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[penguinofhonor]

Line of Sight, If a dwarf cant see it, then you cant. Mainly this would be important so that you can dig out a ore vein, then wall it up, and not have too look at the Mined out Vein. Or maybe just a way to hide those tiles.

No, no, no. A thousand times no. For two reasons:

1. You're supposed to be the near-omnipotent controller of your fort. You should be able to see everything that isn't sneaking.

2. Calculating line of sight for a large number of dwarves every turn would cause huge lag.

[PenguinSeph]

I agree.  Respawning chasm, cave, magma, and underground river creatures would be nice.

Agreed.

Living rock could be handled by having pockets of hidden creatures (some kind of ooze maybe? You could have tones of hidden creatures.) that are in rock. The further down you go, the larger and more common the pockets become.

And it would be nice to have aquifers of different speeds. So that on some aquifers, you can pump the water out. Maybe sometimes, it could be so slow that no water is produced until you've dug out half of your tunnel?

Forgotten tombs? Cities? Ruins?

And what about cave-ins?

[Othob Rithol]

All the above suggestions are already in the list...just not labeled as such...

For instance, if you look at "Unstable Rock" you'll see it is about cave-ins...it was from a suggestion in another thread about "Earthquakes". I guess I could re-label it a bit clearer...

The idea bout tree roots was also recently discussed, but hits the same wall: trees are currently single tile structures. IF Toady takes us into a world with giant trees like the Millenium Tree or Tolkein's Mallorn....then it becomes an excellent addition.

We fleshed out the antmen pretty well (they lend themselves well due to their real world equivalent) but what about the other races? Batmen, Ratmen, and Troglydites(sp?)....they could probably have more fleshed out lairs.

Ratmen could have two really annoying abilities:

• They breed like the wind, so having just 2 in a cavern could lead to a swarm.
• They could be the underground equivalent of kobolds...trap-proof thieves

Gremlins I have always seen as a solitary menace....I really miss their old 2D annoyance factor. Now it is just nearly impossible for them to actually get into a Fort and cause some mischief.

Renaming Unstable Rock to Cave-ins, adding in burrowing creatures (easy to explain, common request)

Also, to reiterate...this thread is not about game mechanics....things like digging speed, LOS, etc. This thread is about map features, underground races, geology etc.

edit...aaaaaaccccckkkkk...just spent 20 mins tracking down one out-of-place "list" markup

[Fieari]

Gremlins could be improved by making them either endolithic-- you encounter them by digging, and they'd try to escape your dwarves trying to kill them instead of fighting back-- or they could be diggers, the kind that don't leave tunnels behind them.  I kind of like both ways it could go, in that the first way is reminiscent of unleashing a spirit, and the second way is more of an omnipresent fey-force wreaking havoc in your fortress.

Gremlins could also engage in theft, as well as drink your booze, for those fortresses that don't have levers hooked up anywhere.  They could additionally jam up your weapon traps, making them need to be cleaned before further use, and futz with any gear mechanisms you might have... as that's what gremlins are supposed to do.

[DJ]

Sorry if I'm being off-topic or repetitive (I didn't read the whole thread), but I think I have a neat idea for endolithic monsters. At least for evil endolithic biomes.

What I have in mind are undead fossils. So you could be happily mining away, when all of a sudden there's a skeletal t-rex in the middle of your fort. To make things more fun, perhaps the fossil undead should be tougher than the standard undead. For example, you could give them a better damblock and explain it away as superior hardness of rock when compared to bone.

[penguinofhonor]

Sorry if I'm being off-topic or repetitive (I didn't read the whole thread), but I think I have a neat idea for endolithic monsters. At least for evil endolithic biomes.

What I have in mind are undead fossils. So you could be happily mining away, when all of a sudden there's a skeletal t-rex in the middle of your fort. To make things more fun, perhaps the fossil undead should be tougher than the standard undead. For example, you could give them a better damblock and explain it away as superior hardness of rock when compared to bone.

Oh, gosh, this would be dangerous. And awesome.

[Othob Rithol]

What I have in mind are undead fossils. So you could be happily mining away, when all of a sudden there's a skeletal t-rex in the middle of your fort. To make things more fun, perhaps the fossil undead should be tougher than the standard undead. For example, you could give them a better damblock and explain it away as superior hardness of rock when compared to bone.

That's a great idea...I've been meaning to add an entry into underground specific undead encounters...and that definitely fits...I really like the idea of them being high DAMBLOCK due to fossilization. No here is a tricky question: do they drop bones or stones?

Other undead (will likely share the same entry) could include lost tombs and necropoli (as in a functional civ/city of undead...not a collection of tombs....or is it?)

[Fieari]

They'd drop fossils, which would be a type of gem.  Some mods have done this already.

[isitanos]

They'd drop fossils, which would be a type of gem.  Some mods have done this already.

Actually, finding various types of fossils could be very interesting in itself - even if they are not all undead. We could use various fossil creatures as statues, sell them...

Concerning antmen, I think stealing eggs from the queen (to raise your own "ant-babies") would be an interesting challenge.

[Fieari]

In fact, fossils could be a material type, and large undead fossils could drop masterwork statues made out of it.

[Psyringe]

The living rock idea has potential, but I'm just trying to get my head around how it'd fit into the game... we don't really need more rock, do we? And would it be able to fight/be fought by dwarves? Some sort of accretion organism (coral, barnacles etc) might fit, and would tie in with the endolithic biome.

I agree that we don't really need more rock on *most* maps. But i thought that it might be fun to find a very rare spot of harvestable living rock on a map were rock is otherwise hard to get (above an aquifer, for example). In this case living rock would be a welcome addition to the map. In other cases (when there's already a lot of rock around), living rock might pose an additional challenge if it tries to expand into your fortress and plugs your hallways.

[Psyringe]

I hate that algorithm.  It's a great puzzle, but its not something that has any basis in the real world (nothing dies from having 5/8 neighbors, and certainly doesn't do so instantly) and such a system is really really hard to set up to be self-sustaining AND harvestable.

I disagree with the latter part of your comment - it wouldn't be harder than building a self-sustaining water wheel/pump system. You just have to understand how it works, once you've done that it's easy. It would require a bit more of surveillance to set it up correctly, since you're working on a living organism which can change its formation during the setup phase, but I don't think it's hard to implement. ADoM (one of the most popular roguelikes) implements a slightly modified Life algorithm for the growth of herbs, and it's utilized by many players. Of course, there are also extensive FAQs on how to set up your herb farm in ADoM.

You've got a point with the realism part, although Life is not an entirely artificial algorithm. It was designed to model the expansion cycles of very simple organisms, i.e. situations where organisms on the fringe find enough nutrients to reproduce, whereas organisms in the center don't (and therefore die). I think it's a quite elegant and efficient algorithm for modeling the behavior of primitive organisms under certain conditions.

But of course, it's not the only possibility, it was just the first candidate that came to my mind. For a feature that can reproduce itself, I'd want some limitation to prevent it from expanding across the whole map (unless you set it up to do so). The life algorithm is an easy way to do that. A "population cap" for living rock would be another one, but would feel much more artificial to me, hence I'd prefer Life. But I'm definitely not saying that there can't be better algorithms around.

[Sprout]

I'd like to see some major historical stuff that doesn't show up on world gen even with events revealed found hidden in underground caves. Perhaps those age-namers were wrong when they said that all the megabeasts had been slain by children...




You have discovered a hidden cavern deep within the mines!

Urist Dragonsnack cancels dig; Interrupted by Dragon Hatchling


The 'pillars' are dragon eggs, by the way- I couldn't really think of another tile to use for them.

[PenguinSeph]

I'm not sure if this counts, but right now dwarfs don't have to worry about running out of air at all.

Should that be added? So that you have to have Dwarf Fans and shafts going from the surface to the fort, to ensure that the dwarfs have air? How could this even work?

[Skizelo]

I think in real life, we do have to pump fresh air around mines. I'm not sure how to code fresh and stale air,but if it worries you, Dwarfs were built for underground. They require so little oxygen, they can get it from the mold in their beard.