Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SixOfSpades]

My new volcano has a nice stack of 5 z-levels of marble layer stone. It's near the peak, so there's not enough horizontal space for a grand dining hall or whatever, but I could definitely carve out some elegant suites of bedroom & office chambers for nobles. My problem is the gems: Leave them in the wall and they spoil the look, or mine them out & replace with a constructed wall that can't be engraved.

Suggestion: Add a new Mining designation that instructs the dwarf to dig out just the embedded gemstones from the matrix, leaving the rest of the layer stone in place, possibly to be fully mined out at some later date. This could only be performed by dwarves with the Stone Detailing and Mining labors enabled, as well as a pick. The remaining wall tile could still be Engraved (but potentially not Smoothed), and engraving it would take longer, due to having to come up with a design that accommodates the chunk(s) of wall that are already missing.

[Bumber]

I think Toady added engraving constructions for the Steam release, IIRC.

I'm not sure how you'd logically remove the gems without leaving holes in the wall. Try to smooth/engrave and potentially run into more gems.

[Salmeuk]

my first thought is that it would be easier to allow us to engrave constructed blocks, thus avoiding your issue entirely. the Romans did it, why cant we?

[SixOfSpades]

I think Toady added engraving constructions for the Steam release, IIRC.

Hey, wait. If he fixes all the problems, what are we supposed to complain about? Did anyone think of THAT?

I'm not sure how you'd logically remove the gems without leaving holes in the wall. Try to smooth/engrave and potentially run into more gems.

This is Dwarf Fortress, why are you trying to bring logic into this?
But seriously, in reality a tile would take up about 2 cubic meters of stone, of which any crystal inclusions approaching gem quality would constitute only a tiny, tiny fraction. It would make a lot more sense to be able to remove any inclusions that happen to be visible, and leave the remaining 98% of the tile intact, than to swing your pick at a crystal outcrop in the wall, and watch the rough gem just drop to the floor because the entire rest of the wall suddenly vanished into the digital aether.

But if constructions can now be smoothed / engraved (as they should have been all along), I'm good with that too.

[Ziusudra]

a tile would take up about 2 cubic meters

(Math nit-pick: volume is HxWxD so it'd be at least 8 cubic meters. [And from the game's physics calculations either ~11 or ~16.])

[SixOfSpades]

(Math nit-pick: volume is HxWxD so it'd be at least 8 cubic meters. [And from the game's physics calculations either ~11 or ~16.])

Facepalm. I was figuring WxDxH as 1x1x2, as that's the approximate dimensions of a standing human (plus enough space for two humans to walk past each other). I forgot that beds are only 1 tile, and so width & depth must also be 2 meters as well. Duh.

[ayy1337]

What if you could smooth the wall, and it retains the colour of stone it would have been if not for the presence of gems, but the smoothed gems also remain in the wall? Sort of like you get from a slice of geode. Maybe this would entail some skill like gem cutting, and possibly a specialized tool?

Could also make the gem-filled wall be considered more beautiful by dwarves to justify the difficulty.

[darkhog]

That's actually pretty cool idea, ayy1337. And yeah, gem walls should be considered pretty by dwarves since they would sparkle and be cool looking in general.

[Starver]

Given that skilful rock-/gem-carvers (here on Roundworld) can make use of inclusions and variations in the actual artwork itself, I imagine that gems in a wall could be left in-situ as sparkling eyes/whatever as the craftsbeing digs into the relief carving (bas-, medium-, high- or sunk-relief) of the character being formed around those eyes.

(Somehow appreciating what is just beneath the surface and what is not... At wall-scale, and no option to put the piece aside for a rethink or to split into smaller and less exacting works if it doesn't go aesthetically right, I've no idea how anyone would actually do it. But clearly an expert in lapidery gets to understand such things, and there may be some innate dwarven 'infravision' (to explain other "map revealing" phenomena, where it isn't quite explainable in human terms) that at least clues them in on what to expect.)

In terms of DF, the mechanics of it may be unimportant, compared to the resulting gameplay issues of it having been done. But wheedling out some/all of the embedded gems (the holes they come from maybe then guiding any future carving, in some hand-wavy fashion; perhaps functionally equivalent to a carved Fortification at least as far as liquids go..?) would be an interesting development to support, as well.