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I did not ignore the poll.

3 (15%)

I paid attention to the poll.

7 (35%)

Wut.

10 (50%)

Total Members Voted: 20

[MDFification]

Freehold - Civ Diversity Mod

Last 34.11 Release:
v0.8.0
Raws Only:
v0.7.2

NOTE: 0.7.2 causes the game to crash upon worldgen. Try deleting the Centaur civilization.

Freehold is a mod that increases the cultural diversity of Dwarf Fortress, to make the active world both more fun to explore as an adventurer and to interact with in fort mode. While previously 1 societal archetype and language existed per civilized race in DF, Freehold aims to add 7+ in addition to attempting to balance currently existing races (by making them reasonably challenging to your dwarves), while balancing wars, populations and entity placement so that war is both omnipresent in your world and unlikely to result in the total annihilation of an archetype unless terrain is severely imbalanced.
In its complete state, Freehold will include numerous new pieces of equipment, new weapons materials unavailable to the player unless scavenged from other civilizations (be it through siege or reclaiming the ruins of their settlements), adventure mode reactions enabling an adventurer to better craft primitive gear they'll need to suvive in the wilderness, DF performance optimization and a living world much more densely populated by radically different cultures than in the mono-cultured vanilla.


A list of people who have helped me through my modding endeavors through bug reporting, advising or me blatantly stealing their files:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 -Meph
-Ingfig
-Phoebus
-Quietust
-BlackFlyme
-Deon
-Wannabehero
-Thundercraft
-gtmattz
-Button
-NonconsensualSurgery
-4maskwolf

If you find a bug or notice a balance issue, please report it here. Any help improving the mod is appreciated!

Current Development:

40.18 v0.1 The High-Elven Arc (Status: Testing and Tweaking)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The High-Elven arc adds a new race (temporarily), a new entity and a new metal to Freehold. The reclusive and mysterious High-Elves are in fact intended to be wiped out early during gameplay, leaving behind expansive ruins on the glaciers in which a canny adventurer or group of settlers can salvage mithril - a metal impossible to produce for any other civilization that is precisely half as potent as adamantine, making it much superior to steel.

Currently, issues existing include lack of production of world constructions by the High Elves (speculated to be due to their low population count, which is intended to prevent them from overwhelming neighbouring cultures early-worldgen), the lack of appearance of the High-Elven hierarchy in any observable fashion, and complete lack of observed mithril in High-Elven ruins.

Future Development

Humans Arc
-Replaces current human civ with 6 new entities using the human race. 2 of these will be [BABYSNATCHER] because they actively raid for slaves.
-New civs are balanced to ensure that humans fight humans rather frequently.
-Elfs and goblins will be rebalanced in terms of maxage and, in the case of goblins, litter size to ensure that they maintain viable populations for fort-mode interaction.
-Alters all built-in worldgen presets to give these civs more area to inhabit to prevent the world from getting too crowded and to make sure the population of entities is as variable as possible.

Elf Arc
-Splits the current elf entity into two archetypes; those inhabiting Good Forests and those inhabiting Evil Forests. The latter will be [BABYSNATCHER]. When nature is corrupted, its guardians are too...
-Adds the re-balancing from this thread so that elves aren't a joke in combat anymore. Their mode of warfare will remain sneaky raiders, but now they'll have the equipment to make these raids actually challenging. Plus, if they show up in force, their animal companions should be significantly more threatening...

Optimization Arc
-As many bugfixes and balancing as I can provide
-Material standardization for FPS boosts (if it turns out people want that)
-Worldgen presets optimized

[MDFification]

Changelog (34.11)
(Kept since version 0.6.3)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

0.6.4
-Tweaked morality to allow goblins and Orcs to go to war.
-Fixes applied to cremation and blood extraction.
-Lord and Captain of the Guard positions added to Neutral civ.

0.6.5
-Fixed: blood extraction/blood cooking did not appear in kitchen
-Added Raider language
-Added Neutral language
-Added Savage language

0.6.6
-Added melting points to most material templates found in creatures. Allows zombies to die in magma.

0.6.7
-Added new weapon: Throwing Spear.
-Added new ammo: Javelin.

0.6.8
-Added new weapon: Rapier.
-Added new weapon: Arming Sword.
-Added new weapon: Back Sword.

0.6.9
-Added Satyr caste to elves.
-Removed elves from Paragon and Neutral civs.
-Rebalanced siege arrival timers (Orcs come later)

0.7.0
-Fixed references to non-existent words in SAVAGE, NEUT and ORC languages.
-Fixed incorrect references to weapons in numerous entities.
-Fixed issues with Satyr tissue thickness.
-Fixed centaurs; pending balancing and entity creation, they're tagged [DOES_NOT_EXIST].
-Cloned evil civ and moved Humans/Dark Elves to that. Each archetype was given different weapons.

0.7.1
-New entity: Horde. It's the centaur civ, with appropriate equipment, morality and siege timers.
-Decreased centaur size.

0.7.2
-New reaction: Carve stone anvil.
-New materials: Peat and Bog Iron
-Decreased centaur size.
-Removed tusks and goreing from Orcs.
-Fixed error: All custom reactions on Freehold were not available in game due to typo.

0.7.3
-Removed Neutral archetype.
-Removed Savage archetype.
-Added former Savage races (bar humans) to Skulking civ, along with harpies.
-Split Evil archetype between Darkelves and Goblins. Dark Elves now come with steel, and siege later.
-Dark Elf civ now has its own language.
-Centaur civ now has its own language.
-Edited Harpies to make them breed, changed description and gave them a male caste.
-Fixed bug: Centaurs were not equipping.

0.8.0
-Deleted basically everything and ported over to Deon's Essential DF mod. Removes a TON of unnecessary creatures and stone types for now.
-Alynxs removed, cats reinstated.
-Centaurs, Orcs, Harpies, Hobgoblins and Satyrs ported over, along with the Centaur and Orc civs and respective language files.
-New race: Gnomes
-New civs: Harpies and Gnomes

0.8.1
-Orcs and Centaurs are now hostile by default.
-Gnomes are no longer hostile by default. They also get a nerf. Sorry, gnomes!
-Kobolds now pull levers at random, the playful things.

Known Issues

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

• The High-Elven hierarchy is mysteriously absent. From legends mode. Adventurer testing to see if they exist in-game while the High-Elven civilization survives are underway.
• No High-Elven civilization constructs sites after their foundation. Speculated to be due to initial population to be too low to expand, or to support the construction of roads, bridges, tunnels or tombs.
• Duplicate raws caused general weirdness. Fixed.
• Typos in entity_freehold caused the reaction producing mithril to be disabled for High Elves. Fixed.
• Despite being enabled, no mithril objects (or metallic objects of any kind) have been found in the ruins of High-Elven settlements.
• Words not recognized by DF inserted into language files by DFlang spam the errorlog upon loading a world containing High-Elves. Fixed.
• During attempts to bolster the initial population of the High Elves, the entire civ mysteriously stops being placed without causing an error consistently, regardless of the amount of free glacier available.

[Thundercraft]

Hmm... Kind of interesting. 
PTW.

Edit: Have you considered added some sort of Poll to ask forumites what features they might want to see next, or if a certain race is too strong/weak, etc, etc? I know that a lot of major mods (Masterwork, Genesis, Modest Mod, etc) often have a Poll to get feedback.

[MDFification]

Hmm... Kind of interesting. 
PTW.

Edit: Have you considered added some sort of Poll to ask forumites what features they might want to see next, or if a certain race is too strong/weak, etc, etc? I know that a lot of major mods (Masterwork, Genesis, Modest Mod, etc) often have a Poll to get feedback.

I had one in the other thread. I'll add a poll after the next release. Nobody's had a chance to play a version since 0.6.4 anyway. 0.7.0 should be out around weekend - it's basically 0.6.9 with bugfixes. I was going to add centaurs, but even if I fix them in time they're OP as heck. It'd be like spawning a civ of semi-megabeasts.

EDIT: Uploaded new version. Fixed all bugs except the Orc tusk material and mysterious double orc spawn. Am likely to be busy over weekend, the earliest you can expect those fixes are next Monday.

[MDFification]

Thinking of adding some lore to the game, since we're spicing things up. Have no idea how this should be implemented. Add a lore section to the help tag, perhaps?
I'm noticing that centuars rarely go to war with anyone but dwarves. This should be changed, as it makes worldgen even more imbalanced. And also because centaurs need a lot of dice-rolls to go down so far during worldgen. Seeing as I've seen mountainhomes attacked repeatedly for hundreds of years without killing a single centuar, further size-nerfs are probably necessary.
On a random note, I'm noticing that virtually all civs now incorporate the rare sentient being from another civ into their ranks as worldgen progresses. Good! If you ask me, taking over someone's village doesn't happen often enough. Pillaging has no real game effect that I can tell, and its done all the time.

EDIT: Just found out that all the custom reactions (burn bodyparts/corpses, cook blood, etc) were not available due to a typo. This will be fixed by the next release. Sorry y'all don't have the reactions advertized in 0.7.0 

EDIT2: Added some more planned civs and races. These are intended not to kill you, but to ensure even a turtling fort gets some action. Unless you're entirely underground with drawbridges raised. In which case nothing will change.

EDIT3: Worldgen is continuously crashing in 0.7.2, I've only seen it succeed once. 0.7.1 worked, though, so the current release should be fine.
Removed Orc tusks, firstly because who ever heard of an orc with tusks, secondly because I got tired of trying to make goreing mechanics balanced.
Harpy civ basically finished, but I haven't been able to test it due to aforementioned game crashing. Game crashing continued after reverting to 0.7.1, though, so it could just be me.

[MDFification]

Posted Raws-Only version of Freehold while trying to solve the Worldgen crash issue. Installing is simple; just copy-paste into your raws and replace any file that is already named within them.

EDIT: Not tested with vanilla. It should work, but if it doesn't, you were warned. For best results, install into a pre-downloaded AcceleratedModest Mod.
EDIT2: Raws currently crash the game upon worldgen. I think that removing the centaur entity should fix this, but I'm not certain.

[Lord_lemonpie]

PTW

[MDFification]

Well, upon testing, the Raws-Only version of the mod still causes the worldgen to crash while placing civilizations. Further testing will continue. My next plan is to transfer files one by one into a new template to pinpoint the location of the error. If that fails, I'll revert to 0.7.0 and recreate the centaurs. 0.7.1 seemed to work for me, but I didn't do exhaustive testing with worldgen in it or 0.7.0

Considering merging SAVAGE archetype with kobolds and harpy civs. This would make the raws easier to navigate, reduce the amount of civs worldgen feels the need to place (not the number of individual civs generated, but the variety of archetypes) while increasing balance. The hypothetical new civ (ANNOY?) would be edited to send sieges.

Increasing the amount of sieges you face would follow a system that introduced new sieging races as your fortress grows in population or wealth. This would be on a five-tier system:

1. No sieges - build your fort and prepare at least a minimal defense. You may cause other sieges to come earlier in this stage, though, if you allow to many thefts of kidnappings.
2. Kobolds/Animal Peoples/Harpies may besiege your fort. They have weak weapons and armor, but can still harass and kill your dwarfs if you have NO military. A wise player will use these sieges as a training exercise.
3. Goblins may besiege your fort. This brings you goblinite and more challenging foes. First war animals and mounts may appear.
4. Orcs/Dark Elves may besiege your fort. Orcs are basically goblins, but bigger. Their pathing is somewhat different as they are building destroyers, which also means that should your defense be breached, they'll wreck the place. Dark Elf civs will exhibit behaviours similar to goblins, but they'll have steel.
5. Cultists of Armok/Centaurs may besiege your fort. One can bypass your traps and wields steel. The other is just large combatants - centaurs are hard for less skilled beings small as a dwarf to kill, especially if they outnumber you.

Note that you can trigger sieges early if too many thefts/kidnappings occur. Additional sieges can be triggered if you get in a war with elves or humans. Elves have their diplomats enabled in this mod, so getting in a war with them is a distinct possibility. It's hard to get humans to declare war on you in this mod as they currently have no diplomats enabled, but it can be done by mass-destruction of their caravans and trading with an elf civ they're at war with.

EDIT: New testing method to find cause of worldgen errors has been found. I can now hopefully find the file that's causing the errors and narrow down where in the file the error is, even if it's not showing up in my errorlogs.
EDIT2: I think I found what's causing the crashes - the centaur civ. Try removing that if the game won't play.

[MDFification]

So, testing to find the location of the worldgen crashing bug has been difficult. I've noticed that the game always crashes before reaching two specific reaction files, but one of them is unchanged from vanilla and removing the other didn't stop the game crashes.

Since I have no idea how to fix this and can't be sure if earlier versions are truly stable, I'm considering just redoing the whole thing. I'd keep all the same features, add some new ones - except this time I'd actually develop the mod in a predetermined order. You'd get all your civs/creatures first, then all your new equipment, then  gameplay changes (which I'd make it easy to opt out of) and then future ambitious projects like a functional gunpowder or magic system.
What'ya think?

Also, I'm thinking of incorporating a system similar to Masterwork's Battlecry interactions. It could spice things up a little to have the numerous races yell things at eachother during combat, at least when spotting an enemy.

EDIT: As of right now, next release will move the mod over to Deon's Essential DF, replacing AccelerateModest as our base. Don't worry, this won't remove the bugfixes or improved performance - but it will remove a lot of creatures and stones. Next release is also going to see some pretty huge changes - it will remove the gameplay changes and cultural artifacts temporarily until I can make improvements. Animal people (beyond the subterranean ones) will also be completely removed. It will however contain two new civs! Hooray!

I might eventually go through all creatures in the mod and make them breed/be trainable by default. Well, except sentient ones.

EDIT2: Well, seeing as I'm using this thread as sort of a development journal, status updates. Currently new version has fixed the worldgen bug/duplication errors. It also has harpies, gnomes and centaurs, but no other races ported over from 0.7.2 yet. 
Before 0.8.0, expect all races/castes/civs to be ported. No gameplay changes will be ported over until 0.10.0 - I've made a massive list of equipment to add before 0.9.0 though. I like how we've managed to get to 0.7 without releasing a stable alpha. I'm the best at numbering releases accurately.

[MDFification]

Just posting a status update for y'all, since I've been pretty busy and not working on the mod much.

Currently, the new version of the mod includes Harpies, Gnomes and Centaurs. I also added Snails as a non-sentient creature group, just to spice things up a little.
By the release of 0.8.0, I'll have brought back Orcs and the new castes.

The reason Cultists of Armok and Dark Elves are going to show up later is because I'm being ambitious. I have to learn how to make better interactions before I can cause Armok Cultists to go berserk in battle at opportune times (because that's basically their nerf - trap avoiding, steel wielding powerhouses should occassionaly go mad during battle and just slaughter everything if they're true servants to a god of chaos and violence). I also want to make Dark Elves siege underground, which I have no idea how to do yet.

Still, while I'm figuring out the more ambitious features, there's no reason I can't give you a load of new equipment. I'm compiling a list of weapons, shields and armors that will be used in-game.
Anyway, happy holidays! Hopefully 0.8.0 will be out by Christmas so you can not interact with your friends and family.

EDIT: 0.8.0 is out! I'll be posting an update including Dark Elves soon.

[MDFification]

So, genned a world. Noticed that you start off at peace with centaurs and orcs, but at war with gnomes. I think this is because of the [ITEM_THIEF] tag for the case of the gnomes, but as it stands you currently have about as good a chance to start at war with elves as you do orcs and centaurs. I'm thinking of adding tags to force you into war with them. So, next update, worldgen will be more balanced and civs more hostile to each other.

Also in the next update; we'll throw in the basic framework for the Armok Cultists (no berserking yet - I still need to learn interactions) and the Dark Elves will rear their ugly heads. Underground. They'll rear their heads down in the cavern level. A lot of bugs will have to be fixed in that.

EDIT: Not sure if Dark Elves are spawning correctly, but from what I know they shouldn't be known to any civilizations anyway. I got rid of their site and biome tags, which were causing errors since they're [LAYER_LINKED], and that doesn't seem to stop the animal people civs from spawning. I guess the only way to find out will be to play a fort up to the point that they attack you - I haven't had the chance to do that yet, but I will.

On an unrelated note, I wish I had been less ambitious with my version numbering system, because not having the entirety of even one basic premise of the mod fully implemented by 0.8.0 just seems bad. I guess 1.0.0 will just have to be the release which everything will be implemented/balanced by.

[Deon]

ITEM_THIEF makes them hostile, yep.

Add BABYSNATCHER to orcs to make them your enemies.

[MDFification]

Fixed the races, put in the Armok Cultists. Still need to add an interaction to make them go berserk under the right circumstances. Watch out for these guys - they're nasty, with Trapavoid, Steel Weapons, and  martial trances. Well, watch out for them in the next release.

Speaking of which, I need more testing when the next release comes! The next release is intended to be the second last release dealing with new civs for a while - after that I'd like to do some bugfixing, re-balancing, and then get into adding more weapons. So if you see a bug/balance issue, please let me know. Thanks!

EDIT: I hate posting so much in my own threads. Also interactions. They are strange. Thank god for the wiki!
EDIT2: Seems to me like this mod, for whatever reason, leads to a lot more conquering of sites than vanilla. This leads to there being some pretty mixed populaces.

[4maskwolf]

I'll help with bugtesting.  That's one thing I've learned to do from infernobreak (dear God, the bugs...)

[MDFification]

I'll help with bugtesting.  That's one thing I've learned to do from infernobreak (dear God, the bugs...)

I know that feel.
Although the point where albatross replaced kobolds was actually pretty sweet and I deeply regret fixing it.

---

Anyway, I guess I'll just post a playthrough o' the fort when I make that release? At least that way I'll be motivated to go through with it. Although it could be late. For perspective, I've done 3 essays this week so far. I'm a tad busy.


EDIT: Quid pro quo, you look like you could use some testers too. I'll look into that when I have time.