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[SamBucher]

The Dwarf Fortress development page mentions "automatons and magical prostheses" as part of Myth&Magic. These features seems innocent on the surface level, but actually raise a lot of question (hopefully not too many to answer):
1. Are the prostheses only for limbs, or will there be ones for every organ?
2. How will prostheses fair in comparison to the original body part?
3. Will there be magical prosthetics that give the user magic powers?
4. Will it be possible to:
4,1. attach a prosthetic in addition to a being's natural body parts? Imagine a craftsdwarf having 4 arms, 2 natural and 2 artificial, increasing work speed.
4,2. replace a healthy body part with a prosthetic one?
4,3. mix and match parts (replace a dwarf's legs with prosthetic arms)?
5. How much of a dwarf's body can be replaced until he is considered an automaton?
6. Will automatons be able to take roles of nobility?
7. Will there be automaton models besides the standard humanoid worker?
8. What will be the upkeep costs of an automaton (I presume they won't need food and alcohol)?
9. Will you be able to have an automaton-exclusive fortress or play as an automaton in adventure mode?
10. Will it be possible for one to achieve immortality not via necromancy, but by replacing aging flesh with machinery/putting one's soul into an automaton body?[/color]
Thank you in advance!

Not Toady, but:

1. Probably; prostheses will have to be coded to be able to act as stand-ins for body parts and their functions (eg, GRASP), so why not the other functions as well?

2. Definitely would vary from world-to-world, and situation to situation. Some prostheses will be crude peg-legs and hook hands (pretty much all worlds will have this I imagine), others will be magical automail arms, others may be literally fully living organic replacements, or even be improvements over the original.

3. Definitely, in some worlds; prosthetics would be some sort of item/equipment/body part blend, and all of these are going to have potential to be magical.

4. I wouldn't be surprised if all of these were possible, given that lots of weird body transformation stuff is planned anyway.

5. May depend on the world. I'd guess it would be whenever their thought body part is replaced, and/or their soul is lost/replaced. What's the difference between a "flesh automaton" and a "normal person"? It's all fuzzy, just words.

6. Probably, depending on what "automaton" means, and may vary. Some may be mindless servants that can't act without orders from their creator, others may be freely willed beings. This answer goes for question 9 as well.

7. Absolutely; there's no way this game of all things will have hardcoded automaton models, especially in an update that aims to procedurally generate entire races. I guarantee that automatons will be treated in the code much like normal creatures are, but with relevant differences like different materials for their body parts, and different sustenance requirements etc (in many ways, a Bronze Colossus could be considered an "automaton" already, just uncontrollable and impossible to create).

8. Will vary from world to world without a doubt. Some will require absolutely nothing, some will require sacrifices of the best crops to the god of metal every full moon, others will be fueled by flesh & blood and will seek it out on their own accord, others will require the concentration/mana of their creator... And of course, some may need food.

10. Almost certainly, in some worlds. I expect there will be many of ways to achieve immortality, and many of them revolving around putting one's soul into something that doesn't age. Note that not all worlds may even have a such thing as souls at all (eg, the "zero magic" worlds).

Thank you for your response. It was rather narrow minded of me to think of automatons as just regular robots. I didn't even consider them being made out of flesh or other non-metal, non-mechanical materials. Also, your response to question 7 made me think of dwarves constructing a bronze colossus to protect their fortress. The mental image of a pair of those guarding the main entrance, unmoving statues, until a threat arrives, is really cool.

[voliol]

1. Are the prostheses only for limbs, or will there be ones for every organ?

It should be mentioned most of the organs don't do anything in current Dwarf Fortress. It's just brains and lungs, I believe ... and hearts are full of major arteries so you'll bleed out if yours is crushed. So that's a needed change, if you want liver prostheses to mean anything. Granted, this giving them function doesn't have to be based in biology. It could as well be a metaphysical/magic-based function, say the guts containing the "dream" part of your soul, or letting some non-brain organ hold the mind so that head transplants are possible (think Ganesha).

[Egan_BW]

Soul being anchored to the heart in some worlds could be entertaining.

[TheFlame52]

Maybe that's why a headless corpse can be resurrected by a necromancer, but a severed head can only be animated.

[Elf Lord]

 You had said in villains part 2 a fort takeover could happen. Could you shed some more light on what this entails? And how the fort behaves afterwords? Does it become some big bad hq afterwords? Will villains use it as a base for future operations?

[Paaaad]

Following up on a question I asked for the October FOTF reply, I assume the version number has been finalized by now? If so, what will it be?

[A_Curious_Cat]

Following up on a question I asked for the October FOTF reply, I assume the version number has been finalized by now? If so, what will it be?

This video from KitFox Games shows a version number of v50.01 about 45 seconds in.  So it’s at least that…

[rickalbert]

• Will we be able to visually identify wild plants, or will we still need to mouse over/select them?
• Will we be able to see the specific weapons used in a trap?
• With the recent balance changes to farming, have you considered making greenhouses from glass roofs/walls?
• How do we identify the differences between animals and their savage giant cousins? Do they have different art, or are they larger than a single tile?
• Are there any Beasts/Titans that will take up more than one tile, or is that something you're not interested in doing?
• What time will the game actually release? Is it a "rolling release" where every timezone gets access at midnight (or some other time) or a global release where everyone gets it at 0000XXT?

Thanks for your time, and Preemptive Congratulations for the Extremely Successful Release!

[Mr Crabman]

• How do we identify the differences between animals and their savage giant cousins? Do they have different art, or are they larger than a single tile?
• Are there any Beasts/Titans that will take up more than one tile, or is that something you're not interested in doing?

Giant animals have enlarged art that's generally larger than one tile (though they don't actually exist outside one tile mechanically, it's just for visual purposes). And forgotten beasts/titans presumably do take up multiple tiles (again, just visually) as well, because the megabeasts definitely do.

Creatures actually mechanically being more than one tile is planned for a future update (if I remember right, it would be in the "siege engines/moving fortress parts" update). It's not clear which ones would be multi-tile though, since Toady said doing that for everything larger than the 2x2x3 tile size would just be too many.

[Randomizer]

Question 1: More on trade caravans. Maybe there is such a thing as a rag man and bone and deteriorated cloth would still have value. It always felt like garbage collection to me. They may guck at low quality stone crafts and demand higher quality goods. I do not think that the whole caravan came all the way out there just too get bone, deteriorated cloth, and low quality crafts. You might get away with it in an early fort but they will not come out there in bulk if you do not give them higher quality goods and requested goods.

Question 2: What will happen in the new version if you kill off the original dwarf caravan in the first year(drowning chamber)? Prolonged war? Will you ever get another dwarf caravan, perhaps from a different dwarf civilization?

[voliol]

• Will we be able to visually identify wild plants, or will we still need to mouse over/select them?

Woah, this post is all in verdana! Neat. Here's a quote from the release date announcement and roadmap post:

SOONISH

For the months following launch, we have more graphics we want to add. We'd like specific graphics for more plants (evergreens, real world plants, etc), for example, and we'd also love to put in images for baby animals instead of just scaling down the adult versions. Kittens and red panda cubs and giant eaglets!

It seems we won't get fully differentiated plants at launch, but in some update after.

[Xen0n]

I have 2 questions about possible future plans:

• I’m very excited about the upcoming changes to the "difficulty" of trading & farming in the Steam release, as “balance / challenge” has always been a big interest of mine. Are there plans down the road to similarly tweak other systems with an eye for balance, e.g. changing how easy it is to feed a fortress via trees / fishing, or certain combat options like cage traps having outsized effectiveness?
• Similarly, with the eventual “army / siege” update down the line, are there any plans relating to the consistency / relative strength level of goblin sieges? I know it was only a “gamey” stopgap measure at the time, but one aspect I appreciated about the old goblin siege mechanics in the pre-0.4x days was reliably knowing a goblin siege would turn up in the first few years of new forts (if listed as a neighbor), and subsequent sieges would usually be roughly proportional to your fort's wealth / size, regardless of what other things may have been going on in the world.

Great thanks to Tarn & Zach for all you've done, I really appreciate the extreme amount of care you’ve put into both crafting the game all these years and handling the "business" side of things!

[dikbutdagrate]

So is ORANGE confirmed for being a new color in classic?
I was looking at some of the screenshots you had hosted of the new classic mode recently, when I noticed the color difference.

[Pillbo]

If you were cursed by a witch to live out your days as an animal person, which would you choose?

[Eric Blank]

Yeah Toady what's your fursona

The real question is why would a witch who wants to curse you let you pick a favorite? If anything they'd deliberately refuse to pick that one.