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2. I remember seeing transgender/non-binary pops being mentioned a few years back somewhere as something that was planned. Is this still somewhere in the development pipeline perchance? I would absolutely love to see this included at some point
3. Is there a chance that (perhaps as part of the map rewrite update) eventually the map will be an actual projection of a planet instead of a rectangle suspended in space? I imagine that once boats become a thing then being able to circumnavigate the globe would be a nice feature.
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2. Currently cross dressing is rendered impossible by the fact that clothes aren't gendered and there aren't any other gender specific customs either, and I don't think the state surgery is in (based on the general reference timeline of 1400) would result in many individual want to try that route (I don't think the gelders would get many "unusual" requests from willing customers). Homosexual leanings already exist, and is currently the limit of what can be displayed.
3. No. This has been asked before, and the answer is that there is no reasonably way to make a rectangular grid out of a sphere. A cylinder (were moving off one side causes you to end up on the other) would be possible, as would the arcade variant where moving off to one side causes you to end up at the other side as well as moving off the top causes you to end up at the bottom. The latter is topologically identical to a torus, but it's not a possible shape if you bring in reality and demand that each tile should be a square of the same size. Of course, the "torus" might eventually be possible in a weird magical realm that's not supposed to make full real world sense, should Toady elect to create such a realm.
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2. In the default DF raws and setting, approximately the only easily visible gender-specific difference is beards. And that's toggleable. Clothes and accessories are gender-neutral; cultural items like poetry, dance, and song are gender-neutral; jobs and roles are gender-neutral... "cross dressing" would be pretty much shaving vs. wearing a false beard in the default raws, and not even that if you've toggled beards for everyone.
Additionally, the attraction system is somewhat more expansive than simple labels; dwarves are generated with a value of disinterested in relationships, interested in casual relationships only, or willing to form permanent partnerships as separate scores for each gender. So, there are officially six sexualities possible in stock DF, including what would probably be described in current terms as aro/ace, and as bi, and a couple we don't have good names for in English. Note also that DF doesn't think of it as "homo" vs. "hetero", but as "attracted to male" score and "attracted to female" score, somewhat irrespective of whether the dwarf in question is male or female themselves.
Also, Male and Female are "just" castes of dwarves. It should be possible with fairly easy modding to create additional castes; whether setting up the additional relationship matrix can be done practically or at all is a more complicated question.
3. My take on things is that what we currently know in-game about the DF setting doesn't make sense for it to be on a sphere. There is no evidence that it should be; and a fair amount of evidence that either it isn't on a sphere, or it is a small enough patch of a sphere that the spherical nature of it can be ignored for practical purposes.
- The extremely thin crust over a world-wide cavern network over magma over spoilers over really dense spoilers is certainly not any sort of traditional planet.
- As far as I understand it is the same solar and lunar time everywhere on the world map at once.
- The area covered is really quite small in real terms; the largest possible DF world is usually quoted as "a bit smaller than the UK"; depending on which value you use based on which internal numbers, it would be somewhere between about 400 km / 245 miles on a side and about 475 km / 295 miles on a side. (And given that many worlds are smaller than that, assuming approximately the same solar / lunar time across an area a few hundred miles across is a reasonable approximation.)
- There is no evidence of survey distortion from true squares or rectangles.
- Despite all of the above, it's possible to have a "polar" region on the top, bottom, or both; but not on the sides.
Given all this, I have two competing thoughts; one is that it's a tiny patch on a large shape, such that assuming local flatness and simultaneousness of noon are reasonable approximations; and the other is that quite frankly it makes more sense if the patch is on an Alderson disk or some similar deity-created gigastructure. See, for instance, the Charles Stross novella "Missile Gap", with a huge number of "unwrapped" copies of Earth on an Alderson disk, with elaborate cooling systems in a grid creating the artificial "arctic regions". Note in particular that constructing an Alderson disk requires one or more materials of un-physical strength and (probably) density, like the scrith required for a simple ringworld, but more so... much like the two spoiler materials featured in DF, a lightweight extremely tensile material that can be formed into strands and enormous cables (which might be mistaken for pillars), and a heavy substrate material found in bulk.
Related to that, I will quote Charles Stross himself in a
reddit post from about a decade ago talking about the technical side of an Alderson disk:
... Surface escape velocity, if you try to lift straight off, is a low double-digit percentage of light speed. It is, in other words, "sticky" -- a flytrap for non-supertech civilizations. You can run experiments on its surface with reasonable confidence that they can't escape. If they try, you can sterilize them by torching off a supernova a couple of light years above the disk (if you can build an Alderson disk you can for sure engineer a supernova) and if things really go to hell in a hand-basket you can kick the props out from under it and suck everything into a medium-huge black hole (a convenient side-effect of which will be a hypernova that exterminates any escapees within several light years, however well shielded (think in terms of the neutrino pulse from a ~50,000 solar mass core collapse)).
Think of it as the ultimate petri dish for examining dangerous life forms.
Think about what we know about the DF cosmology and world for a bit with that in mind...