Breaking the fourth wall a bit, with this one:
I've not yet perfected it for 0.31 (and especially its new flavour-text in the dwarf descriptions) but in 40D I made meticulous spreadsheets of each dwarf. Labelled the first seven a1 to a7, first wave immigrants b1..nN, etc, native-born children got a pure numeric. Made a note of their current skill levels (and, in 40D, valued their Strength, Agility and Toughness), my aspirational first- and second-choice jobs (regardless of their currently recorded 'official' job title, because they might have accidentally majored in engraving prior to their decent glassmaking being taken up and developed), recorded the quality of bedroom/office/tomb, etc they had been assigned (if any, and also any outstanding noble-type requirements for furniture they need), listed their favourite rock/metal/gem/all-the-rest, their "absolute detests", as appropriate, and enumerated their psychological make-up, in .31 there's also the characteristics (though I'm still wading through that). Also relatives (lovers and spouses, parents, siblings, offspring) and pets, which I've found useful (off-game) in to make sure that a potential draftee hasn't got anyone that a death in combat might upset, or vice-versa. Just a small spreadsheet, of course. Adding lines for pets as well would make managing a ten-year-old fortress a little time-consuming, of course. (Aided and abetted by a "last updated on" column.)
Of course, skill levels quickly go out of date (although messages surrounding SAT values changing give me reason to check and update them), and Dwarf Therapist holds some of that information (including quick-updating, i.e. entirely not tedious), but doesn't know everything that I record (although it is admittedly easier to update with what tasks I may have 'temporarily' assigned, and not highlighted as such on the skill-levels table), and while I have a half-arsed solution involving a side-program that does a periodic/on-demand screen-shot of the DF window and actually does something akin to OCR on it (useful for quickly dealing with the whole screen of likes/dislikes/attributes) to emulate my own visual analysis and information transferring process, it's a bit of a kludge to say the least. (Also, unlike DT, can't tell the difference between the different levels of Legendary, and needs
me to change screens, although in one version I got it to prompt me to check someone's current skill-levels (the character it had the most out-of-date info for), and even recognise if I needed to scroll down a screen to give it more known skills[1]. Ditto update issues for the alcohol tendency (e.g. not having had any for a while) and PTSD ("getting used to tragedy") which are the two obviously "variable" qualities on that final screen.
But, anyway, I was supposed to be talking about
my obsessions, not those of the applications I wrote. (Albeit to be surrogate obsessives to save me my own time and effort.
And I've not yet definitively built up a complete physiognomy cheat-sheet for .31 (hair, moustache, beard style, etc), and have instead been fussing over more in-game trivialities (e.g., building a set of masons' workshops for each stone-type, each workshop (eventually) being built of a block of that material, with a that-stone-only stockpile to one side and that-stone's-blocks-only stockpile immediately surrounding it) and practising making the most pre-planned fortress that I've ever made, in a manner that I've described elsewhere on this forum (as a theory, which I then decided to put into practice). Which means that my improved data-capture (and -recording) efforts have been largely sidelined, admittedly. Although I did start off keeping records of animal husbandry (using best-guess techniques to track whether a new puppy had gained its ochre-coloured front legs from its mother (Dog3) or, could be used to suggest that the father was Dog5, rather than Dog3) and even built up character details from various migrating beasts, sentient friendlies and hostiles that entered my territory to graze, trade or steal/attack, to the extent that non-character creatures give a subset of the details ones own dwarves possess...
And I'd also feel it a little cheaty (although i don't mind the "Legendary+3" type of detail) to extract such details through a memory-hacking method like Dwarf Fortress. If I do get my apps perfected, they're basically (apart from being "just for fun") just to speed up the rate at which personally-viewable information is recorded. Meaning I don't spend three days on the first year of fortress maintenance.
[1] Actually easier in 40D when it was ordered by that buff's first appearance time, with all initial skills at top, and any newly (initially) dabbling skills adding to the bottom. That way, it just needed to make sure it had 'snapped' a screen with all known skills, plus a screen that was obviously at the bottom of the list (minor assumption, there, being that there was not a penultimate screen of new skills that hadn't been previously recorded). In .31 where all known skills are ordered strictly by an order I've not so far completely catalogued, I really need it to make me give it 'overlap' screens so that nothing new is missed out. Also I should force it to tell me if I've accidentally deselected combat skills.
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Topic: Anal Rituals (Read 20860 times)