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[Dante]

Thanks for the big reply, Toady!


Oh man I just can't wait to eat me some kobold eggs.

[MrWiggles]

Squee! My question got answered! CSI: Dwarf Fortress!

[Moddan]

Mead is in.

Checklist for introducing new industries to the dwarven work system:

1. Can it be used to make/obtain/store/consume alcohol?

Pottery? Mugs!
Beekeeping? Mead!

[tps12]

Well depending on which part of the cow you eat you get 100 (lung) to 870 (fat)Kcal/100g the average here is 230Kcal/100g...Milk gives you 65 kcal/100g and a normal mediaeval cow should produce between 2000 and 5000 liters per year - so you get around 5 liters per day milk which means 1.25 liters per Person a day.

...this would be a healthy diet. More the half of it comes from the cow.

Depending on how the milk output is impacted by hacking off the odd lung.

[Lord Shonus]

He means that "half the food comes from cows" not "half the food comes from this one, individual animal." One cow was killed (probably an older one that stopped giving milk) and salted/smoked for storage, while a younger one is kept for the milk, and will be killed once he calf gets large enough to be milked. A common system among substinence farmers (it was common to rent a bull to get the calf in the first place.)


Edit: However, his calorie requirements are too low for DF's period. An average peasant would require nearly twice that, with alcohol making up the lack.

[Dae]

I know absolutely nothing about it, but can a cow really supply 500kg of edible food when some races weight 500kg in average ?

[Mel_Vixen]

Depends on the cow-breed. Dairy cows are normaly lighter but the (modern) meat breeds can get quite heavy up to 1.5 tons (which btw are often breeding bull whose meat tastes rancid). Useable are 2/3 to 3/4 of a cows weight. Females are normaly lighter then males.

uhhh let me get some statistics on medival breeds:

• "Alpine"/Swiss Brown -Brown Cow from the Lower Alps in Switzerland and Germany. May stretch back to one of the oldest cattle breeds. Large. Work/Milk. [130 cm (51"); 636 kg (1,400 lbs)/145 cm (57"); 909 kg (2000 lbs)]
• British ("Park") White (or White Park, Ancient White Park, White Forest, White Horned, Wild White)
  England. Medium (or Small) and Shaggy. Longhorns and polled varieties exist. White fur with black points. The Chillingham Park herd allegedly has not had any interbreeding with other herds since 1220/50. Genetically related to the Galloway and Highland.
  [636 kg (1,400 lbs)/954.4 kg (2,100 lbs)] depending on your sources.
• Canadienne
  France, related to the Normande, Jersey, and Alderney cattle, these milk producers were imported in 1541 to Quebec by Cartier. Milk.
  [122 cm (48"); 550 kg (1,210 lbs)/137 cm (54"); 813 kg (1,790 lbs)]
• "Celtic" Black
  Britain (from which the Welsh Black, the Galloway, the Highland, and the Angus may have  derived).
  [110 cm/120 cm]
• Corriente
  Spain, imported to the New World by the Spaniards in the 15th and 16th centuries, their descendants remain in Northern Mexico, and are the also ancestral to the Texas Longhorn
  [99 cm (39"); 363 kg (800 lbs)/99 cm (39"); 454.5 kg (1000 lbs)]
• Galloway
  Scotland (SW Islands) - May be the southern Scots polled cattle referred to since the 11th Century, they may only be 18th Century when the first solid records of them reach back to.
  [122 cm (48"); 575 kg (1,265 lbs)/137 cm (54"); 813 kg (1,790 lbs)]

data borrowed from marc carlson who did the research in 2004.

[TolyK]

Thank you for the update!
My notes:

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.
I must re-start my vehicle megathread.

Do we get now a potter(-y) profession?

Yeah, there are six new professions.
YES!

Just a quick question: Are there any plans to change completely to a masked metric system? It seems popular and will save a lot of work.

[Mel_Vixen]

yeah i would like to see a consistent "metric" measurment system too.

[zwei]

Yeah, there are six new professions.

So, beekeeping, waxcrafting, pottery, glazing. What else, i wonder...

[Mephansteras]

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.

Who about just going with 'Pot'?

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 are the complications with this? We already have metal stored as units (150 iron instead of 1 bar). So I'm curious what the blocking factor is. Lingering old code?

[TolyK]

Who about just going with 'Pot'?

Yeah, weeds will go in sometime and so should pot 

What are the complications with this? We already have metal stored as units (150 iron instead of 1 bar). So I'm curious what the blocking factor is. Lingering old code?

yeah, that might be it. when I add new stuff to my projects it tends to be hampered by old stuff 

[Kogut]

Rather: how to handle partly used bars to avoid economy induced coin spam.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, on that topic...

Is it currently slated for animals of different sizes to require eating different amounts of food?  If elephants and hoary marmots eat the same amount of food, but give off radically different amounts of meat when butchered, then it produces a rather silly comparison of which animals are the most effective to raise...

Well, in the case of Elephants, they take a while to grow up...

Even newborn elephant babies are worth insane amounts of food, though.  You can just do the mermaid thing and keep some breeding stock, and then slaughter the infants.  It is, in fact, something I do on some of my "experiment forts", since it's much easier to just mod elephants to be purchased at embark, and feed my dwarves elephant meat all day every day than it is to work on setting up a proper fort, and it lets me get right down to what I was experimenting on in that fort.

What are the complications with this? We already have metal stored as units (150 iron instead of 1 bar). So I'm curious what the blocking factor is. Lingering old code?

Well, this is something I went over pretty extensively in the Volume and Mass thread...

Basically, almost every object type already has a volume, and every material type already has a density.  The displayed mass of every object is derived from these two things. 

The primary problem with implimenting Volume and Mass fully is that it requires Stacking to work.  (That is, the thing on the top of the ESV, which I'm assuming Toady has been putting off because he's had trouble coding it before.)  If we start using .1 kg of brass to make a brass earring instead of an entire 17.5 kg bar (2 liters), then we are using fractions of a unit, and that means that dwarves will need to start learning to put fractions of bars back into piles with other fractions of bars, again.  Otherwise we wind up with the same problem we have with coins - a whole bunch of .03 kg of brass lying around the fort with no reaction that uses that small a quantity, but it takes up a whole tile in a stockpile, anyway.

The concept that you give quantifiable dimesions to tiles is also potentially involved in that, which means that it can lead to things like a rewrite of the liquids code so that water, for example, is measured in volume, as well.  Quantifiable dimensions to tiles also means multi-tile trees and monsters, which is always one of those big game-crashers.

Of course, all of these things are pretty much necessary for the game going forward.  Stacking is on the devpage (Toady just wants to do Caravan and Military arcs first), and liquids code needs some optimization and the ability to allow in other liquids like oil, as was mentioned in the last Q&A round.  It's just that Toady is prioritizing other topics that he probably thinks are more fun. 

(Which sounds cooler, invading other fortresses or getting mead, or making fluids take up less framerate?)

[jimi12]

If only grazing animals will be needing food, is their any incentive for not just using large jaguar farms for food since they require nothing to keep alive?