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[Chevaleresse]

Soap is used to clean wounds, and iirc a dwarf is less likely to get infections if it is clean.

[Urist Tilaturist]

I generally agree with deboche on this. DF for me is a construction and management simulation - SimCity with more magma - and not a heroic fantasy. Part of city building is waste disposal. Waste includes poop.

[GoblinCookie]

I generally agree with deboche on this. DF for me is a construction and management simulation - SimCity with more magma - and not a heroic fantasy. Part of city building is waste disposal. Waste includes poop.

There is a whole mode devoted to heroic fantasy.  Another part of city building is smoke disposal and pollution as well. 

[Vattic]

Always liked the idea of chimneys and ventilation shafts. They would provide adventurers and invaders interesting ways to sneak into forts (like wells or sewers). They would add to the story potential. Needing air would have to be not too hardcore and the caverns need to be taken into account.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Always liked the idea of chimneys and ventilation shafts. They would provide adventurers and invaders interesting ways to sneak into forts (like wells or sewers). They would add to the story potential. Needing air would have to be not too hardcore and the caverns need to be taken into account.

Mine ventilation would be a superb feature. Mines have huge networks of shafts to try to get air to the miners. Dwarves could even carry animals to check for toxic gas. A bigger issue is all those furnaces indoors; they should suffocate everybody and put themselves out without proper chimneys and air access. As for invaders getting in, dwarves could use grilles, slippery walls, steep drops and other defences to reduce the chance of that.

How much air a dwarf needs would just be a base figure and maybe some increases based on physical activity, though I would suggest ignoring that at first. Areas could have a "breathable air" fraction of the total air, which creatures, fires, and furnaces would convert into "non breathable air". If the fraction of non breathable air got too high, anything (except undead and other possessed beings) in the tile would suffocate and die. Plants (of the photosynthetic sort, not mushrooms like plump helmet) would turn non breathable air into breathable air. Ratios of breathable to non breathable would equalise over time if given access. While this might massively increase load, it would be very satisfying to see old forts suffocate once dwarves realised that they could not respire with an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide.

What do you mean by "hardcore"? It should just be logical.

[GoblinCookie]

Mine ventilation would be a superb feature. Mines have huge networks of shafts to try to get air to the miners. Dwarves could even carry animals to check for toxic gas. A bigger issue is all those furnaces indoors; they should suffocate everybody and put themselves out without proper chimneys and air access. As for invaders getting in, dwarves could use grilles, slippery walls, steep drops and other defences to reduce the chance of that.

How much air a dwarf needs would just be a base figure and maybe some increases based on physical activity, though I would suggest ignoring that at first. Areas could have a "breathable air" fraction of the total air, which creatures, fires, and furnaces would convert into "non breathable air". If the fraction of non breathable air got too high, anything (except undead and other possessed beings) in the tile would suffocate and die. Plants (of the photosynthetic sort, not mushrooms like plump helmet) would turn non breathable air into breathable air. Ratios of breathable to non breathable would equalise over time if given access. While this might massively increase load, it would be very satisfying to see old forts suffocate once dwarves realised that they could not respire with an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide.

What do you mean by "hardcore"? It should just be logical.

That would give chimneys a duel function, not only do they allow smoke out they also allow air in, both of them securely.  The thing we have to be careful of here is making the system too complex and thus FPS destroying.  We should probably not try to positively keep track of oxygen levels, instead we should model stale air and smoke as gas clouds emitted by creatures or fires periodically. 

Stale air and smoke are both are produced by fires, creatures on the other hand produce only stale air.  Stale air does not represent C02, instead it represents the relative lack of oxygen.  Stale air and smoke emitted by fires start off as a high temperature, which causes it to rise upwards if at all possible, unlike the stale air emitted by creatures. 

Both types of clouds automatically dissipate if they reach the surface.  They try to spread as widely as possible, so that there is an even distribution of stale air or smoke, while if hot they also try to move upwards.  Cold smoke gradually diminishes and deposits soot onto the group as it does so, which can then be cleaned up by dwarves but stale air can go away by going to the surface.  Smoke and stale air are both deadly to creatures that need to breathe, but the former has a more violent way of operating. 

Since they constantly equalise into the surface, which always has 0 smoke or stale air the clouds will always dissapear as long as there is an access to the surface. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

A good point about system performance. Dwarves should produce stale air as well, but not anywhere near as much as fires and furnaces.

A compromise must be made between system performance and suffocating stupid dwarves who have 20 coal burning forges running 40 metres underground with a single stairway to the surface.

[GoblinCookie]

A good point about system performance. Dwarves should produce stale air as well, but not anywhere near as much as fires and furnaces.

A compromise must be made between system performance and suffocating stupid dwarves who have 20 coal burning forges running 40 metres underground with a single stairway to the surface.

Also there is the question of how do caverns work.  I suppose we would be using the map edge to get rid of the smoke and stale air but what is to stop someone just installing their industry below a cavern level and then chucking it all out into the caverns close to the edge of the map.

It seems we will need a global model for smoke and stale air by which you fill up the caverns globally as opposed to doing so on a purely fortress level, meaning we want the caverns to have a finite size.  I think that the world generation needs to be redone for this idea to work so that rather than there being an universal network of caverns the system instead snakes out from the cave entrance, so that we have maps that actually have no caverns.  We could then add other cave entrances within the first layer that lead to the second layer which snakes out identically and then create the third layer etc.  We could also tell if our map has caverns in the same way we can tell if it has an aquifer in case (as with glaciers in general) or strategy is cavern based.

If the initial area is only about 5X5 or so we could ensure that the world's caves are generally seperate which means that you cannot simply infinitely dump smoke and stale air off the cavern map entrace.  But we cannot burn out our FPS through the computer having to keep track of a whole world's worth of caverns you have filled with smoke and stale air.  Having seperate caverns also has other advantages, rather than having a generic cavern biome we can each cavern be it's own seperate biome with it's own set of creatures and name. 

Kobolds could create their own secondary settlements in the caverns and more primary settlement in the sub-caves leading down into the next levels, creating another set of secondery settlements.  The complicated bit however is how we will need to have some kind repercussions from smoking up other intelligent creatures homes.  We should face an invasion by an alliance of all the intelligent cave entities and independant creatures if we persist in smoking up their home. 

[Vattic]

What do you mean by "hardcore"? It should just be logical.

Both performance issues as mentioned (we don't really need another system similar to temperature or liquids), and it would need to be carefully balanced so that it isn't too difficult.

I'm not sure how you'd display the lack of proper ventilation to the player; Miasma like smoke makes sense, but it's more complex for creatures using up air / creating stale air as that shouldn't be visible as clouds.

Also there is the question of how do caverns work.  I suppose we would be using the map edge to get rid of the smoke and stale air but what is to stop someone just installing their industry below a cavern level and then chucking it all out into the caverns close to the edge of the map.

I'm not sure this is a problem. It could attract some nasty monsters to your fort (could upset elves on surface or just announce your location). Goblin settlements could also have pollute their neighbouring caverns.

Smoke should also be visible in adventure mode on the travel map.

These too are all things discussed before. Worth a quick search if you all want an interesting read.

[LuckyKobold]

Dwarf Fortress Prides itself on Realism. And Real Living Beings have to Poop at some point.

[Urist Tilaturist]

The "smoke" from creatures breathing could just be invisible. If modelling it is too difficult without crunching system performance, it could be left out for now; fires consume far more oxygen than creatures breathing. At first, fires and furnaces could just produce the current smoke, with its associated ill effects. Seeing a load of coal furnaces underground with no chimneys and everybody being fine with it is something I find very weird about DF.

Mines should sometimes release invisible noxious gases which can suffocate creatures. Mining in general needs to be more intricate and dangerous, with proper supports, collapses, noxious gas, and ventilation.

[GoblinCookie]

The "smoke" from creatures breathing could just be invisible. If modelling it is too difficult without crunching system performance, it could be left out for now; fires consume far more oxygen than creatures breathing. At first, fires and furnaces could just produce the current smoke, with its associated ill effects. Seeing a load of coal furnaces underground with no chimneys and everybody being fine with it is something I find very weird about DF.

Mines should sometimes release invisible noxious gases which can suffocate creatures. Mining in general needs to be more intricate and dangerous, with proper supports, collapses, noxious gas, and ventilation.

However with the present AI I would not want to make mining dangerous, because too many people will die and that would make me (and my dwarves) sad. 

[Urist Tilaturist]

I don't think too many dwarves dying is possible for many players. Besides, for a game that prides itself on being horribly hard, mining is rather easy. A whole 100 tiles squared roof supported by a 1 tile mudstone pillar? Fine! And it shouldn't be.

[GoblinCookie]

I don't think too many dwarves dying is possible for many players. Besides, for a game that prides itself on being horribly hard, mining is rather easy. A whole 100 tiles squared roof supported by a 1 tile mudstone pillar? Fine! And it shouldn't be.

What I am actually reffering to is that the present AI not being good enough to handle stuff like poison gas, dwarves will just do stupid things and will get killed. 

Stuff like supports being needed however are quite sensible because that is not a matter for dwarf AI. 

The game is not horribly hard, merely horribly hard to learn.  The game would actually become hard only if stuff like enemies mining were introduced.  At the moment they cannot hack through a wooden wall. 

[Vattic]

The game is not horribly hard, merely horribly hard to learn.  The game would actually become hard only if stuff like enemies mining were introduced.  At the moment they cannot hack through a wooden wall.

Worth noting that Toady has confirmed invading sappers will make it in eventually. If you want to try similar out early DFHack has a digging invaders module (not sure if it works with the latest version yet).