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[Manveru Taurënér]

This question is a little removed from the current line of conversation, and relates to possible economy developments in the future:

Critters already have preferences and levels of happiness and now you’ve added aspirations, but have you considered in the future giving them utility functions for goods that they possess?

The main advantages I can see to this are:
1. A logical level of hoarding – instead of merely collecting all the socks, maybe they’d see how many socks they have and would rather trade some in for a tunic (setting marginal utility equal and all that), and
2. It can serve as a foundation for a wider economy – rather than having to invent demand curves, and thus prices, for certain goods, the prices of those goods are determined by how many critters actually want them (and to what extent) in the wider world.

The main disadvantage I can see is that, unless abstracted, point 2 would lead to us all having to run super computers.

Or in any case, have you got any plans at the moment for future economic developments?

Threetoe:    From John: When will the dwarven economy make it's way back into the game and make the process of growing a fortress feel much more grand and important.

Now this is the second question about the dwarven economy and I just wanna say that you know, going back in time, the original economy I think was so that you would make coins and the coins would be paid to dwarves that would randomly slip them around in the fortress in their rooms. Just so that the adventurer would come in and find treasure in every room kind of I think was the original idea for that. So that's how it started, anyway.
Toady:   *laughs* Yeah, it was just about treasure placement. We made sure that they always brought the coins back to their rooms so that when you were wandering around the fortress there'd be...It'd be a nice surprise any time, or not really a surprise if you remember your own fortress, but just opening the door and there's the treasure. Obviously we've grown a bit beyond that and then we got annoyed with the economy and had to take it out. I don't recall but I think we said earlier that the taverns and inns is our current thinking right now about when the dwarven economy is going to restart. I don't if that makes the fortress feel grand and important because you turned the fortress into an inn before the economy finds it's way back into the game. *laughs* It's sort of the opposite.
Threetoe:    I think the other problem with it is all the dwarves just never had enough jobs. Like the massive amounts of stragglers just, they didn't have enough money to pay for their rooms and stuff like that. The idlers.
Toady:    Yeah, it's a difficult problem to get everything working right, but yeah, maybe your dwarves will clamour for more jobs a little more aggressively than they did before. If you start ignoring them and they start going broke. But we'll have to see how it pans out. It's one of the things where next time the economy goes into the game there's no chance for it getting turned off again. I mean if we go into it, we're gonna dedicate ourselves to fixing it. Because it's more time for it now. I think it was a little premature when we tried to have it before and didn't have the larger world, and didn't have any goods in the larger world. Now that all that stuff's in, the economy can actually make sense and we can start working it into trading with other people and so on. And make all those systems consistent based on supply and demand. All that kind of thing. So when we do it next time it'll be for keeps.

This is the latest update on reimplementing the economy afaik. I didn't play back when it was still in the game so I can't really say much about how the old economy worked, but whatever new is coming sure seems as ambitious as pretty much everything else DF ^^

[Dirst]

This question is a little removed from the current line of conversation, and relates to possible economy developments in the future:

Critters already have preferences and levels of happiness and now you’ve added aspirations, but have you considered in the future giving them utility functions for goods that they possess?

The main advantages I can see to this are:
1. A logical level of hoarding – instead of merely collecting all the socks, maybe they’d see how many socks they have and would rather trade some in for a tunic (setting marginal utility equal and all that), and
2. It can serve as a foundation for a wider economy – rather than having to invent demand curves, and thus prices, for certain goods, the prices of those goods are determined by how many critters actually want them (and to what extent) in the wider world.

The main disadvantage I can see is that, unless abstracted, point 2 would lead to us all having to run super computers.

Or in any case, have you got any plans at the moment for future economic developments?

Threetoe:    From John: When will the dwarven economy make it's way back into the game and make the process of growing a fortress feel much more grand and important.

Now this is the second question about the dwarven economy and I just wanna say that you know, going back in time, the original economy I think was so that you would make coins and the coins would be paid to dwarves that would randomly slip them around in the fortress in their rooms. Just so that the adventurer would come in and find treasure in every room kind of I think was the original idea for that. So that's how it started, anyway.
Toady:   *laughs* Yeah, it was just about treasure placement. We made sure that they always brought the coins back to their rooms so that when you were wandering around the fortress there'd be...It'd be a nice surprise any time, or not really a surprise if you remember your own fortress, but just opening the door and there's the treasure. Obviously we've grown a bit beyond that and then we got annoyed with the economy and had to take it out. I don't recall but I think we said earlier that the taverns and inns is our current thinking right now about when the dwarven economy is going to restart. I don't if that makes the fortress feel grand and important because you turned the fortress into an inn before the economy finds it's way back into the game. *laughs* It's sort of the opposite.
Threetoe:    I think the other problem with it is all the dwarves just never had enough jobs. Like the massive amounts of stragglers just, they didn't have enough money to pay for their rooms and stuff like that. The idlers.
Toady:    Yeah, it's a difficult problem to get everything working right, but yeah, maybe your dwarves will clamour for more jobs a little more aggressively than they did before. If you start ignoring them and they start going broke. But we'll have to see how it pans out. It's one of the things where next time the economy goes into the game there's no chance for it getting turned off again. I mean if we go into it, we're gonna dedicate ourselves to fixing it. Because it's more time for it now. I think it was a little premature when we tried to have it before and didn't have the larger world, and didn't have any goods in the larger world. Now that all that stuff's in, the economy can actually make sense and we can start working it into trading with other people and so on. And make all those systems consistent based on supply and demand. All that kind of thing. So when we do it next time it'll be for keeps.

This is the latest update on reimplementing the economy afaik. I didn't play back when it was still in the game so I can't really say much about how the old economy worked, but whatever new is coming sure seems as ambitious as pretty much everything else DF ^^

Manveru, that quote deals with point 2.  Point 1 was envisioning an exchange economy... where there are things, people have ways of getting happiness from those things (eating them, wearing them, just owning them, etc.), and they are allowed to trade things with others to make each other mutually happier.

I think right now everyone's utilities are a bit to similar to each other to make this feasible.  If everyone values a sock the same, it will never be traded.  There are two ways to get "a difference of opinion" and therefore kickstart trade.

First is the idea of "enough" of something.  Urist has 2 socks worn for 100 utils of happiness (yes, economics has an actual unit of measurement for happiness), two more kept as spares for 25 additional utils, and only a couple utils per sock after that.  Now the guy with plenty of mittens and no socks will come over and trade some mittens for some socks.  (This gets more complicated depending on hoarding tendencies from personalities, but you get the idea.)

Second is preferences.  Each dwarf prefers certain materials, colors, items, etc.  Someone with a preference for pigtail fiber cloth might trade away cave spider silk socks to get pigtail fiber cloth socks.  If dyes were more prevalent, then color preferences would matter more as well.  A dwarf with a preference for variety due to personality traits would probably end up with mismatched socks.

[Cruxador]

...the version after 0.99 will be 1.00, so no, it won't be any of those

It'll be 0.99.02, I bet.

out of curiosity, I wonder what Toady's planning to add after this release.

Taverns are the big thing for the next big one. First will be bugfixes though, and probably some polish on the contents of this release.

[Knight Otu]

out of curiosity, I wonder what Toady's planning to add after this release.

Taverns are the big thing for the next big one. First will be bugfixes though, and probably some polish on the contents of this release.

It's more that taverns have a good chance. I don't think Toady has decided where to go after the bugfixes and minor features - or which minor features beyond job priorities he'll work on, for that matter.

[Kumis]

I think right now everyone's utilities are a bit to similar to each other to make this feasible.  If everyone values a sock the same, it will never be traded.  There are two ways to get "a difference of opinion" and therefore kickstart trade.

First is the idea of "enough" of something.  Urist has 2 socks worn for 100 utils of happiness (yes, economics has an actual unit of measurement for happiness), two more kept as spares for 25 additional utils, and only a couple utils per sock after that.  Now the guy with plenty of mittens and no socks will come over and trade some mittens for some socks.  (This gets more complicated depending on hoarding tendencies from personalities, but you get the idea.)

Second is preferences.  Each dwarf prefers certain materials, colors, items, etc.  Someone with a preference for pigtail fiber cloth might trade away cave spider silk socks to get pigtail fiber cloth socks.  If dyes were more prevalent, then color preferences would matter more as well.  A dwarf with a preference for variety due to personality traits would probably end up with mismatched socks.

Hey, Dirst, thanks a lot for the elaboration. I didn't want to write a wall of green text, so decided to skip the details.
What I had originally imagined is pretty much both of those points together. The carpenter starts trading his tables once he'd rather have a plump helmet roast than another table, and the hunter (especially one with featherwood and crossbow preferences) is willing to trade more for a featherwood crossbow than the carpenter is. I even made functions. I even imagined in steps how the economy could function. I am just that much of a party animal.

The problem was, the more I looked it the more problems arose. If you want I can PM you some of the issues. Some of them are utility function specific and some of them are more relevant to any economy, such as who owns the gold that's mined or crops that are grown and where do dwarfs get their initial endowments from - you can't make a table without first owning a log.

[King Mir]

I think instead of simulating economics on a per-person basis for the whole world, it would make much more sense to simulate the macro economics that occurs between sites. Each site would supply and demand certain goods, which would set prices for merchants.

[TD1]

Out of curiosity, would we see caravan and wagons on the roads? And, if we were to, for instance, to ambush them, would the sites they were going to lack in supply?

[MDFification]

I think instead of simulating economics on a per-person basis for the whole world, it would make much more sense to simulate the macro economics that occurs between sites. Each site would supply and demand certain goods, which would set prices for merchants.

Toady's confirmed that if he does that it's not going to be implemented for a while. I think specifically he mentioned he's scared of it being as broken as the last economics and starving out all the world's sites.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I think instead of simulating economics on a per-person basis for the whole world, it would make much more sense to simulate the macro economics that occurs between sites. Each site would supply and demand certain goods, which would set prices for merchants.

Toady's confirmed that if he does that it's not going to be implemented for a while. I think specifically he mentioned he's scared of it being as broken as the last economics and starving out all the world's sites.

He's also said that the time to bring it back would most likely be in conjunction with adding in taverns, since they kind of require some sort of economy to function (unless he's going to waste time setting up some kind of placeholder system). And going by this quote he doesn't seem to think possible starvation as that big of an issue, more than annoying perhaps that it might require some fudging to avoid it.

Yeah, it's going to be grossly destabilising when we add the actual economy to the game, but it should be entertaining. If we have to we'll just put strict controls on certain things ... not the same kind of strict controls that might stagnate the economy or whatever, but just actual magical strict controls that give things where there was once nothing. Hopefully we won't need to do that, and just make the overall situation like there's enough food being farmed ... we're going to have a slightly higher ratio than what they could get away with so that there hopefully won't be quite as many artificial problems and just real famines caused by the game saying there's a drought, or the game doing this, instead of just like 'well, the numbers didn't work out that year because some random crap happened'. Random's good too, but it's going to be really kind of horrifying.

We never have a timeframe for anything. There's just dependencies like when we get to the Dwarf Fortress end, and taverns we'll want to have an economy up for that probably, or some kind of payment system or something. Something to make the tavern make sense. In that sense, since we wanted to kind of, I mean, we're not sure exactly when we're going to work on that, but those are on kind of a similar time frame in any case.

[Mesa]

For once I got to read a devblog soon after it was posted.
Keep them fixes coming, and get well soon!

[flabort]

handled broken mushroom cap ramps

Waitasecond...
Giant mushroom caps with ramps to form domes?  I think I missed that somehow.

[Lolfail0009]

I'm more concerned about:

hydras severing the same body part multiple times

I know Hydrae are badass, but they're not physics-exempt

[flabort]

I'm more concerned about:

hydras severing the same body part multiple times

I know Hydrae are badass, but they're not physics-exempt

What about the Conservation of Mass and Conservation of Energy? That's part of why I always thought they were so badass.

[Eric Blank]

Conservation of mass and energy is of no value to us! How are we supposed to get infinite ‼socks‼ if we cant have infinite socks or ‼‼?

[Footkerchief]

With the changes made to the world, are we going to see people retain their titles after leaving the map? For example, the Outpost Liason will retain his or her post after leaving the map after the caravan?

This seems like a bug report.  Is it on the tracker?