So here we are at long last, version 2.5. I went through what felt like coding hell with endless bugs and file corruption to get here but we are here.
Basically what this mostly does is adds dwarves of the D&D/Forgotten variety to the game. While a few of these dwarves are rather similar to Toady One's existing dwarves but a lot are not, that however is a good thing since it allows them to be easily made playable. The more advanced among these dwarves have access to +1/2/3/4/5 metals as do certain existing creatures, but the vanilla dwarves do not have this ability at all, but in converse they can extract adamantine strands which the new dwarves cannot do. The only folks that can make both adamantine weapons and enchanted ones are rock gnomes/lantan gnomes because they basically filch every tech they can from everyone if it is at all feasible.
Also what this mod release also does is add in extra problematic fellows known as giants. They are playable in adventure mode but at the moment this is the equivalent of playing story mode in most games, as the game presently understands only the benefits of being 26 feet tall but none of the drawbacks (needing extra food or drink, turning to pulp after a short fall, not being able to squeeze into small crevices). To make playing a giant more challenging I have increased the size of vanilla giants to be more king kong sized to present a greater challenge to giant adventurers. Since the smaller giants I added are about the size of vanilla giants uncuriously enough this leaves players in the unedifying position of being invadable by whole armies of giants, but we have magical weapons now to kill them with and life is cheap in DF. More of a problem is that the game does not understand how much giants eat in worldgen, so the more advanced giants that have farming (cloud and storm giants) are pretty out of control biomass wise; but not much I can do without breaking radically with lore.
The immediate future plans are *not* to get to work making elves. I do not wish to follow frankly in the devs footsteps, rushing into making a ton of new content while leaving behind me a whole ton of unpolished, buggy and half-baked content behind me. Law of diminishing returns means that adding elves would add less value to the mod than polishing the existing content, so the idea is for 2.6 to be a generic miscellaneous release based upon improving existing content, creatures and entities mostly. One idea however I had is to add evolutionary ancestors to existing native creatures, along the lines of animal people, so that will probably dominate the next release content wise. 2.7 will be definitely elves and unless Knight Otu makes a whole raft of new direforged content requiring a whole release to itself 2.8 will see the first realms human culture. 2.9 will see a batch more human cultures and finally the much longed for MANUAL!
