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[Numancio]

So in the news lately there's been interesting stuff popping up regarding the possibility of cleaning up and reusing ancient pre-Incan canals to provide water to Lima, Peru in the dry season, the translation of an ancient Anglo-Saxon salve for wounds that, once tested, turned out to be significantly more effective than  modern antibiotics, and just now I'm looking at an article regarding why the Mississipian city of Cahokia declined and eventually disbanded.
http://www.sciencealert.com/1-000-year-old-onion-and-garlic-remedy-kills-antibiotic-resistant-bugs
http://westerndigs.org/megafloods-spurred-collapse-of-ancient-city-of-cahokia-new-study-finds/
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/peruvian-farmers-restoring-7th-century-canals-150503084636928.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27311-preinca-canals-may-solve-limas-water-crisis.html

And I thought, these sorts of things give great inspiration for making a game like this. Who wouldn't want to grind up a cow's intestines with garlic and onions to rub into a dwarf's bloody gashes, and we have historical precedence for it! It appears to have already been discussed, and its a scary and cool thing isn't it, when a perfectly stable and prosperous society suddenly gets hit with a natural calamity they cannot control, that random element of civilization (megabeasts of course being controlled by sufficiently hacking away at them).
So I ask, what sort of interesting historical examples do the rest of you know about that produce good ideas that could be added into this game, whether technology, culture, strange forms of government, or natural occurrences that societies must contend with?

[AlexanderTheIncompetant]

 Not quite sure what you're suggesting, are you saying we should add those things to DF or create a mechanism that creates new ones to your civ based on circumstance? Both are very good, but in the future please use the suggestions board.

[Salmeuk]

Not quite sure what you're suggesting, are you saying we should add those things to DF or create a mechanism that creates new ones to your civ based on circumstance? Both are very good, but in the future please use the suggestions board.

AlexanderTheIncompetant

I see you chose a fitting name.


The thing most contrary to what your suggesting is that Dwarf Fortress takes place in a fantasy world spawned from whatever strange, immaterial essence the gods use to shape the land. I love the idea of adding ancient techniques for medicine, but you also have to consider what that might look like in the world of dwarf fortress. Dwarves are spawned and begin living fairly well-thought out lives from Year Zero - they already know how to design and construct massive fortress, roads and tunnels. How to farm and breed animals and how to fight against the lesser races. Sort of a strange knowledge-burst, if you think too much about it.

What does that concept have to do with your idea prompt? Well, let's suppose Toady inserts your aforementioned antibacterial goop into the game, fully functioning and better than soap. If he was to do this right now, I imagine he would have to write up some specific, new code to handle what the noxious goop does when introduced to a wounded dwarf. The remedy would become a one-shot insert that, while interesting certainly, might feel out of place when compared to the utter lack of other, lesser known medical concoctions. So, in theory, Toady would want to add a bunch of medical processes that all represent archetypical ancient remedies.

However, I don't think he should be doing that (not that I get to say anything about it, really). Rather, much like his current design philosophy, I would have such an intestine-garlic remedy be something your dwarves could discover on their own (and by the same logic, the player!). Maybe you have an alchemist who also has a pet cow, and once the cow dies the alchemist goes a little crazy and starts to add bits and pieces to his concoctions, suddenly creating an antibacterial mishmash. Or, something closer to reality, you would start playing a fortress and your civilization would have a certain set of medical remedies that were learned during world gen. Over hundreds of years, agricultural communities would have picked up on already-known properties of various matter, and perhaps in desperate action combined a mixture of intestine, garlic and onion. Or maybe it was beetroot, chicken liver and salt? In a fantasy world it might be anything!

So again, to contrast, I would have the medical remedies come not from human history, but rather be inspired by the archetypes our species have created. I would have this randomness for all technology, but then DF might verge unto the science fantasy or beyond. Also probably impossibru to code.

As far as examples, I don't have many despite majoring in history. Most of my study was way past DF's early-medieval time period.

Perhaps, once soil no longer contains infinite food for your mushrooms, you might be forced to resort to slash-and-burn agriculture. Cut down your surface forest, burn it away, and either harvest the ashes for your subterranean mushroom caverns or build up surface fortifications and farm longland wheat. Much of the amazon was (and is being) destroyed this way. RIP the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, RIP . . .

[AlexanderTheIncompetant]

I see you chose a fitting name.

Yes very clever.

The thing most contrary to what your suggesting

You do realize I didn't start this thread, right?

However, I don't think he should be doing that (not that I get to say anything about it, really). Rather, much like his current design philosophy, I would have such an intestine-garlic remedy be something your dwarves could discover on their own (and by the same logic, the player!). Maybe you have an alchemist who also has a pet cow, and once the cow dies the alchemist goes a little crazy and starts to add bits and pieces to his concoctions, suddenly creating an antibacterial mishmash. Or, something closer to reality, you would start playing a fortress and your civilization would have a certain set of medical remedies that were learned during world gen. Over hundreds of years, agricultural communities would have picked up on already-known properties of various matter, and perhaps in desperate action combined a mixture of intestine, garlic and onion. Or maybe it was beetroot, chicken liver and salt? In a fantasy world it might be anything!

So again, to contrast, I would have the medical remedies come not from human history, but rather be inspired by the archetypes our species have created. I would have this randomness for all technology, but then DF might verge unto the science fantasy or beyond. Also probably impossibru to code.

How clever of you to criticize me for an idea I didn't have, and then propose an alternative that Numancio (I think) and I have already suggested.

[Putnam]

Not quite sure what you're suggesting, are you saying we should add those things to DF or create a mechanism that creates new ones to your civ based on circumstance? Both are very good, but in the future please use the suggestions board.

AlexanderTheIncompetant

I see you chose a fitting name.

wow that's ironic

at least make sure you're right when you're an asshole

Furthermore, you're suggesting that Toady doesn't include stuff from human history, which is hilariously wrong. He avoids eponymous names, yes, but he certainly does not avoid real-life stuff. This anglo-saxon antibiotic would exist regardless of whether the anglo-saxons discovered it.

Also, you don't think Toady would expand the medical system to include more antibiotic stuff? What? That sounds pretty normal.

[Ianflow]

Can we all just calm down a little? This got really hostile really quickly due to one misfired critique.
While I agree that this should be moved to the Suggestions forum, and potentially a Future Of Fortress question be asked, I also want to say that with Dwarven Chemistry potentially being given more focus than before (and delving into Alchemy), this is still relevant to Dorf Fort.

[NW_Kohaku]

The things that dwarves know at year 0 are mostly things that were known by humans at year 5000 BCE.

Virtually every technology used in-game besides steel-making, mechanisms, or crossbows was known to humanity in at least some rough form dating back to before writing.  Glassblowing, soapmaking, and cheesemaking all predate organized farming. 

Anyway, currently, Toady is going through a secret-discovery process whereby certain techniques can be learned in the game, which is basically something like a tech tree.  Having a method of producing something-better-than-soap may fit in well, there.

[penguinofhonor]

Wikipedia tells me we haven't found any evidence of glassblowing older than 2000 BC. Which would mean organized farming predates it pretty significantly.

Beekeeping is also newer than organized farming, though people collected honey from wild bees before they knew how to farm. Catapults and ballistae are newer as well, though you might have been including them with mechanisms. I forget whether they require mechanisms.

[Man of Paper]

Off Topic: Upon reading 'Anglo-Saxon Antibiotics" I could not help but think of Horrible Histories, a show I discovered while lurking youtube for gladiatorial stuff oddly enough.

On Topic: I think I recall somewhere that DF tech wouldn't bypass an equivalent of human 12th century technology. Or was it 15th? No wait that'd include gunpowder weapons which I think have been struck into a firm "Not for DF" category. Either way, combine that with the fact that the different races already have different technological traits and that leaves a lot of room for divergence of knowledge between civs and races, let alone individual worldgens. But I think first we need to have a DF that can consistently generate a world with more than 200 years of history.

[NW_Kohaku]

Wikipedia tells me we haven't found any evidence of glassblowing older than 2000 BC. Which would mean organized farming predates it pretty significantly.

Beekeeping is also newer than organized farming, though people collected honey from wild bees before they knew how to farm. Catapults and ballistae are newer as well, though you might have been including them with mechanisms. I forget whether they require mechanisms.

I thought glassblowing was older, and I forgot about siege engines (what with never using them...) but in general, my point was that the overwhelming bulk of technologies represented in DF were, in some form or another, present in human society since the Early Bronze Age at the latest. 

Meaning that, even if we move the "start date" of technology all the way up to 2000 BC, there's still about 3400 years of ground to cover. 

That said, as I've argued before in technology threads, technology does not progress as linearly as people tend to believe in our modern age.  There were many instances of technology being lost throughout history, sometimes rather deliberately.  (After the Sengoku Jidai, for example, the Shogunate deliberately banned the use, manufacture, and even knowledge of firearms and forbade virtually all contact with the outside world.  England/London resisted the adoption of electricity because its lighting and heat were based upon natural gas, which held a stranglehold on their economy and politics, causing America to suddenly become the place of technological innovation in the new field, instead.)

In fact, there was a rather lengthy argument I was a part of involving that topic a couple years ago...

Toady seems to want to have it be more of a "Tech Orchard" than a Tech Tree, which means it's possible to be at rudimentary levels of one tech while advanced to the limits in another. 

If we're going to have these tech levels, I'd honestly want to see it more reflect the notion that "Technology is advanced on the factory floor", and make it something like a cultural skill that advances and rusts like an individual dwarf's skill does.  Hence, a culture advances, say, shipbuilding when they are actively on an ocean and trading or fighting or exploring by sea, and if they give up on seafaring for a while, or lose their last coastal city or something, their shipbuilding techs crash and they forget all about them.  (Again, this happened to China on several occasions, most notably after the Treasure Fleet, which included the largest sail ships ever built, but after which, a new administration destroyed the ships and the technology to build them just in time to create a power vacuum that European explorers could exploit to build their colonial empires.)

[Vattic]

Virtually every technology used in-game besides steel-making, mechanisms, or crossbows was known to humanity in at least some rough form dating back to before writing.  Glassblowing, soapmaking, and cheesemaking all predate organized farming.

Cheesemaking predates farming? That surprises me given that for a long time after we started farming we were still lactose intolerant; Then again it's not necessarily going to stop people eating it. Still a quick search gives me figures of between 5000 and 7000 years ago for cheese making and 12000 for farming. I also remember Toady mentioning the plate armour is more modern that the cutoff, but included because he likes it (mail rather than plate would be more accurate).

[Eldin00]

I'm quite certain cheesemaking didn't come into being until after humans had begun to domesticate animals which can provide a decent amount of milk, which didn't occur until after humans began living in permanent settlements, which only became possible with the advent of organized farming. Of the mentioned technologies, soapmaking is the only one that I'm not certain came about centuries after growing crops became the major source of food for humans, and I actually somewhat doubt that soapmaking is older, I just don't actually know it.

[Chief10]

at least make sure you're right when you're an asshole

You and the other guy really overreacted to a little quip...

[mscottveach]

And to think I read a blog post about DF just the other day that commented on how mature, reasonable and supportive the community is...

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm quite certain cheesemaking didn't come into being until after humans had begun to domesticate animals which can provide a decent amount of milk, which didn't occur until after humans began living in permanent settlements, which only became possible with the advent of organized farming. Of the mentioned technologies, soapmaking is the only one that I'm not certain came about centuries after growing crops became the major source of food for humans, and I actually somewhat doubt that soapmaking is older, I just don't actually know it.

Cheesemaking predates farming? That surprises me given that for a long time after we started farming we were still lactose intolerant; Then again it's not necessarily going to stop people eating it. Still a quick search gives me figures of between 5000 and 7000 years ago for cheese making and 12000 for farming. I also remember Toady mentioning the plate armour is more modern that the cutoff, but included because he likes it (mail rather than plate would be more accurate).

Cheesemaking is believed to have come about thanks to shepherding, which was certainly done before permanent settlement farming.  I have no hard date on it at all, however.

Now, the point I was making was mostly about time frame.  Maybe declaring some specific thing like permanent farming (although before that, I was saying "writing"...) is a poor choice of words, but the point is the same: Virtually all of these technologies are ancient to the point of vastly predating the Medieval timeframe DF is supposed to occupy, and therefore, any talk of technologies can't really comfortably talk about disabling most of the technologies we have, now.