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[JohnieRWilkins]

I thought it's amusing to see just how much water dwarves can carry in a bucket. It's now possible thanks to the quantification of the size of a tile:

As part of the flying minecart physics, did you decide on a tile size?

Assuming gravity works like real world gravity and you can invent a time unit (obviously not linked to the dwarf mode calendar, which moves too fast for this), then a choice has been made.  It wouldn't make any fewer dragons fit in the tile though.  I think for the purposes of the minecarts it turned out to be 2m x 2m x 3m with 10 clicks / second, but it isn't that important or far-ranging in effect.

Given:
A tile is 2*2*3m^3. (12 cubic meters in volume)
7/7 water is 12 cubic meters of water.
A dwarf can carry 1/7 water in a bucket. (removes 1/7 water from a reservoir and fills a pond to 1/7 in one trip)

We can declare:
A dwarven bucket can fit ~1.714m^3 of water. This has a mass of 1710kg. The mass of 24 humans. The mass of a small sedan.

[I am Leo]

This pleases me perhaps more than it should.

[slothen]

don't forget that 1/7 water = 10 units of drinkable water.  If a drink of booze is the same as a drink of water volume-wise, then its no wonder toady doesn't want to put dwarven excretion in the game, the little guys are probably constantly pissing a steady stream while they walk, sleep, or fight.

[Mr S]

This also pleases me a great deal more than it should.  No wonder our farm plots are so productive, just think of the Nitrogen boost!!!!

[Miuramir]

don't forget that 1/7 water = 10 units of drinkable water.  If a drink of booze is the same as a drink of water volume-wise...

If true, that's around 171.4 liters (about 45.3 US Gal) per "drink" .  According to the wiki, dwarves drink 4 times per season by default; and a season is three 28 day months.  That's an average of one "drink" per 21 days, or a bit over 8.1 liters (about 2.1 US Gal) per day.  That's on the high side, but not an unreasonable amount for "sturdy creatures devoted to drink and industry"; humans can certainly drink that much when working hard in hot climates or hot work environments.  Interestingly, it's in the range of the classic hogshead, which is 48 gallons if ale or beer (63 if wine).  Phrasing it as 'Dwarves expect to consume about a hogshead of beer every three weeks' doesn't sound unreasonable. 

"A 14th century barrel of wine contained 31.5 gallons, which equals one-eighth of the tun of 252 gallons."  (Note these are wine gallons, which are the basis of the current US Gallon.)  Dwarven "Alcohol gets a new barrel after every 5th unit." which puts a dwarven booze barrel at around 226.5 gallons, not unreasonably far from the classic tun cask. 

[USEC_OFFICER]

So being able to carry the weight of a sedan in water means that Dwarven drinking habits are reasonable.

God I love DF.

[JohnieRWilkins]

I think it would help to speculate on what a "bucket" in the DF world actually is.

I think it's one of these things:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[MonkeyHead]

Ill just leave this here...

[Miuramir]

So being able to carry the weight of a sedan in water means that Dwarven drinking habits are reasonable.
God I love DF.

The difficulty is that fortress mode dwarven activity is peculiarly quantized, as a side effect of simulation parameters and scaling factors.  You really need to look at seasonal or even annual averages for many things.  The useful number here is probably something closer to "how many weight-squares can an average speed and strength dwarf shift over the course of a year"; e.g. if a dwarf can carry a stone weighing X between stockpiles Y travel squares apart Z times per year, comparing the product X*Y*Z to both real-world numbers and other dwarven tasks is reasonable.  If this number is drastically out of line, it should be adjusted.  However, given that fortress dwarves do far fewer iterations of things over the course of a season than would be otherwise reasonable due to simulation issues, how much a dwarf can manage to accomplish in a single incident (drinking, carrying, whatever) is obviously going to seem unreasonably large when looked at out of context. 

Particular difficulties arise when you consider that DF has both an economics and worldbuilding simulation approach that has similarities to grand strategic scale games like Railroad Tycoon, yet also models individual combat at a detail not seen even in most fighting games.  DF effectively has (at least) two different simulation "resolutions" and "speeds", but rather than explicitly switching between them, overlaps them in sometimes weird ways.  Many times it works a lot better than you might expect, but the potential for Fun tends to be high along the interface. 

Topic drift: The trendy thing in large-scale astrophysics simulation these days is automatically adjustable simulation granularity and speed.  Basically, when doing something like colliding two galaxies, the computer looks at things on a very broad (low resolution in time and space) level when things are predictable; but automatically "focuses in" with smaller time and space increments in areas that are "interesting".  Perhaps that's a feature to look at adding in for DF 2.x  

[JohnieRWilkins]

That's precisely why I can't wait for adventure mode to get to the same scale as fortress mode. I would like greater simulation depth in all aspects. I would like a consolidation with fortress time. I also want an even more cumbersome interface. Perhaps one where you need to walk up to all of your workers and tell them what they should be doing using the conversation screen.

[CodexDraco]

So you would play as the expedition leader in first person? I'm intrigued.

Then when you get killed by a berserk woodworker is game over.

[Cobbler89]

So being able to carry the weight of a sedan in water means that Dwarven drinking habits are reasonable.

Sigging this.

Topic drift: The trendy thing in large-scale astrophysics simulation these days is automatically adjustable simulation granularity and speed.  Basically, when doing something like colliding two galaxies, the computer looks at things on a very broad (low resolution in time and space) level when things are predictable; but automatically "focuses in" with smaller time and space increments in areas that are "interesting".  Perhaps that's a feature to look at adding in for DF 2.x  

Actually, to some extent DF already does this (consider both worldgen and fortress mode together, or consider that the game doesn't tend to mess with internal organ status when nothing bad is happening to them, etc.), and it's going to do more as history-during-game and economy (a major factor for history-during-game) develop (blending worldgen and fort mode together in practice). Take historical figures for example -- populations are tracked in a general way, but then people who do something important get tracked more particularly; and these figures play a role in worldgen large-scale history and in fort-mode micro-scale detail, if they come to a fort (or rather, the ones that come to forts).

[Jeoshua]

Okay so more logically speaking, if I'm getting what Miuramir is saying, it's not that Dwarves can fit a sedan's worth of water in a bucket, rather that over the course of a day or two they are able to move a sedan's worth of water via a single bucket, due to the time scaling?

Did I get that right?

Still a bit Dwarfy.

[Captain Goatse]

. I also want an even more cumbersome interface. Perhaps one where you need to walk up to all of your workers and tell them what they should be doing using the conversation screen.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[SmileyMan]

Okay so more logically speaking, if I'm getting what Miuramir is saying, it's not that Dwarves can fit a sedan's worth of water in a bucket, rather that over the course of a day or two they are able to move a sedan's worth of water via a single bucket, due to the time scaling?

Did I get that right?

Still a bit Dwarfy.

I once did some programming on a transport game that worked something like this.  The on-screen world ran in real time (which could be accelerated) but a week of on-screen time also represented a quarter-year of background simulation time.

I find it fascinating how easily human players can grasp such a concept intuitively.