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[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, that doesnt make it into strange voodoo either, just adds unnecessary mathematical overhead.

Sustainable horticulture is already about know what your crops want-- farmers have built cheatsheets for soil management and crop cycles for years. They are called farmers almanacs. (though most are little more than pitiful astrology in a pulp paper wrapper.) Crop management *IS* just an optimization strategy, that once you get down, is very easy to keep up.

Adding weather effects to screw up the reliability of growing conditions would introduce far more FUN than an overly complicated growing algorithm.

Observe:

Let's say we are dealing with wild strawberry.  We will say it needs 4000 units of energy per tile to produce a crop, each crop is seasonal, so it's a 3 month period, making each month deliver approximately 1250 units of sunlight per tile, under "ideal" crop conditions. (Since this is a soil neutral crop.) In rolls a series of summer rain clouds that blankets out the sky's sunlight partially for the majority of the summer.  Instead of the 4000 units of sun, we only got 3000 units, or less.  That energy has to be made up for, so the soil neutral crop suddenly becomes a soil depleter, because the sun wasn't out. This means your soil will deplete if you don't watch the weather, and make adjustments!

This, even with the highly simplified system suggested.

The weather is unpredictable, and random based on the biome embarked upon-- Dust storms would be especially terrible for crop growth-- and would make evil biome embarks all the more difficult--

Well, I think this line of conversation has been rehashed rather often in this thread.

Pests already produce much of what you are talking about as an additional layer of unpredictable complexity, as well.  I'm certainly not ruling these things out.

That said, I still think there's a serious value to making the cheat sheet a little more complex than "grow beans then fallow then corn" - by having multiple types of resources, the game is inherently going to give the player far more choices that are far less straightforward an answer, especially when you add in all those unpredictable factors that make a player have to react using what limited resources they have on hand.

(It's like saying that most RPGs would be made simpler by making everyone a fighter and basing everything on HP.  Sure, it's simpler, but it's far less interesting.)

Although I know it's a heavy read, if you could read the original line of posts through, it would help avoid rehashing the same conversations that we already had in the past.

[wierd]

it's a neat idea, but the code backend for that would be atrocious. Every plant tile planted would have to keep a history of the two plants that provided it's heritage data, even after they are long since consumed, and the memory should have been freed.  This means that horticulture would gobble up resources like crazy, trying to track all the geneological data needed to properly simulate genetic expressions and mutations on otherwise fungible produce.

Yeech... I wouldnt want to code it....


--

Hmm..  I still dont like the idea of magic being a testable and verifiable energy source. It is just too plain hard to reconcile with mundane physics without causing a thermonuclear explosion, or causing real-manifested nightmares to spawn in children's bedrooms.  (Pratchett ironically, chose to include this later effect in his disc world even!)

I prefer to look at magic as an expression of what is unknown.  It is unknown how an amethyst man's biology works, therefore, his biology is clearly magical, since it defies conventional reason. (He COULD be purely photonically powered!) Same with a nethercap.  For a long time, people felt pregnancy was magical, for instance.  We have since learned that it is no such thing whatsoever. 

If we are going to start introducing exotic physics metamaterials, then we have to seriously consider all the consequences of that, which quickly becomes head exploding.

For instance, atomic scale wormholes to another dimension with perfect thermal properties held perfectly at 0c interacting with ordinary matter to reduce temperatures, would have very unpleasant effects upon ingestion in species not adapted to that-- It would freeze their digestive tracts, and in warm blooded animals, it would cause hypothermia, because the organism would be unable to regulate internal body temperatures! It would be its own kind of illness and associated syndrome of effects, caused by being contaminated with "nether particles" through ingestion. (though I suppose it would be GREAT for embalming people!) This throws a big monkey wrench into using them as an autotroph to make the cavern ecosystem plausible.

The method I suggested with the seebeck and peltier effects, would just mean the nethercaps have shiny metal striations in them, and their natural slow decomposition is what causes the inverse effect as a slow heat fountain.

Making magic into real forces and not just an artifact of applied ignorance has many very dangerous reprocussions. you should be *VERY* careful doing that!


**Note--

Not that I think all magic should be made out to be pure ignorance though.  Necromancers, Mummies that raise the dead, and the like are obviously REAL magic.  However, these occurrences are "extraordinary"-- 

We would need an explanation for why subterene environs are so obscenely magical, but why dwarves arent natural spell casters, despite living in, and consuming, immensely magically imbued environmental products.  Why dont dwarves have superpowers, and such-- for instance.  We would also need an explanation for why surface areas are routinely mundane excepting in specially magically dense areas, like undead reanimating biomes, and super happy cottoncandy grassed sunshine and dewdrop infested good biomes.

This gets into cosmological explanations, which are PRNG generated-- making them off limits, and or-- not really PRNG, but actually "Selected from formula", and requiring a cogent formula to build sensible cosmologies from.

We would also need explanations for why wild magical energies dont just conjure things up into existence willy nilly.

Pratchet balanced that, by saying "Belief" is a finite resource. (See for instance, the Hogfather story.) But then again, he has power over the cosmology to say that.  again, we dont-- PRNG generated worlds.

Balancing this is fundemental if you want a reasonably sensible xenosynthetic biosphere that runs on magic down there.

[NW_Kohaku]

it's a neat idea, but the code backend for that would be atrocious. Every plant tile planted would have to keep a history of the two plants that provided it's heritage data, even after they are long since consumed, and the memory should have been freed.  This means that horticulture would gobble up resources like crazy, trying to track all the geneological data needed to properly simulate genetic expressions and mutations on otherwise fungible produce.

Well, there are a few ways to make that less of a nightmare.

First, rather than keeping a genetic history of what was cross-pollinated, keep in mind that many species are self-pollinating, and frequently just mutate into beneficial conditions.

You could have just one base wild version of a plant, and then remember seeds/plants as just algorithmic additions of specific mutation modifiers that provide benefits. 

The way that domesticated animals work now, for example, is that you just have a remembered "natural domestication level" state for each animal. 

You could simply have some positive modifiers on a seed of a plant type (+20 crop yield) and then some negatives that are consequences of that type of mutation (vulnerability to pest X, attracts pest Y, consumes nitrogen +10). 

Hmm..  I still dont like the idea of magic being a testable and verifiable energy source. It is just too plain hard to reconcile with mundane physics without causing a thermonuclear explosion, or causing real-manifested nightmares to spawn in children's bedrooms.  (Pratchett ironically, chose to include this later effect in his disc world even!)

Actually, real-manifested nightmares are kind of what boogeymen are, already. 

Anyway, yes, Pratchett is closer to what I'm aiming at.

I prefer to look at magic as an expression of what is unknown.  It is unknown how an amethyst man's biology works, therefore, his biology is clearly magical, since it defies conventional reason. (He COULD be purely photonically powered!) Same with a nethercap.  For a long time, people felt pregnancy was magical, for instance.  We have since learned that it is no such thing whatsoever. 

If we are going to start introducing exotic physics metamaterials, then we have to seriously consider all the consequences of that, which quickly becomes head exploding.

And that's fantastic.

Keep in mind that unknown pregnancy actually did have knowable causes and effects.  Keep in mind that rotting in this game creates "miasma", which is at least unpleasant, but at some point, may include the capacity to spread disease.

Dwarves don't need to know how, exactly, nether particles work or why they exist, but they can still know they're bad news to leave out-of-control, and that bad things happen when you overharvest the nethercaps.  (You could even have superstitious responses to it in-game, like a "curse of the nethercaps" that freezes those who chop too greedy and too deep.)

For instance, atomic scale wormholes to another dimension with perfect thermal properties held perfectly at 0c interacting with ordinary matter to reduce temperatures, would have very unpleasant effects upon ingestion in species not adapted to that-- It would freeze their digestive tracts, and in warm blooded animals, it would cause hypothermia, because the organism would be unable to regulate internal body temperatures! It would be its own kind of illness and associated syndrome of effects, caused by being contaminated with "nether particles" through ingestion. (though I suppose it would be GREAT for embalming people!) This throws a big monkey wrench into using them as an autotroph to make the cavern ecosystem plausible.

The method I suggested with the seebeck and peltier effects, would just mean the nethercaps have shiny metal striations in them, and their natural slow decomposition is what causes the inverse effect as a slow heat fountain.

Making magic into real forces and not just an artifact of applied ignorance has many very dangerous reprocussions. you should be *VERY* careful doing that!

And that's why you take care eating magic mushrooms. ("Never be the first to stick your hand into an unknown viscous material!")

Keep in mind, nether wood is wood, and nothing eats it besides maybe really magical creatures.  But if it's destroyed, it means that nether magic would be released upon its destruction.

The only difference, mechanically, between your magic mushroom that merely has probably-poisonous metal in it and my magic mushroom that has biology-shredding particles in it is how much the rest of the game's rationality can be affected by applying a consistent reasoning behind all the magical artifacts that can then be used to extrapolate later magical effects.  (And creating the capacity for emergent behavior is everything wonderful about Dwarf Fortress.)

It means that you have some sort of invisibly-tracked and rather vague concept of a nether magic level in your environment, and that nether magic goes down the more nether caps are there to sink their energy supply, keeping nether magic low.  When nether magic is high, though, you have an energy source for farming your own nether caps, or possibly even other nether-related "plants" underground.  If nether magic is too scarce or dead in a region, no more nether plants can grow for starving of magic.  If nether magic grows too high, the nether magic can have unintended consequences, including wild magic animals and pests like magic locusts coming in to feast off the abundance of free magic.

[Wastedlabor]

Every plant tile planted would have to keep a history of the two plants that provided it's heritage data

It wouldn't.  A mutated plant is just a new plant, like, any that could have been defined in the raws, but keeping the base name, unless the player wanted to rename it. Rather than making many micro changes from plant to plant, mutation can be a single big change (with it's own alert message). I think finding 1 subspecies of any plant (not per plant) every 3 years would be the highest rate I'd like myself.

Plant properties could be documented by the farmer equivalent of the bookkeeper. Of course dwarves wouldn't be aware of genetic evolution and believe rather in adaptation.

Dwarf psychology could play a role. A dwarf that likes plump helmet wine would be more interested in identifying a mutation in plump helmets that produces better wine.

[NW_Kohaku]

It wouldn't.  A mutated plant is just a new plant, like, any that could have been defined in the raws, but keeping the base name, unless the player wanted to rename it. Rather than making many micro changes from plant to plant, mutation can be a single big change (with it's own alert message). I think finding 1 subspecies of any plant (not per plant) every 3 years would be the highest rate I'd like myself.

Presuming this takes place in worldgen, though, there could still be an explosion in mutation permutations, although presumably, any mutation that was not wanted could just be discarded and deleted.

It could have the interesting side-effect of different cultures having strawberries that mutated in very different ways, which could help lead to concepts like invasive species.

Speaking of which, one of the key things about strawberries discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel was that they never evolved to be large and appetizing to humans until after greenhouses were invented.  Fruits, especially, are evolved to be attractive to whatever species will help spread their seeds, and strawberries were tiny to attract small birds that spread their seeds.  They were impossible to domesticate and make huge and juicy for human tastes until humans put them in greenhouses that meant strawberries had to grow to human tastes to get their seeds spread.  In open air, birds would always beat the humans as seed-spreaders. 

Hence, positive mutation versions of all the fruits and plants should eventually emerge in-game in a manner similar to domestication of animals, like the difference between a dog and a wolf. One is evolved to live with humans that will use it and care for it, the other is wild.

At the simplest level, this can just be a linear scale like domestication, but you can also use a concept where specific negatives are introduced pseudo-randomly, like vulnerabilities to specific pests as you make a non-poisonous version of a type of nut or those needs for greater soil nutrients as a fruit becomes larger.

[wierd]

That would have to be a very weakened and watered down version of evolution though. In nature, traits combine, and you get things like hybrid viggor.

An infamous example of this is the jumbo tomato. None of its progeny will be jumbo. The jumboness is a result of hybrid viggor. It is a specially selected cross of two non jumbo varieties that when combined, have synergistic traits.

[NW_Kohaku]

That would have to be a very weakened and watered down version of evolution though. In nature, traits combine, and you get things like hybrid viggor.

An infamous example of this is the jumbo tomato. None of its progeny will be jumbo. The jumboness is a result of hybrid viggor. It is a specially selected cross of two non jumbo varieties that when combined, have synergistic traits.

Well, it's the balancing act of realism versus what you can actually code, then, isn't it?

Current animal domestication is extremely simplified and not at all realistic, since it basically only tracks how innately tame a creature is based upon how tame its mother was when she got pregnant, and can result in domesticated animals within just a couple generations.

Real domestication is based more upon selecting the friendliest or most desirable-traited animal, and slaughtering the rest. 

Russian researchers, for example, are working on domesticating silver foxes, and one of the things they've wound up doing is winding up with foxes that bark like a dog, have floppy ears like dogs do, and greet humans in a friendly manner and want to play with humans... or in other words, it's basically a dog.

[wierd]

I am familar with that research. The other side was "anti-domesticated" foxes, that were violently agrressive.

But yes-- that's why I said doing that right would be computationally expensive.

I suppose you could simulate hybrid vigor by having a couple of float values representing traits (instead of integer values), like size, nutrient density, etc.... and store that information in an array per seed produced.  We can fudge the memory retention, by having cross fert happen between plants growing in the same field together, as a distribution. (Eg, plant seeds from civ 1 next to seeds from civ 2 in the same field using the "x" expanded menu.), the crossing is statistical, rather than from fixed parentages, and across the whole planted stand. The resulting produce will store their trait array, which is copied to the seeds extracted upon processing. Information can be retained less expensively that way.

Viggor happens when values for traits between seeds planted exceed a standard deviation. (Eg, the seeds are very different.)

The array could hold simplified traits, like these:

<toxic>---<edible>
<coarse>--<pleasing texture>
<small>---<large>
<low yield>--<high yeild>
<disgusting>--<delicious>
<ugly>--<attractive>

Etc.  Each spectrum is a float value between 0 and 1.

[NW_Kohaku]

Didn't see this edit at first...

**Note--

Not that I think all magic should be made out to be pure ignorance though.  Necromancers, Mummies that raise the dead, and the like are obviously REAL magic.  However, these occurrences are "extraordinary"-- 

We would need an explanation for why subterene environs are so obscenely magical, but why dwarves arent natural spell casters, despite living in, and consuming, immensely magically imbued environmental products.  Why dont dwarves have superpowers, and such-- for instance.  We would also need an explanation for why surface areas are routinely mundane excepting in specially magically dense areas, like undead reanimating biomes, and super happy cottoncandy grassed sunshine and dewdrop infested good biomes.

This gets into cosmological explanations, which are PRNG generated-- making them off limits, and or-- not really PRNG, but actually "Selected from formula", and requiring a cogent formula to build sensible cosmologies from.

We would also need explanations for why wild magical energies dont just conjure things up into existence willy nilly.

Pratchet balanced that, by saying "Belief" is a finite resource. (See for instance, the Hogfather story.) But then again, he has power over the cosmology to say that.  again, we dont-- PRNG generated worlds.

Balancing this is fundemental if you want a reasonably sensible xenosynthetic biosphere that runs on magic down there.

Now this is really speaking my language...

Toady intends to replace the good/evil magic with different magic biomes later.  Specifically, he wants all the spheres that already exist to be the basis of magic... and there's some crazy large number like 60 of them, so he wants to categorize them into a dozen or so major types of magic with sub-magics.  Biomes would then have different levels of these types of spheres affecting them.

So, basically, like Pratchett, Toady can actually step in and declare a cosmology that exerts control over how the magic spheres are allocated over the map procedurally in the same way that he declared how deserts form.  It can be as arbitrary or deep as he wants it to be.

Consider that humans now will clear-cut forests to make grasslands for them to colonize in worldgen.  Elves have a special "living in touch with the spirit of the forest" type of druidism, and that may well manifest in their own magic biome that they foster out of specific types of forests and try to spread over the worldmap the same way that humans clear-cut forests to make grasslands they can farm.  (And some of the Threetoe stories involve goblins spreading an evil biome into conquered dwarven lands.)

Hence, you can spread and change a magic biome the same way as a mundane one.  If we can do that, possibly some creatures change one type of magic into another type.  Farming or ranching those plants or animals would mean depleting one magic type and growing another, causing a xeno-ecological shift, and spreading the magic biome you prefer beyond its previous bounds. (And since gods are tied to spheres, this can be related to holy crusades to spread the seat of a god's power.)

There can also be a similar biome field in the caverns, where you can walk out of the standard caverns, and into a nether-heavy cavern, or maybe a severely death-heavy cavern that is like an evil biome on the surface now.

As for why dwarves are not magical... well, they are, actually - they produce artifacts that are supposed to be magical.  It's possible they have an affinity for a certain type of magic in particular (like Artiface) whereas elves have an affinity for another. 

It's possible what they eat is tied to how they can create artifacts, and it's possible they developed some sort of magic-nullifying capacity to survive some of the weirdness of the caverns (with artifacts being an "outlet" for excess magic buildup that will drive them insane unless released).

[wierd]

Some of those explanations are kinda weak though... hmm....  it would be better to claim that dwarves and elves are opposed aspects on an axis, where elves represent the life and growth of the surface world, where dwarves represent the consumption, breakdown, and decay end being subterrene. This would have strong tie-ins to the actual mythical origins of both fantasy creatures. (Pre tolkien mind! The Poetic Adda, in particular has the actual differences between the two being essentially abritrary, and imposed by the aesir, the gods. Dwarves live in the dark, where elves live in the light, but share a common ancestry.)

In this respect, if we are going to use meta-essences as world materials, then the vitality of the subterene is directly tied to the inverse state above, and vice-versa.  Cutting down 10,000 year old oak trees worshiped by elves makes the sporecaps grow below, by freeing up the limited reseource of life energy in the connected spheres of influence.

(Hence, the animosity between them.)

Compare their alignments, for instance.

Code: [Select]


Elves.                Dwarves
-----------------------
Worship nature.             Destroy nature
Spiritualism                       Decadence
Natural harmony.          Industrial might
Peace loving.                Built for war
Natural beauty.             Manufactured beauty
"Woodland friends".         "Animal servitors"
Above ground.                      Below ground
Surrounded by growth.       Surrounded by decay
Tall.                             Short
Fair.                            Coarse
Civil.                          Raucous
Temperent.              Drunken
.....



[NW_Kohaku]

Well, if they're weak, they just need a little more thorough exploration.

I think that the caverns may actually be at least partly insulated from the surface, at least as currently implemented, as caverns are the same no matter where you go.  Evil forest, good hills, glacier, ocean floor, doesn't matter, caverns are always the same.  The HFS, and whatever strange portal you find to it through the cotton candy, likewise, is some whole other ball game.  (And some have theorized that the leaking magic of the HFS is what causes the cavern ecosystem to grow larger and more violent creatures the closer to the HFS you go, and the further from the sources of mundane energy.)

Likewise, elves are not as inherently opposed to dwarves as goblins are.  (And goblins are also, generally, an evil perversion of elves/faeries.)

With that said, it is definitely that dwarves don't respect the magic of the nature whatevers that elves worship that are one of the prime drivers of conflict between them, and like I said, with each dwarven and human civ having different gods they could certain come into conflict "purifying" the land for their own respective causes. 

Also keep in mind that the Threetoe stories depict the nature spirit of the elves as explicitly creating all the animalpeoples (at least, on the surface... no word on what creates a fishman) so there's some precident in how new creatures are created on the spot from magic.  (Well, created a squirrelman from a squirrel and magic, but that's it.)

There's also that I'm not sure dwarves are purely creatures of the caverns, either, and that they are sort of living a liminal existence between the two worlds, especially with Hill Dwarves. 

Currently, (magic) biomes stop the instant you go below the surface, and all the layers beneath that are fixed no matter where you go, so I'm thinking what we might be moving into is a scenario where there are different cavern magic biomes, although for simplicity's sake, I wonder if Toady might not trim down the number of caverns if he starts doing that, or else just making all three caverns share the same magic biome, but with different "intensity" as you go deeper. 

[wierd]

Without a concrete bound, it is impossible to conjecture usefully without devolving into useless navel gazing though. I'd defer on that directon and mindset until something more solid manifests.

[NW_Kohaku]

Without a concrete bound, it is impossible to conjecture usefully without devolving into useless navel gazing though. I'd defer on that directon and mindset until something more solid manifests.

Well, this is the suggestions forum.

Toady basically doesn't have a concrete idea of what he wants to do, but has some concepts, but has asked for people to come up with "strange and different" ways that magic can be involved in the game.

Many people are opposed to the sort of standard RPG magic, and don't want to see dwarves work like that, especially before Toady started adding in more of the more obviously fantastic things like necromancers that just shoot holes in the "strictly real-world mechanics" paradigm for DF. 

Hence, navel-gazing a compelling enough world that isn't revolving around 15 MP to cast Fireball would be a good use of the forum.  Tying the magic into things that aren't in the direct control of the dwarves, but where they are indirectly manipulable, like making nethercap harvesting tied to magic pollution, is a way to produce the sorts of concepts that Toady can use, and probably wouldn't have thought of on his own.


EDIT: 
This means, for example, coming up with a magic-based ecosystem that maintains some rational consistency for its magical explanations would mean that magical thundergoats from the Sky Magic biome might have a special thundergoat liver that is capable of digesting lightning magic, and if ground into powder and formed into a potion - especially if you have procedural alchemy - would mean that you could create potions of insulation that would protect your dwarves from a lightning-spitting forgotten beast.

[Draco18s]

Russian researchers, for example, are working on domesticating silver foxes, and one of the things they've wound up doing is winding up with foxes that bark like a dog, have floppy ears like dogs do, and greet humans in a friendly manner and want to play with humans... or in other words, it's basically a dog.

And also spotted.  They didn't end up silver either.

[wierd]

He could look at the "consequences" angle to magic, normally seen in religions that practice or ascribe to it.

Take for instance, wicca. (No offense to that religion or any other. It's just a well known and convenient subject to put on the table for autopsy.)

In that tradition, any magic invoked has direct and also indirect consequences, associated with the intent and nature of the spell cast.  For instance, cursing someone *will* have adverse side effects for the one performing the curse, and the form of manifestation can be wild and unpredictable. (This is why the wiccans have their 'rede', to live, let live, and wish only good things on people.) In wiccan magic, the spell uses manifested will and intent to gain its power. It isn't wishing, it is invokation.  "He WILL catch fire." And not "I wish he would catch fire."  It basically boils down to belief as a real power; they belive the magic will work, so it does. That is why it requires a declaration, and not a desire. The deleterious consequences of using magic come from the law of unintended consequences. Your setting Urist McFisherdwarf on fire, caused him to run inside, causing the fortress to catch fire, and killing your whole family. Wasn't magic fun? *g*

(Actually spent a whole summer doing nothing but studying magical belief systems one year, to better understand human cultures.)

The powers that toady seems to be going for, is more the "divine gift" kind, which usually has different consequences, depending on the god, the god's alignment, and the god's temperment.

Neither of these are a "fire1: 5mp, fire2: 10mp, fire3: 20mp, flare:50mp" type squaresoft JRPG knockoff, but are instead much more in line with mythical and legendary magic users.

The consequence to using magic, is the consequence to using magic. It draws attention to you, and celebrity can be a terrible thing, especially whe people start paying more attention to the unintended effects of your magic, especially when they kill or hurt people.

If you note, magic users in folklore tend to use very guarded language, if they are benevolent magic users. They never say things like "then he will die." Or "if you do that, you will get sick." They instead allude to natural consequences in an ambiguous manner, like "wicked kings should not rule that way." Or "it isn't safe to play in the snow like that, you could catch your death."

It is the malicious magic users that use concrete, declarative language, and their delcarations tend toward finding ways to manifest while also causing trouble for the magic user. (Their spells find ways to bite them back.)



As for the "potion of magic thundergoat liver", that falls very promiently into the realm of sypathetic magic.  A mandrake looks like a sexual organ, so it must confer sexual potency, etc.  It is really more a form of "magic, through ignorance", and actual, invoked magic. It is the result of imprper understanding, coupled with belief.  A bezoar is really just a glorified gallstone, found in a goat's stomach. Goats aren't really magically immune to poison, and a bezoar has no power to nullify poison. However, the ignorant notice that goats can at some toxic plants and be fine, notice the bezoars inside the goats when they are slaughtered, and believe the bezoar is responsible for that apparent immunity, and that if the (ugh..) eat....(gross.....) the bezoar, they will be able to survive being poisoned as well.

It has the same declarative origins as real, high magic, (by eating this bezoar, I am immune t poison!) but is magic through ignorance, and carries all the consequences that doing an ignorant thing would have. (Like being sickened by eating a disgusting gallstone!)