I voted yes. Bunny and Nikov, on the last page,
summed up went on a great length about generally what I want out of such a system. I would add just a few things, however -
We don't just have vomit and blood.
We already have people modding in things like Goblin Fortress, where there were custom-built strap-on-dildos, and using tentacle demons as sex slaves. Nobody proposed we take away the raws so that we couldn't mod in such things. It was, in fact, quite the popular, if controversial, idea.
We already have not simply chaining up merfolk so that they could factory-breed them and then slaughter their infants, people came up with ideas to use a drawbridge to catapult infants into spikes, and then decorate the forced breeding/rape rooms with the totems of their own infant's skulls.
We already have elven torture chambers with people tossing ash and vomit and dead animal parts into a pit with elves. Is this REALLY made THAT much worse with "waste"?
In fact, one of the first, most popular mods to come out with the new 0.31.01 was "Succubus Mod", where there were succubi that made "attacks" with excretions from their breasts, as well as incubi and other, similar sexually-based attacks. Nobody would have said that we should be disallowed from being able to mod creatures with extracts or the like, however.
In all of this, people kept playing Dwarf Fortress, and simply ignored, or were ignorant of, the parts they did not like. I really have trouble seeing how we would somehow bring out a
worse crowd with the "LOL POOP!" than we would with the "LOL BOOBIES!" or similarly childish gratuitous blood, violence, or cruelty potential in this game, or ability to make giant phallic-shaped monuments to your own immaturity. What is this? It's OK to have dwarves eating pancreas or making blood temples or modding in boob-guns, but not OK to have a working sewer system because someone would make poop jokes? What, are we 13 year-olds who are trying to make fun of how immature the 9 year-olds are?
The whole argument strikes me as the sort of thing people would make a huge fuss over before it happened, and would then completely die out once people got used to it. After all, there's a reason why not even the 13-year-olds make "LOL poop" jokes (and go on to "LOL BOOBIE" jokes for a while, instead) - they get very old, very fast.
With that out of the way, I'd like to say why I support this, and my proposal for "tastefulness - It goes hand-in-hand very well with the changes I've argued for in the farming system, where soil needs to have its minerals replinished. A sewage system, combined with a "worm farm" workshop to break the waste down into usable soil that can fertilize farms that have deminishing crop yields until they are re-fertilized.
It also addresses a little pet peeve of mine, where the farming system completely ignores the Conservation of Mass - crops are infinitely magicked into existence from a single patch of mud, and once consumed, food is immediately annihalated from existence. Any game proposing to call itself realistic should at least try to maintain a semblance of continuity of matter. (Arguments over stone walls being turned into stones or gravel or just dissapearing for another day.)
I would also say that we should have a more general type of material called "waste", which could be treated like a fluid, as well as like a contaminant (this would pretty much be required for a working sewer, unless we make some weird and entirely seperate system). Waste doesn't even have to be bodily waste - it can be the flakes of oxidizing metal from dwarven equipment, the portions of the food they didn't eat (as they already toss aside turtle shells and seeds on the floor of their dining areas, they now toss aside "waste" as well), dust, skin flakes, loose hair, torn scraps of clothing, what body parts rot into, and generally just trash of a more-or-less biological nature. Yes, there will still be latrines, but there could also be other sources of random filth requiring some actual janitors, regardless.
This could also be a bit of a call for a degree more depth in the miasma system - waste can create miasma, as it is something that smells and rots, but it would be nice to have a miasma system with different degrees of how wretched the stench gets, as well as allowing for actual health penalties at certain concentrations of miasma. (Likewise, it plays well into the oxygen depletion / good or bad air suggestions that I have supported in the past.) Sewers, then, would be best used with an actual "toilet" or "trash can" of sorts, where the miasma would either be contained, or the waste pushed into a sealed chamber away from the noses and lungs of all but the unluckiest of dwarves. (
Discussed in this thread, in another previous waste thread.)
Finally, consider how awesome a working aquaduct and plumbing system would be - working flushing toilets with a seperate sewage line are complex achievements. The Romans rightfully were proud of their sewage system - the barbarians that followed them had nothing but cesspits, literally just open trenches in the road going downhill to a pool of waste, and the Romans could rightfully say that one of the benefits of living the Roman life was that even the lower classes would not be living in their own waste.
This gives serious dwarven engineers the ability to rig up systems that would prove their engineering superiorirty over other dwarven cities, much less any hippy elf that lives only as far away from his own filth as he is willing to carry it away.
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Topic: Feces vote (Read 47539 times)