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[darkhog]

Both for trap reasons and for faster mining (when you don't care about the shape of the level and just want to get to the minerals). If not, are they planned? If they aren't planned, why?

[PatrikLundell]

Definitely not in the vanilla versions (I don't know much about mods). The lore reason is that DF sort of has a technological cut-off around 1400 A.D.

Magic will of course cause a lot of trouble for various pieces of logic, in the latter half of this decade, and the complex machinery planned sometime after that will include traps becoming more complex multi tile things, and I wouldn't be surprised if that would allow for fire and acid at least (fire can already be engineered with magma), and quite possibly magic effects as well.

Mining is unlikely to allow for explosives, as the most explosive method used was heating with fire and then adding water to get the rock to crack (I wouldn't be surprised if water freezing to ice was used to some extent as well), and that isn't a lightning fast process, which could be considered to be abstracted by the current mining process. Also, you don't really want the dorfs to run out of rock to mine too quickly...

[darkhog]

Well, according to this website the gun powder was invented in the IX century.

[PatrikLundell]

That discussion again...

Yes. Gun powder has existed well before 1400 (and there was also an industrial revolution in China before that, although it was crushed and rolled back by powers that were threatened by it), but doesn't seem to have been used for explosive charges.
There are also indications of sappers using some kind of explosive substances (and defenders using chemicals against sappers) during Roman times.

Regardless, you can try to argue however much you want, but Toady is the one making the decisions.

[Cathar]

I'll be honest tho, chinese rocket spears are classy as hell...but they are like any other blackpowder weapon until the industrial revolution : a novelty gadget with no real battlefield usage.
Every single time guns were used effectively in medieval battles, it was concomittant with other much more important developpments, which are the appartion of a professional fighting profession, which lead to the massificiation of battles, which in turn allowed the armies to entranch instead of slamming against each other. You can remove guns entierely without altering the battles of the late middle ages at all.

In DF, if you want a slow and loud ranged weapon, just yell when you fire a crossbow, you will effectively lose nothing.

Add to that, in current version, we are not in the middle ages. Dwarves have steel... but humans are still functionally a bronze age technology. In its current state, the DF is more like conan the barbarian, technologically speaking more than warhammer fantasy.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

Though honestly I think that's more on account of the human civ not being as fleshed-out yet as dwarven, not necessarily by design. A human civilization that's reached 15th-century technology doesn't sound outside the realm of Toady's plans.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Was talked about in DFtalk 8 (10 years ago now, yikes), if anyone's interested ^^

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.
Rainseeker:   It's because they're allergic to dwarves.
Toady:   Well, dwarf is a ...
Capntastic:   One dies so that the others may live.
Toady:   Yeah, unless they're all lined up or something, because those things tend to blow up in clusters. I'm not really sure where I'm at right now ... pro modded explosives and kind of ambivalent about vanilla explosives. It should be the kind of thing that is just one extra step in the chemistry raws; instead of saying that this thing heats up when the products are mixed or the products are ignited, it's like 'this does an explosion of this force per unit of black powder'; then there'd just need to be one extra function there that says what an explosion does. After that you can start to work with ideas; like what about things like cannons or mines that you want to do, and we can slowly work with that but the farther afield you go the more it would be deprioritised.

[feelotraveller]

Who needs guns when you've got fireballs?  Or at least if and when you have fireballs...

More generally the whole magic thing points to this being alt-history at best and hence it is authorial privilege, or roughly the Adams brothers' whim, which determines whether or not gunpowder exists. 

If you think this is all in thel 'future' of df then think again: mechanisms already pass signals instantaneously across the entirety of an embark map - more precisely distance adds no delay to their communication.  Can't personally fathom the medieval 'science' behind that one... 

[Shonai_Dweller]

Bottom line is, Toady (at one time) decided he didn't want gunpowder in his game. Doesn't really matter what the reasons are. Magic arc will make modding gunpowder fairly straightforward I imagine. And ships may still have cannons, because it seems kind of cool.

[darkhog]

Bottom line is, Toady (at one time) decided he didn't want gunpowder in his game. Doesn't really matter what the reasons are. Magic arc will make modding gunpowder fairly straightforward I imagine. And ships may still have cannons, because it seems kind of cool.

Haven't you read Manvure's post? There Toady said he isn't against the gun powder, even if only as a mod. Things that go boom makes everything cool.

[Broms]

I believe alcohol will "explode" in game if it catches on fire, that is about as close as it gets to vanilla explosions 0as far as I am aware.