Print

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

[Iapetus]

Curently, the only mods I've made are to remove the [GRAZER] tag from everything.  (I consider the current system, where keeping herbivores requires careful management to keep them fed, but you can have unlimited carnivores without worrying about supplying them with meat, to be essentially broken).

I'll also sometimes temporarily add [NO_EAT] and [NO_DRINK] to dwarves, if I've got some important dwarves starving to death in hospital or jail* and no-one feeding/watering them.  (My captain of the guard (jailed for beating someone to death) gave birth in jail.  The baby crawled away, and the prisoner never ate or drank anything due to constantly trying and failing to "seek infant", until she almost died of dehydration).


When I tire of this particular fortress, I'll mod in display cases, simplify the clothing (replace most clothes with an entity-specific robe-clone), and perhaps add a few new weapon/armor types, and some new entities.  Longer term, I may either implement one of the "simplified leather" mods, and/or prune and consolidate the creature raws to remove some of the less distinct species and sub-species, and to make fewer but more distinct animal-men species.  (Possibly implementing some of the suggestions in the "too many animal-men" thread, such as making similar species into castes of the same species, or making animal-men a rare caste of the base species).

Also, these:

Add SHELL to feathers and nails, so they can be used for decoration and strange moods
Add EDIBLE_COOKED to blood, so barrels of blood can be used as ingredients
Make scales and chitin tannable to leather and tanned chitin
Add diplomats to elves, and trade liaisons to humans

Also, why all the aquifer hate? Easy, early access to clean, safe water, power, and sometimes even fish. Am I the only member of the We <3 Aquifers Club?

I like to choose sites where aquifer and non-aquifer biomes meet.  That way I can get all the advantages of aquifers, with none of the drawbacks.

Yeurgh! Coming from the north east of England I've been exposed to black pudding all of my life.
I can safely say that I have never, and will never, touch the stuff.

Have it killed.

If you've never tried it, how do you know you don't like it?

[KodKod]

If you've never tried it, how do you know you don't like it?

On principle.

The principle that I don't like gross things.

[Valkyrie]

I mostly do a couple of convenience changes:

* Add [GRASSTRAMPLE:1] to dwarves, so I don't have to worry about them accidentally destroying saplings and plants (though pets still pose a hazard).
* Set dwarven ethics to eat & trophy sentients, so I can get my 40d-style goblin bone arrows and dwarf skull trophies back.  I wish I could narrow this a bit more, though - without it I starve for bones, with it I'm overflooded with bones.  (the 'proper' fix, of editing all the relevant creatures to alter their butchery yields, is too invasive for my taste)
* Remove the menial_work_exemption from baron/duke/count & spouses, since it only barely works and therefore just gets in my way, rather than providing the intended limitation
* Lower the goblin siege triggers, so my low pop forts will still trigger them (and lower the Titan siege requirements in worldgen config, for the same reason)
* Add [SHELL], [ITEMS_HARD], [ITEMS_SCALED] to the scale material template, so all scales now count as shells, and can be used to decorate items and make shell armor.  Seemed the simplest way to solve both the old lack-of-shells problem at the same time as finding a use for scales (which had no use when I started this)

Depending on what I want from the fort, I'll also add [SOIL_SAND] to more of the soil types (usually just the ones with 'sandy' in the name), to ensure I've got access without having to manually check embark sites.  I tend to avoid aquifers, but I typically manage that with world gen parameters and site selection rather than raws editing (while aquifers are useful, I find their annoyances outweigh their benefits, given the way my forts tend to span most available underground z-levels).

For the 'normal' game-altering options in init.txt and d_init.txt, I usually use a pop cap of 30-50, and lower the STORE_DIST_..._COMBINE for barrels to 200 and bins to 20 (very happy with that - meant the dwarves would use the stockpile right next to them, rather than lug stuff halfway across the fort just because someone threw a single item a bin/barrel over there first).

I've tried shortening dwarven childhood, but I must've missed something as it never seemed to actually work for me - they'd still take 12 years to get from baby to adult, even when set for 1.5yrs or 3yrs.  Since a fort has to run for a long time to test if its working, I've largely abandoned figuring that one out.

It's been tempting to tone down the grazer requirements, add more refuse & food uses (ie make all hair useable for thread, figure out something for cartilage, feathers, and blood), and ensure that all the underground plants & trees will appear in the 1st cavern level (since I remove caverns 2 & 3 in worldgen for FPS reasons), but am living with the vanilla version for now.

[AWdeV]

Sphalerite, those are pretty ingenious edits, could you explain how you do the leather-thing for bigger (and badder) beasties?

It involves some massive reworking of some of the material and creature raws.  I first created duplicate copies of the required material templates (leather, skin, scale, bone, tooth, sinew, etc) with higher or lower material properties.  That part isn't original, I copied it from the Genesis mod.  I have a Python script which goes through the creature raws and assigns each creature different material types depending on creature size and megabeast tags.  It also culls non-existent materials like penguin teeth or bluejay leather in the process.  Finally, for creatures which are large enough to produce more than one leather, the script creates new TAN_A_HIDE_x reactions that give more than one piece of leather as a result of tanning skin, and adds a tag to each creature's skin to cause it to trigger that leather reaction instead of the standard one.  It's a pretty complex process and requires a lot of hand-tweaking of the raws to work, so I'm not comfortable releasing the script as an automated tool at the moment.

Oh wow, thanks for the explanation. It's a bit out of my league at the moment, though. I don't think I dare try it. I'll fiddle around with some other stuff. 

[slink]

Blood sausage always sounded good to me, because I enjoy the cooked blood dribblings on red meat, but I never had the courage to buy it mail-order.  That's probably the only way I would ever get it where I live.  It just seems to me like something that ought to be eaten freshly made.

When I go to a new version I:

Add my chosen tileset under art, and add the appropriate lines to use it at my chosen resolution.  I turn off intro and sound, turn on FPS and liquid level displays, centralize nicknames, set the screen display type to FRAME_BUFFER, change pop cap to something that gets ignored anyway for practical purposes (80 does not mean 200, really it doesn't  ).

Then I hope desperately for DFTherapist and DFHack to be updated.  I can actually play for a while without DFTherapist but I have become addicted to DFHack.  I need the prospect function to choose an embark site, just for starters.

Once the bug releases slow down, I add some changes to animal names so I can tell males from females in all circumstances.  For instance, I dislike tying out a female dog on sentry duty, with her puppies all swarming around in danger.

I used to edit the plants to make farming more challenging, but the current versions have been providing more than enough challenge without struggling with the farming, thank you.

If I get someone with a mood requiring shells and I have no fishing, I will mod in SHELL to something I can get from slaughter quickly.  If they need silk or wool cloth and the caravan hasn't brought me any that I could afford to buy, I make some at the smelter.  Once I made a mistake and made 30000 pieces of silk cloth instead of 3.     I dumped that and reloaded.

I avoid aquifers like the plague but do not mod them out. 

I do like the idea of edible blood, though.   

Edit: forgot that I set it for annual saves, and pauses after saving

[rtg593]

We <3 Aquifer club member, right here. Aquifer is mandatory, volcano if at all possible, river/stream/brook is nice, and ocean is a nice bonus, in the order of importance for choosing an embark site. I'll sacrifice shallow metals and clay/soil if I can get most of that.

As far as modding, pop cap to 100, no intro movie, and seasonal autosaves. That's about all I do.

Edit: oh, fps counter, liquid level, add in the Phoebus tileset. Guess those count

[AWdeV]

I add       

[SELECT_MATERIAL:HAIR]
         [STATE_NAME:ALL_SOLID:hair]
         [STATE_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:hair]
         [YARN]

to whatever large mammals I harvest for meat so I can make unicorn hair coats and muskox hair trousers. Also I delete _EXOTIC from every raw (oh the tedium). I use dfhack to get rid of splatter occasionally and automate vein digging (or making things easy for megaprojects).

Also I used Dwarf The Rapist to manage my dwarves. Use it and you will wonder how you ever got by without it.

So, how do you turn off aquifers? I've never tried that before.

Just a tiny tip that could save some time (it would still take a lot of time) is to use ctrl + h in the text files. Ctrl + f helps you find things but ctrl + h allows you to replace everything in one go. So just open any file with animals and then use ctrl + h and replace [PET_EXOTIC] with [PET]. [TRAINABLE] needs to be added manually or else you'd get a) war cavies and other pointless things or b) animals with two trainable tags at once which probably won't be a good idea.

I haven't been editing my PET_EXOTICs this time around because I don't know how it works in the new version and I'm kinda curious what Toady intended. It's a pity I'm also incredibly impatient.

[Argonnek]

I just make it so that dwarves can butcher and eat sentients. I'm sick of having piles and piles of corpses crowding my embarks. Hmm, removing skill rust... That's just editing their memory attribute right?

[Ubiq]

1. I've added about three hundred plants and about a hundred animals so I always bring those over. If necessary, I make changes to their entries to keep them up to date. If one of them has a duplicate in the regular version, I change mine to something else.

2. Entity_Default:

Capitalize the various position titles since lower case titles annoy the hell out of me and then add the following:
[USE_ANY_PET_RACE]
[OUTDOOR_FARMING]
[OUTDOOR_WOOD]
[RIVER_PRODUCTS]
[DEFAULT_SITE_TYPE:CITY]
[BUILDS_OUTDOOR_FORTIFICATIONS]
[BUILDS_OUTDOOR_TOMBS]

Just to have more options as well as more variety in Adventure Mode until we get Mountain Halls back in the game

3. Animal Changes.

Up the lifespands of Giant Cave Spider and Desert Scorpions to 200:300 since 20:30 just seems too short.

Add a zero to the grazers that drop dead because they can't feed themselves.

Change Dingo's biome from NOT_FREEZING to ANY_DESERT so I'm not constantly running into them.

Eliminate skill rust.

[Drakkett]

How do you remove skill rust?  I've seen a lot of people say they do this but no example of how.   Still pretty new at the game, but the skill rust bothers me.

[KodKod]

How do you remove skill rust?  I've seen a lot of people say they do this but no example of how.   Still pretty new at the game, but the skill rust bothers me.

By adding

[SKILL_RATES:100:NONE:NONE:NONE]

to the Dwarf entry in creatures_standard.

[martinuzz]

Raw change I never go without:

GCS: [MAXAGE:60:80]

[telamon]

I don't think all my raw fixes apply now that animals have changed in the new version, but historically I always:

remove all exotic tags from every animal in the game
remove all grazer tags (i used to just reduce the amount of grazing on animals that need a lot of space, but nowadays I take them out altogether. Just too annoying)
add trainable to a variety of my favorite animals and all megabeasts (elephants, unicorns, cave crocodiles, eagles, etc, then also hydras, colossi, etc)
remove all vermin_hateable, vermin_eater, vermin_rotter, and penetratepower tags (wretched vermin!)
remove the cat tag that lets them pick their owners (I MAKE THE DECISIONS AROUND HERE, FELINES)

render all plants inedible to vermin (wretched vermin.), and make rock nuts inedible (quarry bushes are too valuable and I don't want my dwarves eating all the seeds)
make all six of the dwarven plants growable in any season
boost herbalism cluster sizes for several of the best wild plants
mod out the [good] tag from sun berries mainly because they're so valuable and I like to have a chance of finding them wherever I go

mod in liaisons for elves and humans (being able to make agreements with them is really awesome - esp being able to request rare animals from elves, eagles and unicorns for example - and I would never get those liaisons unless I modded them in myself)
remove all demand_max and mandate_max tags from nobles (dear nobles, you are the enemy of my civilization and i will use any tools available to render you powerless)
remove treecap diplomacy (I MAKE THE DECISIONS AROUND HERE, ELVES)
remove skill and attribute rust (too annoying to get around with some skills, like medical skills)

remove several examples of trapavoid, canopendoors and buildingdestroyer on hostile creatures (I avoid taking it off of the really powerful creatures, but small timers do not deserve this power if you ask me)
speed up childbirth for some megabeasts (dragons, hydras)

remove all aquifer tags (waaaay too annoying for me. I always embark on a river so water is not an issue)
add a workshop that trains several skills for free, and add all its required reactions to entity files (this is cheating imo, so I try to use it very sparingly, but some skills like siege engineering and medicals are just too difficult to train by "fairer" means. I also use this to improve the skills of freshly arrived migrants, to make them useful to me without having to waste raw materials on them)

Also, as I go, I write down every change I make to a tracker file so I know what raw edits I made for future versions. Some day I'll script this stuff out instead of making all the changes manually, but in any case I want to know what edits I made from the original raws so I write them all down

Make scales and chitin tannable to leather and tanned chitin
Make several different versions of leather, bone, and other structural materials, and assign them such that larger creatures have stronger materials (so dragon hide is much tougher than cat leather)
Apply some experimental reactions that make large creatures give more than 1 unit of leather
...
Make giant animals and animal people much, much rarer
Remove sponges (and giant sponges and sponge men) from the game completely

^ I definitely need to try some of these

[vjek]

... * Lower the goblin siege triggers, so my low pop forts will still trigger them ...

How do you do this?  It would be very handy for my automated magma testing if I could get sieges to show up MUCH earlier!

[King DZA]

there's plenty of little tweaks and addition I enjoy modding in, but I'd say there's about three that I almost never play without these days:

Adding ebony(the tree) to the game.

Additions to the language files.

And, most importantly, bitches.