@srial: Golem are at peace with wildlife, I dont know if that affect wildlife corpses as well, but I assume so. If attacked they will respond however. The most important fact: You cant put golems in the military, BUT you can make them nobles. Make the golems milita captians. Create new squad, and the golem will automatically be in it. This way you can order them around, station them and so on.
Are dark strangler vile forces supposed to have weapons and armour? IIRC, they didn't in earlier versions and served as an easy stepping stone to the harder hordes. With weapons they tear through my guys though, especially lashers.
I noticed that as well. I have no idea why they do have weapons, since I did not mod the FD races in between the versions. They should have NO weapons. I will check their raws/entity file again. Sorry for that.
@panopticum: Thank you so much for the report. Thanks to your feedback sauropods are now war-trainable, dragons slightly nerfed, and the pet armory can heal pets, since I noticed that most of your used pets were quite badly hurt, and the animal caretaker job has no function anyway.
PS: Did you notice your elven civ ?
About my trip: I made 1500km within two days, so I have about 2 weeks more then expected. I cant rush to the US, since I have a date where a certain mentioned girl will fly there, buy a bicycle, and join me for a few months. Therefore I might bum around a week on the beach/read/swim, and put another week into the mod, since doing something productive is always good in my eyes.
- why not make the creature biome restrictions optional? i actually quite like having them - it creates flavor, and lets me sort of pick what i want to be up against, and how much of it. random insane deadly wildlife is fine but shouldn't it be optional? after all, the careful specification of ecoregions and good/neutral/evil tags is one really neat aspect of dwarf fortress - it creates consistent, predictable aesthetic differences associated with different kinds of embark locations, and lets people take on various levels of challenge if they want. a GUI button to this effect would be another strong feature of masterwork!
- related to the above, fantastic powerful evil-seeming creatures, like the oft-decried flaming skulls/facehuggers/etc, could be associated with evil biomes, so people seeking the added challenge of taking them on would know what they were getting into. this gives people options, ya know?
Good idea. I actually nerfed the skulls just now, so that is covered. The optional biomes is a good idea, but since it would essentially alter every creature file I have, it would be a lot of work. I rebalanced it and left the harder animals where they were, and put frost creatures back into tundras/glacier. Hope this is a compromise that works out.
FUTURE OF THE MODI got some work done yesterday, here the changelog and two small pics:
GUI
- Concubines are now optional, and by default OFF
- New balancing feature: Enable or Disable bodyguards for traders/caravans.
- New utility: Perfect World is now included
- New Utility: Legends Viewer is now included
- (I decided on those two since they only add 2mb in total)
- Added bone breastplate to craftsman
- Nerfed Burning/Frozen skulls, no more firestarting. Frozen skulls only in cold areas, and smaller cluster number.
- Raised number of needed essence fractures from 3 to 5.
- New reaction for pet armory: Heal nearby pet, fully heals any pet stationed nearby.
- Automatons got new graphics, new descriptions, replaced CS Gas with Steam (weaker) and no explosion upon death, but mechanisms. The are made of copper now instead of iron. Can also be butchered to get rid of bodyparts.
- They also got caste specific colors, custom named attacks and bodyparts. Way more steampunky now, as I wanted them.
- Made drow bloodsteel and demonbone materials a bit tougher.
- Added reaction to stone grinder to grind boulders into sand. 3 boulder, 1 bag = 1 bag of sand
- New reaction for magma factory: Improve ballista bold, needs 1 ballista ammo and 1 slade. Makes slade ballista ammo.
- New designs for 6 buildings. Armory/weaponry/Magma Armory/Magma Weaponry/gemworkshop/Brewery
- Added "brew drink" reaction to brewery. Same reaction as vanilla still, makes no sense that the bewery cant do this.
- Moved bloodwine, fuel from alcohol and purify water from alcohol from still to brewery.
- Nerfed tame dragons a tiny bit. Slower rate of firebreath mostly.
- Made Sauropods war trainable
- Lowered the number for all teeth to 2. No more "teeth-explosions" creating clutter.
- Changes armoks metal to a gem, instead of an ore. Was being used in any ore-accepting reaction.
- New reaction at transmutation chamber: Work Armoks Metal, gives a random selection of bars, usually around 10-ish.
EDIT: Oh, tiny thing I forgot: IRONHAND IS DONE. You can now select this tileset as well.
NEW POLL EXPLANATIONSALCHEMIST: Extract Essence/Aether from ores/metals
retroengineer metal ore or metal bars. Unlimited metal, but needs a lot of workpower and raw materials.
CHEMIST: Makes real chemistry. probably goes towards landmines and turrets, PVC, KEVLAR, coatings, quicksilver, mercury, oils, rock salt, USE STILL UNKNOWN. SUGGESTIONS WELCOME.
BONEYARD: All kinds of bone/totem/bodypart/blood/spikes stuff, for evil overseers. Mostly for flavor. Problem: Does not respect stack size. That is a problem that I cant solve. I personally postponed this till Today fixes that bug. For all those that dont know what I mean: 1 bone will always use 1 stack of bones, regardless of the size. 16 cow bones will be made into 1 item, wasting 15 bones in the process.
GOLEM UPGRADES: Sword, Spear, Hammer Golem. Choose one. Then speed/strength/steam attack upgrades/shockwave attack/healing(possible?) upgrades, using the dropped parts from dead automatons. Add a super low chance for epic golem, similar to the weapon upgrades, Thors Guardian (working title) that has a special attack. Maybe add a reaction to transform into a "metal" colossus as well. These would be similar to the old overpowered golems, but way more expensive to make. No upgrades for these guys. PS: This will be a bigger project
MAGIC OVERHAUL: Rebalance the mages a bit, but mostly redo the buildings and reaction. Right now all need adamantine to work and use evil/good/dwarfy versions of the very same reactions. Boring. Make them way different from each other. PS: This will be a bigger project
GLASS: Havent done any modding there, so maybe glass weapons and armor, missing glass furniture, maybe a new kind of glass, volcanic/obsidian glass... havent given this much thought yet. Suggestions welcome.
REDO ZOMBIE INVADERS: Undead race. Add zombie bite transformation and resulting zombie spiral back in. OR, better yet: Replace zombies, since official undead invasion now exist, with something else that transforms your dwarves into allies, like illithids (mindcontrol) or bodysnatcher. Using a race with skills also allows for custom profession graphics.
REDO WARLOCK INVADERS: Currently they are super chaotic, starting fires and kill themselves, raising dead only to fight with those. I actually LIKE this random factor about them, but several people I saw rather play without them because of it. Therefore: Rebalance the warlocks, make them more streamlined, adding custom profession graphics and caste colors, a custom body and spells.
CREATURE SPAWNING IN WORKSHOPS: Make your own turrets and landmines, constructs and more. Spawn slaves in the breeding pit, aggressive immobile plants or summon magic creatures. Problem: All of them are tagged "friendly" and while fighting for you, will stay at the spot they are spawned. You cant order/move them. I postponed this till "tame" pet creatures can be created, but LoFR/narhiril did add it, and the reports she got are positive. PS: This will be a bigger project.
WORKSHOP OVERHAUL: Some workshops are liked and used more then others. I get the feeling that a lot of them are barely used because they have only a few reactions. Religious buildings, alchemist, bonfire, libraries and philosophers garden/fountain/potted plant, creature research lab, tech lab.
CREATURE ARMORY OVERHAUL: Currently the setup is very basic, using 1 reaction for all animals, but only targetting 7, and only allowing for steel. Adding more creatures and metals is a minimum, but animal upgrades are also possible. Make the mastiff a bit faster, give the elephant an AOE attack, the raptor metal claws.
EDIT: You guys think I should upload a new version now, or wait for the next update from Today ? I would have to redo all the utilities then, so it could take a while, with dfhack and therapist... the version I have works just fine, the changelog I posted in the last two posts I did.