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[Silverionmox]

terraforming, the ability for sentients to create geological features, that normally are natural.

Not so much for every sentient and his mother, but very cool for wizards, gods and last but not least the player, when designing scenarios.

[Heron TSG]

Terraforming I understand. why only sentients and why even them?

[jamoecw]

beavers diverting rivers and such i can see, but creating sinkholes, overhangs, creating lightning rods to control and increase the likely hood of lightning strikes in sand, and a few others i don't see animals doing.  and i am considering mega beasts as sentient for this purpose.  in the past we have created anything from mountains to islands, diverted rivers, expanded and contracted deserts, forests, lakes, seas, oceans, etc.

it would be great to give the world a personality during worldgen, and possibly (later in the development cycle) while the player is playing.  imagine a field of sinkholes left over from a war between dwarves and humans, and in checking the history logs you find that the dwarves, being outnumbered decided to create a 'minefield' between them and the nearest human settlement, so that most, if not all of their army would perish before it even reached their halls.  or a small group of goblins on the run from some hunters, went into the desert at the beginning of summer, and created some overhangs so that they could survive in the deadly heat, so that when the hunters finally met up with them they were half dead already and the goblins easily won what should have been rather difficult battle. even non battle related stuff, like humans so in awe of finding a fulgerite where lightning had struck, that they began to place iron rods in the sand when ever a storm came in hopes of getting more, but these artificial fulgerites were shunned, so the humans that were trying to make a fortune off of the fulgerite sales, pulled their lightning rods leaving vast fields of fulgerites untouched.  or a great dwarven caravan, laden with precious metals, gets washed away while trying to cross a river, and for decades afterward the settlement down river swells with people panning for these precious metals, all the while sending expedition after expedition into the barren mountain in hopes of finding imaginary deposits of gold and platinum.

[Bricks]

Having old battlefields show up during worldgen would be awesome.  Lots of mythology and history about battlefields.  Redcaps come to mind.

[jamoecw]

Having old battlefields show up during worldgen would be awesome.  Lots of mythology and history about battlefields.  Redcaps come to mind.

try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redcap

instead of:
http://'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redcap'

and could you elaborate on how they tie into battlefields?  or terraforming?

[Craftling]

Im not sure if this comes under Aboveground diversity abandoned but trenches and pa's*.

*A pa if like an earthwork fort.

[Heron TSG]

So, ancient battlefields and earthworks it is!

[TrombonistAndrew]

Too add a bit of chaos to the land: if the population of certain kinds of animals reach a certain limit per land area, they begin to migrate, herd, or rampage throughout the countryside. This could affect things like benign elephant or locust herds who just go through and eat everything but otherwise leave dwarves alone unless attacked, to army ants which are extremely aggressive and will need some pretty good fort defenses to repel. The animal herd should probably roam through all of the adjacent biomes that it can live in and not be restricted to just one. And the population limit to begin "herding" should depend on the land area and population of these combined biomes.

To add to this idea, it'd also be cool if the game kept track of relative populations of predators vs. prey species, so that if a fort happens to be extremely successful at wiping out the population of wolves and cougars in the area, there are more deer or moutain goats or whatnot which eat up the vegetation and when they start to run out of food, they raid farms.

Along these lines, I'd like to see plant-eating animals which actually eat plants on the terrain: grass eaters turn grass tiles into dirt tiles which gradually turn back into grass over time; tree-eaters like elephants eating trees and bushes; and so on.

[Bricks]

I think some of that is already planned for the next update, but not to that extent.  Rampaging animals would make savannas fun places for forts.

There are a lot of simple biological principles that could be used to track the ratios of certain species (via trophic levels) and see if there is an imbalance, which would make implementation pretty easy.  Another way to piss off elves, too.

[Heron TSG]

BAMP!

[Craftling]

Too add a bit of chaos to the land: if the population of certain kinds of animals reach a certain limit per land area, they begin to migrate, herd, or rampage throughout the countryside.

Just wait for locust season.

[Rowanas]

You know that every three thousand gens will produce a world in which the first fort suffers from a migrating horde of zombie whales. Queue reclaim parties.

[jamoecw]

that would be cool for adventure mode.  run around with a harpoon hunting zombie whales, always looking for that special one.

[Granite26]

that would be cool for adventure mode.  run around with a harpoon hunting zombie whales, always looking for that special one.

You mean the skeletal one?

[Rowanas]

No, he's referring to the special one that kills you. So, the first one you meet, I guess.