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[Taffer]

This is my editor's pass over Dwarf Fortress. I want to make the game more pleasant to read and play, but I'm a minimalist at heart. I don't stray from the vanilla files unless it's worth it.

You'll need DF v47.04. If you have a saved world, delete it.

DOWNLOAD & REPOSITORY

This isn't an exhaustive list of changes, but it tries to be.

I've improved the writing wherever I can:
• Every creature has a new description. (Taffer & Toothspit)
• Generated creature descriptions are also improved. For example, minotaurs have hooves and penguin people have spotted fur. Relevant bugs have been fixed. (Taffer)
• Every humanoid has new baby and child names. (Taffer & Dirst)
• Helpful tooltips explain many reactions. (Button, Meph, & Taffer)
• The dictionary is much bigger than it used to be. This feature is optional. (GoblinCookie & Amostubal)
• Many more changes than mentioned above. For example, you smelt metal, you don't make it. Combat logs are more legible. (Taffer, Button, Dirst, Deon, & Igfig)

Your game might be more fun to play:
• You can use chitin to create bone armor and crafts. (Taffer)
• Your dwarves can brew oats into beer. (Button)
• Your dwarves can empty buckets of water. (Button)
• Furry creatures yield fur, not leather. (Taffer)
• Carve bone arrows and bolts in adventure mode. (Deon)
• You can carve more obsidian weapons. (Sver)
• Wooden maces and hammers can be crafted for training. (Sver & Warlord255)
• Feather tree eggs are edible. (Button)
• Most creatures make sounds. (Warlord255)
• More creatures will steal food, items, and alcohol. Beware monkeys. (Warlord255)
• Animal people have skills and talents that suit them. (Warlord255 & Taffer)
• Animal people have mannerisms. (Warlord255)
• Cat people clean themselves. (Warlord255)
• Some animal people have grasping tails. (Warlord255)
• Humanoids age if they didn't already.  (Taffer & Anonymous)
• Apart from golems, all humanoids now have a sex and reproduce. (Taffer)
• More creatures are geldable. (Taffer)
• Butchered megabeasts made of stone, metal, and wood yield that material. (Button & Igfig)
• Some of the grass in good-aligned biomes will heal grazers. (Warlord255)

Combat is a little better:
• Bodies aren't quite as fragile. Most organic tissue is tougher, for example, and ribs protect more. Most tissues heal now. Relevant bugs are fixed. (Sver, Grimlocke, Taffer, & Button)
• On the other hand, internal organs and eyeballs bleed more. (Sver, Grimlocke, & Taffer)
• Facial features are better positioned and can't be targeted or severed. Eyes are above noses and noses are above mouths, for example. (Sver & Taffer)
• Shoulders and hips now separate limbs from the body by one extra step. I adjusted armor and clothing to compensate. Necks and tails are now protected by default. (Taffer & Grimlocke)
• UBSTEP caps at 3 to prevent body armor from protecting toes due to a bug. (Taffer)
• Weapons are better differentiated from each other, and you can half-sword longswords. Whips aren't overpowered. (Jazzpirat!)
• Bird people have a combined talon scratch and kick attack. (Button)
• Many creatures with horns now head butt or gore with them. (Button)
• Compound eyes have a wider field of view. (Button)
• Giant predators eat dwarves, and many ambush prey. (Button)
• More spiders can trap with their webs. This includes some spider people. (Button)
• Giant insects bite. (Button)
• Plump helmet and sponge people now have knees and elbows. (Taffer)

Bugs have been squished:
• Animal training is less bug-free and more enjoyable. Giant creatures are always tameable, giant insects live long enough to tame, more creatures are mounts, and more. (Button, Igfig, & Taffer)
• Animal people and giant variations have questionable tokens removed.  For example, animal people with legs can always jump. They don't meander or lay eggs, which fixes several bugs. (Button)
• Animal people become adults at age 12 and live for 60-80 years total. (Button & LargeSnail)
• Animal people and giant animals that spawn in pools spawn in lakes instead. (Button)
• Mussels and oysters provide pearls, like they're supposed to. (Button)
• Anacondas and hungry heads are too small to eat dwarves. (Button)
• A few creatures had teeth but didn't bite with them. (Button)
• Snail people and cave fish people are legless. (Button)
• Animal people don't need to eat a specific food. (Button)
• Toads, lice, and frogs are carnivores. (Button)
• Many flying vermin hunters now dive hunt. (Button)
• More creatures eat vermin. (Warlord255)
• Some creatures shouldn't be considered benign. (Button)
• Guineafowl appear in savanna, shrubland, desert, and grassland. (Button)

I even have some "performance" improvements:
• Most organic materials rot. (Button, & Taffer)
• Unnatural fire sputters out on its own. (Sver)
• Useless fruit seeds don't exist. (Doom Onion, TheBeardyMan, & Wannabehero)
• Small creatures won't yield leather or usable chitin. Some large creatures don't either, such as blizzard men and grimelings. (Taffer)

There's plenty more that you probably wouldn't have noticed:
• Color schemes with a blue-tinted green won't have blue vomit. (Taffer)
• Mermaids can breathe air now. (Warlord255)
• Several creatures had their products listed several times. (Button)
• Magma crabs have crab bodies. (Button)
• Shoes, boots, and sandals can't be layered. (Sver)

Some notes on the comments:
Every change that Revised makes to the raws is commented. Curly braces {} were used because they only appear once in the vanilla raws. This way you can quickly find every change Revised makes just by searching for curly braces.

The original contents of the token are listed beside it.

Code: [Select]

[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:CHITIN:CHITIN_NOYIELD_TEMPLATE]{:CHITIN_TEMPLATE}

{+} simply means that the token has been added.

Code: [Select]

[SKILL_LEARN_RATE:GRASP_STRIKE:150]{+}
[SKILL_LEARN_RATE:BITE:150]{+}

Sometimes I've felt it necessary to explain things.

Code: [Select]

[APPLY_CREATURE_VARIATION:RENAME_LEATHER_TO:FUR]{+  Revision: the leather is still furry after tanning.}
[CHILD:12]{:1  Revision: 1 is too young.}

Sometimes things are just 'commented out'.

Code: [Select]

[MEANDERER][NATURAL]{BENIGN}

I haven't added '{+}' to every line in cases where it seems obvious an entire section has been added.

Code: [Select]

[BODY:PEARL]{+  Revision: added pearls to fix bug 4108.}
[BP:PEARL:pearl:STP][CONTYPE:UPPERBODY][SMALL][INTERNAL][CATEGORY:PEARL]
[DEFAULT_RELSIZE:20]
[VERMIN_BUTCHER_ITEM]

There's a few edge cases where things are a little different, but this should get you 90% of the way there.

Editor's NoteI came out of “retirement” long enough to clarify that no permission is needed from me to use my work. If I wanted creative control over something I'd create my own game, not hitch a ride on someone else's.

[Taffer]

Revised renames leather from furry critters to 'fur', as in 'tiger fur left glove'. It makes sense for dwarves to dress in furs but I didn't want to add a bunch of new clothing types or new material. This seemed like an elegant solution.

Revised also renames leather from humanoids to 'hide', as in 'human hide left glove'. I know this isn't accurate but (thankfully) human leather isn't common enough in the real world to have a special word for it. I wanted a way of conveying that humanoid leather is a little creepy and thought it would be some fun flavor.

I used to do the same for leather from birds, as in 'giant cardinal feather left glove'. I had World of Warcraft in mind and thought dwarves running amok in feathery clothing was a fun image. Somebody said they didn't like it so it was removed, but I still kind of miss the feature. It's also rare, there aren't a whole lot of birds in the game that drop leather in Revised.

[WolfRaider]

Sounds interesting, but .zip file only contains readme file.

[Taffer]

Sounds interesting, but .zip file only contains readme file.

Oops! That's fixed now. Thank you!

[Zerim]

• nail scratch attacks have been removed entirely. Combatants without talons or claws scratching each other to death is silly. (Grimlocke)
 • bite attacks have been removed from most humanoids, with the exception of bird people, cat people, canine people, and a few bug people. Biting your opponent as a humanoid is silly. (Taffer)

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's not silly, it's a desperate combat situation. Wrestling, being cornered, arms/legs are injured, they have more use than someone faffing around biting people.

[Taffer]

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's not silly, it's a desperate combat situation. Wrestling, being cornered, arms/legs are injured, they have more use than someone faffing around biting people.

I know that it's probably one of the more controversial elements to my mod, but hear me out. They don't use those attacks only in desperate combat situations.

Nail scratches don't make sense to me: if you can scratch them you can also gouge or hit them. Almost by definition, if a creature has nails long enough to do much damage, we usually call it a claw or a talon. I can see somebody with long nails scratching an opponent in a desperate situation, but to be blunt I don't think the combat system "uses this attack responsibly". I'd rather have a slightly less realistic combat system that's better balanced and makes sense more often.

Humanoids will also bite even in situations when they shouldn't, and it can be absurdly powerful: as Grimlock reports here, bite attacks can sometimes just ignore armour. In the Dwarfmoot video, Tarn talks about one of his favourite bugs being a Hammerer with two broken arms that decided to bite his own arm off and carried it around in his mouth for months. That's just absurd: no dwarf should have a bite strong enough to bite a limb clean off, or have a jaw powerful enough to carry something heavy for months without tiring. This entire side of combat has always been a little silly, and personally I'd rather just remove it until Today fixes it.

This is a combat system that models noses, eyelids, and eyeballs, but then doesn't have helmets capable of protecting them. I'm just trying to make things as realistic as I can get away with, without adding new weapons or features. I originally wanted to remove bite attacks from the game, but I erred on the side of caution and only removed them from most humanoids. Many giant creatures actually have bite attacks added.

Thank you kindly for the feedback!

[Taffer]

After some git confusion, I've released version 1.1. Putnam's Microreduce has been integrated: it does a great job at easing some of the more annoying micro that can happen in Fortress mode. On second thought, I also removed the Fantastic module (secrets and curses, materials plus) for ease of maintenance. I decided that it didn't have much to do with the rest of the mod and that it wasn't worth maintaining separately from Putnam. This is still a great mod, so go try it! My 1.0.3 posted release is 1.1 with the Fantastic module intact, so if you appreciate the description updates and little fixes I made then you can still download it.

I also removed these minor fixes, reverting things to vanilla.

 • wooden blocks are now called planks. (Modest Mod) 
 • moon snails can now also be found in tropical biomes. (Modest Mod)
 • rabbits don't hibernate in the winter. (Modest Mod) 
 • swan, duck, and goose bites are no longer edged. (Modest Mod) 

Wooden blocks were still referred to as blocks by the workshop even before this change, and renaming them could be confusing. (It asks for a block but I only have these planks, do they count?) The moon snail and rabbit bugs might as well just be creative interpretation on Toady's part and are of little consequence. The swan, duck, and goose non-edged bites also didn't seem worth keeping, and certainly weren't mentioned in the bug tracker.

There are a few more minor fixes I'm on the fence about, but at least leopard gecko teeth and bark scorpion mouths also apply to animal people and giant variations.

If you're upset by these reverts, please let me know.
If you dislike any of the fixes that remain, please let me know.
If you have any feedback, please let me know.

[burrito25man]

Taffer you are a gentleman and a scholar. This is right along the lines of what I do myself, many thanks! 

[Taffer]

Taffer you are a gentleman and a scholar. This is right along the lines of what I do myself, many thanks! 

Thank you kindly, and you're welcome. If you have any comments or criticism, please let me know. I've had no input on this yet.

I'm hoping to put even more polish into this mod (and my tileset pack) in the next while. I'm finishing my rewritten creature descriptions (excruciatingly slow at times, there's just so many of them), and I'm already sitting on a new version. Just waiting for permission from a mod author before posting it.

[Taffer]

Another release (1.2), this time to bring Coherent Weapons into the flock. I stupidly waited a while for permission from Jazzpirat!, completely failing to notice that permission was already given in the last sentence of the post. Thank you, Jazzpirat!

I'm slightly hesitant about this release: I'm worried that I diverged too much from vanilla with the changes to elven weapons. I'm happy to revert things if people request it. I don't mind straying some from the game's lore, but I don't intend to stray far. I consider rebalancing to be an important part of the mod though, and I've considered elves to be weak in the past. This also gives them a neat flavour, in my opinion. Let me know if you disagree.

Also, notably, bone arrows and bone bolts can now be crafted in Adventure mode. I'm not going to add more Adventure mode interactions unless they're requested, but ammunition really can be scarce at times in adventure mode.

I might have missed something obvious during testing of course, so speak up if I'm wrong about something.

Major Combat Improvements
 • elves now siege and wield better—and more primitive—weapons such as clubs, specialized spears, and atlatls. (Coherent Weapons) 

Minor Combat Improvements
 • long swords have an increased minimum size requirement for one-handed use, a greater contact area when slashing, and also have a new half-sword attack. (Coherent Weapons) 
 • scimitars are larger, and slashing with them is more forceful and has a greater contact area. (Coherent Weapons) 
 • short swords and spears have smaller contact areas. Short swords penetrate better. (Coherent Weapons) 
 • whips have been weakened by increasing their contact area and need more material to be created. (Coherent Weapons) 

Major Bugfixes & Improvements
 • bone arrows and bone bolts can now be carved in adventure mode. (Wanderer) 

[Taffer]

Another update. I rewrote many of the comments. Every comment prefix has been changed from "Revised" to "Revision".

The following fixes have been reverted. I want the included fixes to improve gameplay, not simply make things "more realistic". Most weren't documented in the description.

  • leopard geckos no longer have teeth, just like vanilla.
  • sheep are back to having horn gore attacks, rather than new head butt attacks.
  • whether flies are water vermin or not is of little consequence, so they now spawn in pools again.
  • hippos now gore again, not bite.
  • giant tortoise bites are no longer edged, just like vanilla.
  • magma crabs are no longer trainable, just like vanilla. (How would they survive away from magma?)
  • purring maggots products aren't available for embark anymore, just like vanilla. As mentioned in the modest thread, this was a deliberate change by Toady.
  • ostriches, cassowaries, grey parrots, and emus no longer have talons, just like vanilla.
  • if it's benign in vanilla, it's now still benign in Revised. If it's not benign in vanilla, it's not benign in Revised. I'd rather defer to Toady than realism here.

A few changes were made for consistency.

  • I'd forgotten some of Wanderer's NOFEAR and DISCIPLINE changes, so I've remedied that.
  • goblins can no longer bite, just like most humanoids in Revised.

There's more that I wanted to do, and more that I wanted to revert. I decided I was being too aggressive, however, so this release is significantly scaled back from the original release. None of this made it in, but it's still being considered:

  • I integrated, tested, and improved Wanderer's tiered and standardized leather and standardized wool. Reverting it again was painful.
  • the domestication changes were almost all reverted, but I decided to keep them in. They do improve gameplay.

Please consider letting me know why you're using⸺or not using⸺Revised, and how you want me to proceed. I'm trying to balance contradictory goals of "balance" and "minimalism", and I'm not sure how far to go in either direction.

[Taffer]

In the off-chance somebody's paying attention, what do people think about more generic animal names? Deon's "Essential DF" did something similar. I'm not interested in standardizing materials, but simplifying some of the names would make many leather products less ridiculous sounding. There's no reason why somebody in-universe would name storks "white storks", rather than just "storks", given that there's only one kind of them.

For example:
  • red-winged blackbirds would become blackbirds
  • white storks would become storks
  • grey parrots would become parrots (or at least gray parrots)
  • brown recluse spiders become recluse spiders
  • monarch butterflies become butterflies
  • peach-faced lovebirds become lovebirds (masked lovebirds remain masked lovebirds)

In other news, I'm still working on the creature descriptions. Yes, it's taking me many months. No ETA yet, but the end is in sight if I continue working on it well.

[Grimlocke]

Heh, it seems your running into some of the problems I ran into with my own mod, in that adjusting the game's balance very quickly causes a sprawl of modifications all throughout the vanilla raw files.

One way of balancing this out is splitting the mod into modules, preferably at points where it won't be too much work to keep them separate.

As for reduced animal names, it might be a nice lighter weight alternative to material standardization mods (for the purpose of less silly names). I would probably use it, but it will be quite a lot of different vanilla file edits so compatibility could end up being a hassle. A middle route would be to leave the creature names, and only rename the leather material adjective. For instance by changing 'white-faced gibbon leather' to just 'gibbon leather'. By only changing the adjective, it should still show up as 'white faced gibbon leather' in stocks or when its a tanned hide item. This approach would save you from having to decide which gibbon is going to be 'generic gibbon'.

Fake edit: Changing just the creature adjective name might have the same effect and extend to meat, bone, misc items as well. (so [NAME:white-browed gibbon:white-browed gibbons:gibbon])

Actual edit: Changing the creature name adjective does not work

None of that will make things like chicken leather cloaks any less silly, but it would be one step forward.

[NedeN]

I'm not sure if you're aware, or maybe it is just me, but I can't seem to target an individual for conversation [k]. So went to vanilla DF to double check and it works fine. All I get in this mod is the option to "begin performance", "shout out to everybody", and the deity option.

[Taffer]

I'm not sure if you're aware, or maybe it is just me, but I can't seem to target an individual for conversation [k]. So went to vanilla DF to double check and it works fine. All I get in this mod is the option to "begin performance", "shout out to everybody", and the deity option.

It's just you. I can target people for conversation with [k]. I just tested an elf, a goblin, and a dwarf: I only lack those options when mousing over things I can't speak with. Are you using 0.43.05? Are you using any other mods?

Thank you kindly for commenting!