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[DamnedChoir]

This would make the current game 2.7 times awesomer.

[Captain Failmore]

Here's a silly question.

I know some of the things suggested here would require... you know, significant feature additions. Is there a way to seed unusual structures/formations into the world as it's being generated, though? If it is, I'd like to know how so rare and unusual features like the geographic formations and buildings described in this thread would appear in an otherwise random world.

If it's not possible to seed these things in now, and if HIDDEN FUN STUFF along the lines of what we've described here is going to be added in the future, I'd like to see the ability to seed this stuff in manually be added in the future as a kind of mod-friendliness thing.

---
<Feature>
Global Frequency:
Cluster: (Y/N)
Cluster-Branching: (Y/N)
Cluster Max-Radius:
Cluster Max-Density:
Mandatory Threat Levels: (1-2-3)
Mandatory Alignments: (G-N-E)
[Feature Flags]
Geometric
Circular
Irregular
Smooth
Rough
Civilization <Race>
...
[Pre-Generated Structure and Formation References]
<Chunk>
...
[Creatures]
Massive-Ass Bees
...
[Plants]
Bloated Tuber
Cave Wheat
...
[Random Items]
Random Items: (Y/N)
Min-Quality:
Max-Quality:
[List of Items or Item Groups]
Human Bone Meal
...
---

Or some kind of silly file like that.

[jellyman]

I think what has to be considered also is the total scale of underground features.  Is the DF world like earth, where most of the time you dig down and its just dirt?  Except in special geological situations there are systems of caves due to water action through limestone.  Or whatever else causes caves.  And then on top of that you might add some DF universe factors such as abandoned dwarven fortresses and whatever else.  Underground features could be quite interesting, but fairly uncommon.

Or do we have something like the underdark?  A continuous region of deep underground caverns connected together in which many strange beings dwell?  If there is an underdark, how did it get there?  Maybe the geology of DF is somehow different and allows for many naturally formed gaps?  Or there was an ancient underground civilization that spanned the entire planet?  Or a race of gigantic rock chewing worms that left a labyrinth of holes behind?  Maybe when the Gods slapped the earth down on the back of the 4 elephants and the turtle it kind of crumbled and had to be jammed back together leaving lots of gaps?  With an extensive 'underdark', underground features may then be very common and expected on most or all maps.  Which I think would be more fun for game play.

[Captain Failmore]

Depending on where you are in the world, caves can be either virtually nonexistent or highly abundant. (They may be present but undiscovered or undocumented as well, as many caves still presumably are.) There are also several ways caves can form. They can form through erosion, through volcanic activity, or through dissolution. We're also pretty good at making them ourselves, and if the Dwarf Fortress world contains things like dragons and iron men, it's safe to say some unnatural caves might also exist thanks to the wildlife.

Let's be honest with ourselves here, though. How much would it really bother you if you couldn't nail down where the caves came from or what made them? Sometimes things don't need explanations. Sometimes things are better without them. Sometimes it's a thrill to look at something and say, "I have absolutely no fucking clue how this awesome thing got here," and then build a giant dining hall in or adjacent to it to attract tourists. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

At the same time, it might also be good to make sure natural caves form in places where you could expect to find them. A cave formed by dissolution would be found in limestone, or some other calcium-rich flux rock. Tidal caves would be found near the ocean, with mouths facing the water. Caves formed through volcanic activity such as blister caves and lava tubes would be found in places where there are are or have been volcanoes. Since Toady's aim is to make the geology realistic as it is, it'd make sense to make those features realistic too.

Still, some specific types of caves should be formed through the action of specific creatures and parties that can be encountered in the game. If digging creatures are enabled later, I'd imagine we could see a lot of this, especially with the ant people, mole-creatures, and of course the other civilizations. (What if demons could dig through everything but adamantine?) Giant worms, boring beetles, troglodytes with shovels, they could all get in on the awesome digging action no problem.

[Gangsta Spanksta]

what about a giant ant lion in the desert?    BTW, since we already have antmen, it would be neat if you could dig down and find a colony with eggs and such -- like a giant ant farm.  

[Asehujiko]

Horror style tombs:
Announcement: You have struck an ancient tomb filled with riches!

The tomb your camara pans to is made out of 2 5x5 rooms, one of them with holding 6 masterwork iron statues, a locked door leading to the other and a few bones. The other, holds a complete(but inanimate) skeleton, some jewelry and some furniture.

After that you'll probaly move the camera back to your idustria area, and when you return to the tomb to inspect the jewelry, you'll see that the statues have gone missing. A quick glance at the stocks screen says you have 0 statues and there are no racoons who could have stolen them.

5 minutes later, another annoucement pops up:

Announcement: Urist Paddletraded cancels dig: Interrupted by iron man.

Mushroom alingment:
-A serene fungal growth could contain nicely lined up patches of tower cap and plump helmet. Guardians would include lonely ents just taking care of their cabbage patch untill your midgets show up and try to take it to brew stuff from.
-A wilderniss fungal growth could contain various disorganized groups of random fungus, some good like tower cap, some bad like miasma emmiting mould. There would be a various mix of savage fungal creatures and a few fungus related hyphen men.
-A terrifying fungal growth would most likely only contain evil fungi that try to kill your dwarves, emit toxic spores, grow all over your fortress and cause all the food they touch to rot and spoil alcohol/water. Walking through them will cause dwarves to get covered in mould, which when not cleaned, causes clothes to wear much faster, and actualy take over your refuse pile once that happens. Also, it greatly increaces the chance for infections and diseases. These are best dealt with by stocking them full of explosive booze and a dragon. Don't forget to quarantine the haulers and give them alot of soap.

Good fungi will generaly provide edible items and a small selection of medicinal herbs. When abandoned, they generaly keep to their own.

Neutral fungi provide less edible objects but more extracts, most of them good but some of them only useable against goblins and nobles. Without supervision, randomly mutates, shrinks, grows but nothing too harmful to the rest of the fort.

Evil fungi rarely yield anything edible(and even rarer to see something non poisonous) but they do enable you to harvest some very powerful extracts, provided you have a way to harvest them safely. When left unchecked, will actively proliferate and attempt to take over your fort.

Benign fungi are the most boring variety. They contain a small selection of species and the guardians usualy sit next to them, doing nothing.

Predator fungi contain more varied ammounts of extracts but the inhabitants will also attempt to defend themselves.

Savage fungi contains the widest variety of species but the creatures surrounding them(or the fungi themselves, in evil areas) will see you as an intruder that needs to be rooted out. This can vary between ambushes by plump helmetmen and a full scale war with the ents.

Forests as more important areas:
Depending on alinment, the underground glade/swamp/forest is either the Central Park of your fort, or the creepy woods nobody wants to enter after dark. Incase of te first, nobles may demand offices or dining rooms with window view over those places and dwarves will use them as relaxion places. They will be unhappy if you cut it down. In the second example, dwarves occasionly get scared shitless by a "strange noise" or a "moving shadow" while in it. They will also sleep uneasily in it's vicinity. At this point it's up to you wether to hire an elven druid to "calm the spirits of the forest" or to use a schorched earth policy against whatever is actualy stealthing arround there. At this point dwarves will be more then happy to see a few big explosions.

[Mike Mayday]

I don't know if it has been mentioned, but the main difference in distance between  the previous main version of DF and this one is that the cliff face was a long way from the pits. Now, the bottom of the map is just 15 units below. Hardly a distance at all.

Any possible solutions?

[THLawrence]

quote:Originally posted by Mike Mayday:
<STRONG>I don't know if it has been mentioned, but the main difference in distance between  the previous main version of DF and this one is that the cliff face was a long way from the pits. Now, the bottom of the map is just 15 units below. Hardly a distance at all.

Any possible solutions?</STRONG>

Couple of things.
1: In the old version every map had demon pits, now it is hard to find them.
2: Even if they are there they are much harder to find since you don't know where they are.
3: These new features wouldn't be in every tile so they would be even harder to find. As well there would be one or maybe two features ni the tile.

[Spiders Everywhere]

quote:Originally posted by Mike Mayday:
<STRONG>I don't know if it has been mentioned, but the main difference in distance between  the previous main version of DF and this one is that the cliff face was a long way from the pits. Now, the bottom of the map is just 15 units below. Hardly a distance at all.

Any possible solutions?</STRONG>

Well, in the old version there were barriers that had to be crossed. Aquifers are like that now although there isn't a really good way to get through them. I've been thinking about layers of hard rock that would be difficult to dig through - maybe only if you had steel picks? Or explosives, but that's a topic for a different thread.

But really, what I'd think would prevent you from digging straight down is that it'd be bloody dangerous. That risk/reward tension is what I'm looking for.

Edit: Typo. Bah.

[ December 03, 2007: Message edited by: Spiders Everywhere ]

[SquashMonster]

I like the fungi ideas, though I think having all the mentioned features for a given area alignment is too much.  Encountering any one type of evil fungus is an event in and of itself.  Poison fungus, cloth-eating mold, and miasma fungus all sound like pretty solid threats.

Finally, the idea of fungus taking over the fortress is fantastic.  Imagine a type of stone, "fungal mass", that spreads itself.  It has little or no use, but if you discover it you'll either need to wall off that shaft or dig out every last square of it.

[darknight]

I think some have the idea that all these things should be on every 3x3 map. But things like these should just be loosely sprinkled around. There should be enough that you can expect to hit something on every map, but few enough that they are still uncommon enough to be interesting when you do find them. You wouldnt want to unbalance the game, or make the things less fun, by having too many of them.

They could also be made to be controlled from the init file, at least some of them, so that we can decide to turn them on or off. That way anyone that does not want them, doesnt have to have them. Or maybe a way could be found to do them as installable mods, that we can share with each other?

Just some thoughts.

[Arkan15]

-Ancient temple of evilness

The long-forgotten and long-buried temple to some ancient, evil god. Appears in place of HIDDEN FUN STUFF on certain maps.

It will appear on one of the bottom 3 tiles on a map. It will be surrounded by an irregular series of chasms.

It is made out of a special stone ("Ruin stones", say) which can be used in your constructions, are ubervaluable when crafted.

It contains empty rooms with three things in it:
1. Artifact weapons of incredible power
2. Evil starspawned demons
3. One room somewhere in the middle has an ancient dead god in it. Upon entering this room, it will wake up and move to the surface of your fort, killing everything it runs into.

ia! ia! Cthulu fthagn!

[Buoyancy]

quote:Originally posted by darknight:
You wouldnt want to unbalance the game, or make the things less fun, by having too many of them.

Dwarf Fortress is a sandbox game.  It cannot be made unbalanced since it's purpose is not to challenge the player, but instead to provide an environment for the player to experiment with.

[Spiders Everywhere]

quote:Originally posted by darknight:
<STRONG>I think some have the idea that all these things should be on every 3x3 map. But things like these should just be loosely sprinkled around. There should be enough that you can expect to hit something on every map, but few enough that they are still uncommon enough to be interesting when you do find them. You wouldnt want to unbalance the game, or make the things less fun, by having too many of them.</STRONG>

Well, I don't think any particular feature should be guaranteed, but I really feel the lower levels should always be crawling with one kind of peril or another. I suppose it could use the environmental alignment, so you could pick a calm region if you wanted a boring map. Or a separate alignment for the depths would be cool! You could have a serene surface with terrifying depths.

quote:<STRONG>They could also be made to be controlled from the init file, at least some of them, so that we can decide to turn them on or off. That way anyone that does not want them, doesnt have to have them. Or maybe a way could be found to do them as installable mods, that we can share with each other?

Just some thoughts.</STRONG>

I think getting terrain features into the raws would be the ideal solution. Then we could just make all this stuff ourselves.

[THLawrence]

These items wouldn't even appear on each tile let alone a 3*3 map. Each one would be harder to find then magma in a sedimentary mountain. Ok, maybe not that hard but you get the picture.
Also, please don't post underground features that fall under one of the above mentioned features. Even if they would be a neat variation.

Now I would like to post my opinion on the above features:

Large Underground Features:
Most of the larger underground features could be taken from a variation on the underground pool. At least for the short term. Basically "pools" that are dry but still have tower caps growing in them. In the long run a variation of the "fingers" of the chasm and the underground pool could be implemented.
Caverns would be like this but with no tower-caps.

Underground Dens:
The giant mole dens and giant Beehives may have problems with a proper AI.
The megabeast lairs and golems would probably use coding similar to that of the pits. The creature doesn't need to exist until found. Then the game can create it and let it loose upon your fortress.

Small Underground Features:
Some of the smaller underground features would could appear more frequently then the larger features. Namely the large geodes and fossils(sedimentary primarily).
The geysers and sulferous fumarole would have problems since they would require a new type of chasm tile.
Toady probably wants to avoid gas pockets all together.

Lost Parts of Large Civilizations Underground:
I'm going to guess that if this is implemented it wouldn't be for a long time. The coding required for it would be non-trivial by a larger extent. Creating more exact features like rooms and what is in each room would be more difficult.

Outdoor Features:
Meteorite craters would be interesting but would probably be non-trivial.
Giant trees are on the list of things to do, Toady has mentioned that he would like to see multitile trees, he mentioned this shortly after releasing the lake screenshot and talking about the highwood tree.
Ghost towns and evil ruins are more of variations on the current ruins. Still could make adventure mod more interesting.
The evil/good plants that actually do things beside be gather or cut down would require variations to what plants can actually do, this would make them more like animals and it might be easier to create a creature that can do this but can't move.
The sargasso sea, yes it might be interesting to see some ocean features. As a temporary what about creating plants that only grow in ocean biomes or beaches or creating another version of driftwood.

Other Large Underground Features:
Hell would be interesting to find. So would watching 50 demons tear through your fort leaving nothing behind. In my opinion this should be heavily covered in adamantium, much like the endgame chasm in the old version, if you break it open wave after wave of demons will assault your fort, also an endgame timer should be added for after you break it open because if you break open hell then not even Copperblazes could hold off waves of 50+ demons permanently with out cheating. This would only be to stop cheating.
Continuing, underground civilizations would be more difficult because of once again the AI. Same as the dens only this would be more difficult.
The gateway would have problems unless the creatures that came out were already in the raws, as well if they are friendly then the game has to try to put in a new trading partner when it is already designed and balanced for 3 trading partners.
Other type of river would be difficult since acid, booze and poison aren't liquids yet. Magma rivers would be interesting, if dangerous.

Others:
Whirlpool, I'm trying to think of a better way to kill my FPS but I'm having trouble. It's a great idea and it could be implemented by placing water sources in a large circle around a chasm.
Claim jumpers would require a lot of changes to the AI. They would have to mine and remove the goods that they mine. They might be implemented shortly after sappers.

Captian Failmore's feature design looks good but Toady has mentioned that putting things into the raws is difficult. Although I love the idea and you do seem to have covered the basics. Then we could mod things in.

Sorry for the long rant but after making that list and trying to keep my opinion out of it I kind of snapped and threw everything out a once.

I would feel better getting Toady's opinion on some of these features.