Thanks to Shonai_Dweller, PatrikLundell, Eric Blank, Knight Otu, iceball3, Valtam, FantasticDorf, Mr S, LordBaal, and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions! If you don't see your question below, it was probably answered in the thread.
will there be raws for hunger and thirst, so you can modify the amount of food and water a creature needs?
We haven't done anything with that since we imagined at some point there'd be nutrition or something like that. So it just sits.
I guess if the kid is in a travelling army childsnatchers cant grab him, eh?
Ha ha, yeah, but traveling in an army doesn't make a kid safe in general!
What kind of threats on our artifacts will we see in fort mode? It'd be great if this was a challenge. A siege is easy enough to defend and is more of a threat on your dwarfs than your artifacts, and the current kobold thieves aren't really a threat. New methods involving the identity system would be fun. Perhaps a spy could grab an artifact when no one is looking and try to make it out before anyone notices it's gone, or perhaps a small group of ambushers could come to the fortress as visitors, take the artifact, then try to fight their way out.
What information will the player have available to them prior to sending out a retrieval party? Information like if it's known to be at a current site, if so what type and who owns it, and if not known possibly how was it lost and what was it's last known whereabouts. That would be crucial to know when sending out a party. I imagine an artifact known to be held at a dark fortress might need an entire siege party, while an artifact with unknown whereabouts might just need a couple of dwarfs to wander around searching for it.
Will the player be able to send out spies or take advantage of spies already sent out by their civilization? They're important for artifact location, if the goblins use them for that purpose hopefully the player can as well. Perhaps spies could also be used to gain news of the world from sources other than diplomat visits. It'd be a nice touch.
These people will visit your fort, but I'm not sure how much of a threat they'll be so far. We haven't gotten to that part yet.
You'll have the same artifact knowledge that everybody else gets -- the original location, plus whatever information you have based on rumors received from your liaison/etc. It is possible to send out a raid to get an artifact at the wrong location, but then at least you'll know that location is wrong (as an update to your "rumor" knowledge). Dwarves sent out to recover an artifact instead of raiding a location will be more circumspect and attempt to get information from foreign taverns etc. This means they might not be successful or even attempt a raid, but they'll improve your information.
I haven't yet linked the player into the whole spy system. We're not far off from that sort of thing, but I'm not sure we'll get there this time.
Right now, we find current year money in lairs. This is a bit silly. When will we be able to find historical currency?
I'm not sure. We have historical coinage tracking, but it doesn't use it there.
With the new scrollable map type, would a [SCOUT] entity unit breifly fufill the function (in such a case that you send out dwarves out to nowhere to scout out caves/shrines in fortress mode) of a fortress mode expedition group being sent out?
I'm not sure what you mean. At this time, your dwarves are sent out with purposes, instead of being sent to nowhere.
Does the new map screen include access to information from legends mode in some way? Specifically, will we be able to search for location/event names?
Nope, I haven't changed anything about that. You need to know where artifacts and prisoners are, so we've focused on that sort of information. Seeing legends info would spoil that, so we need some sort of filter in between.
could a squad sent off map lose members and wind up with a single survivor, and if so, could that survivor get beat up by bogeymen?
We haven't involved bogeymen with non-adventurers yet.
could you send out fortress members to participate in events like the dwarflympics and poetry readings with forewarning a event is going to happen in order to earn some social skills & personal notoriety for the dwarf? With the little readout whether they 'won' or not
Those celebration etc. events don't occur post w.g. yet.
What in Dwarf Fortress is still scripted that you hope to simulate in the future?
Eric Blank mentioned the economy, and there's aspects of invasions and diplomacy and other political stuff as well. We're missing a lot.
With the introduction of the ability to send squads of your own dwarves it seems to me that the Fortress Mode and Adventure mode are beginning to compete with eachother economically speaking (not that this matters at present). If the sites can just send their own folks off to kill any beasties they fancy, retrieve any artifacts they fancy, hunt down any bandits that annoy them, rescue any lost children and so on what need to have to wait around to reward random adventurers for doing those jobs for them. This creates a problem since the adventurers reliable depend upon the sites for stuff they need but since the sites no longer reliably benefit from having adventurers around they will not provide them with a reliable income. I can think of a number of possible extreme solutions to this problem.
1. Deliberately restrict what the sites are able to do using their own members by some means or other however realistic or otherwise so that there are a whole raft of things that need doing that can only be done by said special characters. For instance all dwarves that have the skills to hunt down dragons and lost children in the wilderness know they have the skills, opting to become adventurers resulting in the sites being forced to get adventurers to do those jobs.
2. Make the economies of fortress mode and adventure mode mostly self-sufficient to each-other, perhaps by using the same system of production and exchange for adventurers as is used by nomadic groups of creatures in the wilderness. In this system the lack of a consistent value of adventurers is not a problem at all since all the adventurers produce all the goods and services they collectively need, with any economic contact with sites being basically sporadic and opportunistic.
3. Merge Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode economies together completely. This means that the adventurer plays simply an ordinary guy in exactly the same position and function towards the site he is in as a regular dwarf in fortress mode, whatever that is. Since we still need the player to be able to reliably get stuff done in fortress mode, that means that we are going to have to make adventure mode far more mission based, with adventurers being regular folks given explicit tasks to perform by site governments rather than being independent entities 'following their own destiny'.
What are your thoughts on this?
I don't think there's a problem. If a fortress has characters capable of solving all of these problems, they won't need adventurers, and that's fine. As we continue to diversify the game, fortresses simply won't be in that position, I think, and adventurers will be able to specialize. The extreme devotion to one solution or another won't be necessary, though elements of each of your solutions will be at play.
1. Will offsite squads be able to destroy, pillage, or conquer sites or just take artifacts.
When you send squads out to other sites will they be able to conquer, pillage, or destroy the site the way armies do in legends mode, or will they only be allowed to steal artifacts
There are raids, but no conquests or outright destruction (though I guess a place could become depopulated).
During world time, (or after) does older dragons have better chance to survive an encounter than younger ones ?
iceball3 mentioned the growing code, and I wasn't actually sure at this point, having not looked at it for years, if it is respected in w.g. What I've found looks like they might all be treated as old-size, though I'm not sure. I'll put it in the misc pile for clearing before release.
Dont know if this question have been asked yet, but will there be any changes in vermin movement? Cause right now animals such as lungfishes still fly high in blue skies and get eaten by predator birds or burrow deep underground, occasionally being seen in tunnels under the river. This is kinda strange...
Yeah, it's weird and broken. But I have no idea when I'll get to it.
Will we be able to refer to the map when the liaison turns up with his wall of text about what's going on in the world (while he's actually talking I mean, rather than writing everything down and checking the map later)?
Also, you mentioned just before the taverns release that you didn't get the time to add a map that'd be used to listen to tavern rumours. Will that be added now that there's a map, or has that been put off for now?
The ideal would be to clean that total mess up... but I'm not sure that's going to happen this time. We have what we need now, but an interface linking the rumor dump to the map still needs to be written.
What will squads do if they're questing when the fortress falls? Will they continue the quest until it's done before disbanding? Will they form a new group? Or continue questing together for other sites?
Also, NPC adventurers are wandering around the world picking up quests posted at sites, so (as an alternative to making squads out of your citizens) will it be possible for the player to also "post" quests that visitors will be able to pick up (possibly in exchange for a bunch of granite crowns or whatever)?
What I'd love to see is a bunch of mercs naturally picking up on rumours at the tavern about the quest you just sent a squad on and have them form their own band to try to grab the artifact quicker than your dorfs.
Bonus points if they hang out in the tavern the whole time then jump your squad the moment they get back. That would be awesome.
Are the various factions hanging out at the tavern going to cause problems when dwarf squads return artifacts? Because actually it would be very cool to see people killing each other over artifacts.
Hmm... I think they could keep doing the quest, but if the entity is marked as dead, all of their army controllers might be deleted, in which case the army will go off to some other dwarf site, I think. They won't create a new entity, but their existence might prevent the entity from being marked as dead, unless the act of losing a dwarf mode game has some old code that kills it explicitly.
Yeah, at some point, we're hoping you can do what other sites do with quests with all of the heroes visiting your tavern, if you choose. Just have to set up an interface for it, pretty much.
It's possible that visitors in your tavern will trigger some artifact "encounter" code, yeah. Who know how that is going to play out... hopefully it's not too confusing.
So when artifacts are implemented, maybe once the update just hits, you'll start with an encyclopedic knowledge of every single artifact. But later down the road, are there any plans to have to learn about artifacts before you can do things like ask about them? Will books written about artifacts teach player characters about new artifacts that exist in the world? Will cultures have artifacts important to them? Like if you grow up in The Union of Teaching or whatever, would a player character know all of that nation's important artifacts?
Yeah, we're still missing any knowledge system hiding the actual existence of things from people. Locations are handled much better now, but not existence.
Does that mean there might be, in addition to magical songs, magical poems, dances and instruments?
Yeah, we want to use all of the different mechanics we now have available. It's hard to say what'll make the first pass, since we'll be constrained by time, but one thing is as likely as another.
Now that you can send squads out on raids and kidnap rescue missions, are you going to go back and put these kind of missions into worldgen for this release so that npc sites can also send raids and rescue kids?
Turning up in town in the middle of an insurrection is a lot of fun as you work out which side to jump in on. But that's quite rare. Sites raiding each other while you wander about in search of new boots would add to the sense of stuff going on.
Also, edge case question:
I guess most missions will be finished in two weeks judging by the travel times you mentioned, but what happens if you send a player-fortress dwelling retired adventurer out on a mission and then unretire him? If the mission is still going on, will you teleport back to the fortress? Appear in the wilderness mid-quest?
I'm assuming missions carry on without you after you retire your fortress, of course.
The framework for such non-player missions is there now, but it doesn't happen yet.
I have absolutely no idea what happens if you unretire such an adventurer, if it would even let you. They'll continue the mission after you retire, so they could indeed still be in an "army" state, and character creation very likely has no idea what to do about that.
As an eventual development, do you consider the approach of using more accurate temperature physics (heat of fusion/vaporization, specifically raw-able exothermic/endothermic qualities of a burning material, etc.) to quell the more disasterous (from a simulation standpoint) effects of hot temperatures, or is the plan to implement some manner of hardcoded direct limitations to fire to accomplish that?
For elaboration, think like unstoppable wetlands rapid wildfire infernos caused by an errant fire or splash of lava, melting that does not stop when you submerge in water, "melting" being the primary damage when you burn instead of skin-fat incineration, not getting cauterized when you dip your fingers in lava, and being impossible to extinguish when set on fire in most situations.
Making things better is good if the CPU doesn't die. I'm not sure where we'll end up with stuff like this. With the nitty gritty chemistry-type stuff, the CPU tends to die pretty early on, especially where map/body calculations are involved.
- How long will it take for squads to "find" artifacts, people or any other thing you asked apart from the journey time ? Can it take days, weeks, or months ? Is there a limit of time after which they will turn around ?
for example, searching for someone in a big goblin city can be really long if you have to visit every lair and avoid patrols
- Does the type of equipments and general stats for the squad will have impact on their strength/resistance outside of the fortress ?
I don't want to send my full adamantine legendary axe fighters if they are about to die in a place I won't be able to have their stuff back...(and especially if they don't do better than a copper dabbler warrior)
- If a squad is destroyed, what will happen in regard to their stuff ? Will you see adamantine items put somewhere in the economy, or taken by our enemy as a war trophy, or in the next caravan ?
Right now there isn't additional time added to missions for searching. It was one of the things we were thinking of using to extend times a bit, since they are a little fast for nearby targets. If it's only a few days, it hardly matters though, and it just temporarily sidesteps the larger issue (which might not have a good solution).
Yeah, equipment matters. But that doesn't mean you get their stuff back, it just means you are less likely to lose it in the first place. Bodies drop where they die, but the game has been only partially reliable in reproducing bodies up to this point, and some of the battlefield tracking isn't written yet. There could still be some more progress here when I get to non-artifact raid loot for your dwarves (it might also work the other way, though there isn't currently a way for sites to store it well, which is a larger economy-related issue).
1. Would one cost to making a deal for magical power be that the person involved and all their descendants have to serve the entity the bargain was made with?
2. Would another cost of making such a deal for power be that the entity turns the person into a monster?
All fair, and who knows what'll go in on the first pass. It'll be hard to get to everything. We already have a lot of the building blocks to do those sorts of things, but the generator has to put them together.
In the last FotF you said there would be "nothing fighty" for the missions yet. What are the "generic raids" spoken of in the 3/18 blog post? Is it just a hostile/negative diplomatic action?
The missions became slightly fighty, but what I was aiming at is that it isn't a strategy game yet. You can't take over places and that sort of thing.
What would be the effective duration that the individual tasks take when attempted in post-worldgen, will the events themselves (not traveling) be near instantaneous and travelling itself be static, or will obstacles such as negotiations, intermittent stops (sleeping, acquiring rations, slowing by weather, travelling offroad, confrontation, injured dwarves and treating injured dwarves) hinder mission time any? Will any of the above affect morale and stress of the dwarves themselves in any manner?
Will squads or individuals pursue personal interests en route to their destination, or change their plans in the event that the conditions of the mission change the situation initially planned for, or in the event that squad members come across a situation or circumstance that inspires their ambition?
As increased interactivity with the outside world increases, the dwarf-mode adventure-mode time discrepancies begin to become more significant. How do you plan to address certain situations where the discrepancies are pretty significant? For instance, on a slightly large embark at a distance of a handful local regional tiles away, if you send out an expedition, it will take significantly longer for your dwarves to get off of your front lawn than it will take for them to cross the geographically longer distance to the site.
Sleeping happens, but the other stuff pretty much isn't in the game yet, for anybody traveling.
The rescue/recover missions are pretty open-ended, since they depend on imperfect information and unless you have a good current lead, the dwarves don't just raid the first site they think of (you can order it explicitly of course, if you want a raid on a specific place). Then they will avail themselves of taverns, though they don't go totally off the rails (since it would suck in fort mode to lose squads at random too often, especially when you don't get information back about it quickly). We're still working on this part.
We haven't yet found a solution to the time discrepancy problem. I'm not sure a satisfying one exists. As dwarf mode gets more strategic elements, it'll just get worse, if the enemy armies aren't also slowed down, since they'll have a significant mobility advantage. One saving grace is that it isn't really end-of-the-world if dwarves in Dwarf Fortress don't have a mobility advantage and have to rely more on fortified positions, though there are going to be lots of headaches to deal with.
If there are ways off the edge of the map in the caverns, can squads depart using these?
(Instead of say, wandering through the syndrome inducing blood falling from the sky and around the husks hanging out near the front door)
We never really got to respecting those properly -- it's supposed to happen when we get to "deep dwarf" fort relationships, which we don't have yet. All underground movement is still crappy.
> Perhaps not specifically in the scope of dwarves, but will there be different reactions for the different circumstances of sending out adventurers between using different races? Such as in "human town" mode you might employ a use of unconventional bandits dictated by your guidance on where to settle & loot.
Though of course there's always the fact that site scenarios might obscure/limit/complicate the actions of what a player might be able to do from a particular site. The little mention of raiding was interesting, since that seems to lean on the fact that not every reaction when you walk into a town is going to be positive, though i might just be reading too much into it.
The races mattered a bit with the spy stuff, but not in fort mode right now.
Generally the reactions will all be negative, given the limited nature of the current mission types.
Are there plans for other sites (hamlet/retreat) to acquire workshops (in the way world gen fortresses have)?
Nope. The current adv workshops are a hack. We are leaning away from workshops overall and want to try to avoid putting them more places.
Once curses get revamped will there be more insidious curses such as a curse that doesn't seem to do anything at first but slowly turns the cursed person into a monster overtime?
It's possible -- the new myth stuff has various "corruption" mechanisms, but slow body changes are one of the hardest things to do, since the bodies are complicated and intermeshed with all sorts of mechanics.
Are there any plans to "streamline" the presentation of procedural content in future updates? Will it be easier to get a full list of all the things that are "different" in the specific world we are playing?
This is the exposition problem I've discussed several times -- it's hard to get right, as more and more random content gets added, and at some point, there's no way for the player to really absorb the information stream that would be required, which is why that level of randomness will be optional. That said, for mid-randomness worlds, we're going to try to have the myth generator (aka the new first part of world gen) do some exposition so that if there's some important random race or material, it'll make sure to lay it out for you.
1. Will the law rework include the inclusion of more advanced 'factions within factions'? What I mean by this are things like royal houses, trade companies, ambitious common interest groups, popular movements, religious cults, etc. Factions which do not necessarily control independent land on their own, but have (sometimes significant) influence within their country, their own political interests and the potential to try and topple/secede from the current government if they find it justified enough through rebellions, coups, etc. Or is this slated for a much later release?
2. Similarly, will the embark arc include an overhaul on territorial/titular claims? Right now they seem quite clunky, with every single faction claiming half the world.
Adding to what Valtam said (satisfied with the answers to 3/4), for #1, that's the intention of the "embark scenarios" -- to add subgroups more generally to the current "civilizations" that behave more autonomously, with an understanding of the various connections they have with other subgroups and whatever the "civilization" or "culture" is. For #2, yeah, land ownership in particular is completely underspecified. Various sorts of rights etc. will be defined and hopefully lead to various kinds of trouble. Though it's far enough out that it's hard to be specific.
How long does it take for a kidnapped child to 'turn goblin'?
Do dwarves know this? Or will the option to go rescue a child still be available after it's far too late?
If a squad find a kidnapped child which is now pretty much a goblin, will they kill it and then head back to report? Bring it home in a cage for its parents to deal with?
Also, can you 'rescue' kids even if their parents aren't at the fortress? What happens then? The phrase Out of the Frying Pan into the Magma springs to mind...
What options do squads get for carrying out their tasks? Frontal attack only? Can they try to sneak into enemy sites like thieves, or undercover like the new spies do?
It generally happens at adulthood, when they are no longer a "child" unit.
They know the kids from adults, by age, so you'll have the option to rescue children, but there's a chance they could grow up on the trip. In this case, they'd probably end up screwing up and possibly fighting the former child, during the raid. Safeguards may or may not be added.
Yeah, you can rescue children that aren't from your fortress (rather than leaving them in the goblin pits). Potentially, this could lead to cap problems, and I'm not sure how to deal with that right now. They could drop the kids off at a non-player site first, but I haven't coded that yet.
For raids, they currently use the mercenary/hero code, rather than the spy code, so they do some "sneaking" roll-wise but aren't at all clever. If sent on a more location-agnostic artifact recovery or rescue mission, they first attempt to get up-to-date rumors of the target, generally through hard-drinking.
The topics system as it exists, while a placeholder, does give a good preview of what functional systems our dwarves will pursue knowledge in in future implementations. However, it seems a lot of topics are comprehensive in the context of the real world, and do not much touch the fantasy word dwarves live in. Will there be expansion to cover more esoteric topics as systems and "lore" becomes more developed and set in stone, or are such subjects considered "off limits" for dwarven philosophers and scientists alike?
Such subjects include regional alignment, regional emission epidemiology (evil rain, vapors, etc), meta-anthropology (beastmen of any type as well as other similarly esoteric humanoids),
apocryphal/biological/architectual demonology and subterranean animism (HFS),
We intentionally didn't link any fantasy stuff into the research system at present because that'll hopefully be the role of the magic system generator -- coming with appropriate topics for magical/etc. research, to be incorporated into the same system with the same sort of "knowledge forest" we have now. Not that it would all happen at libraries, just that it makes sense to store it that way, possibly interlinking it with "real world" discoveries where relevant. There's the issue of linking that in with raw files, for stuff like creature/biological research etc., but we haven't done that with the mundane raws either yet.
Toady, when you are working on fort mode changes do you create a new fortress in game for every change to test changes or is there one saved game you work off of that has survived a few updates?
I usually have three or four relevant/specialized forts/worlds that survive through a given update, but I almost never keep them into the next major version.
How quick dwarven "armies" are? (in world map) Can we send a raid party to distant settlement, then stop this attack in Adventure mode? (before two weeks will pass)
They are as fast as other armies, so you'd have to create your adventurer over near the destination. Then you could catch them before they arrive.
If I send dwarf squad to look for artifact can they return with some other loot as well? If they fight goblin with steel shortsword can they bring it back?
It isn't coded yet, but we thought we'd do that, yeah. There aren't very good property pools now to steal from (just the w.g. resource piles), but it can just generate crap until that's all sorted out.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1443947 times)