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[oldmansutton]

So back in .40.01, world activation was realized, including site founding; a world that changes beyond your own borders while you play.  I'm currently playing a very young world in .43.03 (currently year 8, embarked at year 5), and I'm wondering if anybody has any data on how frequently new sites are formed?  So far, "the world is the same as ever", which is nice from the standpoint of building my walls and towers to awe-inspiring proportions, and getting my military effectively trained, but I know this calm won't last. 

I've always played older worlds, where a lot of the sprawl has already happened to a greater degree.  It being a very young world, I know there is going to be some time that has to go by while everybody is still going forth and multiplying, but I'm curious how long this would take while involved in a fortress as opposed to how long it takes during world-gen.  I'm especially curious how fast civs like goblins tend to spread.  Has anybody done any !!science!! on this?

[Sethatos]

In my world the local goblin civ makes a new site every 5 to 10 years. The humans and elves however haven't made any new ones and the diplomats only news seems to be former leaders dying off and being replaced.

[Lozzymandias]

For all the hype i've not seen much of the benefits of world activation. After the first glut of information from my outpost liason I only every get news of the world being ever same, even after wave after wave of sieges, the armies on the march of which i would have thought would be a topic the liason might consider pertinent but I aint a man to tell a dwarf his job.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Needs Science, but casual observation suggests a lot more sites are built when there aren't many sites in the world. So I guess the population limits and such eventually slow down site founding for most races and perhaps there's a cap based on population or space available or something.

Sites continue to be reclaimed fairly often.

Use Legends to check this. 'The world is the same as ever' is a pointless way to judge if site founding is happening. Dorf diplomat only reports what dorf diplomat knows (which is very little, generally).

Obviously you're going to see very little of the world if you insist on playing a single fortress in a corner of the world without ever exploring the rest of the world.

"Hype" (unless you're listening to uniformed liars) is the potential for amazing developments over the next 20-30 years of development for the simulation of DF worlds in general. Fortress mode is a tiny part of that.

[Max™]

In some of my older adventurer worlds, especially ones where I spent a lot of time building campsites, I've had cases where my camp listing(s) required a page-up to reach from the bottom of the sites listing in legends mode after a year or so.

[Lozzymandias]

"Hype" (unless you're listening to uniformed liars) is the potential for amazing developments over the next 20-30 years of development for the simulation of DF worlds in general. Fortress mode is a tiny part of that.

What do you mean by that? is the bulk of world activation not supposed to be pertinent to the ongoing developments in the world during fortress mode (as well as adventurer mode), in which case its p darn important for fortress mode. I feel like I don't think we're talking about the same thing...

[mikekchar]

Although I don't have any very long lived fortresses (usually 5-10 years is the point at which I get bored), I think the observation being made is that world activation doesn't have too much impact on a single fortress currently.  The main thing is that there is now some logic behind what attacks you.  However, if you only ever play a single fortress in the world, never go into adventure mode and never look at legends mode... well, this logic is not very useful (or even desired for a lot of players).

World activation currently gives you the ability to interact with an ongoing world, but you need to break out of a single fortress to do that.  You can retire your fortress and adventure.  This allows you to set goals that are relevant to your fortress, rather than follow some random quests that never really worked right in the first place.  You can also retire your fortress and build other fortresses.  To be honest, this mechanism doesn't seem to be particularly useful at the moment since what generally happens is that all of the dwarfs from your previous fortress immigrate to your new fortress.  Finally, you can check in legends mode to see what is going on in the world.

If you look at the dev log, you will notice that in the *very next version* we will be able to send squads out who will interact with the world and we will see reports of what they did.  This will go a *long* way toward integrating fortress mode into the benefits of world activation.  However, there is still a long way to go.

To sum up, for some playing styles the current world activation doesn't do much and can even be seen as a step backwards.  However it enables other playing styles which were useless before.  In the next version it will bring more benefits to most players and we can look forward to it bringing many more benefits as time goes on.  For players like me, I would have lost interest in the game a *long* time ago if it hadn't have happened.  I do also sympathise with long time players for whom the changes have had less impact, though.

[oldmansutton]

Hmmm, not potentially what I was hoping for.  I mean, I've been playing since about halfway through the v.31 releases, so I've got to see the game grow and evolve, and I've loved every minute of it, and it's always been enough changed between releases to keep me interested.  This is the one game I will keep coming back to time and time again.  My idea on my current world ran something like this:

Start 5 years in on a new world, at the dawn of history
Run large generational fort for 200-300 years, focus on becoming the home of learning for the world (like, seriously, embarked with astronomy, logic, and mathemetics experts to perform as scholars and pump out books)
After this time has elapsed, THEN look back through legends to see how far and wide knowledge has spread over the centuries

Of course, this hopefully means that more sites are being founded in the centuries, as the rest of the world continues to grow.  Otherwise, it's going to be a very unsettled world for the next..... 96-196 years.

I'm currently in contact with the elves, humans, and mountainhome dwarves, have run across several kobold thieves that can't even get close to my fortress without being spotted, and have yet to encounter any goblins (not that worried when I eventually do).  I believe all 4 races were in play on my embark.  At year 8, I'm expecting the world to be the same from the news delivered by the humans and dwarves.  Was just curious if anybody else who has played this sort of idea has found that there is any significant founding of new sites as the decades crawl by, as opposed to it sites slowly being destroyed only.  It would be nice to see towers rise and fall, hamlets growing up, hillocks being established, etc, etc over time, as it will make the eventual exporting of knowledge that much more interesting to track.

I have often in the past played multiple shorter lived forts in an already established word, taking time between them to run around as some lone adventurer, and explore the history of the world through legends, and I can't wait for the new version, to better effect the world around me, but until that happens, I'm trying to push the limits of effecting the world how I can for now, and I thought this might be a fun way to do it (through literature and trade).  Just will be kind of ho-hum if the world isn't actually growing.

Edit:  I suppose I can always dfhack into legends while the fort runs to !!science!! for myself how things work, just hoped to save time if anybody else had already done it before.

[therahedwig]

The problem with literature is that the resources of sites are not affected yet by trade. So if you trade away 15 -figurines-, they will never show up anywhere. Books, artifacts and masterworks are tracked by the game, so if you trade away those they'll show up somewhere at some point, but you might need to make a couple of forts to get there.

Poetry and and dance are in a similar position, so maybe it might be an idea to retire, and then start a dwarf in your own fort and compose poetry like there's no tomorrow? (and annoy all the tavern people with said poetry)

[azrael4h]

I have seen some changes actually. During the first two years of my last fort, I noted that the human civilization that I embarked next to was destroyed. After the reclaim, the elves reclaimed a half dozen sites over the next 15 years, built several new ones, and lost several more. My civ was essentially dead; my fort was actually the only site left, though it did have a queen and king consort despite the last site being destroyed some 70 years prior to me starting. I think it's the first time I've seen a nomad court for the dwarves. I built my fort up to being the capitol, then retired, working on other forts for the last 5 years. I intend to return after a century or so, to see how things are going. 

[oldmansutton]

Well, I've found some answers, and they're ever so pleasing!

I went into DFHack while playing last night, and used open-legends to get into legends without having to retire/abandon my fort.  I then did an exportlegends and loaded this all up into Legends Viewer (such a great tool!)  So without any post-retire processing to catch up world history, just going on world activation during regular single fortress gameplay, I've found there have been !!80!! new site events, split up between reclamations, new establishments, and nomadic wanderers.  Also it looks like there is one group currently migrating, hopefully not to my fortress, which is sitting at somewhere in the area of 130-140 citizens currently. 

So the good news, just with the world activation alone while playing fortress mode, there are on average about 26 new sites a year in my 128x128 island continent world. 

[n4m3l3ss]

I have seen some changes actually. During the first two years of my last fort, I noted that the human civilization that I embarked next to was destroyed. After the reclaim, the elves reclaimed a half dozen sites over the next 15 years, built several new ones, and lost several more. My civ was essentially dead; my fort was actually the only site left, though it did have a queen and king consort despite the last site being destroyed some 70 years prior to me starting. I think it's the first time I've seen a nomad court for the dwarves. I built my fort up to being the capitol, then retired, working on other forts for the last 5 years. I intend to return after a century or so, to see how things are going.

Does this mean that new trade partners can appear (and old ones disappear) becaues sites get founded, conquered or razed in the world around you? I mean, during one fortress mode game.

[PatrikLundell]

No. The old trading partners will continue to send caravans even if they do no longer have any sites. However, it seems the number of wagons/animals of burden brought is limited by civ prosperity, so these "struggling civ" caravans tend to be on the small side.
Goblins can send sieges from sites they do no longer own (and in at least one case it was owned by another goblin civ when a siege was sent). Thus, there are a number of things missing from an activated world.
I don't know if a resumed fortress retains the old defunct trading partners or get new ones, though.
Also, the new expedition mechanics introduced in the next release can make additional civs "near". It's known these civs can send sieges at you, but not whether they can also send caravans.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Well, I've found some answers, and they're ever so pleasing!

I went into DFHack while playing last night, and used open-legends to get into legends without having to retire/abandon my fort.  I then did an exportlegends and loaded this all up into Legends Viewer (such a great tool!)  So without any post-retire processing to catch up world history, just going on world activation during regular single fortress gameplay, I've found there have been !!80!! new site events, split up between reclamations, new establishments, and nomadic wanderers.  Also it looks like there is one group currently migrating, hopefully not to my fortress, which is sitting at somewhere in the area of 130-140 citizens currently. 

So the good news, just with the world activation alone while playing fortress mode, there are on average about 26 new sites a year in my 128x128 island continent world.

Df is so tiny you can also just make a copy of the whole thing to retire and check Legends if you don't use dfhack.
Hopefully the openlegends bug that collapses large parts of the world and unleashes hell by mistake is fixed. I guess you'll find out soon enough...

[mikekchar]

Yeah, I wanted to say the same thing.  If you go in your dwarf fortress directory, there is a "data" directory there. And in that there is a "save" directory.  This holds all of your saves.  Each region (i.e. world) is in a separate directory.  You can just copy that whole directory to something with another name.  Then when you start up dwarf fortress, you will see that world in the "continue playing" section.  Load it up, retire the fortress and then run legends mode.

I usually do this from time to time so that I can check on legends during the game.  I really hope there will be a more formal method of doing this -- and maybe a way to filter things you don't want to see (and get spoiled by) in the future.

Actually, I should put this in the suggestions thread, but I was thinking that since books are often written about towns, it would be really cool if it showed you what was in legends mode for that town when you read the book.  Even cooler would be to show you sections of the historical map.  If only there was more than one Toady ;-)