Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Footkerchief]

For those player, it'd be better to allow import/export of water resource, rather than simply cutting them off. Worldgens should follow what you said, but the players don't have to follow the worldgen, and the oppounities to actually survive should be present, otherwise it won't be fun in any way 

Fair enough, there's no reason to prevent water imports as long as they cost an economically appropriate amount.  (disregarding the fact that economic stuff is more or less completely broken at the moment)

[Warlord255]

Forging - water is needed to quench and harden metal and extinguish the forge when work is done
Gem Cutting - water wets the grinding stones used to cut gems
Fish cleaner and Butcher - occupationally water for cleaning these workshops
Cook - water is needed for many foods and to clean dishes
Dyer - all fabrics are dyed in vats of water
Lye Maker - water is an indispensable ingredient in making Lye from ash and thus for Potash as well
Tanner - water is needed to soak and soften animal skins before leather can be made

A counteroffer; certain workshops are built and have full "water" when first made. The workshop must be reloaded by bucket every X uses. This way the water is stored at the shop, and (it is assumed) used for the necessary application until it runs out, whereupon it is refilled.

Forging: Every 50 uses.
Gem Cutting: Every 100 uses.
Clean/Butcher: Every 10 uses.
Kitchen: Every 10 uses.
Dyer: Every use.
Lye Maker: Every use.
Tanner: Every 10 uses.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ Oh wow, I like that.  You should have to build the workshop with a barrel, though.

[Warlord255]

^^^ Oh wow, I like that.  You should have to build the workshop with a barrel, though.

Dwarf Fortress has more barrels than Donkey Kong.

Dying and lyemaking I think ought to be fairly balanced gameplay-wise, since dye and lye industries are strictly optional. The butchery/kitchen/tannery ones aren't really all that bad, since you are rarely mass-processing hides/meat/corpses. If you ever need to , however, this would give an added incentive to having multiple workshops.

A final note; at 2 uses left, a job should be generated to refill it, so you don't make 2/10 meals and get interrupted.

[Impaler[WrG]]

I think your numbers are an order of magnitude too high, their would be no point to it if it only amounts to one bucket of water every year or two, tanner and kitchen really must be every use and forge should be very frequent enough so that it might as well be every use.  Programaticly making water part of the reaction gives us finer control and will be simpler to implement then a counting-up-uses system as it just data in the normal reactions rather then more code.  Storing water in workshops could work and dose make sense but it also adds more code, the player will presumably be able to create stockpiles of water barrels in the future and this will provide practicably the same convenience as an internal water reserve.

[TrombonistAndrew]

Forging: Every 50 uses.
Gem Cutting: Every 100 uses.
Clean/Butcher: Every 10 uses.
Kitchen: Every 10 uses.
Dyer: Every use.
Lye Maker: Every use.
Tanner: Every 10 uses.

Don't forget:

Still: Every use.

[Warlord255]

I think your numbers are an order of magnitude too high, their would be no point to it if it only amounts to one bucket of water every year or two, tanner and kitchen really must be every use and forge should be very frequent enough so that it might as well be every use.  Programaticly making water part of the reaction gives us finer control and will be simpler to implement then a counting-up-uses system as it just data in the normal reactions rather then more code.  Storing water in workshops could work and dose make sense but it also adds more code, the player will presumably be able to create stockpiles of water barrels in the future and this will provide practicably the same convenience as an internal water reserve.

As someone who's done metalwork; with a standard oil-barrel size quench bucket, you do not switch out the water every time you quench something unless you are utterly OCD; water lost from contact steam takes a whole lot to start losing any significant amount. Likewise, the amount of water used for (of all things) gem whetstonery for a single gem could fit in a drinking glass.

If you want to make it REALLY labor-intensive;

Forging: 25
Gem Cutting: 25
Clean/Butcher: 5
Kitchen: 5
Tanner: 5

[irmo]

A counteroffer; certain workshops are built and have full "water" when first made. The workshop must be reloaded by bucket every X uses. This way the water is stored at the shop, and (it is assumed) used for the necessary application until it runs out, whereupon it is refilled.

If the workshop starts with full water, you can get free refills by rebuilding the workshop. It should start empty and need to be filled.

For things like forges and jeweler's shops, I might not require water at all. Or require the barrel to be filled once, when the workshop is built, but water consumption per job is zero.

Also, I think that if the workshop is adjacent to a water-filled tile, it should automatically take from that as needed. Supplying water to workshops should be an easier problem on water-rich maps where you can afford to dig canals through your workshop area, or put them all next to a river, than on desert maps where water is hoarded and rationed.

[AlienChickenPie]

Regarding trading for water-
The WHO recommends 4.5 liters per day for human adults laboring in high temperatures. Dwarves are smaller than humans, so let's put their number at around 3 liters per day. This means around 1100 liters a year, or 5.5 oil drums full of water per dwarf, just for sustenance and not counting any evaporation or spillage, not to mention industrial uses. To sustain your seven starting dwarves alone, you'd have to carry 7700 liters a year, nearly 40 oil drums.
The annual water supply for a small fortress would fit in a large caravan, but it would probably be very expensive and fairly unreliable (from an ingame point of view). Your dwarves would have to use their water very carefully, work hard and secure their area well to avoid dehydration. This means whatever you're going to do in the desert has to be pretty profitable or important.
If you're going to add water requirements for the various industries, which I wholeheartedly support, you'd increase an industrial fort's water consumption several times over, making water delivery by caravan extremely unrealistic. A fortress in the desert acting as anything more than a tiny military outpost shouldn't be able to sustain itself on water delivered by caravans. It's unrealistic and undwarven compared to the alternative, which is harnessing an aquifer.

[Pilsu]

Might be viable once you can establish outposts to gather water (and other minerals) for you. Constant caravan traffic from the edge of the desert should keep you sustained

Half the map being uninhabitable would be outright boring

[AlienChickenPie]

A desert fortress relying on imported water won't ever be viable because the lives of everyone in it depend on a constant stream of easy targets crossing the desert. Small discontinuities in the supply line would shut down your industry, while large ones would take lives. You would have build and invest in a very fickle state of equilibrium.
Aqueducts or underground pipelines would make this situation different, but they would still be a very large investment on which the player would have to make returns for the game to be anything but hopelessly broken.
One of the things I find attractive about DF is the way it forces you to deal with rough terrain. "Order an automated solution to the problem" goes against this part of the game experience and goes a long way towards making the different biomes functionally meaningless.

[TrombonistAndrew]

Half the map being uninhabitable would be outright boring

What worlds are you creating with half of the entire landscape being desert?

Along these lines, I agree that a desert environment should NOT be automatically habitable. You need some source of water to survive.

Furthermore, historically, industries that did get a resource from the deep desert did not process it out there a whole lot. They mined it, then took the stuff to a city to process it. DFwise, this means that any viable desert fort without an aquifer will have to import all their water for drinking, and probably only be able to sell the mined minerals or whatever resource WITHOUT processing it and using up extra water. Which means that the resource itself better be pretty valuable. Which means that world economics has to work before this is feasable.

I think that in practical terms this would mean it's worth it to mine out an adamantium deposit in a desert, assuming that the player hasn't flooded the world with it from other forts - or perhaps some kind of rare desert creature which only spawns in a certain area which produces an extremely useful extract or leather or something. Or if that magnetite deposit in the middle of the desert is literally the last one accesible by a civilization.

Stuff like that.

[Granite26]

The problem is that currently, there's no reason to set up an outpost colony that exports raw materials and does not support a real civilian populace

For some of the less intensive jobs, putting it 'near' water may be sufficient.

[Ivefan]

Time to consider watercontaining plants like cactuses, subterran water pockets and also that certain caves are inherantly moist and thus suitable for farming plump helmets or whatnot.
but otherwise i support the idea for more uses of water and it would make rain more important.

[rjensen1]

Something that occurred to me the other day, while driving in stop-and-go traffic during a snow storm; was that there seems to be a dramatic scarcity of water-usage for transportation. I know that dwarves probably aren't terribly sea-worthy, but I'm sure that the same species capable of incredible-machine-type goblin traps could manage at least a simple boat; (not to mention that there are other species, like eleves and humans which I'd assume would be more boat-proficient) Anyway, currently we are using rivers and such as water sources and/or for fishing; but we're ignoring another HUGELY important importance, and that would be their use for transportation. It's much easier to transport many goods via boat, than pulling them with livestock. I know that some of the various arcs talk about using rivers, etc, but think about this.
*shipyards
*hand-digging channels all over the map to transport large amounts of whatever on barges, setting up major ports and forging breathtaking trade agreements with neighbooring towns (which would be a bit abstracted, as you might not be able to "follow" around your clipper ship you've loaded up with tons of goods
*dealing with pirates
*having some species send boats to your town each year for trading.
*tossing chopped wood into the river and picking it up, downstream at a lumber mill.
*having people stop by in town on a river-ferry, just to visit (and stay overnight at an inn?)

I'm aware that most of these things are larger scale than "Hey guys, I've got 7 dwarves!" But I'm also aware of the draw of a large-scale project seems to bring around this place. Perhaps there could be preset shapes/sizes of boats (ranging from a small rowboat, to various sizes of flat-bottomed barges, to larger clipper ships... they could all just offer a 'platform' which you could then add things to, just as in your fortress... traps, ballistas, stockpiles, kitchens, fortifications, etc. (perhaps even the hold would default to a solid block, or a few different presents, and you'd carve it out... different sizes of boats would have varying #s of Z levels, which could be carved out. Also, these would use shit-tons of wood, so perhaps elves wouldn't build boats, unless they could make smaller boats out of metal, or pumice?

A lot of these things would require more of the economic arc additions, as well as regions and such; (what does having a large clipper-ship matter if you've got no where to send it?)

Also, people talk about building above-ground fortresses, but what about a large house-boat?

Sorry for the rambling, and hopefully I'm not repeating something that's been posted elsewhere... these are just a few ideas.

In one of my geology classes, we were talking about how at one time, Europe was this massive crisscrossing of man-made channels that were used to transport goods from one place to another.