Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tevish Szat]

Yeah, the idea is that "This isn't when the oil reserves have run dry.  This isn't when a religious event shakes the world.  This isn't when capitalism crumbles and Mad Max style anarchy rules.  This isn't even when an asteroid wipes out half the life on the planet.  This is 1,000,000 years after that when the atmosphere is thin and the sun is burning larger and hotter.  It's not the end of the civilized world, it's the end of the entire world."

Really, this reminds me of Jack Vance's "The Dying Earth" short stories.  (which, buy virtue of being a big influence on D&D have been a stealth influence on pretty much all western fantasy since the 70s).  It also makes my goal of provoking a worldgen Age of Death or Age of Emptiness with no to little modding look kind of half-baked

Spoiler: Age of Death plans (click to show/hide)

Start with the "pocket island" advanced parameters.  increase the civ count to get them warring more often and crank the titan count to max.  Increase savagery to further reduce civ-capable lands.  I'm not sure if a low or high civ pop cap is better: low will be easier for the megabeasts to flatten, but high should start more wars.  Also not sure what to do with (semi)megabeast caves.  If they cohabit more or less peacefully, I want to spread them around, but if they'll fight it's time to start a housing crisis that should move us out of the Age of Myths/legends/heroes.  10k year history and bake overnight, of course.  I might have to set night creature types to 0 though, in case they count as civilized entities.

[Xen0n]

Oh man, I just thought of some wacky additions to the "End of the World" scenario that could be possible with the upcoming food-borne syndromes.

1)  Have food grant a temporary increase in all stats, or at least speed.  I suppose the end effect would be like having the race be [FOOD_DEPENDENT].  If possible, make them able to go a bit longer than normal dwarves without food.  The idea is that they're the last stragglers of civilisation, used to subsisted in a near-constant state of half-starvation.
2)  Then, make the only renewable source of food the flesh of your defeated (organic) enemies  (even that would be sparse).  If farming is even possible, crops die in a few seasons due to the barren earth and radiation, and only rarely, if at all, drop seeds.  If you can manage to find seeds in the first place.  Also, mining for food!  Finding fossils to grind some nourishment out of.
3)  Since food is a limited resource (perhaps the most valuable one in this game), you are constantly at odds with yourself, "should I prepare a bunch of the food I have now to be eaten, so everyone will work/fight better for now?  Or should I leave it unprocessed in case we don't have enough later?"

Food is a luxury.

[Girlinhat]

1: You cannot mod the eating rate, sadly, and I don't imagine that changing soon.  But, it you burrow your dwarves and don't include the food stockpile, then dwarves will wait longer until leaving the burrow.  This may be an essential part of an end-world fort.
2: You cannot mod the seed drop rate or the stack farming number - if it can be grown in a farm, then it will produce seeds when eaten, and will produce 1-5 plants per harvest without potash.  But, you can mod in custom reactions with variable output.  It can take 1 farmed plant, and produce however many seeds you want, or however many food items you want.  In this way, I'm hoping to make no plants directly edible, or very few.  Instead, you harvest a plant from the ground or from a farm, and you process it in a custom workshop, which may or may not yield edible material.  Using this, farmed plants can sometimes produce seeds through processing, and identically named plants can be used for a random chance of poison.  After all, if you take "raw berry" and process it into "berry" "berry" and "berry" how do you know which, if any, are properly purified or not?  Or, which have been skillfully purified and provide an edible strength bonus?  Or which have been terribly used and actually catch fire on the workshop floor?  Custom reactions provide a TON of options, requiring an extra step or two but luckily there's already an [AUTOMATIC] tag for reactions.
3: I'm not sure if the new edible syndromes and curses will allow addiction, but I'm hoping so.
4: I'm planning on making golem enemies that drop rocks/ores on death (purifying an ore may or may not make it explode), but due to resource scarcity here, ground rocks will likely be a cookable ingredient.  "This is a cat tallow roast.  It is made with cat tallow, berry, berry, and ground limestone."  Anything to fill the stomach, amirite?  Most resources will have similar multi-use ideas in play, allowing for some questioning of "do I want to make a stone axe, or a meal?"

[Xen0n]

1: You cannot mod the eating rate, sadly, and I don't imagine that changing soon.  But, it you burrow your dwarves and don't include the food stockpile, then dwarves will wait longer until leaving the burrow.  This may be an essential part of an end-world fort.
2: You cannot mod the seed drop rate or the stack farming number - if it can be grown in a farm, then it will produce seeds when eaten, and will produce 1-5 plants per harvest without potash.  But, you can mod in custom reactions with variable output.  It can take 1 farmed plant, and produce however many seeds you want, or however many food items you want.  In this way, I'm hoping to make no plants directly edible, or very few.  Instead, you harvest a plant from the ground or from a farm, and you process it in a custom workshop, which may or may not yield edible material.  Using this, farmed plants can sometimes produce seeds through processing, and identically named plants can be used for a random chance of poison.  After all, if you take "raw berry" and process it into "berry" "berry" and "berry" how do you know which, if any, are properly purified or not?  Or, which have been skillfully purified and provide an edible strength bonus?  Or which have been terribly used and actually catch fire on the workshop floor?  Custom reactions provide a TON of options, requiring an extra step or two but luckily there's already an [AUTOMATIC] tag for reactions.
3: I'm not sure if the new edible syndromes and curses will allow addiction, but I'm hoping so.
4: I'm planning on making golem enemies that drop rocks/ores on death (purifying an ore may or may not make it explode), but due to resource scarcity here, ground rocks will likely be a cookable ingredient.  "This is a cat tallow roast.  It is made with cat tallow, berry, berry, and ground limestone."  Anything to fill the stomach, amirite?  Most resources will have similar multi-use ideas in play, allowing for some questioning of "do I want to make a stone axe, or a meal?"

Oh, custom, chance based reactions sound fun. 
I wonder, is there any leeway for having higher skill either
A) Make it more likely for a 'poison berry' to be identified as such or
B) Make it less likely for a 'poison berry' to be produced at a workshop?
Would make getting a skilled herbalist / plant processor more of a priority so you can reduce your food poisoning rate from 60% at Dabbling to 20% at Legendary or something.

Addictions, eh?  Paving the way for "Vault Dweller Dwarves"? 

Hmm maybe instead of the "food boost" Syndrome it'd be simpler to just make acquiring booze be a rare event, and let water (or the closest liquid you can manage  ) be the standard drink.  That way the default state of the fort is sober, with everyone working slowly, and you have to choose if and when to allow your dwarves to drink and start working harder (and possibly only choosing to allow it for the military, important skilled crafters etc.)  Possibly increase the base stats a bit so things aren't unbearably slow in the staus quo sober state.  That way most of the time they are just barely surviving with stunted metabolisms, but on the rare occasions they actually get something with nutritional value, they perk up for a bit.

That cat tallow berry berry ground limestone roast sounds just exquisite.  It barely has any limestone in it!

[Girlinhat]

Sadly, you cannot make a skill-based reaction.  Skill levels will only ever change the quality, and cannot play a part in the reaction.  Nor can you generate water, or require water.  Booze can be made into a container, but you can't make water at all.  Now, you could have a booze that's called "water" and have it be regular booze, and then a booze called "booze" that has a curse-based stat increase for speed and toughness, lasting about 1/2 season long so that when it wears off, the dwarf is already drinking again.  Thus, "sober" would be "normal" and "drunk" would be "super-powered" but compared to all the other creatures, that's not very super at all.

[Oliolli]

So if someone is dehydrated, they work extra-slow? Seems to work.

[Girlinhat]

That's right, but I don't see how that matters here.  If you're so short on liquids that everyone's dehydrated, you're probably just about to lose.  There's an extremely fine line between "resource scarcity challenge" and "this is no fun because there's no food anywhere".  It'd be easy enough to mod out all drinkables and have a map without water, but then what are you doing?  You're playing for about 6 weeks and then everyone dies at the same instant.

[Gizogin]

Actually, I'm pretty sure you can make a reaction to fill a bucket with water.  There's one in LFR, IIRC.  It's just a matter of requiring a bucket, preserving said bucket in the reaction, then producing enough water (10 units?) to fill it, then making sure that the reaction puts the water in the bucket.  I know it should be possible, but the syntax is a little beyond me.

[Girlinhat]

Really?  Because I've seen no use of actual water in reactions.  Even default jobs like brewing and dying don't need water.  If that were possible though, then I'd certainly include a "drying hut" of some kind, where meat goes in, and water + dried meat comes out.  I'll likely still do that, and have butcher shops produce "muscles" instead of "meat" and then the drying hut produces blood and meat, blood being useful for its own number of reasons.

[Oliolli]

That's right, but I don't see how that matters here.  If you're so short on liquids that everyone's dehydrated, you're probably just about to lose.  There's an extremely fine line between "resource scarcity challenge" and "this is no fun because there's no food anywhere".  It'd be easy enough to mod out all drinkables and have a map without water, but then what are you doing?  You're playing for about 6 weeks and then everyone dies at the same instant.

What I actually meant was that should "water" be a type of booze, and "booze" be the superbooze, if a character doesn't get to drink "water" for a period of time (contextually meaning dehydration) they start to work slowly.

[Girlinhat]

Ah, now that yes.  There's probably going to be three types of "booze" liquids.  The first is "water" which behaves like regular booze in vanilla.  The second is "survival booze" for when you need a push and it doesn't matter.  It will be flawed, causing injury and probably some insanity, but provides a good boost to speed and strength and everything.  The third is "primo" stuff, which causes a good boost and doesn't have a drawback, but is difficult to produce.  Like, a 10x10 farm plot might produce 5 units of primo, making it into an expensive and time-consuming project, but if you can get it into a flask then your soldiers will definitely benefit.  Burrows will be highly encouraged to prevent accident civilian drunkenness.  Regular water, the fluid in rivers, will probably be considered "tainted" or something, as it will provide no boost and dwarves will avoid it naturally, giving the impression 'no one wants to drink it and they all slow down, it must be slightly radioactive or something'.