I'm sure this has already been suggested before, but here I go anyway:It would be downright awesome if Dwarf Fortress used some sort of rope and pulley system. I've messed with the idea a bit, and made a sort of faux version of this in MS paint.
Below are two towers connected by a rope, probably made of pig tail. In the center is a
bed basket, which a dwarf or adventurer could ride between the towers. Not the most practical method of transportation, but still cool. If the basket is not on a creature's side and it is intelligent enough to know how to use basket travel, it will automatically manipulate the rope to bring the basket closer. And yes, both towers are made of adamantine. I used my old modded version of dwarf fortress to make these buildings fast, and adamantine is one of the most abundant resources there.
I apologize for the massive number of pictures below, but the next possibility occurs over multiple z-levels. This second possible use for ropes is, at least in my opinion, 100 times cooler than the basket idea, though probably a good deal harder to program. The idea is for walls that can be attached to the ends of ropes, and then pulled up and down z-levels. I used this idea to make an adamantine temple, with an entrance controlled by ropes and a lever. When the lever is pulled, the ropes should move their attached walls, making them block or not block the entrance. In the images, the entrance is not blocked. Also, the top image is on the highest z-level, and includes the pulleys that "actually pull" the rope up and down.
I noticed later that on the second rope-wall image I neglected to include the top of the walls I hung on ropes. There should be floor image "+"s on the z-level above the hanging walls, but instead you can see some white dots, representing the rope as it travels down a z-level. These white dots should start appearing one level higher, and stop at the pulley.
While making the above images, I thought of some adventure mode puzzles I could incorporate into the temple, though I decided to keep it simple. Here are some of the ideas I decided not to include:
- Walls can serve as platforms to walk on. The center area on the second floor is empty, though I could build floors there to hide lots of loot. It would only be accessible when the walls are in the bottom-most position, resting on the bottom floor. The temple cannot be entered when the walls are like this, and notice that the lever is outside the temple. There could, perhaps, be a closed floodgate in place of one of the walls on the bottom floor, and a lever inside the temple to open the floodgate. This would create a new entrance/exit, so that one may pull the lever and close off the original entrance without closing one off to the innards of the temple.
- Walls on ropes can be used as elevators. Kind of an obvious one. For some more programming on Toady's part, walls on ropes can be made to hold levers, pressure plates, and other trap thingies. With this, levers can be made to move across z-levels and to different rooms, opening up a world of puzzles where one has to move levers to certain places at certain times.
Creatures and objects should be crushed by walls on ropes as if they were crushed by a bridge, and those creatures not crushable by bridges should not be curshable by walls on ropes. Probably the easiest way to control wall on rope movement is with a loop. If the wall on a rope is set to move down, all lever pulls should move it down, regardless of the lever position, until the wall gets as low as it can. After this, all lever pulls should move the wall up until it gets as high as it can. A bit annoying, but it works.
So, what do you guys think?
EDIT: Added to eternal suggestions list.