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[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

GREAT ARMOK

YOU CAN DISABLE ADAMANTINE THROUGH ADVANCED WORLDGEN AFAIK

GO AND TRY IT NOW BEFORE POSTING ANYTHING ELSE

OR BY ARMOK'S BLOOD I WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN AND BECOME STRONGER THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE -~!

(wrong trope you idiot)

[Elephant Parade]

GREAT ARMOK

YOU CAN DISABLE ADAMANTINE THROUGH ADVANCED WORLDGEN AFAIK

GO AND TRY IT NOW BEFORE POSTING ANYTHING ELSE

OR BY ARMOK'S BLOOD I WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN AND BECOME STRONGER THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE -~!

(wrong trope you idiot)

I don't think anyone wants to disable adamantine; personally, I'd just like a toggle to make it rarer.

[Putnam]

I believe that the HFS was changed to be placed every second X and Y tile apart specifically so that even the smallest possible embark in the vanilla game, a 2x2 fort, could not miss an HFS.  Only if you use something like Nanofort to cheat this part of the game can you miss an HFS... Or, you know, turn HFS off in the worldgen settings.

It's not every second X and Y. They're placed randomly in 2x2 areas, as such:

OO|OO|XO|OO
OX|XO|OO|OX
OX|XO|OO|XO
OO|OO|OX|OO

You can still miss with 2x2. You can get anywhere from 0-4 spires. 3x3 or larger is required if you're not deliberately aligning your embark.

Wow, the combination of these two posts somehow made me think that this topic was from 2011, partially because I've been rereading my old posts and partially because nanoforts were added to vanilla in January 2015.

[Bumber]

Wow, the combination of these two posts somehow made me think that this topic was from 2011, partially because I've been rereading my old posts and partially because nanoforts were added to vanilla in January 2015.

Toady hasn't touched candy cane generation since way back then, so the current layout wouldn't account for it.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

I was responding to the guy who said you needed mods to disable candy.

[NW_Kohaku]

Wow, the combination of these two posts somehow made me think that this topic was from 2011, partially because I've been rereading my old posts and partially because nanoforts were added to vanilla in January 2015.

Yeah, well, sorry, it's been a while since I've run a "serious" fort where that knowledge would have mattered, so I obviously got a bit foggy on how it worked.  I generally run "experiment" forts that don't go on long enough/dig deep enough for candy to matter nowadays. I guess my last serious fort just happened to have its candy line up neatly by accident.

[Putnam]

Wow, the combination of these two posts somehow made me think that this topic was from 2011, partially because I've been rereading my old posts and partially because nanoforts were added to vanilla in January 2015.

Toady hasn't touched candy cane generation since way back then, so the current layout wouldn't account for it.

Wow, the combination of these two posts somehow made me think that this topic was from 2011, partially because I've been rereading my old posts and partially because nanoforts were added to vanilla in January 2015.

Yeah, well, sorry, it's been a while since I've run a "serious" fort where that knowledge would have mattered, so I obviously got a bit foggy on how it worked.  I generally run "experiment" forts that don't go on long enough/dig deep enough for candy to matter nowadays. I guess my last serious fort just happened to have its candy line up neatly by accident.

...I didn't say anything about candy cane generation. That hasn't changed. Nanoforts were allowed, but they explicitly give you a warning (well, slightly coquettishly, but it is an explicit warning) that you might not be able to get adamantine if you use a nanofort.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

I'm pretty sure the discussion on whether to put in an advanced worldgen setting for adamantine spire generation density is over. Is there a consensus on this?

The main discussion seems to be, in my opinion, whether the default setting should be candy-dense or candy-sparse.

[break]

[size=14]An Argument for Dense Adamantine[/size]

For one, the Toad has made it so. Status quo and all that.

Most players would like there to be the option of adamantine in most of their embarks, even if they never mine it. Hell, even if they never go past the first cavern, I'm doubting players would want a default that restricts them from the military endgame.

Basically, the default will be used by every standard worldgen (whether it is short or long, large or tiny, savage or easy). And the average player will want adamantine to be dense.

If you only want one cavern - advworldgen. If you want there to be tons of volcanoes - advworldgen. If you want to have three sides of coast and one of land - advworldgen.

If you want there to be very few adamantine spires - advworldgen.

I propose that the option be made like this:

Code: [Select]

[ADAMANTINE:XY]

examples:

[ADAMANTINE:100]
[ADAMANTINE:30]
[ADAMANTINE:0]
The top setting is current functionality, the bottom setting has no adamantine, and the middle setting has 70% less adamantine in the world (30% of default).

How would a non-100, nonzero number work? Every time an adamantine spire would be generated, it has an X% chance of actually being generated.

I end with this question: if there are no adamantine spires, should Hell be generated? Surely yes, as otherwise there would be no goblins, right?

[Witty]

I end with this question: if there are no adamantine spires, should Hell be generated? Surely yes, as otherwise there would be no goblins, right?

I mean, slade spires are still a thing. Which requires a Hell to escape from. Even a no adamantine world would need a Hell for that to work.

I fully approve of what Dozebôm has proposed. Most of the community seems in favor of abundant adamantine, so that should remain the default setting. But an advworldgen option would be great.

[NW_Kohaku]

HFS height/width aside, what the original argument proposed was more along the lines of whether there should be HFS present in a fortress or not. 

In response to this argument, I again have to state that you might as well just make it random whether HFS exists at all at worldgen or not to accomplish this task, because that's basically the effect they're going for: There's either HFS there, or there isn't.  It doesn't functionally matter whether it was there and they just happened to "miss", or if it was never there to begin with, the de facto results are the same. 

At least, that's the case if we ignore goblins and demons taking rulership positions... Still, one could just as easily make a HFS where you replace the candy with something either worthless or even outright unmineable. (I'm not sure raws alone could do it, but I'm sure DF Hack could be employed to change candy to spires of semi-molten rock, instead, upon embark a certain percentage of embarks, accomplishing the stated objective of the original poster.)

You could include worlgen parameters for height/thickness of spires... but that seems to defeat some of the game purpose of the stuff when you allow players to manually choose how much of it they can harvest to a degree that I can't imagine wouldn't involve allowing players to give themselves much more of it while also keeping the "danger point" far below them, neutering much of the risk that is the HFS's main raison d'etre.

[Vattic]

In response to this argument, I again have to state that you might as well just make it random whether HFS exists at all at worldgen or not to accomplish this task, because that's basically the effect they're going for: There's either HFS there, or there isn't.  It doesn't functionally matter whether it was there and they just happened to "miss", or if it was never there to begin with, the de facto results are the same.

Considering you are meant to play multiple forts and adventurers in the same world I could understand why some might want HFS to not be a certainty outside weird sized embarks. Your option of randomising existence for the whole world at generation means you either get HFS in every fort, or none.

Personally I rarely mine the stuff. Just don't bother if RP doesn't call for it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Considering you are meant to play multiple forts and adventurers in the same world I could understand why some might want HFS to not be a certainty outside weird sized embarks. Your option of randomising existence for the whole world at generation means you either get HFS in every fort, or none.

Personally I rarely mine the stuff. Just don't bother if RP doesn't call for it.

Practically speaking, however, that's not what usually happens.  Most fortresses take up so much player time that a new version will come out by the time they are done with the last one, or even in a single version that lasts long enough, there will be new mods players will want to try. At the very least, they'll usually want to regen a world for different worlgen settings and a chance at particular types of embarks, or they just want to see a different world history.  The end result is that players usually don't play multiple fortresses in the same world.  (There aren't really that many tangible benefits for doing so at the moment - playing/retiring a fortress and a series adventurers makes sense because they can interact, but different fortresses cannot.  The only time this might be different is one of those exploit embarks where people embark a continuous chain of forts to form a "bridge", but most such forts weren't actually seriously built, and the functionality they were exploiting has been patched out, anyway.)

And that is the crux of my argument - that for all practical intents and purposes, it might as well be a world without an HFS if it's not on the map of your fortress, because most players will never get another swing at finding one other than their standard one fortress per world.

[Salmeuk]

Considering you are meant to play multiple forts and adventurers in the same world I could understand why some might want HFS to not be a certainty outside weird sized embarks. Your option of randomising existence for the whole world at generation means you either get HFS in every fort, or none.

Personally I rarely mine the stuff. Just don't bother if RP doesn't call for it.

Practically speaking, however, that's not what usually happens.  Most fortresses take up so much player time that a new version will come out by the time they are done with the last one, or even in a single version that lasts long enough, there will be new mods players will want to try. At the very least, they'll usually want to regen a world for different worlgen settings and a chance at particular types of embarks, or they just want to see a different world history.  The end result is that players usually don't play multiple fortresses in the same world.  (There aren't really that many tangible benefits for doing so at the moment - playing/retiring a fortress and a series adventurers makes sense because they can interact, but different fortresses cannot.  The only time this might be different is one of those exploit embarks where people embark a continuous chain of forts to form a "bridge", but most such forts weren't actually seriously built, and the functionality they were exploiting has been patched out, anyway.)

And that is the crux of my argument - that for all practical intents and purposes, it might as well be a world without an HFS if it's not on the map of your fortress, because most players will never get another swing at finding one other than their standard one fortress per world.

I don't know about those generalizations. I personally like to play two or three fortresses in the same world, hoping to find migrants from previous expeditions or to re-encounter named enemies that managed to escapee into the wilds. I've read plenty of anecdotes from people who play on the same world for multiple IRL years. I also find some fortresses reach their climax of entertainment fairly quickly, and just embarking somewhere else in the same world is quicker than re-genning another plane (especially if you shoot for thousand-year histories). Being able to adjust adamantine generation is obviously up to Toady, but I really don't see why you shouldn't be able to. Just like every other minor worldgen option, adamantine generation could be the key to creating someone's penultimate fantasy narrative.

The "most players do this" argument never flies around here, I mean come on it's dwarf fortress! Idiosyncratic playstyles are like, the norm.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

see what I did there?!?! :3

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

I respectfully disagree with you, NW_K. I actually tend to make one or two worlds, and then play for months in just those worlds.

And while randomizing the existence of adamantine may have a similar effect, I doubt anybody would use it. Not just reducing your chances of getting adamantine in an embark, but actually having the chance of no adamantine anywhere, is a bit scary.

It shouldn't be that hard - there's probably already a random number thing to determine where the spires go. Just multiply that by a player-defined percentage, and done.

[NW_Kohaku]

And while randomizing the existence of adamantine may have a similar effect, I doubt anybody would use it. Not just reducing your chances of getting adamantine in an embark, but actually having the chance of no adamantine anywhere, is a bit scary.

Yes, that's the point I'm making.

My point isn't that randomly not having HFS in the world is a great idea, my point is that the actual effect of this suggestion is basically the same for a very large percentage of players.  I'm saying the suggestion is a bad suggestion specifically because it's functionally the same as not getting adamantine anywhere for essentially all intents and purposes.

Especially for new players, the players that the whole concept of the spoilers is aimed at, they aren't going to be reusing worlds simply out of a desire to reuse worlds.

The ultimate result of HFS rarity can simply be boiled down to a percentage chance of simply not having any in your game. Yes, you can reuse worlds, and hypothetically find some the next time, but what you're suggesting is that a majority of the newbie playerbase is going to go building a full-fledged fort, dig down to the bottom, not find a spoiler they hypothetically don't even know exists, and decide to retire there, so they can go embark somewhere else to have another blind random chance to see the spoilers?  That's not going to happen.

The only people it could possibly appeal to are the extremely slim minority of veteran players that are very well aware of the HFS and its dangers who are actually playing dozens of full-fledged fortresses without actually committing to any one, but want to have one fortress out of dozens to be "special" by being the one that has access to the bluemetal out of all of them... and again, that's still something that can be accomplished by DF Hack simply having some random percentage chance that changevein be run at the embark level as you embark, making the change on a per-embark basis. 

Even with all that, however, you're still running headlong into the fact that even that extremely niche desire will become obsolete next update when Toady starts adding in cosmic bridges between different dimensions besides just the HFS, making fortresses have access to different places and metals, anyway, without the "you either have an end game or you don't" nonsense.

The other HFS options like spire size are, as I previously mentioned, not desirable either, because they just beg for players to game them for maximum exploitation at minimum risk.