reaction still uses a transformation syndrome, so it wouldn't be able to produce new workers. Maybe livestock could be used to "feed" the eggs so they can hatch.
Solution
Gave up on implementing a "realistic" caste system as it was difficult to display to the player. Gave males the PET tag, which allows them to breed without marriage. The majority of ant-people are female, the player can decide whether they will function as queens, workers or soldiers.
Troll Civ
I've come up with race that will essentially be a civilization of trolls. I've created troll size weapons for them that are about 4x larger and more expensive than dwarf sized weapons (trolls are about 4x the volume of dwarves and humans). I'm hoping that the cost will serve to balance out the obvious advantage of being gigantic. I don't think these guys will be wildly overpowered when it comes to armed combat, since trolls themselves are not all that threatening, but trolls are balanced by the fact that they don't have armor, which a player would obviously provide.
So the question, should I do something to decrease their armor? I could make them custom armors that cost 4x as much(left alone, I'm assuming a troll-sized breast plate costs as much metal as a dwarf-sized breastplate). I could restrict what armors are available to them. I could restrict armor material to cloth, leather and wood, no metal. I may also give them penalties to mining, to balance out their size, which would also restrict metal acquisition, though a long enough game would balance it out. Any thoughts?
Swimmer Civs
Last time I had an amphibious civ of duck people, which were terrible, since their only advantage was swimming which the AI can't do. They also had a habit of marching their waterbuffalo caravans into motes and rivers and getting stuck there forever. I don't think I'm going to repeat ducks specifically, but I am going to have at least 2 races based on sea critters. Any thoughts on what I could do to make swimming races more flavorful? Something that would encourage a player to play a different way?
More to come.
milo christiansen:
Soap without wood is easy, use an alcohol based soap. There are other ways of making soap too, look it up (few to no soaps used now-days are lye based).
I have some DFHack scripts that would allow you to remove the carpenters workshop, that may be helpful :)
For fuel... In my First Landing mod I have some machines that use jugs of plant oil, and you could make solid fuel from that, but it wouldn't be realistic seeing as you can't mod fuel names.
vjmdhzgr:
FOr the ants you could make it a rare caste, but then add a reaction that turns a normal ant into a queen ant to ensure that you don't end up without one, and then there's two options for getting them to succesfully breed, I'm not sure if one of them will work. So one option could be adding in a male caste with the [PET] token and maybe can't speak though I'm not sure if that's needed that you then just make sure is near the queen all the time and since they're unintelligent and/or a [PET] (still not sure which you'd need) they just breed whenever without requiring marriage. However, I don't know if this will work for the queen, probably not, so you could also add the same tokens to the queen allowing breeding constantly. The other option would be adding in a male caste that is also rare and would probably be obtained by transformation most of the time that lives as long as the queen, is always heterosexual, and always has maximum personality traits that would result in developing relationships quicker. Then add the same always heterosexual, maximum personality traits for developing relationships to the queen, and players would then just lock them in a room together until they marry. Obviously the first is more accurate to how ants work, but has some other problems so maybe the second one could work better.
kilakan:
For fuels, peat blocks were commonly used in england and other parts of Europe as fuel. Mining/digging peat out of bogs would work and then you could shift to making coal/coke if those are prevalent on the map. Perhapes allow a farm to grow 'peat' from spores and then a second workshop to pack it into cubes? You can also use tied hay and other grass bundles as fuel. Some sort of general 'tinder packing workshop' could get around ever touching wood for fuel/ash/ect.
AceSV:
Well if alcohol can be turned into bars of soap, that solves both problems doesn't it? If you can turn alcohol into a bar of soap you should be able to turn it into a bar of fuel. Do you have anymore info on that? I tried to look up how to make soap and I only got lye recipes or melt-and-pour soaps, which are just lye soaps with extra gunk added to them.
Another solution that was proposed to me is to make ash and charcoal from other plants besides wood. Maybe something like sawgrass could be grown as a fuel crop, which is being tested in real life as a feedstock for cellulosic ethanol.
As for peat, that sounds too unrealistic to me. Real peat takes decades or centuries to form, so it would be way too gamey to be able to grow it yearly for fuel. It would be akin to just inventing some fantasy crop that does what I need it to do. But mining peat could be more viable. I could probably modify the raws to make it form boulders when mined that can be packed into bars or cooked into coke.
For ants, I think I'll experiment with both options. Pet males sounds like some kind of pulp adventure fantasy, and I love pulp adventure fantasy. If both male and female need to be pets, I could try making both queens and drones into pets. That would make things really interesting. 2nd option sounds like it would be more likely to work and maybe more intuitive to DF veterans.
Also I've added 2 new brainstorms to the opening, Troll Civ and Swimmer Civ
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