So basically, I have a lot of mods. A lot of them are broken, poorly implemented, poorly written, and generally poorly-thought-out, so I've stopped updating them. This entry is basically going to be a bank of my discontinued mods, along with some thoughts about why I stopped working on them and why I feel they didn't work out. This feels kind of pretentious and self-aggrandizing but I want to do it anyway, mostly to clear my head, unclutter my dffd profile, and set my priorities. If anyone else is actually interested in this, maybe they can use this stuff to improve their own modding skills as well. I'm certainly open to helping others with their own experiments.
Link:
https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=15436Before I go into this, I should explain how I rate my own mods. I have several criteria.
1. It needs to be functional (obviously). No game-breaking bugs or crashes
2. It needs to have good atmosphere. When someone plays it, what they see and interact with should evoke some kind of sincere emotion. I don't really like making jokey stuff or parodies, or mods where everything is all over the place. The caves should feel a certain way, the forests should feel a certain way, the rocks and trees and animals should work together to make the player feel something.
3. It needs to have good lore. I write pages explaining what everything is and why it's there. When you see something, there should be a reason for it to be there which gives more meaning to its presence. The lore needs to be internally consistent, interesting, and while it doesn't need to explain everything, give the player enough context to give their actions meaning in a wider narrative. In games like Dwarf Fortress where everything is randomly generated, of course, this isn't strictly necessary, since all the lore you need can be found within the game's world. But this is me holding my mods to my own personal standards, and the sort of mods I like to make use DF's mechanics as a way for the player to experience the world I have created, which necessitates a good enough explanation to make the player care about it.
The Age of Steel:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169425.0It really just wasn't very good. I had no idea what I was doing mechanically or thematically, I hadn't grasped how to properly mod the game or how to actually make a compelling setting, so in the end it was easier to just give up on. You might see some vestiges of it in my Long Night mod as it did teach me how to make decent robots. I do like it as a reminder of how far along I've come, though.
I will say there's a funny story behind its creation. At the time, there was a bug going around where invading armies in adventure mode would fall asleep and never wake up. I'm a huge fan of games like Mount and Blade, and enjoy the feeling of living in fear that some massive army will roll up to my town and destroy everything that I love. This bug made that impossible, which was frustrating. So, I resolved to create a mod where the armies never slept, because robots don't need sleep. The creation of Age of Steel was more or less entirely for that reason. If it weren't for that bug, I would not have become the dwarf fortress modder I am today.
The Endless Dark:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169739.0This one was sort of overrun by my own ambitions. I originally wanted to keep it nice and sweet, take all the creatures in caves from vanilla DF and put them on the surface to make everything caves, but I went too far and it sort of ran away from me. I was adding all sorts of things with no care as to how they fit into the world, and while this was actually my first foray into experimenting with permanent creature transformations, I hadn't figured out how to make them not CTD the game. Also, it just doesn't really work. Just checking weather shows a sun and blue sky, really takes you out of it in my opinion, but maybe I'm just too fixated on the small details.
The Last Age:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=170034.msg7720124My first gothic/dark fantasy mod. I have some things I like here and some I don't. I do like the basic atmosphere, the dying fantasy world populated by undead and such with black plants and a (though in lore only) red sun. It was heavily inspired by Angel's Egg, if you couldn't tell from the fact I actually used it as the OST for my menu. I am proud of it regardless as my first (in my opinion) truly atmospheric mod. That is, it was the first one that I thought could really immerse the player in a setting of my own design. But even so, there's a lot of holes in it, and I stole too many ideas from DnD. I can't really call it "my own". Plus like the ones before, there's a bunch of mechanical bugs.
Realms of the Gods:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173694.msg7956420#msg7956420Another case of not enough inspiration. All I really had going for me was the Roan and their god-kings, with everything else being a mess. I would say, however, that its competently put-together on a mechanical standpoint, in the sense that by this point I had gotten most of my bad modding habits ironed out. In terms of writing, it's lacking. I was going for a sort of 70s psychedelic fantasy vibe but with a Greek aesthetic, but it never really grew into something I could turn into a proper mod.
Extinction:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=170317.msg7739146#msg7739146This one is sort of embarrassing. Basically, I read a manga called Arms Dealer, got too excited, and tried to make it a bootleg dwarf fortress mod. I didn't have nearly enough ideas to fill out the world, leaving it barren and unpolished. The whole thing is a crash and burn for me.
Rising Tides:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=170845.0I actually really liked, and still like, the concept for this mod. To me, it feels very dark, surreal, dream-like, while still retaining a lot of grittiness to it. There's a bunch of story hooks basically. However, it's simply impossible for me to make DF into a continent-sized castle. The game won't let me truly bring the idea to life. I was fitting a square peg into a round hole, basically. However, I do intend to eventually add something like this into one of my other mods as a unique biome, if the opportunity to do so ever comes around.
Colonialism:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=171468.0For me, this mod was the definition of all style and no substance. I could have stuck with crazy europe, or feudal japan. Instead, I mashed them together, added sea kaiju, and turned it into a poorly-defined mass of nonsense. I will say, however, that the wooden landships I originally created in this mod are the best things to have come out of it and I have used a much, much more sophisticated version of them in my mod, Fall From Grace. A lot of hints of this can be found in Fall From Grace, actually. I'd almost call it a precursor.
Steam and Steel
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=171468.0In theory this was a good idea. Make a steampunk victorian setting, add the tropes of the literature of the time, profit. Morlocks, frankensteins, hydes, and aliens duking it out. There's definitely a glimmer of a good idea in there, but heavily marred by the fact that no matter how hard I try, I cannot rejigger renamed trees and grass into the ruins of a steampunk megacity. Luckily, it's only quasi-dead. Many of its concepts will be moved to Fall From Grace or Beyond The Great War as much as DF allows me to. So its spirit will live on in the dark pulp fantasy of the past and the industrial revolution of the future.
Also, pretty much all the clockwork stuff was directly lifted from the blog, Against The Wicked City. While normally I don't mind taking ideas from other content creators, I don't like making money off of it without their explicit permission, and even in that case, half this mod is basically lifted from another guy's setting, so I feel like I can hardly call it my own. Its really a weird one for me.
The World of Flesh
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=170251.0I saw the trailer for Scorn and wanted to dorf it. I should probably have waited until I actually had a proper concept besides "meat dimension" and "greek naming scheme". I may someday make a World of Flesh 2, But Better if I ever manage to figure out an expansive enough concept to fill 3 cavern layers, like 10 different biomes, and enough species to make the world feel well-populated, or DF introduces partial procedural race generation, in which case I can make the world into a morass of unique mutants.
Also when you get down to it, skin is an important organ. Skinless stuff really wouldn't last very long in a harsh environment without some other form of protection.
Mechanized Warfare
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=171666.0and
Road to Armageddon
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=174116.0I wanted to make a cheesy mecha setting in a game where, at the time, mounts were impossible. Now, mounts are possible, but its either you as an adventuring party being the only guys who have mechs, or you're getting invaded by an army of mechs and can't send them out yourselves in fortress mode. Furthermore, the game is not designed with mechs in mind, and there's a good chance all autoresolve-based battles will be horrendously broken even when mutual mounted combat happens. I have no idea why I thought making a mech game under these restrictions was a good idea. It seems like it'd be fun to play these mods but it really isn't since it's like the ultimate bait-and-switch, at least for me.
If there is ever a time where big mech battles are viable in dwarf fortress I will either resurrect these mods or make something better than both of them.
So that's my thoughts on all that stuff. I will clarify that you are welcome to use anything found in here in your own mods (and stuff in my still-active mods as well). There's a bunch of what I hope are little good ideas buried in here, so maybe you will find it useful.
