Hi there, I've been playing Dwarf Fortress for quite a while now, and as such have built up a huge number of ideas that I think would make the game better. I've finally mustered up the motivation to post them here. I looked through development area and didn't see any of these, but with the huge number of things there I could have missed some, so I apologize if some of these are already in the queue to be implemented.
First of all, I think the number of idlers to the upper bar. The constant announcements make it hard to see if you've got any idle dwarves.
Priority mining:
If a player selects a area to be mined that already is selected to be mined, it will change color and be mined before "normal" mining areas. This would help greatly when multiple areas of the fort are being mined out. You could have your dwarves working on the really important areas, while the less important areas are only mined when the priority areas are unavailable.
Improved Container AI:
Please, please, please, work on containers. I'm really getting sick of my barrels filled up with groups of one plump helmet spawn, or my marksdwarves going into battle with one iron bolt. This should be pretty easy to do too. You'd just have to implement how many items (or how much weight) a container can hold and a count for number of objects (or amount of weight) it currently has, and then then just query incoming objects for their number (or weight). This way a quiver would know that it just has one iron bolt and needs more bolts to be full.
Pack animals:
Horses and mules can be trained at the kennel to be pack animals. They then are assigned to a dwarf, just like dogs. If a dwarf has pack animal assigned to him he will fetch the pack animal and use give it the items he has to haul. This would speed up dwarves hauling heavy items.
Tracks and carts:
I know someone else suggested this first but heres a my take on how it could work. First of all these ideas require several new buildings to be implemented.
First, rails, these would be built much like channels. There would need to be a complete link of rail between the various carting buildings for the cart to travel to them. Dwarves are able to walk across rails, but will take another path if at all possible. A new stockpile for empty carts would also need to be designed, this should be easy to do though. A new building, the Rail Station, where carts are taken from a stock pile, hooked to a animal, and put into the track system. Finally the Loading Area where carts are put while waiting to be loaded. Oh, and you'd need a rail elevator for the new Z-axis forts.
Now for the biggie; how would cart gathering work? Loading Areas have to link to tracks on one side, and excepts certain user designated objects like a stockpile. Also the Loading Area has a targeted rail station (much like a lever is targeted to objects). When a dwarf with the proper job (Raildwarf) notices a empty loading zone he pulls a cart out of the stockpile, hooks a animal to it and delivers it to to the loading zone. This now acts as a stockpile until it is filled (say up to 10 objects or so). When the cart is filled, the Raildwarf goes to the cart and brings it to the proper station, unloads the goods into the building, unhooks the animal, and puts the cart into the stockpile. The goods are then hauled to the nearest stockpile normally.
The main advantage to this is shortening the distance dwarves need to walk with heavy objects, as well as reducing traffic through the fortress. Also a fully loaded cart should travel faster then a heavily loaded dwarf. As such, having a Loading Zone for stone deep in the mountain connected to a Rail Station near your stone stockpile, would save huge amounts of time. Rails could also serve as a "band-aid" for poorly planned fortresses allowing distant dependent resources to be hooked together.
Animal Pen:
I'm really getting sick of all the dogs and horses clogging up my fortress. Basically this would be stockpile for a designated type of animal, and all non-assigned and non-pet animals would be put into there. The animals are free to roam around the pen, but cannot (willingly) leave it. The pens would have a max number of animals allowed, which could be altered by the player, much like barrels are now. Maybe you could even implement gender segregation for the pens so people could stop animals from breeding if they wanted to.
New immigration ideas:
For starters I think that the number of immigrant dwarves should be drastically reduced. It just seems too easy for your fortress to make the jump from a hole in the cliff to a metropolis right now.
Secondly I don't think the dwarves should just show up in front of your fortress. Instead, there should be a queue of dwarves willing to come to your fort and you have to "buy" them from the dwarvish merchants that show up every year. Then when you get to the next possible immigration, they show up as normal. Just as it is now, tribute to the king makes more immigrant appear in the queue every year. I have no idea how this could work if your fortress has no dwarvish traders, maybe they could just show up like now, but at a vastly reduced number?
Sorry about this being so long.
[ March 30, 2007: Message edited by: Sludge ]
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Topic: A huge pile of suggestions for Fortress mode (Read 1009 times)