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[Mephansteras]

Personally, I love the richness of detail in Dwarf Fortress. The fact that it contains rocks like Microcline and metals like Bismuth bronze is awesome.

But, as we all know, the game makes some broad decisions about how much you can get out of a single resource tile.

Metals are a good example of this. In reality, Bronze is only 10% tin and 90% copper, not 50/50. Same with Brass being 10% Zinc and 90% copper. And Bismuth Bronze is actually about 50% copper, 30% Nickle, 10% Zinc, and only 1% Bismuth. With some lead in there to boot. Now, I don't think we need to go to THAT extreme of realism (although it would be very Dwarf Fortressy to do so).

I would like to see more realistic alloy amounts and whatnot, though. As a way to do this without trying to manage the fact that you'd need 9 copper bars for every 1 tin, I'd like to see some way to deal with partial amounts in the game.

Two ways to do this. One way would be to be able to break things down into parts less then 1. So you could have, say 40% of a bar of tin left after making some Bronze. Or we could simply inflate number up, so that you get, say, 10 copper chunks out of a tile of copper ore, and those make 10 copper bars.

Actually, that would allow for a gradient in mining skill. Rather then the all or nothing method right now, where even my Legendary Miner occasionally ruins a whole tile of Platinum, you could have a failed attempt simple produce less then 10 of whatever the stone is. This would also allow for a more realistic use of resources. After all, 3 Marble mugs should take up a lot less stone then a Marble Throne. It would also add in the breakdown of wood for all of us who are annoyed that it takes a whole tree to make either a single bucket or an entire bed. Larger furniture productions would simply require more pieces. And a better woodcutter would be able to bring back more usable lumber from a tree then a novice.

Thoughts?

[Buugipopuu]

Has been suggested before for wood, and it's a sound idea if a little difficult to properly implement.  As for the 1 Bed = 3 Mugs thing, I try and pretend that it's really 1 Bed = 3 Sets of Mugs, where 1 Set of Mugs is about as many mugs as you can make from 1/3rd of an average tree.  If 1 Plump Helmet really means A Plateful of Plump Helmets, and 1 Grass Seed means Enough Grass Seeds to cover a 1m by 1m area in grass, it's not much of a stretch.

What does need partial amounts is armour.  I'm not sure that making a suit of full plate, a sword and a shield for a dwarf uses up as much iron as is needed to build three solid iron statues each as large as the dwarf meant to be enclosed by the plate amour, and you can't use the 1 Sword = 1 Pile of Swords rationalisation with that.

[Draco18s]

I'd like to see ores drop more than one chunk (and trees drop more than one "log"), which would also offset the strip mining required to build a small construction out of steel.  We can make 400 foot tall sky scrapers in real life with the amount of ore in a dwarf fortress sized fort (typical 6x6).

Another reason to have legendary miners: a novice will always drop 1 ore, but a legendary might get 3 (rock though, is rock, either 0 or 1).

[Buugipopuu]

We can build skyscrapers from the amount of ore available on a single map because our architects make steel framed buildings with glass shells, and use I-beams and other design tricks to reduce the amount of steel used.  Dwarven constructions use sold steel walls at least a foot thick (walking along the top of them is trivial, not that there's a Balance skill that could be used).  The techniques required to use steel like we do haven't been invented yet.  I agree that it still takes far too many squares of mining to get a useful amount of steel (and that for every unit of steel one gets, an entire cube of marble was consumed, does steelmaking really eat up as many tons of flux as it does ore?).

Now, higher levels of building designer meaning it takes fewer metal bars to build a given construction (via mass construction designations) would work.

[Pilsu]

Or just, you know, make statues cost 1 bar of metal

Hmm, 3 native gold statues vs 1 golden statue. Gee, hard decision especially considering they have the same damn value

[Buugipopuu]

Wait, that won't help.  In fact it'll do the opposite.  Then you could make 10 Iron Statues using the Iron needed to make 1 suit of full plate, a sword and a shield.  It's even more absurd.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

Or just, you know, make statues cost 1 bar of metal

Hmm, 3 native gold statues vs 1 golden statue. Gee, hard decision especially considering they have the same damn value

i think the solutions would be a balancing in prices ...

[Stromko]

Wait, that won't help.  In fact it'll do the opposite.  Then you could make 10 Iron Statues using the Iron needed to make 1 suit of full plate, a sword and a shield.  It's even more absurd.

I think presently a chest plate takes about 3 bars, and most furniture (including statues) takes 3 bars. If it's hollow this sort of makes sense, and depending on what size barrels and bins actually are it makes sense enough for them too.

Having ore stacks instead of one solid ore, just like we have plant stacks instead of always producing one plant, might be a reasonable bit of complexity. Although Dwarf Fortress presently doesn't allow restacking of things, it's not a big concern if you use bins -- if bundles of bolts are any indication, you can stuff bins with massive amounts of depleted stacks, the lessened size/weight seems to be taken into account.

Actually wouldn't it be just as good if we kept having regular ore-rock that just drops or doesn't drop based on miner skill, but started having stacks of bars generated by furnace operators? I'm not sure if it'd be heavily skill based or what, part of me would be sad to no longer be able to set furnacing on all of my crafters, then again it would be pretty awesome for legendary furnace operators to finally be useful. It could be weighted so that a regular furnace operator gets at least 50% of the potential of an ore bar, and a bad one gets at least 25%, so that it isn't too grueling for newbies or the unlucky. So a regular furnace operator would probably give you a '5 bars of copper' from copper nuggets, or they could give you '2 bars of silver, 3 bars of lead' from tetrahedrite (just as an example, I don't think those ratios are accurate).

The reason this appeals to me is that Dwarf Fortress already does it, it stores 'partial bars' invisibly in each furnace when you do melting jobs or process ore* that contains trace amounts of other metals. Invisible partial bars is kind of an awkward way of handling it, so having stacks of bars is a way of making this visible, something you can plan around and manage, and I think DF really thrives on that. This would allow you to have multiple smelters melting down metal gear without getting any 'orphaned' metal split among multiple smelters, because you'd more often get little bars of metal that can be hauled to forges and used together even if they're different stacks.

(* I haven't actually watched to make sure this is so, I just know when I process certain ore my smelters start producing multiple metal types)

[Buugipopuu]

I think presently a chest plate takes about 3 bars, and most furniture (including statues) takes 3 bars. If it's hollow this sort of makes sense, and depending on what size barrels and bins actually are it makes sense enough for them too.

You can either have:

Iron Chest Plate: Weight 1,178
Iron Gauntlets: Weight 196*2
Iron Helm: Weight 157
Iron Boots: Weight 157*2
Iron Greaves: Weight 471
Iron Shield: Weight 393

Total Weight 2,905

Or:

9 Iron Bars, Weight 1570*9 = 14,130

Or:

3 Iron Statues, Weight 2,355*3 =7,065

Judging by the efficiency of the processes, forges don't melt metal down and reshape it into the required shapes, they take a solid block of metal of the size they want and chisel away at it until is the right shape and dump all the excess metal into a matter annihilator.

(* I haven't actually watched to make sure this is so, I just know when I process certain ore my smelters start producing multiple metal types)

Smelters don't produce partial bars when smelting ore, but some ores have a percentage chance to produce secondary products.

[Granite26]

well, part of it is that this is a game as well as a simulation.  Things are priced(materials cost) based on use-value as well as realism

[LegacyCWAL]

Iron Chest Plate: Weight 1,178
Iron Gauntlets: Weight 196*2
Iron Helm: Weight 157
Iron Boots: Weight 157*2
Iron Greaves: Weight 471
Iron Shield: Weight 393

Total Weight 2,905

Don't forget the Cap and Chainmail that you can trick them into wearing underneat that

[Mephansteras]

Thinking more about stone and mining, I came up with the following thoughts.

1) Ore. Having novice miners destroy ore makes no sense. Gold, for example, is so valuable that people pan for gold DUST in rivers. I don't care how many chunks the novice is putting it into, you'd be gathering it all up. It gets smelted later, so who cares if it's in a large chunk?

2) Stone on the other hand, need to be in nice large pieces for most uses. Crafts can probably get away with being made from rubble, but things like Statues, Doors, etc all need to come from nice big blocks of stone.

3) Gems require careful digging to avoid breaking them too much. Although even a small ruby is worth a bit.

So, I had an idea of how to do this.

Miners still put things into large or small chunks, based on skill. Small chunks, though, aren't lost. They are simply reduced to Rubble. Rubble can't be picked up and hauled the way large chunks are. You have to it into a bag, bucket, or cart (when those are added in). This makes it so that there is still an efficiency advantage for having your Legendary Miner doing the digging, but you don't lose ore when your novice decides to go gold mining. It just means you need a way to transport it back before you can use it.

For gems, I think you'd have a much smaller chance to get a large gem out of Rubble then out of large chunks. And perhaps some chance that you'd get nothing usable out of it at all, but even here I don't think you should get NOTHING out of the gem cluster. You can be pretty sloppy and still get something, although it might be worth less. Perhaps if gemstones start getting an inherent quality, we could have it that gems gotten from rubble have a lower average quality. I've always thought that gems SHOULD be a raw material with quality, since that's how it works in real life. After all, a flawless gem is worth way more then a flawed one.


This system works well regardless of whether we're using the partial amounts I proposed earlier, or simply as a change to the existing system.

[Draco18s]

Miners still put things into large or small chunks, based on skill. Small chunks, though, aren't lost. They are simply reduced to Rubble. Rubble can't be picked up and hauled the way large chunks are.

My only issue with this (because I like the ideas) are that getting rid of stone is currently a problem that has lead to people building 400 foot tall statues of dwarves.

Adding mining = [rubble|stone] just adds more useless material (rubble can only be used to make stone crafts means that I won't use my stone to make stone crafts, thus unless I've got plans for a giant engineering project I'll never get rid of it) I'll never use.

Actually wouldn't it be just as good if we kept having regular ore-rock that just drops or doesn't drop based on miner skill, but started having stacks of bars generated by furnace operators? I'm not sure if it'd be heavily skill based or what, part of me would be sad to no longer be able to set furnacing on all of my crafters, then again it would be pretty awesome for legendary furnace operators to finally be useful. It could be weighted so that a regular furnace operator gets at least 50% of the potential of an ore bar, and a bad one gets at least 25%, so that it isn't too grueling for newbies or the unlucky. So a regular furnace operator would probably give you a '5 bars of copper' from copper nuggets, or they could give you '2 bars of silver, 3 bars of lead' from tetrahedrite (just as an example, I don't think those ratios are accurate).

I like that better than my idea.  Just to tweak it a bit, this is the one place I'd allow for "rubble."  Miners mining a vein of ore or gems will drop either a stone of it (usable all the ways it currently is) or a rubble version (gold dust, silver slivers, ruby gravel...) that can be processed in an attempt to get a "smelted" version out of the tiny chunks (gold dust/silver slivers -> gold/silver bar, ruby gravel -> cut ruby).

[Mephansteras]

While stone is still an issue, with the ability to mass Hide/Dump it it's not as big of a problem. Also, if you start building large roads out to other settlements you may find yourself 'exporting' large amounts of stone and rubble for those jobs anyway.

Which reminds me, rubble can be used to build roads, up to a point. Since most ancient roads are slabs built on top of rubble and sand and whatnot anyway. Wikipedia has a good article on how the Romans built roads, which is how I figure the dwarves do it.

[Othob Rithol]

A lot of this can be fixed by simply converting everything in the game from 1 old unit = 10 new units.

Old: Mining a single tile makes 0 or 1 ore, based on miner skill.
New: Mining a single tile makes between 1 and 10, based on skill.
Same for wood, cloth, plants etc)
All the "new units" generated are a stack to avoid hauling issues.

So a farmer, when harvesting, gets 5-50 plump helmets (which breaks the endless, pointless debate over if it is one mushroom or a bunch). Brewing would no longer give 5 alcohol per plant, but rather one alcohol for every 2 plants. A dwarf would eat 10 plump helmets in a sitting. Cooking would sum the inputs, divide by 10, and dump the remainder as a stack.

What that would give is 10x the resolution for defining how much of a given resource is used. Instead of 1 cloth=1 cloak=1 pair of socks, we get 15 cloth=1 cloak, and 2 cloth=1 sock.