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[FantasticDorf]

More for the purpose of helping out players from a user interface point of view as to look at the existing traditions, folklore and knowledge your civilisation knows seperate of the "wider picture" of full omniscient legends mode that covers everything in comprehensive depth.

And by no means a 'tutorial' for players on how to make the game or anything like that, or to ruin suprises when you read up on HFS or worldgen elements, but a progressively expanding account based off what a dwarven civilisation knows and is accustomed to. Essentially its a big dictionary for players to look through where civilisation knoweldge is split up into categories like religion & instruments with additional categories to look over basic descriptions of jobs, positions and certain people, places & beings of significance.

• 'Dwarfpedia' under a working name would be most useful if it was present before embarkation and during real time play, one use of dwarfpedia is to look at the world generated musical forms & instruments in good amounts of detail as well as research the known histories of certain sites, monsters and beings like a mix of legends & the adventuremode monster list on what has been encountered so far.

If i dont know what a metal Uzbol is, or even if i have any musical forms appropriate for it, i just whip out the dwarfpedia and look at its entry relevant for the generated world and civ i intend to play as, revealing to me more detail than its physical form because players often use the site symbol screen to cheat and learn what a instrument is before they embark with it.

• Much later applications where dwarfpedia could be effective is determining the relationships and history of other sites relevant to yours, as well as just reminding yourself of your creation stories (as the dwarves remember it, not the true creation story) and own magical relevant context.

> The dwarfpedia could also be used to store rumors attached to relevant objects people and sites, as well as serve as a census of every person (past/dead & present) you have currently met within your fortress, in which dwarves talking to them fills in their entries of what the actual guests want to reveal, secret agents & vampires for example may relay false information. Redundant or forgotten information gets dropped from dwarf-pedia after a while.


Fair enough given this is a fairly detailed suggestion, but i think it would most definitely improve the experience of dwarf-fortress players both experienced and brand new to the game to get around some opaque game aspects, as well as provide a very intuitive form of narrative context on half of exploring a compressed legends mode from the perspective of your current played civilisation. It would take some unnessecary guess work out of discerning what things are and leave it up to the discretion of the player on how to use them, which is a driving point of the gameplay.

> As to say if you switched over to another civ like the humans or the elves for example, you'd have a completely different exposition of customs, details & events compared to dwarves where essentially the legends mode is wre-written, elves especially for example may have a comprehensive list of their magical arrow heads & what each type does generally, particularly snarky remarks on dwarves, and a very large and detailed bestiary report on domesticated animals.

Thanks for taking the time to read, i appreciate it.

[Egan_BW]

This would also be a good place to keep the creation myths, and possibly detailed reports from dwarves you've sent on missions away from the fort.
This is similar to the screen in adventure mode which shows all of your character's current knowledge, so it should probably share an interface with that. Features like this will certainly become more important with the magic release.

[FantasticDorf]

Yes that's most definitely the sort of thing i was going for, especially since there's too many bells & whistles as it is, having a informative on a need to know basis that doesn't over extend what you ( the fortress keeper/collected will of the fortress etc ) should know about your site and things relative to it.

I didn't involve it in my OP to save space, but i was also thinking that scholars could have a important role here in fleshing out what is going to be said in the dwarf-pedia by their knowledge being stored in books into certain categories should unlock more entries on the dwarfpedia about other things the fortress is aware of.

• A astronomer either by inventing the ocular machine topic (knowledge - tech milestones yet to be implemented) or making detailed observations and scribing it down would tell you of the relevant in-game astrological movements and importances/associations to each planet. Which may be more important for religious & magical purposes to explain to the player why wizards are suddenly becoming super powered gods for a season then suddenly revert back to low level mages.

• A historian for instance may take note of battles and past events to just keep you up to speed with what happens in the outside of the world, which can be important for determining where artifacts have been taken from in conflicts

So respectively, scholarly pursuits and having a veritable library can become a priority for players starting out if they need to learn about the world as part of their playthrough without actually having to fill out details within the book object itself so that you would need to find a book object to reference & read using k inspect and instead save reading space/wordspam and go to the dwarfpedia topic (perhaps saving that function for adventure mode then dwarfpedia saving it as memory/learnt knowledge along with your beastiary like you describe)

A certain amount of legends culling could be implemented ingame within dwarfpedia to stop it getting too messy, which is what i imagine would naturally happen to old rumours and the like.

[Batgirl1]

I like this idea, as long as it behaves more like an older form of knowledge than Wikipedia. Scholars should have to update the knowledge just like how your bookkeeper updates the stock records, and while I totally agree that the player should only need a button to read it, I do think that updating it should require paper and ink materials, etc, just as if it were a book.  Maybe it should even be tied to an in-fort book object, and when the book is lost, you lose access to the screen. Dwarfpedia could even cost a few points in embark mode, making you have to decide whether to forgo that extra yak in order to not have to start your own from scratch.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I like this idea, as long as it behaves more like an older form of knowledge than Wikipedia. Scholars should have to update the knowledge just like how your bookkeeper updates the stock records, and while I totally agree that the player should only need a button to read it, I do think that updating it should require paper and ink materials, etc, just as if it were a book.  Maybe it should even be tied to an in-fort book object, and when the book is lost, you lose access to the screen. Dwarfpedia could even cost a few points in embark mode, making you have to decide whether to forgo that extra yak in order to not have to start your own from scratch.

Your dwarves don't embark ignorant of the entire world and their own culture and legends, so I disagree with this.

All this needs is a more robust system at tracking what sites and civs know and don't know which dynamically changes as the latest news reaches you from the outside world.

Not allowing you (or making you pay) to look at information on the most popular instrument in your civ or general info on local wildlife isn't realistic at all.

[Egan_BW]

This doesn't represent a book you look at, it represents things you already know. It's only reasonable to allow the player to look at all of their character's knowledge, even/especially when said character is a whole fort of variously knowledgeable dwarves.

[Batgirl1]

Fair enough, I guess I was thinking of it more like a literal, in-game encyclopedia.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Fair enough, I guess I was thinking of it more like a literal, in-game encyclopedia.

They already exist, in the form of libraries. Dorfs can look up tons of information there, from the amusing tales of the hamlet of Pleasantfondled, the breeding habits of gorlaks, the theory of gravity and even the secrets of life and death if you're (un)lucky.

They even gain knowledge from reading this stuff (not that much is done with that knowledge right now, but still...).

[Helgoland]

How about having one system representing Dwarven 'common knowledge', i.e. the stuff that every Dwarven child knows when they're coming of age, and another one for more detailed, scholarly knowledge?

In the unlikely case that The Toad ends up reading this: Maybe the whole thing could be implemented in a way similar to forcing constructions, where in addition to 'this is true' and 'this is not true' you have states roughly corrresponding to 'we don't know yet'. The actual reality would thus be represented by a generic filter on the poset of possible truth values. Come on, it's rather elegant, mathematically speaking...

[Shonai_Dweller]

How about having one system representing Dwarven 'common knowledge', i.e. the stuff that every Dwarven child knows when they're coming of age, and another one for more detailed, scholarly knowledge?

In the unlikely case that The Toad ends up reading this: Maybe the whole thing could be implemented in a way similar to forcing constructions, where in addition to 'this is true' and 'this is not true' you have states roughly corrresponding to 'we don't know yet'. The actual reality would thus be represented by a generic filter on the poset of possible truth values. Come on, it's rather elegant, mathematically speaking...

Because "Dwarven common knowledge" ignores the fact that the game features several dwarf civilizations, all of which haven't different knowledge. Not to mention all the other civs that this ignores. It's something which is going to happen, and is partially in place already. Once it's complete, this kind of in-game wikipedia would work fine.

It's pretty hard to keep track of everything, everyone knows though.

[Helgoland]

Common knowledge inside your fort, I mean. The stuff that every one of your citizens knows.

[FantasticDorf]

Fair enough, I guess I was thinking of it more like a literal, in-game encyclopedia.

They already exist, in the form of libraries. Dorfs can look up tons of information there, from the amusing tales of the hamlet of Pleasantfondled, the breeding habits of gorlaks, the theory of gravity and even the secrets of life and death if you're (un)lucky.

They even gain knowledge from reading this stuff (not that much is done with that knowledge right now, but still...).

Most subjects i imagine are fluff if we're thinking about how book knowledge stored on your shelves adds to this collective knowledge (prior or after it is read by a dwarf) but as my follow up post covers it could have some scholarly applications.

> Breeding habits of gorlaks for instance might describe that gorlaks require to be married before they mate (intelligent) then live birth children, and add that onto the page of 'Gorlak'. If you're really pushing into finding literary meaning for the more miscellaneous book entries. Compared to a giant cave spider that animalistically mates, then births adult offspring in "the breeding habits of Giant Cave Spiders"

Life and death is basically a entry on the magic page that describes the rules of life and death, mentioning a bit about its application once you gain a necromancer citizen to marginalise rare books and texts like that, though i dont imagine that procedurally generated fiction would be of any interest at all.

• Assuming this is a more complex system of the tavern rumor-board, espionage and torturing for information ethics then delivering that information back would also be a way to update a site (not even your's) dwarfpedia in a forceful manner.

Mainly the dwarfpedia is a referencial application, all objects your dwarves embark with such as in ENTITY tags has a entry, steel for instance has a entry specifically because dwarves can work it. It is unlikely to tell you how to work it though except that it goes through stages.

If a bard arrives off map and teaches a poem they composed themselves, if dwarves repeat it (given they learnt it) then its on the dwarfpedia (otherwise you would need to ask the bard to sign up for a long term residency/citizenship)