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[deej]

The first release of my mod is now available, let me know what you all think!

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=874

This mod adds in various items to soil layers to make them more interesting. There is also new sources of fuel (peat which can be converted to coke at the smelter) and iron (small deposits of Geothite). This has the effect that more areas are decent to embark on. It will make piercing aquifers a bit easier if you're willing to use your peat and geothite non-economically.

There are also a few minor changes to stones and gems. All changes are documented in the text files themselves.

This mod is still being tweaked, but should be playable and fun. All suggestions welcome!

To install just unrar and replace default files in raw\object\ with included files.

[Rochndil]

Greetings!

I've been reading the summary of your mod, and I think it looks very promising. The only problem I have with it at the moment is that you combined your new content with the existing matgloss/reaction files.

Unless I am very much mistaken, there's no need to include new content with the existing files. The file headers include the relevant data to allow DF to parse the files correctly. SO, instead of writing new gems into matgloss_stone_gem.txt, for example, you can just as easily write them into matlgoss_stone_gem_SIF.txt - with the tremendous advantage that NOW your files can be dropped right into an existing setup without messing anything else up.

Now, of  course, if you were making CHANGES to any of the default data, then you'd have to change the original file(s), but that's not the case for most of your stuff, and the few exceptions could be easily noted (take THIS item and replace THIS one).

As it stands, I'm going to have to carefully cut redundant records out of your file so I can add them to my in-progress build without buggering up any of the other dozens of changes I've already made (otherwise your changes could un-do changes made by other mods, or combine with them in unpredictable ways).

ONCE I get it all running, I'll be sure to let you know what I think about your mod.

Rochndil, who has lots of experience processing text...

P.S. Upon getting into this process, it quickly becomes apparent that you have a lot of directly conflicting overlap with Sean Mirrsen's Minerals Mod. Specifically, peat as a carbon source, anthracite coal, and probably more stuff I haven't come across yet. I'm still tinkering. Sometimes I go with your implementation, sometimes with his.

[Rochndil]

Good morning!

I got your files tweaked and installed last night, though I haven't genned yet since I'm still adding entities/creatures to my latest build. The two main sources of conflict were, as previously mentioned, Sean's Metals Mod, and ShadowLord's tileset enhancement (which changes a lot of the stone tiles).

In many cases I dumped your changes to the original matgloss entries, since it seems to take some of the fun out of things for EVERYTHING to have a 100% spawn chance. Sure, it would make for a lot more available resources, but intelligent resource management is a big part of the game (for me at least). That's one of the great things about DF, everyone can tweak things to THEIR playstyle.

One thought I did have (in the shower, as always seems to happen), is adding something that would be ENORMOUSLY useful. In my games, one of the single biggest headaches is trying to get all the elements I want in my 3x3 embark location, including SAND.

SO, what about throwing a few veins of plain old sand into soil layers? I'm not sure you could use the existing sand(s), since they're defined as layers themselves, but what about creating a NEW sand for the purpose? You've already got pebbles, what about "alluvial sand" or something? Throw a vein or two of that through some common soil layers, and suddenly soil becomes even MORE appealing for an embark location. Another interesting possibility would be "green sand," which is a mineral-rich natural fertilizer. That type of reaction might not be possible to tinker at this time, but I'll bet you can get veins of ordinary sand into soil layers. Maybe someone has done so before?

Rochndil, who may take a stab at it himself...

[deej]

I'm glad you took the time to separate out my mod from the files for your use.  I hadn't made too many changes from vanilla, but there were a couple of removals and changes of the base matglosses that it was easier for me to modify and overwrite than add.

As far as sand goes, that should be doable, I'll see what I can come up with.

Remember that 100% spawn chance doesn't actually guarantee it's existence, from what I can tell.  It seems more like all the numbers are thrown together, then each has it's number out of the total as it's chance of appearing.  For example, if there are three items, one with 100, one with 90, and one with 1, the 100 item has a 100 out of 191 chance of appearing in any given location, the 90 has a 90 out of 191 and the 1 has a 1 out of 191.  The trick is once you have ten items with 100, you've only got a 10% chance of them showing up.  I tested this by having only one thing show up in soil and gave it a 1, but because it then had a 1 in 1 chance, it was always present.  That's why there's other things in soil that aren't useful.

Perhaps it would be worth my time to create two versions, one of just additions and one of the modifications.

Thank you very much for the feedback!
-Deej

[Rochndil]

Success!

I'm still tinkering with some issues, and making adjustments (like making treestumps CLUSTER_ONE for example) - and there's still something weird with the mire layers - DF doesn't want to let you specify them for peat currently (need to test if you can specify ANY soil layer). BUT, the sand inclusion DOES work, and the other additions are spawning properly in soil layers. Hooray!

Too bad we can't make DEBRIS_WOODY into actual wood, that would be cool. It would also be nice to be able to restrict certain elements to ONLY spawn in the top (or top two maybe) layers of soil - it doesn't seem terribly plausible to find a treestump four Z-levels below ground.

Rochndil, who had to resolve a pile of other unrelated technical issues before he could actually TEST this...

[deej]

Sounds like your tinkering is going right along the way I was thinking of going

You should be able to specify to specific mire layers... I caused Peat to be more or less present depending on the type of mire and that seemed to work in my testing.  Are you finding it to be in about the same amounts in Tundra vs. Blanket for example?  Tundra should have a much smaller chance of having peat...

I happened upon the wikipedia article on potash today and apparently it's a mineable resource, but the specifics are vague on there.  I'll probably look into it more before I add a mineable potash.

[Tellemurius]

interesting.... can i throw this in my hobbit mod? looks like it could fit in there good.

[deej]

Bloodsheder: yes you may!  I'm not quite done tweaking it, and has been pointed out I should create new files instead of overwriting and have instructions for the few overwrite/delete bits.  If you want to wait until that version it should be easier to implement.

FWIW, the next version will probably be about three to four weeks away given my current commitments on time.

[Rochndil]

Just a quick note, I fixed all my problems - of my own making. I'll provide more details this evening when I have more time. While I'm still tinkering, everything works, at least as far as world gen goes. Strike the...soil!

Rochndil, master of sand...

[Rochndil]

OK!

I'll try to make this as brief as possible, since I'm sure nobody wants to hear about all the dumb stuff I tried to do and what I screwed up in the process.

I love the basic premise of this mod, ie make SOIL more interesting. Endless (subterranean) plains of unbroken soil are, frankly, boring. In Vanilla, nothing much spawns in soil, and having dug up my share, I can tell you that's not very realistic. SO, as soon as this was posted I downloaded it and took a look around.

There are a few areas where I disagree with the personal choices the modder, deej, made in his design. These were not WRONG, just not compatible with my play style. In making the mod more compatible with my own style, I ended up changing a good bit, and simplifying some areas. What I've come out with, though, does exactly what I wanted (though some items are still untested!).

Goals:

1. Make soil interesting! Accomplished. Now you can find small quantities of various inclusions and resources in your soil, including rocks(me), dead trees, peat, sand(me), iron, and other debris.

2. Limit inclusions to a reasonable percentage of the total soil volume.

3. Provide SMALL quantities of essential resources for embarkation on soil areas.

The primary things I changed were to add some sand and boulder spawns to the soil layers, created reactions to extract charcoal from some of the buried wood spawns, and a LOT of other tweaks. Many of the things I changed were to maintain compatibility with my OTHER mods.

Some items I modified from deej's original:

Removed most of the extra coal types. They offered the possibility (in sum) of having TOO MUCH  coal available to be challenging.
Removed all the mire layers but one (the mires were taking over the world!).
Reduced the spawn chance of most inclusions, to make their presence more striking than if they were common.
Changed the spawn size of Varmit Warren and Dead Tree to CLUSTER_ONE, as seemed appropriate.
Reduced the Peat size to CLUSTER_SMALL, and lowered its spawn rate - again to maintain challenge and scarcity.
Altered some material entries to allow reactions to (hopefully) work properly.

Doubtless I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff, but I think that's all the important items.

Thank you so much for creating this mod deej, you've really added a lot to my (future) games. Now I just need to finish adding stuff so that I can actually PLAY again.

Rochndil, who is finally moving beyond soil, metals, and minerals...

[slink]

In looking at this mod I am a little confused.  Some of the entries say

ENVIRONMENT:ALLUVIAL

and some say

ENVIRONMENT:SOIL

In the wiki, under matgloss tokens, it refers to the following as "tags"

[SEDIMENTARY]
[IGNEOUS_INTRUSIVE]
[IGNEOUS_EXTRUSIVE]
[METAMORPHIC]
[SOIL]
[SOIL_OCEAN]

and the following as "class may also be"

ALL_STONE
IGNEOUS_ALL
ALLUIVAL (sic, should be ALLUVIAL)

Are tag and class one and the same, and if so, should the ones using ALLUVIAL be replaced with SOIL?  I ask because the Wonderment mod left out things from the Soil Is Fun mod on account of platinum not working right, and platinum is one of the ones that uses ALLUVIAL instead of SOIL.

[forsaken1111]

Running this mod I get the following in errorlog:

DIAMOND_BLUE: Environment Spec Stone Not Found, Token - DIAMOND_FY
DIAMOND_CLEAR: Environment Spec Stone Not Found, Token - DIAMOND_FY
DIAMOND_GREEN: Environment Spec Stone Not Found, Token - DIAMOND_FY
DIAMOND_RED: Environment Spec Stone Not Found, Token - DIAMOND_FY
DIAMOND_YELLOW: Environment Spec Stone Not Found, Token - DIAMOND_FY
DIAMOND_BLACK: Environment Spec Stone Not Found, Token - DIAMOND_FY

What are those environment tokens supposed to be?

[Impaler[WrG]]

slink:  I've read that the ALLUVIAL tag is defunct and shouldn't even be any ware in the raws, SOIL is supposed to be in its place and should produce results.

forsaken1111:  It looks to me like Fait yellow Diamond (FY_DIAMOND) was removed from the raws, all the other types of diamonds are count as singletons inside small clusters of the former which are themselves in Kimberlite veins.

[slink]

Thank you, Impaler[Wrg].  I had already tried it and it is working fine.  I also saw a post by quietust, in an other thread, that said the same thing.  The ironic thing is that the error in the erroneous platinum entry is from vanilla, not from Soil is Fun.   

So I am using a little from here (peat fuel with only one type of peat layer, and only two additional types of coal), a little from Wonderment (the multiple paths to iron and the meteoric iron source), a little from Dig Deeper (hobgoblins, frost giants, bugbears, and their associated weapons and armor), the gentle farming mod, four of Pickerel's plants, orcs, and a few of my own mods (added slugs and snails, and added shells to mussels, oysters, and snails).  It has added an interesting variety to the game, in addition to dropping copper, iron, and steel at my doorstep during sieges instead of endless piles of useless silk clothing.