Having still-suits in the game would be nice, but what I was talking about earlier was door-seals at the entrance to your fortress so that the entire fortress is basically a still-suit. Much simpler.
The entire fortress has airtight seals? How do you breathe?
We can handwave the problem of ventilation in most fortresses, but if you specify a fortress that's sealed up tight to trap water vapor, it's hard to ignore the fundamentally related problem of everyone suffocating.
(Stillsuits have a similar problem. If your sweat isn't allowed to evaporate, it doesn't cool you off, and if the climate is warm and you're exerting yourself moderately, you die. [Edit: I see SirHoneyBadger has already pointed out this issue.])
I agree that the game shouldn't go out of its way to make deserts survivable. The occasional cactus that you can brew directly into booze without adding water, fine. Other than that, it should be a matter of aggressively exploiting more general mechanics, such as trading for water or diverting rivers out into the desert.
Flashzom: We actually produce water by burning food for energy. This is highest for fat (more water than the mass of the fat--the camel's hump works like this), moderate for carbohydrates, and near zero for protein because burning protein increases urine output. The larger problem with a closed water cycle is that much of that water is vapor, and hard to keep contained. At best you can set up big chilled condensers of some kind to pull it back out of the air, but this requires some kind of heat pump.
Stop being obtuse. Of course the fortress would have to be ventilated. Right now in DF 'breathing' is merely the opposite of 'Drowning' . But when dwaves breathing properly is fixed, a massively complex system of vents will have to be built. I think this is a good thing. It will be even more complicated when you have to factor in moisture loss. This is the type of thing in DF i like, its why I play the game.
Stillsuits too hot? Of course they would be hot. The desert is hot. Its called adaptation. You get used to it. Deserts aren't uninhabitable, the people who live there get used to the heat. On that note, have you ever played an rpg where dwarves
didn't have a massive bonus to constitution? If anyone can survive in harsh environments its dwarves.
I don't want deserts to be easy to live in, and water reclamation wouldn't do that. It would just add another prong to the multi-pronged fork that would be desert survival, and I think, an interesting one.
Not necessarily...I think the scorpions would get to our dwarfs long before our dwarfs ever did.
I mean, given the technology levels and dwarf propensity, the vision I get of a "still-suit" made by dwarfs, for dwarfs, is a big copper diving-suit/platemail looking thing.
What exactly are they going to use to *cool* such a thing? And how are our dwarfs going to see or even breathe in it?
I'm sorry, but I just see it all ending badly...
...Why can't our dwarfs just dig a really deep well until they hit water, again? Pretty much everywhere has *some* groundwater-from my limited understanding-if you dig deep enough.
Ok, maybe not in DF.
I like the moisture collector idea though, and the harvesting of the cacti. Both of those could be interesting to mess around with. Not to mention the toads.
Drinking from a toad is balls-out "dwarfy". We need this as a vermin in the game.
I'm not sure about buying water, but perhaps it might be possible to transport enough of it--either by caravan, aquaduct, whatever--to eventually form a small oasis.
Big copper diving suit.... very steampunk. Makes me think of wow gnomes, not DF dwarves though.
Digging down to you hit water. In RL, some parts of desert you can do that, others you can't. This should be the case with DF. Variable difficulty. Not a problem.
Toads, i like the idea too. Like when ur dwarves are starving, they hunt vermin. They are dying of thirst, they hunt toads.
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Topic: Desert (Read 12165 times)