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[Buttery_Mess]

With the map rewrite, can we expect floating islands and castles in the sky? If so, will they move over the map? That would suggest the possibility of a segue into mobile forts and ships.

If you were going to start making DF from scratch again, what would you do differently?
 

[Shonai_Dweller]

With the map rewrite, can we expect floating islands and castles in the sky? If so, will they move over the map? That would suggest the possibility of a segue into mobile forts and ships.
 

Floating islands, probably, yes. (It's a favorite feature of fantasy worlds, apparently - past fotf reply).
Ships are planned for the ships update (when moving fortress parts are introduced - basically all moving bits of map, which would probably include floating islands actually moving about).

[PatrikLundell]

With the map rewrite, can we expect floating islands and castles in the sky? If so, will they move over the map? That would suggest the possibility of a segue into mobile forts and ships.
 

Floating islands, probably, yes. (It's a favorite feature of fantasy worlds, apparently - past fotf reply).
Ships are planned for the ships update (when moving fortress parts are introduced - basically all moving bits of map, which would probably include floating islands actually moving about).

If you access floating islands via portals (requires two way portals to work properly -> not the first release) it's probably fairly straight forward. If the island is accessed by flying it may be trickier (although it IS mostly just a very big flying craft with potentially rock [and more exotic stuff] that can be mined). However, a craft that covers several mid level tiles will probably require some special logic. Pathing might be interesting if a floating island docks with a mountain or a shore, for instance, although it might not be fundamentally different from opening a drawbridge/mining a hole, and movement would require dynamic loading/unloading of tiles as per adventure mode.

[Tobihaze]

fairies are generally cute flying things

The original Celtic Fair Folk were monstrous creatures.

Yeah, I know. I just put down the "cute winged thing" descriptor since that's what we have in the game right now, even if things like dullahan were fairies. It'd be really cool if Toady does something to represent the good-neutral-bad sorts of monsters within a class of creature. He could even make a dichotomy template that is applied to a class of creatures on world gen that fit the bill under the mythology generated for that world.

Of course, this is all assuming that the tag pulled actually influences the creature's generation and is not arbitrarily assigned to creatures who have already been generated.

[Bimbus]

1. What can we expect for medical options with the upcoming Adventure mode medical improvements? Will there be doctors like in fortress mode, and/or will it be up to the player character to diagnose and heal their injuries?

2. Will the Semi/Megabeasts become more unique with the myth/magic update? Will they be procedurally generated similarly to forgotten beasts, just with more limitations so that they can still be recognized as hydras, dragons, cyclops, etc?

3. Is there any future plans for a manual way to progress time in a world, without going into/out of a fortress/adventure mode save?

[Vivalas]

It's not worth playing with the Flaming Obsidian Mug of Lebesnóton if there's a chance it might fill your fortress with magma because you don't know what it does in advance.

I don't know, that sort of thing sounds exciting to me-- I would love to play SCP Fortress and lock a random dwarf in an isolated chamber with an unknown artifact to see what happens. I think I even flavored my first fortress as a "dwarven research facility", and magical research is quite interesting.


Anyways, I read that bit about the FAQ, but it's somewhat hard to go and find answers from previous FotF unless you've been reading them all, and the forum search seems very useless sometimes. Apologies if this has been asked:

With improvements to sieges include some sort of look at balancing the cage trap. Right now it's a very icky thing that pops up when I play, whether or not to use them or not. While of course players can just use restraint, it's nicer to have mechanical reasons. The dev page mentioned somewhere about multi-tile traps, but is there perhaps a few short-term tweaks that could make cage traps a bit less powerful? Right now if you build enough of them to match the invader cap, you really don't have to do much but open the gates and capture everyone.

Granted, I noticed in an older fort after 34.11 that invaders seem more cautious towards traps, and I can't tell if this is noted anywhere, but I noticed that attacking goblins very slowly creeped down my main trap hallway, as if suspiciously, and immediately ran out and refused to enter my fort once one got trapped. I don't know if this is a feature or bug or some other behavior, but it's in the same realm of trap balance improvements.

Planned for traps during this update phase is possible invader intelligence (they'll avoid areas where there were traps). That's only if development gets that far before the cut-off date.

Planned for the future, won't be included in this release (confirmed in previous fotf), is the complete trap update, which you can find on the dev notes. That'll be about the same time as ships and moving fortress parts. So cages respecting size, complex traps made of many moving parts, rocks positioned to fall from other areas, etc. The "wooden cage traps dragon" slight unbalance that we have now is just a placeholder.

I might be mistaken, but isn't the bit with the whole "invaders avoid traps" already in somewhat? I don't know what was going on in that fort, but the goblin (ambushers) definitely decided not to dwelve further into my fortress after a trap was triggered.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Might be, but I think it involves invaders looking for an alternative ways in (like digging) too. That's not been added yet and might be part of the update.

[Death Dragon]

For people who are interested in the villain arc and for some reason haven't seen this before:
Toady was in this pcgamer interview a while ago and he mentions player spies and villain plots at around minutes 29 and 35 specifically.
http://dl.pcgamer.com/PCG_Show_123_March19_2018_GDC_01.mp3

It's essentially what's also listed on the dev page though.

1. What can we expect for medical options with the upcoming Adventure mode medical improvements? Will there be doctors like in fortress mode, and/or will it be up to the player character to diagnose and heal their injuries?

2. Will the Semi/Megabeasts become more unique with the myth/magic update? Will they be procedurally generated similarly to forgotten beasts, just with more limitations so that they can still be recognized as hydras, dragons, cyclops, etc?

3. Is there any future plans for a manual way to progress time in a world, without going into/out of a fortress/adventure mode save?

For 1 and 3: There have been replies to questions about adventure mode medical rework and "re-entering world gen" time progression stuff in the last couple Toady posts. I think what you can expect as answers is that the specifics for the medical rework aren't set in stone yet except that it will bring it closer to fort mode levels (he does have a ton of notes for it though apparently) and that Toady acknowleges that a way to fast forward time in the world is something that would be useful, but is a difficult problem to handle. In his last post he mentioned making world gen stop at specifically interesting times so that the player wouldn't have a need to fast forward time.
For 2, well not sure if he plans on making the classic beasts more random, but we do already have titans which are basically randomly generated megabeasts. Depending on what your world creation sliders are set to, the classic beasts might not show up in a world at all.

[Bimbus]

I dont quite get why the game can move forward two weeks every time you play, but not any other way? Doesnt make much sense to me. Is there really no way to make the same thing possible without going into the game modes?

[Shonai_Dweller]

I dont quite get why the game can move forward two weeks every time you play, but not any other way? Doesnt make much sense to me. Is there really no way to make the same thing possible without going into the game modes?

Watch the videos, read Toady's words. He's the only coder, he should know what's incredibly difficult and what isn't. Pretty sure he's not making stuff up just to mess with your mind.

edit
He first (as far as I recall) mentions the difficulties here:
https://youtu.be/L67Xb4tgVv8
(At around the 1 hour point).
Then he mentioned a bit more in the fotf reply that followed this video (I recall because I asked a question right after watching it).

[PatrikLundell]

I dont quite get why the game can move forward two weeks every time you play, but not any other way? Doesnt make much sense to me. Is there really no way to make the same thing possible without going into the game modes?

Watch the videos, read Toady's words. He's the only coder, he should know what's incredibly difficult and what isn't. Pretty sure he's not making stuff up just to mess with your mind.

edit
He first (as far as I recall) mentions the difficulties here:
https://youtu.be/L67Xb4tgVv8
(At around the 1 hour point).
Then he mentioned a bit more in the fotf reply that followed this video (I recall because I asked a question right after watching it).

The two week embark time isn't the same thing as putting the game back in the box: it does everything that happens in the world in fortress (and, I presume, adventure) mode in the background, but not the fortress' own stuff. It may look fast to you, but try it on a crowded world, and that's only two weeks as well, not two years.
Just running DF without a fortress isn't hard, and I think the two week period has been hacked to be longer (MaxTM?), but the speed is very much slower than world gen, so you're rather unlikely to be willing to use that to advance the world more than a few years, not the centuries a "reboxed" DF would allow for.

[Bimbus]

I'm still not exactly sure why there cant be an option to move the world forward manually, even if it was only two weeks. To clarify, I am not asking to reenter world gen, just to move the world forward in time, the same way it does every time you play on a world.

[UristMcEngineer]

How do you protect the DF code from getting lost?
It is no exaggeration if I say that in my opinion Dwarf Fortress is one of the most amazing achievements of humanity in the last decade.
It would be a catastrophe if the world lost the ability to work on it, because of a fire or your demise.

[PatrikLundell]

How do you protect the DF code from getting lost?
It is no exaggeration if I say that in my opinion Dwarf Fortress is one of the most amazing achievements of humanity in the last decade.
It would be a catastrophe if the world lost the ability to work on it, because of a fire or your demise.

That question has been answered in the past. There are backups off site, and there's also a will (with a clause to ward off foul play).

I'm still not exactly sure why there cant be an option to move the world forward manually, even if it was only two weeks. To clarify, I am not asking to reenter world gen, just to move the world forward in time, the same way it does every time you play on a world.

There is no technical reason blocking it, but it's not something that is of any priority for Toady to implement. You can easily move the world forwards by two weeks at at time by embarking and retiring/abandoning (the same site repeatedly if you don't want to clutter the world with embarks).

[Vivalas]

How do you protect the DF code from getting lost?
It is no exaggeration if I say that in my opinion Dwarf Fortress is one of the most amazing achievements of humanity in the last decade.
It would be a catastrophe if the world lost the ability to work on it, because of a fire or your demise.

That question has been answered in the past. There are backups off site, and there's also a will (with a clause to ward off foul play).

So much for my plans to assassinate Toady for the source code