Using cursed stones as weapon

While using the altars and temples in DFA your dwarves produces lots of cursed stones, which will explode to poisonous gas immediately. That's how it was meant to work, and it does exactly that as long as player has temperature turned on.

I have noticed that there is a nice trick of turning these cursed stones to weapon against annoying sieges. Here are the steps to do so:

1. Before using the temple and altar reactions turn the temperature off. If you don't do that the cursed stones will vanish immediately. Instead of that we want to save those stone for weapons
2. Collect as many cursed stones as you can and want. More is better, as the more stones you have the better chance of severe effects.
3. Dump the stone in your entrance. You may want to spread them as much as you can, one stone affects at least all the squares next to it, even wider area. Spreading the stone also increases the chance of more enemies being caught in the gas.
4. When the enemy is over the stones turn the temperature back on.
5. Witness the poor enemies being caught in poisonous gas!

That's the basic method. I have not tested out the following yet, but I think it should also be possible, with a bit of micromanagement, to use the cursed stones in stone traps. After the traps are and loaded it should be possible to turn the temperature back on without causing the stones to explode. When poor enemy triggers the trap the stone falls over them, exploding immediately and releasing the gas. Just make sure your dwarves are far enough to not be caught in the gas.

0.1.8 is out!

I managed to fix all the bugs I had found while playing, so it's time to upload the new version. Instead of jumping to 0.2.0 I decided to go with 0.1.8 version number, as the main focus of this release was fixing the current bugs, in contrary of what I had planned earlier. Some of the bugs were just too serious to leave any longer, so it's better to start from clean table than buggy version.

All the bugs I discovered have been fixed, though the vampire problem is still uncertain. I think I got it fixed, but after generating three new world I was able to get living vampire civilization, and it would take years of game time to reach the point where vampires get aggressive. So, instead of pushing the release any further I decided to trust that the problem got fixed.

Even though 0.1.8 was mostly bug fixing I did add few things to the mod. Three new creatures, vargouille, mammoth and pegasus, gnoll entity and possibility to train mace and hammer skills in Training dummy were included.

Of the creatures mammoth, pegasus and gnoll should be very easy to recognize: Mammoth are elephant like creatures, huge and hairy. Pegasus is flying creature resembling of horse, and very valuable. Gnolls are humanoids with dog head. In DFA gnolls are quite primitive, so it requires a bit of luck to get them to survive the world generation. Vargouilles are familiar to those who play D&D, as those are in short heads with wings. Evil creatures, which can be found from marshes and swamps. They can also poison any creature with their bite, causing pain and paralyze.

The 0.2.0 version will contain my attempt to make the world more versatile by increasing the number of creatures and fauna. I also try to spread the diversity as evenly as possible, so I try to avoid rations such as twenty underground creatures and two aboveground creatures. New entities could be added, though I have not decided anything specific regarding them yet. If I can think of good entity fitting to Dwarf Fortress, it gets added. But I'm not going to create new entities just for the sake of it.

Bug killing time!

Since uploading version 0.1.7 I have been testing out the features I have incorporated so far. I'm a bit surprised by the number of bugs present in this version. So far I have been able to deal with the following bugs:

• Slings not available in weapon workshop
• Green glass beds not available in furniture workshop
• Holy steel having wrong name
• Platinum hammer reaction having strange name
• Primate -noble positions not showing up.
• Holy and iron steel reactions having wrong production dimension

Now, there are lots of bugs still out there, which I have either had no time to fix yet or I have not found out the cause of them. The following bugs are known but still unfixed:

• Vampires dying immediately. I think this has something to do with their homeotherm, though not sure yet, only witnessed one occasion when suddenly there were two vampire thief corpses at the edge of embark area.
• Holy and simpleton castes not showing the full description. I think I have done something wrong when determining the description,. This has low priority, as the words "simpleton" and "holy" appears, and thus players can tell which dwarves belong to these special castes.
• Holy dwarves not immune to the cursed stone syndrome. I think this is caused by the fact that holy dwarves belong to the general poison class, which the syndrome affects. Now there are tags inside the syndrome to determine that holy dwarves should be immune to this effect, but apparently I have either made the tags wrong or they have no effect. One possible solution is to change the poison class of holy dwarves to something completely different, thus making them immune to all syndromes. Strange thing is that the holy dwarves apparently are immune to certain effects of the sydnromes. No necrosis and no pain, but dizziness and lung and hearth failures do occur.

I'm trying to fix most of the remaining bugs before I upload another version. No more new features are included before next version.

Bugs of 0.1.7

So, after few hours of testing I have found following bugs in 0.1.7:

1. Holy and simpleton dwarves have buggy description. Only the words "Simpleton" and "Holy" are shown, not full description.
2. Holy dwarves are not immune to cursed stone syndrome, at least partially. I have witnessed dizziness and lung and hearth failures. Strangely no necrosis nor pain has shown out yet.
3. Reactions producing holy iron and holy steel has wrong production dimension, 15 instead of 150.

Number three was easy fix, as I only had to fix the tag determining the production dimension.

The bug number two is more interesting, as I have not been able to figure out why the holy dwarves are not immune to those three conditions I have witnessed. Perhaps I should remove them from general poison -class, which should make them completely immune. The bad side of this is that the holy dwarves become immune to all syndromes affecting dwarves in general, though perhaps that's something I can live with. It could become trait of holy dwarves, being immune to all normal syndromes.

Bug number one is not on top of my priority list, as the game still shows the words simpleton and holy, which is enough to determine which dwarves belong to the special castes. Still it's something I should fix sooner or later, just have to figure out what causes it.

DFA 0.1.7 and upcoming features

So, version 0.1.7 of DFA has finally been uploaded, which took longer than I originally planned. I have been quite busy lately, making me to miss the promise I made about the deadline. Well, the mistake has been fixed and the new version is out. Couple of fixes to the existing features as well as new entity, Vampire, finding its way to the latest version. I also incorporated two new metals, holy iron and steel, which are a bit more effective in general but also cause disease to vampires, if used in bolts and one get stuck inside vampire.

Now that 0.1.7 has been uploaded it's time to think of the upcoming features. The next release, which will be 0.2.0 instead of 0.1.8, will contain mostly new entities and creatures. At this point no new items or reactions are planned, though if one of the new entities require something specific it's possible. But the main point of 0.2.0 is to make the world more alive, with new creatures, civilizations, megabeasts and perhaps even flora.

The problem with new flora and fauna is the graphical side. I'm in no way good artist, and so if I can't find any ready graphical sets for the creatures nor anybody is ready to make them for me I believe the new creatures shall be using ASCII characters. At least that will be the case with 0.2.0, the situation may change in the following releases.

Currently I have the following creatures made:

• Mammoth
• Pegasus
• Gnoll (entity)

Testing out DFA 0.1.6

Now that I have finally published the new version of the Dwarf Fortress Advanced, it's time to do some extensive testing for all the features I have applied thus far. Also, as I have not had a chance to actually play with the latest version of Dwarf Fortress (0.31.21) yet, this testing period is also meant to make me a bit more familiar of the new features the vanilla version offers as well.

First thing I noticed, after generating several worlds to actually find suitable location for my fortress, is that the Ancient Dwarf -entity works as meant to. Of ten worlds only three had existing Ancient Dwarf -fortress running, in every other world they had ceased to exists by the time of 100 years. As it was meant to be that it should be difficult to find thriving fortress of ADs, with maximum number of two fortress from them in any given world, I see this feature is working as meant to.

Next I noticed that, due some misunderstandings I had with the workings of entity files, I noticed that slings can be made out of any material suitable for crossbows as well as the leather, and all the upgraded crossbows can be made directly from metal bars, skipping the whole idea of producing normal crossbow, then doing the upgrades with special materials. This problem was caused by the [WEAPON:****] tags in the entity file. I removed those, and now the new weapons are working as intended. Unfortunately only your dwarves can produce those weapons now, so now importing them from mountain home, as those weapons are listed as foreign. Nothing I can do for that now, but at least there is no possibility of getting around the normal procedure of producing those weapons. This fix is included in version 0.1.7, which I will be publishing later.

The castes seems to work, though I haven't yet tested out the immunity of holy dwarves against the cursed stone produced during the temple reactions. Unfortunately right now every new immigrant or newborn must be manually checked to see if they belong to any of the special castes, which can be a quite task with migrant waves over twenty dwarves. Thus far I haven't figured a way to get around this problem.