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[Dradym]

ability to advance time.

would be cool to decide what year to embark rather than randomly picking...though thats just as fun

[Zesty]

...you can pick a year to embark, during world gen.

Do you mean a way to advance time between embarks on the same world?

[Dradym]

yes, thats what i mean, advance time AFTER a complete world gen...including in between forts/adventure modes

[IT 000]

Then this has been suggested and discussed before, I think it's on the Eternal Suggestions list somewhere. Still, I do support it.

[TolyK]

Then this has been suggested and discussed before, I think it's on the Eternal Suggestions list somewhere. Still, I do support it.

[Jeoshua]

I really support this.  It would be very good to generate a world, look around it in legends, decide "Hey, this world look like it needs to 'bake' for a few more years," then drop it back into the worldgen mode.

[TolyK]

it would also be fun to start wars with humans and elves, then skip a few years, then play adventure mode and start another war between humans and elves, then skip another few years (maybe even a decade) and embark on red ground.
what could possible go wrong?  It's as safe as possible!

[Dutchling]

But what if you embark 100 years before you stopped world gen, abandon and than embark when at the same time as you ended world gen?
There might be a village build at the same place as your old fort...

[NW_Kohaku]

This is something Toady would probably intend to do, but there are technical reasons why it isn't particularly feasible right now. 

Basically, right now, time only runs during worldgen, when everything is just sort of abstractly being tabulated. 

Towns and villages and caves and such aren't actually "built" until you, the player, visits them. 

The game does not know how to take an already-constructed town that an adventurer visited, and put them back into the same abstracted format where time can run on them.  The game doesn't know how to react to whatever the player has done to the world (especially considering the atrocities players can inflict upon a world) to run the simulation of how the world copes.  The game definitely doesn't know how to keep a player-created fortress or player-remodled town running in the abstract for worldgen time advancement to work.

These are all things that need to happen eventually, of course, but these are the main reasons why you can't just punch a button that says "advance another 100 years".  There isn't the infrastructure for history to advance once worldgen stops, and the player has taken a look inside Schroedinger's box.  It only knows how to advance quantum variables. 

Once that necessary infrastructure is there, I'm sure Toady could fairly easily add a "Rip Van Winkle - wake me in 100 years" button.

As it stands right now, as I remember it, one of Toady's games as an adventurer involved him running away from an alligator to go visit the king of a castle, and get a quest, and when he came back from the quest, the king had been eaten by the alligator, so he recruited all the guards he could from the castle, and went looking for a new castle to get his quests from, because there would never be another king in that castle again.  Once something dies, the function it fulfilled is gone forever.  The game is built on a massive amount of entropic decay.  Societies cannot function, they can only collapse.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Once something dies, the function it fulfilled is gone forever.  The game is built on a massive amount of entropic decay.  Societies cannot function, they can only collapse.

...That is really dark.
I am so glad that that's not what the real world is like.

[NW_Kohaku]

In the real world, behavior like that in DF's AI would never have led to civilization in the first place.  It has its ups and downs, but real-life cultures have always generally striven to build and advance.  DF cultures do not.  They cannot advance, there is no "upward pressure" to innovate or build, and so the "downward pressures" of destruction are completely unopposed, leading to inevitable global extinction.

Killing every living thing (besides vermin) in the entire region is not something epic in this game, it's just hastening the inevitable, completely unopposed entropic decay of a DF world.

[antymattar]

Not so shoure. I had a world run for 1050 years and mankind had dominated every continent, island and other civ that there is.
...
Genicode time.

[Jeoshua]

But what if you embark 100 years before you stopped world gen, abandon and than embark when at the same time as you ended world gen?
There might be a village build at the same place as your old fort...

Wot 

We're talking about running worldgen, then stopping it, being able to play the game, then starting worldgen on the same world and continuing history.

There would be no village there, there would be a player fort.

[Geen]

Once something dies, the function it fulfilled is gone forever.  The game is built on a massive amount of entropic decay.  Societies cannot function, they can only collapse.

That's probably the most depressing thing I've ever heard about DF.