Hillocks have shallow underground farms. Will the changes to soil farming affect crop yields in hillocks? More generally, does the sim now track whether a site has shallow sub farms or deep sub farms, and does crop production for that site correspond accordingly?
upd: upon further inspection the tiles inside the individual hillock structures are actually made of cavern floors... so it looks like they're just deep farming, technically. not shallow farming as implied by location.
Although as you've mentioned in your most recent response, the hill dwarves could have gathered the "improved" soil from the mountainhome. That's my headcanon for now, at least.
How would that work anyway, if you were to add a soil gathering zone? Since soil is a material and is the same regardless of depth, plus cavern floors are currently just rock overlaid with mud. Would the rock/mud gathered from a cavern have a special flag for plot improvement use?
upd2: haven't noticed this before until now, but i've dug out an indoor surface soil layer in fort mode, and the resulting floor tiles are labeled as cavern floor. Wondering if this was also changed as part of the farming overhaul. "Cavern Floor" just indicates that the tile attribute is subterranean, as far as i can tell (it's not displayed if vegetation is growing on it). But still wondering if the changes you've made affect this label since players could read "Cavern Floor" and confuse shallow soil for the cavern surface. I'm also not sure anymore if this means the hillock farm plots are counted as cavern/deep farming, since I initially assumed they were because the tiles were labeled as cavern floors.
Another "new farming" question: How does a potash fertilized muddied stone/soil plot compare with cavern plots? How about with potash fertilized cavern plots? Some cleverness with the numbers could make potash fertilization useful for more than specialist early quarry bush cultivation.
clinodev:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8386588#msg8386588Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8386817#msg8386817Are you talking about world gen production? Everything there works differently from fort mode, and we haven't updated anything. There's no production in other parts of the world after play begins.
Yeah, if we went into this further and added a zone, we'd need to clarify further what deep soil actually means, since it doesn't exist currently except as the grass floor of the underground plants, and as the mud if it happens to be in the right spot. The effect is linked to the natural open cavern layers, so it's not indicated in the floor name but the layers are also kind of hard to miss, at least at first.
Currently, surface is just divided by four. You can also fertilize cavern plots.
1. When will the development page on the dwarf fortress site be updated.
2 how quickly is progress going on premium and any time frame for it
3 once magic and myth update comes out in what ways can during gameplay can a deity manifest
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8387665#msg83876651. It just hasn't felt like a thing since we are in stasis more or less until we return to the villains release.
2. Things are going well! Still trying for autumn. Between the tutorials, art, keyboard stuff, music, and bugses, we have our hands full, but it doesn't feel like there are any Vague Unknown Chunks left anymore either.
3. Ha ha, who knows! We want the possibility of them being more active and tangible, but that could attach to anything from them having a standard body to them being a weather event or a plane or something, and we'll only hit certain possibilities on the first pass, since there's so much to do. I'd anticipate bodied ones at least.
Regarding the changes to farming (and I suppose subterranean effects in general); Will there be any changes to the way 'light-dark' tiles are calculated? Right now, once a tile is exposed to the surface it becomes permanently 'light', even when covered again, meaning you can neutralize cave adaptation without risk.
I haven't changed this, and I'm not really sure how to do it reliably and quickly. It feels like it would need to investigate the entire area around for suitable materials somehow, to avoid towers or even cottages from becoming subterranean (rather than 'inside'). Just looking at the old subterranean area is insufficient since the player might strip mine for a bit before building their outdoor structures, so it actually needs to understand what's going on somehow.
Will steam version have the option to display water depth as 1-7? Not necessarily numbers but at least different tile image?
Rose:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388327#msg8388327Yeah, we have this in two ways currently. The transparency of the depth, and now there's also a button you can press next to the minimap that turns the actual numbers on and off (there's also one to put arrows on ramps.)
I've noticed that custom modded bloodsucker races with their own entities perform bloodsucker purges. I dont think this is a bug since it makes sense for other races to purge bloodsuckers but is them doing it to themselves intended?
Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388357#msg8388357Ha ha, Eric Blank is correct that we didn't design the game around this tag being used on entire civs. I imagine there are a variety of problems like this, and as broader civs are introduced, they'll likely work themselves out.
Oh, and I've also noticed many bandit forts being continually declared war on by random civilizations, why is this? Is this to cull bandit populations? Because as far as I can tell it doesnt have a major effect on fort populations and instead results in clutter in legends mode with the 1991th pillaging of a random bandit fort being noted.
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388492#msg8388492TheFlame52:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8388504#msg8388504No, this isn't intentional, and hopefully it'll be cleaned up at some point. We were going to sort out some fort issues when we transitioned to the adv side of the villains release, since forts were going to be important for parts of that, but then we had to delay the whole thing.
1. You often mention the famous "Map Rewrite" that will happen... Soon-ish? And although with a name as foreboding as that, it must be very important to the game, what exactly is there to rewrite? What will the map rewrite do/change regarding map/world generation? What will it mean for modders?
2. Regarding culture; symbols and colors don't have the same meaning depending on the culture. For example the color black in Europe is attached to death and grieviances, whereas in China, it usually associated with prosperity and good health. Are there any plans to add cultural differences in DF?
3. Regarding Technology; every civilization seem to have access to the same level of technology no matter what age it is or how far in time the game takes in place. This means that even at the dawn of dwarfkind, they already figured out how to make wacky contraptions, but ten thousand years later, goblins still haven't put one and two together and figured out how to make drawbridges. Do you have any plans regarding technology evolving with time?
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389432#msg8389432PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389456#msg8389456Mr Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389537#msg8389537PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389577#msg8389577Putnam:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8389593#msg8389593Quietust:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8390698#msg8390698BlueManedHawk:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8390710#msg8390710King Mir:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8390864#msg83908641. I think the replies cover this pretty comprehensively and accurately. There are lots of capabilities we want but don't have. The editor side of the myth/magic stuff also means that a lot of the map/sites will be available for modders in new ways as well.
2. On top of stuff mentioned in replies (or I might have missed them), there are also randomized positions in human and goblin societies, and humans have randomized values, but yeah, there's a lot to be done here that just doesn't even exist in the game (so it can't be differentiated either.) The current plan is to address some of this in the entity/scenario/etc. update after the magic stuff.
3. This is similar to the cultural differences, with the somewhat irritating addition that we have all that scholarly stuff that just doesn't intersect with actual game mechanics (except in a few specific and pretty unimportant ways, like the types of books which are available to write). Ultimately the hope is to have those completely tied together (not that all techs need to be invented by scholars in a library, and of course Prometheus-type critters could also teach/gift people stuff), but this of course would have a profound impact on the game and need to approached in some prudent way, since the only initial effect of it would be to take mechanics away from people.
According to Dwarf Fortress Talk 7, and comments you've made in this thread, artifacts are truly indestructible (if atom smashed, etc, they'll just be "hidden" and scrambled during claim/reclaim or adventurer visits.)
I've been wondering about a few nuances to this:
1. Are books and named items treated in the exact same way as other artifacts? (I reckon so, as the game tends to treat them the same way with the 'L' artifacts screen.)
2. Any changes to how 'hidden' is handled, or how artifacts are scrambled after destruction? I've made 2 attempts at destroying books and finding them again and both have failed. I haven't been able to find a proper artifact that was destroyed either. (Ignoring copies of books, which can be destoryed)
Also a completely unrelated question:
3. When two sites occupy the same world-tile, the 'c' menu will only show one of those sites and the other is inaccessible to raids/missions unless you send a mission for a person/artifact that might be there. Has this been dealt with in the new and upcoming UI stuff?
Thanks to you and the community for any answers to this!
1. There's a flag on them distinguishing "crafted" artifacts from other named objects. This flag came up later, so it isn't applied everywhere, but it does allow me to draw distinctions.
2. Doesn't look like it. It's still using the same placement function for hidden objects and artifacts that it expects in the area but which don't have assigned locations. However, if the item blasting function is called on an artifact, it adds a destruction event, and on top of the hidden flag, the "utterly destroyed or transformed" flag, which should prevent it from coming back - and it looks like it doesn't care if it's crafted or otherwise. Artifacts being indestructible by default appears to be gone. The destroyed flag is also added if the artifact is used in a job to make something, for books/scrolls in a world map library that is destroyed post w.g., or books/scrolls in any building that is destroyed in w.g.
3. Nope! It should be easy to handle with a new popup, but there's never time to do everything. I can aim for doing it by the time the army stuff makes it much more important to get right.
I have a few questions related to world generation, which turned out longer than I anticipated. Apologies in advance for being so wordy!
As I understand, the prevailing winds are based on the real-life Polar, Ferrel, and Hadley circulation cells, but are they generated to match the pole(s) of the world? Could there be a world generation option to set prevailing winds to be homogeneous across the whole map? Something like the existing option to set a north pole, south pole, both, or neither, but have options for the wind to come mostly from the north, northeast, east, and so on.
What scale do the temperature settings use in the advanced worldgen options? I've heard that the bug with pole-less worlds having extremely hot ""temperate"" biomes is already a known issue, and I know that the actual temperature is affected by rainfall and elevation, but I'm curious what the scale is supposed to be since it doesn't seem to match the ""degrees Urist"" used elsewhere in-game.
Also related to temperature, any rough idea of when we might get more fine-grained distinctions than ""temperate"" and ""tropical""? Maybe even have yearly minimum and maximum temperature values for each region, and have each plant and animal have its own tolerances? At the very least it would be nice to have ""subtropical"" biomes so that we don't have koalas in subarctic climates.
I love that in this game you can generate a world with a very realistic distance/area scale if you have no poles and set a very narrow temperature range. However, there are a few problems that arise when trying to make it as realistic as possible (so as to avoid questions about the geometry and scale of a whole planet the size of even a large DF world, and for the fun of recreating real-life locations), which is why I asked about the wind directions and temperature issues, and my last question is about the vertical scaling.
While it's possible to realistically recreate real places at a 1:1 scale horizontally (a Large DF world is nearly 395000 metres across and could fit Tasmania), you have to either flatten the real elevation range to fit in into DF's 400 2.8m z-levels, or find an area where any salt water is less than 278m deep and the highest elevation above sea level is 840m, and deal with the awkwardness of having the ""mountain"" biome anywhere that's more than 560m above sea level even if there's no big difference in biome IRL. (For reference, Mount Everest is about 9000m above sea level and Challenger Deep is about 11000m below it, or about 3200 and 4000 z-levels respectively.) So basically what I'm asking here is how doable it would be to have deeper oceans and taller mountains. Having a larger world volume to simulate would be a performance issue, but could the map have the same number of z-levels everywhere and have them offset depending on the elevation of the region or something? Isn't that how it already works?
We don't do anything that interesting with winds, but yeah, the directions alternate over the latitudes and depend on the pole settings, and yeah, a no-pole world is treated like a N+S pole world. The wind direction could be made more complicated, or have additional options, sure, it just hasn't been a priority since nothing really depends on it much right now.
The base world temperature is just an arbitrary scale. The conversion is local temp = world temp * 0.75 + 10000. I have little record of how this came about. I probably started with a 0 to 100 fractal and then adjusted it based on elevation/etc/etc, and then mapped it over to the fahrenheit + 9968 or wtvr scale whenever that came up, with the 0.75 factor added to make it line up better with what I wanted for the biomes. There are some comments in the conversion function about targets I had for freezing and scorching places, anyway.
Adding additional biomes is complicated, since they are used in a lot of places in various ways. We were going to mess with them (leaning toward weird magical ones) with the map stuff, and we'll see if it shakes things up. But I have to be careful about how regional animal populations are created, and it can be slow/expensive to prepare matches with a proliferation of biomes.
It's hard to add more verticality because when there are steep slopes (or places where we would have had cliffs before), it all has to be loaded in memory currently. Part of the map rewrite is getting rid of this requirement - this means that there'd be areas where no sky is loaded (only the underground with no way to get up to sky), and loaded areas where there are effectively bottomless pits. Both of these present problems that need to be overcome. A steep mountain slope or cliffside might have both at once.
Which version of C++ is Dwarf Fortress written in?
Ziusudra:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8391215#msg8391215Putnam:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392031#msg8392031Yeah, the responses cover it. Mishmash, definitely got some mileage out of auto some time after it arrived.
Has any function for right-clicking been implemented?
Right now right-clicking closes stuff. There are lots of menus opening and closing and it's nice not to have to click Xs or reach for ESC. The only place I've felt tension with this is where I'd sometimes want right click to erase (say, during designations), but the erase mode works well enough for that.
I'm very excited about the Steam release for many reason but one will be the mods.
There seem to always be "quality of life" mods which come out and I was wondering what the policy would be on if these mods get adopted into the game?
I realize DF is probably a deeply cherished personal project but I also know that the devs have things they'd rather work on.
Has this been given any thought or an answer? Thanks.
Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392565#msg8392565voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392582#msg8392582clinodev:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392609#msg8392609PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8392872#msg8392872I think the replies more or less cover this question as well. We listen to modders when they have questions etc., have set up some memory addresses etc. for DF Hack etc., and modders try fixes for design problems before we have a chance to get to them. I'm not sure how much things will change - it's not a matter of explicit policy as it is just time and etc., though occasionally there are issues like "spreadsheets vs. no spreadsheets" where we have a different point of view than the community surrounding the mod. We'll certainly continue adding little improvements, however they come about.
Previously when you had shown the hyperlinks, figures and entities were coloured according to their kind.
Does this colouring carry over to statue and engraving descriptions in fortress mode?
Do functional hyperlinks?
Whether or not legends mode is going to be hooked up to fortress mode is an open question! There are the concerns about spoiling vampires and such, which we should probably be a little careful about, but there's nothing really wrong with rewarding investigation either (though it does feel a little easy to just be able to open up your fort's history and see the vampire migrant right there with their identity name given away.) The technical side isn't hard now - the text construction and render code just needs to receive an extra flag to enable everything, and the input would also need to be enabled similarly. So mostly just a question of time, with a pretty comprehensive payoff in this case.
Just finished reading the spoilerific Zachpost over the main page, I think i got the jist of it. 
Just the nitpicky one thing i want to pick up on though, question directed at Toady or Threetoe in this instance: If the caravan limit triggers have been altered, will suddenly losing the contents before they leave the map still cause as significant a relationship rift or has the tolerance/mechanics behind trade-relations been changed?
Because forcibly-small caravans running aground to adverse conditions and simple wildlife encounters getting too close seems like perfect-storm noob entanglement that's going to cause players issues; when the home civ attacks and ceases further relations for no apparent reason than the loss of traded capital with the fort fronting the blame (many times also hard to diagnose, and taking scripting than any ingame mechanism to fix). Typically a fortress's starting trust relations close to 0'ish in the first caravan is usually vital to direct diplomacy with any nation they interact with in 47.05 and many preceding versions.
2. Is first contact more formal in the planned new release, or can you still send delegations of unwashed dwarves applying demanding tribute missions to contact traders across the continent? The mentioned already used strategy would probably be more effective in the new build because of how better the UI is for trade/caravan mangement in general.
3. And co-joint question on the same topic as trade: does this open back up the path to the merchant nobility returning to the game in more force than just offmap merchant companies?
Probably just me overthinking it, but i am amused by the idea of a spymaster like noble who writes up little scribble money schemes, pays off legitimate hired goons and handles greater money loanlending (if spymaster ever gets completed to compare that imagined role to)
Ill be honest though, some parts of it left me confused and sometimes a tiny bit worried over change of such a vital part of fortress sustainability as my questions probably infer, but im still hopeful the changes are a safe addition to pass over some gripes and cheesy trade tactics.
1+2+3. It's still the same more or less for the next release. We aren't able to add a lot of new diplomacy features (the ones I can think of are goblin artifact diplomacy and elves being a little different in savage areas, aside from the wagons and end-game stuff), and the capabilities of the player aren't really different, so it doesn't feel particularly worse.
Hello! I have a bit of a difficulty settings question: is there currently a way to tweak how common visits that petition for mercenary/temple/tavern type are? I ask because I really enjoyed having a squad of humans/goblins/outsiders in the prior version and since when merc companies were added to world gen I haven't seen a single mercenary petition. That is something that would be really cool to have an option of having again some day for roleplaying/etc. Thank you for reading
Doorkeeper:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8393980#msg8393980If I recollect, the chance of a solitary mercenary joining a company also depends on how much of a loner they are, and that might also be skewed too much - this could be another thing you tweak, though it'll impact a few other parts of the game (but shouldn't matter for humans etc. too much.) But I haven't added an option to alter more general world generation properties.
When might we expect some random properties to be assigned to the divine metals? Any chance of we could see a small update for the divine metals prior to far off Myth and Magic update? Perhaps in a not entirely dissimilar manner to the prototype for magical powers that intelligent undead were given.
The divine metals are pretty boring as they only feature procedural generation which assigns them a name based on their corresponding deity's sphere. And their material properties are always the same.
Without turning this into a suggestion, I think simple things like random numbers for the material properties, and maybe one or two wacky things from a list would go a long way in generating some good stories out these obscure metals. It's certainly difficult for me to say that I would not thoroughly enjoy laying a war hammer of 'whatchamacallitonium', that has a persistent temperature of something like 672 °F, out in an open field with nothing to guard it. And just having the dwarves sit back and watch the results of kobolds and giant kea birds attempts to sneak off with it.
Doorkeeper:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8393980#msg8393980FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8394052#msg8394052The replies apply to the currently-released version, but divine items make more of an appearance in fort mode in the next release. I haven't changed anything about their properties yet, they just act as treasures and as equipment with properties between steel and adamantine if I remember. Certainly there's now a bit more dev potential in that direction with them around more commonly in play. But I'm not sure what'll happen with so much on the table - the myth/magic update is obviously the place for them to shine.
How much do you worry about accidentally sacrificing gameplay value when pursuing other goals?
Ha ha, you might have to be more specific. There are a lot of things that need to be balanced. Mostly we'd been sacrificing usability through the years, and now we've switched gears to bring some of that back, but we haven't had to make many mechanical changes for that reason.
With the steam release's redesign of activity zones, will there be support for activity zones that exist across multiple z-levels? This would be especially useful for outdoor pastures on hillsides, where there isn't enough room on a single z-level to support many animals.
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8394113#msg8394113Rekov (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8394126#msg8394126It's not coming for general zones for Steam, since it's a bit too complicated to pull the z variable out of zones or to make zones hierarchical. Locations (which FantasticDorf mentioned) like hospitals etc. can have subordinate zones, which makes it come for free. There'll be some solution along these lines, but it'll also need to be respected in the interface, which might look different for the various zones. I don't know immediately that all 3D rectangular solids dragged out should be treated the same, for instance, between pastures and other zone types. But the main obstacle is just the lack of a z range in the zone object, and how much code uses the single z height for them (generally, for all 'buildings', it comes up more than 1400 times it looks like.)
I apologize if this isn't an appropriate question for the Future of the Fortress thread, but I've heard conflicting theories over the years and I haven't been able to figure it out in my varied embark attemps. Though I have seen reanimating biomes quickly fill up the caverns with many reanimated trogdolyte and crundle pieces moving about and getting stuck atop giant mushrooms.
Does discovering the caverns have a negative impact on FPS due to cavern critter pathfinding / flowing water etc.? Or do those calculations just happen normally regardless of whether or not the caverns have been revealed?
Mr Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395038#msg8395038Yeah, Mr Crabman's right that the calculation are generally happening, open or not. I couldn't think of anything that would be open-the-caverns-specific + very slow, but after the latest interview, this came up in a conversation, and if I remember another element was possibly creatures trying to path through pet-forbidden doors when you open the caverns. Those doors don't exist anymore, since they caused FPS problems universally.
1.Do you have any favorite generated myths you're willing to share?
2.How is the economy eventually going to work in our forts?
3.After the Magic update, is hell gonna go away depending on the myth?
4.How far away are we from getting fortress mode mounts?
5.Can we reassign war animals in the steam version?
6.Are we ever going to get the option to surrender to a siege and become part of the enemy civ, and if yes, when could we expect that?
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395048#msg83950481. I don't really have anything new to share here, and I think overall the prototype just isn't interesting enough that way. It's clear it'll work, but it needs more meat on the bone in a variety of ways; I stopped where I did with it since it needs to be integrated with the main code and that will require reworking it. What you can see in the video and elsewhere I've talked about it is about all the narrative variety you get there. The first actual release with myths will be much better.
2. Hard to say! It looks like by the time you get it, you'll be able to start your fort as an actual working magical temple, possibly with an underground sea where the ships sail out from your subterranean docks, with a society where laws and customs can change. Only then, you'll be able to slap some trinkets on a mule and send a dwarf with it off to a village to make some dwarf bucks (or use the ships, or have god do it or something.) This order is possibly odd, but this is the order we are currently working with. Everything is fine.
3. voliol covered this one. Having an underworld or punishment plane etc. won't be required, but overall that kind of thing should be pretty common.
4+5. I haven't changed anything here that I remember, and I'm not sure when I will.
6. This comes up from time to time, mostly in the context of the scenarios release, which would have the infrastructure needed to make this interesting. For the army release, if anything happened, it would just involve something like humans sticking a site administrator in your site, and I don't there'd be time with all that's on the table to make that interesting. On the other hand, if we do all of the villains plots from w.g. in fort mode, which is the plan, we'll end up with coups and other trouble, so who knows where it'll land - we'd speculated about letting you play through those in some fashion no matter the outcome.
How long will it be before attacking armies will have the ability to dig or otherwise enter a walled off fort?
Mr Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395056#msg8395056Mr Crabman is correct about this - the army stuff will address this, and the rough order is steam stuff (pre/post launch) -> finish villains -> army stuff, with any mixing where convenience/speed/betterment suggests it, as Mr Crabman mentions.
Regarding animal people, is there any control on how many show up or how frequently? Some people hate them with a burning passion and don't want them at all, afterall
dikbutdagrate:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395210#msg8395210voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395317#msg8395317Adding to the replies, depending on the irritation, another possibility is removing [CV_NEW_TAG:LOCAL_POPS_PRODUCE_HEROES] from the animal person creature variation.
Hey T-dog, whats up with this dwarf and soap?
(picture of dwarf made miserable by soap)
Doorkeeper:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8395377#msg8395377No idea. Bliss and contentment should be the only available outcomes for soap baths. Misery should only come from confinement, break-ups/divorce, or hated jobs, for certain personalities.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3129899 times)