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[LaikaBauss]

Hey guys.
Been thinking about something here for days.
So, i always saw DF as some extremely realistic game... when it comes to the actions of, well, dwarves, and animals, to some degree. Need food, booze, to keep them alive, and happy.

But there is something that i just never saw in a game. Maybe because its disgusting. Thing is, DF has a buch of "disgusting" stuff, like miasma and rotten bodies, and it kinda makes the game... more fun. More attractive.

So i had one brilliant idea!
Adding sh*t into the game. Cuz, why not?
More "uniqueness" and well, realism? Maybe realism is boring to some extent. But yeah.

So dwarves and other creatures have to, well, poop, after eating. So dwarves can be assigned to a "activity zone" where they can feel a good thougth about "took a fine poop lately". That is, if he is not disturbed.

First of all, sh*t acts like a rotten corpse, exploding miasma all over the plase. So, sh*t would, well, "work" in a similar way. Unhappy thoughts to any nerby drarves. Also would happen if assingned to be dumped.

Sh*t would also work like vomit, and so it can *magically dissapear* in water. To make and appropiate "toilet", the dwarf would need something like this:

Side view:
####             # - Wall
D_...#             D - Door
##  #             ... - Floor Hatch
##7#              7 - Water

When making the activity zone, the toilets would be channels on the groud ( poopholes ), and in this case, the floor hatch.

But, why the door? Well, if dwarf "a" sees dwarf "b" takin a sh*t, both will receive an unhappy thought about it. However, because two dwarfs would never (by god, no!) try to use the same toilet, a door can prevent such a disaster.

After the "process", a successfull poop ( by that means, no interruptions or awkward situations ), the now empty dwarf will receive a good thought.

Cool huh.

But wait - there's more!

Everything needs to be useful. And poop is a natural fertilizer. Pouring poop on what later will be your food, or drink. Very dwarfy. I also heard that it is possible to make poop crafts, like... well, balls, maybe? I dunno, what could dwarves do with such a versatile material.

[dwarfhoplite]

It has been suggested many times. Most don't consider it a thing they would like to have ingame. It would fit the medieval city theme, though.

[NW_Kohaku]

Just for reference, the threads with the 7th most posts, 9th most posts, and 18th most posts in the whole suggestions forum are on this topic. (And that's just the first page sorting by post count - there's quite a few more.)

Opposition to it seems to have become less vitriolic over time, and it's not like Homosexuality, where the threads are almost guaranteed to get locked, but this is one of those topics that brings out some fierce opposition.

[10ebbor10]

There's was a quote from Toady on the matter , right?

[NW_Kohaku]

There's was a quote from Toady on the matter , right?

There were several, depending on what year you wanted to reference.

One was a joke reference about how dwarf poop dissolved into the stone to explain why it didn't exist.

One was about how he didn't want animals dropping manure but not dwarves because "what if someone magically changed you into a horse, would you just start dropping the bomb?"

And he also said that his primary reason for not including it was "breaks".  In that, he feels that the game has dwarves taking breaks for too many things (food, drink, sleep, parties, and to be lazy) and didn't want to add another.  (To which my counter-suggestion would be to just make them go immediately after taking a chug from a whole cask of wine in one go, so it's all part of the same "break".)

It's also been pointed out that yellow filth and brown filth were hardcoded materials that basically represented what we're talking about that were the contaminants of the old HFS.  Hence, it was already in the game, just not something dwarves could do anything with.

[Adrian]

There's was a quote from Toady on the matter , right?

Yeah. He said something like he doesn't want Dwarf Fortress to be remembered as "that game with the shitting and raping dwarves".
[/paraphrasing]

[Starver]

Something like "I don't want this game to be known as the one with the raping and pissing and shitting dwarfs", is the one that most comes to my mind.  [ninjaed]

Sewers as structures[1] exist, but I think can be assumed to be rainwater-runoffs.  There's nothing to stop the Fortress player from building a convoluted system of water-flowable sewers, and an elevated water-supply to flush through them, with various mechanical valves involved...  Make it your megaproject, if you will. I don't think there's much mileage in making it necessary to deal with

Very few sims, with the notable exception of Hospital Tycoon, IIRC, and The Sims itself(/ves), ever require the provision of toilet facilities, in my experience.  Always as a "necessary resource" that you need to provision for, because of the game itself.  For the hospital, because (again, IIRC) of certain of the comic sicknesses you get lumbered with, the The Sims because of the 'discomfort' factor.

Dwarves don't deserve this.  On top of kobolds, goblins, forgotten beasts, unforgotten megafauna, herds/packs/flocks of food thieves, undead and the like interuppting the normal everyday processes of keeping the food and drink stocks high enough to get your fort rolling out the necessary inedibles you want to roll out to get your next defence/attack/dig-deeper/whatever to be successful...



(And if you feel the need to trivially censor your own thread's subject, then you maybe ought to work out whether you're serious or not about your idea, you know.)



[1] I'm finding, having been unlucky enough in my first few encounters to have gotten effectively impenetrable systems, but now have started to find more Adventurable ones.

[NW_Kohaku]

In the defense of sewer systems, one of the reasons that the game is actually fairly easy to create a "turtle" fortress is that the simulation makes creating a "biodome" that can infinitely produce resources from within your locked-down fortress without needing any outside contact.

Having to create sewers that flush things away generates one more opening, and creates one more layer of difficulty to the challenge of building a fort. 

... Of course, with that said, I think having air quality concerns and the need to build ventilation systems might be a better solution to that.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Agreed.

While sewers don't sound so bad, they'd probably be a pain. Choices: Dig a new cistern every so often (you'll run out of room eventually), dig a pit or several into the caverns for toilets, or come up with a crazy solution. Oh, and this would consume lots of precious space, and be hard to expand without digging out a fair part of a whole new fortress when you outgrow your current sewers...not worth it IMHO.

[thburns]

I don't know. Poo decomposes and all that so maybe space wouldn't be such an issue.
Hole with a grate (seat) covering it. kinda port O' potty style, then we could use soap bars to manufacture rock shaped air fresheners to keep the smell/bad thoughts down
I'm up for the idea, just as long as it doesn't interfere too awful much with everything else.
But the devs say no, and that's just fine with me.

[NW_Kohaku]

Technically, if you just want to get rid of it, then so long as atom smashers exist, there is never a want for a disposal system. (And setting up my garbage chute to the atom smasher and hooking it up to a aquifer-based repeater is something right behind "build first farm" and in front of "set up magma forges" on my priorities list.)

If you had consolidated breaks, you would also only need to put the toilets very near the dining halls, as well, and those could be set up with an eye towards dumping everything into your desired target area.  (Real-life restrooms are often stacked atop one another in multistory buildings to take advantage of only having to run one set of plumbing pipes through that portion of the building - same principle, here.  Build your toilets around the drainage system.)

Of course, if you had the capacity to use it as fertilizer, you'd probably actually want it all going to some decomposing field, and having minecarts nearby to transport it back to your farms.

When it comes to "consuming precious space"... well, honestly, I don't think space is terribly precious in this game, right now. Granted, the idea that walls have to be as thick as passageways is kind of stupid and annoying, but making the residential sections of the fortress slightly bulkier wouldn't be a terrible burden, since I can often fit my entire fortress into the space of a 2x2 embark and only around a half-dozen z-levels I really use, anyway. (Excluding only the magma forges or farms or whatever that are purposefully on a different floor from the rest of the fortress.)  (That said, I tend to optimize my fortresses for compactness when I'm not purposefully going for something like fractal fortresses...)

[GreatWyrmGold]

I don't know. Poo decomposes and all that so maybe space wouldn't be such an issue.

That's not how decomposition works. The actual matter is still there. The pit would eventually fill up, without any kind of drain. And good luck finding a non-cavern drain when you're digging underground...

[thburns]

That's not how decomposition works. The actual matter is still there. The pit would eventually fill up, without any kind of drain. And good luck finding a non-cavern drain when you're digging underground...

Yes I know that. What I meant is over time it will decay, become one with the soil. I know it doesn't magically disapear. I'm just saying it doesn't have to be quite the space screwer people think. Besides Dwarves are small, so hopefully the poops would be too (though some animals are exceptions to the small creature small crap rule).
Don't matter much though. This will not be implemented anyway, at least not in the near future! Maybe 20 years from now, after the game is "released" they may add redundent or otherwise alpha/beta impracticle things, as a sort of "expansion."
Eh! Who knows...

[GreatWyrmGold]

That's not how decomposition works. The actual matter is still there. The pit would eventually fill up, without any kind of drain. And good luck finding a non-cavern drain when you're digging underground...

Yes I know that. What I meant is over time it will decay, become one with the soil. I know it doesn't magically disapear. I'm just saying it doesn't have to be quite the space screwer people think.

Assuming people can find deep enough soil. I'd imagine that 100-250 dwarves, using a single latrine, would fill up a Z-level or two before it could all decay into the soil.

Besides Dwarves are small, so hopefully the poops would be too (though some animals are exceptions to the small creature small crap rule).

They're actually 6/7 the mass of a human being.

Don't matter much though. This will not be implemented anyway, at least not in the near future! Maybe 20 years from now, after the game is "released" they may add redundent or otherwise alpha/beta impracticle things, as a sort of "expansion."

So? I'm still going to refute arguments on the subject.

[thburns]

Touche'
But as I said before, I'm really indifferent about it. I just try to help the underdogs every now an again eh!
But now that I think about it... Poo may be a terrible idea. I mean what happens when the monkeys get ahold of it.... SHUDDER!