What would be interesting is if we could ever build things that are 3 dimensional and standing in the middle of an area regardless of the ground under it (building stuff in the air). Making a merperson civilization could be possible then.
It is possible to attach buildings to the sky... (but afaik MDF uses an open sky plugin and has no sky ceiling, but not sure)
Already can be done by turning caveins off in the init (or was it d_init?) file. As for the merpeople, though, pathing would still be completely broken, and you'd have to drain all water from an area to build things or produce a good at a workshop since neither of those can happen underwater so far as I know.
That's my point. It's a pity because if you could put in some kind of tag "aquatic" or "free floating" you could have avian and aquatic races. Even if pathing was just fucking weird.
Why is flight pathing weird btw?
edit: Also, for the brood mothers. What if the brood mother is some kind of item more than a creature? You build a particular building with it for producing various monsterous and varied pets based upon the items you feed into it. Basically, we have all these various kinds of dusts for experiments right? So we need some place to use them!
Obviously this should go into horrifying experiments, the production of vile poisons and all kinds of syndroms. Enchantments. Strange golems. Evil beasts that none should have the capacity for imaginging let alone unleashing upon the world!
See what I'm getting at? We have all these experimental materials... so why don't we USE them for shit? A massive variety of pets, creatures, golems, spells, enchantments, syndrom causing substances, and other things. All of them researched in the libraries, produced from crazy combinations of the various dusts and reagents created by the grinders, and fueled by souls.
edit2: Basically. To make up for a faction that will basically be constantly under siege, and without a focus on actually keeping it's citizens alive (after all, you just want a basic breeding population of Ghouls at the end of the day, or a constant stream of souls), they'd instead be focused on research and discovering more and more perverse ways of ending lives and making their foes miserable and inflicting more horrors upon the world. Basically. We should come up with every 3 dust combination possible, make it into a list. and figure out if that's used for producing a new minion. A new pet. A new spell. A new set of enchantments. Or a vile kind of poison.
edit3: Also, depending on how many different things are made, and the percentage chances of research inside of the libraries. Well, each fortress will play radically differently than the others. Some might have fast hordes of war beasts and monstrosities. Another might go in for spell slinging in a big way. Yet another will coat all of it's weapons in terrible syndroms. Yet another will have complicated enchantments that turn foes against one another. And so on and so forth.
edit4: I'd imagine that researching buildings would be a fairly high percentage chance of finding them. So you might have a 10% chance of finding any particular building. But only a 3% chance of any one particular spell, enchantment, poison, etc.
edit5: Alternatively (and no idea if this works). You have the research break it down as follows:
1) x% of things we want to be fairly common and all warlocks to have, y% of things that we want to be broken up and be ludicrously hard to get 100% of.
2) once you've researched something, it doesn't appear in the research libraries anymore. That way percentages will change over time and players will no longer have to worry about getting the same thing over and over.
edit6: Just realized, you probably can't add new reactions to already researched workshops from more research. but perhaps lots and lots of 1x1 or 1x2 workshops? That or what is produced by the research is a 'thesis' that is part of the making process.