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[LMeire]

...
As already discussed in the previous threads ad nauseum, yes, that exists, but it's nowhere near capable of generating enough energy to be put into the ecosystem for licking caustic slime off of rocks to plausibly sustain a small city, much less the biodiversity of the cavern system.
...

I was more arguing for how magical lifeforms would process material in a way that could translate to agriculture, since it is a given that they're using some nonsensical energy source, it doesn't matter if the real mechanic is low-energy or not.

...We've got the energy source figured out, but there is still the matter of nutrients and moisture to discuss for cavern plants.

I was actually focused on answering this part; it's a deep, dark cavity in solid rock, assuming energy is limitless for sessile organisms, how would a pioneer organism look and function? I went with chemotrophs because it solved three problems with subterranean life, they could make material-food out of what the barren underground has to offer, they could widen the caverns by transmuting solid rock into potentially breathable gasses. It wouldn't matter so much if it were high-fantasy, but since there's a scale to work with I figure this would be fine for low-medium fantasy.

...
That sounds good, but why isn't that common in real life if that works?

As noted by NW_Kohaku, chemosynthesis is low-energy and can't carry an ecosystem as well as phototropism can so they get out-competed anywhere sunlight is an option.

[NW_Kohaku]

Chemosynthetic creatures on rock faces do exist, they just only form one trophic layer (slime on a rock) because they cannot produce enough energy to support any larger ecosystem.  The same also goes for most volcanic vents (outside of deep sea ones) or sea "dead zones" where you get bacterialogical sulfur-based life, but nothing larger because when energy is so scarce that minimizing energy loss is everything, there's no point competing as anything but a producer, as every step up the trophic chain is a roughly 90% loss of energy.

Again, any talk of subterranean ecology that involves predatory megafauna of the sort that makes for interesting encounters has to start with the "Laws of Physics" being based around fountains of energy completely alien to our own world's Laws of Physics. This, again, is what I refer to as "xenosynthesis", since you can start talking about magic energy sources in ways that are meaningfully internally consistent in much the same way one can talk about internal consistency of superhero powers. (I'd point back to Expwnent's link on how fiction works, which is interesting, if highly dry reading.)

If, for example, forgotten beasts are "fountains" of magical energy, and their random roaming empowers a field of magical energy aligned with their spheres, you can talk about how FB migrations are key to the blooming of certain plants that xenosynthesize energy of specific spheres, or you can talk about producers and consumers of magic energy or exchanges between magic energy and chemical/biological energy in a way that is an internally consistent "Laws of Physics", even though it requires some assumptions of magic to enter.

Again, the problem is when you try to avoid accepting that the game as it stands and is clearly going is clearly meant to run on magic based upon spheres, you break more aspects of "physics" in the game world than you preserve by rejecting some notion of "magic".  Making the concept that some magical form of energy exists in the world and enters through some vector and interacts through some other arbitrary vectors an "explicit premise" (or in Physics terms, "assumptions",) you have to agree to before entering means you can then apply all the same lessons of physics, as modified by the acceptance of the assumptions as true. Comparatively, trying to deny these assumptions because they are unpalatable and "forcing the numbers to work" results in breaking some far more consequential assumptions of conservation of mass and energy or even basic math.

[cochramd]

Again, any talk of subterranean ecology that involves predatory megafauna of the sort

No one is saying megafauna, though, let alone predatory megafauna. Assuming that vanilla DF as we know it now is medium fantasy, I am perfectly fine with low fantasy worlds having zero animal life in the caverns because all the plant life is based on heat from the magma sea and thus insufficient to support animal life, and I'm 99% confident that everyone else here shares that opinion.

[Vattic]

It might be entertaining to keep it a mystery and have naturalists come up with different theories about the unusual vitality of the caverns. This would not prevent performing rituals or using fertiliser to help crops.

If prayer produces demonstrable results, a pleased deity produces more crops related to their sphere, and you can actually go to the plane of that god and ask them or their servants whether they're magically influencing crops or not, where's the mystery?

It's like being a theologian in Discworld; Why bother pondering to yourself what the gods believe or want if you can just go down to the bar and ask the gods, themselves what their views of proper human behavior and morality are?

I wasn't under the impression that deities and/or planar travel was to be so accessible to the common folk. The specific mystery I mention is that of the liveliness of the caverns, not of a deity granting crop based boons. Even if you could ask about the caverns and get an answer you can't expect the truth. I hope to see theological disagreement, the veil of perception flavouring retellings of messages from the divine, manipulative gods, mostly silent gods, the unfathomable.

In relation to your question I'd say you should ask those that still bless their crops and why the perceived benefit does not lessen the mystery present in their faith. Even if you think you've got proof you are still apart from your god in fundamental ways which to me grants mystery. In a world where gods have an obvious impact it does lessen the mystery I admit, but they would still posses a noble-like mystery and a sense of the beyond.

[NW_Kohaku]

No one is saying megafauna, though, let alone predatory megafauna. Assuming that vanilla DF as we know it now is medium fantasy, I am perfectly fine with low fantasy worlds having zero animal life in the caverns because all the plant life is based on heat from the magma sea and thus insufficient to support animal life, and I'm 99% confident that everyone else here shares that opinion.

You could have fooled me.  It certainly didn't look like there was any sort of consensus on anything, what with everyone arguing radically different definitions of the very basic framework of what you were talking about to everyone else before I even came back into the thread...

Anyway, I have to wonder what, exactly, your metrics for high and low fantasy are that a world where it rains the blood of sentient species that causes plagues of undead to roam the land while creatures made literally out of shadows phase in and out of reality and entities of elemental magical forces made literally out of fire and shaped like three-eyed mastadons that fly and spit webs aren't quite divorced enough from reality to quite earn the designation "high fantasy" from you, but, well, I guess that just gets to my next point:

Putting aside that chemosynthetic organisms will, definitionally, not be "plants", I'm not sure why you would come to that conclusion, exactly.  You seem to be arguing that "fantasy levels" mean it goes "no fictional creatures" -> "fictional plants" -> "fictional plants and animals" -> "some presumably even more wacky stuff not yet in DF".

I'm just not seeing how you expect these "fantasy sliders" to play out.  From a purely rational ecological standpoint, if you accept a break from reality to allow for a magical ecosystem, then it is actually even less believable to make only half the ecosystem appear, but function as though the whole ecosystem was in existence.  (That is, presuming you aren't talking about a whole new set of "cavern flora" that is created solely for one gradient of the fantasy sliders, which I doubt Toady would be willing to spend the effort building.)  If there's a magic mushroom world, then having animals, even if they're generally inexplicable animals like an elk bird, makes perfect sense when you already accept the break with reality of mushrooms just plain being able to rapidly grow huge in caverns with no access to surface energy.

And once again, the chemosynthetic magma "plants" idea is actually more fantastic and belief-straining than magic is, because it is impossible in ways that break far more physical laws than merely saying there's some magic energy field they can synthesize energy from. 

From an internally-rational worldbuilding standpoint, a "fantasy slider" makes more sense being a set of assumptions you can turn on in the world before it is made, like "are there patches of good and evil land where there might be clouds of zombifying dust?" than "select the number of trophic levels in the cavern layer". 

From a programming standpoint, I'm expecting Toady is going to be far more direct about what each "slider" will do.  Rather than a single "how fantastic" slider, I'm expecting it's actually going to just be more of the same worldgen options we've been getting that sets whether the game makes up procedural creatures like FBs, Night Creatures, Secrets, procedural metals, etc.  The new fantasy setting is likely to mostly just be individual settings for how the myth selection works, and if you want to have realistic underground, you already have those settings right now: Just turn off all the caverns, the magma sea, HFS, FBs, various megabeasts, semimegabeasts, night creatures, secrets, region magical alignment, and comment out dwarves, goblins, kobolds, and elves.

The game doesn't have a capacity for recognizing the physically impossible, which leads to unintentional breaks with reality like the mechanisms Expwnent mentioned. Hence, even a "no fantasy setting" is going to still rely upon raws where you can make a civilization of telekinetic horseshoe crabs made of spongecake if you want to in your "no fantasy" world, just because the game doesn't know how to stop you.

A fantasy land where there are just specific types of "plants" based upon chemosynthesis is just the fantasy land variety you're specifically hunting for, which would, honestly, be the place for modding, since I honestly don't think most people want what you are arguing for, nor is Toady likely to supply it.

[Bumber]

...
A magic-less world will have a few caves (not the same as caverns) with bats and maybe some olms, but they will not have giant, interconnected caverns, it will not have a "magma sea" so close to the surface you can easily dig down to it, it will not support farming any better than real-life farmers exist in mile-underground mine tunnels.  The only real-world underground farming (barring artificial light and hydroponics) is mushroom farming on beds of sawdust requiring decomposing surface trees that rely upon photosynthesis at a fairly significant loss of chemical energy. (Mushrooms have very little nutritional value, and nobody in real life can really survive on just mushrooms.)

A magic-less world would be much more like 0.28 without chasms and the HFS.  About 8 z-levels of solid rock below the surface, (non-magical miners can't dig down too far without much better technology than DF civs possess,) and that's it. Caverns were added to "add magic to the underground". (The 0.28.40d years were when this whole "low magic" meme was started.  Since then, more and more blatant magic has been slopped all over DF.)

A "no magic world" would be Toady trying to make the closest game he could to an actual historical medieval life simulator as DF could be.  No dwarves. No blast-process steel. No mining more than a couple z-levels down. Humans only. Final Destination.

I think it bears pointing out that a mundane DF world still isn't earth. DF worlds are only about 300m deep. Rock isn't necessarily harder with depth. Caves don't need to form by the usual process (volcanic? organic?) Gravity might be different. Etc.

[NW_Kohaku]

I wasn't under the impression that deities and/or planar travel was to be so accessible to the common folk. The specific mystery I mention is that of the liveliness of the caverns, not of a deity granting crop based boons. Even if you could ask about the caverns and get an answer you can't expect the truth. I hope to see theological disagreement, the veil of perception flavouring retellings of messages from the divine, manipulative gods, mostly silent gods, the unfathomable.

In relation to your question I'd say you should ask those that still bless their crops and why the perceived benefit does not lessen the mystery present in their faith. Even if you think you've got proof you are still apart from your god in fundamental ways which to me grants mystery. In a world where gods have an obvious impact it does lessen the mystery I admit, but they would still posses a noble-like mystery and a sense of the beyond.

Well,

If you set the "fantasy rating" of the world to zero, it still builds a series of events, but those are then just stories (perhaps at a civilization level, not really decided how they might interweave between civs).  If you set the parameters to allow for it, then the story is correct, which creates a kind of shared lore for the world.  Each race has a different thread of the story they tell based on which events resulted in their creation, mostly, though there are some differences in emphasis which can make the racial stories sound quite different from each other.  I haven't tried to mix false and real beliefs yet, and that might just lead to confusion.

The myths it creates can lead to varied game elements, especially since you can just turn them off and on with parameters.  We won't be able to get everything in all at once, but we should have a healthy first pass.  This could change the end-game in player forts significantly, for instance, or make a certain form of magic occur everywhere, opening up new workshop/job chains etc., whereas other magic would resist industrialization/familiarity.  There are various frequency/bloodline/requirement variables that come up, so individuals of a given race won't all be the same.  We're hoping to add new landforms in the first release (giant region-sized cosmic egg shell fragments, and so forth), and eventually get to entire planes that you can visit in either mode (the difficulties there are the same as the difficulties with getting a separate off-site battle map up in fort mode, pretty much, and we'll probably handle them at once, in the distant future).  Important artifacts will come up in the first pass -- the generator has stuff like looms that guide all of fate and so forth, and I'm not really sure how your interactions with those will go.

Bolding mine.

Also, one of the goals I've read Toady talk about was that he would want to have something where you could visit all your dead dwarves in the dwarfy version of Valhalla and actually converse with them.  Maybe that's more Adventure Mode than Fortress Mode, scholars are already travellers for their knowledge, so if fortresses can open up access to other planes (and HFS is supposed to be another plane, already,) then it makes just as much sense for a few scholars to just go knock-knock-knockin' on Heaven's door and ask a few baseline questions to get their religion down right.

Beyond that... I'm getting the sense that you mean something rather different when you say "mystery" than when I hear it. 

Dwarf Fortress is hardly the first game to put mechanics to religion.  In games like Emperor, having sufficient access to ancestor worship shrines or Buddhist temples meant you could call on an ancestor spirit deity to literally walk the streets and give out free food to your people, or lead my armies in battle.  I even had a choice of which ones I wanted to summon for what benefits, and could clearly measure and weigh the opportunity costs.  No mystery there, just clearly stated game mechanics producing predictable results. 

I think you might be putting a little too much upon Toady if you're genuinely expecting him to start giving you real theological debate and revelations into real world religion. I'm more expecting "if you pray hard enough, Your God gets a +3 bonus that lets him punch the Goblin God in the face REALLY HARD and the goblin siegers get a -10 to attack rolls."

[NW_Kohaku]

I think it bears pointing out that a mundane DF world still isn't earth. DF worlds are only about 300m deep. Rock isn't necessarily harder with depth. Caves don't need to form by the usual process (volcanic? organic?) Gravity might be different. Etc.

What Toady creates in the game that isn't myth and magic, however, is as close to historical reality as he can make it.  And again, pre-cavern 3d was a lot shallower than even that 300m.  (Plus, cities had more than 10,000 people, but somehow, that obvious performance-preserving cap isn't used as a "gotcha" anywhere near as much as an in-game adjustable max depth for digging...)

If you want altered laws of gravity or organic creatures that carve out whole world-spanning cavern systems, then once again, you're just adding in your own version of personally appealing magic and pretending it's not magic just because it's the kind of magic you like.

This is really and truly a pointless argument, because it's flagrantly apparent nobody making these arguments even wants the same thing, and Toady isn't going to make any of them explicitly his default setting, although he'll make all of them hypothetically possible through modding. 

If you want a "only slightly magic" world, then just get to the raws and mod the stuff you don't like out, but don't pretend it's somehow a more "correct" fantasy than other people's preferred fantasy or somehow uses a "less bad" break from reality.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Also, one of the goals I've read Toady talk about was that he would want to have something where you could visit all your dead dwarves in the dwarfy version of Valhalla and actually converse with them.  Maybe that's more Adventure Mode than Fortress Mode, scholars are already travellers for their knowledge, so if fortresses can open up access to other planes (and HFS is supposed to be another plane, already,) then it makes just as much sense for a few scholars to just go knock-knock-knockin' on Heaven's door and ask a few baseline questions to get their religion down right.

Nah, he meant "it is possible to go to the plane," not "it's summer vacationing site for all the peasants." And still, some gods probably like mystery. "What do you say about X?" "[insert mysterious and nonsensical statement here]" "oh."

Edit: yeah, it should be trimmed.

[NW_Kohaku]

Nah, he meant "it is possible to go to the plane," not "it's summer vacationing site for all the peasants." And still, some gods probably like mystery. "What do you say about X?" "[insert mysterious and nonsensical statement here]" "oh."

The law of inverseness of length of quote and length of reply still holds. (You know you can trim that...)

Anyway, "it is possible to go to the" HFS.  Players have made it a "summer vacationing site".

As the popular RPG expression goes, "if it has stats, you can kill it," and in DF, if it is interactable, it is exploitable and weaponizable.

Beyond that, if neither a god nor their servants nor petitioners will answer a question, I chalk it more up to an insufficiently advanced conversation system than some lingering "mystery" of mysterious noteworthiness.

Talking about the "mystery" of an "unknown lesser god" not in the myth section that doesn't speak, impact people's lives, or interact with the game in any way is broaching Bertrand's Teapot levels of irrelevance whether it is true or not.

DF is a computer program.  It operates on strict rules set forth by its programmer in interactions that provide objectively measurable results.  If it's not explained in the game or interactable, it just flat doesn't exist. It is not going to magically become a self-aware prophet of a new world religion, no matter how much you might throw yourself into memes wishing it were so.

[Bumber]

I think it bears pointing out that a mundane DF world still isn't earth. DF worlds are only about 300m deep. Rock isn't necessarily harder with depth. Caves don't need to form by the usual process (volcanic? organic?) Gravity might be different. Etc.

What Toady creates in the game that isn't myth and magic, however, is as close to historical reality as he can make it.

Only the parts that should be. If it were everything, then all worlds would look and behave exactly like Earth (which obviously isn't the only planet in our universe.) Instead, we have a great degree of control over the variation, with more planned. You could generate a fantasy world without magic (think sci-fi worlds minus the tech.) The processes are made as realistic as possible, but the results don't need to be familiar.

If you want altered laws of gravity or organic creatures that carve out whole world-spanning cavern systems, then once again, you're just adding in your own version of personally appealing magic and pretending it's not magic just because it's the kind of magic you like.

Because obviously you need to change the laws of the universe to get a planet with a smaller gravitational pull. Because obviously flora couldn't ever grow that big, even in low gravity.[/sarcasm]
If you're wondering how the atmosphere stays in, it's got nowhere better to go. Serious response is it's being contained somehow, or replenished by reserves trapped inside the planet.

This is really and truly a pointless argument, because it's flagrantly apparent nobody making these arguments even wants the same thing, and Toady isn't going to make any of them explicitly his default setting, although he'll make all of them hypothetically possible through modding. 

If you want a "only slightly magic" world, then just get to the raws and mod the stuff you don't like out, but don't pretend it's somehow a more "correct" fantasy than other people's preferred fantasy or somehow uses a "less bad" break from reality.

It's not really a modding issue, it's a world gen thing. It's pretty much guaranteed that we'll be able to gen worlds without magic. It's reasonable to assume that we'll be able to gen non-magic worlds that are very close to what we have, and I hope we won't be restricted in that respect.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

MANY SPOILERS

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Anyway, "it is possible to go to the" HFS.  Players have made it a "summer vacationing site".

This is because it is a remnant from the gamey past of DF. Archdemons shouldn't be able to be killed with steel. Actually, remember 23a? Digging adamatine = Game Fucking Over. Just straight to the crumble screen after a few years. The current circus is what you get if you take the archdemon out of hell. I'm sure there'll be some large changes over the years. Maybe hell won't be a physical place below the magma! These planes might be spooky and impossible to just "go to," especially for a peasant.

As the popular RPG expression goes, "if it has stats, you can kill it," and in DF, if it is interactable, it is exploitable and weaponizable.

SRSLY, STILL GAMEY! Really, though, that era of DF might not last forever. Don't you like to RP even a bit? Admittedly, you are known for incredible simulation suggestions, not incredible flavor suggestions, but I kind of like the idea of things beyond one's ken.

Beyond that, if neither a god nor their servants nor petitioners will answer a question, I chalk it more up to an insufficiently advanced conversation system than some lingering "mystery" of mysterious noteworthiness.

No, they just might not want to tell you! Or some of the servants might just use their power for their own gain, or perhaps some are false prophets, or the god DOESN'T WANT TO TALK WITH A MORTAL JUST BECAUSE THEY WALKED IN.

Talking about the "mystery" of an "unknown lesser god" not in the myth section that doesn't speak, impact people's lives, or interact with the game in any way is broaching Bertrand's Teapot levels of irrelevance whether it is true or not.

They interact, through many layers of interaction, with the player in an incredibly minor way. Same as personality, but I don't see many people complaining about that kind of flavor.

DF is a computer program.  It operates on strict rules set forth by its programmer in interactions that provide objectively measurable results.  If it's not explained in the game or interactable, it just flat doesn't exist. It is not going to magically become a self-aware prophet of a new world religion, no matter how much you might throw yourself into memes wishing it were so.

No, in the DF world there would be prophets. This is all stuff we want Toady to code in. Remember? This is the Suggestions Forum Board. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Because obviously you need to change the laws of the universe to get a planet with a smaller gravitational pull. Because obviously flora couldn't ever grow that big, even in low gravity.[/sarcasm]
If you're wondering how the atmosphere stays in, it's got nowhere better to go. Serious response is it's being contained somehow, or replenished by reserves trapped inside the planet.

As a matter of fact, scientists suspect that the Earth is on the small side of what planets could be habitable. It's only because it's unusually dense and iron-rich that it is capable of generating a magnetic field powerful enough to protect its atmosphere.  Otherwise, you wind up as Mars, with your atmosphere blowing away in the solar winds.  They're looking for habitable planets that are five or ten times the size of Earth.

And "being contained somehow" is again just magic with the veneer of soft sci-fi.  If you haven't, I would again encourage you to read the link Expwnent gave on fiction.  You are making a fantastical explicit premise any which way, but the problem is in how many implicit premises and elaborations need to be taken with it.  Just trying to justify caverns as an explicit premise, you go to low gravity, then when questioned, have to start talking about fantastical ways that atmosphere can be trapped, and that winds up being fantastical, too...

See how this attempt to retcon impossible "science" creates a chain of problems that don't even accomplish anything beyond saying "it's not magic", while also breaking so much that you make practically anything possible.  Isn't it much simpler when you just accept a single fantastical premise from which completely rational, (dare I say, even scientific,) concepts can be built so long as you accept that the original premise contains magic? Eezo/Element Zero in Mass Effect is magic, but on top of that magic, they're still capable of putting some fairly believable and detailed elaboration that still feels satisfyingly explained and rational.

It's not really a modding issue, it's a world gen thing. It's pretty much guaranteed that we'll be able to gen worlds without magic. It's reasonable to assume that we'll be able to gen non-magic worlds that are very close to what we have, and I hope we won't be restricted in that respect.

Honestly, I'm not sure there even is going to be an expressly labeled "no magic" setting from what I've read, just a setting for "turn off the procedurally generated stuff", with the "off" setting being DF as it exists now with magma men and flying heads unless you also manually turn caverns off. But regardless, yes, you can do whatever with mods, and since when has Toady ever deliberately restricted modding through anything other than not managing to put everything into raw format quite yet?

Which, again, makes this an argument not about what DF is or should be, but in what it should be perceived to be.  Some old jokes to explain the inconsistencies of the game became memes, and memes became "accepted truths", and when DF didn't become the steampunk sci-fi game Toady always said he wasn't going to make, there's been some rear-guard action to try to justify the magic as science going on for years.

On an unrelated note, are you guys allergic to spacing lines between quotes and responses or something?

[NW_Kohaku]

This is because it is a remnant from the gamey past of DF. Archdemons shouldn't be able to be killed with steel. Actually, remember 23a?

You seem to be reading the trendline backwards.  That sort of mechanic was taken out of the game for a reason: it wasn't satisfying gameplay.

These planes might be spooky and impossible to just "go to," especially for a peasant.

Tell that to the direct quote from Toady saying they will be able to go there.

No, they just might not want to tell you! Or some of the servants might just use their power for their own gain, or perhaps some are false prophets, or the god DOESN'T WANT TO TALK WITH A MORTAL JUST BECAUSE THEY WALKED IN.

That is not how games work.  Either it is in the game and it can be found and learned, even if only because DF Hack will pull it out of memory, or it doesn't exist. 

They interact, through many layers of interaction, with the player in an incredibly minor way. Same as personality, but I don't see many people complaining about that kind of flavor.

Yes, they interact.  Personality therefore isn't a "mystery" the way that Vattic was talking about it, because that kind of "I will never be able to truly understand the depths of this" concept cannot exist in a computer program.

SRSLY, STILL GAMEY! Really, though, that era of DF might not last forever. Don't you like to RP even a bit? Admittedly, you are known for incredible simulation suggestions, not incredible flavor suggestions, but I kind of like the idea of things beyond one's ken.

Again, you are putting an unreasonable degree of hype in front of recognition of what games are capable of actually delivering.

It is not just an inevitability, it is the pride and joy of the forums that they will find ways to exploit and weaponize new mechanics before they're even released.  (See the threads on how minecarts could be exploited - which proved alarmingly accurate, if not yet capable of grasping just how ludicrously exploitable minecarts would prove to be.)

Just look at Loud Whispers prove that an undead raven can beat the HFS when he turns necromancer invaders into weapons against the HFS, then colonizes HFS while the land's denizens are locked in cages. 

Again, "If it has stats, you can kill it," is from RP games.

But this is really what it's all about, isn't it?

You're mad because I'm not sharing in your delusions.  The people in this thread arguing various impossible forms of "science" are mad because I'm not "RPing" (which I can do just fine, thank you very much,) in a way that affirms their personal way of hyping up DF.  You're mad I'm telling you to face facts. A position I'm not at all unfamiliar with after dumping cold water on plenty of other unfulfilled hype-trains in the past.

DF is based on a lot of meticulously researched real-world science mixed haphazardly with poorly-integrated and completely unexplained magic. DF's next version isn't going to make procedurally-generated Bibles with religious revelations or the capacity to out-think its players with ways of denying any method of exploit through what would have to be a full-on general artificial intelligence.  (Not to mention it would have to be without hilarious bugs that renders any of this anti-exploit design moot - and bugs are something that DF never suffers from.)

Keep in mind this whole conversation system where you expect gods to be keeping meaningful secrets from players is based upon the same conversation system we have right now, which was hyped as being something capable of passing a Turing Test, and which wound up having vampires gleefully tell you that they had killed 10,000 humans and show off their human skull necklace when you ask them what their job is. 

It was inevitable.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

...okay, I give up. I can't argue against you. You're awesome, you have a good argument, and you compare me to people who I can see are wrong. That's ethos, logos, and pathos all together. You're probably right about that religion thing; he's only one person, and it'll be decades before we get anything that's an eighth of what I'm imagining.

Still, I can dream. But not post about it here, that's what the Dream Thread's for.