In any event if we want any sort of realism the question we should be asking ourselves first is: why DON'T female humans have beards? And why do male humans have beards?
The hormones linked to beard development in males are not as present in females in general. At least, that's what I remember it being.
Well ya but those hormones don't do anything to the hair growing off the tops of our heads. Why should it impact the hair coming off the lower fronts of our heads?
Testosterone is directly related to the growth of facial hair and a significant portion of body hair. Hence men grow beards and women do not. Women with high natural testosterone levels (or who take it as a steroid) will grow more facial and body hair, though it requires a major imbalance for them to grow something you'd call a beard.
Without another explanation I am personally inclined to presume the male beard is incidental. The beard itself is unimportant, and unlikely to be selected for or against. However, high levels of testosterone are also associated with increased muscle development, aggression, and libido, all of which are evolutionarily desirable traits in males.
Conversely, high testosterone is undesireable in females. Aside from being responsible for male sexual characteristics, increased aggression in females is generally a bad idea. The survival prospect of a species whose females regularly get killed in unnecessary fights is fairly grim. This is especially true of a species with a ~nine-month gestation and mostly single births.
No, look. Testosterone doesn't innately have anything to do with hair. He grow hair off the top of our head, in our armpits, our groins, and usually a semi thick coat of it on our arms or legs. None of that hair takes testosterone.
So the question is why would we just happen to have this big patch of testosterone triggered hair roughly centered on our chin? It had to somehow get there in the first place before "more testosterone" could give it any extra push.
My guess for males is that a thick full beard is a show of healthiness and excess resources (protein), much like a lion's mane or a peacock's fan, although in all three of these cases I'm not entirely certain why females don't have corresponding structures.
Umm...they (at least female humans) do have corresponding structures (i.e. physical traits which indicate health and excess resources). I hope I don't have to explain what they are.... 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines
Typically, it's males of a species who evolve..."plumage" (for lack of a better catchall term) in response to mating pressures. Basically, critters with bigger whatevers have more success finding a mate, so their genes get passed on to the next generation. There's not always a practical reason at work (other than increased mating chances, which is really the *prime* yardstick a mutation is measured against to judge it beneficial or not).
Females lack the mating pressure in most populations, so they don't need to evolve showy plumage. In more social animals, females do seem to evolve sexual characteristics or strategies to attract healthier/stronger/smarter mates in order to safeguard herself and her offspring (again, evolution is all about preserving one's DNA legacy).
I prefer not to say that's what evolution is about so much as that anything alive today has a very long history of ancestors who managed to pass on their DNA.
You can tell which direction sexual selection goes in a species by looking at which gender is at all picky about who they mate with. So for humans it's both ways but with a little bit of a female bias. With drunk humans it's nearly only weak female bias.
I vaguely recall some line about Gimli not wanting to talk about female dwarves, as if they were some kind of secret.
Are you sure that wasn't added by the movie? I don't recall Gimli saying much about dwarven culture other than how awesome Moria used to be and how awesome the Glittering Caves still are.
No, I read the books quite a ways back so I only watched fragments of the movies. I tend to not want to sit still and quiet for several
days hours at a time.
probably a fair bit of why females don't have beards is just plain husbandry: human males don't seem to like bearded human females (we cringe), ergo human males don't breed with bearded females, ergo bearded females cease to exist.
if you ask why human males don't like bearded females it would be that a male does not want to attempt to breed with what appears to be another male, for if he did then his line would slowly die out ergo, no bearded females
Arbitrary evolution aside, I think the question is more about why beards should be a male feature in the first place more than cultural nudges at keeping it that way.
Indeed. All you need for a steam punk fortress are turbines that provide power in the presence of steam and a boiler workshop to turn coal and water into steam. The DF community will handle the rest.
Maybe some secondary gears and axels that are instead pipes.
Where did this notion of Dwarves being steampunk even come from. Is it a Gamesworkshop thing, or did Blizzard do it?
It came from us knowing that the game used to have steam but now it doesn't I'd say.
"Oh the things we could do with that"
hee hee blood extract hee hee vampire fortress hee
Toady said non-sentients only.
I got the impression that vampires un-sentient-ed whatever they were planning on factory farming in most of those stories. Docile cattle are preferred to ones that will scheme prison breaks and so forth.
From my understanding, milking still requires the creature being milked to be carried. I don't care what you say, you can't carry a cow.
Um, dragging is still in the game. Your dwarves drag creatures to the Butcher's Shop and the Kennel. And for being pitted off of towers.
A: dragging creatures is painfully slow.
B: Milking didn't used to drag it, probably in part thanks to the question of where to drag them to.
It would be kind of weird if milk-type extracts weren't caste-level, since then you'd be able to milk males.
We already had this conversation a couple pages back. Cloth-for-tying-around-ankles* will doubtless provide a link to it if we ask.
*by which I mean Footkercheif.
I was making a strong effort to to think of some kind of new partial sock.
Please could you release a list of new creature names so that those making tilesets can prepare them in advance?
Unfortunately a lot of people in the Dwarf Fortress user base find the game unplayable without one. I'm aware that you might be hesitant to reveal all of the creatures, but perhaps you could provide the list only to the reliable figures who have made tilesets in the past, and who ask for it in exchange for their secrecy? (I'm sure someone who loves the game enough to make one of the better tilesets is not likely to break such a promise)
As long as the tilesets we currently have can be quickly adapted to the new version (which is a matter of resolving changed directories at most), I don't think the game will be unplayable for those who need graphics without the tiles for new creatures. Nearly everything in the new version would then remain as graphically facilitated as it would be in the old version.
Will it be so horrible to go underground, and in the middle of your tiles see a Giant Cave Spiderman represented as an "S" instead of a small picture?
Ohmygawd an R! What the hell is that? I can't take it anymore!
So and so is throwing a tantrum.
Aaah ok, I don't know particularly much about the tilesets, I presumed the pictures would be in a different order (or something) and the tileset would be broken
Nothing so wretched. You have a second text file where you say the grid size for the graphic and then assign x y coordinates based on species, job, caste, age and maybe some other stuff I have forgotten. It's actually very low hassle so you don't even need to list all of those (ex: you could use one line to say all dwarves look like one image and then another line that said just female pump operators used a different one.)
Sorry if this has already been answered (is there a consolidated resource with all of Toady's answers sitting around somewhere? On the wiki maybe?)
Are burrows single z-level, or can you make a burrow that is say 20x20x3?
My impression is that even if they are single z-level, you could just make 3 of them on top of each other and assign dwarves to all 3 to get the same effect?
Perhaps they will be like workshops and multiple burrows can have multiple dwarves enabled for them.
However, then making your dwarves live in vertical tower-burrows would become very tedious.
Not really. The d# series has convenient little macros I have been using to dig my complex stairways.
Go figure...not only has Toady created a kickass game, he's found a way to implement universal free health care! 
Well it's long been known that Dwarves are heartily Communist.
Urist McSurgeon cancels store item in bin: Attending Death Panel
Canadas not communist...
Canada has socialized health care, not universally free healthcare. They pay for it in taxes.
Boo taxes. I only want to pay for the healthcare, roads, and soldiers that I go through, over, and walk by.
Relatively-pure quartz simply does not form whole layers in DF. Silicate minerals do, but none pure enough to make glass at all, never mind as pure as rock crystal.
And yes, there are plenty of other varieties of quartz, but they have color for a reason; they're much more impure than rock crystal is. If they were chemically-identical, after all, they'd have the same color.
Perhaps they are the same chemically but one is angry and another is upbeat and so on.
Relatively-pure quartz simply does not form whole layers in DF. Silicate minerals do, but none pure enough to make glass at all, never mind as pure as rock crystal.
And sand of different colors and structure gives all the green glass. Great.
And yes, there are plenty of other varieties of quartz, but they have color for a reason; they're much more impure than rock crystal is.
"Much more" means addition of somewhere about 0.001% of rutile, aluminum or pitchblende. ;-)
If they were chemically-identical, after all, they'd have the same color.
Ahaha. Tell this to graphite and diamonds.
Those are not chemically identical. The electron structure is very different. Different in a way that can make medicines cause birth defects different.
Well, not more then a tile or two anyway. I *have* been thrown in full armor by really big guys before, so I know it's possible. You just won't go flying twenty feet or anything like that.
And I've been hit with a hammer so hard I flew twenty feet and exploded on a wall.
Wait.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3635047 times)