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[Nordlicht]

Not really a full finished suggestion, as don't really know a lot about it, but would DF profit from having a own Periodic Table (e. g. for magical stuff?)

[Azerty]

Even though sugested in jest, I think subatomic simulations might be too much taxing on the computer.

[Nordlicht]

I don't think it would need simulation at all. No mans sky had his custom table, and I guess it would alter the properties of certain materials? Enable new reactions? I'm not even sure if it can be made clear to players whats going on if it was made procedural.

[IndigoFenix]

I think the existing reaction system works well enough.  Implementing actual fictional chemistry would just increase the likelihood of unintended game breakers when you find that some random common chemicals combine to produce something far more powerful than their reagents would suggest.

[voliol]

I think the existing reaction system works well enough.  Implementing actual fictional chemistry would just increase the likelihood of unintended game breakers when you find that some random common chemicals combine to produce something far more powerful than their reagents would suggest.

You mean you are opposed to discovering alchemical secrets by means of !science! ? In all seriousness though alchemy is a common enough fantasy trope that systems like it are already planned:

Do you think dynamic combination of magic will be possible with magic, an example being mixing water and fire magic on the fly to create steam or fire and earth to create magma or would such combinations need to be predefined?

Something needs to be defined somewhere; what the atoms are is up to the system.  If we rely on chemistry etc. out in the typical game mechanics, we'll have the things we current have (magma and water produces steam and obsidian etc), plus anything that is explicitly added.  If the system uses predefined conceptual nodes, like the spheres, then they can hop around the friend/parent/child/opposition relationships they have, and spell effects might be related to that.  So, as a potential example, a light effect might miscast into a (generated) sun effect, which could be very bad -- I'm not sure what we'll have in this first pass, but this is the sort of thing that should be natural for it to do, as sphere-effect coverage grows.  There's also a cross-over zone with stuff like the "sphere" regions; if a region is interacted with and its attached symbols change, then its properties might shift dynamically.

We don't currently have a (possibly generated?) sphere/concept math, like <sphere:earth> + <sphere:water> =e.g.= <sphere:muck>, but this sort of thing is possible and might come in with alchemy.  There are various ways this can be done, and we've toyed around with a few of them in side projects.  Not all ~120 spheres need to be represented; it could pick, say, 8 sufficiently "far apart" spheres at random, and then use whatever mixing system and generic sphere-effect generators to handle situations, with coverage and possibilities being increased as we add effects and conceptual linkages.

My anticipation now is that we'll have some of this to start, a few classes of generated system with this kind of behavior, and then it will improve and broaden over time.

The question is more how than if.

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

Not really a full finished suggestion, as don't really know a lot about it, but would DF profit from having a own Periodic Table (e. g. for magical stuff?)

As Indigo/fenix suggested, wouldn't it be possible by modding the reaction tokens? One can already add materials for the game, create different reactions and even mod different workshops, so I think this could be achiavable already. But the idea of procedural reactions, as if the game would do the "modding", seems nice.

[Putnam]

I mean, like, there's already e.g. CALCIUM_CARBONATE materials that can be used for quicklime.

[Azerty]

Could we reuse the divine metal framework as starters? We could define, in the raws, basic models for the game to use to generate specific metals or other elements and then associate some of them to spheres.

For exemple, we could have a crystal which could be linked to the Birth sphere and which could favorise pregnancies; when mixed with another metal then it could make multiple pregnancies even likely.

[NJW2000]

Procedural alchemy would be cool, I'd love a procedural alchemical table, especially one that interacted with the spheres. I'd imagine divine and other special metals would be tied into that, as they're related to the gods.


The proc-gen alchemy/chemistry controlling the interactions of everyday materials... that would be hard to implement, and depending on RNG potentially game-breaking as Fenix says, though perhaps in a fun way.

I'm reminded of the Noita (roguelike game, check it out) seeds where the procedurally generated alchemy of the world gives ordinary ingredients tremendous power, so a mixture of mud and water could turn an entire cavern layer to gold. My main concern would be that Dwarf Fortress currently doesn't have the small-scale large-scale interaction needed for this to make sense: a mountain range might be perfectly ordinary for a thousand years of worldgen, then an adventurer loads a chunk and kills a goat, a mixture of stagnant water and fresh goat blood touches exposed granite, setting off an explosive chain reaction that turns all nearby rock into thousand degree lava. There are probably ways to work around this.

[Starver]

Procedural alchemy would be cool,

This was my first thought when I read the intro post (just now, only spotted it due to the recent bump).

Already we're maybe getting myth'n'magic procedural "each world is different", including in degrees of rationality vs. fantacism, rather than hard-coded 'the world is what it is'. It could easily extend across whether everything works across (current) reactions like Cu+Sn->Bronze or centres mostly around such things like Fire+Water->Liquid Fire.

[Nordlicht]

Found this on reddit:

https://chemdata.github.io/DF_Metal_Generation/

My site will let you generate new metals and their associated ores. You can then download the necessary raw files to play with the new metals. Just drop them into your raw/objects folder and gen a new world.

The metals will have properties similar to real world metals although they can achieve strengths that approach the special metals in DF.

The generator will make alloys and even some advanced metals that require unusual ingredients like borax or chromite.

Something like this would also go into a world-specific period table.

The AI needs to learn which make good weapon and armor materials, though.