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[Snaaty]

Hello Forum,

in all of this current "adventure-mode hype", that I myself am gladly joining, I have noticed, that there are some things that could improve adventure mode immensely. I'm just sharing my ideas, (which have probably been discussed before), to see if other people like them too, and, if possible they are moddable through raws and/or dfhack. I am not posting this in the suggestion thread because the ideas here are nowhere close to fleshed out.

1. Pets. Make it possible to start with and/or tame wild animals. Imagine the awesomeness of you chasing down some goblin criminals, whith your hunting dogs tearing them apart limb by limb. Or imagine, you take your trusty war-dogs with you only to break your legs in some forgotten cave; starving, you decide to decapitate your least favorite wardog so you might make it to the next village. 
I guess the framework for that is already implemented, as companions are able follow you, so should animals. Taming wild animals sounds ver dfhacky to me, though I don't know that much about it.

2. Smaller, but better quests. Yeah, so Urist McDwarf just decided he wants to be an adventurer and asks people for what he can do. Well, you can choose between the savvanah titan, some forgotten beast or an ancient vampire with 3000 kills.
So, instead people could ask for smaller quests, like certain items (clothes, weapons, jewellery, gems) or perhaps the death of a civilian, but noone is supposed to notice. So, the first few quests can actually not be ridiculously out of proportion.
Sadly, I believe for a change on such a basic level we need Toady to work on it. I actually belive this point to be the most important one, the current "quest progression" in DF is even steeper than it's learning curve.

3. Mining and woodcutting Mining in adventure mode also sounds really awesome, especially in combination with the smaller, item-demanding quests. Imagine some master-jeweller is asking for a rough gem so he can craft a wonderful bracelet, to win over the love of his life.

4. Extended crafting This is very closely related to the mining and woodcutting thing. Right now, getting decent loot is just determined by chance, if you happen to see a steelclad macelord die to some goblins, you wait it out and take his loot. Imagine crafting your own items and perhaps even selling them. Of course the reactions would have to be very much modified as far as ingredients/products go, and proably have to be simplified a lot to at most three steps of manufacturing.

5.Different professions Right now pretty much every ultimate goal in Adv-Mode involve: "kill this dude". I believe the combat system in Adventure mode is incredibly awesome (even moreso with the additions from 0.40, though I would really like to see the extended attack options from masterwork bundled with the starter pack, or something). Yet I believe, that the game as an adventurer can be certainly made less dull, if you also can pick up a "civilian" profession and start creating your own items.

6. Make site designs shareable Okay, this one is a bit off and probably not possible without Toadys cooperation and looks like much work. The idea is, that players can create fortress designs and then post these online. Then they could get bundled up and supplied to everyone who wants them. That way we can avoid overly repetitive designs (which is possibly inevitable if only one guy creates them) and also allow for a nice kind of "multiplayer" modus. One thing that would be very difficult though, is that the surface and surroundings of every fortress are different, so you probably can't just port one fort into a totally different region. But maybe just something smaller, but along these line can be possible?

That's all for now, I am aware that probably most of these ideas are not possible, yet I want to know what you think of them. So this is the thread or your crazy, hype-induced adventure-mode ideas where you're not sure f they're even remotely realistic.

Last but not least, I know that there is some dfhack plugin floating around that allows for Fortmode reactions to be conducted in Adventure mode. There seem to be some bugs, though, and now with the new version it is probably broken.

[therahedwig]

Actually most of these things have been suggested already. With the last one expressed as 'pregenerated building raws'.

Most of them will also be implemented in the final game.
The eventual idea is to blur away the lines between adventure and fortress mode, so you could start out as an adventurer and end up creating the greatest fortress in history. Or you could get bored halfway that and become an explorer, mapping out the different places in the world, and then, when you're bored of that, return to your fort building!

[alexandertnt]

There are a few things I would like to see:

1) Combat system (specifically wounds) de-binaryified. Your arm will seamingly work 100% fine with any number of injuries, until that one extra wound suddenly and completely disables it. I often see a "straw that breaks the camels back leg" situation.

2) Better communication of whats what. How big is that creature? (I shouldn't have to look in the raws to find out). "Peach-faced loverbird man"? Why not just "Bird Man" and describe the specific sub-species in their description? Would create a lot less noise without removing any detail.

3) Bug and quirk fixes. Stuff thats been around for ages like flying creatures crawling on the ground mid flight, insta-healing when traveling etc.

IMO all this sounds more fun to me then pets and mining. Expecially the third point, which I think would be worth several new features in itself.

[Snaaty]

Actually most of these things have been suggested already. With the last one expressed as 'pregenerated building raws'.

Yeah, I thought so, still, bringing it up now that there's a surge of attention might encourage some modders to do something. 
And what did Toady and/or the majority of the community say about those 'pregenerated raws'? I believe it's a pretty decent idea.

@alexandertnt: Hm, I see your point, but I think there has to be some sort of "threshold" at some point, where your arm goes from working to unusable. Maybe the new attack speed system can smooth things out a little, so having more injuries slows your overall attack speed?

I agree totally regarding improved communication. In Masterwork DF there are some creatures that have their size written in their description. It's still an abstract number, but I think you can also have a look at the dwarven size and then compare.

Bugfixes are very important. Although I think people have been playing with many bugs for such a long time, they don't consider them bugs anymore. Still a logically coherent world would be appreciated.

As I said, the most important point of my initial post was really the improved quests-thigy. Seriously, the more I think about it, the more abstruse and un-fun adventure mode appears to me. We don't need an extremely linear and predetermined "campaign" for every adventurer, but bein asked to kill one of the last three dragons as your first task in your new life as an adventurer is just friggin ridiculous. Smaller, more realistic quests could be so much of an improvement. Generally, people in adventure mode are always terrified, by allegedly horrible and powerful beasts of the night. (And the occasional Bandit lord.) Why not introduce more "petty" crimes that don't involve maiming, raiding parties und clubbing people to death with the arms of their recently slaughtered relatives?

[alexandertnt]

IRL people can still use injured body parts, just less effectively. I would imagine in DF you should be able to sustain some injury to your leg and be able to walk on it but with reduced efficiency (i.e. limping) and thus walk slower (but faster than crawling). There would still be a threshold, since eventually it should go from "somewhat functional" to "totally broken".

Adding the size in the description is a crude workaround, but it is still far better than nothing. I imagine it would work well as a wordy description based off the difference between your size and the size of the thing you are observing (Elephant observing mouse would see "It is tiny", mouse observing an elephant would see "It is towering!" etc).

I have been playing the game since 40d (~2008) and those issues I listed go back all the way to that version of the game. Although it doesn't come up too often, my mind still skips like a broken record when a flying creature falls over in mid air, bringing me out of the game world. I can let my imagination smooth over things like the injury thing mentioned above since it's reasonably abstract enough, but both flying and being on the ground is a literal contradiction.

I agree with you on the quest thing, it would be nice to see some smaller tasks available to characters with less skill (especially since I like starting as a peasent outsider. Roc's are hard to kill when all you have is a knife ). ATM if you don't want to exploit bugs, it seems you have to basically hack tamed animals to death or something for a while before you get enough skill to take on something like armed bandits.