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[greycat]

If you are producing a mod, I'd suggest surface creatures only being capable of living "above ground" for longer periods,

My mod fu is weak, but I don't think there's an easy way to allow grazing only on "grass" and not "moss".  Or of differentiating which creatures would be able to graze on which kind of flora.  Maybe you'd do better to ask in the modding forum.

and adding/modding a wool producing subterranean creature [draltha?]

That should be easy.

(other than trolls, for which I don't think there are any dwarf approved shearing methods [does splatting release wool?]).

Killing a troll does not produce usable wool.

[PatrikLundell]

I know killing a troll using normal means don't produce wool, so my (unclear) question was if you could smash it sufficiently to release wool by letting it fall at terminal velocity onto as hard a surface as possible or similar treatment. The troll doesn't even have to be alive for smashing it apart potentially working. I've had clowns that shed hair when killed by repeating spikes, so there's sort of a precedence [that hair could be spun into thread, but not cloth]. It also was in 0.40.24.

I think flora grazing selection is hard, that's why I suggested "sunlight". It might, for instance, be possible to create a fatal reverse cave adaptation (a.k.a. fatal vitamin D deficiency). That still might be non trivial to mod, though.

[IndigoFenix]

I think flora grazing selection is hard, that's why I suggested "sunlight". It might, for instance, be possible to create a fatal reverse cave adaptation (a.k.a. fatal vitamin D deficiency). That still might be non trivial to mod, though.

It's not that difficult; a syndrome that activates based on cave adaptation levels is all it takes, and that syndrome can be whatever you want.  I used to use steadily increasing dizziness to encourage surface dwelling, but now that emotion syndromes are a thing, I prefer depression from long periods underground instead.

If you're looking for more invaders, try the Fortress Defense mod.  There are also mods that make farming more difficult.

The only thing that I think needs to be changed in the base code (because it isn't moddable) is to make traps less overpowered, especially cage traps.  As it is now, a row of cages will protect you from any animal or invader that doesn't just ignore them completely.  Creatures should have a chance of dodging a cage trap based on their agility and observation, and strong/clever creatures should be able to escape from weak/low-quality cages.

[taptap]

Imagine you were a very good tennis player, and your local club didn't have anyone who could beat you.

I am a decent Go player, people are expected to give and to take handicap in that game as appropriate.

Seriously, the silly resistance against even trying out a harder agriculture conduct makes me doubt you would like it at all. My first post on the forum was calling for nerfs and changes to animal husbandry (which is btw even more overpowered than farming), I completely understand the wish for more challenge in food production. Farming at least needs a bit of dwarf labour, a few workshop and stockpile arrangements and a small amount of space, husbandry of carnivores and omnivores only needs butchering. I can feed my fort on voracious cave crawlers or tasty giant cave spider meat. You can make farming as hard as you want without increasing challenge as long as no-input auto-meat remains in the game. I would start balancing from there - 1) require feeding of carnivores/omnivores, 2) increase grazing requirements for grazers, but allow additional feeding, 3) make farming require a) more space, b) more labour, c) water, 4) implement egg sizes, 5) fix broken plants (e.g. strawberries and weird strawberry plants are both edible, just get rid of the plants imo). Finally, the elephant issue: you can permanently store food in dwarf fortress unless you are affected by serious amounts of demon rats or similar vermin.

[Innocent Dave]

If we're going historic, you'd get very little done, since 90% or so of the fortress population would be fully caught up in the farming industry. You might get a bit of a break during winter, but that would probably largely be spent processing what's been harvested earlier.

Research done on historic farming practices in the UK has shown that the average medieval farmer worked less than half the days of the year, and that a significant portion of that was wasted on pointless activities such as carefully removing all of the worms you could find on your strips.

You'd probably have to basically shut down all other activities during harvest, since every hand would be needed at that time.

Well, yes.  But that could be awesome.  A little bump to the priority of harvesting jobs, plus making the harvest all happen at once, and anyone you've not disabled food hauling on will pile into your fields and shift all that lovely food into storage.  It'd look great, make sense, and if food's been nerfed you'd be grateful as hell for it.

[dennislp3]

I'm not making farm simulator 1216...

When I said realistic i mostly meant realistic crop behavior like not growing all year long and in a period of 2 weeks per harvest. Same goes for eggs...the clutch sizes are completely illogical in the vanilla version such as turkeys making more eggs than chickens. And finally the notion of stockpiling and managing food vs instantly growing food from a tiny ass crop to instantly feed 5 dwarves. If you run into a food problem the solution should not be a 5 minute wait for a 3x3 crop to grow real quick.

Even so in a sufficiently managed fort over production will eventually happen amd eliminate the micro of farming. It SHOULD add to the early and mid game and be less of an issue late game.

I am also looking to split it into a "hardcore" and "casual" version with the casual version simply tweaking some grow times and nothing else too exotic.

Also, yes you will likely have to pay attention to farming times but its not that hard. You can make all haulers be farmers and even if you have to pull others from different duties you have to remember it only happens once or twice a YEAR. In the end you will not likely lose out on much labor because farmers will be almost completely open for at least 3 months of the year.

I don't  have much syndrome experience but I am sure i can come up with something for animals getting problems from living underground....that being said that is a thing for later.

I completely understand the need to appeal to the majority but right now i simply want to focus on my vision of the mod and when it's more than just a little dinky mod I can look to expand features and options for players.

[Ghills]

I agree. I am a new Dwarf Fortress player, I just retired my second fort after FPS death (~120 dwarfs on a 4x4 map, was getting down to ~45 and I didn't really have the heart to persevere), and I didn't really spoil myself very much. I looked up bridges in the wiki to see how they work, it mentions they're destroyer-proof so I used bridges instead of doors because that just seemed sensible, and then I was able to easily outlast all my sieges by just closing the bridge, having dwarves fire through fortifications, and survive on the absolutely copious amounts of food I could produce. It wasn't difficult at all; and certainly didn't match the expectations I formed from e.g. Boatmurdered. I'm just a little discouraged. I know that one can always go out and create active fun, but sometimes it can be nice to have "passive" fun as well, where you react to what the game throws at you rather than always initiating.

snipping the rest of stuff about bridges and farming for space

This is an sandbox game. The whole point of DF is that it doesn't set up a plot line and skill tree for you. You have to pick your own challenges and decide what you want to do.  You should start thinking up megaprojects like the dwarf-shaped volcano or gold-maze-fort or whatever strikes your fancy.  Use your imagination - that's the whole point of late-game DF unless you want to mine adamantine and summon the circus.

If you aren't finding a challenge, it's because you're expecting to be gently led to interesting stuff, which is literally the opposite of DF's design philosophy.  Not all games are for everyone, and if you don't like what late-game DF has to offer that's fine.  There's lots of games that offer a more guided and story-based experience.

Boatmurdered, Ardentdikes and the major story forts all

1) Were community forts, which massively increases the !!fun!! potential due to different overseers
2) Failed in part due to megaprojects or overseer overreach

Go join a community fort in http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=14.0 if you really want a challenge without having to seek it out.  I think Ardentdikes 3 is still running, and there's always a lot of other forts running.

Wanting to destroy a playstyle (turtling) because you can't come up with something to do and haven't bothered to check out what the community does is lame.  Stop it.

EDIT: QFT

You haven't lost in SimCity (or the current gold standard, Cities: Skylines) if you stop at an idyllic, rural hamlet and just let that sit. You also haven't lost if you attach a handful of pieces from a whole bucket of Lego, say "I made a chair!" and walk away. You also can't lose when bowling alone.

But not-losing and winning aren't the same thing.

Play DF to win. Intentionally maximize the value of mood projects. Figure out how to defeat sieges quickly and brutally so you don't miss caravans. Maximize the personal wealth of even your poorest dwarves. Sapphire encrust everything. Train, tame, and breed only the most exotic war animals. Don't just kill, but capture megabeasts and turn them on your enemies. Develop legendary tradesdwarves to the point that all non-masterworks are garbage to you. Design rooms carefully, with great attention to layout and ceiling heights, wall textures, and materials. Make creative use of natural embark features (tall cliffs, split-level aquifers, freeze-thaw cycles).

These aren't even megaprojects. It's about playing the game really well. When your goals are high, you don't need halls piled with corpses to lose. And it's in striving for perfection that I most often have "fun".

[arbarbonif]

One of the keys for Boatmurdered and the various famous succession games are that they are succession games.  If you are just playing your own fort, it has a consistent plan and that makes it easier.  You should look into the community games forums, people are having lots of fun and !!FUN!! because they have no idea what the last guy was doing and thus have to change their plan to account for the ridiculous state of the fort and only have a year to try and implement it.

[Crab]

Firstly, I want to quote Toady himself.

The long-term goal is to create a fantasy world simulator in which it is possible to take part in a rich history, occupying a variety of roles through the course of several games.

The main reason people enjoy fantasy worlds is because of the stories contained within. Nobody would be particularly interested in Middle Earth if all that happened after Aulė created the Dwarves was that they settled down to work on Moria, happily ever after, until the end of time. That's not a story. It can form the background to a story - Dwarves working on Moria in the face of orc attacks, proletarian Dwarves struggling on building Moria under the oppression of the Dwarven nobility, etc - but fundamentally the core of almost any compelling story is a conflict, real or metaphorical, to be solved by the protagonist(s). If Dwarf Fortress generates worlds absent of meaningful conflict, it has missed the point of what a fantasy world simulator is. Yes, Dwarf Fortress is a sandbox insofar as one defines one's own goals, but those goals should be achieved in the face of struggle, not tedium. Currently, a greater degree of difficulty is therefore necessary to make Dwarf Fortress a good fantasy simulator.

But fine, you may disagree with this. So secondly, I say that you make far too much noise for such a small issue. Let's run through some commonly proposed suggestions for making Dwarf Fortress sieges more enjoyable

1. Allow lv.2 building-destroyers to destroy bridges.
2. Allow lv.2 building-destroyers to destroy fortifications and constructed walls/floors.
3. Reduce the relative gains from underground farming by some amount, either by requiring more tasks as part of planting [fertilizing/watering], reducing the amount of crops produced, reducing the speed at which crops grow, reducing the seasons in which any given crop can be planted, or making dwarves require more food. [I make no specific suggestion and any of these has strengths and weaknesses]
4. Make non-grazers also require food.
5. Reduce egg clutch size.
6. Make foods perishable.
7. Set goblin military skills to scale with fortress wealth.
8. Allow certain enemies to dig soft soil.

None of these fundamentally change the sandbox-satisfying capacity of Dwarf Fortress. If you are interested in mega-projects, then by embarking on an island away from goblin sieges the military changes are entirely irrelevant to you, and the only changes you have to worry about are the changes to food and changes to building-destroyers. The changes to food distract from your ability to pursue mega-projects only in a very small way, as by the time you are usually able to focus on mega-projects you have at least 80 dwarves, and if you have at least 80 dwarves, 40 of them will usually have nothing to but haul anyway. Taking another 20 of those to bolster your agricultural industries will not be easily missed. That means, barring the change to building destroyers, these changes have almost no impact on your capacity to pursue mega-projects. However, they have a big impact on enjoyment for those of us who thrive on conflict. It is completely nonsensical to oppose them as such; you are wilfully denying Dwarf Fortress a larger community for no real reason.

These are small changes, they don't affect you particularly but others would enjoy them very much. There's a ~50 page thread on improving farming, for example. Why do you put up so much resistance?

[therahedwig]

Nobody is putting up much resistance actually, but those changes are not instantaneous, they need time to take place. People are trying to find ways to interpret DF as it currently is and how to get the most fun out of it. Not DF in 10 years, which may well have all those things in it.

[gnidan]

First off, really enjoying this thread! Agree with generally everything being said, but I figured I'd add some thoughts I've had about DF after playing for a number of years:

So, a lot of the lack of challenge in late-stage play is because of the constraints everyone's been talking about (Constructions being unbreakable, food being too cheap to produce, etc.)... my question is how does Today go about making these changes in a way that doesn't make the game too hard. Having a forgotten beast come through at the wrong moment early on in a fort and tear down all possible basic defenses seems unfair. Maybe it's just a case of "too bad, it's a game, you lost", but I prefer the idea of the game presenting reasonable challenges given the fort's circumstances: forts should die in a fire, but I want to feel like it's a deserved death.

I think maybe that's just the challenge of opening up the game to more manners of disaster: making sure the simulation stays compelling. I can imagine walls being destroyed by enemies, requiring outer defenses/inner defenses, sound tactical reasoning, all that. But if that's to be required, I don't know, then I think sieges shouldn't be these sorts of seasonal affairs. I know Toady has talked a lot about expanding this aspect of play, with hill dwarves and armies and whatnot, so I imagine that battles will match real-world expectations a lot more after that arc.

I think maybe the point in all this is that there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot of them live today as placeholders. The systems in the game today make it so that, after a point, you really have to seek out fun. I imagine as the simulation becomes fleshed out, made even more believable, then we'll start to see more inherent fun in "winning," and playing in a Dwarf Fortress world would feel like a natural challenge in and of itself. As the environment gets richer, it seems to reason that gameplay will require a richer attention to that environment. I imagine that's what the goal is anyway: to have this big world, where one can dictate their own play in any of a plethora of situations going on inside it.

[Crab]

Nobody is putting up much resistance actually, but those changes are not instantaneous, they need time to take place. People are trying to find ways to interpret DF as it currently is and how to get the most fun out of it. Not DF in 10 years, which may well have all those things in it.

I don't think anyone has asked for these things to be done instantaneously. The thread has just been a) identifying a problem, b) pointing out how it is a relatively high priority one, and c) suggesting solutions. I'm content to see what Toady does for now, I'm just hoping he is aware of the situation.

[greycat]

The thread has just been a) identifying a problem, b) pointing out how it is a relatively high priority one

It isn't high priority.  There are simple workarounds.  Some people in this thread simply refuse to use them.

Also, I'll repeat something I said a few pages back: this is not the Suggestions Forum.  If you want to suggest changes for Toady One, you're in the wrong place.  He might read this, or he might not.  Probably not.  You're talking to other players here.  All we can do is tell you how to play the game, which includes modding, but does not include core game engine changes.

[feelotraveller]

Wait... there's a win condition!  I must have missed it... no, the wiki doesn't enlighten me -hmm.

Boredom can be a real issue but really it is up to the player to find the fun.  DF is not a game which holds your hand (quest-pickup a block, success - here's 20 urists; now build a wall, etc.)  Nor is it an annihilate all opposition type of game where there is a clear measure of success (sheesh, I don't even score points, so how about achievements...oh, shit now I don't know what to do).

Sure there's little bits of this - e.g. your fortress wealth is tracked or you can become the mountainhome, your dwarfs level up, etc.  But in the end the challenge is set by the player. 

Gameplay will be tweaked and even significantly changed by future versions.  As far as I understand it we are still in 'early' alpha stage of development.  Specifically cage traps are already scripted for a big nerf at some later date and I think there are plans to overhaul food (at least cooking).  And who knows maybe goblin caravans will start to bring tame dragons. 

I'd never do it myself but Larix's working calculator using minecarts and levers is a good example of challenging fun.  Or build the biggest library the dwarfs have ever seen - could even make a thread for posting book tallies (screenshots required).  Or try a vegan fort using zero embark points (and maybe refuse to ever mine...).

The possibilities are endless.  Personally I like getting families of dwarfs going in one fort and then waiting for their reappearance at other embarks in the same world.  Or I would if I played enough (although it has happened a couple of times).  And somewhere down the military arc all those 'dreams of conquering the world' may well actually be doable, if that's your fancy. 

[quekwoambojish]

I think the issue here lies with the invaders...

What invaders show up to a fully built fortress with just weapons in hand?

Once our invaders get a hold of more strategic sieging AI, siege equipment, and tile destruction, I'm sure a lot of this boredom issue will go away.

*edit: and more fliers!