Print

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

[dragnar]

Urist McAdventurer has been struck by the spinning poison!
Urist McAdventurer's brain has bean pierced!
Urist McAdventurer has been struck down.

[RedKing]

I am now one step closer to my goal of having a clan of Scots Highlander dwarfs. Kilts? Check. Claymores? Check (with slight modding). Haggis? Check. Might wind up being made out of hoary marmots instead of sheep, but ye dance wi' wha brung ye. Once musical instruments actually get used, I'll have to mod in a reaction to create bagpipes (maybe 1 logs + 1 cloth?).

That brings up an interesting idea for future dev: Music as a skill, with a combat effect (like a mild form of the martial trance). You could have designated pipers/drummers/chanters/whatever inspiring the troops in combat. Would be very apropros for goblins too...what self-respecting goblin warband doesn't have drums, bone flutes, etc.?

[HammerHand]

I just had a weird question that occured to me at random: if DF is able to model animals and their constituent parts in such detail, is it possible that some day entity cultures will have elaborate dietary rules about what kinds of meat is 'clean'?

As in:  "Anything scaly with four legs is impure and must not be eaten" = no alligators, but T-Rex, snakes and fish OK

or "Anything with four feet but no hooves is impure and must not be eaten" = chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas, unicorns, kangaroos are OK, but not dogs, pigs, cats of any kind, elephants etc.

I should hope that this does, indeed, go in.

I should also hope that, once it does, we'll be able to check this information BEFORE we prepare for the journey to our new fortress.  I would hate to bring two breeding pairs of cattle with me just to find out that my Dwarves consider it a cardinal sin to consume beef or use bovine products.

Similarly, if your culture forbids the butchering of cats, you may have to resort to all those ... "creative" methods of preventing catsplosions.  I usually just cage mine up and butcher the kittens, but if I have to come up with some elaborate cat-killing trap just because of the culture I arbitrarily chose for a name hours ago...

Also, it would be hilarious fun if a culture revered cats, and refused to cage them.

[rhuntar]

Would be very apropros for goblins too...what self-respecting goblin warband doesn't have drums, bone flutes, etc.?

after all, for a goblin that flute also serves as a tasty snack!

[smjjames]

Also, it would be hilarious fun if a culture revered cats, and refused to cage them.

There already is, or rather was one, Egypt. They worshipped cats as gods/goddesses, they even had a cat (lion actually) goddess named Bastet. I don't know if they went so far as not caging them, but they definetly mummified them.

[LordZorintrhox]

The ancient Egyptians would shave their eyebrows when their cats died...

[smjjames]

The ancient Egyptians would shave their eyebrows when their cats died...

Yea, they were THAT devoted.

[Neonivek]

I am getting uneasy with finding out the reasons, or probable, reasons for all these often nonsense practices.

For example one good reason for near catworship by the Egyptians is that Cats is because of the very serious rat problems they prevent. Though that may not be the official reason, I am just extrapolating.

[Lancensis]

I am getting uneasy with finding out the reasons, or probable, reasons for all these often nonsense practices.

For example one good reason for near catworship by the Egyptians is that Cats is because of the very serious rat problems they prevent. Though that may not be the official reason, I am just extrapolating.

Well they were in the habit of depending on large stockpiles of grain, weren't they? It's not so bad if your civilization depends on meat and animal products, but if you've got a huge silo of cereal that's got to last you untill next year, you'd definately want to keep rats out.

[kiffer.geo]

This makes me wonder, is DF going to have magical prosthetics that could enhance a dwarf?

Have a look in the power goals... The devs think of everything?   Power Goal 45. The Adams Brothers think of absolutely everything.

[Jetman123]

Bastet was the goddess of the home and homefront. This basically indicates that cats weren't just used to keep rats out of the grain siloes, they were also heavily used in homes, and probably quite beloved pets.

On the other hand, they didn't like dogs, seeing them as servants at best.

As for the prepared bits of animals? Dear god, I can hear my butchery shop crying. So... much... clutter...

Then again, I'll only need one hunter if dwarves can make use of every bit of it. One animal would provide enough food to keep 14 dwarves going for one meal cycle...

[RedKing]

One potential way to easily (IMHO) put in dietary restrictions would be to look at a civ's pantheon. If any of the deities are "typically represented as XXXXXX", then you could have a dietary taboo for that animal. For instance, I've seen the occasional dwarven deity represented as a mountain goat. So, goats would be off the menu.

Or, goats might be the main dish. Cultures are funny like that. I think a civ-wide taboo would be a heck of a lot easier to code in than a civ-wide preference. Alternately, it could be tied to the specific religion of that deity, so only members who worship that deity observe the taboo. Kind of nice way to create sub-cultures within a civ.

[OneRaven]

If turtle shells are now left at the fishery, does this mean that the prepared turtles that merchants bring are no longer a source of shell? Moods/mandates just got a little bit harder.

[Footkerchief]

If turtle shells are now left at the fishery, does this mean that the prepared turtles that merchants bring are no longer a source of shell? Moods/mandates just got a little bit harder.

It probably does mean that, yes.  On the other hand, cave lobsters will probably be much more common.

Progress still going steady!  I'm holding out hope for a 2009 release, not that it really matters if it's a week later or something.

[Shoku]

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/imgs/crafts.png

HA! I told you guys that we should be able to make ivory crafts now

The image of a dragon tooth crown is just awesome, and very dwarfy.

I notice that there are no walrus tooth items, so maybe there is a size limit to what teeth can be made into stuff?

A bear tooth necklace would be cool though. I could picture the elves having them from animals that died of natural causes.

They'd probably have a strong stigma about cutting animals up, alive or not.

Once the bones were all that was left past the rotting phase maybe but bones often don't survive so well to that point so there would be very rare teeth things available to them.

On the subject of calories and energy consumption; about a third of a human's energy every day goes into pumping Ca²⁺ and K⁺ to keep up the charge gradient along the plasma membranes. Both ions are constantly pushing back through the barrier, and must be pumped back in/out. All reactions in the body require this charge gradient, and failing to pump the ions equals death. I don't know how much energy elephants need for this, but I guess it's going to be the same amount of energy per surface area of membrane.

I don't think the average layman is going to recognize that that is in regards to nerve cells without you at least using the word neuron.

That's fine; he wasn't necessarily talking about nerves.  All live cells constantly pump ions across their membranes, and I imagine that muscles pump more ions overall than nerves.

Calcium and Potassium are the specific ions used to create the polarity changes in neurons that open up the gates that let those ions through making the signals that "travel" down the axon. Muscles do make use of the ions but I've gone and fuzzed up my memory of quite how the chemistry of that works. I've just got all the useless unlabelled diagrams in memory now -_-

Back to meat for a minute...guys, the whole bonus from meat comes when you feed the animals things that you yourself cannot eat.  Eg, you can get a lot more food off dry rangeland by feeding the grass to cows and then eating the cows, since you can't get any food at all directly from the grass

Thing is, most of fodder for mass produced meat is edible for humans (beet, oats, etc.). Still, humans need to eat meat to be healthy (vitamin B12 for one thing), we are omnivores and arguing whatever we should or shouldn't eat meat based on the amount of energy needed to produce the same amount of calories is pointless.

get back to topic

Historically we fed our farm animals with the corn that was too low quality to sell to anyone else and a little bit of stuff we couldn't eat, like the cob left after you've taken the corn off of it. Or maybe we could eat that and just don't.

I think fairly often we'd be able to grow something we could eat instead of food for cattle but ya, it's silly to try and take meat out of our diet. Maybe reduce it from what we do now a bit but there's a fairly obvious balance that works for us.