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Total Members Voted: 137

[73]

Here's a few things I've noticed while playing my fort a bit more:

Stockpiles. Dwarves are unwilling to stockpile the following:
-Insulated buckets/barrels (though they will use them fine, and filled barrels are still used in food stockpiles)
-liberator's aspises or branches of thorns. They will stockpile tin aspises, however.
-phantasmal statues
-clouded crystalline shamshirs
-Bloodforged bolts

Fishing:
-Fish show up as a ? on a red background, like a corpse (when carried; when on the ground it's a red ? on a grey background). Not sure if that's intentional or not.
-Dwarves don't want to stockpile fish. They'll eat the fish, but they won't put it in a food stockpile. It won't even be moved from the fish pond unless you have a fishery, in which case it will just sit there until eaten. Whether or not they'll rot and produce miasma because of this I'm not sure.
-This may be just me, but it seems to take a much longer time to catch fish in the pond than it did in a river. I'm just going on memory, though, since I don't have any fishable water on my current embark; I'm probably just imagining it.

Machine Shop:
-The machine shop will use clay if it's the closest available stone. I have no idea if this is intentional or not. However, any clay bins and beds created won't be placed in a furniture stockpile.

Basically, everything works... my dwarves just don't want to organize things. And yes, I have a stockpile of every type, excluding stone and a block stockpile.

Also, nephilim diplomats will dodge into midair or the like, and then get stuck there because they can't path to my baron or whoever they want to see, and eventually leave unhappy. I'm guessing that's just flying creature pathing and it can't be adjusted, though.

I've also had a pegasus the nephilim brought me out in the snow for several months, and it doesn't seem to have gotten hungry. Are they not grazers?

[Pan]

I believe slabs of accreditions doesn't seem to be stockpiled as well. So I just put the slab processing workshops next to the training workshops. It's not perfect, though.

[astianax]

on the pegasus, yeah, they were made before the grazing came in. since they were a pre existing creature but not from vanilla (or her own mod, just borrowed, with permission) quite easy to slip through the cracks during updates. prob'ly set 'em similar to the unicorn, that's what i wound up doing. also took deon's idea from genesis and made both unicorns and pegasoi (i think that's supposed to be the proper plural?) milkable and 'cheesabe' which is really nice when you get breeding stock of both going

[73]

Holy... remind me never to annoy Armok. Ever.

My priest was performing the greater ritual of power. Been injured before, but never actually anything permanent. This time, I see an explosion, get a cancel message about injury, and see the dwarf take exactly 4 steps.

Then he bled to death. Seconds from the explosion. I've seen dwarves immersed in magma live longer than that...

[narhiril]

[PERMITTED_REACTION:MAKE_WALL_OF_TEXT]

Holy... remind me never to annoy Armok. Ever.

My priest was performing the greater ritual of power. Been injured before, but never actually anything permanent. This time, I see an explosion, get a cancel message about injury, and see the dwarf take exactly 4 steps.

Then he bled to death. Seconds from the explosion. I've seen dwarves immersed in magma live longer than that...

Thanks for that, I had no confirmation up to this point that this particular syndrome was actually working properly.  It's very rare, so it never showed up in my tests.  Yes, Armok has a sick sense of humor.  Expect more horrible possibilities to come further along in the ritual tree - there are, after all, fates worse than a quick (if messy) death.

on the pegasus, yeah, they were made before the grazing came in. since they were a pre existing creature but not from vanilla (or her own mod, just borrowed, with permission) quite easy to slip through the cracks during updates. prob'ly set 'em similar to the unicorn, that's what i wound up doing. also took deon's idea from genesis and made both unicorns and pegasoi (i think that's supposed to be the proper plural?) milkable and 'cheesabe' which is really nice when you get breeding stock of both going

That's exactly what happened - they're leftover from an older build of DF.  I will give them an appropriate graze value in the next update for those who are not making their own modifications (in your case, you'll likely want to replace that particular file in the next release with your own version).

Here's a few things I've noticed while playing my fort a bit more:

Stockpiles. Dwarves are unwilling to stockpile the following:
-Insulated buckets/barrels (though they will use them fine, and filled barrels are still used in food stockpiles)
-liberator's aspises or branches of thorns. They will stockpile tin aspises, however.
-phantasmal statues
-clouded crystalline shamshirs
-Bloodforged bolts

Fishing:
-Fish show up as a ? on a red background, like a corpse (when carried; when on the ground it's a red ? on a grey background). Not sure if that's intentional or not.
-Dwarves don't want to stockpile fish. They'll eat the fish, but they won't put it in a food stockpile. It won't even be moved from the fish pond unless you have a fishery, in which case it will just sit there until eaten. Whether or not they'll rot and produce miasma because of this I'm not sure.
-This may be just me, but it seems to take a much longer time to catch fish in the pond than it did in a river. I'm just going on memory, though, since I don't have any fishable water on my current embark; I'm probably just imagining it.

Machine Shop:
-The machine shop will use clay if it's the closest available stone. I have no idea if this is intentional or not. However, any clay bins and beds created won't be placed in a furniture stockpile.

Basically, everything works... my dwarves just don't want to organize things. And yes, I have a stockpile of every type, excluding stone and a block stockpile.

Also, nephilim diplomats will dodge into midair or the like, and then get stuck there because they can't path to my baron or whoever they want to see, and eventually leave unhappy. I'm guessing that's just flying creature pathing and it can't be adjusted, though.

I've also had a pegasus the nephilim brought me out in the snow for several months, and it doesn't seem to have gotten hungry. Are they not grazers?

Let me try to hit these one at a time. 

The stockpile issues are coming from the technical aspects of how "god metals" currently work.  I elected to use a modified stone template for these "metals" to prevent them from having full metal functionality (melting and preferences), but this seems to have created some unintended side effects with stockpiling, as there isn't a category for "stone ammunition" or the like.  Dwarves will currently use bloodforged bolts (to devastating effect), but will not pick them up afterwards.  I need to comb through the wiki and raws to see if there is any way that I can get around this problem - perhaps making them use a wood or even an organic template instead (purely from a technical standpoint - the material properties will be the same).  Tin aspides are being stockpiled because tin is a stock metal, not one of these "stone-metal" hybrids that I used for ritual materials.

Fishing.  Ugh.  I have noticed this as well.  The "speed" issue is something that I can easily tweak just by playing with probability numbers, but the generic "fish" products are a bit more complicated.  Namely, I don't have a clue how to make them name and stockpile properly.  They're produced as FISH_RAW items with the materials set as muscle materials from different fish creatures, which is why dwarves will eat them (and why the "big catch" products are higher value), but despite this specification, the product is still showing up as "fish" and not stockpiling properly.  I'll go ahead and tack this up as a "known issue" while I try to find a suitable solution.

The machine shop using clay is an oversight.  I will disallow absorbent reagents in those reactions for the next version, which should have no effect on any stone but the several types of clay.

I cannot fix DF's buggy flying creature pathing, unfortunately, so the nephilim diplomat is going to do that from time to time. 

If its any consolation, their sieges are wicked fun.  I had an epic battle between my army of 33 bronze and mithril-clad dwarves and their army (which, to my surprise, was actually led by their legatus) in the most recent test fortress.  I have a picture of the battle, during which my steel razor-wielding champion racked up fifteen kills and my baron took an arrow to the head after wading into the fray with his *iovium pair of knuckles*.  It was unfortunate, for he was a good and just baron, but I did at least get the knuckles back, and his tomb of gold furnishings will stand for many a century.


--

On a related, but different note, I sincerely apologize for the delay in concept art.  I have had a nightmare of a week, getting home from school after midnight every day so far.  I have a number of good pieces to post, but I have been so tired that I have fallen asleep every night without remembering to scan them first (doesn't help that my scanner is at the foot of my bed).  The few hours I have been able to put into LFR have been mostly without fanfare - trying to track down and fix issues, anomalies, and revising minute details.  Thanks to you guys, I have a bunch more of those to pin down for this coming weekend - and I mean that sincerely.  It is much less work for me to target issues that you guys report than for me to have to comb through and find them myself - as they say, sometimes the author is blind to the flaws in his (or her, in my case) creation.

I have also planned out the most extensive and complex easter egg thus far, and the logistics of this are not something I wish to share at this time beyond the fact that it is requiring a new template for some materials planned to be used in very late game mechanical/ritual hybrid technologies.  I had to actually write and debug it sooner or later, but its one of those things where I don't have anything wonderfully exciting or spectacular to show for my work thus far.  It involves a new, "rare caste" of an existing creature, but takes it to a level of complexity that I have never done before, and I want you guys to stumble upon it rather than listen to me blab about it.  If you're using the raw-only release, you'll probably notice that one of the creature files has nearly doubled in size in this next version - the bulk of this content corresponding to a single caste of a single creature.  Trust me, when it works, it will be something beautiful to behold.

[73]

Ooh, more easter eggs... Always fun to find.

Anyway, there's a few more issues I've run into, several of which were a bit of a pain to find because they  involved fighting off 2 voidwalker squads, 4 goblin squads, 2 lizardman squads, 6 - 8 goblin/lizard theives, and another 6 voidwalker theives (who did more damage than everyone else combined). At the same time. Just so I could trade.

This mod can be so hardcore sometimes.

I had one of my soldiers, who had occasionally served as a priest, diagnosed with 'divine displeasure' after he had a disagreement with some voidwalkers and their shiny weapons. However, there was no medical signature for this diagnosis, and I'm not sure if it actually did anything; I haven't had anyone die out of combat or complain of injuries. Then again, said dwarf might have been killed later on by the rest of the enemies rampaging around.

Also, I'm not quite certain that my previously-reported priest's death was due to the ritual itself anymore, because after examining the circumstances a bit, I realized he was also a member of the militia and had grabbed a voidshard shield from one of the ambushes the nephilim killed for me. So I suspect that it may have actually been the voidshard exploding at a high temperature due to the ritual failing. Would that actually be hot enough to trigger voidshard exploding?

Voidwalker thieves behave oddly, which I think is due to their building destroyer abilities. Namely, I had one run straight through my entire military, completely ignoring the beating it received, to travel another 30 squares or so to start trying to kill a door. It seems like half the time when discovered they immediately attack, and the other half they ignore everyone until they find a building. Heck, I've never even had them steal anything, despite the tons of loot from all the dead lying outside that I can't be bothered to clean up.

I've also realized that I've got some ethereal spheres from alchemy. I've never had any before, so they're definitely rare, but I think 24,000 dwarfbucks might be excessive for masterwork spheres. I could buy out a caravan with a few of those.

Also, after you confirmed that the machine shop isn't supposed to use clay, I went and tested my alchemy lab. It tends to use clay too.

Lustrum extraction also trains alchemy absurdly fast (probably due to the number of products), especially when compared with alchemy's normally slow speed, since it requires so many regents. In addition, it doesn't actually seem to have a harmful byproduct - sure, there are explosions, and people go rest in the hospital and leave a few squares of blood spatters, but they have no injuries listed, return to work immediately after being diagnosed, and can be left in bed for half a year (lazy doctors) without any ill effects.

Courage oak may also be overpriced, as a masterwork crutch is worth 1440, versus the 120 or so for normal wood. Dunno if that also effects the other ritual wood; I don't have any handy at the moment.

Also, not really sure if I should mention this or not, since the pegasoi aren't actually your creation, but they can apparently grapple with their wings, which has produced some odd combat logs (it's actually fairly effective, too).

[astianax]

on the wing grappling bit, that's not just pegasoi. i've had my war giant eagles and other warbirds (borrowed from different mods, most of the birds are large groundbased things similar to an ostrich. sometimes bigger) decide to wing-grapple. which caused quite a laugh when a giant eagle caught a voidwalker thief in a chokehold and strangled it with said wing while war versions of elephants, giant lizards, golems, giant spiders, cave crocs, and a giant snow leopard all gnawed on the thing's head until a hammerdwarf sauntered up and caved its skull in. seriously, after the chokehold, ever single attack was aimed at its head...

and yes, color me interested in the new easter eggs, as well...

[narhiril]

I had one of my soldiers, who had occasionally served as a priest, diagnosed with 'divine displeasure' after he had a disagreement with some voidwalkers and their shiny weapons. However, there was no medical signature for this diagnosis, and I'm not sure if it actually did anything; I haven't had anyone die out of combat or complain of injuries. Then again, said dwarf might have been killed later on by the rest of the enemies rampaging around.

Also, I'm not quite certain that my previously-reported priest's death was due to the ritual itself anymore, because after examining the circumstances a bit, I realized he was also a member of the militia and had grabbed a voidshard shield from one of the ambushes the nephilim killed for me. So I suspect that it may have actually been the voidshard exploding at a high temperature due to the ritual failing. Would that actually be hot enough to trigger voidshard exploding?

"Divine displeasure" is a byproduct of rituals.  It causes intense pain for a reasonably short amount of time.

And yes, looking at the values, it is actually possible that the voidshard bastion exploded, causing its syndrome.  Armok's displeasure causes brief (but severe) bleeding from every orifice, but it seems highly unlikely that this would be enough to kill a dwarf, especially before he even left the vicinity of the altar.  That sounds an awful lot like voidshard's effect, so I'm guessing that's probably what happened.

Addressing other issues and concerns - the alchemy lab is supposed to be able to use clay.  Pricing issues are related to material values - masterwork ethereal and courage oak pieces are going to be worth more because their materials are worth more.  A masterwork ethereal sphere is quite a lucky find, and will be an amazing item to trade or use for a display case.

Lustrum extraction is not meant to be as much hazardous as it is inconvenient.  The syndrome slows down production and causes a mess, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.  Occasionally, a dwarf may catch a fever, which has a more lingering slowdown effect.

--

The difficulty level of this mod is admittedly quite high at the moment, especially if you are playing in proximity of all possible civilizations.  Unfortunately, the plans I have for lightening the burden will not come to fruition under the current version of DF.  Later ritual and mechanical advances will be made possible with the next version, allowing for things such as improved war creatures, physically augmented warriors, and more diverse weapons of war which will help tip the scales a bit more in your favor.

Much further down the road, I would like to override the procedural conflict generator and manually set relations between hostile races, which will cause some interesting dynamics (siege armies fighting each other as well as your armies) and should lighten the burden of ambushes on your trade routes.  Unfortunately, I do not know when or if this will become possible - probably no earlier than the army arc, which is the next planned major development for DF after the "caravan arc" (in other words, it may be quite some time).

For those of you who appreciate the difficulty and fear that the mod is becoming "dumbed down," you'll find that none of these advances or weapons mentioned will be easy to come by.  For those of you that fear that the concept of more dynamic conflicts will make defense much easier, I still have a full new hostile race that has not even been implemented yet simply because they would break the game without this in-fighting mechanic (they would wipe out almost everyone else in legends).


---

Other news, which I thought might intrigue a few of you.  Using tentative information about the upcoming Dwarf Fortress update, I have sketched out a method for making fragmented zingers work a lot more effectively. 

Fragmented zingers will be given a subcutaneous tissue layer called "trigger fluid."  When the skin is broken, the trigger fluid leaks out.  Inevitably, some of this trigger fluid gets on the zinger itself, carrying a contact syndrome that changes the fragmented zinger into a "detonating zinger."  The detonating zinger carries an undirected dust breath attack - killing itself, causing cave-in knockback, and spreading "bone splinters" which carry a contact bleeding effect.  This change will likely have the following effects...

1) Fragmented zingers will be much, MUCH more dangerous, and a much more useful tool in a dwarven arsenal.

2) Instantly lethal wounds will kill the zinger before it can transform and detonate itself - a "dud" effect.

3) Blasts will cause cave-in knockback.

4) The slightest impact, just enough to break the skin, can cause the zinger to detonate.  Dwarves using these as weapons must be excessively careful.

But don't get too excited just yet.  This change is not currently possible due to the inability of a syndrome to change a creature - a problem which will hopefully be rectified very shortly.  However, I wanted to give you a little taste of some of the plans I have for the new features.

[Pan]

Hate to bother you like this, but when's the concept art going to be scanned?

[G-Flex]

All else aside, I noticed some names with real-world places in them, like "Damascus sentinel". Seeing as how there's presumably no Damascus, isn't this a little odd?

[astianax]

the damascus centinals are named for their primary component, damascus steel, which itself is also the name of the process of making said steel. it's mostly meant to tell us two things, i believe. 1) she didn't make the metal up, instead took it from a real source and 2) if we know what damascus steel is, we'll know that it's a definite step up from regular steel

also, while a lot of people believe that damascus steel is named after the city, that may not be the case. some cite it being named after a swordsmith (damashqui) and some cite it as being named after the patterns in the steel being similar to those found in damask fabrics

so, while damashqui isn't a name any of the races will pick (currently...easily fixed, if one intends to) and damask isn't one of the types of cloth we can use (again, easily fixed, if one wanted) they'd both work quite well for the item being named after them and keeping the same name as its rl counterpart. heck, we could even say the ancient civilization discovered the technique before fading into obscurity was called damascus, itself

[73]

Just lost another priest to the ritual of power, a medic who had never been in the military; no voidshard anywhere nearby. Bled to death in 4 tiles, exact same location as the previous priest.

I guess that syndrome is lethal after all.

[narhiril]

Hate to bother you like this, but when's the concept art going to be scanned?

You're not bothering me.  I'll have it up tomorrow, promise

[astianax]

so...umm...i just had two migrants in my latest wave point out something to me, accidentally. it seems each one liked a different one of your 'greater' easter-eggs. and, it also seems that  neither of those greaters has a prefstring, so they both "liked them for their ."
odd, odd migrants, for deciding those were favorites of theirs

in other news, i'm almost giddy at toady's mention of books for the upcoming release. whenever it gets here

[The Master]

Hate to bother you like this, but when's the concept art going to be scanned?

You're not bothering me.  I'll have it up tomorrow, promise

*taps foot importantly while munching on !!prepared titan intestines!!*