As usual, I excised many of the suggestion questions and questions that were answered by helpful people.
With the continued addition of good/evil/savage/calm flora and fauna, is there any chance of eventually having good/evil/savage/calm minerals/soils? I know it would involve changing worldgen to determine surroundings before minerals, so how feasible is this?
It's quite feasible and we've considered it but haven't taken the plunge. Random minerals should be fun. Even the current stock minerals can be a bit confusing, and random minerals might add to that further, so further exposition of what minerals can be used for and so on might be necessary there.
Will kobolds lay eggs, as was joked in (I believe) the last DF Talk?
Yeah, kobolds will lay eggs, although they'll need their homes fleshed out before you can actually find them.
Besides the standalone creatures, there are several vermin/parasites sponsored that (could) live on/adopt unwilling creatures.
(cave beez living in beards, leeches clinging unto exposed skin, flees/mites/crabs living in furry bits or clothes, maggots burrowing into rotten bodyparts. etc)
Will these creatures get special code as they get added or will they, for now, remain the same as the vermin we know?
I've never seen it happen yet, my dorfs generally die of infection or thirst before they lose additional limbs; is the necrosis syndrome modelled in the healthcare/wound healing system ?
The sponsored parasites should get proper support as parasites rather than free living wandering vermin. There are necrosis wounds, but it might only happen from poisons. I didn't get a chance to make infections interesting.
Hey Did Toady change the background to the Animal Drive or is it just my computer?
Mind you on the Laptop I was using the background was 100% the Zebra stripes without the overlay for the writing.
Was Toady responsible or was it my Laptop?
I had only tested it in Firefox. Then after I saw your post I tried it out in IE and it was doing the bad background thing, so I tweaked it until it worked in both. I didn't try other browsers.
Can we see how many people and the total donation per animal?
I wanted to avoid giving any further information to avoid compromising the privacy of donors that chose to have their names listed in the raws.
With the addition of eggs and vegetable oil, it's gotten me wondering. Are there any plans to overhaul cooking at all in the near future? For example, meals that require certain ingredients to be included?
There aren't plans for the near future other than the release schedule I put up and the army stuff which is presumably coming after that, but all of the new materials certainly are suggestive of cooking and don't hurt its chances.
Toady One, what do you say to a monster sponsorship deal?
It was one of the ideas we had, along with trees/flowers and syndrome effects, but I'm really not sure what the future holds there. At the very least, we need to get through the currently sponsored animals before we consider starting up anything else.
Are there plans to do something about the abundance of food in Fortress Mode? Right now, it's extremely easy to have almost endless food stocks - plants are easy to grow in huge numbers, using only a small land and dwarfpower; meat is very abundant thanks to the recent body changes which multiplied the number of food units in each creature, and thanks to massive and edible forgotten beasts; and now we have several new food sources to make things even easier. Doesn't this mean the player's fortress is a much bigger food producer than any other settlement on the world?
The other settlements now outdo fortress food production by many times, because they are feeding by the day on more of an adventure mode scale, but they don't have the same margins in terms of excess food. You shouldn't end up having a lot of impact on the world food market, but internally it is a bit strange. The plans currently are the farming overhauls, which should reduce crop output a bit, and changes like livestock feeding requirements, which have started up with grazing for the next release.
Will villages produce and export other goods besides food? And will they also demand materials for these?
I think it would be awesome if a nearby human town decided that they want to make walls or a special building of some kind and start mass-demanding stone blocks.
Yeah, they have a number of industries. The towns have more industries than the agricultural villages and they often end up specializing.
So, when moving fortress pieces are implemented, how mobile will they be?
For example, will we be able to move something to any point of our map, move things off-map, move it within a certain radius/confine/prepared area?
Also:
Could we put buildings and furniture (Workshops, ballistae, beds and etc.) on them? (I ask this because of the unbuildability of bridges, our only moving fortress terrain) How will they be controlled? Powered? Locomoted? Will we be able to make moving fortresses of death?
Moving off-map seems unlikely, at least in terms of what will be worked on for that dev item, although since boat-support is part of what that framework is about, it'll be a consideration. Buildings and anything else that can be placed in a tile will definitely be supported. I don't have any idea about how the rest of it will work.
Is it likely to see any interface improvements before core element nr 25? For example - filtering for units list (now it is required to pass through all inhabitants of your fortress/or all dead creatures to reach invaders listing).
The Core system is outmoded. In the last wall of text response, somebody asked this, and I mentioned that the stocks screen and likely the unit list would be getting updates for this release (which is now a series of releases).
Isn't it about time you created the 2011 page of the devlog?
Do you mean giving the 2010 stuff its own page? I wanted to wait at least a month on that, but it is time now to split it up.
will only herbivore animals be eating now or will carnivores and omnivores be hunting or scavenging meat?
I'm starting with just the grazers. I'm not sure how I want to handle the others.
Do we get now a potter(-y) profession?
Yeah, there are six new professions.
Will ceramic jugs (or some other ceramic product) be used to store any food or booze?
Yeah, there should be something. I just haven't found a name yet. Amphora made sense, and "large vase" seems too decorative, but I'm not really happy with anything yet, since those seem too specific. I'm not sure what the other historical examples are and if something else sounds nice and general. It could just be the jugs, but the jugs might be smaller. This was one of the last sort of unresolved quibbles for this release.
Where would you obtain clay from?
It would be nice to see a mechanism where there is at least a small chance of a tile being mined out if clay mining will use the current sand collection interface. (Same for sand actually, but less so.)
Right now it works like sand, and we were considering making it eat up the tiles after a number of uses, but it doesn't currently do that.
Are there any plans to increase the frequency of Clay and Sand layers? Or to change what certain layers count as to make Sandy Clay a source for both Glassmaking and Pottery, for example?
The glass layers are the same, and earthenware comes from clay and <adj> clay layers, which are fairly common. There's a new layer "fire clay" for stoneware, and the kaolinite deposits are used for porcelain.
With the inclusion of pottery will more obscure things like bone ware be included by default?
I didn't put it in for this time.
Toady does the new Ceramics stuff include enamel and decorations with enamel picture etc.?
All I've done at this point is mono-color glazing (and then other dwarves can do whatever they like as usual in terms of jewels or metal or whatever).
Have all ceramics to be fired or can very basic things like low quality bricks be left in the sun to dry?
There isn't a wet phase for ceramics -- that is skipped and things are fired when they are made, so there aren't any mud bricks that you just leave out. "Ceramics" implies firing, I think, but I might be mistaken. Mud/adobe/etc. structures aren't in the game yet, but it's certainly a reasonable thing.
Now that site resources are going to become much more important, are we going to see items start to take multiple material types anytime soon? Spears are an obvious example, since wood is much cheaper than metal and it's cheaper and more efficient to make 4 spears instead of a single longsword.
I don't have a timeline. On the one hand, I've always been interested in multi-material, multi-part items, but there are complications, especially with using metal in small portions.
What will my dwarves be making in their ceramics workshops?
How many intermediate workshops will there be for ceramics from beginning of the process to the final product?
I could see it as a chain of processes such as, clay maker --> potter --> kiln operator, or even more steps for decorated objects, etc... Or a potter who collects his own clumps of clay from mining and has a kiln in/as the workshop, so the process involves a minimum of 1 dwarf and 1 workshop, like a glass furnace.
Sort of covered in the last question, but how is clay handled in the game? Workshop product or clumps from mining that are processed in some general "pottery" workshop into a finished piece of pottery?
Right now, as I mentioned up there, you don't set out the wet clay objects to dry before the initial firing. So you gather clay (from a kiln). Then you pick an object type and fire it at the kiln (currently jugs, bricks, statues, hives and crafts, I think). Then you can optionally glaze them at the kiln (and you'll want to glaze earthenware jugs).
Since beehives are now in, any chance for a parallel underground creature in the underground? Or will wax production (once that's a thing) require that you keep your fort open to the surface?
And an entirely different question,
Is honey brewable into mead?
There isn't currently an underground parallel, and I'm not sure what I think of that. It seems like we probably shouldn't have an underground analog to everything above ground.
Mead is in.
This has probably been asked, but what are the planned uses of wax collections, once they are implemented?
Right now you can make wax crafts. The rest of it will have to wait for the relevant parts of the game to be added (lighting/sealing/mold-coating/waterproofing etc.), mostly, although I guess a few of those other uses that are out there don't require other mechanics (polishes/beard waxes).
Are there any plans for better animal control? Maybe something where dwarfs will actively remove animals from an area where they're not allowed?
You have the pasture option for next time.
Essentially, the question I want to ask is will the ceramics be like the one in this thread on ceramics? Will we have just "clay" as a soil type to work with, or can we fire up any kind of soil to make terra cotta, so that it is (rightly) a material everyone with access to most types of dirt can make? Can we wood glaze pots? Do we need sand or crushed feldspar to glaze? Are glazes necessary to make a water-tight storage jug? Are we going to be crushing a single metal ore unit to make, say, 50 pots worth of glazes which can then be used to make decorations? I hate to think we have to use an entire metal unit for one pot's decoration.
I don't know what wood glazing is. If that means using wood ash, it is in. Glazing only requires the coloration right now, and like everything else, you use one unit for one item.
Does this basically mean even with a max number of hives on the map, beekeeping will basically be "renewable" within that limit as long as you keep unharvested ones to split into your bee farm?
Yeah.
Are we going to get people who are deathly allergic to bee stings and can die from it?
I don't have bee allergies at this point. It's certainly a reasonable thing to add though.
Will we have tavern brawls in the dwarf mode?
You have brawls in dwarf mode everywhere already, but it seems like something like drunkenness will have to be added with taverns. In that case, you might have more focused troubles than before.
Toady will the town map rewrite (shortterm release 1) just include renewed shops or will it be more in the direction of "district/alley" based placement of stuff. Like having a clothier-alley, a dyer-street or a jew-lane (these are real-life examples not some kind of political statement) where all people with the same job (or whatever) are concentrated? It makes only sense for bigger towns thought.
Yeah, we're going to try to add some additional structure, not just the improved workshops. There will have to be respect for market locations. They might even have walls in some cases. With a release focusing just on this, I expect to do some interesting things, anyway.
When the economy (presumably after the caravan arc) is more fleshed out, will there be a possibility for more fleshed out specifically-for-trade goods? (coins, and so forth) Currently coins are just minted with a random engraving and/or the symbol of the civ, but it might not be hard to come up with an alternative solution.
I wasn't really sure what you were getting at here. The coins are probably more fleshed out than many people want already, since the detail contributes to the stacking problems.
I see no mention of parties, musical instruments or toys in the new short-term goals.
Are behaviours involving this type of item going to be put on hold, or will the new inns and such include them.
I don't specifically have a timeline for these, although I've been wanting to do them for a long, long time, and the musicality attribute is just sort of sitting there.
No, it's not the same. The personalities actually miss important stuff like "cruel", "evil", "ambitious", "envious" etc... But even if they were there, the main point is that numbered 0-100 scales simply aren't the way people think and stories work.
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I seem to remember Toady talking something about how the system probably needs to be replaced because it's too modern, politically correct and generally unfitting. It was while they were talking about bandit leaders, I think, but I can't find
it.
Will the personality and need rewrite include the foot work for the the ability for dorfs to commit crime? Such as but not limited to murder, theft, and corruption? (Like embezzling)
From my PoV we dont need actually traits for "cruelness", being "envious" or being "evil" because either they are can be calculated from the current pesonality values or are context based like the "evil" trait you mentioned. "Ambitious" could for example come from high scores in "Achievement striving", "Assertiveness" and "Self efficacy". A cruel person could have low "sympathy", "altruism" and "cooperation" scores.
What is involved in the Personality Rewrite? Do you have specific goals there?
I tried to find a DF Talk quote too, but the one I was thinking of might be in the one I still have to edit, so I'm confused. In any case, yeah, I think the current facets I've got are too wishy-washy. Instead of trying to use them as the basic axes and figuring out how something like "greed" might arise from them, it seems like using a new set which isn't focused on being non-judgmental will be more efficient. I'm not going over to a yes/no archetype/quirk/trait system. This will definitely include the foundations for crime, although initially we're thinking less about criminal dwarves and more about villains and their motivations in general for the army arc. My specific goal at first is just to capture a wider breadth of dispositions, since I had trouble writing world gen AI with the current facets. From there, I think adding personality effects to the game should be easier. I think goals and dreams are also a part of this. The "needs" rewrite is related to that, but we're still working that out.