About Lizard Blood: I'm perfectly fine with that. Fighting them close quarters will be annoying but not cause fatalities despite killing them, so will be more interesting, while deadly ingested blood adds more challenge in keeping clean and finding other things to drink. Makes the game interesting but still fair.
@Halfling: The clothing of larger creatures being much thicker than that of smaller creatures is a fundamental bug with no known workaround, aside from nudity.
Adherents:Okay. Found a monastery. They don't have spears, they just take them from the enemy. So that was my bad.
Food for thought: they may (I'd say will) kill a siege (forgot about sieges blocking caravans) or a megabeast if they arrive at the same time. If they bring a gifted adherent they kill anything in the game. This is standard behavior for caravans. They may pick up equipment on the map. If they're unable to leave, or sometimes due to a bug fail to path correctly, they may go berserk as merchants sometimes do and cause a lot of trouble, more so than anything else.
Furthermore I just feel that in an open world game something being able to unavoidably instakill you, like these will an adventurer, is bad game design. It's kind of like a forced choice; an invisible wall. You're not supposed to go there. Something being massively hard is okay, literally impossible is not really.
...
So how about both a nerf to their unconsciousness abilities and a reduction of the frequency of their visits, both?
I agree with reducing their visits (how about to Winter only?), but...
They're not an "unavoidable" obstacle, they do not railroad you in ANY way or force you to avoid certain areas. They might be able to trounce you,
but you'd have to actively pick a fight with them. They are
never initially hostile. I don't see what the problem is. Occulentibus can destroy you without you being able to do much about it and they'll target you even if you're friendly. If you really want to kill an Adherent, you can take all the time you want to prepare one of the few things that can kill them (like the Occulentibus gaze vigor), because they'll never strike the first blow. You can still sneak up on them after provoking them, too. It's a challenge, but fights with them are 100% avoidable in adventure mode.
As for fortress mode, I purposefully disallowed them wagons to ease their pathfinding. If they're staying on the map too long, just do what DF players always do: wall them in and/or drop a ceiling on them once they go berserk. And in my experience, destroying three or four caravans doesn't start a war, giving the player years to correct the issue. I want them to be very, very difficult to defeat, but at the same time, it's the players' choice whether or not to face that challenge. It's like demanding a nerf to dragons because they get mad when you strike them.
Also, their powers are pretty much useless against things that don't have minds. People have golems, zombies, machines, and other things in the works, so the list of things they can't kill is growing, and already nonzero. Likely there will eventually be something made from endgame materials that will kill them, too.
In short, they're a challenge to fight, but you have to actively seek out such a fight.Materials:About iron: we've already got meteoric iron, which is far too common (and deep) than any meteor has a right to be. In it's current state it's not very meteoric. I think we should have some regular iron (with a single kind of ore), and make meteoric iron use gem behavior, so it shows up uncommonly as relatively "meteor" sized clusters within most kinds of rock.
Too common? I prefer to see it as the gods decided to throw a f***ton of meteors at the place and see what happened. The moon that causes syndromes is just the debris that got shot up high enough, and the gods decided to make it not look like a mistake.
Yes, but it's not really
"meteoric" if it constitutes a good chunk of the planet. The Earth is essentially made entirely of meteorites, but we don't call just any mineral "meteoric". If it's gone through the geologic cycle and become veins within layers of rock, it is by no means meteoric any longer. Therefore, we should either change it from veins to clusters (since then the material would be grouped in clumps, like burried meteorites), or rename it just "iron". Thematically, we ought to have regular iron if we have a supposedly rarer, better form of iron. And linguistically, wouldn't people just call it "iron" if it was the only kind of iron?
Hobbits work exclusively with Iridium, one of if not the
most rare and precious metals on earth, yet don't have any iron to make simple tools for their pastoral lifestyle. Iridium, a fairly obscure metal which requires
industrialized technology to make into anything useful, but no iron.
It's very important that we have the standard materials of most any setting, so people have a reference point for the fantastic materials. What the hell is Lunanium and Aeresium? Sounds like jargon, is of no meaning to people who hear it or find it in game. They can hardly conceptualize it without something known to compare it to. I say we need copper, iron, and steel so people can compare stuff to them for combat properties; we need silver and gold so people can see how valuable stuff is compared to those. Hell, we have Iridium but not platinum, and people didn't even know there was a difference between the two until the 1800's.
Stone layers:I think all stone should have a background, but not necessarily grey.
Any color is fine, as long as it's not black. We have way too many stones with a colored icon on a black background, which is very confusing as it looks like either the ground cover or a whole bunch of items. In vanilla, you can tell at a glance what's open space/ground and what's solid wall because walls look solid. Too often in this, a quick glance cannot distinguish between the walls, the floor, open space, and rock walls. So just give it a background, ANY background.
Let's not use Jaded Slade as a lava rock. It's undiggable and contains water, which would make a massive mess and eliminate much of the fun of playing with fluids.