03/20/2015 So you knew you were getting libraries, right? I mean, there are all these books being carried around by traveling artists with no easy way to read them, and we can't have that. Also, it was a little odd to imagine a library packed with art books and the occasional rambling necromantic tract -- we're in the process of solving that problem in the usual way: I just got through with engineering and chemistry, such as they are. The outlines are ready for mathematicians, philosophers, historians, geographers, doctors, naturalists, and astronomers. I'm using the same master-student framework for them as they work on research projects, and they'll also consult existing books at their home libraries, of course -- a good thing, since the early tests without books led to the expected and repeated tragic loss of knowledge and the constant rediscovery of previously known facts without much progress toward advanced techniques. It has been entertaining building up the different knowledge branches, interacting with our year 1400 cut-off, and no doubt screwing up various simple ideas and so forth.
As it stands, the state of your civilization's collected knowledge does not impact what buildings, jobs, etc. you can use in your fort -- that's a tricky issue I don't want to get sucked into at this point. Figuring that out for a later release is certainly on the table. It's an interesting problem -- smaller worlds with fewer scholars don't advance as fast, and the future myth generation stuff will doubtless shake up the progression. We're not worrying about any of that now! All we want are wholesome libraries.
Dwarves practice all forms of scholarship (while still preferring craftsdwarfship to books), elves do elfy stuff, and humans are variable (human values are randomized for each instance of civilization now, and there's a raw tag that sets scholar types based on the particular civ's values and jobs).
This shouldn't be too lengthy a side-track, given that we aren't tackling any of the difficult questions where game and knowledge intersect. Festivals soon! Then we can move to fortress mode. Though the focus with your dwarves this time is on taverns and leisure, there is a possibility of a fort library being a minor topic (as temples are currently). -Toady One
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Like DF 40.x in general, the latest devlog posted by Dr. Toady One is basically where Dark Ages wants to live. Libraries, taverns, temples, adventurers joining forts, randomized values, poetry - all potentially bring more world gen history to Fort mode.
It's an interesting problem -- smaller worlds with fewer scholars don't advance as fast, and the future myth generation stuff will doubtless shake up the progression
The size of worlds is already a significant factor in Dark Ages. History is paused in the
Age of Myth intentionally. Mainly because this is when the most content is available and history has the most cards to play. It's also why large worlds are more stable.
So you knew you were getting libraries, right?
I have been adding spellbooks and libraries to Dark Ages as of 3/18 from Eric Blank's
Spellcrafts Mod - Basic Magic in Dwarf Fortress mod for inclusion with [
R7].
Needless to say, I'm
very excited about the next release of Dwarf Fortress.