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[Ghills]

Do you have ANY IDEA WHAT IS POSSIBLE WITH MODDING?!

I love those ideas SO MUCH but ALMOST EVERY ONE OF THEM IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Cool your jets, kid. There's no need to shout.

This is a brainstorming thread. Wacky, over-the-top ideas are the whole point. 

Adding a workshop that takes plants and soap and makes soap and food ingredients is not that hard, for one thing.

I wasn't even the first one to propose vermin syndromes. And one way to do Balanced Diet was also mentioned upthread - make food have different syndromes that cancel each other out.  This stuff might not be as hard as you think.   

[Teneb]

- Cleanliness is Healthiness: Vermin or animals spread syndromes. Add an Herbworker shop that creates syndrome-cures from plants. The cures can be dumped in water or alcohol, added to food, etc.  Could also be incorporated into pre-made soap at the new workshop.  Perhaps add a profession that puts herbal pesticides around the fort to keep vermin down.

Pesticides are impossible, as are cures to syndromes. However, you can make the "cures" actually prevent infection in the first place (maybe make it so that infected creatures have a chance to spread the disease around); trappers will also become way more important. Bees can attack, so vermin bites are possible; no idea on interactions.

- Bad Air: Traditionally mining carries a high risk of bad air and underground gases. Add some 'stone' materials that make dwarves high or sick. Syndrome should decrease after exposure, so getting away from the Bad Air material will fix the problem.

Automining on veins and such will just cause the dwarfs to go around and the player identifying the offending stone. There is/was a mod (the earth strikes back) that used DFHack to make any stone (with filters, I think) drop gasses/spawn stuff. But needs DFHack.

- Curses: Dwarves casting curses on fellow fort members they abominate would be loads of !!fun!!. Would probably require modifying dwarf raws?

Would require modding the dwarf raws, yes. Make it so it is an attack interaction that can only target other dwarfs, or give it such a long start timer that visitors will have already left by the time it kicks in.

- Airshafts: Vermin and unwashed dwarfs cause minor nausea. Victims are cured by getting having access to 'light' tiles, making airshafts desirable. Unwashed dwarves just need to go wash. Makes soap and fort design more important.

Unwashed stuff... would be convoluted. Dwarfs would need two interactions: one that checks for cave adaptation and gives the dwarf another interaction (yeah) that causes other, nearby dwarfs to have negative emotions (disgust, aversion) and a small chance of nausea; the second one checks if the dwarf is in water and gives them a syndrome (that is basically useless, like modifying skill rolls to 100% (so unchanged)) with a syn_class that blocks the first one. A workshop with an interaction to use soap would give the same thing in absence of water.

- Balanced Diet: Dwarves need to eat some grain, meat and herbs every so often. Turns food into a resource that needs active management. May be highly irritating for players.

Same principle as above, but without any counters besides time, with food having an ingested syndrome that blocks it.

All but the first two require modding dwarfs and all are pretty messy, RAW-wise.

[Ghills]

- Cleanliness is Healthiness: Vermin or animals spread syndromes. Add an Herbworker shop that creates syndrome-cures from plants. The cures can be dumped in water or alcohol, added to food, etc.  Could also be incorporated into pre-made soap at the new workshop.  Perhaps add a profession that puts herbal pesticides around the fort to keep vermin down.

Pesticides are impossible, as are cures to syndromes. However, you can make the "cures" actually prevent infection in the first place (maybe make it so that infected creatures have a chance to spread the disease around); trappers will also become way more important. Bees can attack, so vermin bites are possible; no idea on interactions.

- Bad Air: Traditionally mining carries a high risk of bad air and underground gases. Add some 'stone' materials that make dwarves high or sick. Syndrome should decrease after exposure, so getting away from the Bad Air material will fix the problem.

Automining on veins and such will just cause the dwarfs to go around and the player identifying the offending stone. There is/was a mod (the earth strikes back) that used DFHack to make any stone (with filters, I think) drop gasses/spawn stuff. But needs DFHack.

- Curses: Dwarves casting curses on fellow fort members they abominate would be loads of !!fun!!. Would probably require modifying dwarf raws?

Would require modding the dwarf raws, yes. Make it so it is an attack interaction that can only target other dwarfs, or give it such a long start timer that visitors will have already left by the time it kicks in.

- Airshafts: Vermin and unwashed dwarfs cause minor nausea. Victims are cured by getting having access to 'light' tiles, making airshafts desirable. Unwashed dwarves just need to go wash. Makes soap and fort design more important.

Unwashed stuff... would be convoluted. Dwarfs would need two interactions: one that checks for cave adaptation and gives the dwarf another interaction (yeah) that causes other, nearby dwarfs to have negative emotions (disgust, aversion) and a small chance of nausea; the second one checks if the dwarf is in water and gives them a syndrome (that is basically useless, like modifying skill rolls to 100% (so unchanged)) with a syn_class that blocks the first one. A workshop with an interaction to use soap would give the same thing in absence of water.

- Balanced Diet: Dwarves need to eat some grain, meat and herbs every so often. Turns food into a resource that needs active management. May be highly irritating for players.

Same principle as above, but without any counters besides time, with food having an ingested syndrome that blocks it.

All but the first two require modding dwarfs and are pretty messy, RAW-wise.

About what I was figuring, then. Sounds like adding some kind of biting flea vermin with a syndrome and an herbal preventative is the easiest of my ideas?

Would Balanced Diet require modding dwarfs? I think syndromes on the food that cancel each other out would work, but that might wind up being more work not less.

AFAICT anything aside from just adding more invaders or dangerous wildlife is going to be messy.  Most of the ideas in the OP seem pretty messy, aside from the wall-piercing animals which can just be added. The whole idea is to fundamentally change how one of the game modes works.

[Teneb]

I thoroughly do not recommend the balanced diet thing because while I think it is probably possible to do without modding dwarfs, it would be a massive pain for the player. There is no way to control what dwarfs select when eating other than forbidding.

If I was to pick any of the ones above, it'd be the vermin.

[Ghills]

I thoroughly do not recommend the balanced diet thing because while I think it is probably possible to do without modding dwarfs, it would be a massive pain for the player. There is no way to control what dwarfs select when eating other than forbidding.

If I was to pick any of the ones above, it'd be the vermin.

That would be why I included the 'may be highly irritating' note on the Balanced Diet. 

I agree that fleas and fleadip is probably a good place to start. Anyone else have other ideas?

[Putnam]

Do you have ANY IDEA WHAT IS POSSIBLE WITH MODDING?!

I love those ideas SO MUCH but ALMOST EVERY ONE OF THEM IS IMPOSSIBLE.

oh jeez buddy i know i'm like the patron saint of this statement but you're sounding like pope urban right now

Also, more importantly, one of these is quite possible, despite not seeming so at first:

- Balanced Diet: Dwarves need to eat some grain, meat and herbs every so often. Turns food into a resource that needs active management. May be highly irritating for players.

This has a solution without DFHack. AceSV pointed it out pretty well:

You could make the underground crops toxic in high doses, so if your dwarves are only eating plump helmets, they'll get a plump helmet high or something.  Underground crops could slightly cause it, overground crops could slightly cure it and meats could be neutral.  Off course, you could still wall in your overground crops, but it makes certain strategies a lot more difficult. 

Rather than making underground crops toxic in high doses, give all dwarves an interaction that imparts various syndromes (one interaction can have multiple syndromes) that represent nutrient deficiency after a certain amount of time, then give every single edible material in the game appropriate syndromes of the same SYN_IDENTIFIER so that, when eaten, the syndrome's duration will be reset.

[Meph]

Ideas:
- Workplace accidents, aka smelters that catch fire (1% chance for burning product).
- Workplace dangers, aka bacteria that cause sickness in the butchery/tanner, alcohol vapors in the still, mercury/arsenic vapors in the smelter (% for syndromes)
- Vermin bites that spread diseases
- Vermin that eat more or your food
- Raw foods cause sicknesses
- More demands/mandates
- More nobles that require rooms with specific furniture
- evil rains/clouds/mists with delayed syndromes, (unit goes in, nothing happens, unit turns into monster later)
- better vampires (no growing eye teeth, dwarven blood removes NO_DRINK so that they still appear alive and drink booze, more combat power)
- better werebeasts (longer transformation times)
- grasses that add syndromes to grazers, like evil grasses turn grazers opposed_to_life, other rare grasses make them sick
- Use GROUNDED_ANIMAL_ANGER for proper fights that break out between animals. (too many in one area, scratches/bites lead to infections, rabies, etc)
- More flying cavern monsters that path into the fort, for example with BUILDING_DESTROYER or CURIOUS_BEAST
- More world-gen secrets that your migrants might have found, which make them a danger to your fort, like secret necromancers to suddenly turn
- Cavern layer 2 & 3 trees with vaporizing wood that add syndromes. (surface and cavern layer 1 wood is used by caravans, which would bring evaporizing barrels/wagons) For example poisonous mushroom clouds.
- Rare cavern layer 2 & 3 plants that have very strong negative effects
- A lot more mischivious monsters that might manage to sneak into your fort, especially flying ones. Lever-pulling and cage-opening are among the few things that can really hurt a locked-down fort.
- Cavern monsters that affect a dwarf with a syndrome that kills him/transform him into a monster. For example I made face-huggers that can impregnate dwarves, which turn into a green devourer after a while.
- Changing personalities/attributes to make dwarves tantrum sooner.
- Make food harder to get, aka less omnipotent farm plots, forcing people to hunt or trade (aka opening their fort)
- Make drinks harder to get, resulting in more water being used for drinks, lowering morale.
- Mining accidents, rare gems/veins that vaporize and inflict negative syndromes.
- Mini-aquifers, rare gem that spawns unlimited water for even more mining accidents.
- Random god of death - Every year there is a 1% chance that a dwarf dies (so if you have 100 dwarves, on average one dies per year). You could add humorous explanations to the syndrome/interaction that kills him like "fell down the stairs", "chocked on his drink", etc. This is clearly unfair, but could lead to interesting events, depending on who dies.
- Antisocial caravans, rare castes of elves/humans that turn the caravans berserk once inside your fort, simulating bandits that killed the merchants, donned their gear and try to rob your fort.

I can think of many more, but all of the above are possible with raw-modding only.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

- better vampires (no growing eye teeth, dwarven blood removes NO_DRINK so that they still appear alive and drink booze, more combat power)

I'm of the understanding that NO_DRINK doesn't remove the ability to drink, hence goblins getting drunk. Surely BLOODSUCKER is the tag that would need to be intermittently removed (and even then, I'm not sure how you'd time that)?

Speaking of vampires, it seems like it should be possible to modify any one by way of an omnipresent regional interaction with IT_REQUIRES:BLOODSUCKER.

[Teneb]

I'm of the understanding that NO_DRINK doesn't remove the ability to drink, hence goblins getting drunk. Surely BLOODSUCKER is the tag that would need to be intermittently removed (and even then, I'm not sure how you'd time that)?

The problem is that NO_DRINK means that vampires have no reason to drink, and due to the dependence on alcohol (that can't be removed) it means that vampires will get progressively slower.

[Urlance Woolsbane]

I'm of the understanding that NO_DRINK doesn't remove the ability to drink, hence goblins getting drunk. Surely BLOODSUCKER is the tag that would need to be intermittently removed (and even then, I'm not sure how you'd time that)?

The problem is that NO_DRINK means that vampires have no reason to drink, and due to the dependence on alcohol (that can't be removed) it means that vampires will get progressively slower.

However, if they lack that tag, they die, or so I'm told.  CE_SPEED_CHANGE seems like the ticket here.

[pikachu17]

I would like something that moves through walls like a ghost, and is nearly unkillable, but can be killed by sunlight. it would force you to unwall yourself from the outside in order to get sunlight

[Putnam]

Can't get them to move through walls. Other than that, that's all possible (nigh-unkillability is fairly easy, dying in sunlight... may actually be a problem, given that you can only have things happen with certain amount of cave adaptation and nothing starts with any cave adaptation, may need DFHack for that)

[IndigoFenix]

Dying in sunlight can be done by giving them a lethal syndrome by default and making cave adaptation remove their vulnerability to it.  For example, destroying their lungs and making cave adaptation add NO_BREATHE.

[Meph]

Dying in sunlight can be done by giving them a lethal syndrome by default and making cave adaptation remove their vulnerability to it.  For example, destroying their lungs and making cave adaptation add NO_BREATHE.

No need to destroy their lungs, you can make them AQUATIC and NO_BREATHE. They act like amphibious creatures, walking around on land, but air-drown if you take the NO_BREATHE away.

[AceSV]

Huh, could you make more kinds of vampires?  Like maybe instead of drinking blood, there's a booze vampire that drinks too much, or a rust vampire that breaks metal objects (or just iron/steel if being literal) or a vampire that has a steel body or dragonfire breath, suddenly the vampire starts breaking bones and burning things when it gets mad. 

I suppose you could still avoid the exovampires by turtling, but if any are in your fortress before you seal it up, you're in trouble. 

Werebeast epidemics are one of the few things that can really sink one of my fortresses anymore.  It would be interesting to make something which is as virile as werebeasts, but not as immediately dangerous and obvious.  Because if you see a werebeast you react strongly to it, if it were something more tame, you might not choose to divert resources to fix it until it's too late.