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[SpeardwarfErith]

The current dune mod, Fremen Sietch, is the 8th-last post on the mod releases subforum and is for 0.31.12. I think it's fair to say we need a new one. I have been convinced to do this after showing off my sandworm, but it's been a while since I read the book and I need some help figuring out what should and shouldn't be in it.

The first question that needs to be answered about a dune mod is obviously the sandworms. Before you start telling me how 1 tile creatures can't properly represent massive snakes, let me present you with my worm prototype:

This should hopefully be adequate proof that I am capable and seriously planning to make this mod.
They are size 100 million, legendary biters, and leave a wormsign behind them of modifiable length and width. They will only show up in sand tiles, and will be physically incapable of moving onto rock. Settling on a rocky wasteland will guarantee safety, and indeed that's where all non-fremen civs will settle.

The sands offer great rewards for the great risks, because that is the only place spice is to be found. Pre-spice masses will occur randomly throughout any sandy area of the map, and eventually they will burst, leaving behind spice that can be collected. All of this is actually rather easy to implement with some simple scripts and flow manipulation.

Spice is critical for survival, and will replace the function of alcohol in the vanilla game; unlike alcohol, a fremen that goes without spice for too long will die from withdrawal. It will be an incredibly valuable trade good, and will likely be your main export.

As for weapons, I don't quite remember what ones exist in the dune universe. Swords and knives obviously exist, but do they ever use axes for anything? Spears?
-Shields will likely be some sort of armour with max coverage.
-Lasguns will act as overpowered ranged weapons, but will cause a massive explosion that kills anyone in a very large range. For that to work, I need to find a way to stop a lasgun user from shooting someone with a shield. If that can't be done, I'll just remove the explosion and make shield users immune to lasguns, but that seems like a lame solution.
-Crysknives will be fremen-exclusive and extremely sharp, but can only be made from the teeth of a sandworm.

That's everything I can think of right now. ATM, the design problems that still need to be solved are:

• How will water be handled? How can it be made important, without diminishing the importance of spice?
• How will the lasgun-shield interaction work?
• What is the production ability fremen have? I vaguely recall a scene in the book where Paul sees one of their factories, but I don't remember the details
• How will coriolis storms work? Maybe instant-death evil clouds?
• Is there anything that I'm missing here?

if anybody has any ideas, please say so.

[Taffer]

I don't really have any answers, but this looks great and I can't wait to try it out. I'd probably make it back into a fantasy mod for myself, but I do love the books.

• How will water be handled? How can it be made important, without diminishing the importance of spice?

Well at the very least you'll want to get rid of aquifers, of course. You could distribute world gen templates and recommend people use them.

[smakemupagus]

Distilling water from corpses, of course.

[Meph]

Considering that 7 settlers arrive, wouldnt it make more sense to play as House atreides instead of freemen? 

Have freemen as both traders and ambushers coming by, while harkonnen send sieges.

A worldgen presets for a few arakis inspired maps will go a long way, without water.

Water can be made important by removing it almost entirely, the same goes for plants that make alcohol.

Use spice to make people immune to aging, heal them with it, make them stronger, but spice is not needed for survival. Water is.

Make it a slow product of windtraps, distilled from the few critters you can hunt, or from killed invaders. Maybe even sacrifice a members of your fort to get his water.

For a lot of spice you could trigger a space guild catavan for trading. Just make a civ without aktive seasons, that way they only appear when you can pay them. They could bring off-world goods like the mentioned lascannons.

Muadibs, tiny desert mice, are a must as pets. :-D

A lot of Sand, clay and leather related workshops sound fitting... You'd also have to do something about mining... Far too easy to make good forts and people shouldn't be able to mine in sand anyway
 Maybe add UNDIGGABLE.

Embarking on caves could simulate a siech.

I'd stay away from the contents of the later books...  While awesome, far fewer people have read them and it gets really, really weird.

You can easily make sandstorms with evil weather clouds. :-) they could blind and slow down or daze people.

Whats the main goal? Creating a god emperor?  :-)

[SpeardwarfErith]

Considering that 7 settlers arrive, wouldnt it make more sense to play as House atreides instead of freemen? 

Have freemen as both traders and ambushers coming by, while harkonnen send sieges.

That's a good point actually, but my issue with that is that playing as House Atreides would be a little generic. They more or less just live around in the city until they get massacred and die, and afaik they never make any sort of desert outpost.
Paul and the rest of the survivors then go ahead and do stuff, but that's wayyy outside the scope of fort mode. Plus, I don't want to recreate the plot of Dune, just the setting. Although now that I think about it, it would be cool to have a rare event as the fremen where a nobleman's son and refugee comes and asks for sanctuary...

A worldgen presets for a few arakis inspired maps will go a long way, without water.

Naturally.

Water can be made important by removing it almost entirely, the same goes for plants that make alcohol.

Use spice to make people immune to aging, heal them with it, make them stronger, but spice is not needed for survival. Water is.

Make it a slow product of windtraps, distilled from the few critters you can hunt, or from killed invaders. Maybe even sacrifice a members of your fort to get his water.

For a lot of spice you could trigger a space guild catavan for trading. Just make a civ without aktive seasons, that way they only appear when you can pay them. They could bring off-world goods like the mentioned lascannons.

Yes, water will be ultra-rare. Alcohol won't be included at all, because it doesn't fit in thematically to have them all be alcoholics.

You are wrong when you say spice isn't needed for survival though. One of its main properties is that it's extremely addictive, and for anyone who is addicted enough withdrawal leads to certain death. The fremen are so spiced up that they are all too reliant on it to go without. That's why I thought it would fit well thematically as alcohol.
The issue is that both spice and water are critical for survival, but making spice into alcohol removes much of the need for water and vice versa. Maybe this can be balanced by making "spice water" or something that acts as alcohol and is made from water and spice?

I really like the idea of butchering a fort member for their water- it adds an extra level of brutality.
Also, how would summoning a guild caravan work?

Muadibs, tiny desert mice, are a must as pets. :-D

Heh, there's actually a comprehensive list of all the flora and fauna of arrakis, which makes my job quite easy. Muadibs are on it, and will obviously be available as pets

A lot of Sand, clay and leather related workshops sound fitting... You'd also have to do something about mining... Far too easy to make good forts and people shouldn't be able to mine in sand anyway
 Maybe add UNDIGGABLE.

Ooh, I really like this idea. Sand should be undiggable, as should any non-sedimentary stone. Hopefully with the given preset the whole world will be sedimentary, so all sites should have a few duggable layers and nothing more.

Embarking on caves could simulate a siech.

I'd stay away from the contents of the later books...  While awesome, far fewer people have read them and it gets really, really weird.

You can easily make sandstorms with evil weather clouds. :-) they could blind and slow down or daze people.

Whats the main goal? Creating a god emperor?  :-)

I haven't actually read the later books, but I've heard that about them. I won't use them as a source, don't worry.

There could be several ranks of sandstorms, from regular ones that temporarily disable dwarves to deadly coriolis storms that kill everything in their path. I just hope I am able to spawn them in non-evil biomes, because otherwise I'd have to very badly recreate them.

As for the main goal, idk. Maybe just fremen around? Maybe conquer the world? Maybe terraforming?

[Meph]

Force event script can call caravans.  Its really simple to add.

As far as i know weathers just need a biome, should work outside good/evil regions.

A script run from a workshop that slowly changes the biome around it would be awesome, enabling grass and trees to grow. As elvish as it might sound, a nice goal could be to establish a large enough "garden" to sustain yourself.

Water = Drink. Spice = Food.

Make normal food inedible, unless cooked together with melange/spice.

Item-syndrome can give the freemen suits the ability to add NODRINK to the wearer for most of the time, making it important to keep every siech member well equipped with suits. Remember your suit discipline! ;-)

Embark Wagon pullers could be spice harvesters (for atreides)  or small sandworms for freemen. Same for caravan pack animals... Small Sand worms carry the goods.

[SpeardwarfErith]

ok so I've gotten to the part where I need to start adding civs, and I realized that I don't actually know what civs should be added.

The ones that obviously come to mind are Fremen, smugglers, and Harkonnens. That list seems a bit short though.

I don't want to add imperial and Atreides civs, because the imperium never controlled Arrakis and it doesn't make sense to have them all exist on the planet mutually. Also, that would imply the mod is taking place at the time of the events of the book, which I very much want to avoid.

Anybody have any suggestions for other civs?

[NJW2000]

Harkonnen poor/refugees?

Can't remember if they're mentioned in the book, but war and instability creates refugees anyhow.

Such people would live in the cities of other civs and maybe shantytowns of some sort.

What about the Bene Gesserit? You're putting them in, right?

[SpeardwarfErith]

about the refugees, they aren't mentioned in the book afaik (I'm rereading it, currently halfway through), but either way I don't think they deserve a full-blown civ. Maybe a civ that represents the local population though...

Bene Gesserit, Mentats, Space Guild, etc are probably not going to be in the mod for the initial release. I think I'll eventually do them as a rare caste rather than an entire civ, because you don't see Bne Gesserit cities and armies popping up all over Arrakis.

[KittyTac]

And how about making it adv mode-compatible?

[scourge728]

This is quite impressive already

[SpeardwarfErith]

heh, thanks. Atm it's not much more than a few creature/plant raws, and basic sandworms...
As for adventure mode, it shouldn't be incompatible per se, but seeing as the way sites look is hardcoded I doubt I'll be able to make it convincing. It would be a little weird walking on Arrakis and stumbling on a forest retreat or the extensive farms of a hamlet.

I finished my rereading of dune, and one thing that struck me as important that I forgot was that shields don't work in the desert because they enrage worms. There's apparently quite a few things that enrage a worm, and I think I'll make it into a full blown mechanic where certain actions (the activation of a shield, planting a thumper, etc) call a bunch of enraged worms.
Anyways, fremen don't use shields, with all the implications that come with that. Specifically, the implications of guns. It's not explained in depth in the book, but rocket launchers and maula pistols are certainly present, and it can be implied the fremen use more conventional carbines and machineguns, too. After all, why limit yourself to a spring-loaded pistol with a range of 40m when your target is unshielded?

Now that I'm done reading the book I can start real work on the mod. The raws are about halfway finished, and I should be starting scripting this week.

[Meph]

For more civs: More freemen. There are different siechs after all, with different clans.

[SpeardwarfErith]

For more civs: More freemen. There are different siechs after all, with different clans.

That already happens naturally though, any world is bound to have several fremen civs just like a vanilla world is bound to have several elf or dwarf civs. 

[Meph]

Yes, but with different alliances. There are 4 in the game:

1. No tags.
2. Babysnatcher.
3. Babysnatcher and Itemthief.
4. Itemthief.

These will always be at war with each other, and will always ally with other civs that have the exact same tags. So if you make 4 different freemen, they can all fight... or trade.