So, I have been working on making a revised
Improved Farming thread, reformatted so that the proposal is better-formatted and more easily readable. In spite of these efforts, however, I haven't been getting many takers on people willing to read through the argument and comment. I am having trouble coming up with exactly what people would be comfortable with in regards to magical plantlife being a basis of farming, and as such, I'm making another sub-issue spin-off thread. Basically, I'm throwing the idea out on its own, and seeing what explodes.
The major problem I have is bridging the problem of magic and science. Generally speaking, the corollary to Clarke's law would state that magic is just science you don't understand. However, many players and Toady himself, to an extent, have stated a desire for less predictable magic. When working on the Improved Farming thread, however, I think I have hit upon an idea to make a system where magic operates on something rational enough that it isn't just a random roll against a chart of pre-scripted magical events, yet also isn't something that turns into a "magic industry" where magical stuff just rolls off of assembly lines - that is, turning magic into an energy source for a "xenosynthetic" ecosystem, modeled in some ways on the chemosynthetic life forms from black smoker vents. Magic exists as a static charge of energy created by certain events, creatures, or possibly artifacts or other items on the map. Living organisms attuned to that form of magic can use their xenosynthetic abilities to use that as an energy/"food" source, living off the magic energy field, yet at the same time, exhausting the ultimately finite energy sources.
This finiteness is a key aspect of the idea - like with real ecosystems, it drives competition, and sets the ultimate limits on what these creatures or systems built off these creatures can accomplish.
To keep the background as minimal as possible, in the Improved Farming thread, there has been plenty of discussion over how to make a more compelling, realistic, involved, yet not overwhelming farming experience for players of DF whose complexity is not as front-loaded as current farming is, but makes farming simple at first, yet progressively more complex. To this end, the thread has evolved towards simulating whole ecosystems, rather than just farm plots, and blurring the lines between a farm plot and the wilderness.
In trying to create this ecosystem, however, the problem of underground ecosystems comes up - they obviously do not rely upon sunlight as their energy source, but upon some sort of magical source. Yes, it really does have to be a magical source of energy, as there is no hard science way of explaining floating guts or flying heads or amethyst men or purple worm grass or the other crazy things in the deeps without magic. It actually makes less sense to have a magical energy source that lets those magical monsters live, but the ever-more competitive world of plantlife actually doesn't have some sort of magical source of energy feeding the ecosystem.
I'll just throw out the most relevant things put out about this in the IF thread, however, there were also a couple other threads that are spiritual predecessors to this,
this one on the HFS, and also
continued in another one I started on making physical gods.:
This is where I get into thinking about having underground climates... just as a Sunberry needs a Good sphere influence to grow in the wild, we could start having energy fields that create the necessary conditions for certain plants and animals to thrive. When an energy field of a certain sphere is present, it allows creatures of that sphere to live there, and if it is repelled, then those creatures migrate or die. Creatures that depend upon magic to survive, however, may be more versitile, being capable of survivng on multiple types of energy fields, or any type of energy field, so long as it has a sufficient power level.
Underground Climates, then, could change from one cavern layer to another, the way that surface biomes are Good or Evil and Savage or Benign, there could be different energy fields in the cavern layers that change what grows down there by supplying different energy sources. Different levels of the caverns could even have different climates, so that more energy radiates in the deepest levels, causing more rare and valuable things to live down there, but also much more dangerous, magical things that can fall upon unwary dwarves, as well.
In fact, if we are going the route of letting dwarves manipulate their environments, then we could also let them manipulate the energy fields, as well. But on the surface, you screw up your environment, you created a desert. In the deep caverns or even if you are colonizing the HFS, where the energies you are toying with are wild and powerful, if you mess with the energy fields and ruin "the environment", then you start creating conditions for utterly horrifying things to take place. (The air becomes poison, dwarves turn into clowns, all kinds of Fun!)
Ultimately, after having slaughtered the denizens of the HFS, the dwarves somehow manage to make everything worse, and then the Gods, in their infinite wisdom, push the last of the dwarves into the HFS, and seal it back up with a new metal, one even dwarves cannot dig through. And then they turn into even more horrid things than that which they once slew, all the while waiting for someone or something foolish enough to unseal them once again.
•What about something like magical stone types that cave plants are getting energy from? We would probably think of them as magnetic or radioactive, but that doesn't need explaining since dwarves would never understand it in this time period anyway.
This is one of those things I'm thinking about. "Green rocks" are kind of blah for a power source, but they could be a default or a supplement. The advantage of green rocks is that they would be fairly obvious to see, understand, and manipulate. The disadvantage is that they aren't particularly hard to manipulate, and that damages the dynamic I want to aim for.
I want player's actions to have consequences beyond their most immediate impact, so that there are long-range consequences that must be weighed against short-term consequences. If all you are doing is moving a rock, you can just move the rock somewhere else when you're done with it, and you have no fear of long-term consequences. If something like unicorns create the "Good" biome, then making unicorns really, really valuable, and letting dwarves slaughter them for their parts satisfies a short-term goal, but killing too many means they flee your fortress, never come back, and the "Good" biome dissapears.
The point of most of this is to get players to experiment until they can find ways to make sustainable systems that balance competing natural forces in the game while generating the most of the resources the player wants to obtain. Importantly, these competing forces you must balance are complex and dynamic enough that there isn't one single simple solution you can always apply to every situation, and can find easily on the wiki. At the same time, total collapse of the system shouldn't be sudden and utterly irreverseable, it should have chances for the player to see warning signs, and make adjustments. This means tempering the instinct to just "make more farms" whenever you want more biological material. Things can't just scale perfectly, there has to be additional complexity as you scale.
Actually, let me go into a little more depth on the concept of a "horn of plenty"...
To reiterate, one of the most key aspects of an ecosystem, aside from merely being a place where matter is recycled, but energy passes through and must be replinished, is that, while these things are renewable, they are also *FINITE*. Competition for finite resources is the fundamental aspect that drives all of life.
This concept can (and almost certainly should) be applied to the energy fields I am talking about building the "xenosynthetic" ecosystem upon. Whatever energy fields are out there, they are finite, and creatures must compete for who gets to have the energy from whatever glowing rock or open rift to another world or whatever supplies this energy.
This could mean that it works like the chemosynthetic environments in "Black Smoker" vents - this type of life can only exist in finite quantities that are very densely packed around the source of this life. The entire ecosystem is based on bacteria that can perform chemosynthesis, and bigger creatures don't so much eat the bacteria as allow them to grow within them for the purposes of generating their energy, and the bigger things on the food chain eat the things that symbiotically live with the bacteria.
A green rocks ecosystem could produce only enough energy for a finite amount of "plants" that live very close to the green rocks, and anything that is based off this kind of energy must eat those plants regularly to get their particular brand of energy in their system.
But basically, this would mean that, for example, zombies and other similar creatures are not merely undead, but are the result of a virus of some sort that merely waits to attack organic life forms that have lost their ability to resist invasion, and allow the hivemind-driven microorganisms to take over.
The specific sphere in question would obviously have radically different effects on the organisms it powers, though. A Marriage sphere, for example, might be driven by places where people are married or in the vicinity of where married people live (perhaps causing specific types of flowers that only bloom in wedding chapels, or in the homes of happily married couples). Such a flower might become obvious symbols for love and marriage, and be highly desirable because of it.
But it could be the end of the world if having the artifact sword is somehow drawing your fortress closer to some kind of world of fire and then suddenly it like sucks into some kind of fire plane and your whole fortress catches on fire and then everyone wonders why there’s a new volcano.
What I have been working with and working towards is a model in which "manipulation" and "control" are two separate things. Nature, in the model I am trying to create, is powerful and resilient enough that you can't just kill it outright, it will always spring back, but it's just that you can't really control the spring back. Your actions have consequences beyond the immediately obvious, and you can set into motion a chain of events that you might not be prepared for. (Not that this is much different from "Today, I learned about water pressure when I flooded my fort," but for the timescale.)
Consider if your fortress already has "fire" or "magma" spheres pretty well-represented, and then you go making more fire or magma sphere-generating artifacts, or you perform magma sphere-raising activities. Especially if your ability to understand the exact levels of the sphere's influence in the area is limited to only being able to look and see the population levels of the xenosynthetic lifeforms in the area, not an "energy map", it could be very subtle when you are slowly getting your fortress towards a firey doom when the ecosystem/xenosystem hits the tipping point, and suddenly dwarves' bodies start getting taken over by fire sprites or something, and start turning into magma men.
So then, my question to all the players out there is to weigh in on this sort of mechanic - a mechanic where you could invisibly impact the magical energy levels of the map, and the only way to really tell that you are doing it may be to just look and see if plants or vermin or even larger creatures of that sphere start popping up with greater and greater frequency.
Things like having too much magma sphere in the area might start causing magma men to start appearing in the mamga tubes with greater frequency, eventually leading to some dwarves to start actually being taken over by magma spirits and becoming magma men, themselves, if you do nothing to stop the trend.
Extra Credit problem: Look at the
spheres already in the game, and try to come up with ways in which these can actually manage to have impacts in-game. That means both "what sort of life forms they create", and "how the spheres gain dominance in an area."
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Topic: Xenosynthesis and magic fields (Read 53657 times)