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[Andreus]

As a person modding his own playable race into Dwarf Fortress, I'm absolutely delighted at how easy it is to set up a race and civilization and how easily the game integrates them and adapts to their presence. However, my plans have hit somewhat of a snag in that I'd like to have the civilization builds stone cities, roads and bridges but does not deforest the terrain surrounding their settlements, something which both dwarves and humans do. Stone cities don't currently exist (they're always made out wood, and deforestation behaviour seems largely tied to the KILL_PLANT ethic (I actually switched to TREE_CITY at one point and noticed they still deforested, even though they weren't building anything with any of it). To my dismay, although turning KILL_PLANT to UNTHINKABLE does prevent deforestation and doesn't prevent the construction of roads or bridges, it makes the race unwilling to trade wood.

So my proposals are:

1. Divorce terrain alteration and world map landscaping from ethics, perhaps integrating them into the behaviour of a specific type of site instead, or failing that, the entity. If behaviour was more dynamic rather than hard-coded, as it seems deforestation is now, that could allow for goblins doing things like "tainting" land around their Dark Towers or elves "reforesting" an area and other such behaviour.
2. Allow sites such as cities, tree cities and mountainhomes to be customised via raw modification, to some extent or other. This could be as simple as determining what sort of materials buildings were made out of and what shops and other buildings were permitted (this could feasibly allow nice things like having dwarf shops that sell decent iron and steel equipment), or as complex as allowing you to design custom buildings that would then appear in a modified site.

[Andreus]

In fact, on a partially related note I'd also like to suggest an expansion of the ethics system in general, so that you could set races to like or dislike certain things but not care about how other races handle it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, I've been kicking around an idea related to this, myself, about making it possible to chart out how a civilization will build its cities in the raws, but I also want to make out some plans for how to impliment it to go with the suggestion, so I've back-burnering it for a while.

[Andreus]

Actually, I've been kicking around an idea related to this, myself, about making it possible to chart out how a civilization will build its cities in the raws, but I also want to make out some plans for how to impliment it to go with the suggestion, so I've back-burnering it for a while.

I'm interested, tell me more.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, basic idea is that I've been thinking of ways to make worldgen create actual dwarven mine-fortresses through a sort of template. 

Basically, it uses modular hallways and rooms that the game can simply add on scalably to fit the size of the settlement's population, preferably using a system where it would use the native layer stone instead of simply using "rock" or "wood".  I've been playing with making it all 7x7 rooms (actually 8x8 if you count the walls), and two-tile-wide hallways with a 2x2 stairwell at the vertical hubs.  Each modular room could have seperate furnishings, like simply having 4 workshops, or 2 workshops and a stockpile for their inputs and outputs, or by having set of 5 standard rooms, a dining room for 14 tables, or a single noble's room.  Simply expand horizontally or vertically to fit the population.

Still, I want to have it kind of polished up before I make a new suggestion thread.  I want to work out, for example, elven tree refuges, a better human city, a black tower with actual living space, etc. with raw moddability, plus I want to throw in several other things that I want in raws, like tags that let you make custom strings that can be read from other raws, so that you can say specific things like that only certain castes can wear certain equipment or hold certain positions, which would help in modded entity construction. 

[thijser]

have you tried any of the other ethic options http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Ethics

[Knight Otu]

A previous thread dealt with the idea of customizing sites and site structures, but it didn't include ideas on how sites should impact their environment.