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[Vester]

Well, tentacle demons have corrupt intentions, so I assume they're sentient.

[Nexii Malthus]

Well those dire wolves have intentions of ripping your throat and eating you alive but they aren't exactly sentient either.

[Vester]

Yeah, but I always associated "corruption" with "evil".

Evil is always sentient.

[Nexii Malthus]

Evil & Good was always something 'From the beholders' Eye' kinda thing.

A nuclear weapon is evil but isn't sentient. Sentience is also an abstraction, an impossiblity as true sentience can never be achieved. Intelligence, thought and self-consciousness are all shades of gray.

Going a tad off topic here.


Ontopic-ish:

Dwarf Fortress is one of those rare games where you learn-as-you-go. I find it amazing how you can learn new things as time goes on, one of my favourite types of gameplay that really appeals to our innate human curiousity.

[Vester]

Wait, what? Evil isn't innate. Evil can never be innate. Evil is, by definition, the privation of good. So it's more of an absence than a presence - a lack of good.

Think of it this way. It's not "evil" that you have no wings and therefore cannot fly, because you aren't supposed to have wings in the first place. There's no privation there. But crippling a pigeon's wings is "evil", because you are depriving it of the "good" that is its natural state.

Also, a nuclear bomb is neither sentient nor evil. It's a lump of metal and electronics that can be used for evil (to deprive people or animals or whatever of the "good" that is being alive).

...

For the sake of being on-topic:
I just recently noticed that cave-ins, apparently, will punch right through floors, resulting in great hilarity. All 20 z-levels of it.

[piecewise]

Wait, what? Evil isn't innate. Evil can never be innate. Evil is, by definition, the privation of good. So it's more of an absence than a presence - a lack of good.

Think of it this way. It's not "evil" that you have no wings and therefore cannot fly, because you aren't supposed to have wings in the first place. There's no privation there. But crippling a pigeon's wings is "evil", because you are depriving it of the "good" that is its natural state.

Also, a nuclear bomb is neither sentient nor evil. It's a lump of metal and electronics that can be used for evil (to deprive people or animals or whatever of the "good" that is being alive).

...

For the sake of being on-topic:
I just recently noticed that cave-ins, apparently, will punch right through floors, resulting in great hilarity. All 20 z-levels of it.

Under that definition it would mean doing things like eating, cutting my hair and burning wood is evil. And if burning wood is evil, that means the elves are right.

Are you saying the elves are right?

Because I hope you're not.

[smjjames]

Also something of a facepalm moment. I just now tried to erase a whole bunch of webs by making it burst on fire, without realizing that the silk made from it also bursts into flames!!

Now I have to make it boil away to put out the fires. I only hope that enough dwarves live to fontinue, and I really hope my champions are okay.

Edit: Whoo, luckily, no casualties and since I had it boil at room temperature, nobody got hurt. I also magically put out the fires and I guess it was so brief that the effect was more like your clothes suddenly emitting light for less than a second. Everybody is going to complain about smoke for a while, but my attempt at improving FPS should work.

Edit2: pfft, no FPS improvement, but it did remove some floating webs.

Edit3: I did start a brushfire, but only a couple replaceable sacrificial alert critters died, and a few wild critters.

[Micro102]

boil?

Can you heat up water? Can that be turned into pressure and used in a megaproject?

[Vester]

THE ELVES ARE NEVER RIGHT.

[smjjames]

I was tweaking the raws. I don't think steam can be turned into pressure right now. Maybe someday, but not now.

@Vester: huh? who are you yelling at? nm....

[Phantom]

I just learned a valuable thing, if you give elves iron and towns, their numbers and power will even make the orcs squeal in fear, so I gave the humans steel, there were a lot of ruins everywhere.

[Leafsnail]

I just learned a valuable thing, if you give elves iron and towns, their numbers and power will even make the orcs squeal in fear, so I gave the humans steel, there were a lot of ruins everywhere.

Yeah, if you look at legends mode (admittedly a mess, but you can gain a general idea from a quick look) you find that elves always have lots more troops in any battle.  You also find that they always take a lot more casualties, ranging anywhere from 5 to 20 times as much (or sometimes they can even take heavy casualties without inflicting any on the tiny numbers of their opponents).

[Biag]

I think I actually had a battle once between like 75 elves and 50 humans, and only one elf survived. He (she?) won. I hope Toady includes survivors' guilt someday...

[Leafsnail]

I dunno if elves would feel guilt.  Their battle plan seems to involve marching single file into the enemy.

[Rowanas]

This is a fortress mode thing I noticed, but there's no thread like this in fortress mode. Anyway, I discovered that if you don't ask for anything you get warned about not strengthening trade bonds! I never saw that before, but it's awesome.

EDIT: Just discovered something else awesome. It rained during winter (instead of having a snowstorm) and as a result water that fell into a murky pool turned instantly into a 7/7 ice wall. Hopefully with this much water being created, my farms will be automatically irrigated every three or four years at least.