You can carve tracks in stone now. I haven't done the wooden/metal constructed tracks yet. I haven't done minecarts either, but that's next. Tracks can be carved in stone floors or stone ramps, and it keeps track of the four directions in each tile so that you can have adjacent parallel tracks or carve writing into your fort without using too many tiles. For minecarts to make sense for mining, we'll have to change how mining works, but I want to get the carts moving first. By the time we're done, we're hoping to have the mining system remain about the same for new people, so they don't have to worry about tracks to get started (this might involve default embark wheelbarrows which dwarves would automatically use), but things will be much more efficient for people that use tracks and minecarts, across various industries.
I... I am a rather prolific writer and a connoisseur of language. On a dare, I wrote a 5 page opening chapter on nothing more than rain. I have done such things with words as to make an otherwise unthinkable scenario into a vividly detailed, painted, masterful landscape of activity - one of my personal favorite achievements because an explicit fanfic between a Klingon Bird of Prey and the Enterprise. That being, the ships. Not the crew, but the ships themselves being explicit.
I can summon no words to accurately portray my level of awe and stupefyingly grand ideals at this simple prospect. Dwarven Minecarts. Let me say that again.
Dwarven Minecarts. That is, the little drunken naked bastards are now clothed and no longer shuffling about the fort, but blazing around at the speed of an industry powerhouse totally devoid of OSHA approved conditions and fueled primarily by the least environmentally friendly power generations ever created and the screams of damned children.
Hauling itself is going to see an overhaul. More than likely, this change will also drastically reduce the hauling speed of civilians, lending stone transport to become an extremely labor-intensive task that may take days to carry one stone. Instead, carts will obviously be preferred to transport heavy materials over long distances. (This is all conjecture, I have no proof that hauling will become more difficult.) Since Toady also implies that other industries will profit, we may see many fortresses with dedicated cart networks to ship resources from farm to still to individual bedrooms to the clothier's sections. This might also allow for some very clean hallways. No longer needing to share hallways space with hauler access, a few access tracks set into the wall could allow hauling to continue "out of sight" from the main fortress, with a flurry of activity and movement hidden cleanly from the main hallways.
And Toady does, ever-so-casually, drop this massive feature on the devlog like "Oh btw I made everything 100x more awesome." The further-reaching implications are even heavier. Moving units via cart could herald a new age of warfare, with the first mounted infantry not riding bears or elephants as we all hoped, but rather strapped to an iron war machine and hurled face-first into the goblin sieges. Recovering wounded would obviously become much simpler, with many fortresses having a hospital that resembles Grand Central Station both in size and the amount of traffic. Delivering and retrieving soldiers could take on a whole realm of possibilities,
especially if pressure plates will react to carts then the amount of computational possibilities and one-way gates becomes downright incredible.
Even without transporting units, the prospect of cleanup and stone movement becomes intense. Sieges? We have a corpse cart for that now, which runs along the killing field and piles in goblin and elf corpses before running off a ramp and diving into magma. A new cart will be forged of their melted weapons and used for the next siege!
If they're involved in combat reports...
The rolling +Iron Minecart+ strikes the goblin in the lower body, bruising the guts and severing the lower spine!If they can be modded, even a little... Just the smallest hint of data in the raws... Good god...
I give up on sleep, I'm going to be excited until this next release, and then I'm going to remain excited after it.
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Topic: Holy Crap Minecarts (Devlog Quote) (Read 252130 times)