I hope Toady gets around to simulating the underground civilizations soon. Back when he had trouble with underground highways for Dwarf civs he just gave up on the whole idea but it'd be cool if he decided to take it up again.
If he did this, I would destroy the shrine to him that is currently sitting in my closet and upgrade it to a temple.
Well, I don't think any of the new workshops and associated reactions in them will be carried over. And that's the meat of the update anyway. The little things that could work without world regen is the changed zinger anatomy and... Pretty much it I guess. I know the feel bro. But then again, my fortress just burned down from Zalkor's flames. So it's off to the new version!
I seriously hate it when emberlights fuck it all up. And they take so much resources to make, too.
I'm actually not quite happy with emberlights right now from a cost-benefit standpoint. The idea behind requiring so many resources was because emberlights were coming from a technically "tier two" ritual hybrid building, so they were going to be the first units available. However, when I ended up turning the ritual tree into more of an investment choice-based progression rather than a linear one, that became kind of a moot point. Right now, emberlights require some ridiculous number of reagents in addition to a tech advancement to unlock, whereas things like tempests are a lot more straightforward. I can tell that they need some tweaking because I'm even just kind of ignoring the Temple of Fire during testing. I'm thinking it might be time for a radical cost readjustment - something along the lines of two iron bars, two ash, and two logs.
That being said, it's an immense amount of fun to build a "lava maze" and force your enemy to walk through it while fighting emberlights. Because they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, enemies end up dodging into magma, while emberlights who do the same can just climb back out. Just make sure you watch out for voidwalkers when you do this, as that can get ugly in a hurry...
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On a somewhat unrelated note, I think I've got a much better structure for the training workshop and tier two advancement portion of the tech tree. Training workshops will no longer produce slabs of accreditation in the next update - instead, I'm switching them over to harmless boiling stones. This should both reduce clutter and reduce the spam in your announcement log due to masterwork slabs being produced.
Obviously, with the removal of slabs, documentation needs some revision as well. What I was planning to do was to give alchemical and transmutation experiments a 100% product called something along the lines of "experiment results." These items would then be used for the documentation reaction, which would be re-named "evaluate experimental findings" or something like that to produce the same products it does now. Obviously the ratio will be adjusted - I won't make you do ten experiments for every research attempt. I was thinking more along the lines of one or two. I may even feel like pushing to make this change the bulk of the 0.18b update, since I feel like this is a better system, overall, from both a lore and functionality standpoint. But more on that as it starts to come together.