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[alcohol_dependent]

A dearly endearing theme of DF is dwarves being unable to grow their civilization sustainably.

The theme appears in many corners of the game; from elves harassing a fortress' overzealous tree chopping to the cotton candy veins at the core of the world. The opening animation, with its pick tumbling into darkness, signifies the quintessential crashing moment of the dwarven boom-bust way of life. I can't help but consider how to push the theme further. I see it as a hallmark of dwarven civilization, so ITT I want to encourage some discussion about it.

I don't have timeline considerations for any of this stuff nor any pressing urge to see it swiftly implemented.. just see it more as waxing perhaps in the way that Toady and Threetoe probably do in their kitchen while they doodle.

Wood/coal/magma pollution. It seems like magma is a pretty sustainable way to forge in the environmental sense unless you manage to leak it. Magma should probably be tremendously pressurized though and depressurizing it should be fun. Was there a reason why it wasn't pressurized?

Coal/charcoal industries are of course savagely destructive on their environment especially on the scale of industrial metallurgy. I'd love if coal burning workshops created a shit-ton of smoke that without proper ventilation would cause large quantities of fun. Also always wanted a real reason to build smoke chutes in my fort and a coal burning fort would be really fun to set up this way.

Oil -- I've always dreamed of crude oil layers and its of course been discussed, but it would be tremendously fun to have oil leaks polluting sources of water, with seals, carp and birds drowning in the stuff. Philanthropic dwarven celebrities soaping down indigenous fauna. Spontaneously igniting crude oil geysers that launch thousands of barrels of flaming oil into the air? Yes plz. Sealable only by cavern collapse, oil wells would require some ingenious dwarven engineering to extract with any modicum of safety, lest the fort be content to have its sky on fire, bathed or flooded in burning crude oil and otherwise disastrously polluted or destroyed. Deep water oil extraction for those who love what would be a dwarven kind of challenge. There are also all the uses of oil as a resource. It changed the world when we found out how useful it was, so it could touch on everything from power to mechanics to industry to dwarven nightlife (hahaha, oil made nightlife possible).

Availability of resources. The way it is now either you've got enough of a resource to build an entire fort out of it or its not at all present and every season you'll get a trickle of it from the caravan. I see wood as pretty much the best of the basic building resources in terms of availability; limited in its supply but renewable on a given timescale, so you can manage wood availability without depending on the outside world. It could be cool if you had some way to transform your biome, like irrigating sand so you can create a forest. (Actually, can you do this already? Holy crap. It would still be recognized as a desert though, even though it should change mechanically) Play-wise I enjoy expending effort to make resources sustainable to some degree, and it would be interesting if more resource systems were unsustainable/destructive in their own right the way deforestation has sort of played with the idea a little bit. Even that could obviously go much further and be more disastrous. I'd like to see deforestation change the biome completely. Biome transformation would increase the sense of the power of dwarven civilization in a big way.

Mining parties -- kind of like dispatching your armies and such, your miners could go off if you have no local source of a given mineral. This would eliminate a lot of the need for perfect embarks. The process could also be more easily and sensibly tweaked to provide a source of minerals for your fort that is in some way balanced or unsustainable if you'd like it to be, sure some fun could come from that. I could see civilizations getting pissed if you start taking resources inside their territory, amongst other disasters. Also, it could be cool to set up infrastructure to increase the supply rate from outside sources. I won't hold my breath for railroads (god damn dwarven railroads would be cool.) but something along the lines of dispatching your serfs to build roads etc with war-dwarves to guard them and the incoming cargo through savage lands would be fun. This also brings up the idea of dispatching your own dwarven caravans throughout the world.

Global warming -- I don't know if dwarven industry is on the scale to destroy its world the way we are today, but I can't help bring this idea up. I think its going to end the world as we know it. That sucks in real life but of course translates to tons of fun in DF. You could watch the world's biomes erode, become less diverse and more extreme. Polar caps melting with cataclysmic floods swallowing up landmass. Biodiversity plummets as the range of different biomes decreases dramatically. DF has an excellent structure to show off the ill effects of global warming now that I think of it. Has everything a world needs to be destroyed in a sufficiently dramatic way. Dwarven warming!

Water -- water should probably be more important than it is. I guess you need a tile of it or so to move your fortress hospital along, but I don't get why dwarves don't get dehydrated from getting drunk all day, or that they can farm, cook and brew without water, etc. To a certain degree it would probably annoy the playerbase to make such a fundamental change at this point, but I could reasonably envision water as central to the entire fortress and every industry therein. Its pretty crucial for metalworking too. Eradicating a water supply should swiftly end even a mature fortress. Temperature could affect dwarven thirst - this would also make desert fortresses a lot of fun.

Merchant navies -- mountainhomes and other civilizations connected by bodies of water could have harbors for trade routes. Plenty of room to expand on this. Overfishing, polluted seas that poison anyone depending on them. Deep water oil ruptures could completely destroy a given body of water, which would probably piss off any civilization that depends on them. Whole towns could get destroyed from this considering the way they probably depend on bodies of water for food. Naval warfare and goblin invasions from the seas or large rivers.

Lots of shit here, don't want to drown out any other voices, especially since replies tend to be a single line. Also a lot of this has probably been brought up before of course, but I wanted to look at it through the thematic lens of unsustainable expansion. So I'll shut up and go for a walk now. Have fun!

[NW_Kohaku]

While I'm hardly one to criticize large threads on a theme, and actually find it refreshing to find someone else trying one of these, I do have to say that the Suggestions Forum is not for threads based around "here's a topic of discussion, so discuss!" threads, it's based around you actually putting out a full idea and asking for criticism. 

You should also be aware that many of these topics have been previously discussed. 

Magma isn't pressurized because magma already flows a little too freely (it's been likened to magic red water), and the concept of pressure probably isn't sophisticated enough to allow for real pyroclastic events. 

With that said, concepts like pressurized magma, oil deposits, and the like are all considered ideas.

Merchant navies are part of the caravan arc, and will be done relatively "soon".

Mining parties are part of hill dwarves, and will also be done "soon".

When it comes to water management, pollution in general, and even the concept of global warming (although there's little a single fortress can do to impact global warming), you might want to look at the Improved Farming thread.


On the topic of the overarching principle of unsustainability, I actually think that the game is a little too unsustainable, already.

The game suffers from overwhelming amounts of "entropic decay" thanks in no small part to lack of replacements of historical figures, the fact that you excavate, but never replenish the stone (barring obsidian), the way that dwarven nobles demand their favorite goods constantly even as they have no more room to even put all their stupid glass goblets anywhere anymore, anyway, and they just throw them out in the hallways. 

If we're going to get into a game where there is a finite number of black diamonds in the whole world, then there needs to be some sort of recognition on the part of some local podunk town's mayor that maybe he doesn't really have the capacity to order more black diamonds than actually exist in the world be encrusted on his throne while the king is content with fungiwood tables. 

[Babylon]

I think that tree seeds would move trees toward being a realistic sustainable resource, since if you clearcut there wouldn't be any more trees to drop seeds.

[alcohol_dependent]

Thanks for joining in Kohaku, from what I've read so far your threads kick ass, and thanks for more or less getting me up to snuff. I always dread the tremendous amount of material I've probably missed since I don't have much time to pour over this site and mostly just keep up to date through Toady's dev log. You seem like a kindred soul, so kudos to you for being bright and thank you for your keen observations of DF. Exciting to see that kind of thought going into the experience.

Now I'll quote you. Dialogue will ensue. I'll also probably visit your thread because it stimulated my brain tremendously.

I loved when you started emphasizing the importance of balancing farm ecology and immediately chided yourself as undwarfy.

This is what I'm trying to touch upon here with this thread, namely the idea that a dwarf would do anything rational through a long-term mental framework is absolutely counter to his nature. Its deeply endearing because it says something intimately true about ourselves, but to a (probably not at all large) degree of caricature.

On the topic of the overarching principle of unsustainability, I actually think that the game is a little too unsustainable, already.

The game suffers from overwhelming amounts of "entropic decay" thanks in no small part to lack of replacements of historical figures, the fact that you excavate, but never replenish the stone (barring obsidian), the way that dwarven nobles demand their favorite goods constantly even as they have no more room to even put all their stupid glass goblets anywhere anymore, anyway, and they just throw them out in the hallways. 

I agree and I think there's two ways you can approach this problem. You can tack on more content at the critical immersion-breaking event of entropic decay such that its extended to another point of nonsensical entropic decay, OR you can make it flavorful enough to be !!fun!! such that it seems intentional and contributes to the sense that the story of a dwarven civilization has unfurled.

DF is a glass snow bauble, but when you shake it, a new story unfolds each time. I think this is the intention of many things Toady puts into the game that have no real meaningful effect on the way the player plays the game. He added socks, and they became a running gag on dwarven suicide. He obviously didn't anticipate that would happen.

In the same way many developments occur that trump classically entertaining gameplay mechanics, but DF is still a fun game because of what occurs in the player's brainspace as a narrative they've pieced together along the way.

What I mean to say is, somehow these entropic effects should become more polished, more integrated into the fabric of the way the narrative unfolds. It is a story-telling event when a dwarf has no more space to put his goblets, but demands more of them anyway. I imagine a drunken dwarven noble, immersed in vice, certain of the irrelevancy of his own office, issuing mandates as some mad ritualistic exercise in the affirmation of his own existence -- a bizarre collection of goblets as the legacy of his existential despair.

If we're going to get into a game where there is a finite number of black diamonds in the whole world, then there needs to be some sort of recognition on the part of some local podunk town's mayor that maybe he doesn't really have the capacity to order more black diamonds than actually exist in the world be encrusted on his throne while the king is content with fungiwood tables. 

Well, the problem is not what the dwarf recognizes. Its what the player recognizes -- the immersion is interrupted. I could imagine a situation where a dwarf of humble station demands nonexistent luxuries beyond the possession of even the highest elite of his society. I could even imagine this happening fairly often. The problem is that you see an info screen that says Dwarf demands X and the in-game potential of the situation ends at "Dwarf is now fairly happy" instead of ecstatic. Not that this in itself is a bad result -- its a good one in fact (perhaps the dwarf accepts his station) but its the only result and it tends to repeat itself in a dense, nonsense cycle that doesn't show us anything that would say "this is the developing narrative of a dwarven elected official". The narrative could still even be cyclical -- many behaviors are. If it were well-developed and polished and integrated into the way we play the game, however... it would be seamless and highly immersive.

That's the same way I see many of the issues of dwarven unsustainability. Not that we should necessarily eliminate it (although sustainability is a fun way to play the game, it tends to be the most successful/least "fun"/least "dwarfy", it should definitely be an option, just as polished as/more than any other in terms of narrative experience), but that it should be embraced and iterated upon such that the player's sense of narrative is satisfied.

[NW_Kohaku]

What I mean to say is, somehow these entropic effects should become more polished, more integrated into the fabric of the way the narrative unfolds. It is a story-telling event when a dwarf has no more space to put his goblets, but demands more of them anyway. I imagine a drunken dwarven noble, immersed in vice, certain of the irrelevancy of his own office, issuing mandates as some mad ritualistic exercise in the affirmation of his own existence -- a bizarre collection of goblets as the legacy of his existential despair.

...

Well, the problem is not what the dwarf recognizes. Its what the player recognizes -- the immersion is interrupted. I could imagine a situation where a dwarf of humble station demands nonexistent luxuries beyond the possession of even the highest elite of his society. I could even imagine this happening fairly often. The problem is that you see an info screen that says Dwarf demands X and the in-game potential of the situation ends at "Dwarf is now fairly happy" instead of ecstatic. Not that this in itself is a bad result -- its a good one in fact (perhaps the dwarf accepts his station) but its the only result and it tends to repeat itself in a dense, nonsense cycle that doesn't show us anything that would say "this is the developing narrative of a dwarven elected official". The narrative could still even be cyclical -- many behaviors are. If it were well-developed and polished and integrated into the way we play the game, however... it would be seamless and highly immersive.

That's the same way I see many of the issues of dwarven unsustainability. Not that we should necessarily eliminate it (although sustainability is a fun way to play the game, it tends to be the most successful/least "fun"/least "dwarfy", it should definitely be an option, just as polished as/more than any other in terms of narrative experience), but that it should be embraced and iterated upon such that the player's sense of narrative is satisfied.

The problem with a mayor ordering black diamonds specifically, while kings order wood tables is that the game is currently completely arbitrary in what individual dwarves like and mandate.

It's even more absurd when it comes to favorite meats, since what they'll declare as their favorite foods have a decent probability of being something they couldn't possibly have ever eaten before, like giant red panda meat in a world where there are no savage biomes capable of hosting giant red pandas, or, for that matter, mandates for deep materials like slade. 

As for goblets, what needs to happen is there needs to be some way of taking items back from dwarves, so that they can't have property that stretches out to infinity, even if it means getting dwarves to steal undefended property.  Hypothetically, give the stupid mayor his own goblets back to him to satisfy his mandates.

[weenog]

I'm sorry, but you lost me here.

lest the fort be content to have its sky on fire, bathed or flooded in burning crude oil and otherwise disastrously polluted or destroyed.

Who wouldn't be? That's not something you settle for, that's something you aspire to... especially the ‼sky‼.

I don't know if dwarven industry is on the scale to destroy its world the way we are today,

You do know dwarfs have drained the oceans to more easily engage in deep-sea fishing, and emptied them into the caverns or hell just for shits and giggles, right?

[NW_Kohaku]

To go back to the notion of how this really works better if you have a full suggestion of your own for us to discuss for just a second, though, I have to ask what you really mean when you talk about "embracing" the entropic decay of the forts?

Specifically, here:

You can tack on more content at the critical immersion-breaking event of entropic decay such that its extended to another point of nonsensical entropic decay, OR you can make it flavorful enough to be !!fun!! such that it seems intentional and contributes to the sense that the story of a dwarven civilization has unfurled.

DF is a glass snow bauble, but when you shake it, a new story unfolds each time. I think this is the intention of many things Toady puts into the game that have no real meaningful effect on the way the player plays the game. He added socks, and they became a running gag on dwarven suicide. He obviously didn't anticipate that would happen.

Many of your statements are fairly metaphoric and abstract, so I don't quite get what that would exactly entail to actually critique it.

Socks don't exist for the purpose of being collected, they exist as clothing and protection from the elements, and dwarves will die of exposure if it is cold enough without them - the "suicide" part is just because there was no way to forbid items that fell off a dead creature at first, so dwarves would be alterted to the fact that a sock was on the ground, and go retrieve it for a stockpile, while not being aware of the thing that actually killed that creature still being around.

The entire joke of it exists because it is not desirable or purposeful behavior.  Toady tries to make the game as "immersive" as he can, and in trying to do so, makes it as "realistic" as he can, and therefore, it becomes glaringly obvious in those moments when the realism obviously stops.  (Dwarves running into fire to grab a sock is clearly something no realistic simulation would do, which is what makes it so funny and distinct.)

So I have to ask what you're going to do with trying to make it actually purposeful chaos? 

One of the things I remember from reviews of games like Overlord or Evil Genius was that games like Max Paine having mechanics that let you punch out random office workers or using Half Life 2's physics to make little forts out of the sofa cushions was funny because it was something you weren't supposed to do.  When you make "being evil" the thing you're supposed to do, everyone goes out of their way to try to play the good guy, just because that's not what you're supposed to do.

We drain the oceans for shits and giggles now because that's something clearly deviant from what we're supposed to be capable of, but when you make it normal, then it loses all the appeal.

[weenog]

So, you see this suggestion as trying to standardize emergent gameplay, and think that's an inherently self-defeating thing to attempt?

[alcohol_dependent]

Who wouldn't be? That's not something you settle for, that's something you aspire to... especially the ‼sky‼.

Haha, yes, I agree. Disaster and dwarven ambition are pretty much synonymous. I suppose the difference is the player's intention. Did the player intend to set the sky on fire or not?

Either way, the result is awesome. So that's the keystone of anything I'd suggest for implementation.

You do know dwarfs have drained the oceans to more easily engage in deep-sea fishing, and emptied them into the caverns or hell just for shits and giggles, right?

Hahaha, yes, I did know this actually. I must have forgotten my place.

It would be great if these things were expanded upon in terms of mechanics. What exactly happens to a biome when its ocean is drained? I'd like to see the biomes of spans of land transform under the duress of dwarven ingenuity. So for instance, drained ocean tiles becoming salt flats, the tremendous humidity of the ocean evaporating causing nearby forest areas to transform into swampy marshy jungle land. Noxious steam clouds. Stuff like that -- guess it would depend on how exactly the ocean was drained. It would definitely make the game feel tremendously dynamic. I could see dwarven terraforming plans becoming an embarkation standard.

Many of your statements are fairly metaphoric and abstract, so I don't quite get what that would exactly entail to actually critique it.

Yeah, I guess I don't much care about suggesting ways to implement hard logic or anything. Although you spoke about some pretty hard mechanical truths of the game pretty brilliantly in your thread,

It's not like we're going to have control of the numbers or the logic. Strictly brass tacks: all we really have the capability to shape is an idea or maybe the spark of one we didn't anticipate.

I've suggested some things that have been implemented in games (well, plenty of shit that hasn't, too.) In my experience, the ideas for the exact mechanics typically get thrown out the window, the developers extract the essence of whats good and fun about what thought you put forward, and then they make it happen sensibly since they're the ones that have to deal with the circumstances of the way the program is engineered.

We drain the oceans for shits and giggles now because that's something clearly deviant from what we're supposed to be capable of, but when you make it normal, then it loses all the appeal.

Well, just for the sake of the argument.. Say you're not supposed to be capable of digging past the magma sea. Then you find a way to do it, but there's nothing special there. Dev sees the player doing it, thinks about this. Instead of removing the way to dig past the magma sea, he build a circus at the bottom.

Digging to the bottom didn't lose appeal -- actually, it became a core piece of the identity of the game.

Or take like Missingno from pokemon. What if, instead of removing it, they took what was so appealing about getting this weird bizarre buggy pokemon, built a bit of lore around it, got rid of the fact that it corrupted your save file, and then left it as this totally wierd tangential part of the game? That would still be pretty damn cool.. especially if it was as immersive an experience as the main quest objectives.

More to write, I know, but gotta run for now.. Next time I have a minute I'll come up with something more concrete.. just as food for thought, though, really.

[NW_Kohaku]

I was ninjad by alcohol_dependent, but I'll post this, anyway, and then read what was said.

So, you see this suggestion as trying to standardize emergent gameplay, and think that's an inherently self-defeating thing to attempt?

Well, I'm honestly not sure what this suggestion is trying to accomplish, specifically.

However, emergent gameplay, as a rule of thumb, can be encouraged, but the means of doing so is to basically ensure that multiple independent systems apply their "forces" in a single shared space, rather than allowing each independent system to have its own individual space that "keeps its hands to itself".

That is, the stock market is an emergent phenomenon because the relative prices of everything all get jumbled together, and millions of independent actors are pushing the market in different directions simultaneously.

Likewise, much of DF's current emergent behavior occurs because everything takes place inside the same spacial simulation (or inside of worldgen) where the combination of the seemingly unrelated fluid mechanics, digging capacity of the player, drawbridges, pressure plates, pumps, and mechanisms can be used to create extremely complex systems.

Those are emergent behaviors - they're not something Toady specifically tried to program to create, but which don't actually work against the overarching goals of the game as a whole.  If dwarves can create water clocks and time drawbridges to raise or drop based upon the time of year, that's generally fine for the verisimilitude this game tries to create - dwarves are just great engineers that can construct complex machines using seemingly simple tools.

What I am talking about, however, is conflating the notion of emergent gameplay with jokes about bugs.

Dwarves running into a fire to grab a sock was a bug.  It's not just unintended behavior, it downright destroys the illusion of verisimilitude. 

Verisimilitude is actually one of Toady's highest goals in creating the game - it's what makes it a "realistic" type of "realistic fantasy simulator". And undermining the verisimilitude by purposefully just making it a part of the game that dwarves are sock-crazy and enjoy dying in fires diminishes what DF is trying to be.

[NW_Kohaku]

It's not like we're going to have control of the numbers or the logic. Strictly brass tacks: all we really have the capability to shape is an idea or maybe the spark of one we didn't anticipate.

I've suggested some things that have been implemented in games (well, plenty of shit that hasn't, too.) In my experience, the ideas for the exact mechanics typically get thrown out the window, the developers extract the essence of whats good and fun about what thought you put forward, and then they make it happen sensibly since they're the ones that have to deal with the circumstances of the way the program is engineered.

I believe you are conflating "not wanting to get down to specifics of coding" with "having some sort of solid, actionable idea."

You're talking about how there should be "something" that happens at the end of a dwarf demanding tons of goblets, but you don't have any actual suggestion of what.  What should happen when a dwarf mandates too much of a product?

[Mimaku]

Hi there,

i really like the idea of oil being present in the layers, either as a small lake on the ground or a deposit underground (or as mentioned even under water). Poluting the surrounding as a negative side-effect (which _could_ but does'nt have to occur) sounds like fun:
- poisening the soils, so there wouldn't be any growth for some time and actual fauna would die of it
- accidantically polluting the water, making it undrinkable
- animals suffering and finally dying because of it (when they made contact)
- igniting it accidantically, so the only way to put it out is to close the pit

But there would be some benefits too, such as:
- refining it for weaponary (like traps, bins filled with oil which could be thrown at enemies, flamethrowers *gg* and so on)..
- using it for some machinery, instead of using waterflow as a energy source
- using it for workshops as an alternative to coal etc...
- let the sherrif tar and feather criminals ;-)

I think, there are plenty ideas for why it would be a nice addition to the current materials...but all i mentioned above are just some ideas and nothing else...

...but i find it worth to discuss this, what you others think? (perhaps its worth a seperate thread)...

...greetings,
Mimaku