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[EnigmaticHat]

Hopefully we at least keep valley herbs in some form, or we're going to be forever in suspense as to what the golden salve does.

[Spiderking50]

Can you explain hill dwarves a little more holistically? What exactly will they do and what will their relation to your fortress be? Will they actually be on site (i.e. on your fort screen) or just an invisible force that sorta matters? Will they be attacked by armies and that cause problems? Will they wander on and off screen and just be just uncontrollable dwarves? What do they do?

[Footkerchief]

Can you explain hill dwarves a little more holistically? What exactly will they do and what will their relation to your fortress be? Will they actually be on site (i.e. on your fort screen) or just an invisible force that sorta matters? Will they be attacked by armies and that cause problems? Will they wander on and off screen and just be just uncontrollable dwarves? What do they do?

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.
Rainseeker:   Are you thinking that you'd allow dwarves to train, or you could set up training that happens off the map, basically?
Toady:   Yeah, and it could be all kinds of things. You basically have representatives from your fortress sent out to the ... kind of in the way we were talking about, as the player you're in control of the official capacities of the dwarves, it would give you that position over a whole population that you have even less control over, all these hill dwarves. I don't know if you have to take care of you hill dwarves, maybe they'll leave, maybe they'll just attack, try and get new people in charge of the main fortress. We've kind of put you in the position of being a noble from the beginning in a way, and then when you become a barony you would be a baron over your barony of hill dwarves, so taxing the hill dwarves might be a big theme, going out and taxing your poor hill dwarves. We don't want to get too far off topic, I guess, not that we ever had a problem with that before, but it's just I don't want to talk about something I haven't completely ... well, that never stopped me either, but let me just say that Zach and I have not one hundred percent worked this out, but that's the idea with hill dwarves, and that's the justification for hill dwarves, and no, you're not going to have to have hill dwarves.

[...]

Rainseeker:   So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?
Toady:   Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks.
Capntastic:   So the hill dwarves are basically a conduit for your fortress to interact with the rest of the world?
Toady:   Yeah, yeah, at least in that way ... I think there will be places for your dwarves to also have direct impact, but when it comes to military stuff, and certain trade things, you're going to have to act through intermediate sites just because of the sheer numbers behind it. The deep sites are ... they act in a similar fashion for underground business, but they're also ... we haven't really planned that exactly how strange they're going to be, but they supplement your food, that kind of thing, if you don't want to farm, you can trade with them.

[smurfingtonthethird]

Do vegetables and plants shmush if they are thrown at people, or walls or things?

Do people in battles break down in tears mid-fight should they kill a relative or an old friend?

We'll never know what golden salve does, EnigmaticHat. We'll never know.

[Footkerchief]

Do vegetables and plants shmush if they are thrown at people, or walls or things?

Nope.  Projectile impacts are the same as in the current version.  Items getting damaged (in the same way that creatures do) will be a big change when it comes.

Do people in battles break down in tears mid-fight should they kill a relative or an old friend?

They can, yes:

Would the killer of someone be disturbed by the corpse of his victim? For example, someone gives you a quest to kill his brother and then you recruit the quest giver and have him kill his own brother. Would he break down and start crying over what he has done?

Yeah, he'd experience all the same troubles.  The game sort of needs adrenalin or something now.  It does get reasonably strange sometimes, how immediately reflective people get in large combats.

[neblime]

Now that wars can start (and stop I assume) out of worldgen, can player adventurers directly cause them?  can you become affiliated with an entity to an extent where your actions could be considered a reason for war with that entity? (say i'm good friends of a dwarf civilization and I go kill some elves in another civ, is there any circumstance in which this will cause anger with the dwarf civ?)

[CaptainArchmage]

No really, I'd really like to see things like longland grass and whip vines stay in! Clearly though, we'll have a lot of choice for aboveground crops. We'll need to build some greenhouses.......

Are we going to be able to order rough gems from caravans in the next release? Any changes to the caravan mechanics (i.e. more than four items of each kind can be brought).

That would help keep things stocked up for crystal glass and so on.

Are we going to see material-based mandates go back in anytime soon, or are you going to be reworking that system?

Also to be honest, it would be great to have a release tomorrow on the anniversary of DF2010. Even if it is completely crawling with bugs. Some of us had to water soil to get farms to grow in those days!

[Orange Wizard]

Also to be honest, it would be great to have a release tomorrow on the anniversary of DF2010. Even if it is completely crawling with bugs. Some of us had to water soil to get farms to grow in those days!

An anniversary release would be kinda nice, but honestly I would want Toady to make the game playable first.
As long as it's before 2015.

I hope it's before 2015.

[CaptainArchmage]

Also to be honest, it would be great to have a release tomorrow on the anniversary of DF2010. Even if it is completely crawling with bugs. Some of us had to water soil to get farms to grow in those days!

An anniversary release would be kinda nice, but honestly I would want Toady to make the game playable first.
As long as it's before 2015.

I hope it's before 2015.

Given the day it is going to be, we’ll probably be hearing about the Xbox One version of Dwarf Fortress, and the Tavern DLC.

[Orange Wizard]

Also to be honest, it would be great to have a release tomorrow on the anniversary of DF2010. Even if it is completely crawling with bugs. Some of us had to water soil to get farms to grow in those days!

An anniversary release would be kinda nice, but honestly I would want Toady to make the game playable first.
As long as it's before 2015.

I hope it's before 2015.

Given the day it is going to be, we’ll probably be hearing about the Xbox One version of Dwarf Fortress, and the Tavern DLC.

That made me laugh more than it should have ...

Now I want to know what DF would be like on an Xbox. There's not a lot of buttons, so Toady would have to make the interface even more unintuitive.

[darkflagrance]

Can't wait to start a fort in a world where dwarves are extinct and repopulate the world. Has Toady mentioned if we can pass legends mode to skip centuries after we retire a fort?

[smirk]

Thanks for the wall of text, as always!

With all these real-world plants going in, will they have more realistic growth times (plant in spring, harvest late summer/fall, etc.)? Or are you sticking to the 'one crop every season' plan for now?

[Matoro]

Are we going to see material-based mandates go back in anytime soon, or are you going to be reworking that system?

Urist McBaron mandates bismuthine items! Urist McMayor mandates slade furniture!

Yeah, I think it'll need some reworking. It will probably be handled when Toady starts rewriting fortress economy and nobles.

[sambojin]

Quote from: Deboche
Will creatures be able to ride a creature that can climb? And would they keep use of both hands in that situation?

Yeah.  Jumping mounts, maybe, too...  though I'm not really sure what happens code-wise currently when a mount becomes a projectile (which is how jumping works).  The rider may detach, which'll be funny until it is fixed.

Does this mean that an adventurer also becomes a projectile when jumping? Is it possible to jump at an enemy and damage them and would you take damage from the impact? Is it possible to lodge yourself or your mount in bits of enemies, and if so, how do you dislodge yourself? If damage and lodging is possible but unintended, can you leave it in as a "feature" for at least a few versions?

(I only ask because corpse-shurikens and fluffy-wambler-throwing are time-honored tactics for many adventurers. But if you could throw yourself or your mount by jumping, the results may be rather amusing (and lethal) in the combat logs. I'm assuming human adventurers are considered blunt weapons with a large impact area.)

[Spitzkrug]

There's a way to set up army formations and move the units all together, keeping that formation? like in some rts games. If not, i suggest it! also for enemy armies

Some times ago someone told me which the game will become a 4x like game (that's why i thought about army formations and large battles).. is this still true? if yes, in which game mode? Fortress or legend?