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[Mr Crabman]

There are some classes of potential Steam achievement that a player could get by accident either through modding or just playing the vanilla game with unusual embarks/adventurers, and thus they might feel disappointed like "oh man I didn't earn this, it was too easy" when for example, they earned the achievement for "become legendary at a skill" because they played as a barn owl man that [NATURAL_SKILL:CLIMBING:15]. Or maybe a hypothetical achievement for managing to survive X years even if you embarked without food or drink, obtained by accident because they played as a species with [NO_EAT][NO_DRINK].

So basically, when writing achievements, consider some of the ways that through modding, or future game updates with more procedural content, or even the current vanilla raws (so many animal people are legendary climbers!), someone could plausibly gain them by accident, and do some sanity checks before granting the achievement to prevent this.

Such checks should be used carefully/sparingly though; for example, an achievement for stopping an invasion shouldn't be invalidated just because your species has good NATURAL_SKILL's that gave you an edge. Sure, someone motivated to deliberately cheat could give themselves inflated skills and tissues made of iron, but they could also use third-party tools to command the Steam server to grant them achievements for free (ie call the server and make it think you earned it genuinely). The goal of what I'm proposing isn't to stop cheating (that would be impossible anyway, there's always a way), the goal is to stop people feeling cheated by accidentally getting achievements that were meant to be a challenge.

[DwarfStar]

One broad stroke that would prevent some of those problems is to disable achievements when mods are enabled. Otherwise, we might see mods developed that are mainly focused on cheesing achievements. Or, maybe just have one achievement “embark with a mod installed”, to encourage people to try a mod, but lock out all the rest of the achievements.

[Mr Crabman]

One broad stroke that would prevent some of those problems is to disable achievements when mods are enabled. Otherwise, we might see mods developed that are mainly focused on cheesing achievements. Or, maybe just have one achievement “embark with a mod installed”, to encourage people to try a mod, but lock out all the rest of the achievements.

I don't think this is advisable.

For one, because some of these circumstances could happen in vanilla too right now, and even moreso in the future when myth&magic and other updates make for far less consistent playing conditions.

And I don't agree with the principle of preventing achievements in a singleplayer game just because some mods were used (even lots of them!), especially since considering these later planned updates, some mods we have now will frankly change less about the game than the game itself will. It just discourages modding, and that's not good to do.

Modding with the aim of deliberately cheesing achievements isn't an issue to be worried about at all, because if someone wants to cheat, they always have the likes of SAM that can give them any achievements.

[Quietust]

And I don't agree with the principle of preventing achievements in a singleplayer game just because some mods were used (even lots of them!), especially since considering these later planned updates, some mods we have now will frankly change less about the game than the game itself will. It just discourages modding, and that's not good to do.

In all fairness, there are plenty of other games out there that disable achievements as soon as you install mods (in the same way that they disable achievements when you enable cheats), so it's not like there would be no precedent for doing such a thing.

[Mobbstar]

Please don't disable achievements for modded saves outright.  That invariably discourages or punishes mod-usage, or drives people to conduct frustrating metahacks instead.

Perhaps mods themselves could decide which achievements to disable.  Or, without Toady intervention at all, the modders could add a warning to the Workshop/DFFD page.