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[NW_Kohaku]

After making a new thread, I consider this thread essentially subsumed by the larger Class Warfare thread, which includes these ideas as part of a greater system of dwarven happiness requirements as your fortress advances.


So, I've been preparing for the arrival of my queen, who happens to be an elven queen who's done pretty much nothing but be a farmer.  I set aside my initial dwarven instinct to show her my magma forges up close and personal, and figured that if I just put her in a really pretty room filled with lots of shiney things and happy little fuzzy killing machines, she'd probably not notice that I'm usurping the kingdom from beneath her nose.

So, I started thinking about how to add that "Elfeminine touch" to the section of the for I'm dedicating to the royal suites, which includes a clear glass window wall overlooking the second story of my great hall, some waterfalls, making everything out of marble, and tethering some nice wolves and bears and giant jaguars up as "pets".  (What hippy nature lover who wants to command a little respect wouldn't want some giant jaguars and bears cuddling on her lap?)

Still, that's not what I REALLY want for a royal suite: Where are the massive red carpets?  Why can't I throw up tapestries? I want to give her a garden with fruit trees, and harvest flowers to put them into glass vases, which I can arrange around the throne and bear tethers.  Why does she just spend her time petting fuzzy killing machines, when she could better spend her time playing tiddlywinks with her consort or reading a book?  (Well, OK, spending all my waking life not spent at work playing games, especially computer games, may not sound like "better" to some people, but it does to ME, darnit!)

This whole thing got me to thinking about other aspects of furniture, furniture interaction, and nobles...  Basically, nobles are worthless lumps who occasionally make odd mandates for gopher bone crafts or forbidding the export of doors, while occasionally socializing, "slumming it" by digging up a pig tail, or maybe pulling a lever.

Even if they are useless nobility, shouldn't they do more with their day?  That's why we need nobility activities... something like jobs for nobles... only, they're more like hobbies.  I'm thinking poetry (requires paper/books), artwork (painting with more dyes or sculpting with clay and a kiln), or maybe even organizing plays that can serve as happiness-boosting entertainment, and may potentially re-enact some historic events, like that time you ordered a half dozen dogs butchered, "The Launching of Orbs".

Unfortunately, I can't, since there's no way to mod in new furniture, much less mod in a way for them to be used in any way except as a means of just adding more value onto a room.

The more I think about it, however, the more I'd like to see some sort of social stratification in Dwarven society.  Let the middle class rise!  Your starting dwarves may all be happy living their spartan existences with the bare minimals needed to sustain their life, and the workshops to defend their hold, and expand it for future waves of dwarves, but incoming dwarves will want luxuries in their life, and dwarven children might be given the chance to climb the social ladder.

The essential thrust of this suggestion thread is to be a somewhat comprehensive suggestion box for dwarven entertainment, decorations, and other things that aren't necessary for the spartan lifestyle that our dwarves are currently expected to suffer through, but to generally make your fort a nicer place to live for your dwarves.

Here is a list of general suggestions:

Furniture raws and furniture interaction tokens.

Once I started thinking about it, there were just more and more ways I wanted to mess around with furniture in ways that you just couldn't do with mere crafts items.  What if I made a marble and jet chessboard?  I would want my dwarves to be able to play each other.  (And then I'd need a "games" skill, and they could bet with each other...  And if we're betting, we could use cards, you can make that from the same paper you'd need for books plus some wax for lamenation...)  So I think the best way to deal with all the myriad ways that the fanbase can mod things is to just have a special raw file for modding in decorative and entertainment-related furniture, and a sub-menu within the build menu to place furniture.

Dwarven entertainment needs

There are often complaints about how a fully mature fortress is in no real danger of being destroyed from external threats, and that internal threats should make up for it.  (This comes up when talking about nobles often, as they have internal threats in the form of killing off dwarves if you can't fulfill an impossible demand.)  The idea here is that, as dwarves climb up the social ladder, and have more and more money to burn, rather than simply buying all those jaguars you manage to cage and tame, or cows you breed, they could demand a higher quality of life.  They could want baths so that they aren't rolling around in mud and vomit and blood all the time.  Their standards for what makes a good dining hall could rise.  They could take more free time to enjoy the sights and sounds and luxuries of your fortress... and your fortress better start having them!  No more demands for merely a window that faces another wall! No, you need to get some horse races (make that tame jaguar races), some game halls, and some artwork to admire, or art studios to blow off some steam, or I hope you enjoy your tantrum spiral.

Of the types of furniture, I'd like to suggest the following:
1.  Potted plants.  Yeah, they're dwarves, but not everything has to be stone and metal.  That's stereotyping!  Potted plants may be admired, and possibly watered, with dwarves who like gardening with their free time getting happy thoughts both for the plant/furniture, but also for being happy that they helped it grow.

2.  Easel.  Can be used with an "art" skill, spare canvas (made from rope reeds or pig tails, since as far as I can tell, they're basically hemp and cave hemp, respectively), and dyes to create paintings that dwarves can hang on their walls.  Worker dwarves probably won't go into art, but it's a way for children to pass time, and nobles can really get into it.  If we ever get a chance for dwarves to sell their unneeded personal belongings back to the fort, they can also be sold for actual nobles producing wealth for the fortress... however, paintings are even more affected by quality levels than other goods, and untrained scribbles are worthless, except to the one who drew it.  Painting should be something that you can't order, like a job, but an elective task done in free time, whose odds of being chosen should probably be affected by the "artistic" trait, and the amount of skill the dwarf already has. (Once they are expert artists, they should spend more and more of their free time focused on their craft.)  Paintings should, generally, work like engravings (in terms of subjects), except with the addition of extra decorations/value due to having dyes, and could be placed on walls, like an engraving.  It might also be neat to be able to just plain paint on engraved walls to make frescos. 

2.5: Additional dyes and paints.  Paints might actually be better made differently than dyes, and allow you to make stacks of multiple paints (maybe 5 or 10) for the price of 1 dye.  In real life, the use of coking coal produced coal tar derivatives that soon became the basis of all dyes and paints.  As such, I'm hoping that Alchemist's Workshops could have a chance to turn a by-product (potentially, you could have a "Do no produce by-product" option if you don't want to deal with them) of "tar" from the coking of coal, which can be made into paints of various colors at the alchemist's workshop.  Variety of paint can add to the value of paintings, ceramics,

3. Bookcases, books, libraries, and (dare I say it?) schools.  This has been suggested before, I know, but I'd like to re-suggest it in the spirit of being a somewhat more comprehensive "Quality of Life" suggestion.  Dwarves can, much like with paintings, as I detailed above, start writing books, either about epic tales of that time a goblin got crushed by a stonefall trap, or those other 863 goblins that got crushed by stonefall traps, or maybe even about *gasp* dwarves travelling.  Anyway, books can make their way into DF, with bookcases to showcase and store them, and with public libraries being a leisure activity for dwarves, or a special room for more literary-minded nobles or pampered legendaries.  Combined with a "classroom" or "schooling" suggestion for putting all your little dwarflings into a classroom instead of having them litter your dining halls throwing parties every day, you could have books teach your children to be more literate (or even literate at all...), as well as potentially giving them tendencies (and experience) towards more scholarly pursuits than getting really good at cooking, and making food stacks worth more than a royal throne room.  If books can have subjects that matter (that is, some books are artbooks or some are craft books or technical manuals, while some are just poetry) this could potentially send dwarves down a path of creating more sophisticated engravings and artworks or even making plays to be acted out before dwarven audiences in dwarven theater.  (And I'm tempted to combine this with an arena suggestion, and make it a really "Roman" play, with live animals and slaves getting slaughtered on stage during the re-enactment of warfare for the amusement of the crowds.)

4.  Gaming and gambling.  Chess, poker, maybe something like mah jong.  That sort of thing.  Let dwarves socializing get a bonus to their socializations and relationships (especially if they aren't really the social type, since a game they enjoy will make anyone more social) if they are gaming, and get bonuses to their happiness for doing so when they play with high-quality gaming sets.

4.5  Dwarven sports teams.  Yeah, we all have tried making "arenas", but dwarves might enjoy sports that aren't blood sports.  (Well, OK, maybe they'd still be blood sports, but they could involve more than just killing everything.)  Still, what's more dwarven than a pair of teams going at each other with hockey sticks large hammers trying to get a puck boulder into the other side's goal, and occasionally beating the other team's players down?

5.  Carpets.  Let's get some felt, made from Alchemy, maybe something like mercury, and normal animal hides.  Let's make a nice bear skin rug for our champion's personal quarters to celebrate his slaying of a bear that was trying to nuzzle its way into your booze warehouse.  Let's dye a massive stack of mink furs purple, and carpet the duchess's throne room in them.

6.  Fireplaces.  Because people really seem to want to suggest this.

7.  Bathouses.  I'm thinking Roman bathouses, here.  Dwarves already like mist, so why not give them a chance to really bathe, with heated pools (either with magma below, as someone has been trying to create in the Dwarf Mode Discussion thread), that can produce happy thoughts, as well as generally promote good health... potentially even increasing healing rates, but also being good socializing points.  (Beats meeting around the well, at least.)

8.  Ceramics - pottery, sculpture, and porcelain.  I've already made a porcelain suggestion thread as a spin-off of my suggestions for additional uses of power and mechanics, using a "High Temperature Furnace", and other people have suggested more typical ceramics.  I actually think Toady has been considering this one already, since he left notes about how Kaolinite can be used in ceramics.  Anyway, clay can be fired and glazed to make valuable crafts and potentially even furniture or statues.  Pottery can be an alterate "art", to make more crafts.  Rolling in my Porcelain idea, a high temperature furance that burns massive amounts of fuel, and requires mechanical power for an "air pump" to burn the fires hotter could turn powdered kaolinite and microcline into porcelain goods, which can also be glazed, to create extremely high-value goods.

9. Improved Statues.  Make statues depict something, rather than just being objects that take up space.  We already have a good model in the engravings system, just expand it to statues, so that it will actually be a statue of Urist McFeyMood making that artifact.  It would be even better if you could designate what category of sculpture you would want to be crafted.

10. Music.  Give those instruments a purpose!  Also suggested before, but in general, I think this could take a page out of Pharoh's playbook, and let you put musician's stands out on the corners of busy throughfares, or on a stage in the main dining hall, which radiate a happy-thought-generating zone to all who passs through the "music cloud".  This would require a music skill, possibly including a composing skill in conjunction with books, and combine artist skill rolls with instrument quality to produce the overall happiness effect upon dwarves who hear the music.

[ed boy]

I heartily endorse this suggestion.

In particular, I do like the concept of dwarves doing things in their free time. Why is it that dwarves with a "no job" or "on break" status will sit around doing nothing? It could give rise to new rooms:

Library
Designated from:chair
When in the library, dwarves will grab a book from the nearest book stockpile/bookcase and read it, sitting in a chair if one is available. They get a bad thought if they read in a noisy room

Games room
Designated from: table
If a dwarf wants to play a game, they will go to the games room. If they find a partner, they will go the the nearest games stockpile and retrieve a game. After a while, if there is nobody who can will play a game with them, they get a bad thought and go to another activity

Art room
Designated from:Easel, sculptor's table,etc...
Each form of art would have a skill and an item of furniture associated with it. When they have some free time, the dwarf will fo to the art room and create art depending on what items of furniture are inside.

Nobles, as they already have a huge amount of free time, would most liekely spend their time doing tasks like these.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, I was thinking of things like that, although I was hoping for, perhaps, something more like an activity zone, where you could more manually control the layout.  You could designate the rows of chairs near the stage to be an "audience zone", that could be considered a meeting zone whenever a play/gladiatorial game/band got underway nearby.

[Gazz]

Nobles - given that all their time is essentially "free time" - would naturally spend more time with books, art, or otherwise brainy activities.
If nobles would "naturally" acquire more education than the average stone hauler, this could lead to nobles actually becoming nobles and performing some kind of useful leadership functions.
A noble who has studied military history and the dwarven equivalent of Sun Tzu might acquire a "strategist" skill and become the leader of an army.
(Also one more way to get rid of them in a heroic manner. =)

That would be a pretty radical concept, though. A useful noble???
Yet it would be more believable than them being nothing but negative random events -  to be removed through the application of magma.


As for pottery:
Porcelain is very tricky business. Not only is (pure enough) kaolinite very rare, there are also many technical issues like very small temperature intervals when compared to "normal" pottery.

Montmorillonite/Illite based pottery is far more likely for a dwarvieval technology level.
Earthenware for sure, stoneware... maybe. Stoneware is already a big step up in technological demands.

[NW_Kohaku]

Nobles - given that all their time is essentially "free time" - would naturally spend more time with books, art, or otherwise brainy activities.
If nobles would "naturally" acquire more education than the average stone hauler, this could lead to nobles actually becoming nobles and performing some kind of useful leadership functions.
A noble who has studied military history and the dwarven equivalent of Sun Tzu might acquire a "strategist" skill and become the leader of an army.
(Also one more way to get rid of them in a heroic manner. =)

That would be a pretty radical concept, though. A useful noble???
Yet it would be more believable than them being nothing but negative random events -  to be removed through the application of magma.


As for pottery:
Porcelain is very tricky business. Not only is (pure enough) kaolinite very rare, there are also many technical issues like very small temperature intervals when compared to "normal" pottery.

Montmorillonite/Illite based pottery is far more likely for a dwarvieval technology level.
Earthenware for sure, stoneware... maybe. Stoneware is already a big step up in technological demands.

Yes, a non-useless noble... even if only semi-useful, and even if only those that have managed to get into the right kind of hobbies, is a side objective of this general catagory of activities.  If nothing else, it gives consorts a purpose in life besides being the lucky jerk who managed to catch the eye of a baroness, and gets to spend the rest of his life in one of the nicest rooms in the fort, mandating more nickle silver scepters he can line his room with or executing dwarves in between going to stud with the baroness once a year.

Anyway, I had a longer, more in-depth discussion on the subject of porcelain in its own thread.  Considering as, in this world, I've run across pure aluminum 4 times while digging one little section of my apartment complex, I don't think we're being quite THAT strict in terms of what it takes to make certain items.  Considering porcelain, even if it isn't exactly what would qualify as "porcelain" by today's standards were first produced around the first century in China (and according to Wikipedia, modern porcelain by the 11th century, which is still within the technological domain dwarves dwell within), and dwarves certainly have kiln technology, plus I was suggesting an "air pump" additional mechanism to make a High Temperature Kiln, which would supply the proper temperatures, I was thinking that there could be varying qualities of porcelain and pottery, in the same way that there are multiple levels of glass.  (In fact, ground glass can be a component of mid-quality porcelain...)

[NW_Kohaku]

I also have this notion in my mind that it would be a great way to have some stratified social classes in some sense (probably because I play games like Ceaser or City Life): The lower class dwarves (the ones who have trouble even affording a room unfurnished but for a bed) will spend their leisure time on things like gambling on racing tame large roaches.  Middle classes (the ones with bank accounts at least four digits large) will demand some kind of furniture or books or games for private use, and a certain amount of room quality, and will want bath houses or at least one public amusement.  Upper classes (which would be some legendaries and the nobles) would want an increasing number of entertainments.  Barons could start out demanding 3 entertainments, and want 4 at Count and 5 at Duke.  Kings could demand just as much, but also a pre-requisite quality version of their favored game.

Dwarves could even have prefstring favorite types of games or entertainments or leisure activities...

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm also trying to think of uniquely dwarven games.  I'm trying to think of making different kinds of game halls, with lower, middle, and upper class entertainments set up in each of them.

Upper class entertainments could be theatres, music halls, bath houses, and statue gardens and certain kinds of card games (Bridge?) or the like, as well as enjoying things like chess sets made of marble and jet, or god help you, clear and black diamond.  There might even be some kind of collectables game you could invent, made with painted stone or glass figures.

Middle class entertainments could be zoos, bath houses, libraries, and other public services.  They would also be interested in a wider variety of games like your typical chess sets and the like.

Lower class entertainments might just be little dives near the booze warehouse, where they could gamble on racing vermin, play a dwarven equivalent of pool, throw darts, or gamble on cards or dice.

Which brings up something I'd like to ask members of the community to help me think of: Dwarven games (and potentially, elven games, and goblin games... that don't involve torture for fun.)

I'm thinking of something like pool would be a good start, as you can already work with a stone billiard table and balls made of stone.  I'm thinking using hammers instead of cue sticks would be dwarfier (and neccesary if those are heavy stones). 

Perhaps more dwarfy than that, however, could be a variant of foosball, where dwarves must use various levers to kick the item, let's say it represent's an elf's trade goods, into their own bin.  Instead of simply having lines of players pretending to be soccer players, there could be levers activating traps that kick the ball in various directions, or even into the lava pit.  We could call that "Elfball".

A large enough (200+?) fortress might even demand its own sports stadium (which can easily double as the arena), involving wrestling for sport, or other dwarfy sports... perhaps some team sport involving trying to beat a large stone into the other side's goal by whacking it with hammers.  Or we could just use Rugby... it's a brutal enough sport.

[ed boy]

dwarven croquet.

[Gazz]

A large enough (200+?) fortress might even demand its own sports stadium (which can easily double as the arena), involving wrestling for sport, or other dwarfy sports... perhaps some team sport involving trying to beat a large stone into the other side's goal by whacking it with hammers.  Or we could just use Rugby... it's a brutal enough sport.

You are describing M.U.D.S.

Do not dare to call it anything else! =P

[NW_Kohaku]

dwarven croquet.

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of horseless polo, since this would be a team sport going on without any turns... and would probably inevitably involve whacking other players into various objects.

... There should probably be a bloodlust setting for your sport, so that you can do things like add in automatic releasing of caged wild beasts onto the field for added excitement...

"OH! He accidentally hit the goblin panel! AND THAT'S A FALLING GOBLIN TO THE FACE!  He's already smashed the offending goblin to paste, but man, did he look flustered.  Oh yes, and he flung that goblin's head into the bleachers! The crowd really loves that."

[Gazz]

But in M.U.D.S. you could bribe the ball...

[nil]

Dwarves would definitely play curling if they had any ice.

Also, anything here, especially the caber toss.  Dwarves would probably use stone instead of logs, obviously.

edit: vvvvvvvv Don't hold your breath, brother vvvvvvvvv

[besieger]

Let me suggest powering instruments by electricity.
It may not fit the time the game is supposed to play in but having waterwheels powered by the blood of my enemies just to enable one dwarf playing his e-guitar would totally fit the spirit of the game.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, I think some kind of water organ or, Armok help us, even a magma organ might work.

As for sporting events, I think it would be better if there were something unique and dwarven about the games they play, rather than just having dwarves invent the same games humans invented.  (Not that a stone throwing competition is out of the question.)

I kind of think some kind of mechanical device competition would be suitable... something like a challenge to fill a basin with water using a manual screw pump.

[besieger]

As for sporting events, I think it would be better if there were something unique and dwarven about the games they play, rather than just having dwarves invent the same games humans invented.  (Not that a stone throwing competition is out of the question.)

Like the Lumberjack Olympics only with stones maybe?