i kinda want to make a dwarf fortress mod focused around not doing a violence
but, to my utter horror, i can't think of any way to make it interesting that isn't violent
Something that can kill off dwarves that isn't enemies.
I still think the best thing for fortress mode right now would be a farming revamp, ideally with a bigger concept of cost of labor. DF is nominally set in a medieval fantasy setting but it has a labor distribution like a modern society. Farming is handled by a specialized few who can none-the-less create an excess of food. In actual medieval societies the vast, vast majority of the labor goes into food production for what is functionally sustenance farming while the upper class shaves a little off the top (that the lower classes might not actually be able to reasonably offer) in order to survive. Something like pests, drought, crop disease, should very much be a threat that could wipe out the whole of a fortress. You could definitely have an interesting conflict there, probably less so until your dwarves have the option to leave the map to hunt or steal food from others.
(bare in mind, have not been actively following the DF development for at least a year)
~Eeh, that's because DF dwarfs basically
do live in a modern social structure which bears the trappings of a feudal medieval society. I know that intrafortress economics is supposedly a thing, but in practice they're hard-line communists in the vein of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need", and their manufacturing is essentially pseudoindustrialism which gets away with brute-forcing the automation with manual labor (or in some cases elaborate minecart systems &c.).
You'd have a couple ways of approaching the problem of making food more scarce and labor-intensive (we'll ignore whether they're possible to implement fully).
1. Make hunger increase more often. This isn't practical in gameplay terms; you'd have dwarfs breaking to eat so often that nothing else would get done, once you tossed in all the other interruptions.
2. Make all farming-related activities consume much larger spans of time. Likewise not practical; you'd have farmers interrupting plantings and pickings to do other shit, little would get planted and most of that would rot in the fields. It's hard enough to get the buggers to gather crops to begin with.
3. Drastically increase the time it takes to grow crops. This would be the simplest and best, I think.
The problem is, that option still doesn't deal with the heart of the issue: Dwarfs are
ludicrously efficient, despite all the memes about them being stupid fools. You normally wind up with a handful of specialist farmers and a ton of dabblers who gather crops because
that's all you need, even for hundreds of tiles of crops. Sure, you could push things enough that a healthy fortress of 80-100ish dwarfs need three thousand tiles of crops to feed them all over the course of a year, but then you run into other problems: First, now you're playing Farmville Dorf Edition. Second, you could
still get away with a relative handful of specialists, just slightly more than before. Bump up from 4-8 to 12-16 and you're probably good. The main problem is still gathering stuff before it rots, and the main solution is still to beat the entirety of your population over the head until they do it.
But wait, you've just turned up the grow times. Certainly, the dedicated farmers are going to spend a few weeks or months planting, but the gathering is brief, since anything that isn't brought in will rot. So you've still got the same situation with a handful of specialists and a bunch of dabblers, only with more starvation because the little shitters not gathering crops is a bigger problem (and even that can be brute-forced by turning off all other labors and forcing everyone to gather come picking season).
Again, it goes back to Fortress Mode not really being a feudal subsistence society at heart. Dwarfs are just too efficient for that to be realistic, and there aren't actually nobles in the feudal sense--you've got the ruler who is genuinely useless (when they show up), and assorted nobles who can be put to work in administration, with any who are too troublesome quietly brushed into a burrow in a nice warm room with magma-proof floodgates for walls. A single useless individual, with
everyone else contributing something meaningful to society, and no particular task demanding an extraordinary amount of labor.
If you want a real DF equivalent to feudal subsistence farming, it would probably be stone smoothing. Absolutely necessary, and so labor-intensive that even 95% of the population working together can't get it done fast enough.
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In reference to Putnam's original quote: AsylumFort? No external threats, no traders, a set (large) starting population, maybe 120 or so, sealed inside a fortress. Guarantee that there are at least one vampire and one werething. Massively ramp up the rate of strange mood incidence, but exclude from the asylum environs several key types of material in order to ensure that most moods result in some form of madness. See how long you can hold the place together. There's naturally going to be some violence involved, but it's rather different from the soldiering or slaughter-death-murder-runs of traps.
IDK how much of that is possible, but it's different.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14952853 times)