Thanks to BlackFlyme, martinuzz, Button, Thief^, PatrikLundell, Random_Dragon, Knight Otu, Vattic, MrWiggles, Witty, Untrustedlife, Max^TM, burned, Putnam, therahedwig, Untelligent, Dirst, vjmdhzgr and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions. If your question doesn't appear below, go back and check for one of these people! It has quite possibly been answered.
Yeah, they are all real, but it doesn't know how to pull from outlying villages yet, so there's a limit on the area of the effect. Global populations can also increase if there are enough of them, regardless of what you are managing at your fort.
Well, that certainly explains why the sieges always take a turn for the underwhelming after I crush a few big ones. Any plans to remedy that?
I mentioned the villages, which would mostly handle it, and it shouldn't always be fixed (e.g. if you kill them all).
A) What exactly is a scholar doing when his job reads "Research!"?
B) My fort hit the wealth and population for FBs a long time ago. I got one, then didn't see any for over a decade. However, for the past 2 years, I've gotten one or two FBs per season, every season (not complaining, for the record). Is my drought and flood of FBs a coincidence that occurred because my embark was very far away from the stomping grounds of all but that first FB, or is there something deeper going on?
C) Related to the above, I've noticed that every time I do get 2 FBs in a single season, they come from different cavern layers. Is this a coincidence, or did you code "a cavern layer may only have a maximum of one FB appear in it per season" in somewhere?
A) It's the organizational activity. They'd like to branch into something else, but it's either on a timer or they are having an issue. Sometimes they wait for a collaborator.
B+C) I think it was probably even less deep and more of coincidence. Just random chance, if you got them later. It doesn't care much about FB locations now, other than that they are underground. In general, large beasts of all kinds don't have any code at all about how they move around or attack or whatever, post worldgen. It wasn't part of the first world activation pass we did. There is a strict limit on the number of attacks per layer per season, and that's the sort of thing that'll be lifted once we get their post worldgen behaviors in.
If we start getting more sites or site-like things, then will they appear in the exported Legends data? If so, are there plans to make their (and other sites') locations more accurate than the world tile they're located on?
Like exporting their mid-level rectangles in the xml? I should be able to do that.
How come Threetoe doesn't post devlogs often these days?
He never appeared often. We just had that little insertable face and did it a few times. We didn't get into a rhythm with it.
Besides the missing "harass a town" orders, do bandits give any orders to their lieutenants? I recall someone mentioned being told to kill a local lord and such, which would be very exciting, but I've never encountered it. The only hearth quests I've gotten from non-lords was a criminal gang asking me to take out a local beast.
They don't do anything else. It was kind of a crime and punishment release thing, but now I think the hearths and bandit camps will become more mushily related before then.
Are there any near-term plans for introducing new (or reintroducing old) !!FUN!! parts to the game? I'm talking sieges, dangerous critters, better ways to generate dangerous worlds.
The nearest term thing should be the myth generator, which'll potential shake up various aspects of the world that are threatening, and we were planning to have the danger of the world be a parameter. It's unclear exactly what'll happen though.
I remember it being mentioned that people with elven ethics that join your fortress permanently and are made to cut down trees suffer from an incredibly bad though. What other situations where you can make someone go against their ethics cause bad thoughts? What would happen if you made a new civilization which couldn't stand killing animals, but you make them into a butcher? Or if you play as a civilization that allows the butchering of sentient creatures, but you get someone who's ethics aren't okay with that to do it?
There aren't very many now. Just for caging/chain, gelding, butchering and felling trees, for the plant/animal ethics.
How exactly is a creature's acceptable clothing size range determined? From my own testing, it seems a tick man (35000) can wear an otter man's (40000) clothes, but not the other way around. This rules out a simple +/- tolerance or size brackets. Is it percent-based?
It looks like 6/7 < size < 8/7 are the limits.
Toady, a lot of the interface is configurable with keymappings and raw modding, which is awesome and appreciated, but I was curious if DF's overall design is roughly how you envision it after allowing for multi-tile creatures and graphics. That is, primarily a keyboard interface.
And for those design elements you think of as relatively final, do you have a set of guidelines you use (for example, high contrast or accommodating red/green colorblindness)?
Yeah, it's difficult to go over to a mouse interface. I don't have a set of guidelines. If you had some specific issue in mind, a thread in suggestions would probably be useful. I don't know how to handle things like color other than allowing the rgb values of the 16 colors to be customized in the init file (and I don't know how useful that is for the various forms of colorblindness).
Now that the world has been activated and the 'bones' of DF's engine are starting to settle, are these months long release cycles that flesh out and extend features here to stay as the norm or will there be more epic year(s) long cycles still planned for the road ahead?
I've been wrong every time I try to predict. We're always hopeful that we can keep them down. Next challenge will be coming up with a way to move the myth stuff over, incorporating it into systems as necessary, without it taking too much time -- it's difficult to do it piecemeal without having a bunch of dead weight in the myths.
when will I be able to legitimately open up a "bone carving" shoppe in a town or something similar instead of just peddling to people on the streets?
When? Probably when we get to the merchant role adv stuff, or a little later. Depends on how that plays out.
Are there any plans to add more materials options besides born, like horn or hoof? It's doable, but the most efficient way to make it work out (using reaction_class to group all desired materials for use in the same reaction) will work different from the way you have the reactions working now (namely, reaction_class makes it consume an entire stack, while).
Though personally I don't mind the other method consuming whole stacks, as it allows reaction mods to use bone and related materials in a way that's consistent with how leather reactions and the only non-buggy cloth reactions are used.
The other jobs will go in over time, but I'm not sure how it's all going to go moving forward.
In relation to Deep Dwarves. If we could establish a reasonable trade relationship with them (assuming they can speak/no diplomats until a mayoral or barony stage for easy trades on hitting caverns/within range in the caverns/have access to the fortress depot from topside or cavern entrances) besides from trade goods like wood and maggots, would they offer a variety selection of animals from the caverns additionally?
Given the scarcity of some cavern creatures that appear in small numbers and the interesting barriers of [cave_animal] preferences to level 1 obtaining additional jabberers at a high price or selling off some troglodytes (into slavery? ethics unknown, would they eat them? force them to work? I realise these are all questions in themselves.) would be helpful to breeding programmes that have hit a dead end.
I'm not sure how it'll work out -- right now I think their sites are still on level 1 aside from the magma access points. It would be better if there were more variety.
Once player fortresses will be able to interact with hillocks and mountain halls, will they be able to interact only with nearby settlements that aren't too far away? Also, will new hillocks and mountain halls be founded near the player's fortress over time?
It depends on what you mean. Once you can send out a group of people, we don't plan on having that restricted, if you want to send them someplace far away for whatever reason, though nearby sites will send people to your fort more often since you'll be more relevant to them. Part of that will depend on the situation of your embark -- if the religious setups have some faraway central temple, for example, you might be communicating with them quite a bit. New sites should be founded as you go -- that already happens in post worldgen play now, and we just need more reasons for it to happen.
Toady, I've noticed that nearly all tavern fights seem to erupt into a large scale fortress-wide conflict and end lethally. Is this an intended aspect of drunken brawls? I was under the impression that the fight would end once one of the fighters was knocked unconscious or yielded - but is that actually the case right now?
Nah, that's a bit much. I'll probably need to look at a save at some point.
Because of all the performing, dwarves don't talk to each other as much any more. This means dwarves don't form relationships as easily, though I have noticed that lovers marry sooner. Are you going to do something to balance this out?
They are supposed to talk to each other during the "Socialize" breaks between performances, which last a while. I'm not sure if they are pulling it off.
Currently, you can only trade with the dwarven caravan of your own civilization and the nearest human and elf civilizations. Will this ever change? Will travelers ever come from much further away to trade at the fort?
MrWiggles mentioned the existing trade networks and worldgen flow of goods, and ultimately that'll be how most of it works. There'll be some other cases most likely, and I'm not really sure how it's going to end up since so much will have to be tweaked to make it work at all. I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, as the artifact stuff moves forward, if somebody trying to get rid of one ends up wandering from place to place far from their point of origin. Bulkier goods will just be moved from node to node though. I don't know how much the sea stuff will eventually disrupt that.
Given that the basic room system is half implemented already, with the development planned targets surrounding nobility entering and staying at the fort in rented rooms will there be any particular advantages to keeping nobles in pocket either long-term or permanently? Economy and diplomatic based bonuses perhaps?
Probably not until we flesh out the economic and diplomatic systems. Then it'll matter a lot more what you do with them, since they'd relate to the rest of the world more meaningfully and stuff like their relatives/protectors etc. will matter.
Are fistfights supposed to be counted as crimes? Right now they're not, even if somedwarf dies in a brawl.
Witty mentioned the report on the tracker, and it's a bug.
How does the game determine what material is used for outsider weapons? My testing so far has shown that if you mod copper to be unsuitable for use in weapons, it'll pick silver instead. What makes it choose though materials, over, say, iron?
Hmm... it doesn't use special mats, and they have to be is_metal with the items_metal flag and the items_weapon flag... it picks among those with the lowest non-zero min(shear force/1000+1,max edge). It doesn't respect economic value at all. So, it's as strange as you might expect. I think I just wanted the crappiest edged metal, to the extent I was thinking at all.
Assuming you get to one of these replies before 42.07 is out, will the tree-cutting job involve moving to the travel screen like composing? I assume the mention of player-created data necessitates the transition to reload the map in the new state if that is the case.
If you do get 42.07 out before replying to this, is the push for adventurer-site creation related to the work needed to get the roadside taverns working?
Yeah, chopping goes to travel... we watched a video of a tree being taken down by a stone axe and decided the travel screen was at least as much as their time-consuming effort deserved. It takes an hour right now. Even if we took material into consideration (we don't yet), it'll probably still pop in and out, unless you can do it in a stroke or two.
It's partially related to the roadside taverns, yeah, though I didn't end up using a new data structure, so there's still more experimentation to be done.
1) Will we be able to embark on areas with adventurer made sites present or will they be blocked?
2) If we designate our adventure built site as a fortress (if that's possible) can we actually reclaim it later in fortress mode?
1) It looks like it'll be allowed.
2) It isn't possible yet. I suppose I could considering it once we start digging, though I'm not really sure when it should change you from a camp to a fort in its reckoning, or if the reckoning itself should be ditched.
Here's a thought. If or when adventure mode sites become a thing, how are they planned to interact with existing sites? For example, would local lords get annoyed at the player-character for building unauthorized things all other their farming fields?
And what about the potential for building an isolated shelter in the wilderness, would that eventually allow retiring in places that normally aren't safe to retire in?
You can't build over other sites at this point.
Yeah, this should extend your retirement possbilities, provided you define a zone and an entity perhaps (which isn't required for the sites you make in general).
I know you plan to add bounties, but will we ever be able to for example, join a shady organization that for example kills nobles for other nobles.
Sort of like the dark brotherhood from skyrim? (Like an assassins guild) Or at least will nobles who are having succession issues maybe confront you and ask you to kill another noble to help you up their social status if you have a reputation for killing things and offer monetary rewards, perhaps only communicating through messages and that brings me to my other question...
Will you ever add "couriers" who deliver messages to you from people who want you to do things for them/meat them somewhere and if so could we use this to order around members of our own organization.
also (unrelated)
You said on the adventure mode df talk toady that you wanted to keep workshops out of adventurer mode - since they were more an abstraction of a concept and would be overhauled later. What changed your mind?
(original question from a dude on reddit)
Can players no longer usher in the age of emptiness in a given world many adventure mode players are claiming you can no longer depopulate sites in adventure mode
I'm not sure what we'll get to. We'd like to get to various things, but there are always more choices as we go.
We were happy with the figurines, so we figured we'd just toss in some more stuff. We still want to switch the workshops over, but that'll take the same amount of work either way, pretty much, and we didn't have time now to get into that, since we're between major pushes and already have other plans.
I have no idea about the age of emptiness. If the pops are broken, we'll need a bug report and so forth. Populations do breed up now, which might make it rough to manage even if everything works as intended.
How will hafts for stone axes work, anyway? I'm assuming you'd use bone, or would you have to get wood in some other way first? Assuming harvesting branches from trees doesn't become a thing, that might cause something akin to the Anvil Paradox.
You can pull a branch from branch tiles. We'd like to eventually make those weaker than helves that are carved from a split log (I think that's how it works anyway, avoiding the innermost bits is a goal, but I don't know much about it), but right now, it doesn't matter. The anvil paradox will come up more with picks and actual anvils, though it might be avoided as things stand with use of free-standing boulders or something.
Will adventurers be able to use stones in building? Will they be able to farm?
Haven't done either one yet, but it's the eventual plan. I imagine stone will come earlier, and farming will only happen with a farming rewrite (though with the whiff on workshops vs. tools, anything is possible).
will adventurer's buildings protect against bogeymen?
Yeah, they should.
Will workshops be replaced by zones or rooms eventually? Like a tavern, you build tools and store them in it.
therahedwig mentioned the issue with tool management, and just coming up with the list of things that are needed is also an issue. We're hoping to unify the various systems at some point, to the extent it is practical and possible.
Will adventurers be able to make buildings from cloth?
And if they can, will that eventually migrate to fort mode as well?
I haven't done anything with it. Those army tents are terrible too.
In what manner do boogeymen exist? Are they phantasmagorical, physical-just-summoned, or some kind of spiritual entity, like a ghost?
Looking forward, how do you think boogeymen should exist in relation to the citizens of fortresses? What sort of cultural influence do you think they should have? Will their degree of physicality vary with the "world fancifulness" settings you mentioned implementing at one point or another?
Do bogeymen set off traps? Should bogeymen set off traps?
We don't have much metaphysical rhyme-or-reason in the game. The myth stuff will help with that over time. I don't have much more to offer about them.
With being able to build now, does the construction exist as a true site, with a name, people who know of it could give directions, an entry in legends mode? Would we have a claim of ownership to our site? Would that be an independent claim (only we are associated with it, nobody else) or would it belong to our civilization if we are a member of one?
Since you made a workshop, which workshops and reactions are available to us in adventure mode for now? All of them?
So we can entomb the dead now in coffins we made (they are a container), right? Will that actually count as them being properly memorialized? Can we make slabs to memorialize someone as well?
The site has a name if you give it a name, and then it's like anything else. You can claim ownership if you define a zone on the site, and that works the same way it does as your claims on hearth sites.
I've only done the carpenter's workshop at this point. It's not a straightforward process (since the default dwarf jobs are as old as the hills as unifying them would break old saves completely), and in many cases you wouldn't have the necessary raw materials available anyway so far.
Yeah, you can stuff dead bodies in coffins, but I think I'd need to do building placement of coffins to make memorialization work (which may or may not be done in time). You can't do slabs yet.
Im unsure if this fits FoTF, but do you edit the RAW files by hand? Or did you develop your own RAW tool?
I do it all by hand, which is why there are typos and so forth. Supporting tools as things change still seems like more of a hassle at this point, probably because I don't work with the raw files very often overall so keeping them updated would be more of a time sink.
Will the 30-item cap for manager jobs ever be lifted?
We were planning on doing it when we get to the upcoming work order stuff.
Oh my, when you use a reaction that specifies only something empty (for brewing into flasks/waterskins/mugs/barrels as an adventurer, for example) it lists weapons you are holding. From poking around trying to do this with dfhack I know there isn't much difference between a weapon containing a corpse and a coffin containing a corpse. You recently mentioned putting items in containers, will we be able to have a nice cozy little cabin in the woods with rows of upright weapons and the bodies of our foes impaled on them?
Body impalement isn't really related to containers -- that's a weapon building with a building inventory the way things work now, and we haven't done those. When a weapon is stuck in a living critter, it's an inventory item of that critter, and flipping that around to a containment doesn't seem right. It'll probably be more manageable when we handle corpse inventories, though I'm not sure that'll be related to upright spears in any case. It'll all need some work.
Do you have any intention of adding a sound engine at some point in development?
Like sound coming out of the computer, rather than whatever the capybaras are doing? There was some dev item about it, but it's not a priority.
Do you plan to ever add any new Ages?
Will Armok appear in any capacity in generated mythology?
Actually, are gods are planned to ever be RAWable?
The myth generator is going to mess with all of this. I doubt Armok will appear.
Is it possible to dig/channel in adventure mode?
Will Bone carving and butchery adventure jobs be restricted to specific workshops, or there will be no changes?
It isn't currently possible to dig or channel. We'd like to get to it before long, but we might do pick-making before that, which requires more industries.
I haven't restricted the old jobs.
Will necromancer adventurers be able to get their zombie minions to help build in the next version?
I think so. Any historical critters traveling with you count, but I haven't tried with zombies.
Toady, do you ever plan on moving away from tiles/increasing the resolution of tiles? Of course, this would likely come WELL after multi-tile creatures, so the question is a little premature.
I'm not doing 3D graphics, and I can't increase the resolution of mechanics easily without that. A few things already do use more specific locations, like minecarts and certain projectiles, but I don't anticipate that being used in many more places.
What's the intended behavior for small goblin ambushes/sieges? Small groups of goblins will occasionally turn up before you hit the population trigger, then leave pretty quickly. Are these supposed to be ambushes? Thief groups? Simply lost goblins on their way to somewhere else? Goblin entities don't seem to have the [AMBUSHER] tag, but there seems to be some confusion as to what this tag actually does/is supposed to do.
The thieves can come with helpers as a distraction, and they aren't supposed to stick around long. Could be something else though.
What exactly are your plans to equip uncivilized intelligents, surely them walking around naked and unarmed is not the final intent?
I don't have exact plans about it. It'll probably change over time. It depends in part on the sort of critter you are talking about. We haven't sorted out animal people at all, or critters like gorlaks. Others like gremlins might not end up with anything.