So, after a long while of not really doing much DF stuff, I decided to start tackling some ideas for my
Adventurecraft mod.
General summary, I started off deciding that I might as well revive the idea of crude gunpowder weapons I tinkered with for an unreleased mode, adding full support for producing it in fortress mode too.
Next came a host of misc fixes, along with the realization that the backgrounds you can select not only have a practical use (free skills whooo) but what permitted jobs the entity has affect what backgrounds can be picked. So I added a bunch more after testing which ones actually have a use. At the same time I did some rebalancing for magic availability, letting curses dole out the nastier varieties with some side effects, changing which spells are given by which beasts, and a few related tweaks. Also notable was fixing it so trolls, beak dogs, and the like can be more readily picked up as pets by the goblins in worldgen, which is fun given the pet options adventurers have now.
The next update was dominated by a silly thought that came to mind: could I rig it so that human and other civilized NPCs will treat kobold adventurers as hostile as you'd expect them to, given how kobold NPCs would consistently behave towards human or other non-cave-dwelling adventurers? Rumrusher proved to be a MASSIVE help with this, but sadly every method we discovered to try this came with downsides of some sort. So the third notable update as of late came with a change that made kobolds and their pets semi-undead to exploit some hostility behavior, but this was soon removed since I discovered later than it prevents retiring. I went with the idea of making special variant pets for kobolds so that they'd not only behave properly towards their masters, but also so they wouldn't be slaughtered by the traps infesting kobold caves. Even after undoing the hostility feature, I retained that simply so it still makes their pets TRAPAVOID.
Then finally, today's update put a lot of focus on tissue and butchery stuff (plus the second half of my efforts to tinker with kobolds). A fair few tiny critters got size buffs until they were juuust large enough to be butcherable, with obligatory fixes to their giant variants. But on top of that, came sinew and feather stuff. I finally decided to make sinew a proper tissue that can be obtained from butchery, and set it to be used for the catgut thread recipe instead of guts, allowing guts to count as meat again. And as for feathers, lot of tweaks went into ensuring all birds you can butcher will give feathers, whereas in vanilla nothing smaller than an ostrich can do so. For now it's only useful in a decoration reaction since there's not much to do with them, as I'm not sure yet whether I'd want to make arrows and bolts require explicit fletching or not. That might be too much detail for my taste.
Summary of last major changelogs since I resumed tinkering with it:
* Added primitive gunpowder weapons, mainly fire lances and hand cannons. These require explicit assembly in fort mode, and can be made in adventure mode too.
* Relevant reactions for gunpowder production added to fortress mode. You can grind up saltpeter and brimstone directly, then use them together with charcoal or refined coal to make gunpowder, all using milling at a quern or millstone.
* Alternative reactions for producing sulfur at a kiln, using galena or pyrite as sulfide minerals.
* Alternative reaction for producing saltpeter at a farmer's workshop, using any plant you can turn into flour or thread, plus potash. This method is based off the method of making niter beds.
* Added a reaction for producing potash from sylvite, adding another option for the potash needed for the niter bed reaction.
* Added fort-mode recipes for producing fire lances and hand cannons, as well as powder and shot, both metal and stone.
* Added gun barrels to dwarven tool selection so they can produce and embark with them. The weapons and ammo will still need to be assembled on-site, so they will likely not count as native weapons.
* Added fire lances, shot, and gun barrels to the human and goblin civs.
* Added adventure mode reactions for making charcoal and ash from logs.
* Changed adventure mode smithing to use charcoal instead of logs.
* Saltpeter production and gunpowder for adventure mode. Recipe is a bit simplified since there's basically no viable option for sulfur innawoods.
* Added relevant reactions to make gun barrels, fire lances, hand cannons, and ammo in adventure mode.
* Buffed shear value of lead a bit, to perform closer to bismuth when used for gunpowder weapons.
* Misc fix to tool use for baking bread.
* Allowed satyrs, foul blendecs, and harpies to potentially join civs in worldgen.
* Added reactions for making wooden mauls using a log, as well as options for bone/shell and skull mauls involving the same process plus material for making the face of the mallet. Mostly just as a way for megabeast-tier materials to have some use to hammer specialists.
* Added methods to obtain a few of the available spells via major curses. Be warned, gaining a spell via curse comes with some bonus side effects since being given apocalyptically evil magic is not normally a downside.
* Overhauled magic from megabeast hearts to rebalance how common the primary ones are. In addition, each one has a 25% chance of giving a second magic essence when crafted. It also makes certain forms of magic, the ones that reasonably count as elemental/nature magic, twice as available.
* Changed animal magic from the double-edged sword of transforming into a wild animal into a commune with animals spell. This allows you to talk with and recruit most mundane wildlife.
* Added some extra permitted jobs to civs because it lets you start as a monk, thief, scholar etc in adventure mode. Mostly just flavor, but all the options I went with enabling all come with bonus skills of some sort.
* Gave dwarves access to gambesons because duh.
* Fixed goblins lacking access to some of their evil pets like trolls, tweaked a couple other evil critters to be exotic pets so goblins might end up taming them, and made sure trolls have a pet value so goblin-native adventurers can't start with an army of them.
* Disallowed Resurfaced from migrating to kobold caves. While it was a logical idea, it opened up a method for humans and other non-utterance creatures to migrate to kobold civs, which wasn't intended.
* Removed religion from Resurfaced since it wasn't really helping them access spells.
* Set it so that the blood of Pestilence victims can also spread the effect.
* Set it so people with mummy curses aren't barred from gaining spells via interaction.
* Allowed sickle weasels to drain blood with their claw attacks too, tweaked the amounts of blood sucked by their bites as well as by sanguine dragon bites.
* Made Infernal Pact have some more fleshed out effects on the personality of the caster, also halved the chance of losing your voice to it.
* Shuffled around megabeast and interaction spheres a bit, so that things line up and megabasts can dole out their retweaked set of secrets in worldgen.
* Couple minor typo fixes.
* Removed the natural discipline granted to entire species since it's no longer strictly essential these days.
* Overhauled how biological megabeasts grow up, net result is dragons reach full size faster, all other flesh megabeasts grow up slower. Also entailed tweaking the max size of eternal things and treants, and letting the latter grow up over time too since it's technically biological.
* Reworked kobolds and their pets to ensure kobolds are mutually hostile with other races, while allowing for a pet selection that won't attack them.
* Added feywood catalysts for elves to produce, which adventurers of any sort can use to make feywood logs if they obtain one.
* Gave Resurfaced a couple other misc flavor additions to add variety to their loot.
* Removed [ITEMS_HARD] from the hair templates, fixing a vanilla bug where tools could be made out of wool.
* For good measure, added specific-material tokens to most tools in place of [HARD_MAT].
* Added bit more variety to the stuff Resurfaced can have, including river products, ocean products, and a couple more tools.
* Removed [MINING_UNDERWORLD_DISASTERS] from elves because they're the only civ to have no real capacity for striking the earth whatsoever.
* Did however make more widespread use of [STRANGE_MOODS] to create more interesting items and intrigue during worldgen. Elves, humans, and the Resurfaced races can now make artifacts in worldgen, goblins and kobolds are excluded and thus have to work for (read: steal) their artifacts.
* Re-added a bit of natural discipline skill to the main races because yeah, they still overreact to some things.
* Removed the old workaround of fake oak intended to force outsiders to not have metal weapons. Now if you want to have the actual challenge of starting from scratch, you can simply choose to not start with the items it offers you.
And current update I just now finished, updating 1.98:
* Ported over minor raw changes in 47.05 version and confirmed it works with said version.
* Undid the idea of enforced hostility for kobold adventurers for now, because the previous version I tried prevented retiring and every alternative I tested had some form of problem. I decided to retain the "kobolds get special trapavoid versions of their normal pets" idea though, since that's just pure QoL for kobold adventurers.
* Implemented sinew as a proper tissue that'll be dropped by most creatures when butchered, replacing the previous use of gut cordage.
* This renders prepared intestines edible again.
* Heavily overhauled tiny non-vermin critters to ensure basically any animal in the wild will hit the minimum size for butchery.
* Set it so that birds grow enough feather tissue for it to drop on butchery more reliably.
* Corrected the size adjustment for giant variants of rebalanced animals so they'll be the same size.
* Fixed hand cannon recipe making fire lances.
* Fixed wrong category for bone and skull mauls.
* Gave fire lances crossbow skill as NPCs were only spawning them for melee with no ammo.
* Made "marksman" more consistently used for profession names, more fitting with gunnery anyway.
* Made relative sizes of joints more consistent relative to parent limbs.
* Fixed omnidisciplinary necromages via allowing mages to be content with the secret they obtain.
* Rebalanced Infernal Pact further. Odds of permanently going mute are now only 1%, but their summons have a 25% chance of being rogue. They won't be hostile to the caster, but they'll bugger off and do their own thing rather than counting as a pet.
* Reworked the raw-defined HFS a bit so they can properly conquer sites if they get loose.