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More tech tree!

36 (26.1%)

More ritual tree!

8 (5.8%)

More lore!

12 (8.7%)

More mythical weapons/armor!

22 (15.9%)

Plagues!

28 (20.3%)

More secrets!

21 (15.2%)

More mechanical constructs!

11 (8%)

Total Members Voted: 137

[TehNoob]

I second agree with the other two.

[Pan]

I'm disappointed that the shrines do nothing. The temple district took me 5 solid minutes of planning and designating, and almost a year to carve out, fill the water areas with water, magma area with magma, and place all the captured goblin cages. Still, it looks pretty nice...

[narhiril]

Thanks for the input, all.  I've come to the conclusion (for now) that it's more trouble than it's worth to try to simplify clothing.  I still have very little in the way of actual data about object counts versus fps, and this would cause some significant compatibility issues, not to mention stepping on the toes of some people who genuinely enjoy the clothing diversity (I had a feeling you guys were out there, thanks for speaking up) and distracting from more exciting developments.  I will likely revisit this concept later, but it will likely be a separate, compatible modification that will be an optional component for LFR.

I'm disappointed that the shrines do nothing. The temple district took me 5 solid minutes of planning and designating, and almost a year to carve out, fill the water areas with water, magma area with magma, and place all the captured goblin cages. Still, it looks pretty nice...

Alright, point taken.  You want to know more about those useless buildings that you can spend resources to construct now, right?  Here's a little more about the ritual tech tree's upcoming developments.

If you've been conducting rituals, you may have gotten a slight glimpse at the "materials of the old gods," which are all unique to the ritual tech tree.  A sacrifice to power might produce "bloodforged bolts," while a ritual of wealth may produce a "dull crystalline shamshir."  These materials are tied to the old gods, and are referred to in the raws as "MINOR_METAL_OF_(name)" - the only difference being that they cannot be melted down.  Most of the tier one materials are approximately identical to iron in terms of strength, though they vary a bit in terms of weight.  As you might expect, higher tiers of the ritual tech tree will be able to create more interesting and more powerful materials that will compliment (or rival) the advances in the mechanical tech tree.

Objectives for the future ritual tree advances include...

-Weapons, armor, and other objects created out of these new materials.
-New methods of acquiring flux stone.
-New methods of acquiring soap.
-New methods of acquiring potash (undecided if this will be ritual or mechanical in nature).
-Miraculous healing.  The new version of DF does not mention this as a possibility, but I have a number of ideas for using unorthodox uses of tokens where it *might* be workable.
-Enchanted, syndrome-bearing ammunition (that, hopefully, will actually work).
-Creature material weaknesses.
-A number of "hidden" rewards and risks.
-Unique beverages
-Production of bone furniture.


Planned for the mechanical tech tree:

-Production of larger ammunition stacks.
-Production of stone bins.
-Production of backpacks and quivers from unorthodox materials.
-Production of beds from unorthodox materials.
-A new "distillery process" for an extremely valuable and potent alcohol.


Planned for "crossover" advances:

-A method for growing limited quantities of plants without appropriate soil conditions.
-Living constructs.

[Carn]

Narhiril, please never stop working on this mod. You do all the right things.

Optional plugin minimods? Bone furniture? Stone bins and non-wood beds? Poison arrows, living constructs?

You make DF better with every update.

[Pan]

Will all these awesome, awesome ideas need for us to wait for the next DF update? (By the way, when is that update coming?)

Also, while making a throne from the bones if a dragon is awesome, wouldn't that mean cat/dog/badger/etc bone thrones will also be popping up? That probably isn't a good thing to most people. I mean, the Standardized Leather Mod got quite a good reception, since people are tired (some from the start) of 'kitten leather armor' and stuff. Perhaps you could only allow big, badass megabeasts, titans, semi megabeasts, FBs, and clown bones to be made into furniture?

By the way, Narhiril, what does the concept art look like? I mean, you may want to keep it as a surprise, which is completely fine, but in case your feeling like it, how about telling us what it's going to be about?

[Carn]

I guess armor / furniture / etc could be done kind of like the foundry, with different reactions for each kind of leather, bone, what have you, but that would be a lot of writing. There are a lot of kinds of bones and leather. Still, I suppose most of the reaction could just be cut and pasted, only the animal's named would have to be changed? I guess I can see a reason for it, you don't want those dragon bones being made into bolts when they could be used for a magnificent throne or hat or something, although they'd probably make good bolts too. You could already make a workshop in a room with a stockpile that only accepts the material you want (or dump it there, then undump it) and lock the worker in so they only use that material.

It's what I used to do in 40d to make bauxite floodgates and mechanisms. Still, that's quite a workaround, more efficient reactions would be handy I suppose.

Perhaps some day we'll even be able to specify that you want the stonecarver to make that miniforge your mayor is demanding instead of 574 toy axes.

[narhiril]

Will all these awesome, awesome ideas need for us to wait for the next DF update? (By the way, when is that update coming?)

Also, while making a throne from the bones if a dragon is awesome, wouldn't that mean cat/dog/badger/etc bone thrones will also be popping up? That probably isn't a good thing to most people. I mean, the Standardized Leather Mod got quite a good reception, since people are tired (some from the start) of 'kitten leather armor' and stuff. Perhaps you could only allow big, badass megabeasts, titans, semi megabeasts, FBs, and clown bones to be made into furniture?

By the way, Narhiril, what does the concept art look like? I mean, you may want to keep it as a surprise, which is completely fine, but in case your feeling like it, how about telling us what it's going to be about?

The way I've done the new material templates for legendary creatures makes this a very simple thing to do.  All I have to do is add a reaction class token to those templates and call it in the reaction to prevent anything of "lesser" bones or leather from being used.

The concept art is not supposed to be a surprise, but is limited by the fact that I don't have access to a scanner until Monday.  I suppose I could take pictures of them, but the quality of my camera phone is somewhat lacking.

And no, not all of these ideas will need to wait for the next update.  Some of the things within the ritual tree and everything within the mechanical tree's listings are possible with the current version.

[narhiril]

I think I finally tracked down that bug with the flashbang zingers not actually causing blindness - the token was calling the category EYES, which, while valid, is an empty category (thus no error).  Changing this to EYE should make it work as intended.  Expect this change (and also a fix for a transmutation byproduct) to be in 0.14c.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This also gave me a few ideas for some FUN ritual byproducts.  Stay tuned

[TehNoob]

I guess I'll finally have siege operators that won't run away.

But still, having a high priest that is blind probably wouldn't be cool. You might want to restrict it to higher tech rituals.

[narhiril]

I guess I'll finally have siege operators that won't run away.

But still, having a high priest that is blind probably wouldn't be cool. You might want to restrict it to higher tech rituals.

I was actually talking about plant transmutation at the alchemy lab - one of the possible byproducts causes temporary blindness (it fades after an in-game day or two).  Or at least, it's supposed to  Right now it doesn't do a thing because it needs the aforementioned fix. 

Ritual byproducts currently only cause short-duration extreme pain (usually knocking the dwarf unconscious for a little while) or, in rare and special cases, coughing of blood for a brief duration.  They may also light things on fire periodically.  All of the current ritual byproducts are short-term effects that do not have much potential to seriously harm as long as you're careful where you put the altars. Consequences of later rituals will be more severe, but the rewards will also be greater.  You may even find yourself with a double-edged result - "blessing and a curse," if you will.  I won't say much more about that because I don't want to make any commitments to ideas before the tokens even come out, but the gods can be fickle.

I will, however, promise the following.  There will never be a ritual or mechanical advancement that comes with hidden risks - reactions and advances that have risks associated with them will always be explicitly noted in the manual - though the exact forms of these risks may not always be fully described, you will know the level of risk associated with each reaction up front.  The same cannot be said of rewards - I like to hide these in unusual places sometimes without telling anyone about them.  There's actually one or two of these buried in the current version of the ritual tech tree, but I'm not telling you where - it makes the experience for the first person to accidentally stumble upon them that much more magical. 

[Pan]

The concept art is not supposed to be a surprise

In that case, would you like to describe it? What is it, dwarves fighting voidwalkers? Dwarves being smitten by their gods? Goblins bleeding to death from atrophic bliss vapors? An alchemist holding up an ether sphere?

[narhiril]

The concept art is not supposed to be a surprise

In that case, would you like to describe it? What is it, dwarves fighting voidwalkers? Dwarves being smitten by their gods? Goblins bleeding to death from atrophic bliss vapors? An alchemist holding up an ether sphere?

All of the above, more or less.  Concepts of creatures, races, weapons and armor, old gods, and mock-ups of technical advances - some of which made it into LFR, some of which were too ambitious for the current engine.

[Pan]

Oh. Speaking of visualizing the stuff, I always wondered how do orichalcum work, and what makes them so special.

And I'd like to see your rendition of voidwalkers. Always sort of wondered what they would look like to the you (the graphics were not very clear).

 In fact, to be honest, I don't feel very threatened when the bog trolls and the lizardmen show up. Their graphics don't really make them look serious (the bog trolls look like the flintstones, and a friend asked me once what an army of people in king's robes [the bog trolls] was doing there) and they don't really seem to blend in with the rest of the ironhand graphics. Same goes for the nephilim, who don't really look all that majestic.

No offense meant, though. Sorry if I do sound a bit harsh. I understand you must have spent a lot of time on them. They aren't bad and I couldn't do better myself, just that I have a little criticism to offer .

[narhiril]

There's only so much detail you can put into 16x16 squares.  I feel like you can at least recognize them.  And since when did the Flintstones have two massive horns coming out the sides of their heads?

If you feel that they don't "blend" with Ironhand, it's partly because he uses 18x18 squares and a grayscale background (whereas I use transparent).  And because he's a much better artist than I am. 

But really, I didn't think they were half bad.  Especially the lizardman master spearman and the nephilim consul - the latter of which you won't likely ever see in fortress mode, unfortunately.  The hardest ones to do were the voidwalkers, since it was extremely difficult to get them to look even remotely like the concept art, which you'll see as soon as I can get that scanned.  I understand that they might not suit everyone's tastes, but I personally spent quite a while on them and I feel like at the very least, they are recognizable.



Which reminds me to add to the changelog... fixed a bug where nephilim diplomats were using the wrong graphic.  They should be using the one with the green robe (they only start showing up when you get a baron or higher).

[Seriyu]

How is Iovium for armor? Obviously it's super dense which is good for blunt weapons, and it'd make the dwarves using the armor incredibly slow considering how heavy it is, but would it provide good protection?