Speaking of hydras, with the body and tissues revamp, will the hydras (ideally) drop the correct amount of skulls?
Ideally, yeah. This is part of the hydra test. Corpse pieces track an assload of additional information, so it should all be much more effective now.
Now another set of questions: For kill orders, are they specific to a dwarf, or a fortress?
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Or are the kill orders for the next version just a base implementation that could be expanded on further later?
Kill orders are given to the individual dwarf or squad that you gave them to from the real-time/paused squad menu. It isn't something that is scheduled. Putting out bounties in the way you described is sort of neat, but also sort of strange for a militia. It might fit in more for when you can have adventurers staying over at your place or something (which would end up being reminescent of Majesty). I'm not sure how a more autonomous kill order should work for the militia. The system now is more for getting something important done in the very short term when your dwarves are behaving in a sub-standard fashion.
Possibly with Bill Nye, though.
I recently saw an interview where he was just bagging on the person that (supposedly) discovered a new cloud type. I wasn't used to this vicious side of his personality, since I only saw him on the kid's show before. It was pretty funny though, he he he.
Toady, will the player be able to assign animals to a burrow?
This would be an elegant way to allow the player to set up pastures and meadows for specific animals rather than have all strays congregate in meeting zones. I imagine designating a 20x20 burrow area outside on some grass, label it "Horse Pasture", and assign only horses to it. The horses would then (obediantly and rather unrealistically for now) trot over to the area and mill around there, which I think would be more atmospheric than horses dawdling about underground in a stone dining room. I'd imagine that they'd be eating the grass as they trample it to dirt and I think it would be a great touch.
They can't be assigned to them, as it's supposed to reflect something thinky things think about. Burrows would be useful for the later livestock updates, although in the end I'm not sure between burrows, zones, rooms, fluid workshops and piles and whatever else what the settled dust will have for us when I get there. You should have control over where they are. I just don't like the idea of them following orders on their own, even as a placeholder.
Would it be possible to assign borrows in areas you haven't mined out yet?
I am pretty sure he mentioned that you could assign a burrow to an area with a mining designation so that only your legendary miners would mine it, if it has a vein of something.
Which means implicitly, yes.
Yes, but say I'm trying to mine out a big area, in order to find something. Would I have to reassign the burrow repeatedly?
You can make the burrow over rock and you can make it as large as you want. If you get out of its bounds, you'll have to paint some more, but you can select an entire underground Z level with a simple rectangle command in advance if you want -- you can even move the cursor down to the lowest Z level so that the whole underground becomes one giant mining burrow at one command, if you find a reason for that.
The ill-named burrows
What about "boroughs"?
Yes, hence "ill-named." I think it was an awful pun right from the get-go.
Additionally, I used ill-named here as the original pun had kind of broken down (on more than the moral level at which it was already degenerate), since they don't really represent semi-autonomous administrative units anymore, but something much more general, as I went into a bit in a previous post.
Could you add an option like the sleeping options whether to use a dining room or not?
It would be good, though time is tight. Right now soldiers don't pay attentions to burrows, but there could be a squad burrow setting or something that adds areas they can use outside of their assigned barracks or something. Hopefully it doesn't all get too messy.
<various things about the manager and workshop orders> ending with:
All I want for christmas is a "do job A when output of job A is below N" option.
Hopefully this release will be out by Christmas, though if I say it it'll likely end up like all those war'll-be-over-by-Christmas promises. In any case, your request was doing quite well in eternal suggestions last I checked, so it'll be up for consideration during the various releases after this one.
Will there be practical limits on just how high attributes can go in the new version? And what will determine these limits? For example, if two creatures are exactly the same, except one has a bigger 'increases with strength' (or whatever that tag is) layer, will the second creature be able to be far strong than the first? And how will it work with mental attributes?
You can set a cap percentage in the raws. So if it's 300%, any instance of that creature will be able to increase their starting att value to up to 300% of their starting value. I haven't really had a chance to test the practical implications of my choices yet. You can set the increase/rust rates for all of the attributes, so how fast they change between creatures is up to you as well. I think it's a little weird to give everybody the same percentage of potential, so that might be shaken up over time, but I don't think it's crucial to do it now. It might be exceptionally rare to hit caps already. Mental/physical atts work the same, though I might have changed the numbers.
In the current version, if an entity has a king (or similar) they act as one big nation (like elves), but if they only have site leaders they act more like a series of city states (like humans)
I was wondering, if in the new version you had it so a nation could only be ruled by a specific rare caste, would they revert to city states until another king candidate was born? Or would they just keep acting the same, sans king?
This is all going to be somewhat sloppy until I get to the dev_next succession/schism item, but as it stands they should revert to city states. I can't guarantee that though, since I still have to do the "Handle entities with variable world gen positions" stuff in the the entity positions list up in the OP, and that's where this code will be completed. As things stand, I might end up going with the easiest-to-complete options.
Does equipment storage refer to a soldier's weapon and armor racks, are will they need cabinets and coffers as well (if the setting to have them sleep in the barracks vs a room is still viable)?
I haven't quite decided. The militia guys will likely want to stand down and return to their regular lives at times, in which case they might want their own crap outside of the barracks. Hence my ambivalence about boxes/cabinets. At the same time, there can be uses for cabinets and things for things like padded armor or whatever might be coming up, and they might have reasons to store some personal property. It's still somewhat unclear.
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What about soldier families? Will they claim and stay in a room or will they sleep in the same bed as the soldier (in the barracks)?
The 'down time' may moot these questions as the soldiers could visit their family/real rooms and deal with treasures and clothes, but I just wanted to make sure.
The families don't sleep in the barracks. But yeah, if the soldiers aren't required to sleep in the barracks they aren't required to sleep in the barracks and it's all good.
What happens when, halfway through a fort, you designate a burrow after dwarves have claimed rooms all over the place - will eviction occur and/or will they seek out a room in their new assigned burrows?
There's the matter of alert burrows and so on, where it might be more appropriate for them to keep their old rooms and just sleep in a dormitory until the danger has passed, and then there are temporary or permanent reassignments, of which only the player knows the purpose. Making it all sort of tricky. I'm not sure what the best solution is. Right now they'll sleep in a dorm until they are reassigned if you mess with their settings after they are already settled.
Instead of calling everything a barracks, why not call a weapon rack or armor stand room an armory, and a box room a storeroom?
It's alread called a "barracks/armory" from racks and stands I think. But the main issue is that the defining piece of furniture does not determine the purpose of the room. A barracks made from a weapon stand might sit over several beds and be used as a sleeping area, or it might stand mainly over empty floor and be used as a training hall. It's more the squad assignments you make afterward that determine the nature of the room, and one squad's storage room might be another squad's training hall if you line some boxes across the wall. You can give the rooms nicknames to help you out in any lists, and it'll show you the current flags for them for each squad.
Shouldn't they keep regular clothing in cabinets? Like dresses and socks?
They do that in their own cabinets, but there's not much that they have to take off since the armor just goes over those things in general. Again, this goes back to the notion of the militia having downtime and not considering the barracks their home, but we'll see how it plays out.
could we get this thread linked to on the dev_now page? Right now the only link is in one of the entries, I think it should be somewhere a little more permanent.
Yeah, I guess I could do that... sort of a monument to the amount of time this is taking.
Would it be possible to have toggleable alert statuses instead of a single alert status? E.g. status 'eat in fancy hall' could be toggled on/off with alert status 'allow passage into tree farms'; it'd be silly if we couldn't have both on at the same time. In fact, I imagine alert statuses like meta-levers in this way.
A few things would have to be enforced: Alert statuses only affect burrows which are mentioned by them, e.g. my fancy dining hall alert would not affect the mason's burrow. In conflicts, the most recent change in alert status overrides any older settings (e.g. if both statuses try and change the usage of my fancy dining hall, only the newest one is heeded). An 'ignore all other alerts' flag that would cause all other alerts to be turned off. Basically, levers all over again.
There's a problem with that now in that alert states are filling two roles (for squad schedules and civilian burrow assignments) where in some cases that is justified and in some cases that is not. Something like "eat in fancy hall" doesn't really sound like an alert, so much (edit: beaten on this). It's more like there needs to be a system of burrow tweaking that isn't really in yet, for those times when the two roles want to be split. The current alerts are more like "change how everything is working with one command in order to respond to something major and possibly recurring".
Hey Toady, I was wondering about the feasibility of training up some sort of 'military worker' dwarf.
Yeah, it's sort of a weird thing. You don't want to get too far inside their heads, and yet there's this notion of dangerous civilian work. I haven't really thought about how that might be handled. A siege-engineer type notion as you suggest might be appropriate for it, though it might not capture everything, like dangerous operations you might want your non-sapper miners to do, or something.