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[Kanddak]

If it slows the spread of the cancer known as dwarven social circles, I'm in favor. 

Hell yes. Every time some dwarf throws a party, draft the tanner and order him into the meeting hall to break things up.

I'd love to see Giant Hogweed and its sap. As fun as the vomit pond around the entrance to my fort full of cave-adapted dwarves is, it'd just be fantastic to see them come out into the light and end up with horrible blisters... or to put the stuff in barrels and pour it on merchants. Attempting to remove, build over, harvest, or extract from certain plants without the appropriate clothing should be dangerous.

It would also be wonderful to see adhesive materials, perhaps starting with dwarven syrup and cave spider silk and moving on to a giant dwarf-eating sundew plant. These would have obvious military applications when building things like drowning traps; if first group of goblins gets stuck in my glue trap, I can wait for the second group to walk into the trap and kill more of them with one drowning cycle. Being covered with a sticky material should also make things more easily covered with other materials, including things that wouldn't normally stick to them, so that you can tar and feather people. And it should probably also be very bad to get glue on levers, pressure plates, traps, gear assemblies, doors, and so on; perhaps one day, sieges will catapult barrels of sticky substances into your entryway to jam everything up.

Certain materials should be able to hopelessly foul dwarves' beards, causing a very unhappy thought for the affected dwarf and making them a social outcast. This would include sticky stuff, as well as plants like burdocks. Plants with sticky seeds could have a number of other interesting implications, especially if said seeds are also poisonous to dwarves.

The damned elves should probably have none of these problems with plants. They probably cultivate them on purpose as a form of defensive barrier around their retreats.

[G-Flex]

I agree with the last point, and think races need natural variable resistances to toxins and other ailments.

For instance, elves wouldn't have much of a problem with plant or animal derived toxins, especially plant, but would have relatively poor defenses against, say, poisonous earthen substances, although they'd probably have good defenses overall. Dwarves, on the other hand, would probably be VERY good at avoiding the sort of natural problems (silicosis, asbestosis, black lung, mercury/lead poisoning) that would occur in their line of work, but their bodies would freak out if they swallow too much birch bark or whatever. Humans would be sort of middle-of-the-road, but since humans' schtick is adaptability, a good immune system makes a lot of sense, especially against ingested/injected poisons.

[G-Flex]

I never said it shouldn't be. I just said it should be a low priority.

As someone said to me, DF is about making a "compelling fantasy world". Accurately modeling pollution does not seem like an important part of that.

This is Dwarf Fortress. It tries to accurately model GEOLOGY and weather patterns, things which medieval people didn't even really know much about.

It's easy to overlook environmental/occupational hazards in the game right now because they don't exist and they're not the kinds of things most people think of, but they were a common fact of life in the time period represented by the game, and they still are, and the uses for it are numerous. It would add another level of depth to the game which makes sense for the time period that is (sorta) represented, and would be an important part of life.

Granted, I'm not saying it should have priority over the other changes that are close on the horizon. Obviously, I'd like to see other stuff first myself, but I think this could be pretty nice, and not TERRIBLY hard to implement once toxin-type stuff is fleshed out a bit.


And tanners... christ. Urine/ammonia, dung, and a bunch of other stuff I forget. Not very pretty. Not to mention all the flesh scrapings all over and sitting in vats.

[Footkerchief]

I agree with the last point, and think races need natural variable resistances to toxins and other ailments.

For instance, elves wouldn't have much of a problem with plant or animal derived toxins, especially plant, but would have relatively poor defenses against, say, poisonous earthen substances, although they'd probably have good defenses overall. Dwarves, on the other hand, would probably be VERY good at avoiding the sort of natural problems (silicosis, asbestosis, black lung, mercury/lead poisoning) that would occur in their line of work, but their bodies would freak out if they swallow too much birch bark or whatever. Humans would be sort of middle-of-the-road, but since humans' schtick is adaptability, a good immune system makes a lot of sense, especially against ingested/injected poisons.

I'm starting to think Suggestions is turning into a hivemind: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=30301.0

[G-Flex]

Shit, I didn't even see that thread. Heh.

[Mel_Vixen]

This is Dwarf Fortress. It tries to accurately model GEOLOGY and weather patterns, things which medieval people didn't even really know much about.

You would be surprised if you would see an list of "Farmer rules" for weather. Weather was essential to farming, Sailing and war. Sure the guys back then didnt know what an deep or an highpressurezone is or how to meassure temperatures but they did knew ammonut of rules that apply to weather.

Geology is the same. They did know an good amounts about it but they didnt know why this stuff did work.

[Felblood]

Don't forget Native American tanners, many of whom mostly just worked with brains as a tanning agent.

I'd like to see basic protective equipment start to show up, if serious environmental hazards appear. A facekerchief shouldn't prevent coal miners fro getting the black lung, but it should slow things down.

Coal miners and smiths should be covered in layers of soot.

I'd like to see mechanics turn into grease monkeys, but that needs to wait until dwarven gears require lubrication.

[Kanddak]

I'd like to see mechanics turn into grease monkeys, but that needs to wait until dwarven gears require lubrication.

Damn, that's a good subject for thinking about material spatters.
I have one fort with an extensive power network across multiple Z-levels. Suppose some clumsy mechanic spills a lot of grease around a gear that transfers power downward. That could present a slipping hazard, causing dwarves to plummet down the power shaft to their deaths.
And if they get the grease all over themselves, they could then track it all over staircases and near wells. I'd want to build waterfalls in all of the entrances to my utility system, and/or be careful to use dwarves with good agility or personality traits favoring cleanliness as mechanics.
And, like everything, it could have wonderful military applications. Besides the obvious pouring of boiling oil onto invaders or nobles, I'd want to build a system to pour grease onto my bridges, causing passers-by to lose their footing and fall into the moat to die.
Pouring water onto a bridge in freezing weather should accomplish the same thing. There could be a lot of other implications of water coverings turning into ice coverings when it's cold; long before someone gets encased in enough ice to be hilariously killed and used to decorate your fort, they should slow down from the ice layer accumulating on the joints of their clothing, and get icicles in their beards.
Hm. Weather is just rain and snow right now; how about some freezing rain? Besides the wonderful ice coverings, it could take down trees and kill saplings. Trees felled by weather should probably become auto-forbidden logs so that dwarves don't rush out into the foul weather to collect them.

On a totally different note, perhaps dwarves who spend a lot of time in sand, especially collecting it, should suffer the indignity of getting sand inside their clothes.

[Footkerchief]

I'd like to see mechanics turn into grease monkeys, but that needs to wait until dwarven gears require lubrication.

Damn, that's a good subject for thinking about material spatters.
I have one fort with an extensive power network across multiple Z-levels. Suppose some clumsy mechanic spills a lot of grease around a gear that transfers power downward. That could present a slipping hazard, causing dwarves to plummet down the power shaft to their deaths.
And if they get the grease all over themselves, they could then track it all over staircases and near wells. I'd want to build waterfalls in all of the entrances to my utility system, and/or be careful to use dwarves with good agility or personality traits favoring cleanliness as mechanics.

Yeah, greasing mechanisms would be cool.  You might be interested in this thread, where it got fleshed out.  Combining that with spatters is a new idea, though.  The lubricant itself could even be implemented as a spatter/coating of grease on the mechanism, which a dwarf deliberately adds.

It would be pretty hilarious if slippery floors caused creatures to randomly fall down or slip into an adjacent tile.

[Kanddak]

It would be pretty hilarious if slippery floors caused creatures to randomly fall down or slip into an adjacent tile.

Turtles can be eaten to obtain shells.
Can bananas be eaten to obtain peels?
And you thought the macaques were obnoxious before...

[Felblood]

I can't go within six feet of an engine without getting covered in black, grimy grease, but I have never been so covered in clean oil that it posed a trip hazard.

A spilled bucket of gear lube could very well be quite dangerous, but most grease that get's spattered is going to be the black gunk that you get when you mix out with dirt and soot. It's sticky and gross, and it take forever to clean off of anything, but it isn't really very slick.

Water spills should pose a serious trip hazard, as should paint spills and significant layers of clayey mud.

It would be cool if Lye and ammonia spatters caused disfiguring scars, but didn't actually would dwarves, since you could lose a lot of labor that way.

[Random832]

Cinnabar wouldn't be the only issue either - even though other stuff isn't poisonous per se it's still bad to breathe in - it'd be interesting to see black lung and silicosis (though dwarves should have a significant resistance to it compared to humans)

[BonSequitur]

It would be very damaging to gameplay if, suddenly after a few years, all your early miners start dropping dead or going into forced retirement because of black lung, or if they all started going mad and vomiting everywhere because of heavy metal poisoning. So I don't much see  the point of that, unless it was something that afflicted some dwarves more than others (So that most dwarves would skip getting any mining-related disease entirely, a few would have cause to complain, and some would be heavily afflicted). The problem with having labours that slowly kill or drive mad each and every dwarf assigned to it is that you would get waves of death and madness going through your fortress unless you did a lot of micromanagement to rotate the labours (Which would prevent you from getting legendary miners, as well). And a wave of death and madness, with several old, established dwarves dying, would almost certainly cause a tantrum spiral. Dwarven psychology is fragile enough as it is without them being inevitably doomed.

Maybe mining skill could protect miners from mining hazards, and so on for other types of poison and splatters. An unskilled tanner would get ammonia and poo everywhere, but an apprentice tanner would just reek; more skilled tanners would have a lesser and lesser chance of getting spatters, until a legendary tanner would go into the tanner's shop and out spotless. Likewise, skilled miners wouldn't get black lung or cinnabar poisoning, skilled furnace operators wouldn't suffer from heavy metal poisoning when smelting mercury or lead, and so on. That would make certain skills much more important. Particularly, conscripting a mass of unskilled dwarves to work on the coal mines becomes as dangerous and stupid as it should be.

[Granite26]

It would be very damaging to gameplay if, suddenly after a few years, all your early miners start dropping dead or going into forced retirement because of black lung, or if they all started going mad and vomiting everywhere because of heavy metal poisoning.

gameplay as it exists now, not to argue that dwarves shouldn't be largely immune, but the game could still work with dead miners, people'd just have to get over the 'don't use anything but fully trained dwarves for any real task' hang up

[G-Flex]

You know, there is some player intelligence involved.

Only an idiot player WOULD send his valuable miners to go mine the cinnabar (or whatever) all day and expect him to be all right.