Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urlance Woolsbane]

Huh, could you make more kinds of vampires?  Like maybe instead of drinking blood, there's a booze vampire that drinks too much, or a rust vampire that breaks metal objects (or just iron/steel if being literal) or a vampire that has a steel body or dragonfire breath, suddenly the vampire starts breaking bones and burning things when it gets mad. 

For booze vampires, CURIOUSBEAST_GUZZLER should do in a pinch. Rust vampires seem to be impossible, right now (without DFHack.) The last one should be perfectly doable.

Say, what happens if a creature with BLOODSUCKER has CURIOUSBEAST_GUZZLER? Will it drink alcohol?

[IndigoFenix]

CURIOUSBEAST tokens are only relevant to wild animal behavior, and cannot be added through syndromes in any event.  While more CURIOUSBEAST animals would make the game more fun (especially if they come in large groups), they can still be avoided by sealing off the fort.

I'm experimenting with communicable hidden syndromes but it seems intelligent creatures don't use GREETING interactions anymore in Fort mode, ever.  Even with a month to pass it on, it never seems to spread.  Also wild animals don't seem to use interactions except in combat.  This is new for .42.

This is odd because in the arena friendly creatures will use greetings when they are standing around, as will tame animals in fort mode.  Maybe the socializing prevents it.

[darkflagrance]

Huh, could you make more kinds of vampires?  Like maybe instead of drinking blood, there's a booze vampire that drinks too much, or a rust vampire that breaks metal objects (or just iron/steel if being literal) or a vampire that has a steel body or dragonfire breath, suddenly the vampire starts breaking bones and burning things when it gets mad. 

I suppose you could still avoid the exovampires by turtling, but if any are in your fortress before you seal it up, you're in trouble. 

Werebeast epidemics are one of the few things that can really sink one of my fortresses anymore.  It would be interesting to make something which is as virile as werebeasts, but not as immediately dangerous and obvious.  Because if you see a werebeast you react strongly to it, if it were something more tame, you might not choose to divert resources to fix it until it's too late.

If you were allowed to mod the dwarf raws, you could make sleeper dwarves that come as normal migrants but manifest and pass a werebeast syndrome. As it is you can just wall the were/vampires out of your fort.

[pikachu17]

can you make a new caste of dwarves that has [OPPOSE_TO_LIFE] and can breath fire, so when you open the gates for it, it attacks everyone in sight?

[IndigoFenix]

New kinds of vampires/werebeasts could be done without modding dwarves at all.  It just needs a new major curse added to the raws.  Weredragons could be fun... though survivors would be rare, so they would be unlikely to spread their curse.

I did come up with an interesting 'jumping evil spirit' mechanism (or its benevolent counterpart) that places an effect on a dwarf (such as bloodsucking), but periodically 'jumps' to a new host, making it hard to trace.  The only problem is that in order to get it to jump reliably, the dwarf needs to go berserk/opposed to life for at least an instant (since combat is the only time sapient creatures will use interactions), so you'll tend to notice when it jumps, as dwarves will start fighting.  Maybe if it causes everyone around it to go berserk at the same time, though, you won't be able to tell who started it...

Inflicting the syndrome in the first place is tricky, though.  It can't be a major curse (or a caste) since it needs to be temporary, bug bites give you a warning message, and wild animals can be walled off.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

New kinds of vampires/werebeasts could be done without modding dwarves at all.  It just needs a new major curse added to the raws.  Weredragons could be fun... though survivors would be rare, so they would be unlikely to spread their curse.

I did come up with an interesting 'jumping evil spirit' mechanism (or its benevolent counterpart) that places an effect on a dwarf (such as bloodsucking), but periodically 'jumps' to a new host, making it hard to trace.  The only problem is that in order to get it to jump reliably, the dwarf needs to go berserk/opposed to life for at least an instant (since combat is the only time sapient creatures will use interactions), so you'll tend to notice when it jumps, as dwarves will start fighting.  Maybe if it causes everyone around it to go berserk at the same time, though, you won't be able to tell who started it...

Inflicting the syndrome in the first place is tricky, though.  It can't be a major curse (or a caste) since it needs to be temporary, bug bites give you a warning message, and wild animals can be walled off.

A regional interaction seems like the ticket for this. It infects one dwarf, who then targets every other living creature on the map, giving each one a syndrome that grants immunity to the regional interaction. Both that syndrome and the infected dwarf's syndrome last for the same amount of time. Then someone else is targeted by the region, and the whole thing begins anew.

[Meph]

New kinds of vampires/werebeasts could be done without modding dwarves at all.  It just needs a new major curse added to the raws.  Weredragons could be fun... though survivors would be rare, so they would be unlikely to spread their curse.

I did come up with an interesting 'jumping evil spirit' mechanism (or its benevolent counterpart) that places an effect on a dwarf (such as bloodsucking), but periodically 'jumps' to a new host, making it hard to trace.  The only problem is that in order to get it to jump reliably, the dwarf needs to go berserk/opposed to life for at least an instant (since combat is the only time sapient creatures will use interactions), so you'll tend to notice when it jumps, as dwarves will start fighting.  Maybe if it causes everyone around it to go berserk at the same time, though, you won't be able to tell who started it...

Inflicting the syndrome in the first place is tricky, though.  It can't be a major curse (or a caste) since it needs to be temporary, bug bites give you a warning message, and wild animals can be walled off.

Make a new kobold civ. They send only a single unit, which has a map-wide interaction to infect a single dwarf. Since SKULKING civs are not in the civ list, no player will notice that there are two kobold civs.

[IndigoFenix]

New kinds of vampires/werebeasts could be done without modding dwarves at all.  It just needs a new major curse added to the raws.  Weredragons could be fun... though survivors would be rare, so they would be unlikely to spread their curse.

I did come up with an interesting 'jumping evil spirit' mechanism (or its benevolent counterpart) that places an effect on a dwarf (such as bloodsucking), but periodically 'jumps' to a new host, making it hard to trace.  The only problem is that in order to get it to jump reliably, the dwarf needs to go berserk/opposed to life for at least an instant (since combat is the only time sapient creatures will use interactions), so you'll tend to notice when it jumps, as dwarves will start fighting.  Maybe if it causes everyone around it to go berserk at the same time, though, you won't be able to tell who started it...

Inflicting the syndrome in the first place is tricky, though.  It can't be a major curse (or a caste) since it needs to be temporary, bug bites give you a warning message, and wild animals can be walled off.

Make a new kobold civ. They send only a single unit, which has a map-wide interaction to infect a single dwarf. Since SKULKING civs are not in the civ list, no player will notice that there are two kobold civs.

Same issue as with wild animals, though.  Creatures don't use interactions anymore except in combat (and tame creatures will occasionally use GREETING interactions), although a creature in combat will use interactions on all possible targets immediately.

[Teneb]

Does GREETING prevent self-use by creatures not controlled by the player?

[Urlance Woolsbane]

The lack of non-combat interaction-use sounds like a bug. Has anyone reported that on Mantis?

[Meph]

The lack of non-combat interaction-use sounds like a bug. Has anyone reported that on Mantis?

It does...

IndigoFenix, is that since the newest version? So many things are done with interactions that are not combat-related, it would be a shame if none of them work anymore.

[IndigoFenix]

It's been around since .42, my guess is that the socializing behavior counts as a 'job', so dwarves are always too 'busy' to greet each other.  Non-sapient pets still use greetings (so cats still use their head bumps, and plump helmet man rebellions still work, at least now that I removed CAN_LEARN from them).

I did add a suggestion to make more detailed interaction AI raws, so that we can have a say in how interactions are used instead of each new version changing the way they work, but since the suggestion covered pretty much everything there is to say on the subject (and covering one of the trickier aspects of modding), it didn't stimulate much discussion and disappeared from the front page pretty quickly.  And since the 'bug' doesn't affect vanilla, it's unlikely to get much attention anytime soon, at least until vanilla magic becomes more detailed.

[Putnam]

From the looks of it, they're actually "activities", not jobs, which as far as I can tell are basically jobs that aren't expected to have any result or do anything in particular

i'm actually slightly miffed that I can't add arbitrary activities, it doesn't seem too out of the way a thing when activities are so very arbitrary anyway (ponder (sphere), worship X deity, read (book), play music, recite/listen to poetry; all of these are super modular, in a way)

[IndigoFenix]

I'm all for making everything modular (I still don't like that discoveries are hard coded instead of being a variant of raw-defined secret) but from a programming standpoint it's almost always easier to hard code things than to take into account the effects of every possible variation a modder might introduce.  A lot of it might have more to do with Toady's mood at the time and legacy effects than actual coding complexity.

[Bearskie]

The only problem is that in order to get it to jump reliably, the dwarf needs to go berserk/opposed to life for at least an instant (since combat is the only time sapient creatures will use interactions), so you'll tend to notice when it jumps, as dwarves will start fighting.  Maybe if it causes everyone around it to go berserk at the same time, though, you won't be able to tell who started it...

Just an idea - would temporarily blinding other dwarves help to avoid the fighting?