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[CharlesPeter]

Goodness this whole thing makes me morbidly curious on what Toady actually spends his donation money on.

But it is probably something boring like food and water.

Well, the bigger ticket items are probably easy to figure out. Rent, and web space. Then Soda, then food.

After that, who knows. The New York Times articles described his abode as rather spartan.

I think Zach gets some of it too. And he probably saves some of it, in case donations ever slow down. That'd be my best guess.

[wierd]

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?

Or, you know, let them just throw the bones away.

Grinding the bones up and then plowing them under destroys them, which pretty much *is* throwing them away.  Given the objective of having all items be produced via game mechanics, and the issues with starvation that could happen, giving a way to fertilize without massive deforestation for ashes would be a good thing to consider.  The bone ash suggestion for ceramics to make china and white glazes was just to throw out another suggestion.

[Footkerchief]

But also, it has never been rare for bone to get thrown away unused.  I doubt it was ever common to go around collecting chicken bones from family homes.

[wierd]

True, but bonemeal for fertilizer has also been around since antiquity. So has bone ash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_ash), which is required to make bone china. (Bone ash is also used in the cuppellation process to refine silver from lead ores, but we don't need to further complicate df metalurgy. Just pointing out that these products have been around for a very long time.)

Other historical uses of bones prior to ending up as midden, bonemeal, or bone ash was to boil them for creating soup base.

Chicken bones are soft and porous, so it would take a whole lot of them to make any reasonable quantity of either bonemeal or bone ash (a whole chicken would only produce a few ounces...), so they were usually used for soup stock, then discarded.

Bonemeal was traditionally made from the thick, heavy bones of herbivores where you would get more out of the labor.

[King_of_the_weasels]

Bones are also used to make broth for soups and such, so that's another use for when recipes actually exist instead of the whole biscuits, roasts, and I forget the other one.

[Anatoli]

He means that there shouldn't be items that appear out of nowhere just so there are interesting things down in the sewers. Ideally, every item would come from someplace in worldgen.

Thanks. I get it now.

[Neonivek]

But also, it has never been rare for bone to get thrown away unused.  I doubt it was ever common to go around collecting chicken bones from family homes.

I think the issue is that Dwarf Fortress is a world where labour has no value.

So why WOULD they throw away anything?

[Mel_Vixen]

Well Labour had almost no value prior to the industrialisation. Materials like Iron or Cooper on the other had where high-prized because there where no machines which enable a fast and easy mining/extraction. Its just that you had countless low-education Jobs and literally thousands of abuseable workers. Today its almost the other way around with stuff like iron or cooper being relativly cheap but labour is rather expensive thanks to unions, tarifs, healthcare, insurace etc.

[Neonivek]

Right but there is little mechanism for someone to go "Hey maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile to turn these chicken bones into rings and just throw it out" Except possibly a Production Possibilities curve.

[Footkerchief]

Right but there is little mechanism for someone to go "Hey maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile to turn these chicken bones into rings and just throw it out" Except possibly a Production Possibilities curve.

Or making bone craft production subject to demand, which was what it sounds like Toady did.

[Caldfir]

Right but there is little mechanism for someone to go "Hey maybe it wouldn't be worthwhile to turn these chicken bones into rings and just throw it out" Except possibly a Production Possibilities curve.

Or making bone craft production subject to demand, which was what it sounds like Toady did.

More specifically, it sounds (from later devlog entries and his most recent post in this thread) that for now at least there is a static demand for all types of finished goods, and items in surplus of this get junked.  From the player's perspective, this makes pretty much no difference, apart from meaning you probably can't wreck the economy by flooding the market with spoons or whatever (at least not anytime soon).

[Koji]

Toady, you were worried the sewers lacked enough items. What about things like garbage discarded by the townspeople or accidentally washed down in floods etc? It might be fun to start on the bottom of the food chain (Say, as a kobold) and literally pick through trash to get by until I could start competing with my angrier neighbors.

Medieval cities, as I understand it, generally either maintained a midden outside the gates or just threw their garbage in the street, where a lot of things like half-rotted food and discared/damaged tools might end up. Mix in a little rain and it all goes down eventually.

And who else is going to mod CHUD into this release?

[Thundercraft]

...More specifically, it sounds (from later devlog entries and his most recent post in this thread) that for now at least there is a static demand for all types of finished goods, and items in surplus of this get junked.  From the player's perspective, this makes pretty much no difference, apart from meaning you probably can't wreck the economy by flooding the market with spoons or whatever (at least not anytime soon).

Toady, you were worried the sewers lacked enough items. What about things like garbage discarded by the townspeople or accidentally washed down in floods etc? It might be fun to start on the bottom of the food chain (Say, as a kobold) and literally pick through trash to get by until I could start competing with my angrier neighbors.

Why not solve both problems at once? When town crafters find that they can't sell more of their bone crafts, perhaps they'll conclude that their craftmanship wasn't quite up to par on those particular items and dump (some portion of them) them into the sewers? While adventurers probably don't want to keep many bonecraft items or other leftovers, beggars shouldn't be choosers. And perhaps some times some more valuable, random items get washed down as well?

Though, if the game continually dumped the excess bone crafts into the sewers, then it would probably get cluttered rather fast. Probably best to put a limit on it or something...

[Footkerchief]

Toady, you were worried the sewers lacked enough items. What about things like garbage discarded by the townspeople or accidentally washed down in floods etc? It might be fun to start on the bottom of the food chain (Say, as a kobold) and literally pick through trash to get by until I could start competing with my angrier neighbors.

The devlog indicates concern about having interesting items -- the kind that would be deliberately taken down there by criminals and adventurers.  If you want to pick through garbage, you can still go to a craft shop.

[Vattic]

If you kill a were-creature while in it's were-form does it's corpse change back?

Following from above: If one of your dwarves becomes a werewolf and gets killed how do they treat the corpse? Does it count as a dwarf corpse with burial? Can you butcher and have it eaten / leather made from it's skin?