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Author Topic: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?  (Read 1990 times)

Crab

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Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« on: January 31, 2017, 12:52:45 pm »

I mean, as the title says. I've generated 22 worlds with Terrifying Glaciers and tested them to see what sort of evil weather crops up. So far: exactly half had no weather within the first year, 7 had nothing but various varieties of blood rain, and 4 had some sort of goo/murk/filth etc., one of which caused mild nausea if it contaminated water, one which caused mild blistering, and two which didn't appear to do anything other than make dwarves disgusted. It's really frustrating me at this point. Ideally, I'm looking for thrall clouds, but I'd settle for even a moderately challenging evil rain at this point. I don't know what world gen tricks address this problem, or if it even can be addressed - at not a single evil cloud in 22 tries, I'm becoming skeptical they exist on glaciers.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #1 on: January 31, 2017, 03:24:00 pm »

I haven't heard there are any exceptions for particular biomes. As far as I understand, the community hasn't figured out how to deduce what the weather in an evil region will be, unfortunately. Otherwise it would be quicker to gen a world and check the regions. A lot of people want reanimating and/or thralling embarks.
Personally I keep away from reanimation until the unkillable head bug is dealt with.
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gchristopher

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #2 on: January 31, 2017, 04:37:08 pm »

I haven't heard there are any exceptions for particular biomes. As far as I understand, the community hasn't figured out how to deduce what the weather in an evil region will be, unfortunately. Otherwise it would be quicker to gen a world and check the regions. A lot of people want reanimating and/or thralling embarks.
Personally I keep away from reanimation until the unkillable head bug is dealt with.
It's possible to look up evil weather with dfhack now, ever since someone discovered the structure: df.global.world.interaction_instances

That contains an array of biome-to-evil interaction associations. The second field, interaction_id, is the index of the interaction in df.global.world.raws.interactions. (The main entry for a particular set of evil weather/reanimation.) The fourth field, region_index is the index of the region in df.global.world.world_data.region.

Sorry I don't have a canned script, but assuming you know what region you want, you can look up the interaction (evil weather/reanimation) from there.

I haven't attempted to add an interaction to a region that doesn't have one. (Like trying to make a good region rain beer.) But this structure makes it easy to move a desired interaction to your region. I've only tested changing it prior to embark.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2017, 06:24:59 pm by gchristopher »
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #3 on: February 01, 2017, 04:12:17 am »

Thanks gchristopher, that's good to know.
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Crab

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #4 on: February 03, 2017, 02:06:45 pm »

57 (!!!) Terrifying Glaciers later, I have a fantastic candidate - all three caverns are linked by a Deep Pit for extra fun, I'm in range of two towers, at war with the Elves, and there's (finally, praise Armok!) a thralling dust cloud. The only problem... the biome isn't reanimating, so the caverns are pretty damn safe if you expand carefully and seal things off with constructed walls and the like. I don't want to have to go through another 60 odds world to make this the perfect candidate, so I'm really hoping that there's some way of modding the raws in the save file to just turn on local re-animation. Is this possible?
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Rethi-Eli

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #5 on: February 03, 2017, 02:21:14 pm »

Sounds like you're looking for quite the docile embark.
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Crab

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #6 on: February 03, 2017, 02:26:10 pm »

Sounds like you're looking for quite the docile embark.

If there is no struggle there is no !FUN!. Those who profess to favor glory and yet deprecate the thrall are dwarves who want iron without striking the earth; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
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gchristopher

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #7 on: February 03, 2017, 04:12:39 pm »

57 (!!!) Terrifying Glaciers later, I have a fantastic candidate - all three caverns are linked by a Deep Pit for extra fun, I'm in range of two towers, at war with the Elves, and there's (finally, praise Armok!) a thralling dust cloud. The only problem... the biome isn't reanimating, so the caverns are pretty damn safe if you expand carefully and seal things off with constructed walls and the like. I don't want to have to go through another 60 odds world to make this the perfect candidate, so I'm really hoping that there's some way of modding the raws in the save file to just turn on local re-animation. Is this possible?
I'm sorry! That's truly excessive effort. Yes, it's possible to assign any evil weather/reanimation to any evil biome prior to embark using dfhack. If you want, it can be a cloud of Toxic Crabspores that turn everyone into Crabthralls.

I haven't written up a how-to, but if you post the save to dfdd, I can give you the commands to fix the weather. (And if you want, move any other towers in the world close by so you have a better necromancer supply.) Sounds like you've got the rest of the bases covered for a fun embark. (I look for about the same things as you in an embark, apparently.)
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Crab

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #8 on: February 03, 2017, 04:50:17 pm »

57 (!!!) Terrifying Glaciers later, I have a fantastic candidate - all three caverns are linked by a Deep Pit for extra fun, I'm in range of two towers, at war with the Elves, and there's (finally, praise Armok!) a thralling dust cloud. The only problem... the biome isn't reanimating, so the caverns are pretty damn safe if you expand carefully and seal things off with constructed walls and the like. I don't want to have to go through another 60 odds world to make this the perfect candidate, so I'm really hoping that there's some way of modding the raws in the save file to just turn on local re-animation. Is this possible?
I'm sorry! That's truly excessive effort. Yes, it's possible to assign any evil weather/reanimation to any evil biome prior to embark using dfhack. If you want, it can be a cloud of Toxic Crabspores that turn everyone into Crabthralls.

I haven't written up a how-to, but if you post the save to dfdd, I can give you the commands to fix the weather. (And if you want, move any other towers in the world close by so you have a better necromancer supply.) Sounds like you've got the rest of the bases covered for a fun embark. (I look for about the same things as you in an embark, apparently.)

Would you mind posting the how to? I'd like to know how to do this in a more general sense so if ever the mood takes me some months down the road, I can do it myself. Plus I imagine there might be a few spectators to this thread over time who'd fancy knowing too. If I knew how to set regional interactions and move towers prior to embark, I'd be a happy man!
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gchristopher

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #9 on: February 03, 2017, 07:29:43 pm »

Sorry, I've got a LOT of work to do before I have anything close to a embark editing writeup. It's a lot of poorly organized information.

Here's my attempt at a brief description of how to move necromancer towers.

If you want to do it yourself, (even if I or someone else writes a guide), some programming will be involved. If you're comfortable enough with using Lua in DFHack, here's the structures you need to know about:

df.global.world.interaction_instances : Connects regions (df.global.world.world_data.region) to evil interactions (df.global.world.raws.interactions)

df.global.world.world_data.region : You can find your home region here. I usually match on dfhack.TranslateName(df.global.world.world_data.regions.name) == "Wastes of Time" (or whatever your region is named)

df.global.world.raws.interactions : This is where an actual evil weather lives. It'll have a .name field starting with "REGIONAL_" and a number. The number of evil interactions is something you pick at world gen. Each one will have 0-1 evil weather (rain or clouds), and either reanimate, or not. This is also where the material of the evil weather is chosen. (in the .targets structure array). targets
  • .material_str[1] will have the name of the material for the weather. I think it's easiest to pick an interaction that already does what you want (has a thralling cloud + reanimates) and associate that one with your biome by changing interaction_instances, above.


I'm not 100% sure from memory/notes, but I think the materials for evil weather are stored in df.global.world.raws.inorganics. You have to find it by name "Creeping Gunk"/etc, and then in df.global.world.raws.inorganics.str[], you'll find the critical information on whether it's a thralling weather, or just a set of severe status effects.

I know that sounds like a lot, but it's still a thousandth the effort of re-genning dozens of worlds to get the right weather.

If it helps, I don't mind putting together sample Lua for your particular world to show and change these values. It's quick after you've done it a few times. Sorry I don't have it more well-documented than that!

Both of these changes can be done after world-gen, while in embark site selection and are not harmed by moving the site pointer around. Other changes, like elevations rivers and moving specific sub-biomes within an embark screen, will be reset if you move the site pointer on the main world map.
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Nagidal

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Re: Can you get evil clouds in Glaciers?
« Reply #10 on: February 06, 2017, 01:16:23 pm »

I mean, as the title says.

You can download my world, if you want. I have a haunted glacier where a cloud converted a weasel and a reindeer kid into husks (no coating). I uploaded for you a backup of the world before I embarked on the glacier.

I generated it in 43.03. Default worldgen settings, if I remember correctly.
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