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Author Topic: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)  (Read 3453 times)

Rekov

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[47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« on: June 08, 2020, 02:02:12 pm »



Elves collect special new plants via herbalism/farming. These can be processed into wood, or reagents used to upgrade wood to better types. Elves can embark with exotic animals. They can mine, as it's just such an essential feature of the game, even for surface living. They can't work with metal, though. My elves seem to be able to get strange moods without the mined out tile requirement, so I don't know what's up with that.

I recommend using my color scheme (included) and the Vettlingr tileset (not included).

Installation
Set up DF with whatever tileset you want, and extract the zip file into the base directory. My modded creatures are 32px. Not sure how they'll work with 16px tilesets.

Features
  • New elven workshops. Require seeds to build, so embark with extra!
  • Use special plants to conjure guilt-free wood, and others to upgrade wood.
  • Make wooden weapons and armor.
  • Press resin from wood and use it to make amber items.
  • Plume Cats are forest felines which can be sheared for feathers (used in feather wood production).


Tips and Notes
  • Elves use the Woodcutting skill for 'growing' wood, and the Alchemy skill for mixing reagents.
  • You can create uniforms for the upgraded woods by requiring their specific colors.
  • The current reaction for creating wooden gloves doesn't work with regard to handedness, but the next version of DFHack should have a fix for this.
  • You can embark with wooden picks, but they are listed under weapons, not digging implements.

Plans for the Future
  • More unique elven animals.
  • Penalties for living underground. Currently they can get cave adaptation, but the penalties should be for living underground, not just for coming to the surface after living underground.
  • Better elven nobility. Not just better names, but something more than just a re-theme of the dwarven ones.

New Workshops
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

New Material Details
Spoiler (click to show/hide)


Feedback would be hugely welcome. In particular, I think many of the names are kind of silly and could do with something better. But really any suggestions. Is a material worth too much, or not enough? Would a workshop look better with different tiles? Is there a better elven name for a profession? Just let me know.
« Last Edit: June 17, 2020, 12:44:31 pm by Rekov »
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Rekov

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat
« Reply #1 on: June 17, 2020, 12:44:11 pm »

Updated to 1.1
  • Updated BUILD_COLOR for several custom woods so that it shows on doors.
  • Corrected a few reactions not correctly using ALCHEMY as the skill.
  • Flame Blossoms can now be burned to ash. They should correctly give seeds now, as well.
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Borzoi

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #2 on: June 21, 2020, 02:38:43 am »

Interesting mod! Haven't gotten too deep into it yet, but do the new materials show up in the world? Will elven civs use them in sieges, or are they only available for the player in fortmode?
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Rekov

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #3 on: June 21, 2020, 09:37:03 am »

They only show up for the player, unfortunately. I don't know how I would go about giving them to other elf civs without also making them available to all other civs that use wood.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #4 on: August 01, 2020, 03:56:27 pm »

Very nice, im glad i swung by to check it out. I've tried something like this before personally and i always like to see newer more updated attempts. Thumbs up particularly on the gem-cut shapes, that's attention to detail, cat is nice flavor too.

If i can make a small set of suggestions:

Quote
- Tools for clearing soil/rock & trees - Trauma from treecutting is a little known feature, and cave adaptation is harder to experience if no digging is undertook. To this extent instead of axes, might i suggest a ritual knife so the designated treeshaper goes out and sacrifices the tree and has a little protective measure with them. Sometimes clearing trees is a nessecary evil.

- I have some templates for tools, my own involved compressing wood into obsidian (mainly to cheat out obisidan swords later) sharp enough to make cuts, but robust tree-wood may be enough. I would hope these are helpful to you.

- Some advanced tree-fungi wood interactions, for growing toadstools fungi minatures and such.

- Canola Oil or some sort of dew-sap oil for ethical soap crafting if you can bypass the ashery? I would like to wash my elves to upkeep their mood and offer something in trade.

- Wood gears, statues and other miscallenous items were very helpful the last time i tried a elf-fortress modification, little qol things would help keep in theme, unless i misunderstand that's what amber is deemed to be used as.

On advice for elf wide items, civilizations can't use trees that do not reproduce because it breaks the internal logic of how civs generate items to use on a weekly basis (if jobs present crops, animals, fishing, mining, logging & smithing occur to stock the resources each settlement has), even if they're only recieving the logs from your workshop (which are valid points of generating your items). Dispensing seeds from a source (maybe a merchant or backward conversion process from wood) will also help them to sell them to you without any local supplies.

  • Caveat of trees needing growths can be seen with glumprongs as evil tree harvesting and using nations like goblins cannot use them in embellishment or shields until the reproductive aspect is added, there's no way to gurantee that the elves will use the wood you want however depending on how the game makes its choices from local lumber but it will certainly trade it to you.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #5 on: August 01, 2020, 06:22:37 pm »

I suppose a seperate post for a seperate point, after some rooting around i did find the pick in the warrior grove, that was reassuring, some other things i overlooked too after raw-diving a bit more have corrected some of my thoughts about potentially missing objects like flasks and amber stuff.
  • It may sound silly but wouldn't it be more efficient to have elves generate boulders of amber instead of working such a wide variety of items at the forge? I was looking forward to making amber swords from the 'd' details screen in the craftshop for 'stone' swords, not least a magma amber forge at some eventual point.
edit - checked over again, boulders are indeed specifically designed from the amber forge, neato.

I really like what you did with your sacrificial blood idea, that was really inspired and a really nifty trick. Making blood generic for interactions therefore bypassing the animal problems found in raw reactions.



Did some of my own stuff ontop of it for myself (making entire weapons out of amber etc, that ritual knife from earlier for tree clearing, wood statues etc), but i do have some feedback that the amber material is good it has nice sharpness (it isn't really balanced, but is weaker than regular grade metals to be used as armor, so there's that.) but you've missed out quite a lot of material tokens when making it.

Code: [Select]
[ITEMS_BARRED]// Regards as bone, which may be important but also items hard   [ITEMS_WEAPON]// melee, important for vanilla df's stone sword reaction, which amber can be used within for balanced 1 wood, 1 (rock).
[ITEMS_SCALED]// regarded in same game terms as shell but is still hard         [ITEMS_WEAPON_RANGED]// bows etc.

[ITEMS_AMMO]// amber ammunition, important upgrade over wood & distinction for military
[ITEMS_DIGGER]// hopefully embark with amber picks
[ITEMS_QUERN]//removes need for explicit recipie

Full list is on the wiki

It'd also be nice to see some difference between blood amber too more than a monetary one, but that's just me personally.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: August 02, 2020, 02:20:18 pm by FantasticDorf »
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Rekov

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #6 on: August 02, 2020, 08:33:33 pm »

I'm grateful for the feedback, FantasticDorf.

The amber material I just copied from the wiki using the values for glass. I suppose I could modify it to make them weapons grade.

Here is the main problem I'm struggling with for this mod: The lack of scarcity of materials. Since all of my elf materials are derived from "renewable" resources (unlike mined metals in default DF), there's very little incentive to ever use the lesser grade materials for weapons or armor. You don't have to make bronze equivalent weapons when you could just as easily make iron equivalent weapons. They take more steps to produce, but you're never in much danger of running out.

Ideally there could be some kind of system by which certain materials are better for certain purposes, while other materials are better for other things. But I don't really know how to go about that. I need to come up with some reason to have all of these materials other than flavor, if that makes sense.

You're absolutely right about the need for some way of ethically removing trees. You can remove boulders by building floors over them, and you can remove shrubs and saplings by building dirt roads. The only way to 'remove' trees currently is to shoot them with a ballista, which doesn't give elves an unhappy thought.

I don't actually know how I would go about your ritual knife idea. Is that something that can be accomplished with raws, or would it need lua scripts or dfhack?


And just for the sake of propriety, I have to give most of the credit for the blood idea to Meph, who has something similar in his Warlock mod.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #7 on: August 03, 2020, 04:13:40 am »

The amber material I just copied from the wiki using the values for glass. I suppose I could modify it to make them weapons grade.

That's understandable i guess, but the fragility and specialty of edged weapons does suit it being good for that purpose. Being so cheaply renwable, also carrying some planned obselecence that parrying with it too much or packing the cheap weapons in weapon-traps due to its brittleness can cause the weapon to degrade & eventually snap without invalidating wood armor.

Just as it would say on the wiki, max-edge determines how it performs against metals of a higher strength and grade, thankfullly only shear yield, shear fracture, and shear elasticity matter elsewise for edged weapons (as the others relate to armor values being reactive to types of biting, pinching, strangulation, latch & shaking etc)

Resin is also quite interesting as a plant for production (in the way its implemented), but at the same time has nothing to lose in being a glob like material (see paper production etc) except maybe a bit more thought about quantities used in each reaction.

Here is the main problem I'm struggling with for this mod: The lack of scarcity of materials. Since all of my elf materials are derived from "renewable" resources (unlike mined metals in default DF), there's very little incentive to ever use the lesser grade materials for weapons or armor. You don't have to make bronze equivalent weapons when you could just as easily make iron equivalent weapons. They take more steps to produce, but you're never in much danger of running out.

Ideally there could be some kind of system by which certain materials are better for certain purposes, while other materials are better for other things. But I don't really know how to go about that. I need to come up with some reason to have all of these materials other than flavor, if that makes sense.

You're absolutely right about the need for some way of ethically removing trees. You can remove boulders by building floors over them, and you can remove shrubs and saplings by building dirt roads. The only way to 'remove' trees currently is to shoot them with a ballista, which doesn't give elves an unhappy thought.

I don't actually know how I would go about your ritual knife idea. Is that something that can be accomplished with raws, or would it need lua scripts or dfhack?

Ritual knife is easy peasy, its just a dagger, the hard part (if you can really say the productive process is 'hard') is to make it into amber so it has a edge that is worthy of being able to cut into trees. The axe skill is used for tree-cutting, elves are already giving off unhappy thoughts to me when i go about cutting trees becuase its hard built into their unthinkable ethical response for tree murder. ((also i can't strictly remember if elves give tree quota's to their own race, fun way to enact a civil war))

I can empathize with the renewablility, its a recurrant problem in similar modifications, unless you go out of your way to have resources out in the world you need to find to kick-start a particular production chain, its better to kind of hover at a naturally low point of technology for infinite distribution.

Also, technically while you can't melt things down, you can still aquire resources from raiding & trading with other races, some metal bars at the metal-forge for instance. Perhaps metal armor and ingots can be transmuted into a special kind of wood to be refitted, but elsewise the metalsmith forge should still work out for them providing you have enough emberflowers reduced to ash/coke or magma to properly fuel it.
  • Mimic wood logs for copying protective values from bars and objects, for unsharp reproducible adamantine or steel for instance.
  • Molten metal resin for elf alchemical epoxy-alloys? ((epoxy is the same resin-stuff that cosplayers use to make their armor))
Amber is magma safe material anyway since its deritive of glass thankfully so you can cheaply pump it to a more convenient place.

Speluncaphobia or the fear of caves, as much as i've tried to extract from masterwork's humans seems to be this simple set of light reactive syndromes. Which should help your elves do much more poorly in the dark.

Spoiler: "syndrome enclosed" (click to show/hide)
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Rekov

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #8 on: August 05, 2020, 06:41:25 pm »

Oh, adding a ritual knife is easy. I thought you were talking about adding a means to remove trees without causing negative thoughts. But maybe having negative thoughts is actually a good trade-off, and a means of limiting use.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: [47.04] Rekov's Elven Forest Retreat (v1.1)
« Reply #9 on: December 28, 2020, 06:50:33 am »

Old thread im sure, i have fond memories of this modification. Im posting this on a few elf related productivity mods so that they can know of a recent re-discovery. Here's a lua i've recently unearthed that allocates grown to reactions, there could still be dfhackery akin to many other kinds of workshop dfhack things to allocations to a reaction to make custom elf workshops produce valid grown items.

I've posted it on the DF discord through here:
< https://discord.com/channels/102738113478021120/173908541088858113/793081972762476584 >
with a pernament invite link to the DF discord here if needed; doing it this way because its much more convenient than uploading it arbitarily to the DFFD if its not exactly new (i found it inside a larger scale mod).
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