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Author Topic: questions on making a dwarven economy / infrastructure mod  (Read 1727 times)

quarague

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questions on making a dwarven economy / infrastructure mod
« on: April 04, 2012, 06:30:48 am »

So while the learning curve is steep once you know what you are doing it takes only a small number of dwarfs to keep a large fortress going. A single planter and a single cooker+brewer produce enough food for a 100 dwarf fortress, one furnace operator plus one smith can fully equip a whole army in a season or two and after you find gold or another valuable metal you have more wealth than you know what to do with.
Hence my idea to create a mod that makes the dwarfen economy a lot harder. I plan to put a bunch of changes together and upload them here.
Metal industry:
A ton of iron ore cantains quite a lot of iron but in real world mining a ton of gold ore is considered very rich if contains something like 25g of gold. So I would change various ore smelting reaction so that one gold ore gives you a gold bar with say 20% probability and nothing otherwise. Also abolish all ore to alloy reactions, if you want alloys like bronze make them from bars. I know how do this, all are simple changes in the mineral raws
food industry:
I would like to increase the amount of food and alcohol a dwarf needs by about a factor of 5. Is this in the raws somewhere, or are there good workarounds that achieve the sam effect?
happiness:
increase the amount of wealth needed to make a room great, legendary etc by a factor of 10. I could mod the raw value of the items but is there a more direct way to do that?
leather:
Currently a cat produces the same amount of leather as an elephant, can I change it so that the amount of raw hides corresponds to the amount of meat you get from slaughtering? Then change tanning so that that a raw hide gives a leather only about 10% of the time, so an elephant would still give several leather but one would need half a dozen cats to get a single unit of leather.
other ideas:
possible change masonry so that it requires several stones for a table or a wall.

Thanks for any hints of what has already been done in this direction, how to do things and other usefuls ideas.

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Sphalerite

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Re: questions on making a dwarven economy / infrastructure mod
« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2012, 08:14:29 am »

So I would change various ore smelting reaction so that one gold ore gives you a gold bar with say 20% probability and nothing otherwise.

Easy to do, change [METAL_ORE:GOLD:100] to [METAL_ORE:GOLD:20] in the appropriate gold ore definition.

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Also abolish all ore to alloy reactions, if you want alloys like bronze make them from bars. I know how do this, all are simple changes in the mineral raws

Just remove the appropriate reactions from the entity files.

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I would like to increase the amount of food and alcohol a dwarf needs by about a factor of 5. Is this in the raws somewhere, or are there good workarounds that achieve the sam effect?

Hard-coded.  You can't change that.

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increase the amount of wealth needed to make a room great, legendary etc by a factor of 10. I could mod the raw value of the items but is there a more direct way to do that?

Room values are hard-coded.

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Currently a cat produces the same amount of leather as an elephant, can I change it so that the amount of raw hides corresponds to the amount of meat you get from slaughtering? Then change tanning so that that a raw hide gives a leather only about 10% of the time, so an elephant would still give several leather but one would need half a dozen cats to get a single unit of leather.

Very difficult to do, but not impossible.  Start by removing [MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_MAT:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:LEATHER] from
[MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:SKIN_TEMPLATE], and also remove the standard leather making reaction from the raws.  Then add to each creature's definition a line that adds a custom MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_MAT_x to that creature's skin.  You probably don't need to have a different reaction for each creature, just multiple different reactions for different sizes of creature.  Then create for each TAN_MAT_x a new TAN_A_HIDE_x reaction, that gives a different number of pieces of leather.  This is massively labor-intensive to do by hand, but I have a script that does something very similar for my own mod.  The only downside is that you lose the ability to tan the skin of procedurally generated creatures, since they won't have your custom reaction added.

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possible change masonry so that it requires several stones for a table or a wall.

Masonry is hard-coded.  You can't even remove the masonry workshop from a civilization.
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Slidey

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Re: questions on making a dwarven economy / infrastructure mod
« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2012, 05:56:38 pm »

Masonry is hard-coded.  You can't even remove the masonry workshop from a civilization.
seriously are you even suggesting you remove that if you could, are you an elf? ;)

~~~

To be dwarvenly though@quarague
If you were thinking of making things harder i would suggest you make blocks easier to make actually...and leather(s) easier to get too. Then add/raise requirements/conversion (in excess of the easing) to get the various goodies (via reactions)...maybe make blocks intermedium currency (to get currency too if its not hardcoded) and/or needed on top of the gold/etc to make currency etc.

I wish seriously though you could simply (leatherwise) put MORE leather on all the medium-sized and larger critters (like extra one over the head and neck..even to put of wrapping it around muscles/fat elsewhere lol) then make it take more leather to make things.

Another thing you can do to make it harder is !!Science!! it up, make materials more unstable! !sciencey! by playing with the temps and syndromes etc. For example make them turn into gasses with weak drowsy effects if it gets too warm ;) Could have base materials unstable then convert into another material to make the products that aren't as unstable. Course theres changing the odds things succeed like spharalerite says too.

Just a few thoughts ;)
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Abregado

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Re: questions on making a dwarven economy / infrastructure mod
« Reply #3 on: April 04, 2012, 06:15:15 pm »

I wish seriously though you could simply (leatherwise) put MORE leather on all the medium-sized and larger critters (like extra one over the head and neck..even to put of wrapping it around muscles/fat elsewhere lol) then make it take more leather to make things.

Already did it mate ;) Check out Underhive Settlement. Ive got two skin types, and large animals get the LARGE_ANIMAL_SKIN template, which produces more leather.

I would like to increase the amount of food and alcohol a dwarf needs by about a factor of 5. Is this in the raws somewhere, or are there good workarounds that achieve the sam effect?

Again check out our mod. I found the trick is not to increase how much they eat, but how many available items there are for eating and the LABOUR COST of each of those items. I use a cycle which makes harvested plants completly useless until processed into useless seeds and plants. Then the seeds must be processed into plantable seeds. The Plants also cannot be eaten raw, and must be cooked or prepared further.

Drink items in our mod all require a Water item, which is actually a tool generated through an ongoing reaction. You could call this Yeast, Brew Mash or Starter and require it for all brewing to take place. These generated through another reaction (in our case the water is from a "free" reaction) and then consumed per Brewing reaction.

Have a bash of Underhive Settlement. You will see, with a little creativity you can change the emphasis of the entire Dwarven Economy! Its also.. A LOT HARDER

quarague

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Re: questions on making a dwarven economy / infrastructure mod
« Reply #4 on: April 06, 2012, 06:04:56 am »

thanks for the replies so far
as expected, the metal industry changes were rather straightforward
making food production more labor intensive by requiring multistep processing is a great idea, I will look into that and I think I know how to do that

on the leather industry it might be enough to make leather more expensive (currently it is so cheap that you can just buy tons from the traders, no reason to set up your own tanning industry). The value in the creature description applies to all butchering returns and I didn't find a general item description of leather in any of the item_* or inorganic_* files? Would presumably be the same place where I can make leather armor as awesome as candy (or as lousy as paper).
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