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[mnjiman]

Well its good that people express themselves with what they like and dislike about the patch. We must be able to communicate our collective thoughts to Toady so he can see our reaction to certain elements with the patch. His changes to the game may of not be on purpose, or maybe he thought it would gain a positive reaction. Who knows.
 That does not mean we will be able to presuade Toady to change the way he will develop the game, but at least he can see whether something he does to the game will generate a positive or negative feeling about it. There is nothing wrong with that.

Maybe Toady always intended the game to be played a certain way, and we just got used to it the way it was before. We may just have to live with it.

Also, people shouldn't lay down judgement until the bugs fixes within the next few weeks imo.

[Cespinarve]

I keep having this hilarious thought that Toady has just been sleeping the whole day away, and when he wakes up and reads all this debating we'll learn it's because of an error on his part to re-insert a value or something, and then scarcity will disappear entirely.


I can dream, can't I?

[RiderofDark]

I keep having this hilarious thought that Toady has just been sleeping the whole day away, and when he wakes up and reads all this debating we'll learn it's because of an error on his part to re-insert a value or something, and then scarcity will disappear entirely.


I can dream, can't I?

In another game I play, there was a bug that existed for several years because it was "RNG H8, not a bug".

[Buttery_Mess]

So much pointless bickering, so little discussion of aviaries.

Wild animals seem obsessed with claiming nest boxes. I had a bunch of elk birds spawn in the caverns and run straight through my fort and onto the surface, where they murdered my chickens, a cat, and a single bewildered dwarf, before claiming all the nest boxes. They were untameable, and scaring all my dwarves, so I had to put them down with wooden crossbow bolts (natch).

It just occurred to me that I could put nest boxes in the caverns surrounded by cage traps to catch elk birds and, presumeably, cave swallows. Not terrifically useful unless dungeon masters are working yet.

My two cents on the metal issue; it's obvious that metals are too scarce, and vein distribution needs to be tweaked. Clearly, the modifications to what's going on in worldgen go beyond metals. Fixing these issues that are causing some civilisations to die off right off the bat is tied to metal availability within civilisations; namely, it seems that conurbations are not being sited logically to meet the requirements of the parent civilisation.

I for one am glad to be rid of the horrible technicolor marble cake that ruins the colour coordination of my fort. Every map should have some metal though. I find it hard to believe that there's anywhere on Earth where there is no metal, and few gemstones, between the surface and the mantle.

That said, the issue of prospecting has been raised. I've always liked the idea of populating the world with multiple abandoned forts. In this version, setting up mines for prospecting, and then abandoning them if nothing turns up, sounds kind of cool. That has certainly happened in real life; there are whole ghost towns abandoned because the expected mineral wealth was found lacking.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Pretty much everything has been said about the lack of metals so far, except the affects it has on shallow worlds in world gen.
I used to generate and play on 2x2 embarks in shallow worlds when I was playing on my notebook. Thats impossible now.

As for the other features like clay, It's very welcome. I can finally create and above ground Yak herding society.

[Buttery_Mess]

Pretty much everything has been said about the lack of metals so far, except the affects it has on shallow worlds in world gen.
I used to generate and play on 2x2 embarks in shallow worlds when I was playing on my notebook. Thats impossible now.

As for the other features like clay, It's very welcome. I can finally create and above ground Yak herding society.

I hadn't thought of that. I don't tend to mess with the raws much, but I do like to gen worlds with extra volcanoes from time to time. Seems like it'd be nice if Toady added the ability to change ore scarcity in the raws.

Or, maybe, just decide how many veins are on a particular square of the world map, and squash them all into however many layers the player chooses to embark with.

Yeah I'm loving the breadth agriculture now. You can have lovely pastoral forts. Feels very humany. There *must* be a way to weaponise bees though...

[Catastrophic lolcats]

I haven't really had a chance to play. So does the change in ores also have an affect on the "Blue Metal"?
Seems strange if you have more than that on your map than iron.

[Urist is dead tome]

I'm really liking the addition of pigs. I for one welcome this ore scarcity. It makes players have to think on their toes to get cash. Instead of a steel clad super army, you have a couple dwarves wearing a mail shirt. Pants if your fort is prosperous. It will probably cause people to get an appreciation for iron and copper.

[Ledi]

Pretty much everything has been said about the lack of metals so far, except the affects it has on shallow worlds in world gen.
I used to generate and play on 2x2 embarks in shallow worlds when I was playing on my notebook. Thats impossible now.

That's one of the concerns I've raised as well. People playing on a 7x7 will have a lot more area to scour for ore than a person who needs to run at 2x2 or 3x3 - being able to scale the ore quantity in worldgen would be awesome for people who know they'll have a 3x3 space to work in max. Especially if they need to cut down on cavern layers as well.

Edit: Also, they'd be doing this at the same population numbers as well - as both sizes would start with the same number of dwarves.

[myrkul]

I would be A-OK with extremely scarce metal if the glass max_sharp bug is fixed.

A bunch of wooden cage traps and glass serrated disks seem like a fine defense to me, as long as those disks aren't randomly sharp or dull.

[dooots]

3x3 are fine 2x2 may be a bit light on ore.  I have no idea what a shallow world would do the metal placement.

From my tests and what people have said this is how the new ore placement works.  If you embark in an area flagged as having metal each layer of stone has a chance of having metal.  If a layer has metal each embark square flagged as having metal will have one ore deposit per z level of said stone.

So if you have a 3x3 area with a layer of limestone that is four z levels thick and the limestone contains magnetite you would have 36 deposits of magnetite.  Its less metal then you had in .18 but its not really that bad.  Also you can have multiply layers of stone that contain metal.  I have had three stone layers that contained tetrahedrite which was my deep metal for that embark so I had something like 81 tetrahedrite deposits although the caverns did eat some of them.

Some other notes.  HFS follows the same rules as it did in .18.  Spots flagged as having metal can pick a mineral or maybe even a gem instead of a metal ore.  Metal (no s) means one chance at metal, Metals means two chances.  Metals follow the stone regions* not the biomes.  So to get more then five types of metal in an embark you have to find two stone regions that contain metal next to each other which looks very rare.  And lastly shallow seems to mean before the second cavern and deep seems to mean the second cavern and lower.

*stone region is an area where all the stone layers are the same they span multiply biomes.

[Thoranius]

Irrigation is unnecessary in this build? That's great news, glad I read it before attempting another go at failing to defend with a pathway of soft-serve not-quite doom (a hallway lined with wooden weapon traps ) Although, on the note of irrigation, the previously belowground hallowed out farms for aboveground farming underground claims to be lacking mud when setting up the farm plot, however, the underground plots don't give that notification, and from testing, I am certain the aboveground farms work without the mud. Has anyone else witnessed that as of yet?

[NW_Kohaku]

stuff

You know, I think you're a little misdirected in getting so heated at G-Flex.  You seem to agree with the things I've said, and G-Flex's stance has little difference from my own.

As someone already pointed out, if you randomly happen to find an actual gold deposit, you really can build a solid gold pyramid or giant moai statue in the likeness of yourself or whatever.  It's just finding a gold deposit that's hard.  To make that easy, you need some way to search for gold deposits, and G-Flex agrees with the notion of searching for specific metal types.  He's just saying it's unreasonable that gold be in every part of the world map. 

Minerals are, from all appearances, pretty dense when they are present, so if anything, building a giant megaproject from one particular material would be easier if you just find that material, and just finding that one material means a search function, not necessarily making sure every embark location has every material in the game.

Aye, I'm having fun by not playing .19. I don't feel like taking a month to get the site I was only spending 5 days on in .18.

And ore scarcity may be a hot topic, but there's also the much vaguer embark screen now too. 'deep metal' to some people has turned out to be one 6-tile vein of unspecified origin. Since the actual maps haven't changed, just how they're being presented, I do not feel that it is too unreasonable to ask for an option of 'precise' or 'vague' embark details.

Ore scarcity would do better in the worldgen parameters (e.g. Ore_Quantify 1-100x or somesuch). I'm concerned as well by the fact that I'm limited to a 3x3 embark due to performance - I could easily be crippled due to lack of minerals while someone who can embark on a 7x7 would have much more area in which ore could be found (with the same dwarven population). The abundance of ore in .18 made small embarks possible, but without some form of scaling I think there is a chance we will be forced to take early FPS death and a larger embark simply so we can have those extra potential ore deposits.

I'm not really finding that to be the case, myself. 

I embarked on a place with no metals I've been able to find at all (deep metals on the map indicator), but I've been pretty OK, just because I've embarked in a savage jungle with absurd amounts of wood and fire clay, so I just have been making all kinds of wooden cage traps and ceramic mechanisms while erecting a marble wall around my expansive pasture to protect it. 

When the goblins come, I'll find my iron source even if I can't find metal on the map , I have absurd amounts of wood for fuel, and marble unadulterated by veins of any sort of other material running through them, even if there's apparently only one z-level of the stuff before I start running into warm stone.

I'm not exactly ecstatic with the no metal when I was told there would be metal, but as long as I have freak tons of wood and infinite clay, I can at least do the overwhelming majority of the industry, and still play with most of the things I wanted to play with in the new version.

In fact, I'm thinking that, with no more magma forges that I can see, and no way to find coal, wood is actually a much more valuable resource than the metal is.

That said, the issue of prospecting has been raised. I've always liked the idea of populating the world with multiple abandoned forts. In this version, setting up mines for prospecting, and then abandoning them if nothing turns up, sounds kind of cool. That has certainly happened in real life; there are whole ghost towns abandoned because the expected mineral wealth was found lacking.

While this is certainly true, keep in mind that while "Losing is Fun" certainly describes DF, we don't want to have to change that to "Abandoning in frustration because you didn't find what you were looking for is Boring". 

Yes, we all need to learn to overcome adversity, but having to take multiple throws of the dice that take an hour or so to check the results of to find a roll we like (functionally, savescumming) is just tedium.  Maybe you'll enjoy it the first few times you do it, but I suspect it will get boring if you have to make five aborted forts before you find a site you like every time you try to play a new fort by the third or fourth fort you play.

I've never really seen a real use for things like Prospector or Reveal before, having only ever used Reveal once before when I just gave up and used it to find an underground river once in 40d (I didn't realize it could be literally at the peak of the mountain, and searched all of the lower regions), but I think that just having a means of pointing some utility at the map and making it tell me what I can rely upon finding would make my life a lot easier.

Trying to survive with limited resources is a real challenge.  Just repeatedly embarking over and over and over again to get a lucky roll of the dice isn't real difficulty, it's just sacrficing hours of my life at the alter of the Random Number God until it shines down some favor.

[Taricus]

no more magma forges

NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[myrkul]

There *must* be a way to weaponise bees though...

WAR Bees!