Will the sword do nothing, or will it act as a bludgeoning weapon since iron cannot cut steel?
Yeah, right now it would end up being a bludgeoning weapon, and though I'm just starting on the character of wounds, it should probably make dents if it manages to strike hard enough to get up to the yield point. I'm not sure if I'll get to damaging items, though it should be possible and it currently has a place on the list. In that case, the sword would become dull (it tracks the edge's sharpness now) and possibly break if you get beyond the fracture point. Items don't yet have anything like specific wounds, so having things like the sword becoming tragically bent are out of reach for this release.
Will eligibility for becoming a noble be able to be restricted on a caste-specific basis?
Yeah, this release.
This might be too much, but separating central and peripheral nervous tissue might make sense, especially for things like pain and regeneration. I believe peripheral nervous system tissue can regenerate much, much more than something like the brain or spine, and certainly would have more pain reception.
Currently all of the nervous tissue away from the spine and brain are abstracted away (as the pain receptor value for example), as are ligaments and tendons, so the nerve tissue template currently refers to the spine only. I guess the sinew making up tendons is a common useful material, so that'll probably be added in later on, but likely not this time around. I'm not sure if peripheral nervous tissue will ever be in as a material in vanilla DF, though I can see it happening if I start added specific nerves (and arteries/veins). The arteries are also currently abstracted as a single tag.
Can the tag [BIOME:SUBTERRANEAN_WATER] be used for civs too?
Nah, I haven't done anything with underwater civs at this time. I'm not sure when that will happen. I'm going to be doing more with the underground this time around, but there are so many irritating pathing and other issues with underwater/flying stuff that it'll probably take a more concerted push to get through it than I'll be able to muster for this release.
Thanks for the melting points. I imagine correcting the various fudges and errors in the metal and other defs will be an ongoing saga.
Huh, I just noticed blood is only present in the new raws as a material template... are the "blood types" still hardcoded?
I just haven't gotten to bleeding wounds yet, so I haven't defined blood in the raws yet, as I'm not sure what I'll end up with. I was thinking of tracking blood events on the ground with a bit more precision, as there generally aren't a zillion of them and it's currently eating up a ton of map bits, so I'm not sure if the current blood type notion will survive. It'll take some looking at though. Everything about blood should make it out to the raws, though that isn't something I can promise.
Hmmm... Gaseous blood...
I hope so. I already have the boiling material flow it uses for the molten metals and alcohols, so it shouldn't be too hard. It would be cool to mix it with the poison effects when I get there. I suppose powder blood should also be allowed now that I have a separate powder state. Then you can be attacked by Time Men that have glass on the outside and sand on the inside, and I can be fired. That might work better with a whole sand tissue layer though.
That's the adamantine example there, but I don't know what affects what.
As it mentions in the stone material template raw (I think that's the one), 4 of those categories don't matter yet. The high impact and shear numbers will make it resistant to all attacks and also cutting attacks specifically. In game terms, the yield=fracture means that if you manage to hit the adamantine hard enough, it won't dent but will fracture immediately. I don't think the low elasticity (which is probably actually something like yield strain, but I found inverting the moduli convenient -- I think it's strain with scale 1000 times the percent deformation at yield) will matter for items at this point, as it only is used so far in determining some skin/soft tissue like behaviors for attacks on creatures. It also makes the current notion of adamantine thread something that needs some explaining. Since I threw the numbers in haphazardly without considering that, one can now start to come up with some sort of weird hooking together sewing thingy that the dwarves do -- either that or some miracle chemistry they do that lets them get around the raw mechanics. Since the elasticity number doesn't matter for adamantine items, perhaps it could also be changed, but I currently like the starkness of it. In terms of adamantine weapons, the edge and shear properties mean it will be able to slice through steel for example quite easily, even though the low density means that it won't be effective in bludeoning weapons. Normal cutting weapons won't be able to slice through your adamantine armor, but you can still get knocked around.