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[Jacob/Lee]

I've heard so much about so-called "hill dwarves" but I have no idea what people mean when they say it. Someone enlighten me?

[Rose]

They're basically dwarves that live outside of the main fortress, not under your control, and come there for work or whatever.

[Jacob/Lee]

They're basically dwarves that live outside of the main fortress, not under your control, and come there for work or whatever.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks.

[Valtam]

I was perusing through the Consolidated Development at the Wiki, just to tease myself with all the stuff planned for this already awesome alpha-of-a-game, and I found this:

Bloat330
   CLEANSING EVIL AREAS    (Future)    The cleansing of evil areas needs to be put back in after tracking is improved.

I know that the development usually strays from the (sort of) predefined way, and that's why there isn't a feature timeline to be found anywhere, but given that repopulation and various sites are going to be implemented, will there be a way to "claim" or, as said above, cleanse evil lands?

[Trif]

I was perusing through the Consolidated Development at the Wiki, just to tease myself with all the stuff planned for this already awesome alpha-of-a-game, and I found this:

Bloat330
   CLEANSING EVIL AREAS    (Future)    The cleansing of evil areas needs to be put back in after tracking is improved.

I know that the development usually strays from the (sort of) predefined way, and that's why there isn't a feature timeline to be found anywhere, but given that repopulation and various sites are going to be implemented, will there be a way to "claim" or, as said above, cleanse evil lands?

Toady said that the game will move away from traditional "good" and "evil" areas because that's rather ill defined and also misses out on the spectrum between the two extremes. In the future, lands will be associated with various "spheres", much like gods are now.
And the best part is, you'll be able to influence these spheres with your fortress. So, if you produce a lot of musical instruments for example, maybe the surrounding woods be called the forest of singing after a while, and there will be more birds or some trees start to sing or something like that.
Of course you could reverse the influence, too, in some ways. That should be useful for lands of decay, violence or death.

[Knight Otu]

There were demon sites long long long ago before the switch to full 3d. They were things like pyramids and stuff.

Weren't the pyramids the old undead ruins? I believe the only "demon sites" were the goblin dark tower capitals, which would have a demon lord (assuming it didn't get killed during world gen).

And as Toady said that we doesn't want to reveal the details yet for "entertainment purposes", don't expect answers on what the demon sites are beyond what he already said.

As for ocean titans... I think they aren't generated at the moment? Probably happened at the time that titans got their lair shrines.

[rhesusmacabre]

A bunch of questions about trees:

What sort of timescale is treegrowth on?
Will they have foilage and/or seeds?
If they have seeds, will dwarves be able to plant them?
Will underground trees become multi-tile? (probably unnecessary, and it's cramped down there anyway, but Morrowind)
If treefelling now works like mining, what happens if a tree is cut all the way through? (i.e. does it all collapse into logs, or act like a regular cave-in, or just drop one level?)

[CaptainArchmage]

A bunch of questions about trees:

What sort of timescale is treegrowth on?
Will they have foilage and/or seeds?
If they have seeds, will dwarves be able to plant them?
Will underground trees become multi-tile? (probably unnecessary, and it's cramped down there anyway, but Morrowind)
If treefelling now works like mining, what happens if a tree is cut all the way through? (i.e. does it all collapse into logs, or act like a regular cave-in, or just drop one level?)

*sigh*

Toady is now working on goblin sites, so we probably won't know about the trees until we hit elf sites in between 96 hours and 2 months from now. You have a legitimate concern there - unless changes are made, multi-tile trees may cause problems in the underground, as they use the same code for growth as aboveground trees. This can be solved by making the underground more spacious, and having a minimum amount of space around trees for them to grow. We will probably get some new woodcutting designations, so we can cut staircases inside trees. We may also get water inside trees...

There were demon sites long long long ago before the switch to full 3d. They were things like pyramids and stuff.

Weren't the pyramids the old undead ruins? I believe the only "demon sites" were the goblin dark tower capitals, which would have a demon lord (assuming it didn't get killed during world gen).

Once again I want to play the 2D version. Checking out these old features is a quest in itself.

As for ocean titans... I think they aren't generated at the moment? Probably happened at the time that titans got their lair shrines.

Ocean Titans are generated, they've been cited in a number of threads and I think I've seen them in Legends mode...

[Knight Otu]

Ocean Titans are generated, they've been cited in a number of threads and I think I've seen them in Legends mode...

I've just generated a quick world with max titans (nominally 1000, but I suspect I might have gotten fewer), and no ocean (or synonymous) titan was among them. As I said, I suspect they were taken out of the game when lairs where added - I know they used to exist.

[rhesusmacabre]

*sigh*

Toady is now working on goblin sites, so we probably won't know about the trees until we hit elf sites in between 96 hours and 2 months from now.

I wasn't expecting answers straight away.

[Torchy]

Ocean Titans are generated, they've been cited in a number of threads and I think I've seen them in Legends mode...

I've just generated a quick world with max titans (nominally 1000, but I suspect I might have gotten fewer), and no ocean (or synonymous) titan was among them. As I said, I suspect they were taken out of the game when lairs where added - I know they used to exist.

Can we get a clarification on this, Toady? Were Ocean Titans taken out? If not, do they have Shrines placed currently or is there some system in place to prevent the strange situation of an inaccessible shrine sitting out there somewhere, presumably on the seafloor?

[MrWiggles]

*sigh*

Toady is now working on goblin sites, so we probably won't know about the trees until we hit elf sites in between 96 hours and 2 months from now.

I wasn't expecting answers straight away.

I think the question is bit premature though. Those questions may very well be answer through Dev Logs when he gets to Elf Sites.

[Khalvin]

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this. Surface Rivers in low lying layers cut through higher layer cliffs hills rather then detour around them.

Is this side effect of the world gen process, or is caused locally when the region is loaded in Dwarf mode/adventure mode?

It is nit picky. So I'm wondering what causes it.

[monk12]

They're basically dwarves that live outside of the main fortress, not under your control, and come there for work or whatever.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. Thanks.

They get mentioned a lot more in DF Talk, and multiple talks touch on them and their role in future events. In particular, DF Talk 12 has Word of Toad for your question.

Rainseeker:   I'm sorry, for those of us that don't know what you mean, what are hill dwarves?
Toady:   Hill dwarves ... The main idea is that if you want to have an army arc and you want to be able to compete at the numbers that other civilizations are putting out there, and if you want to actually go on the offensive especially - because you can lock up your fortress and trap people and do horrible siege things to them and magma and later when we have moving fortresses I don't even want to know what people are going to grind the poor attacking armies into - but if you want to go on the offensive and you hope to actually make your mark on the world then you're going to need more dwarves than fifty or sixty or seventy dwarves, and this is where hill dwarves come in. Now hill dwarves, it's not just to say that you have a bunch of dwarves living just in hills, like their copies of hobbits or something, but it's just meaning that they're outside your fortress, either in the wilderness or they've colonised the underground lairs that you've got, you could make deeper colonies of dwarves as well. And that might be related to getting extra mining, it might be related to just getting extra farming, or they could totally just be subsisting by themselves. But the idea would be that you could send out dwarves from your fortress, you can arm them, you can train them and you can send them out to cause trouble. At the same time they'd be able to come to your fortress and trade, probably mostly food and other things like that, so you can do some exports that way without having to wait a long time for a caravan; if you want to do it. Like I was saying, this is only really required for a fort that wants to be an expansionist military rather than a strictly defensive dwarf military setup. At the same time that we're adding hill dwarves we'll probably - if they're not already in - we'll be adding the fortress embark scenarios, so that you can say 'We have three hundred dwarves left to go found a fortress out in the wild' or, whatever 'to go found a fortress on the border with the goblin kingdom'; then you'd have dwarves inside your fortress and you'd have dwarves outside your fortress. It totally changes the relationship with migrants and how many dwarves you have, so it's a big deal. But that's not to say that the old gameplay system wouldn't also be preserved where you can start with a small number of dwarves and have a different sort, or a smaller kind of operation going on, rather than one where you're worried about playing more of this world strategic game. But if you want to play the world strategic game, which is part of what the army arc is about and part of what having a world map is about - it's so underused in dwarf mode - then you need more numbers, and you can't just have them all on the map, it's just not practical, as we've seen with the frames per second that we get. The alternatives are like having ever dwarf count for twenty dwarves or something, but we just didn't want to do it that way, especially with it how it has to match in with adventure mode, and how adventure mode actually has all the people all over the place. So your fortress would have more sprawl to it itself.

Hopefully I didn't strike you down with that wall o' text there This is also why the question about Hill Dwarves is timely, since it sounds like embark scenarios and soforth are very near term, and the two topics are rather intertwined. I'm really hoping the answer is yes, but it's a big enough thing I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it didn't make the cut.

[Cruxador]

A bunch of questions about trees:

While we don't know this for sure, I feel that I can anticipate the answers to these pretty reliably:

What sort of timescale is treegrowth on?

It should be about the same as real life. Growth calculated each season.

Will they have foilage and/or seeds?

Yes, but seeds will continue to be abstracted in most cases.

Will underground trees become multi-tile?

Yes, of course.

If treefelling now works like mining, what happens if a tree is cut all the way through?

More like a regular cave-in.