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[Zwerg]

Sometimes I read comments of people who totally dislike the idea of having Gunpowder. WHY? Explosives/gunpowder are IMO worth a long discussion and I couldn't find one (link?). I see huge possiblities. I'm not that creative so I just say what comes to my mind:

Gunpowder for cannons, simple rifles and explosives. You can actually blast a hole into the earth or into you Fortress aswell. Finally a way to break in certain places (like a magma pipe) without a Dwarf. And FUn Fun FUN! I know it could make things to easy (like fighting armies and monster) but think about it to be difficult to handle and only long installed fuses can blast in the distance.

Explosives are generic to any kind of game like DF in some way or another, so why are these things are still missing and seldom spoken about?

[pisskop]

Gobs could xplod you gate and kille you.
Explosions are not permitted within the technology limitations or 'timeframe' of DF.
gunpowder means massive rewrites for weapons, physics, armours, etc.

Explosives are generic to any kind of game like DF in some way or another, so why are these things are still missing and seldom spoken about?

This.  this is exactly why they arent needed now.  Same with magicks.

[katana]

We do have magic, just not in the way that most people think of it. One of the quotes in my sig refers to a guy who gained mastery of salt magic. Then there's necromancers, magical creatures, cursed lands etc. We just don't (in vanilla) have the generic mages/fireball spells.

[Man In Zero G]

When we have Alchemists back (who actually DO something, with an actual workshop) then this could be a thing. A quick search of what Toady has actually posted in the forum regarding gunpowder is an amazingly small list that universally says 'I don't know', which is funny considering how many people insist he isn't going to let it happen.
I seem to remember something in a DFTalk though, about gunpowder and alchemy and the current reactions system. So, if nothing else, he does at least seem to intend for it to be capable of being modded in, if my memory serves.

[Jake]

Way, way ahead of you, mate. See my sig.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

i personaly prefere the way it is good old high fantasy with a medieval technological context.it could also have robots and nuclear bombs but i would change the feeling of the game.
more specificly for the gunpower issue: ok if you have gunpower you have rifles, and cannons but that also means that you do not have swords/axes/spears/bows/xbows and all those stuff why? because technologicaly that is what happend rifles replaced all other war-equipement why? easier to use, produce and deadlier
and if it is often written by other players that no gunpowder thanks, it should mostly be because of this...

[Broken]

i personaly prefere the way it is good old high fantasy with a medieval technological context.it could also have robots and nuclear bombs but i would change the feeling of the game.
more specificly for the gunpower issue: ok if you have gunpower you have rifles, and cannons but that also means that you do not have swords/axes/spears/bows/xbows and all those stuff why? because technologicaly that is what happend rifles replaced all other war-equipement why? easier to use, produce and deadlier
and if it is often written by other players that no gunpowder thanks, it should mostly be because of this...

Actually, there are quite some centuries of difference between gunpownder and rifles. And while the second is out of the arbitrary max tech
that toady established, the first is not. So, maybe, this may appear in some distant release. Maybe.

[katana]

All we really need is some sort of way for boiling items to "explode" and actually destroy tiles.

[Zwerg]

"Insanely strong acids are required for the setting and will make it in at some point." Toady, January 26, 2010

What can you actually do with acids? And why are they required for the setting while gunpowder is not?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Pits of acid, black and green dragons, being eaten...

Anyways, I could see cannons, basic explosives, and maybe muskets in DF, but not reliable ones. Just my opinion.

[Trif]

Because it came up, here's what Toady said on the topic in the DF Talks.

I think what I've said before is [that] gunpowder is probably something that's not going to be necessarily in the vanilla Dwarf Fortress, but it's something that I'd probably support for modders.

Capntastic:   The next thing; explosives. What are your plans for tactical nukes?
Toady:   That's right, we have unrefined uranium in the game, and I hear about centrifuges all the time, and aluminum tubes ... We've got aluminum, we don't have centrigues, we have pipe sections, so you make a giant aluminum pipe section and fill it with pitchblende or whatever we've got and ... Yeah, so we're not doing that. But the kind of thing that's on the table is gunpowder, and the materials that you need for that are already in the game, I think. We've got brimstone, which is sulphur, and I don't remember if we have saltpetre, if it's there or not, but ... I guess you could do all kinds of things with manure and urine to make it, or you can find it in a crystalline form in the ground perhaps. And we've got charcoal and coal and kinds of stuff like that available, so it's there, the building blocks are there, and then it become strictly a matter of taste, and what you're going to do with it. I don't think we've had the discussion on Dwarf Fortress Talk before but I've had the discussion on the forums or in the dev notes and so on about what we think about that. Where we were on that is that we are not against coding up the code necessary to get that kind of thing to work; at the very least just blowing the crap out of things. Maybe not making a gun or something but blowing the crap out of things. That probably wouldn't be in the most vanilla vanilla Dwarf Fortress. After we see it action and see it perhaps not spoiling the mood entirely it might make it in, but certainly we'd support that kind of thing shortly after chemistry starts to take off; I've no problem with that at all. Then it's a matter of how blowing stuff up works in the game. It would just be another one of those reactions; when this point hits its ignition point it's a little different than just setting on fire. It would just need to be able to look around at the adjacent squares and apply forces to things, and it can do all that. It should be not that difficult once we have the chemistry stuff we've been talking about to have things that are explosive, and not just black powder which as far as I know is the only historical example of a real explosive. Of course people can show me whatever else there is that I don't know about there, but there can also be fantasy-type explosive things, like creatures that blow up for no reason that somehow survived after all these thousands of years, and then when you come up to them they just blow up.

Capntastic:   'Will there ever be materials able to explode or combust? Will coal or grain dust ever be a hazard, or alcohol burning, or do you not think players should be able to engineer explosions?'
Toady:   I like explosions! I mean I don't like modern explosions, but there are plenty of reasons for things to blow up that are not modern and I think all of that is something that should be considered for the game.

To summarize: explosions and gunpowder are cool, it'll be possible to have them in the game, but Toady isn't completely sure if they'll appear in vanilla DF.

[GreatWyrmGold]

He's certainly thinking of adding gunpowder, at the least. By the way, gunpowder was first created around the 9th century (ironically, while trying to find a formula for the Elixer of Life), about when stoneware pottery (I think) was invented and well before the 1400s.

[AutomataKittay]

Because explosives are generic to a genre of game for destroying things doesn't means that it's a necessary part of the game. That's like saying everyone must eat meat because it's a food

I imagine it's also a feature that'll be implemented when other kind of blasting is doable with a way to work out environmental damage from it, likely with more complex magic system. I think the only current explosive-like mechanism is some kind of dust attack that's just as likely to kill the attacker using it ( And I've seen a mod or two that have pets with those kind of attacks ), and boiling syndrome materials, which pretty much have to be made where it's used. Neither breaks stuffs either.

Gunpowder weapons, on other hand, have been done pretty often, just not explosive barrels or rockets because of above issues, nor emplaced cannons because siege weapons aren't moddable currently.

Please note, second paragraph's a speculation of what is likely, I'm not too familiar with what's planned in future, unfortunately. I suspects it'll be supported eventually, if only to have more evil environmental effect ( Would you want to settle where flowers blows you and your wagons up? )

[GreatWyrmGold]

And then there's grain- and coal-dust explosions...