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[antymattar]

So, my idea is [un]symple. right now rodents are just vermin that dont do ANYTHING! I think that it should be verry important that you actually protect your fortress from thesae creatures of plague and fammin. What this propposes is that rodents(rats, mice) should have the abbility to dig "tunnels" in hidden rock and walls. here is a small immage where the hidden rock is visible:


the lines in the soil walls are tunnels.
the +, * and circled R are nests(smaller to large).
The arrow-lines indicate paths that the rodents might take to get to food.

Rodents would require a different pathing system that allows them to walk through tunnels.
Alternatively, every tunnerl would have a range of how far a rodent is allowed to stray until he can dissapear back into the tunnel.

every nest can be inside hidden blocks as long as it is x spaces away from the nearest enterance/nest and y spaces away from the nearest wall/nest.

nests would spread depending on how much food they have stolen. Otherwise, nests will spread by capturing lesser vermin or if in contact with rass/wild plants(by the tunnel openings). Thi means that infestations would not spread by themselves. It woudl amlost always be the players fault for not watching them.

Here is an immage that shows how the enterance distance would effect nest rgowth(in this immage, nests do  not grow deeper into the hidden zone)


This would mean that rats and mice would be able to expand across corridors and empty halls. Cat antics would involve them sitting at the enterance of a rathole and waiting to catch the rodent(with possible chances.) Cats would finally have a use.

Also, rooms with tunnels in them would have a lowered value. this introduces a new profession: Ratcatchers. Other than vermin traps(whitch should not be fail proof) and cats, ratcatchers would be a noble of sorts that finds ratholes and exposes them. Before exposure, ratholes would be invisible and only if a dwarf saw a rat run in/out of the hole then the hole would be found. A ratcatcher would also have the abbility to "cover up" a rat hole wich is sort of like engraving. a covered up rat hole would not stay covered up. rats would chew through the wall after a period of time.

Heres a picture with several examples of how ratholes would expand:


the first row shows how, when nests grow in size(from small to medium or medium to large) they can expand by making another small nest somwhere withing their radius.

The second row shows several things that large ratholes can do when they can no longer expand. The first slide demonstrates that ratholes can make non-expanding nests next to them. Theses nests therefor make the large nest a maximum size and do not expand themselves. the second tile in the second row shows how, if two large nests have a tunnel between them, then they can spawn a storage area. This basically destroys the tile at wich it is located. The benefits of this are that it spreads the food range(the range of how far the nests can expand). They can appear only if ther are atleast two large nests connected. the botom row shows how nests can expand through multiple z levels(the 1 2 and 3 repreent the z level).

Rats and mice would also not only steal/eat(make it spoil REALY fast) foood every now and then but they would also gnawl on furniture and clothing every now and then(making it get a bit x`d or xx`d).

if a nest is dug out or a tile next to it is dug out then all the rats will spawn on the tile that had the nest.

I guess you could also get announcements like "kitten has gotten stuck in a mouse hole" or "kitten has dissapeared into a mouse hole" with the results varying.

Thoughts?

[IT 000]

So, my idea is [un]symple. right now rodents are just vermin that dont do ANYTHING!

Currently they will eat food if it is left out in the open. But the effect is unnoticeable. They should do more then just nibble one plump helmet after a year.

While it overall looks like a great idea, my only concern is FPS. Perhaps instead of having 'tunnels' they will just have nests hidden away in the unexplored areas of your fortress. They would then have the ability to eat/steal food within a certain vicinity relative to the size of the nest. Once you crack open a rats nest with a miner, it zooms to the spot and says "You've found a rats nest!". The Ratcatcher (ratchatcher sounds a tad to specific but still) noble would still come in handy, once in a while if it found a mouse it would cancel it's current job, and have the job 'Following Rodent', where it follows the rodent until it goes into the wall, and then has a chance that the nest could be revealed. The more experienced the catcher the better chance it has of finding the nest.

[Capntastic]

As with most things, there's a lot of vermin stuff that Toady has considered.

[antymattar]

As with most things, there's a lot of vermin stuff that Toady has considered.

All i says there about vermin is that they should be sort of tracked and would be able to actually do something. I didnt know that arc thing existsd though. REALY big list...Is Toady ever going to finish all that?

@IT 000: Yeah, it could just be that. though there should be holes in the walls that lead to other holes because they need to be able to get through walls.

[Aquillion]

The problem with pathing for vermin is, you know, pathing.  This suggestion is a particularly nasty way to do it, since whenever you introduce new paths that can only be taken by certain creatures, you drastically increase the overhead required for pathing in general (because it means that they can't use the same generated and maintained paths used for everyone else.)  So basically, I suspect that this suggestion is unworkable, at least at the present time.

EDIT:  Also, another major problem:  If mice can't go too far from the nest, this means that the best way to store your food is to empty out a huge, massive area with no walls (and hence no nests!)  This is problematic because honestly, for many applications, huge open areas are already rewarded more than they should be -- they make it easier for your dwarves to move around, and aside from rooms (which are only important in areas where your dwarves sleep or eat, and only require thickness-1 walls with no room for nests), what good are walls, anyway?

Incentivizing the digging out of a huge area too highly doesn't seem like a good thing to me, since it encourages and rewards boring layouts.

[Solace]

I had largely the same idea, but considering that vermin are supposed to be, you know, small, they probably shouldn't be digging out a warehouse's worth of space for a nest. If you allow the (tiny, tiny) vermin to overlap on the same space, you'd only need them to dig/build maybe 2-3 spaces for a nest, unless you had hundreds of the things. Although mice do make mouse holes and such, the issue is that DF doesn't really allow for much differentiation in size, so a five-space long tunnel is the same as, well, a thin house.

[Quarterblue]

Rodents shouldn't be able to dig in solid rock. That stuff should only happen in soil/clay layers.

[Ethicalfive]

It would be nice for vermin to get a rewrite, im sure that toady also wants to get to this at some point, but doesn't yet know how he is going to implement it.

I really like your tunnel idea though! That could be pretty cool, to have a miner breach a nest and have rats or mice or other burrowing vermin come pouring out and scatter all over the place.

They could even make nests inside boxes, barrels or furnature that hasn't been touched for some time. Then when someone goes to use that barrel, BAM! ratsplosion, with rats running off in different directions.

While I don't think they need full blown pathfinding like animals, I don't particularly like how they work now, they should be able to have some kind of limited pathfinding to food and shelter and away from danger(dwarfs, cats), even if only restricted to small areas, and be more persistant like other animals.

[sockless]

I think that first we should work on vermin that make syndromes, like mosquitoes, but that would require a good model for illness, where there are injuries, syndromes and illnesses (split into viral and bacterial maybe).

As has been said already, pathfinding is a huge issue with this idea.

I do like the idea of making rodents do more stuff though, but in a way that doesn't require pathfinding. We could maybe start with ants, since we have 'colony of ants''s, but we don't have ants.

[Ahra]

Fun fact: rats gnaw trough concrete if given the time