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[Urist McDagger]

The rivers have ramps now, so you can get in and out of them, and the water is generally a bit more accessible. Adventurers traveling can get thirsty and hungry now and can last 5 and 30 days without, respectively, as things stand, though if you don't take care of yourself your rolls will start to deteriorate after 8 hours. It'll drop you out of travel and prevent you from sleeping if you are nearly dead. I think I'm going to mess around with salt water a bit next, and perhaps adds some usable wells in places.

The rivers have ramps now, so you can get in and out of them

Cool. Now competent swimmers won't drown to death because there's no way out of the river anymore.

[Dakk]

Why does everyone keep saying that blood should be poisonous, made you ill or whatnot? Blood is actually completely edible and quite nourishing. It's more of a food than drink, though.

Wait, doesn't drinking good of amounts blood over a longer time actually lead to an iron overdose? I think the human body has serious problems getting rid of excess iron from ingested stuff. Some animals might be adapted to that.

Drinking blood in regular DF adventure mode circunstances (IE spilled on your right out of whatever you just killed, or directly from the corpse) is actualy very dangerous though. For blood to be used as nutrition it needs to be prepared like most kind of animal products. Blood has a higher possibility of carrying diseases then actual flesh, plus there's the issue with iron overdose as he mentioned.

Using blood to hydrate and feed yourself is not unheard of though. Crusaders would sometimes bleed their horses to drink their blood if they got lost in the desert without water and food. I think the french resistance fighters did it as well but I'm not sure.

[mnemon]

Why does everyone keep saying that blood should be poisonous, made you ill or whatnot? Blood is actually completely edible and quite nourishing. It's more of a food than drink, though.

Wait, doesn't drinking good of amounts blood over a longer time actually lead to an iron overdose? I think the human body has serious problems getting rid of excess iron from ingested stuff. Some animals might be adapted to that.

Drinking blood in regular DF adventure mode circunstances (IE spilled on your right out of whatever you just killed, or directly from the corpse) is actualy very dangerous though. For blood to be used as nutrition it needs to be prepared like most kind of animal products. Blood has a higher possibility of carrying diseases then actual flesh, plus there's the issue with iron overdose as he mentioned.

Using blood to hydrate and feed yourself is not unheard of though. Crusaders would sometimes bleed their horses to drink their blood if they got lost in the desert without water and food. I think the french resistance fighters did it as well but I'm not sure.

Drinking fresh blood is quite common among hunters even nowdays(From the vein when bleeding the kill, not splatters or whatever) and it isn't really any more dangerous than eating the flesh as far as i know, the flesh will have some blood left in it anyways and the most common problem of getting parasites can happen with meat too.

That said, drinking large amount of blood will probably make you throw up and might cause ironpoisoning and since blood spoils fast only fresh blood is suitable for consumption unprepared.

Drinking blood from their steeds(horses/camels) is/was quite commong among nomandic people in dry climates.

[Caldfir]

Oooh! or possibly Megabeasts that instead of dying come back as some sort of corrupted version of themselves (I can imagine Titans doing that)

Though I believe right now... Powers cannot be mummies and there are no "sentient" Megabeasts and no "social" semimegabeast.

Actually, from the mummy raws, it does look that powers can be mummies. I'm assuming that the IT_FORBIDDEN:SUPERNATURAL in the were and vamp interactions prevents powers from getting those, but mummies lack that tag in the posted raws.

Mummies I (assume) have to be created by disturbing the tomb of some historical figure, which means they would need to be civ-linked in some way.  Currently only worldgen demons qualify for this... which is actually incredibly awesome.  I for one look forward to the curse of the mummified demon overlord. 

[Zesty]

The new human towns look great. I'm excited.

I've heard about multi-tile trees and that you'd like mountainhomes to look more like player fortresses.

Could you go into more detail on the changes you'd like to make to mountainhomes, forest retreats, goblin towers, and maybe kobold dwellings?

I certainly understand that these kinds of things are still far off.

[MrWiggles]

The new human towns look great. I'm excited.

I've heard about multi-tile trees and that you'd like mountainhomes to look more like player fortresses.

Could you go into more detail on the changes you'd like to make to mountainhomes, forest retreats, goblin towers, and maybe kobold dwellings?

I certainly understand that these kinds of things are still far off.

Nothing as of yet. Right now, its just human towns. Though by having human towns being more dynamic, means that fort, towers, and forest retreats will get reworked too.

Though when he's talked about working on those other cities, seem to be waiting for the fabled army arc.

[Footkerchief]

The new human towns look great. I'm excited.

I've heard about multi-tile trees and that you'd like mountainhomes to look more like player fortresses.

Could you go into more detail on the changes you'd like to make to mountainhomes, forest retreats, goblin towers, and maybe kobold dwellings?

I certainly understand that these kinds of things are still far off.

Nothing as of yet. Right now, its just human towns. Though by having human towns being more dynamic, means that fort, towers, and forest retreats will get reworked too.

Though when he's talked about working on those other cities, seem to be waiting for the fabled army arc.

Bolded a part of Met's post that I'm not sure you saw.

I tried to dig up some details, but I couldn't find much.  It came up in DF Talk, but the answer went slightly off the rails:

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Rainseeker:   I have a question here from Desmet, he asks; 'Are there any ideas or plans for improving cities, towers and fortresses in the game world? I was wondering if we could get specific, so for instance elf retreats and human towns and goblin forts, how that's going to be improved, I guess specifically for adventure mode because you don't really see that in Dwarf Fortress mode.'
Toady:   Yeah ... I mean they suck, right? So certainly we want to improve those. Now when it comes to specific plans for how towers and city walls and so on and are going to be implemented I don't have at my fingertips information ... I actually used to know more about the little bits and pieces that make up castles and all that kind of thing, but it would be cool to go there. When it comes to the elf ... the elf retreats rely on getting multi-tile vegetation in, once we do multi-tile vegetation those places will look awesome.
Capntastic:   They need Stonehenges.
Today:   Yeah, there's the whole mystery of Stonehenge and stuff, I remember those TV commercials where it's like ...
Rainseeker:   Well they can't build clocks for themselves right? They need something to tell time with.
Toady:   They can just ask the animals, animals know time. Yeah ... so I'd like to have ... the humans civilizations for example, it would be lame if they all had the same architecture, once I refresh my memory on what are the bits and pieces that make up the different architectures, what kind of different buildings there are and all that kind of stuff, they should make choices, then, and be able to have the towns have different characters to them when they make their walls or just their houses and various castles and little parapet things, and little spikes that stick out of the top with little flags on them, and minarets and all that kind of thing or whatever. As much diversity as you've got in the real world, as much as we can convey with a tile based format, that stuff should come across, it's one of those things where you have to engage in the project at some point and actually do it, and it's hard to time things which are superfluous in a sense, but they should be done. At first things will look vanilla, just as we get people to have walls properly and moats and tapestries and rugs and things, just making the towns look better, but as we get enough information to allow them to diversify then they should be able to do that, hopefully.
Capntastic:   Viking longhouses, and ... that's the only type of building I know.
Toady:   Yeah, because they've got those mead hall things right now, and they all look the same, they all have the stairway that goes up one side and curls around the other and there's this balcony ... that's kind of lame, that everything should look that way, it would be really cool if we could set up a way for the raws to guide a lot of what's going on. But I'm not down to drawing specific maps because that gets clunky and repetitive, but it would be good to guide the process using some kind of architectural primitives, and preferred shapes ... like right now all the houses and things are squares, and it shouldn't necessarily be that way. It's kind of funny, you mention these longhouses, even if the entities right now just said 'we prefer these dimensions versus these dimensions' it would add a degree of character to the civilizations when you arrive at them, so just a few things goes a long way and if we really jump into it it should be awesome.
Rainseeker:   Yeah.
Capntastic:   Yurts. That's another building.
Toady:   Yeah I wanted to have tents for my animal camps this time, around the animal people camps, but we were like 'why do they have tents when they're underground? There's no wind, there's no rain, the temperature's completely the same' ... If they're in a live cave maybe they should carry out little umbrellas, if they're in a really wet cave then the umbrella's definitely a must so you don't get this limestone caked all over your body and stuff.
Rainseeker:   You have been struck by an umbrella ... The batman strikes you with his umbrella.
Capntastic:   What would they make it out of? Like a cave spider umbrella ...
Toady:   Yeah well they've got all kinds of leather down, and they can cut people up and tan them ... Right now the camps have these stacked leathers and they have this stacked prepared meats or preserved meats that they keep down there and they just kind of hang out with all the meat and leather.
Rainseeker:   Do they eat it?
Toady:   No, they just hang out there. If we forced them to eat it it would be one of those things that develops into a problem over time since they aren't hunting new stuff and they aren't really doing anything. It's the same problem as allowing your pets to eat or allowing anyone to eat, you have to allow them to replenish their supplies or walk off the edge of the map and so on. Eventually having that happen would be cool, of course you run into those problems with dwarf mode versus adventure mode because everything would be operating at two speeds that are seventy two times apart and you have to reconcile all of the differences there which is quite annoying. But yeah, they just sit there now, they just hang out with their meat and stuff, and they've got weapons and things and just kind of hang out and wait for you to show up and cause trouble.

[Zesty]

It's good to read that again. I haven't heard that since the podcast was released.

I suppose my question can be better expressed as: Now that you have put in so much work into human towns and brought sewers, dungeons, and markets into the mix, has that given you new ideas for the dwellings of other races? For instance, instead of sewers for players to explore and fight monsters in, perhaps mountainhomes would have... abandoned mining caves or something that criminals and creepy-crawlies would hide in?

[Sizik]

Why, when you started on the new town structure a while back, did you remove dark fortresses and mountain halls* instead of leaving them in until they were ready for a rewrite? Or did the new town code make those structures incompatible with the site-generation code?

Side question: Labyrinths and Shrines still exist, right?


* and elven retreats, but there wasn't anything there anyways.

[Zesty]

* and elven retreats, but there wasn't anything there anyways.

There were elves to slaughter interact with at least. Now non-human settlements and populations seem to exist on another plane of existence.

[Sharp]

When you say were-dwarves do you mean dwarves that turn into men?

Werewolf does not mean wolf-wolf. Of course a dwarf turning into a human at the full moon might be interesting, a perfect spy to infiltrate the rival human civs or perhaps an abomination cast out by both dwarves and men.

If you want to go Old English into it then it would be dweorg-wulf but dwarf-wolf might do. Were-dwarf makes me cringe. Unless you want to start calling werewolves into were-men in which case I could take that as an artistic licence.

[wierd]

Blood certainly can be edible, and is the basis for at least 2 noteworthy foodstuffs: blood pudding, and blood sausage. You won't catch me eating either, but in dark age times they were a vital source of nutrition for many poorer people. As for editing in that use, I don't know...

Personally though, I find that the current amount of blood in barrels shipped as trade goods by merchants far exceeds this culinary use.

What I would like to see is a new set of jobs available at querns/mills, and at furnaces, which would deal with the "way too many bones causing too many bone crafts." Issue, as well as the "what in armak's name do we do with all this bottled blood!?" problem. Simple: fertilizer.

Right now the only fertilizer we have is potash. I suggest expanding that to bonemeal and bloodmeal. (Bonemeal could be further burned in the ashery to get bone ash, which is required to make white glazes and chinaware, irl.)

Coupled with the food use for blood, that should solve all the trouble.

So, for a question for toady:

You mentioned in the dev log entry that there were problems with too many bone crafts showing up in the village markets. Have you considered other industrial uses for bones other than as a crafting material, such as bonemeal, or as a secondary material in the pottery industry, such as bone ash?

[Cruxador]

When you say were-dwarves do you mean dwarves that turn into men?

Werewolf does not mean wolf-wolf. Of course a dwarf turning into a human at the full moon might be interesting, a perfect spy to infiltrate the rival human civs or perhaps an abomination cast out by both dwarves and men.

If you want to go Old English into it then it would be dweorg-wulf but dwarf-wolf might do. Were-dwarf makes me cringe. Unless you want to start calling werewolves into were-men in which case I could take that as an artistic licence.

We've already talked about that for like three pages. We don't need to do it again.

[Footkerchief]

When you say were-dwarves do you mean dwarves that turn into men?

Werewolf does not mean wolf-wolf. Of course a dwarf turning into a human at the full moon might be interesting, a perfect spy to infiltrate the rival human civs or perhaps an abomination cast out by both dwarves and men.

If you want to go Old English into it then it would be dweorg-wulf but dwarf-wolf might do. Were-dwarf makes me cringe. Unless you want to start calling werewolves into were-men in which case I could take that as an artistic licence.

"Were-dwarf" in the context of dev discussion is a convenience term that means "a dwarf that has been cursed to turn into a were-creature".

[PTTG??]

Dweorg-wulf does sound kinda awesome.