Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[KillerClowns]

I will not be using spoiler tags; if you don't know what the lowest layer of Hidden Fun Stuff is, you may wish to wander away now.  If you've not heard the phrase "horrifying screams," you've not truly encountered HFS.



It's an academic question, but one I enjoy pursuing.  Are populations of Demons infinitely spawning, or "merely" in the billions?  Well, dwarfkind is screwed either way, but it's fun to experiment, and good information for modders or the most dementedly devoted DF players may result.  I will be editing this post, both to report on progress and add new experiments I think up.

The best way to measure demonic numbers is to lower them until they are no longer "unnumbered."  Obviosuly, dwarvern axes will not suffice for this task, nor will magma.  But I do have an experiment plan that may just work.

Step 1: Success, sort of
Attempt to inject a custom demon.  I will extract a demon from a .dat, one which carries the [UNIQUE_DEMON] tag so that it goes up into the overworld, making it easier to detect, and place it in a raw, changing only its name and its identifier.  If this quasi-demon is accepted into the world, I will be able to modify it.  This is essential.  The demon will not be in any way different from any other demon, save for its unique name and identifier, and the fact that it is contained in the raws, not the .dats.

Results:  Well, the aforementioned plan failed.  But I managed to make a giant bat clone appear in Hell instead; it was supposed to lay the groundwork for Extra 1, but its purpose has just been rather significantly expanded.  So I achieved my goal.  I put a creature in Hell.  Just not the one I'd planned to.

Step 2: Significant error in basic experimental procedure.
Set the demon to go extinct during world gen.  I will first remove any and all tags that would allow the demon to reproduce; no [MALE] or [FEMALE] tags whatsoever, and then give it a max age of five, and see that the demon disappears or is described as having zero population.  If the numbers remain "unnumbered," this will be very, very strong evidence that demon populations are not tracked, but spawned indefinitely.  As a control, I will also set a group with no [MALE] or [FEMALE] tags and a max age of 3000; if both groups disappear, removing gender and adding age will prove to be the culprit of demonic elimination.

Step 3:  Significant error in basic experimental procedure.
Pierce hell in a world where demons should be extinct by maximum ages and inability to breed.  There are several possibilities, depending on what is seen and reports coming from step 2.  The first is that test demon populations are listed as unnumbered, but none show up; I will dig into various sites in a pocket world until I have a sufficiently large sample.  This will mean that demons are described as "unnumbered" regardless of their populations, which makes the possibility of annihilating suddenly very real.  The second is that they are listed as "unnumbered" and DO show up.  This will, conclusively I believe, prove that demon populations are infinitely spawned.  The third is that the test demon population is listed as zero, but test demons are spawned anyways; this will prove that although demonic populations are tracked, ex nihlo spawning is used as well.  The fourth is that test demon populations are reported as zero, and none show up.  I personally expect this the most; it will prove ex nihlo spawning is not used, and it will lead to Step 4 as a last test.

Step 4:  Significant error in basic experimental procedure.
If step 3 conclusively demonstrates accurately measurable, finite populations and no ex nihlo spawning, set the max age to reduce the demonic population as severely as possible, without causing them to go extinct outright before worldgen's end.  This should give us a better idea of the scale of Hell's legions.  If I can reduce the numbers to a reportable amount, we should be able to calculate the initial population by making some educated guesses as to how maxage works.

Extra 1: Side project
Attempt to get some form of plant to grow in Hell.  I think I should make brewing it result in the Most Valuable Beer In The World, or, if it's a tree, make its wood the Most Valuable Wood In The World.  This may require me to turn Slade into a form of soil, which could make it mutually exclusive with Extra 2.

Extra 2: Side project
Replace slade with something actually useful, such as an ore for a heavier, more awesome version of Adamantine, and see if it can be mined, used, and processed.

Extra 3: Side project
Attempt to make an anti-demonic poison.  Demonic IDs are all in the form DEMON_# (DEMON_1, DEMON_2, DEMON_14, et cetera) so, as long as we make affected creatures be DEMON_1 through DEMON_X, where X is a reasonable stopping number for unmodded DF, we should be able to make an anti-demonic chemical weapon.  I gather there has been progress in making poison weapons elsewhere; success here could result in Dwarves becoming very, very Fun from the perspective of Hell.  If Extra 1 is successful, we could make the plant itself grow exclusively in Hell, make things more interesting.

[Shinziril]

I think to might want to move this to the Fortress Mode forum.  Otherwise, it looks quite Fun, and should be usefully informative.  Onward, for Dwarven SCIENCE!

[LordSlowpoke]

This is highly revelant to my interests.
My interests being killing so many demons that their amount goes down to a reasonable level.
That's about a million. Or less. Probably two for breeding if I can catch them.

[KillerClowns]

Added some extra projects.  Somebody was doing experiments with poison weapons; anyone got the link to that thread available?
EDIT:

I think to might want to move this to the Fortress Mode forum.  Otherwise, it looks quite Fun, and should be usefully informative.  Onward, for Dwarven SCIENCE!

Sounds good.  Done.

[Kagus]

This should probably be in modding, rather than general discussion.

And as for poison weapons, we're still working on getting those to work.  There are a couple different ways of weaponizing venoms, but getting an actual poisoned sword or something has proven to be quite difficult. 

Solid-state materials don't do anything.  In order for a contact poison to be transmitted, it needs to be in the form of a contaminant (goo, gas, and possibly dust.  More testing is required), weapons made out of a poisonous material won't do diddly.  Injected and contact poisons won't trigger just by getting slashed with something, or even getting the material stuck in you (like pincushioning someone with bolts).

It is possible to get a poisonous weapon if you can somehow get the weapon coated with a particular contaminant.  However, this is both exceptionally tricky and rather hit-and-miss.  It's quite difficult to get an item specifically coated with a contaminant, and it's nearly impossible if you only want that one item to get coated, and not everything and everyone else in the surrounding area.

Striking someone with a coated weapon has been shown to properly transmit the venom.  In adventure mode, I managed to do this by throwing goo at a cougar, killing the cougar, and then whacking some test subjects with the cougar's corpse.  Not exactly simple.


There have been some ideas about using heat values to keep a venomous material in a solid state for as long as it is in the quiver or is otherwise contained, and then will melt as soon as it is in an area with a higher temp.  Since projectiles aren't fully treated as objects while in flight, it has been theorized that they won't calculate temperature differences until they stop.  This would open up the possibility of firing a solid bolt, getting it stuck in someone, and having it melt as soon as it recalculates and finds that it is no longer in the colder aura put off by its starting point.  This would result in a gaseous or liquid contaminant that would coat the struck creature and transmit the venom.

The problem with this is that materials don't seem to be capable of radiating heat, so the creature itself needs to be chilly enough to keep the bolt solid.  This can lead to issues.

One thing that could also be possible is just to make the material melt at the natural radiated temperature of the specific target, such as a fire man.  This is kind of tricky to get right, and I don't believe it has been proven to work yet.


Yeah...  As you can see, this is a subject very near and dear to me.  I would love to see easily-accessible poison weapons in the game.

[Psieye]

Regarding getting a coating of poison on your weapons... Is it possible to generate some kind of domestic 'poison elemental' that, when killed, violently explodes, coating a wide area with its contaminant? If so, then some room can be set up where a spike trap is used to kill this poison elemental that got dropped into it from a hole in the ceiling. Drop target weapons into this room too, then pull the lever.

Pure theory, but I do wonder if it can be done. The "violently explodes" part may not be necessary if you make the room very tiny... but I'm not sure whether contaminants get coated onto items that happen to be nearby a corpse taht died in a bloody fashion. Yeah, pure speculation theory.

[Village_Idiot]

Wait, what .dat do you speak off? How can I extract the demon raws from it? I've been looking for this for ages! (and with ages I mean about 29 days)

[Kagus]

Regarding getting a coating of poison on your weapons... Is it possible to generate some kind of domestic 'poison elemental' that, when killed, violently explodes, coating a wide area with its contaminant? If so, then some room can be set up where a spike trap is used to kill this poison elemental that got dropped into it from a hole in the ceiling. Drop target weapons into this room too, then pull the lever.

Pure theory, but I do wonder if it can be done. The "violently explodes" part may not be necessary if you make the room very tiny... but I'm not sure whether contaminants get coated onto items that happen to be nearby a corpse taht died in a bloody fashion. Yeah, pure speculation theory.

Not too sure about violent explosions, but vapors will quite readily spread over a large area and coat everything they touch (and it's quite simple to get someone to evaporate on death, or even during life).  The trick, of course, is figuring out how to do it properly.

I haven't tested this, but I think that contaminants will boil away if they're set to remain gaseous at relatively low temperatures.  This means your "coating" would only last a frame or two, if at all.

However, if the creature expels a vapor-type breath attack, they will create a cloud that acts like a gas, but will condense on objects and stay there.  This could be done by giving some sort of breath attack to the poison critter, and then dropping in a live "target".  The other items will get hit with collateral spray.

Regardless, the whole system is, as you can tell, rather convoluted.  Simpler and less weird methods are being researched.

[KillerClowns]

Wait, what .dat do you speak off? How can I extract the demon raws from it? I've been looking for this for ages! (and with ages I mean about 29 days)

World.dat, but ONLY if Compressed Saves are turned off in the init files.  Otherwise the result is a compressed file that isn't human readable.
This results in some huge saves, though; as soon as I'm done with my experiments, I'll be re-activating Compressed Saves, myself.

[smigenboger]

Haha, at first I thought you were going to do a tagged fish experiment, counting how many tagged demons are wandering around to get a number of total demons

[Quietust]

I've written a small PHP script here that extracts all of the forgotten beast, titan, and demon raws from world.dat or world.sav, compressed or uncompressed. Run it in your regionX folder redirect stdout to a file (with a normal size world, it'll be over 700KB long), then split on the "----------" lines to isolate each creature.

[Psieye]

Regardless, the whole system is, as you can tell, rather convoluted.  Simpler and less weird methods are being researched.

By 'violent explosion' I had in mind "liquid contents spread out far apart to coat many tiles" but the whole system is convoluted indeed. Hmm, is there a tag which dictates whether underground tribes coat their weapons? Is it specific to them? It'd probably mean every weapon is automatically poisoned but it's at least something.

[Retro]

Experimenting on Hell with artificial demons? Well damn. I'll be watching this.

[Acanthus117]

Watching as well.

[Daenyth]

I can't wait!