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Author Topic: Libraries and Books  (Read 16428 times)

Fleeting Frames

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #15 on: December 01, 2019, 05:29:26 pm »

For Legendary something progress, I recall Archchrystal had a legendary Mathematican - might be worth a look.

feelotraveller

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #16 on: December 01, 2019, 08:48:18 pm »

Very nice.  :)

Weirdly enough I have had dwarves who gained record keeper from pondering as well, but also dwarves who have not gained any.

From the Wiki: "The record keeper skill is also used by scholars when thinking about history topics".  But perhaps there is more to it?
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therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #17 on: December 02, 2019, 08:20:23 am »

Well, here's the thing. I had three experiments.

- A rank 2 chemist, who gained recordkeeping skill through pondering.
- A rank 2 geographer+rank5 recordkeeper, who gained recordkeeping skill through pondering.
- Another rank 2 geographer+rank5 recordkeeper because the first one had DF segmentfault during spring so I had to start anew, but none of the dwarves in this fortress gained recordkeeping while pondering.

So either I have found a bug, or there's something weird going on I haven't had any grasp on yet.

I've updated my forms post with more forms I managed to find with an adventurer scouring the library. I have confirmed that for .44.12 the writing gain is 50 writing, 12 wordsmith, flat, per written content. And am also trying to get my password reset email from the wiki :C
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Fleeting Frames

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #18 on: December 02, 2019, 10:42:12 am »

Yeah, it looks like dwarves pick a research area at start and then work on it, and some research areas share skills, so there isn't one to one skills to expected research match.

therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #19 on: December 02, 2019, 01:07:07 pm »

Yeah, it looks like dwarves pick a research area at start and then work on it, and some research areas share skills, so there isn't one to one skills to expected research match.
Ah, it seems I have missed an element; they were pondering their research field and getting experience in their research field too, in addition to recordkeeper when they got it.
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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #20 on: December 03, 2019, 12:25:28 am »

Also they can get exp in up to 3 different skills in case of observer/tracker/record keeper trifecta, afaik.

therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #21 on: December 04, 2019, 06:38:13 pm »

Also they can get exp in up to 3 different skills in case of observer/tracker/record keeper trifecta, afaik.

Yeah, I am slowly starting to get the feeling that it is both topics are what decides a scholar is a type of scholar, and that an assortment of skills are used for a given topic.

So, I decided to set up a fort for just paper making, so I have a place with a ton of quires. The idea being that I could then make an adventurer who'd go around making books and deliver them back to the fort so the fort would have a nice assortment of books in it's library.

I ended up getting super lucky, as it turned out one of my migrants was a historian who knew 16 out of the 20 history topics, including all the forms. Now here's the thing, when you have a library and assign a scholar who already knows topics that aren't in your library, they'll go and write manuals to put them in the library. I am wondering if this is also the case for bards and art forms... hm...

More surprisingly, if you have a master-apprentice relationship between your scholars, one will teach the other their topics directly. The books are more useful, certainly, but this was quite a surprise to me!



Anyway, I guess this further emphasizes that taking an immigrant or visiting scholar will help far far more than trying to setup a library with a starting dwarf as scholar.

Just putting this here for putting it in the wiki later, whenever I get my password recovered...

Quote
Technological treatise: The method of examining artifacts to determine how methods have changed over time.

Enxyclopedia: The compilation of many summaries into a single text.

EDIT: Of course topics teaching was in the wiki already, on a completely different page.
Quote
Scholars can also form master/apprentice relationships. The master will teach his apprentices about topics. A high teaching skill for the master and a high student skill for the apprentice leads to faster skill growth.
« Last Edit: December 04, 2019, 07:03:30 pm by therahedwig »
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Untrustedlife

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #22 on: December 04, 2019, 07:06:39 pm »

Also they can get exp in up to 3 different skills in case of observer/tracker/record keeper trifecta, afaik.

Yeah, I am slowly starting to get the feeling that it is both topics are what decides a scholar is a type of scholar, and that an assortment of skills are used for a given topic.

So, I decided to set up a fort for just paper making, so I have a place with a ton of quires. The idea being that I could then make an adventurer who'd go around making books and deliver them back to the fort so the fort would have a nice assortment of books in it's library.

I ended up getting super lucky, as it turned out one of my migrants was a historian who knew 16 out of the 20 history topics, including all the forms. Now here's the thing, when you have a library and assign a scholar who already knows topics that aren't in your library, they'll go and write manuals to put them in the library. I am wondering if this is also the case for bards and art forms... hm...

More surprisingly, if you have a master-apprentice relationship between your scholars, one will teach the other their topics directly. The books are more useful, certainly, but this was quite a surprise to me!



Anyway, I guess this further emphasizes that taking an immigrant or visiting scholar will help far far more than trying to setup a library with a starting dwarf as scholar.

Just putting this here for putting it in the wiki later, whenever I get my password recovered...

Quote
Technological treatise: The method of examining artifacts to determine how methods have changed over time.

Enxyclopedia: The compilation of many summaries into a single text.

EDIT: Of course topics teaching was in the wiki already, on a completely different page.
Quote
Scholars can also form master/apprentice relationships. The master will teach his apprentices about topics. A high teaching skill for the master and a high student skill for the apprentice leads to faster skill growth.

I hope you update the wiki with your discoveries.
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therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #23 on: December 05, 2019, 12:56:52 pm »


I hope you update the wiki with your discoveries.
Well, I'll first need to get my wiki account password back for that :D

Today's experiment was about writing with the new forms, the results were a little less interesting. I have added them to my forms post, but basically, Autobiography does what you think it does, Genealogy, Technological Treatise and Biographical Dictionary don't seem to be implemented as trying to write them just results in essays (though, sometimes it seems this might also be caused by a lack of knowledge on my adventurer's part? I tried to interrogate my fellow adventurer about his family, but that didn't seem to make much of a difference, similar with the treatise and staring at artifacts).

What is cool though is that I can confirm that if you have a scholar in a retired fortress, and you run off with your adventurer, the scholar will continue to research. This was sorta expected with the way the research is stored in the histfig part of the unit, but this kinda confirms that you can basically set up a fort somewhere, equip it with a good tactical militia commander and a scholar, and then go off and do something else (like skedaddling across the country side like some kind of research journalist adventurer, or just start a different fort) and come back with the scholar have gotten further with their topic. I guess this makes up a little bit for research being so slow.
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therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #24 on: December 11, 2019, 11:47:49 am »

I have gotten my wiki password back :D

The books page has been updated (with some extra help from voliol because of duplicate section titles, thanks!), and I updated the knowledge page so there's a little bit more hyperlinking flow between the different types of knowledge. The scholar page is gonna take a while, I am having trouble figuring out how to exactly insert my knowledge into the page, which from my experience means the page could do with some restructuring.

For the books page, I had also discovered there's some stuff on the adventure mode page about writing books, so I recycled a little there, but I guess someone should maybe link that section back to the books page and double check the books section? I am not totally sure I am not accidentally treading on someone's feet here.

Edit: updated the scholar page. That was sorta hard, I hope the paragraphs make sense :D
« Last Edit: December 11, 2019, 01:05:23 pm by therahedwig »
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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #25 on: December 11, 2019, 02:25:05 pm »

Doesn't look obviusly broken at a glance.

therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #26 on: December 17, 2019, 04:05:36 pm »

So, I switched back to my main world as my test world just didn't have any atlasses or catalogues...

I found the dialog! It requires the philosopher's dialected reasoning (Which... yeah, I have read plato's dialogs but I associate dialectics with actual talking instead of the dialogues themselves)!... but my test dwarf can't write them yet :< The ones that have been written are basically the same as essays on a value.

Also found atlas: This is in regards to a region instead of a site(They also have titles of region names...). As well as star catalogues (star_catalogues_1000: 'It concerns the precise compilation about of information about the stars', and star_catalogues_100: 'It concerns the compilation about of information about the stars', note the missing 'precise')

Also found treatises on technological evolution(the ones I could not produce in adv mode myself); in practice they teach an engineering knowledge(always engineering-types). Biographical dictionary concerns several histfigs, genealogy only concerns a single dwarf's lineage and doesn't seem to include anything else.

(again, posting this here till the wiki stops acting up...)

So, this is all the written forms, now to figure out if there's a reason why sometimes it just produces an essay for an adventurer(I asked in fotf).
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therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #27 on: December 22, 2019, 09:13:34 am »

Ok, went back to this as I am somewhat done with figuring out the various reps. (Only friendly fighter and monster are unverified, but still somewhat figured out)

To my annoyance, it doesn't seem the site/histfig/artifact stuff actually gets taught to an adventurer when reading about them, at the least, they don't show up in the questlog. forms and topics do... I remember asking of FotF before about finding and seeing info with my adventurer that indicated that a particular gang had been dead for a while, and Toady's response was that the rumours and knowledge system are separate, and he was unsure whether it should be considered a bug or a suggestion. I wonder if this is the same issue...

I have also started a new fort, hacked one of the figures as a legendary what-ever-they-were-pondering, and it seems the research point gain for a 20+ legendary skill is about 25K (this required pondering 65 times, which is also more than I've ever seen before), which is pretty good. What is more interesting is that they were pondering existence, a philosophy topic, but got critical thinker. What I suspect is going on here is that each topic has their own skills that are associated with it. (Halnoth thought there was branching per skill, but that kind of went out of the window after it became obvious the topics are a separate thing from the skills)

Then there's still the issue there is an invisible techtree, the topic page shows the subdivisions, but that by itself would not necessarily say what the techtree is(after all, Toady talked about joined research projects not being possible, which indicates multiple topics or different branches are required for some). There's two approaches we can do here, either we run a lua script over all histfigs in a big world and tally which histfigs know what and try to correlate the topics, or lua is used to hack away topics and see what it requires for a histfig to ponder about a topic. I am... not looking forward to doing the testing on this, seems very fiddly... Guess I'll delay it for now...
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Scruiser

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #28 on: January 01, 2020, 11:02:38 am »

How does the latest future of the fortress reply affect the science done in this thread?

The reply:
Quote
Let's see, fort scholars...  they do activity cycles, the length of which is 1-2 days (whether they are pondering or discussing etc.)  Once they get through 50 cycles, it rolls 0-50 vs. the number of completed cycles minus 50 to see if they get "breakthrough credit."  So at 51, they have a 2% chance, and at 100, they have a 100% chance.  Then, it resets the cycle number to zero and gives them breakthrough credit, based on a skill roll plus 100 (for discuss, the other researchers contribute half of their summed skill rolls.)  Based on the difficulty (1-4) of the topic, total lifetime breakthrough credit is then assigned a number of 50-sided dice.  An easy topic is dice=credit/2500, then /5000, then /10000, then /20000 for level 4 topics.  The number of dice cannot exceed 10.  Then roll these dice -- if you get a 50 on any of them, discovery!  This is a bit archaic, and I'm not suggesting it works particularly well.  But that is how it works.  Also: if they fail to get the breakthrough after the 50-sided rolls, they have a 2% chance of switching topics, or if their credit exceeds 100000, they always switch topics (though they keep the credit, so returning to the topic later gives them a decent chance at breakthrough.)

I went ahead and added this quote to the wiki page on Topics.  I wasn't sure whether to add it to topics or knowledge, but I figured better to get it on the wiki sooner rather than later and let someone else who knows better organize it.  I think the next logical thing to do is to work out the implications of this reply in regards to the science in this thread.

Important question: does it look like the credits Toady mentioned correspond to the research points therahedwig was tracking?


The way knowledge works is that you have that knowledge tech-grassland, with it's topics. Each histfig keeps track of which topics they do and don't know, as well as which books they've read. It also keeps track of a knowledge goal for the histfig and how many times they've performed a research action(in the DFHack api reffered to as times pondered, but it also goes up when they participate in a discussion regarding their research goal). After a certain amount of research actions (DFhack comment suggests between 40-60, I myself suspect this is tied to academic skill) the scholar gains research points in said topic(the amount of research points is definitely tied to skill level, with dabbling giving in the thousands, and competent/skilled three times as much, but there's no set numbers). According to the DF hack comments, 100K research points is necessary for a topic to be researched, and the histfig will then write a book about it.

There's still a lot I don't understand, for example, there is a certain amount of variance in how much pondering is necessary to get research points, and the research points themselves also vary for a single scholar. One time a skilled (lvl 4) geographer got 4700 research points, and the subsequent time 3700 research points.


Also does anyone have past research or FotF statements on how Toady typically handles adding skills to rolls?  I think this has a big impact on optimal strategy for developing scholars and researching topics.  In particular, based on therahedwig's research on xp gain, it heavily influences the tradeoff on dwarf's discussing more vs. dwarf's pondering more.

therahedwig has noted that research takes a long time.  But with the latest information from Toady, we can use a bit of statistics to get an exact probability distribution of how long for level 1/2/3/4 topics...
  • Research takes a long, long, long time. I haven't ever seen the research progress on a legendary something-or-the-other, so no idea how much effect this has. However, as long as the scholar doesn't die, they keep their research progress, suggesting that you could expel a scholar if you think a siege will end your fort, and then start a new one elsewhere and hope the scholar comes to your new fort.

Some initial math, with unskilled rolls, as a proof of concept:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It does indeed look like it takes a long time for even level 1 research topics to get a breakthrough... and early on, there are even odds between making a breakthrough and changing to another research topic entirely.

Important Edit:  I think I made a major error in my understanding of what Toady said... I misread the description of the roll each cycle that it was vs. the cycle counter and I also missed that it takes 50 cycles before the first roll.  This increasing the research time required even more.

Edit 2:  So with a corrected understanding of what Toady was saying...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: January 01, 2020, 09:07:53 pm by Scruiser »
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therahedwig

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Re: Libraries and Books
« Reply #29 on: January 01, 2020, 03:31:56 pm »

I think you are misinterpreting some of the wall o' text, I think "However there is also the 2% (1/50 chance) of changing research topics.", is actually for when the right amount of research points is gotten(that is, there's research cycles, which pool, and then can produce research points(a different meter), and it seems each time research points are added to the second pool, the second set of rolls is done. I need some time to actually decipher it fully (It's new years right now, happy new years, btw), but yeah, the biggest surprise for me is that the different topics have difficulty levels too. I was sorta getting this feeling because I was able to force my poor scholar to learn topics, and certain topics take much more effort than others. It's more complicated than I anticipated, in any case.

I'll try to decipher the actual comment in the next few days whenever I have the mental capacity :)

EDIT:

In pseudo code I think it'd be...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It means that a novice chemist discussing chemistry topics with a legendary chemist will get benefit from the legendary chemist's skill in their research credit as well(despite the only the person whose topic gets discussed getting the research cycle points). This is particularly useful with doctors and their insane amount of topics.

EDIT2: I guess what is most surprising is that any random Urist could in theory discover the most complex of topics after only 50 times pondering. In theory.
« Last Edit: January 01, 2020, 04:01:31 pm by therahedwig »
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