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[Eagle0600]

A while back, some guys tried to mod DF into Darksun World. I got the same idea, so I figured I'd reboot this.

If you just want to be notified when this is playable, send me a PM or post here with your preferred method of contact and I'll add you to the list.

The long-range plan is as follows: Athas is a world of desert, hills, dunes, and badlands, with the occasional forest, rare marshland, and exactly one sea, somewhere, but you don't know where. Water is scarce, kindness scarcer. The world will be savage and dangerous, filled with exotic creatures from the Darksun manuals. Metals are rare, and extremely valuable; people rely on leather, bone-mail, and chitin for armor, while using bone and stone weaponry.

Spoiler: Done (click to show/hide)

• The world generates with large amounts of deserts, hills, and badlands, with the occasional forest. A lot of heat and savagery. Problems: The world generates with more rivers than I would like, and tundra and glacier are always on one edge of the map.
• Metals are extremely rare, and ten times the value, except for nickel, zinc, tin, and bismuth. Alloys are set between 1x and 10x their original value, on a case-by-case basis.
• Since tanning will play a more pivotal role than it has, it has been made more in-depth. Tanning requires acid, which can be extracted either as tannin acid from plants, or chromium sulphate from chromite (simplified process).
• Carapace armor can now be made from any chitinous creature.
• I have bone mail shirts being produced in the craftdwarf's workshop, but I doubt NPCs will go around wearing it.

Spoiler: In-Progress (click to show/hide)

• NPCs and invaders will also have to go around with the new equipment, so these changes have to effect equipment-picking behavior, something I don't know much about.
• Expanding bone and obsidian weapons. Obsidian will be fine, but the only way I know to make weapons is with a stone or bar, so I'll need to make it inorganic? Or maybe I should make it through a reaction, though that will remove the quality.
• Full integration of Wanderer's Friend by Lofn, which most creature material crafts will be based on.

Spoiler: To-Do (click to show/hide)

• Making composite weapons using bone/horn/shell and glue (thx. Lofn).
• Increasing bone-arrow stacks somehow?

Spoiler: Future Plans (click to show/hide)

• Races and Entities for all standard races will be modified to fit the setting.
• New races: Halflings and Kreen. Both of these could go with or without entities; suggestions?
• Lots and lots of creatures. I want to be going around seeing dune-reapers and slaads.
• Segregation of carapace material for different creatures. Some shells are just better than others.
• Zombies! Hopefully I won't actually have to do any work at all with this one, but I'll put it here just in case.
• Perhaps water should be an ingredient in booze? It would make survival harder.
• Existing creatures will have to be revised or removed, to ensure they fit wit whatever other modifications I make, and with flavor.
• If animals are going to be the ultimate source for much more of your industry, I may have to revamp hunting to be a bit more effective. Especially with the increased danger of the local fauna.
• When stack reactions are fixed, balancing the amount of items you get will be important. Current considerations: Chitin cleaning.
• Smaller, more fragmented civilizations. Every major city for themselves, along with a few vassal towns, against the world. Not sure how to do this.

Any help with the problems I have highlighted here would be appreciated. Volunteers to help populate the world with Athasian creatures would also be great, and will receive credit in the release post and the readme.
And if, beyond all reason, someone wants to actually download what I have at this stage, just ask. I'm not going to upload a barely-started project otherwise.

[Eagle0600]

Since no one seems interested in helping with this, I'll just keep working on this until it's at a releasable stage. At that point I'll post it again and see what happens.

[TooBad]

Do you mean this Dark Sun? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Sun

[Eagle0600]

Yes, that Darksun. I'm currently working on some tanning moddifications, because tanning is going to take a more pivotal role and I want it to be a bit more involved.

Quick question:
Giving the Kreen [NO_SLEEP] will stop them from sleeping in fortress mode, right? Not implementing race modifications right now, just thinking ahead.

[TooBad]

Quick question:
Giving the Kreen [NO_SLEEP] will stop them from sleeping in fortress mode, right?

It will also make them immune to magical sleep. He he!

[_DivideByZero_]

Yup. But if they rest (from an injury), they won't be able to wake up again.

[Reelyanoob]

Chitin tanning:

1. Quick and dirty method, little/no control of material. Add to chitin meterial template:

[MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_MAT:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:CHITIN][ITEMS_LEATHER][LEATHER]

        - maybe beef up chitin strength if going this way, as it will be used for chitin skin AND "chitin" armour
        - pro: quick and easy, should be bug free, and works for any chitin creature from any mod. Dorfs appear on embark with the gear.
        - con: doesn't allow you to change how strong chitin is on per-creature basis. Chitin on creatures is same properties as Chitin Armor

2. More complex method

        - edit CHITIN_MATERIALS to have a new material in it, e.g. called CURED_CHITIN. Point this at a new material template.
        - Mod chitin template with line [MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_MAT:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:CURED_CHITIN]
        - Make sure new CURED_CHITIN_TEMPLATE has tags [ITEMS_LEATHER][LEATHER]
       - con: have to change CHITIN and CURE_CHITIN separately. They are independent.

3. Full on method.

       - do as method 2, but change/override CURED_CHITIN material in selected creatures.
       - lots of control, but lots of work

[Eagle0600]

I've decided to use the tanning mods from Wanderer's Friend as the basis for chitin-tanning. I've taken a look at it, and it basically just uses the second method you described, but with creature variations instead of a per-creature basis. It also comes with modified skin and bones so that some creatures can have better skin an bones than others, but no similar thing for chitin. Getting my dwarves to make bone mail shirts was as easy as adding the "banded" tag to bone shirts, but no invaders or other NPCs will spawn wearing them, which could be a problem. For chitin, I'm planning on editing it so that processed chitin is a metal, and possibly making the output material for the process bars instead of leather (but I might not have to, we'll see). When chitin is considered metal, people will start to spawn with it, which will be neat.

[smeej]

Hmm... I might look at trying to mod in Kreen, at least. That sounds fun.

Would Halflings be the only forest-specific race?

Can you make monsters that spawn additional monsters? Having a silt horror make little tentacles could get interesting.

And I imagine the Dark Sun style ghosts will be easier to put in once we get Night Creatures. But yeah, I'd love to see this come about so I'll poke around at making monsters at least. Mekillots are adorable and will have to be included.

Oh, I imagine the other big thing in Dark Sun, trading and caravans, won't be able to be fully fleshed out for a while. Not exactly sure you can really include the fullness of Sorcerer-Kings yet, either.

[Eagle0600]

Yeah, Halflings will be forest-specific, and elves will be... I don't rightly know. They tend to be nomadic , but they'll need sites to be a civilization that can trade. Maybe their sites can be regular meeting places and the like (as in, no one stays there for very long, but there's always someone there)? If so, I can imagine they would form around oases. Can I make elves oasis-specific?

Apart from Halflings, I think there will be other forest-specific creatures... there must be something in the dark-sun universe that lives there if the places exist (and they do).

I don't know about monsters spawning other monsters, but I've heard tell of conversion coming up.

[Reelyanoob]

When chitin is considered metal, people will start to spawn with it, which will be neat.

I tested "method 1" for several materials and people spawned with chitin, scale and feathers instead of leather. Method 2 should be basically the same. The advantage is that it keeps the creature name it came from. The metal one won't.

Plz make this mod a full conversion, with cross-modding potential. e.g make all new creature files etc, and not need the vanilla stuff. That's my advice. PUt lots of chitin and scale creatures in.

[Eagle0600]

The plan is to make it a total conversion, but still in the spirit of DF. As an example: I'll not attempt any form of psionics and magic, except where they're basic attacks made by creatures, for instance.

As for spawning, the game is treating those as leathers with different material properties, which is fine, except that I want to see people with "chitin breast plate" and "bone mail shirt", instead of just standard leather stuff.

[Reelyanoob]

Wouldn't you just mod the breastplate itself to be makeable from leather type materials? That would work, but also give regular leather breastplates etc. Might be simpler, but not give the full control I guess. Possible stuff -

BUTCHER_SPECIAL tag could gove bars of chitin automatically. That might do the trick. Chitin just needs tags for metal items then. You'd get to keep the creature name then. You'd have to see how that works at embark though, there's quirky rules about creature/plant etc products. But normally that only kicks in if you're doing custom reaction trickery.

Another choice would be a "harden chitin" (or "layer chitin" maybe) reaction to turn the leather into a bar, which would give you all options open.

[Eagle0600]

That's exactly why I don't want to do that. I don't want people to be making "leather breastplates" or "feather breastplates". As for creating bars of chitin and giving it the is_metal tag, that was pretty-much what I was going to do, except that I was going to make it require processing in a tannery first. I was just waiting to see if anyone could come up with any better ideas. My main problem is bone anyway, because I don't want to be able to make anything but ring-mail, but I also want people to spawn wearing it. I can do one or the other at this point, but not both.

edit:
Running tests now. Making dogs chitinous for testing.

edit2:
Chitin armor is in... and is shit. Going to have to mod its properties.
As an extra idea, I'm thinking of making 'composite', which will be like chitin/bone, but for ranged weapons instead of armor. It will use the glue that can also be produced using Lofn's mod.

edit3:
Chitin seems to be working a bit better now, but I can't be certain. Any volunteers for more thorough testing? Just post or PM or something and I'll upload the file for the material.

[TooBad]

Problems: The world generates with more rivers than I would like

Mess around with minimum and desired river start locations in worldgen.

Edit: From observation, it seems that a lower number for these parameters will produce less rivers, but they are still evenly dispersed across the land.