Here is a rough list of the most basic (and sometimes easiest) jobs that need done, that I'd like help doing, before we can move on to a real revamp of the game's overall economy:
Firstly, I'd like to completely rework all workshops, as well as most or all furnaces, and some other buildings. This will involve a few renames, as well as a lot more resource requirements for even basic buildings. (so that putting more thought and planning into outfitting your initial 7 expedition will have immediate dividends/repercussions, and will immediately provide and require some basic decisions about what directions you want your Fortress to go in).
This will also require some careful balancing and thought about more advanced workshops and growth of infrastructure.
To give an example, I'd like to remove the ability to easily produce crossbows within the first year or two of a Fortress. You'd still be able to buy them (and spending the money on a high quality crossbow or two might really help your Fortress survive those first few years, while siphoning money away from other necessities), and make basic bolts, but I'd like to make the setting-up of a crossbow-making industry to be a lot more involved than it currently is, partly to compensate for the power and speed of crossbows in the game, and partly to give players some "high-tech" weaponry to strive for.
So, to make the very best quality, most powerful crossbows, you'd need to develope first steel, and then spring steel, which would have it's own furnace requirements, and would need to be forged into the horns and stirrup, you'd need the ability to make basic clockwork for pulleys, which would require the casting of geared drums from bronze, for a windlass, as well as a mechanism, and you'd also need a stock made from hardwood, or some other tough material (steel, brass, horn, etc.), which would have to be polished to a high degree along the groove. Finally, you'd need a thin cord bowstring woven from either hemp or flax, which would then be rubbed with beeswax.
All of that would require several fairly advanced workshops, and atleast two different types of furnace--one that can produce high grades of steel, and one that can cast bronze.
Metal bolts would then also be manufactured with more difficulty and resource requirements than they currently are. In part, because they were typically made with four "blades" to the bolt head, as opposed to the 2 that an arrow head has, and because bolts were often made from solid metal.
So I really need a lot of help with someone who is really experienced with modding workshops and processes, and who is patient enough to teach and answer questions, and help me understand modding a little better than I probably do right now.
Whoever wants to do that (whether it's one person or several) can help me hash out which workshops should be added or modified, and how to balance out the rest of them, to make the game more of a challenge, and to make workshops a little more interesting and important than they are right now.
Secondly, I'd like some suggestions on how far we as modders can go with making cooking and brewing more complex and interesting with the modding tools we have now. I figure that's a nice place to start giving the economics of the game more variety.
One thing I'd like to try is to develope several different methods of preserving meat and fish, so coding ideas for modding in smoking, salting, barrel-brining/pickling, and potting (cooking the meat/fish, then placing it hot in a jug or a jar with herbs, spices, sometimes salt, and covering with either hot tallow, honey, or strong wine or spirits) would be welcome.
I'd like to know how feasable it would be to require water to brew drinks, and I'd also like to see some modding suggestions for metal stills, and distillation that actually requires fuel.
Lastly, ideas for new raw materials would be welcome (suggestions should only be made once you yourself have already created a new material mod writeup for them, and are willing to send it to me in a PM. It doesn't have to be perfect or extremely polished, since everything will need to be balanced, anyway, but the work of modding your suggestion into the game should already be done), as well as ideas of how they could be processed (mod writeups of these processes wouldn't be necessary, but would be a helpful time saver).
Suggestions for these:
New herbs, vegetables, types of trees, useful plants, exotic and valuable flowers, and their seeds, as well as the biomes they're located in. Suggestions for how to make farming more interesting and challenging, using current modding tools, would also be good.
New spices/fruits, and methods of gathering them that avoid or solve the difficulty (impossibility?) of modding in the gathering of resources from trees,
A materials write-up for rock salt that allows it to be gathered (in bags or buckets, if possible) used to manufacture foods, preserve foods, and be traded, and overall to be very
useful and valuable as a resource.
Someone willing to put some real work and effort into just modding rock salt in these ways would be extremely helpful to me.
I also would like some way of making sea salt from sea water, if that's possible (or possible to reasonably fake), and a couple of different varieties of mineral rock salt would be nice.
Suggestions for new exotic, and magical, materials, as well as plants and even tradeable exotic/magical animals (and/or their parts).
I'm aiming to mod in enough of these in to give the economics of the game itself a considerably more fantastical bend, but not so much that realism, and the fundamentals of trading basic everyday goods, ever becomes overshadowed.
I'd also really like elves, specifically, to trade in a wide variety of wines, including different kinds of fruit wines, as well as things like herbal liquors, so anyone wanting to come up with interesting types of "elvish spirits", who's also willing to do the work of modding them in, would be welcome to do so.
Some of these could be considered "medicinal", to a greater or lesser degree, and if anyone knows enough about modding syndromes in the game so that some of these "medicines" actually cure something, that would be awesome, if unlikely.
Mostly, though, I'd like some balance to be reached with elves that will give their traders a vibe that occasionally alternates between "dark alchemist of booze" and "snake oil hawker", instead of just the "hippy gypsies" we've got now. A little more mysterious, maybe a touch more sinister, and just more entertaining and Fun, overall. I would like to help players to find themselves looking forward to an elf caravan, for it's own merits, and not just for the opportunity to pick up a few spare rolls of tie-dye, or steal a wooden scimitar, so feel free to suggest other elvish goods.
Incense seems obvious, but elvish spices, fine foods, toys...whatever you can come up with.
I would prefer this be done in a semi-realistic way, so someone who wants to atleast do the research on some real world recipes for things like absinthe, strega, lemoncello, fruit wines and hard ciders, and what have you, would be the best person or persons for the job.
Elves trading in "medicinal waters" would also be interesting. Such waters from special springs were considered to be very healthy, and dozens if not hundreds of different bottled waters were traded very extensively, around the 19th century and earlier, and charging exorbitant prices for water seems like the kind of semi-shifty thing an elf might come up with.
Dwarfs making mead, and different types and flavors of honey (not sure quite how to do that, but maybe faked through the creation of several rarer bee subtypes that each produce a different kind of honey?), also seems like a good idea, and it would be great to have someone modding these in, if anyone's willing.
Suggestions for trading partners would also be welcomed. This would involve modding in a new entity (again, please do a writeup of the mod information first, and please also test it in the game first, before making a suggestion--entities are easy to mod though, I find), and then coming up with various interesting things that entity produces, and trades.
Someone suggested that the current entities in the game be modded so that they are active year-round, which I think would be a great way to indicate which entities are the largest, most politically powerful, and most active traders in the game, but small entities may only become active in a single season, or two, so that you'd only occasionally see a trade caravan from the minotaurs of the Stormcaves, or the gatormen of Black Bayou, but these may trade in extremely valuable resources that simply can't be had elsewhere, such as strobelight diamonds that have soaked up raw magical radiation, or the only medicine in the world that can stop the Laughing Plague devastating your Fortress.
If anyone just wants a fairly basic, and easy, modding task, I have a very big list of different types of marble, and other simple economic stones I'd like added to the game, so I can assign small or larger parts of the list, depending on how much time people have on their hands.
I've got plenty of other raw materials, too, mostly things like gems and economic stones, but also a few metal processes that will help lay the groundwork for larger production-structures, and some pretty-to-really complicated materials for more experienced modders to look at.
I'm also going to need a lot of help with balancing everything that gets modded, and that will ultimately be the most important, and also probably the most boring, aspect of this mod, since it will often require the repetitive changingof dozens if not hundreds of little details, until everything gets to where it feels stable and Fun.
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Topic: A total reworking of the current Fortress economy, from the ground up. (Read 18795 times)