Please inform me if this topic allready exists. I've done a quick search of the board and mostly found "bolts" as "lightning bolts," and I found plenty of threads about cleaning and dumping things like tattered clothing so I'll focus on the bolts, as I believe I have a simple and easy to implement solution, and a possibly a solution for similar problems.
Note that this wall of text is quite big mostly because it contains some ranting and philosophical rambling about DF. Skip to my second post for the tl;dr version.
I'm sure this has happened to you at some point: Urist McExpertShot, originally a hunter or recruit. He has saved your fort multiple times. You've put some effort into his training and epuipment: lets say you equiped him with a crossbow because of his high focus and low strength and toughness for example. One day a goblin ambush or siege comes to town. You send the army to deal with it. Mister legendary crossbowdwarf fires a single shot at the enemy, and then breaks formation to charge at them attempting to bash them with his no-quality wooden crossbow. Having dwarves die stupidly is not fun. Having dwarves die doing stupidly heroic things is, but having them die doing meaninglessly studid things isn't.
Why did Urist the champion die? You accidently unforbid a stack of one bolt while mass unforbidding something on the surface. He put that into his quiver and thought that was enough.
-Making the dwarves have a smarter AI when equipping would solve this problem, but is complex and I think there is an easy stop-gap measure for until then.
This is also an aesthetics issue. In any fort that utilizes marksdwarves stacks of single bolts will accumulate on the outside. Even if you don't train marksdwarves. Arrows and Bolts brought by seigers will pile up. The only way to get rid of them is to mark them for Dumping (Tedious!) As it is this is not only an annoyance, it can also become the cause for a tragedy (see above), thus stacks of -acacia bolt- lying all over the place are not only a detail that doesn't add anything to the game, it is one that can detract from it. (I want to say again: having your dwarves do stupid things can be fun! Having them do stupid and meaningless things for stupid reasons is not.)
Therefore my suggestion is simple, (perhaps too simple) make all bolts and arrows break on contact. No more bolts falling one z-level and landing unharmed. They allways break. This will clean up the surface and stop any unfortunate marksdwarf from picking one up and ensuring his death.
I have a similar idea for tattered clothing but that's been covered in other threads by other people.
Now while thinking this out I was haunted by a disconcerting sensation. Someting about removing features from the game struck me as wrong. Now the game allready has feature bloat, with more features planned and no end in sight. That's undebateable. (what's debateable is whether that is a bad thing. perhaps bloat is the wrong word, as I actually like that about the game) The game is allready horridly complex (again not neccessarily a bad thing. But there isn't neccessarily always a way for the player to interact with the game's complexity) And yet, removing a minor feature that, in my opinion, adds nothing to the game and can possibly hurt the game still struck me as wrong. I finally hit upon the right word. It's "UnDwarvenly."
That's because it's the little details that make this game what it is. The complexitiy and details of this game are what attract us to it. I talk about this at length because it goes beyond the issue of bolts.
-Tattered clothing
-blood splatter
-millions of different kinds of leather
ect.
This game is filled with little details. I'd categorize them thusly:
Positive Feature - adds something to the game (game mechanics)
Neutral Detail - adds flavour, but nothing that actually affects the game (the Stray thrips roots around in the tall grass) Tends to be immersive.
Negative Feature - detracts from the game. Usually by being tedious to deal with (going through every level of your fort and checking every ] to see if it is tattered or not and then designating each one to be dumped)
Off course a feature can have elements from each of the above. For example we can all agree that tattered clothing is a hassle. But it is related to what I would call a positive feature: having to replace clothing. Having to keep your dwarves clothed is one of your duties as a fort overseer. You have several options for how to do so as well, each with pros and cons (buy clothes from the caravan, make them from scratch, buy raw materials from caravan and make them from those, ignore the problem alltogether and make a legendary dining room to offset the negative thoughts, ect.) Dumping the old clothes? Not so much. There's only one way to do it, and that is by tedious micromanagement.
Maybe that will change when there is something to actually do with old clothes, like as has been suggested elsewhere: composting them, recyclying them into new cloth, ect, right now there's only one thing to do with them, dump them, and only one way to achieve this: tedious micromanagement.
The player is to blame as well here. It is the player that gets all OCD about it and has to find every item and do someting about it. But it is an eyesore to see items lying about your fort.
Going a little off topic from bolts there, but DF is full of such examples. It is awesome that beheading a goblin invader causes his head to fly off in an arc and blood to splatter everywhere. That the "pile of Xuspas Fiercedtissues' goblin blood" multiplies and comes to cover your entire main entrance hallway and is never cleaned off for years if ever? Less so.
So with that in mind I have an alternative suggestion for dealing with stacks of single bolts and, for that matter tattered clothing too.
-have them disappear each season change.
Easy. I hope it's easy to implement as well.
If not, the first suggestion should be, since allready most bolts break on contact, just make is so they all break. That is less ideal than having them disappear a few months after landing on the ground though, since having unbroken bolts lie on the ground after you've defeated a goblin charge with marksdwarves is a neat little detail. Whatever works though, in the current system the bolts aren't used for anything anyways.
PS: since Toady seems to like complex little immersive details, (and we love the game because of such details) you could also make them break if a dwarf or other unit steps on them. Maybe not a good use of programming time, but consistent with the level of attention given to other such immersive details.
PSS: Alternative for tattered clothing would be to give the player the option to have dwarves consider tattered clothing as refuse, a sort of autodump behaviour (default on, because until recycling is implemented, who wouldn't?)
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Topic: Removing Stacks of Single Bolts (Read 1234 times)