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[BradUffner]

Whenever fire and walls is done, it should never be easy to burn down an entire elf grove simply by starting a campfire next to a named tree. That would be lame. Unless maybe the forest's been in drought and everything is tinder dry.

I'd expect some sort of Elfy / Nature magic thing to protect the Elf cities from standard (non-magic) fire.

[Cruxador]

Whenever fire and walls is done, it should never be easy to burn down an entire elf grove simply by starting a campfire next to a named tree. That would be lame. Unless maybe the forest's been in drought and everything is tinder dry.

I'd expect some sort of Elfy / Nature magic thing to protect the Elf cities from standard (non-magic) fire.

Sure, if by "Elfy / Nature magic" you mean "elves with buckets". That and the fact that wet (live) wood doesn't burn that well anyway.

[Vattic]

By the sounds of things hill dwarves will be making their own hillocks, if this is so does it bring us any closer to other earthworks and even earthworks in fortress mode? Shaping the earth being one of the most lasting impacts of activity should make ruins more interesting even after a long time of decay.

In the last batch of ToadyOne answers, he said that this wasnt happening for fortress mode.

Fair enough. Must have missed that specific answer. Cheers .

[CaptainArchmage]

So how large are the hill dwarf sites? Are they still 17x17 and too large to be reclaimed?

In which cavern layers are the deep sites going to be?

[Mel_Vixen]

So how large are the hill dwarf sites? Are they still 17x17 and too large to be reclaimed?

In which cavern layers are the deep sites going to be?

The answerisin the newest Dev-log:

  I'm working on deep dwarven sites, and it should include a bit of early work on fortresses as well, since the basics of their individual living arrangments and industry should be about the same.  Deep sites claim areas much larger than forts (the size of human towns in the current version -- up to 17x17 embark tiles), and a lot of this will probably be devoted to farms in the cavern layers, but I'm hoping for something reasonably different from a human village underground.  These kind of sites aren't reclaimable (because they are too large), so the amount of farms won't clash with the time-compressed nature of farming in fort mode.  Aside from the living, farming and workshop areas, there'll be zones for mining and storage as well.  Certain of them have barons, and those'll have an additional area.

[monk12]

If an entire mountainhome is lost, and then a player claims one of the border forts, would the population spread from that fort prefer to spill into the old deep sites, prefer to build new sites, or simply not care? Does the presence of those sites increase the rate at which the population spreads?

[CaptainArchmage]

So how large are the hill dwarf sites? Are they still 17x17 and too large to be reclaimed?

In which cavern layers are the deep sites going to be?

The answerisin the newest Dev-log:

  I'm working on deep dwarven sites, and it should include a bit of early work on fortresses as well, since the basics of their individual living arrangments and industry should be about the same.  Deep sites claim areas much larger than forts (the size of human towns in the current version -- up to 17x17 embark tiles), and a lot of this will probably be devoted to farms in the cavern layers, but I'm hoping for something reasonably different from a human village underground.  These kind of sites aren't reclaimable (because they are too large), so the amount of farms won't clash with the time-compressed nature of farming in fort mode.  Aside from the living, farming and workshop areas, there'll be zones for mining and storage as well.  Certain of them have barons, and those'll have an additional area.

Toady was referring to the deep sites; my question was whether the hill sites are also 17x17.

[rhesusmacabre]

The hill/deep sites are too large to reclaim, and that's the main difference, though the maps are also completely different.  I'm not sure about the borders -- the layers of the cavern tend to be connected, though there are water areas.  I'm sure I'll encounter various problems when I get to the deep site maps.  Ideally, the fortresses will go down to at least the first layer (and sometimes all the way down to have magma forges), and through the cavern layers they will connect to the deep site maps.  I'm not sure every deep site map will be on a cavern layer(s), but it'll probably be very common for them to have a significant presence there, especially for food and lumber.

[Cobbler89]

Toady, when you said before that non-fortress sites would be too big to reclaim, I'd assumed that they could theoretically span who knows how many of those 16x16 map sectors; but now that I notice the latest devlog saying they only go up to 17x17, I'm wondering... If non-fortress sites can't go far beyond the player limit of 16x16, why not limit them just one embark tile more (er, fewer?) and let sites use a common framework, suitable not only for eventually making other sites reclaimable but for eventually letting modders play as human towns, elf hamlets and such? At the moment I'm starting to suspect that the fact other sites can exceed 16x16, all the way up to the whopping one embark tile wider (yes, that's sarcasm) of 17x17, is not the real cause of their being nonplayable, but rather a technical means to enforce their nonplayability, while the real reason has been left unwritten (as far as I've seen), though it might be as simple as that the task of making all types of sites meet certain standards of playability is not worth your trouble in the near future (which I'd still rather hear than suspect while I hear other things). Or, is the intention to limit site sprawl at the present time, but leave room long-term to make sites that do stretch across a multiplicity of 16x16 sectors -- a sort of Dwarven/Elven/Goblin equivalent of Los Angeles, if you will?

A note to the mathematically inclined: I'm aware that going from 16x16 to 17x17 itself adds a grand total of 33 embark tiles, one more than the size of a fortress of maximum length and minimum width. I still think that whether you're looking at 16 vs 17 or at 16^2 (256) vs 17^2 (289) it's odd to let the size only just exceed what would allow a common site framework, if that isn't itself the point.

Also, if this has already been discussed elsewhere, say, in DF Talk, feel free to just point me to it.

[CaptainArchmage]

There's one other thing with embarking that is you can't have an embark crossing between region tiles. You can't have a 4x4 embark that has 8 tiles in one region tile and 8 tiles in another. I noticed that a lot of the settlements now do that.

The problem with 17x17 sites beyond the game engine is also with performance, but there are people who can run 16x16 embarks. They just don't run very well for most of those people, however.

Toady, how large are the worldgen fortress sites at the moment? Are they strictly of something like 4x4 dimensions or can they vary?

[Jables]

There's one other thing with embarking that is you can't have an embark crossing between region tiles. You can't have a 4x4 embark that has 8 tiles in one region tile and 8 tiles in another. I noticed that a lot of the settlements now do that.

This. I'm pretty sure the reason 17x17 is the maximum size for certain sites is that it's the biggest size you can have while still guaranteeing that the entire site will fit inside a 2x2 block of region tiles. Preventing sites from crossing region boundaries is an artificial limitation that applies to player fortresses for technical reasons. This will almost certainly change in the future (though likely not the near future), but until then we'll have to live with many sites being impossible to reclaim.

[CaptainArchmage]

There's one other thing with embarking that is you can't have an embark crossing between region tiles. You can't have a 4x4 embark that has 8 tiles in one region tile and 8 tiles in another. I noticed that a lot of the settlements now do that.

This. I'm pretty sure the reason 17x17 is the maximum size for certain sites is that it's the biggest size you can have while still guaranteeing that the entire site will fit inside a 2x2 block of region tiles. Preventing sites from crossing region boundaries is an artificial limitation that applies to player fortresses for technical reasons. This will almost certainly change in the future (though likely not the near future), but until then we'll have to live with many sites being impossible to reclaim.

Toady, will all ruined dwarf fortresses be reclaimable or will there be fortresses that cannot be reclaimed because of crossing region tiles and so on?

[Cobbler89]

@Jables: Good points both re. 17x17 being as large as possible while limiting to 2x2 sectors/region tiles and re. the region boundary limitation for player embarks. Would be interesting to hear more from Toady (e.g., is it a long-term goal to remove the region tile boundary limitation for embarks, and what limitations on embark size will then be in effect, the same 17x17 to limit actual region tile coverage to 2x2?), but now my curiousity as to the reasoning involved won't bug me so much in any case. ;^) Thanks!

[CaptainArchmage]

@Jables: Good points both re. 17x17 being as large as possible while limiting to 2x2 sectors/region tiles and re. the region boundary limitation for player embarks. Would be interesting to hear more from Toady (e.g., is it a long-term goal to remove the region tile boundary limitation for embarks, and what limitations on embark size will then be in effect, the same 17x17 to limit actual region tile coverage to 2x2?), but now my curiousity as to the reasoning involved won't bug me so much in any case. ;^) Thanks!

If you want to hear more from Toady, you can always put the question in lime green and he will try to answer it. Copied for you:

Toady, do you plan to remove the region tile boundary limitation for player embarks and if so what limitations on embark size will be in effect?

Was there any reason behind making the large worldgen sites 17x17 rather than 16x16?

One reason Toady may have done this was to prevent players reclaiming worldgen sites; if one had a 16x16 ruined city in the next version it might have been possible to reclaim it (assuming a suitable computer system). The reason for not making worldgen sites bigger than 17x17 would be covered by sprawl and making sure they wouldn't overlap more than a 2x2 area of region tiles.

How do dwarf settlements react to aquifers in worldgen? If we have a mountain range with an aquifer, will dwarves just not settle there, or will they construct shafts down to below the aquifer level? How do hill dwarves react to aquifers?

Will there be worldgen walls in the next version, especially around mountains with dwarf settlements?

[BinaryBeast1010011010]

Would be undying glory for quantum menace if his two slits method was to be immortalized through use by hill dwarves...