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[Taffer]

Finished comparing to the Modest Mod again, now I'm on to vanilla-spice revised. The next release will definitely include a ton of fixes and improvements I'd previously deleted or said no to. I'm trying to be more lenient to improve Revised, so long as the change is easy to grok and unlikely to cause problems. You can see my progress and changes in the github repository.

[Taffer]

I've just added some Comments (some just personal opinion) and my Modders Knowledge to some scenarios. I didn't answer it all, as some of the points are points only a mod's author/visionary (I believe) should be the one to have the say in.

Not sure if Hugo_The_Dwarf will see this but just wanted to add that these comments have been very useful. Thank you again!

[Taffer]

I've mostly finished combing through Vanilla-Spice Revised, which has brought in a ton of nice improvements. Now I'm revisiting the below, because I was feeling kind of guilty about it. I was probably too petty.

I've already reverted elves to vanilla.

I'm putting some thought into elves, but I'm not sure exactly where I'll end up. Despite the many additions in the pending release I'm still very much a minimalist, so I don't want to go crazy. I'm thinking of bringing in flint from Vanilla-Spice Revised (and maybe bog iron) and then maybe they can start using stone weapons, but that kind of goes against my image of them. I might go back a few versions to the aztec-inspired spear throwers and weapons, those were fun. Maybe it was a mistake to get rid of them.

I've already gone through the material template file with a massive banhammer. I quite like Sver's work but there's some pretty significant differences between Revised and DF Combat Reworked already and I don't want to try to support these changes (balance-wise) independently.

The materials file remains tricky. Sver uses really high values in many cases and I worry about breaking combat, and I don't know if I have the energy for extensive testing. Some of it (like the linen buffs) seems to have been balanced specifically for Sver's armor, as well. That being said I agree with the motivation for a lot of it. I'll see where I end up in this file. I'm unlikely to bring it all back in but maybe I can compromise.

The banhammer will fall next on the plant files. I'm a little obsessive about Revised (if it wasn't obvious already) and I'm not confident I can give the plant files the attention they need going forward. Every creator has different interests, and while Button seemed to quite like modding plants I've never had any interest in it. As with the material template file I won't revert everything blindly, just the non-obvious changes.

The banhammer has lifted on the plant files. I was much too harsh on these files and a lot of the changes are a lot more straightforward than I'd thought after some study. Still unsure about the 'seeds come in pods' changes and 'more plants have seeds' changes. I just haven't done much gardening in Dwarf Fortress and it shows whenever I go to touch these files. Still, I do grok most of the other changes so I've brought them back in.

I'm also re-thinking the Coherent Weapons changes I'm currently making to the weapon files.

I'm mid-way through Coherent Weapons and my old weapons changes now. Some of them are pretty straightforward, but there's a few others I'm unsure what the motivation was. For example, spears have a smaller contact area, which helps them penetrate better...but I don't think spears have much problem penetrating already and the DF wiki doesn't indicate spears have any problems. I also made a bunch of changes to bows, crossbows, arrows, and bolts, and I'm not actually sure why (I just propagated the changes blindly, which I'm trying to avoid now).

[Yakefa]

Shouldn't this mod be part of the main game?

[Taffer]

Shouldn't this mod be part of the main game?

Thank you! I actually e-mailed Toady a long time ago offering that, mostly because I spent an obscenely long time improving the creature descriptions and I thought he might want to use them. He said he didn't want any creative contributions from others. (Although now we do have people contributing art to the game, so I guess he had a change of heart about "creative contributions").

[Yakefa]

The guy has been working on his own game for 14 years so I understand his opinion.

The steam version will only affect graphics and UI as far as I know, it doesn't seem to fall into the "creative contribution" category.
Anyway, your mod looks like a great complement to the base game, maybe you should contact peridexis to include it in his pack, looks like a must have since it refines lots of rough edges and adds more layers of depth to some areas of the game.

[Taffer]

God help me, I've also started another editing pass over the creature descriptions. Send help.

[Taffer]

Will be restoring most of the materials changes, with full apologies to Sver. Just a few pages ago Sver already gave me the details I needed.

Material changes, aside from cloth (thread plant, silk, hair), chitin and wood, are all about the force transfer mechanic and work just as well with vanilla weapon velocities.
There are also temperature changes, but those stand on their own: makes it slightly harder to settle freezing/scorching biomes (but also slightly easier to wait out sieges there) and makes creatures catch on fire more realistically (in contrast with how fat is the only thing that burns in vanilla, and fatless creatures become immune to fire). Whether to keep it or not is a matter of taste.

Tissue changes are a different matter. It's probably best not to go as far with pain and bleeding increase on organs as my mod does while keeping vanilla weapons. On the other hand, changes that increase the durability of creatures (such as layer changes in b_detail_plan_default.txt) would work alright.

...

It is possible if you stick to only buffing the shear (edge) values, as all training weapons are blunt. That said, it will affect wooden trap components with edged attacks.

I've yet to test out the elves with "fake stone" weapons, but that is on the list. Might be a more elegant alternative to new wood types.

Thank you! Still a very useful post, months later. I'll go back and re-read the comments and PMs people have made to see what else I'm missing.

[flyteofheart]

Re: above conversation, i would kill to have these changes put into the vanilla game.

Im so addicted to this mod I cant play any fortress without it, which means I essentially cant use other mods that ever touch vanilla files LOL. it would save me a lot of effort if most of this would just be vanilla! This plus your latest tileset is the first thing I look for after an update.

Really though thank you. The descriptions are wonderful, the slight changes to combat are fantastic, the bugfixes are much needed. how can i go back to forts without feather tree eggs after tasting the forbidden fruit?

[GreyGoldFish]

Hey there! This is definitely my favorite mod, ever, I would kill to have it added by Toady, but as a developer myself, I can understand how he doesn't want to stray from his own creative vision of the game.

That said, there are some things that kind of irk me and that I wish that I could turn off, like having hyphenated or words with spaces in names, for example. World names especially end up looking really funky with the expanded dictionary in my opinion, though I agree that it definitely adds more variety than just having "The Windy [Blank]" every time!

All in all, love your mod and I wish you all a lovely day/evening!

[Taffer]

The woolly limbed dwarves from v1.7.0 are returning! I stumbled into this again in my art collection and got inspired. Apparently the original artist took it down, which is a shame because I think it's an awesome interpretation of dwarves. Very non-canon (and therefore controversial), but if I'm honest I've always found dwarves kind of boring and this helps with that.



Not sure at the moment if it'll be an optional extra or not like it was last time. It's such a small change and pretty easy IMO to interpret as just dwarves being really hairy rather than literally the above image, but maybe it's too controversial. Let me know.

Re: above conversation, i would kill to have these changes put into the vanilla game.

Im so addicted to this mod I cant play any fortress without it, which means I essentially cant use other mods that ever touch vanilla files LOL. it would save me a lot of effort if most of this would just be vanilla! This plus your latest tileset is the first thing I look for after an update.

Really though thank you. The descriptions are wonderful, the slight changes to combat are fantastic, the bugfixes are much needed. how can i go back to forts without feather tree eggs after tasting the forbidden fruit?

Thank you so much for the kind words! You can thank the modest mod for the feather tree egg change specifically, I just inherited it.

Hey there! This is definitely my favorite mod, ever, I would kill to have it added by Toady, but as a developer myself, I can understand how he doesn't want to stray from his own creative vision of the game.

That said, there are some things that kind of irk me and that I wish that I could turn off, like having hyphenated or words with spaces in names, for example. World names especially end up looking really funky with the expanded dictionary in my opinion, though I agree that it definitely adds more variety than just having "The Windy [Blank]" every time!

All in all, love your mod and I wish you all a lovely day/evening!

Thank you! I go back and forth on the expanded dictionary myself. It's probably the most controversial part of the mod. I really like the expanded word selection, I really like that lewd words actually exist, but I also agree that it can make things hard to read sometimes. I already spent a few weeks helping GoblinCookie clean up the expanded dictionary. I could give another go, but I've been hesitant to for a few reasons:

• New versions of the expanded dictionary randomly re-generate all of the words, making comparisons between versions impossible. I'd have to re-create any cleanup myself.
• I don't want to do a hard fork and keep it maintained myself because I honestly think GoblinCookie does a better job of it than I could.
• I can't simplify the upstream mod because GoblinCookie (for the most part) likes the word lists as they are, hyphens and occasional obscure words and all. I respect that, just pointing out that I already tried this option.
• I'm not sure myself what all to remove. There's a special word for each animal and animal person, but some of them are long (like peach-faced-lovebird-person). There's all the geology, gem, and stone related words, which are dwarfy but often obscure.
• If I simplify extensively the next Expanded Dictionary update will be painful (for reasons 1 and 2).

I think I like it too much to remove, so maybe I should simplify anyways? I'll think about it. I'm not going to worry about it for now because I already have a lot on my plate for the upcoming release.

[Taffer]

I've finished sorting through Sver's mod for Revised and imported many changes. There's some followup work I have as a result: DF Combat Reworked allows more humanoids to scratch and bite than I do and un-nerfs some of the wilder, stockier humanoids, so now I need to follow through and decide what to do with the remaining humanoids that Sver doesn't touch that Revised does. After that I'm just going to compare to vanilla one last time and start the tedious process of revisiting my documentation.

The editor's pass over the descriptions has been delayed a release both for my sanity and also for the sake of getting something out again for people to play.

I'll be separating the Expanded Dictionary into an optional module. I'm not sure yet if woolly-limbed dwarves will also be an optional module.

[Yakefa]

Your mod makes the latest peridexis installer version crash.
As soon as I removed it, it worked again.
Crashes when embark.

[Taffer]

Your mod makes the latest peridexis installer version crash.
As soon as I removed it, it worked again.
Crashes when embark.

Thanks for the report! Unfortunately I can't provide any support for PeridexisErrant's Starter Pack as I've never downloaded it. I don't notice any crashing issues in vanilla or errors in the error log, so I'm not sure what's going on.

[Taffer]

If it wasn't obvious before I tend to focus on one thing at a time when it comes to my personal time. Sometimes I'm in a DF mood and I work well at it, but then I distract myself and forget all about DF for a time. Replying to one of my threads or PMing me can often help, as it'll warrant a response that might end up sucking me back in.

I want to get the next release out but my to-do list keeps exploding in unfortunate ways. I'm shunting a lot of the flavor-related to-do items for the release after next. There's still some cleanup to do but the hardest remaining problem is below.

Informal poll: I've been spending a fair amount of time on this unarmed attack nerfing nonsense. Comparing to Sver's work brought it up. Want some feedback, if anybody reads these ramblings.

• Fix what I'm already doing. Unfortunately this is a noisy, inconsistent option. Revised v2.3.0 doesn't nerf crundle attacks, for example, and nerfs some animal attacks but not others. I'm not liking this option, it feels like a hack job. Sometimes it means nerfing creatures that are already pathetic. (Poor kobolds. Why do I hurt you?)
• Un-nerf animals and dangerous, rare, or weak humanoids. This option is closest to what Sver's current mod does. I'm not confident I can sort out the inconsistencies though. I'll also need to think about what to nerf and what not to. Thinking is exactly what keeps delaying this release.
• Nerf unarmed attacks for dwarves, humans, and goblins and un-nerf everything else. This fixes the most obvious problems with the attacks but it does mean they'll be weaker than they should be.
• Nuke the whole idea from orbit and chalk this up as a good idea too annoying to perfect. I'm either nerfing every creature or indirectly buffing some of them. The more I untangle this the more of a balancing nightmare it becomes, unless I stop caring (I care). I'll still fix bite and nail scratch attacks, courtesy of Sver.

Untangling my thoughts on this mess has already added many hours of work to this release. If I hear nothing I'll go with option 3 or 4. I like option 4 best: I don't have to think anymore and I'm not monkeying with combat balance more than I already am.