Can we make subtle region curses? I'd like to see little hamlets full of backwards, mutated townsfolk.
From the sound of Threetoe's teaser in the Dev Log, it sounds curses can possibly alienate you from normal not cursed individuals. Will these curses be causing effects that might make you unpleasant for normals to deal with?
For example, a curse of sores or a curse of ugliness. I imagine these types of curses might make it in because of how they are tied to mummies in fiction and simply want to know if they are within the scope of working on mummies. The idea of a curse making you an outcast is not uncommon either and that what it sounds like could happen from the Dev Log...
This came up in the List thread:I know your removing Good and Evil in the not so distant future... but what would be your guess of the Spheres which would be closest to good and evil? Actually undertaking all the Sphere related Spherical Land conversion of the Evil/good lands seems like a lot. I am guessing the dev item refers to you taking the first steps? What exactly does that entail if I am allowed to ask.
You mean not close to good in the moral/whatever sense but in the close to good in terms of having unicorns and fairies and fluffy wamblers occur as they do now? If a unicorn is associated to particular spheres (luck, say) then it would be luck-lands that get them, rather than anything else (unless luck is linked to other spheres, then there's some chance of pulling them over to those as well). The evil lands either get the "evil" creatures or the undead curses, so when those are sphered out, it would be handled that way. Of course, since there are like 100 spheres (and will be many more no doubt), yeah, this is a large project overall, especially when you get away from the stock raw monsters and ask which random creature/veg/etc. traits should be linked to spheres and try to do every sphere justice. If it also gets deity links at that time, you have the local civilizations associated to the deities to consider as well, so an "evil" god sphere-related land near a human civ might take the human body definition and then sphere-twist it into something that is meant to be a mockery of human form (good ones do the same thing but the twists would not be seen as a negative thing, though they could still be terrifying). In real-world mythological examples, a lot of this depends on the cultural values associated to certain animals, though simple things like stripping off the outer layer (ie skin) or adding fire breath or making the skin a different color etc. all work as well, and I've got the tools to do all of that now with this revision. As long as the sphere/cultural links are reasonably maintained, I think it won't devolve into a sea of garbage slush (as a more trivial but current example, take god names vs. some of the other names -- sphere-links tend to make the god names "better", in one sense at least, though clearly it all needs work).
A question, though;
Have you settled on what these 'secrets' will allow? Would you pretty please be able to post a list (so, immortality, raising and binding undead, rapid healing, etc)?
You mentioned that new secrets will be able to be modded in on release. What kind of functionality on release are we looking at for that system? Will secrets be able to change attributes, give new body parts, or anything like that, or will it just be tags like [IMMORTAL] or whatever for now?
"I don't want to post those now because the format is still fluid."Toady, will necromancy be possible in the Arena?
Today's devlog confirms this.With the advent of necromancy, will it be possible to use necromancer's powers to recruit ghosts on quests of revenge?
Oh, and another question: Will it be possible to get quests of revenge from your old dead adventurers for in exchange for the dead adventurer's equipment?
AFAIK there hasn't been any mention of necromancers recruiting ghosts in world gen or otherwise, so probably not.
Tangible rewards for quests haven't been implemented yet, nor has any notion of personal revenge, so no, not in the next version.
Are necromancers going to send their armies to all nearby sites?
(to harvest bodies)
or only to fortresses? If so, what is their common motivation to focus on dwarves so?
Also, will these small towers grow larger as the number of minions grows?
The dev log mentions necromancers raising corpses from old battlefields, so they're not focusing on dwarves per se.
Tower size will probably be fixed at worldgen.
3. Is it possible that the leader of a dwarven civ, perhaps the king at your fortress even, might become a necromancer while you're playing? What would happen if they did? Would they suddenly just become an enemy while standing in your fort and promptly get slaughtered, would they run off and disappear off screen before returning years later with an undead horde, or would they remain in power and you would just have what amounts to an invincible population in which any member who died was raised almost immediately.
Covered in the last thread:Will secrets make an appearance in dwarf mode any time soon?
Lets say that a demon relates a secret to a man in world gen. That man writes it down on his fancy stone tablet. A megabeast then steals that tablet and takes it back to his lair. World gen ends, and the player embarks with their dwarves on that lair. Will the tablet be there for the dwarves to find? When can we expect some kind of meaningful interaction with that kind of world-gen artifact?
I'm not sure what's going to happen with dwarf mode vs. the world gen artifacts. It seems like they will be available in the same space, which I guess would mean if it's a slab you could unforbid it and place it like a building... but I dunno if your dwarves will suddenly all become immortal and start raising their pets. We'll have to see what happens.
If the player in adventure mode/armies in the future dwarf mode slaughter a village, will a necromancer be able to harvest their bodies / create an undead city while in-play? or will the necromancer rise be restricted in a short worldgen that happens between one adventure/fortress and the next one?
Creation of necromantic towers and undead armies will probably only occur during primary world generation. It definitely won't happen during play (that's a Release 5 thing at the soonest), and while the game does currently skip a year or two between Adventure/Fortress games, it doesn't seem to incorporate most of the stuff that happens during primary world generation.
The absence of a 'jungle' biome have puzzled me a long time. Surroundings like "Polluted", "No-Gravity" and "Irradiated"(magically, that is) might be a bit out-of-place, but still possible to mod in.
In the future, are you planning on implementing other kinds of biomes and surroundings?
'Jungle' is an inexact term, but the game has plenty of
tropical forests.As for new types of surroundings:
# Core94, RANDOMIZED REGIONS AND THEIR FLORA/FAUNA, (Future): The current good/evil regions should be scrapped and replaced by a system that aligns a region to varying degrees with a set of spheres. In this way you could end up with a desert where the stones sing or a forest where the trees bleed, with all sorts of randomly generated creatures and plants that are appropriate to the sphere settings. It's important that randomly generated objects be introduced to the player carefully during play rather than just being thrown one after another to allow for immersion, though there's also something to be said for cold dumping the player in a world with completely random settings, provided they can access enough information by looking/listening and having conversations, etc. Requires Core92.
You talked on the dev page about adventurers interrogating bad guys for information. While I understand that's a ways off, could that theoretically work for magical secrets?
Part of the implementation of secrets was that Toady
"set up the knowledge structures for historical figures", and coupled with his comment about
"knowledge [of secrets] spreading all over the place" and the general goal of being able to interrogate people, yeah, it's one of those things that will hopefully work out later.
Will brewing continue to make liquid out of nowhere?
This one just puzzles me at the moment.
In the next release, yes. Later on, probably not.
Will we see non-human towns (such as mountain homes, goblin forts, and elf forest retreats) return sometime during the nine releases?
From the last thread:will the town revamp starting with the next release finally give us elf/dwarf settlements with actual elves & dwarves?
Doing those prior to the dwarf mode army arc releases is the current plan, so that you have something to attack. So in between the caravan releases and the army-related army arc releases. If it comes up, it might happen sooner, if it's forced in some way by the trading, but that might not be how it works out.
Will we be able to find and use slabs that contain knowledge of secrets? So my adventurer could find the "slab of death" and then go run off to build a tower and raise an undead army to conquer the region?
Last thread:Will adventures be able to learn these new "secrets"?
It comes down to adding an interface to it, pretty much, and supporting any special interactions that might take some care when coming from the player. Ideally if you can turn into some sort of night creature, you'd get all of its powers and get to keep playing, but the use of interactions is exactly the problem with allowing the player to do that. We'll see what the breadth of interactions ends up being. It could end up being pretty straightforward to do.
Building towers and raising armies won't be possible yet, though.
Imagine, you get a quest from a priest of Merra -the blessed blossom- to attack a shrine to Armok -God of Blades- and kill it's priest. If both temples are located in the same civilization, how will this work out for your relations with that civ? Will relations with temples be seperate from those with civs? Will effects on relations be more confined to sites.
The game already separately tracks your affiliation with a temple vs. your affiliation with a civ, but in the next version, you will still become an enemy of the civ. Toady probably won't have any detailed predictions until he begins working on
Justice.
when weather becomes more implemented will there be creatures that affect the weather? such as a lightning titan that brings rain and causes random lighting strikes leading to Fun and fires?
Cool idea, but there's no timeline or definite answers yet.
you once mentioned in a df talk about artefacts playing larger roles such as a hat that sucks the world into a fire realm, considering that we already get named weapons, is it possible that you might include a way of the weapon getting "enchanted/cursed" from over use?
Toady: Part of it is almost like words in a sense, because what is an artifact in Dwarf Fortress when you already have the masterpieces they make? In a sense the masterpieces should become a little rarer and maybe get names themselves. Some of them have names - a lot of the engravings have names - but if you make a masterpiece painting or sword or something like that, then even if it's not through the artifact process and even if it's not through the attachment kill-the-dragon process then those things maybe should oftentimes be elevated to the semi-artifact status where they can be known. Because there are all kinds of stories about people stealing a named diamond or something; it's not magical, except for the fact that it's cursed, and anyone who has the diamond will die! But aside from that - the obvious curse that every stolen object has - then a lot of mundane objects should be able to attain that kind of elevation, and when we flesh out exactly what it is that the artifact maker is doing - whether there's a god involved or whether there's this perfection of nature idea involved, or that kind of thing - then those might not be neutral objects, but the semi-artifact status really needs to be expanded.
[...]
Toady: It's kind of a thing where after you've played Diablo II you don't want to do it, but there should be stuff like that. Especially when you come down to a guy who becomes attached to multiple objects or something, the fact that those are kept completely separate from each other is odd. If the guy has a sword and a helmet that he's given names to, and he stabbed the dragon and then drove the helmet through the dragon ...
Interlocutor: Headbutt.
Toady: Yeah yeah! Then those things should be linked in history and perhaps even in some magical way ... but certainly historically there should be linkages like that.
[...]
Toady: So the process that’s currently in the game – not the released version but the one that’s coming – where we’re starting to explore this whole semi-artifact idea, it looks at how much time the dwarf has been holding the object, does he like the materials it’s made out of, and eventually if you’ve got a match then the dwarf can get an attachment to it. Once an item is elevated to that state ... or actually for every single item now, it’s kind of insane the out of information that’s being tracked sometimes ... It tracks every item’s kills, and once the item gets up to the attached state with a dwarf then it can look at those kills, especially as they continue to be added as that dwarf continues to do amazing things, it can look at the historical events attached to those things in the historical figures – so if it kills a dragon that dragon has a history – and it’s already got methods for calculating the importance; like ‘what is the era importance of a dragon?’, well that’s one hundred because it can name eras after a dragon, and when you’ve got something with high numbers then the artifact’s importance level, once it reaches a certain amount the dwarf can name it, it can become an artifact. At the present time it’s about as exciting as other artifacts, but essentially what would happen at that point is that it would enter the same mechanic pool that we’re planning for artifacts; people would know about it, like if a trader arrives and talks to your other dwarves then they would know about that sword just as likely perhaps as they’d know about your magical chest that any time you put something in it you get two back, or whatever, so they would say ‘there’s also the sword that killed the dragon’ or whatever. Then if someone became jealous about that, or someone asked for that for their community civic project, like they want to use your named dragon killing axe to chop down trees ... that’s not going to happen, but that’s the spirit anyway ... then it would just enter the same pipeline as the rest of the artifacts. Now it could be that the process of naming it, killing dragons and so on, there’s nothing that says that the item might not actually become magical itself as well, but even without that it would still have access to all the same sort of code stuff.
These powerful beings that can be disturbed. Will they all be Historical Figures that have been buried or will they be other Fun things as well?
Night creatures too, it's sounding like.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1202790 times)