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[bombzero]

NW has done a pretty good job of convincing me that a feature like this is positive if done right.

I have not seen NW present a method to do it right though, one can say somethings great if done right a million times, it can still be done wrong a million times easier if nobody has an idea of how to actually do it right.

I also redirect you to my previous statements about:
1) rubble has uses in real life beyond walls and roads, NW does not want it to.
2) slowing down mining with excess material slows down hauling, which slows down all other forms of production.
3) it takes time to code, time to debug, and time out of the players day(we don't all have 10000 hours to play DF).
4) continuing with the above, that is time that Toady could use to work on interesting fun additions to the game.

[GoldenShadow]

Dwarf Fortress is not a mining simulator, the same way its not a farming simulator. You dig some holes to live in, and you dig other holes to obtain ores and gems.  I thought the digging stuff was fine. The problem was hauling all of the items around. That was fixed with making dwarfs carry bins to vaccuum up all the little things. I would have been happy with just that one change.

We already have the metal industry to represent smelting and refining mined ores, we don't need to add redundant features in the form of rubble. There already is rubble in the spaces I dig out, it's all the diorite and microline stones that are dropped everywhere.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

consider this. rubble is added, mining now takes longer, it now takes longer to build your dining room, it now takes longer to create bedrooms (a nigh insurmountable task at present in some forts), it now takes longer to set up forging operations, it now takes longer to move anything as haulers are tied up clearing rubble, food starts to rot away, dwarves tantrum, goblins invade before you even have weapons or armor, all of your dwarves die while you were waiting for the lazy shits to clear out some rock. is this fun? or frustrating?

you speak as if the game was challenging at the current stage. by the end of spring you'll never have to worry about food again unless it starts filling up the barrels you reserved for booze, before the end of the first year most people reach the magma sea and start cranking up steel arms, most forts are entirelly dug out to house hundreds of dwarves before the second year ends(as if dwarves needed individual rooms), people complain they can't get legendary dwarves in mere months of training with regular instruction and instead build danger rooms for insta-super-soldiers(just add dwarf and stir). i think you're out of touch with the reality, the game hasn't been challenging for a long time

[NW_Kohaku]

Finally, for those who don't like the term "rubble", "tailings" is technically what the remaining bits of rock left over after extracting the valuable bits is called, and "overburden" is the rock and soil that lies between you and the valuable rocks and ores.  (That "tailings" link also includes all sorts of interesting ways for disposing of the tailings.)

I've been calling it mullock mostly, personally, as that indicates its lack of use for ore. 

why? no really, why should we add something that will cost fps, time, and dwarves. and all it accomplishes is being frustrating and time consuming?

Now who's just dragging their feet on a concept? 

It will not cost FPS, but yes, it will cost time and dwarves.  That's the whole point: Gaining stone resources should cost more time and dwarves.

Value in this game is a function of their utility (and stone is nothing if not absurdly useful in this game, much less metal ores), but also in their scarcity, and the cost in game-terms it takes to achieve them. 

In order to make this a properly challenging game, stone (and ore) must be not be freely available to solve all your needs.  It is for this same reason that I have argued as I have regarding farming (food and lumber and clothing and alchemical resources).  We need to make our organic and inorganic resources scarce enough that we are not, as you put it in the last thread, just trying to get rid of our resources because we are drowning in so many of them.  Stone needs to have value for the game's resource management to have meaning, and for it to have value, it cannot be available freely.  To be a complete game, you will need to put some effort into getting your stone. 

For farming the organic resources, this means that your resources are infinitely renewable so long as you take the time to actually set up a system for composting fertilizer to give back to the land as you take crops that take nutrients from the soil.  This sets a functional limit on your capacity to pull resources from the land as the amount of nutrients you can replace after you take.

For stone, ores, and gems, the inorganic resources, there is a finite (but massive) quantity of goods, and so the system that limits how much you can use at a time must therefore be related to the way in which you extract those resources. 

The way to do that is to make gaining those resources take more time and dwarves.

The ideal situation from a game-standpoint is that you have some other function, such as cave-ins in play such that you are having to play a guessing game to try to triage where your mining resources can best be spared, and what the best point to try getting at those minerals you suspect will be found.  (Having geological signs that point to where valuable minerals will be as a gameplay aid in this regard, such as quartz veins indicating more valuable metal ores ahead.)  If this were a more puzzle-like game, I would want to make players sweat choosing which deck of cards to draw from.  Choosing where to devote their mining resources should be a game like that.  In the meantime, how much of your labor force you can afford to devote to mining resources should be a very open question, as farming and military among others should be vying for your preciously short supply of labor. 

The fact that cave-ins and rubble are completely realistic mining problems are just bonuses to this gaming need for a challenge to your capacity to triage your resources.  It satisfies both the realists and those who want to play a challenging and rewarding game.

On its own, yes, that would just make the game go slower, but that's ignoring how interconnected mining is to damn near everything.  In farming, people say they want to just make farms take more area to produce food - but if generating huge space underground is still easy, that's no obstacle at all.  Make excavation of a huge space slower, however, and it's not such an easy answer to your every problem anymore. 

Most players now just start off by digging straight into a hole and sorting things out from there, because that hole is easier to defend.  If it's not nearly that easy to just dig a stairwell straight down from right beside the wagon, however, suddenly defense becomes a much harder subject when you have to defend your initial (partially aboveground) encampment until you can excavate enough underground space to actually fit your fortress underground. 

The problem isn't that I'm not seeing the game for the simulation, it's that you're not realizing an easily accessable lego bin isn't really a game, it's just a palette for painting.  Minecraft doesn't have much game to it, either, past surviving your first night, finding food, and then, once the only real challenges are gone, maybe killing a boss.  The bulk of the game is just moving blocks around for aesthetic purposes alone.  That's fine for minecraft, but DF can be much more of a game than that.  It has to start by rebalancing the resources you have at your disposal to make the game actually challenging enough for people to remember what the game actually is - a game of trying to survive on limited resources.


And incidentally, I also want to make dwarves themselves "cost" more, which is the purpose of the Class Warfare thread - fortresses having internal stresses that require the expenditure of resources and player effort to keep the dwarves themselves running optimally, with a progressing degree of difficulty as the fortress itself matures.  Simply making a fortress that doesn't collapse under its own weight should be a challenge, not just because you haven't learned the controls yet, but because it is a genuinely hard thing to do, even when you know what you're doing.

I've played city-builder games like Pharaoh and the Caesar series - this game should be hard to learn how just to survive up until the first enemy army actually comes along to finish you off, and a great part of the fun is in just figuring out how to FIT all the industries you need into a secure area within access range of all support services.

If people don't want to play the game with a challenge, and want to play legos, they can just do what they've been able to do up to now: turn off eating, sleeping, drinking, sieges, cave-ins, and set SPEED:0 and minerals to max.  We shouldn't set this game permanently to simplified easy mode to satisfy the lego-players when they can still have their legos while we can also have a real challenge. 


Ugh, ninja'd 5 6 times over... I'll respond to that later.

[bombzero]

people complain they can't get legendary dwarves in mere months of training with regular instruction and instead build danger rooms for insta-super-soldiers

actually there may be a problem with the playerbase's mentality, in that people have come to think that legendary is just the standard, and that anything that takes a while is bad.

just to clarify, im not strictly against rubble, I just want it to actually add to the game in a meaningful way, not just take more of my time to do things I already can.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

actually there may be a problem with the playerbase's mentality, in that people have come to think that legendary is just the standard, and that anything that takes a while is bad.

i agree with you there,

just to clarify, im not strictly against rubble, I just want it to actually add to the game in a meaningful way, not just take more of my time to do things I already can.

just to clarify, im not strictly against rubble adding to the game in a meaningful way, I just think that adding a logistic challenge and slowing down the gameplay should stand on it's own as an argument for the implementation of rubble
IRL rubble is mostly trash that needs to be taken out of the way. just because you can recycle trash doesn't mean it isn't trash

[bombzero]

well depends where it is gotten from, certain types of rocks tend to have higher 'background' levels of minerals, running these through a sluicepan/box can result in a great amount of material after a few metric tons of rock (something we have in no short supply) so thats one potential solution.

however, while im more simulationist than gamist i suppose, im against simulationist additions that severely impede or annoy gamist type people. these things being stuff that adds tedium or time consumption, without gain of any kind.

so overall.
if it is more realistic, add it. UNLESS, it does not actually bring something to the game in a meaningful way, we are in the beginning of an entire arc based on economy, so it makes no sense to add in something like rubble anytime soon if it doesn't bring a new industrial factor to the game. while if it did, it becomes more critical to add it sooner rather than later, so it can be rebalanced alongside everything else.

[Cellmonk]

Woah. the discussion moved along quite a bit while I was writing. Anyways, I'll post it in spoilers if its still useful.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1) rubble has uses in real life beyond walls and roads, NW does not want it to.

hmm. I wasn't aware that NW didn't want that. I like the idea of sifting through it for valuable materials (I forget who brought that up) or dropping it on invader's heads.

2) slowing down mining with excess material slows down hauling, which slows down all other forms of production.

With a rail system (carved) that can be set up automatically by one dwarf after you designate it,
With a single dwarf and a wheelbarrow capable of removing one unit of rubble (from one space) to a minecart in several hundred ticks,
With hauling improving stats correctly, so that continuous haulers are buff,
And with digging taking place within ten Urists or so of the current rail system
I can imagine getting away with ten loaders and ten unloaders for two legendary miners.
I'm not sure about the mathmatics behind it, but I'm sure the functionality of wheelbarrows can be tweaked so that this is possible and not too easy.

3) it takes time to code, [and] time to debug
4) continuing with the above, that is time that Toady could use to work on interesting fun additions to the game.

Every feature takes time that toady could be adding something else. Remember that this a long term idea, not a short term one. This is no less an interesting or fun addition than vampires (though it would probably take quite a bit more work on toady's part). So I take this as a useless statement.

and time out of the players day(we don't all have 10000 hours to play DF).

I think it'd be reasonable to have a init option to turn rubble off (switching to traversable rubble or something like the current system)
And every feature that requires input takes time out of the players day. We play it to deal with these features. One feature that takes the most time out of my day is trade, which is why I just kill them all. The init option would be for those who need to make a megaproject and don't want to set up a hauling system for it. Currently I set my dwarves' speed to 0 and set hunger to off for such things.

Thank you for pointing these things out for me. I missed some of them in my reading.

Please forgive me if some of my responses miss the point you were trying to make.

EDIT: You have a point that we might want to go into depth on the workability of it. I'll try to get a model of what sort of tweaking would be needed to make my 10loader/10unloader system work.

[NW_Kohaku]

consider this. rubble is added, mining now takes longer, it now takes longer to build your dining room, it now takes longer to create bedrooms (a nigh insurmountable task at present in some forts), it now takes longer to set up forging operations, it now takes longer to move anything as haulers are tied up clearing rubble, food starts to rot away, dwarves tantrum, goblins invade before you even have weapons or armor, all of your dwarves die while you were waiting for the lazy shits to clear out some rock. is this fun? or frustrating?

In a word, Fun.

The threat of that happening is exactly what I would want.

The fact that you seem to act as if it is inevitable now just proves you haven't really considered how you'd actually react to it.  Come now, are you man or dwarf?  Are you just going to roll over and die without trying to engineer a solution? 

In my quicky test forts, I'm perfectly fine with just setting up my workshops in the open air using stone I embarked with. 

Wood is cheap and readily available most places if you didn't embark with plenty.  Build a wooden palisade wall with a single defensible entrance (trapped, hopefully) and put a roof over a communal housing project while protecting the mining project.

To live in a spacious, heavily defended and gloriously engraved fortress with a legendary dining hall is a privilege that should be earned through hard-fought struggle against adversity, not some pantywaist noble idea of a freebie birthright.

I also redirect you to my previous statements about:
1) rubble has uses in real life beyond walls and roads, NW does not want it to.
2) slowing down mining with excess material slows down hauling, which slows down all other forms of production.
3) it takes time to code, time to debug, and time out of the players day(we don't all have 10000 hours to play DF).
4) continuing with the above, that is time that Toady could use to work on interesting fun additions to the game.

1) It's not so much that I am adamantly opposed to these ideas of uses, I am just opposed to the notion that something has to make the player's job easier for it to be considered a "useful addition" to the game.  Why is it things that make the game easier are always "useful additions" in a game where we are supposed to be enjoying the challenge? 

Aren't you, at the same time, looking forward to harder sieges?  Why is it when you make the enemy stronger, it's an OK kind of hard, but when you take away the exploits the player has, like 1 metal bar breastplates, people complain?  Why is it when military becomes harder, it's an OK kind of hard, but when the basics of the game are harder, people complain?


2) Yes.  That's exactly the point.  It makes resources scarce, and that is something the game needs to be more challenging. 

How often do you actually stop and consider preserving some sort of layer stone for a given use?  You already said yourself - people are trying to get rid of their stone.  It has no value as a resource now.  They must be made rare, so that there are actual shortages, for them to have value.


3) Actually, this is much easier to code than nearly anything else Toady could be working on - you really only need to code in dropping extra items when you mine a wall, which is trivial, and then code in the obstructive nature of the rubble, and possibly stacking.  Obstruction from large quantities of items and stacking are both things Toady really should be prioritizing, anyway, and will have benefits beyond just mining. 


4) This goes hand-in-hand with the problem you had in the first question.  You're just assuming that anything mining is never going to be interesting, and that therefore, it's pointless to even try to make it interesting. 

When you can't just assume that you will always have all the minerals at your disposal that you want, and you have to desperately hope that you strike an iron, or at least tin ore vein to be able to smelt some iron or bronze weapons to survive, and you are trying to read the geology to find where those metal ore veins are, I think you might find the subject just a little more interesting.

[bombzero]

Woah. the discussion moved along quite a bit while I was writing. Anyways, I'll post it in spoilers if its still useful.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1) rubble has uses in real life beyond walls and roads, NW does not want it to.

hmm. I wasn't aware that NW didn't want that. I like the idea of sifting through it for valuable materials (I forget who brought that up) or dropping it on invader's heads.

2) slowing down mining with excess material slows down hauling, which slows down all other forms of production.

With a rail system (carved) that can be set up automatically by one dwarf after you designate it,
With a single dwarf and a wheelbarrow capable of removing one unit of rubble (from one space) to a minecart in several hundred ticks,
With hauling improving stats correctly, so that continuous haulers are buff,
And with digging taking place within ten Urists or so of the current rail system
I can imagine getting away with ten loaders and ten unloaders for two legendary miners.
I'm not sure about the mathmatics behind it, but I'm sure the functionality of wheelbarrows can be tweaked so that this is possible and not too easy.

3) it takes time to code, [and] time to debug
4) continuing with the above, that is time that Toady could use to work on interesting fun additions to the game.

Every feature takes time that toady could be adding something else. Remember that this a long term idea, not a short term one. This is no less an interesting or fun addition than vampires (though it would probably take quite a bit more work on toady's part). So I take this as a useless statement.

and time out of the players day(we don't all have 10000 hours to play DF).

I think it'd be reasonable to have a init option to turn rubble off (switching to traversable rubble or something like the current system)
And every feature that requires input takes time out of the players day. We play it to deal with these features. One feature that takes the most time out of my day is trade, which is why I just kill them all. The init option would be for those who need to make a megaproject and don't want to set up a hauling system for it. Currently I set my dwarves' speed to 0 and set hunger to off for such things.

Thank you for pointing these things out for me. I missed some of them in my reading.

Please forgive me if some of my responses miss the point you were trying to make.

no thats all about right, and i recognize those counter arguments already as i have put some thought into it, however in my mind there are more cons than pros to adding it.

however on 2, that requires constantly building and managing new minecart stops as you dig, slowing mining down even more than rubble alone would.
and I meant how the whole butterfly effect of having dwarves doing that, instead of helping in another industry, the hauling changes are entirely designed to free up dwarves and improve efficiency, rubble would effectively undo an entire update.

[bombzero]

-snip-

alright let me rephrase this, what does adding rubble do in the long run? its a quick fix to the current general brokeness of the economy.

adding rubble will not stop a 5x5 farm from feeding a fortress, it wont stop people from buying a caravan with one steel disc, it wont stop people from holing up for 30 years straight and never seeing the outside world, and if it did you would be killing what could be considered its own playstyle.

I LIKE difficulty, I LIKE challenge, I HATE needless tedium. while the concept of rubble has potential, everything about the way you present it makes it seem like a tedious, pointless addition that will cause tons of frustration and annoyance with no return, ever, unless you are a completely masochistic pure simulationist who wants everything the hardest it possibly could be, and takes true joy from being 100% unable to do something within a reasonable span of time.

im done trying to argue this, you are too set in your ideas that this is a positive addition to the game to see that it will have tremendous negative implications in the long run, once more changes have been made to fortress economy.

[NW_Kohaku]

Dwarf Fortress is not a mining simulator, the same way its not a farming simulator.

And this, right here, is the mentality we must defeat.

No, it's not a mining simulator or a farming simulator, it's a Fantasy World Simulator.  And worlds are complicated things.

We need to simulate a great many complicated things for this to be the sort of grand world simulator Toady originally envisioned this game to be.  Making mining and farming and survival difficult is just the tip of the iceburg.

We also need to have an interpersonal relationship simulator, we need a dwarven politics simulator, a corruption of politics simulator, a decline of a great house as the descendants inbreed themselves into drooling idiots simulator, a macro- and microeconomics simulator, a full language simulator, an adventure mode complex conversation with an AI simulator, a grand strategic warfare simulator, a plumbing/sewage/ventilation system simulator, a realistic physics simulator, a street traffic of a medieval town simulator, and a simulator of a great deal of fantasy pulp fiction novel schlock. 

And we need them all inter-connecting, compounding in complexity as they interplay... I get tingles just imagining.

I can't see how people could be satisfied with legos when you can have a living, breathing world full of personality and personalities at your fingertips, just waiting to tell you its unique story.

[NW_Kohaku]

alright let me rephrase this, what does adding rubble do in the long run? its a quick fix to the current general brokeness of the economy.

adding rubble will not stop a 5x5 farm from feeding a fortress, it wont stop people from buying a caravan with one steel disc, it wont stop people from holing up for 30 years straight and never seeing the outside world, and if it did you would be killing what could be considered its own playstyle.

I LIKE difficulty, I LIKE challenge, I HATE needless tedium. while the concept of rubble has potential, everything about the way you present it makes it seem like a tedious, pointless addition that will cause tons of frustration and annoyance with no return, ever, unless you are a completely masochistic pure simulationist who wants everything the hardest it possibly could be, and takes true joy from being 100% unable to do something within a reasonable span of time.

im done trying to argue this, you are too set in your ideas that this is a positive addition to the game to see that it will have tremendous negative implications in the long run, once more changes have been made to fortress economy.

What a defeatist outlook...

One change alone cannot change everything, so we shouldn't try to change anything?

When have I said this alone would fix everything?  I have spent a great deal of time and effort on that farming thread so that farming would no longer be so simple.  I am writing this on the assumption that something that at least makes farming harder will come eventually, even if it is not my own suggestions.  I have been arguing for ways to change that single large steel disc, and assume that this change will fit in like a glove with those future rewrites and systems changes.

You phrase this as though you think I am not considering your point of view.  In fact, it really seems it is you who are not considering the full implications of this.  You seem to refuse to believe that when those other problems are solved, this will actually make the game a much more fun thing to play. 

You can't solve economics without first solving resource overabundances, and making organic resource production (farming) slower and more resource-consuming goes hand-in-hand with making inorganic resources less plentiful. 

If you think what I am telling you sounds like this is a game that can only be enjoyed by 100% masochists, then why would you have been interested in a game that not only promises no means of "winning", but whose tagline is "Losing is Fun"? 

The fun of a game doesn't come from winning, but from what you can explore along the journey, how you are tested, how you learn, how you adapt, and how you can express your own individuality through your reactions to the world around you. 

The game, as it stands now, is just a shallow set of blocks that can be pushed around.  It needs to have these simulation elements to give it the sort of life that gives it more meaning than just the "look at this thing I built with these blocks".  When you look at the complex cities that Toady built, and is still in the process of building, do you think it was a waste of time to create that simulated antfarm for us to explore and simply sit and watch, especially when we get daily schedules and personal motivations for the random peasants?  That's the power of a simulation with verisimilitude. 

[HiEv]

I'd be OK with rubble being something that you could turn on or off in the d_init.txt the way you can turn on and off invasions, artifacts, and weather, or even if it was somewhere in the raws where it could be removed like aquifers can.

Dwarf Fortress is aiming to be a world simulator.  How detailed that simulation can get is really up to Toady, but he has already added options for how detailed that simulation can be, so this might be another good spot to make it optional if he adds it.  Then again, it might not be as bad as some people worry about, in which case that wouldn't be necessary.

Still, I'd like to see it someday.

[Mudcrab]

Really? You guys really want toady to work on this feature?

I personally would much rather see some cool, FUN things added in, not something that is just going to require more time, in a game that already demands so much of your damn time.

Some of us like to have fun and don't play the game all freaking day.... This is silly if you ask me

EDIT: And for those saying the game isn't challenging enough, perhaps not. However if you want to use danger rooms, use them. If you rush down to the magma sea, then do it (Ive never done this and ive been playing for quite a long time. I really need to get round to it the idea of magma just worries me though)

^ And yeah if its a toggle-able feature I really don't care!

Oh and I really hope this game doesn't go down the route Kohaku wants.... For me that just doesn't sound fun, at all. Im not interested in fantasy because of the farming or mining. Your other points about interesting things such as politics, personal relationships, im all for! But god no I don't take an interest in fantasy stories/games etc on account of how realistic the basic, real life aspects, of the world are. Thats just sillyness and surely defeats the whole point

Oh and plumbing? Sewage? Who really wants to spend hours working out where all their dorfs shit is going to go, really man, thats just insanity. I hope this games development isn't skewed by those who really ought to get off their PC more often........ (I mean obv we're all nerds here but I do draw the line at such pointless tasks)