Bay 12 Games: Dwarf Fortress

Development in 2011 (RSS Feed)

12/30/2011 Wells are done (but not before there was a well with a bucket that was lowered down through an open tomb filled with skeletons into a pool in the center of the grimy room). You can fill your waterskin from the well bucket (after you lower/raise it) or drink right out of the bucket. Crayon drawings and New Yearsy stuff tomorrow.
12/29/2011 A couple of weeks ago I mentioned perhaps adding wells to towns, and that came up today as the last of the travel issues. It involves an unhealthy mix of aquifers, rivers, sewers, catacombs, and dungeons in addition to the well shaft, and I haven't quite finished it with the general clumping of things that starts to come up at the end of the month, but I should have that polished off tomorrow -- right now they can still drop a well right into the occasional sewer channel, which is a dangerous thought. Humans no longer create towns or villages in world gen away from rivers/brooks or aquifers. If you are the sort to turn aquifers off, rivers/brooks are still common enough that this shouldn't change too much, but I wanted my wells to be proper wells, so they only occur where you have a valid aquifer.
12/28/2011 I handled large towns that stopped entry due to closely packed buildings around the edge, extended the site travel maps out to the wilderness, made rivers (not brooks) block movement, and added a little valid travel direction indicator. When necessary, you can jump out of travel and swim across a stream with your buddies, and it can also be a good time to refill your waterskin.

Back in July, I had these four images of site travel (1,2,3,4). Here are some new ones that show today's tweaks (1,2,3,4). In the first and third picture you can see the valid direction indicator -- it only shows up if some directions are known to be blocked. The map background used to be entirely green, but now it'll show through biomes in places that aren't developed, and the biomes, roads and rivers extend beyond the boundary of the site. The wilderness biome squares are blocky 3x3s on the zoomed-in map, because it doesn't have information to judge further, but that could be handled later on with a bit of extra data. The red thirst indicator comes from the vampirism, he he he.
12/27/2011 Let's see... stopped travel from underground areas in sites, stopped animal attacks that were happening too close to town, stopped adventurers from travelling through city walls, stopped indoor tag from being placed on roof tiles... lots of stopping.
12/26/2011 Appropriate objects have been placed down in the dungeons as a result of thefts perpetrated throughout world gen by the critters living underneath the towns. The smart ones try to keep their living areas reasonably clean of corpses. Now I'm going to work on travel map issues. Sometimes it lets you walk where you shouldn't be able to walk, sometimes it has critters ambushing you at incorrect times, sometimes it doesn't print enough of the map. That kind of thing. We're just about two thirds of the way through the overall list that I outlined back during the December report.
12/25/2011 I cleaned the last few (known...) dungeon bugs up early this morning, and that leaves the placement of appropriate objects for people down in the dungeons, which I should get to tomorrow. Then I'll be moving on to the next set of issues, which'll probably be the travel related.
12/24/2011 Rainseeker directs your attention to our traditional Dwarfmas short, his reading of Smirk's Night Before Dwarfmas.

Today was the sort of day where I thought things were working out. Then I test-embarked in a different town, and bandit leaders were embedded in the walls, dungeon rooms came up through the street and into the center of stores, the sewers were completely inaccessible, amphibian men were hanging out in a farm house and a gigantic frozen river of ice raised up from the ground and partitioned the town except where the bridges cut tunnels through it. I fixed all of those problems to get back where I thought I was when I started.
12/23/2011 Despite soaping out my insides, I managed to get a bit done. Leaders show up properly with their populations and I managed my sewer troubles. For some reason the animal people living in the sewers coated their blowdarts with honey bee venom before shooting me with them as I walked by the sewer outflow. I wonder why the townspeople tolerate them. Dungeon items and a few bugs remain in the dungeon issues list.
12/22/2011 I've gotten a start with situating the critters down in the dungeons in proper groupings. They appear in separate locations, they don't overcrowd and they avoid disturbable coffins, but I still need to get leaders placed with their subordinate critters, and I need to handle entity items and inundated sewers that think they can hold more critters than they actually can. But the traditional dinner is being held at a nontraditional time, and now is lutefisk.
12/21/2011 I did the door materials and event logging and naming issues I mentioned. Now we'll see how long it takes to get through dividing up the critters and treasures and things down below. I had given myself two days for that in order to stay on track for a date in mid-January, but this, along with map maintenance and optimization and sponsorship critters, is one of the places where I see some potential slippage, and it also aligns with the holiday festivities. In any case, that's the current project. There are criminals, kobolds, subterranean animal peoples and beasts underground, in addition to tombs with disturbable critters, and they will all need their space to the point that they won't see each other and get all negative every time you are shopping up above.
12/20/2011 I stopped the town's citizens from giving kobolds and beasts in the dungeons dignified burials when they happened to die from old age. Fixed a tomb entrance issue. Did a bunch of tweaks with undead naming in world gen, and next up I'll be extending that throughout the game, so that any interaction syndrome can provide a name like "vampire", "mummy", etc. (or whatever you want for mods). Then dungeon door materials and some bandit/criminal historical event logging, the dungeon segmentation stuff, and that'll be it for dungeon issues.
12/19/2011 Fixed another bug with tomb skeletons not being reported as skeletons, made contaminants on zombies work properly when they are raised up (so the blood stains are in the same place), made castles and monuments respect rivers better, fixed a couple ancient problems with frozen ramps, and I allowed adventurer vampires to suck the blood of sleeping and KO'd people. If the adventurer doesn't suck blood within a week, their skill rolls start to falter. If you want to be more ethical about it, you can get bandits etc. to an unconscious state (by choking them, say) and feed on whatever blood they have left. The amounts all matter, so if you let yourself get too thirsty, you drink more blood and are more likely to kill somebody.
12/18/2011 Some problems with wall detailing, subterranean status, and sewer connections bring us under 20 dungeon issues. As I said last time, this includes some interaction leftovers. Things like making material emission effects work in some basic way when attached to a region. So the next few days will be strange, then I'll get to dungeon populations getting their sections.
12/17/2011 The dungeon list is down to 22. Half of those are dregs from tombs and interactions, and most of the rest concern getting the dungeons sectioned out, as I mentioned before. Back at the beginning of the month, I was thinking I could make it out by mid-January, and I'm still on track for that, although I think the map maintenance and optimizations have a good chance of holding me up a bit, especially since optimization is on the until-it's-fast-enough schedule. It is going well, though.
12/16/2011 I fixed a problem with dead adventurer equipment down in the dungeons and fixed some catacombs that managed to exit out into the ocean and fill with water. It now keeps track of all the former positions of historical figures by start/end year, so you can see those in the legends, and so I can mention the important points about a person on memorial slabs.
12/15/2011 I made some changes to how bandit and other criminal outcast groups work, the main one probably being that historical figures can now participate in the formation of the groups, so that when you face a bandit camp leader, for example, he or she can now have something of a history. I also found that the large cave layers were folding over each other a bit, and now that's fixed. It makes the whole underground look a bit better overall and prevents some catastrophic failures.
12/14/2011 Bodies down in the sewers, respecting the proper historical context, to match the ones that were already in the dungeons and catacombs, but they can be skeletons down in the channel and so on. I made dungeons smaller in places that haven't had the time or occasion to make them large, and I made them less blocky. I think the overall list of 55 dungeon issues from the report is down to 39 now, so there has been some progress.
12/13/2011 Sewer ramps and crossings, sewer elevation issues. A bridge problem came up that left the city walls empty... now I'm working on a dungeon room that's getting pinched down to nothing. And sock-wearing kobolds that have little coats and caps for some reason. Adventurers in world gen go down into the dungeons and sometimes run into trouble, and there are criminal gangs down there, and hopefully that'll be enough to get objects down there for you to find. The fewer spontaneously generated objects the better, but we'll make concessions for now if they are too boring.
12/12/2011 Now it's time for the dungeon issues. If you remember the breakdown from the last B12 report, there were an awful lot of these, but it's all basically little ways to make going underneath the towns more entertaining. The list is mostly bugs and cosmetic changes, along with the main issue of grouping the dungeon inhabitants from world gen into sensible living areas (they are scattered pretty badly right now). It'll take more than this release to have a really good dungeon diving experience, but it'll be more interesting than wiping out an isolated night creature in its lair, anyway.
12/11/2011 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.
12/10/2011 The Future of the Fortress Q&A post is actually two posts this time: 12/10/11 Part 1 and 12/10/11 Part 2. There are some crayon drawings that we want to get in the mail on Monday, so we'll be setting those up now that I've finished typing up the posts. Late tonight and Sunday should see the return of eating and drinking to adventure mode.
12/09/2011 I finished trading partial amounts in both modes. You can also type in amounts of currency to trade in adventure mode. Most people carry around little pouches with money stuffed into some article of clothing or another, and the market vendors will use those. The shops that have multiple traders working with the same objects still have a money chest, but you don't have to fuss around with picking up the money from it. Money and goods will teleport to you for the time being, until something better comes up, but you are still allowed to grab the objects you want to buy first and bring them to the merchant if you want to do it that way. Next up comes people in the market hollering at you on the street. Then hunger/thirst, which is probably going to involve a lot of messing with river ramps etc.
12/08/2011 The forum is down, and the web hosting company is failing me, but hopefully I can have that sorted out tonight. I've started testing out adventurer trade stuff and making changes there. The next thing is to allow picking up and also trading portions of a stack, since most food stacks in town are larger than you'd want to buy.
12/07/2011 Well, I would have gotten to the trading interface, but a bridge opened a hole to the underworld instead. Again. I finished my store clumping, back doors into pig yards, updated shop sign text... now I'll finally be doing the last of the trading issues and then moving to reenabling hunger and thirst for adventurers, so that we can have proper little expeditions down into the dungeons... and the many dungeon issues.
12/06/2011 I found a few more problems with sewers and tower doors when I was checking out the market in a giant city, and those are sorted now. Continued messing with the goods distribution in markets and elsewhere, and that's basically settled enough now. I just need to add a few extra kinds of import stores to stop rarer traded goods from getting choked out. I want to clump similar stores a bit before I get along to the trading interface stuff, and I should get to all of that tonight.
12/05/2011 I got the ranged weapons and ammo to show up, and I made stores for traded goods where you can find stuff from all over the trade network that made its way to the town during world gen. There was also various grief with the website and adblockers hiding some of my screenshots (named adv1 to adv5) with me not realizing it for far too long. Cautionsaurus has reappeared here. Next up will be a series of market stall tweaks, then some adv trading interface stuff, then reenabling hunger (and thirst if I do wells and river tweaks). That will get us to the dungeon issues list.
12/04/2011 Various tweaks to how the items in the stores are produced so that they better respect the state of specialization at their origin site. Did some work with market containers. Now I'm working on getting the distribution of item types to be a bit more reasonable -- right now, you end up with an awful lot of bone crafts from all the animals that are butchered over the years, so it'll have to respect the lack of demand for those a bit more than it seems to be doing. Normally this wouldn't be high enough priority to delay the release, but it's pushing all of the adventure-useful goods almost entirely out of town.
12/03/2011 The first section of town issues from the B12 Report are done. Distribution of scarce items, handling gloves/shoes in cabinets properly, as well as a few different broken road issues, and what was hopefully the main cause of all those long-standing cave-in-on-embarks. Next up are all the market and shopping-related notes.
12/02/2011 More fixes. Some building facing issues, there was a weird gravity of people toward the keeps, another bridge length issue that popped up, fixed a long-standing random buffer overload from world gen aborts, cleaned up an issue which made shop types change at random, fixed a problem with labor specialization hours tracking, stopped dungeons from being treated as homes that your adventurer can start in...
12/01/2011 This month's Bay 12 Report. I finished the temple issues (and broken shop signs). Once a temple is built in world gen, they can build the catacombs underneath it, and if the temple is destroyed and another is built, the catacombs are still hooked to the first temple's basement, so you can go see the ruined pillars and then go down into the pit in those cases. You'd imagine they'd often build the new temple over the old site and attach the catacombs up that way, but they don't do it that way right now.
11/29/2011 I fixed three problems with bridges, stopped pigs from thinking that they are selling things at the market, made towns that overlap lakes and oceans not screw up rivers and made them not screw up river sources in general, and also finished the graphical map export. Tonight I'm going to fix various issues with temples and whatever else I can get to after that. Tomorrow is crayon art day.
11/28/2011 I've done the first few zoomed out map pictures (after fiddling a lot with broken village doorways...) and have a few more to do (the legends export and mini adventure map).

Here's one of the towns I was talking about yesterday. The first picture is the overall map with the zoomed-in area highlighted, and the second picture is that zoomed-in area. In terms of fortress embark sizes, the zoomed-in part is a 7x7. This part has pigs, turkeys, cats and dogs in the town and waste areas, and it has donkeys and an alpaca down in the pastures. No animals or people use the streets yet, and the mud blends too much with the dirt roads here because the local soil is also brown. You can see the sewer grates, which is good, and you can also see the bridge ramps get trashed where the sewer exits into the river at unfortunate spots, which is bad. There's a ramp down into the sewer walkways between some buildings in the lower right of the town part (so the lower right of the upper right). There are some pigs and turkeys among the market stalls... I'm not sure why yet! In fields that have a sharp angle, the cottages can end up a little too surrounded by crops rows for it to seem sensible (there's one on the middle left side). The bridges are a z-level too low, although aside from the ramp issue they still work to get you from place to place. A few empty shops. You can really see the unused river areas in the zoomed-in picture, and they'll need to work on being more productive in the future. But despite all that, I think it is becoming okay.

Overall town
Highlighted area
11/27/2011 I saw my first pig. The city is nice and muddy for them. The populations are tracked, bred, butchered and moved around through world gen, so it's satisfying to know that that pig is actually descended from the original pigs from the first human settlement, even if it doesn't track its specific ancestors. The breeds I put in a while ago seem to be working, now that I can finally look at the animals -- the cats in the first town I looked at were all large and slate gray with dark brown ears. Next up the new plot types need to be translated to the various map pictures -- travel map, zoomed travel map, mini adventure map, legends graphical world export map, and whatever other maps there are.
11/26/2011 Here are some with plot assignments. It pig-yardifies the town portion, and the remaining parts are allocated among 3 crop areas, pasture, meadow, woodland and waste according to how they were using them when world generation ended, much as the villages worked when I did them before. But now I get to see my pigs and chickens.
Town
Town
Town
Town
Town
Town
11/25/2011 A few small forum posts to add to yesterday: on empty web of "roads" in some images, on roads to gobs and empty walls.
11/24/2011 Here are some more maps. I'm going to clean up the villages next, as well as adding lots of pigs and chickens to the yards in the big towns, since it'll all operate on the same principle of working with the components defined by the roads/boundaries (which are a bit less square now). I think the main glaring problem remaining with these maps, which I probably won't have time to deal with, are the occasional silly gates and silly bridges that don't justify their construction when they connect to nothing of consequence or dead-end entirely. The maps are also too similar to each other, without branching out into different styles of dividing up land, etc., and they don't really respect their own history or the elevation. The rivers still have exclusion zones (the blocky part). Later there will have to be river-oriented industries/etc. with associated stuffs. The main roads are also a bit ignored by people that should appreciate them. I suppose inns will help that. Overall, we aren't there yet, but these layouts here are likely to unchange for this release (aside from the village cleanup stuff, which'll be farmy and animalish), and I think this framework can accomodate future town updates for a while. That's the hope, anyway!

World 1

The large city
NW of the large city
SW of the large city
West of bay in center
Near lake, west
West of inlet in SW
Southern coast
South east

World 2

Town
Town
Town
Town
Town
Town
Town
11/23/2011 Here are a few bridge pictures. Nothing special when compared to various megaprojects or even the real-life bridges with shops on them and so on, but better than the nightmare the humans have been producing over the last years in that they cross the obstacle successfully. The roads still bump up and down a bit, which could end up being rectified by wrapping a little with the topography and/or cutting away some more terrain, I suppose, but I've been burning a lot of time on road maps and should probably move on. There were also several sewer fixes that went in during this time. There were lots of dead-end access points and holes below the grates that cut away road ramps and so on.

bridge,below

bridge,below, below,below, below,below
11/20/2011 Thanksgiving was moved to yesterday due to family schedules, but I'm doing bridges now. Bridges that hopefully aren't as scary and tragic as what came previously (that is, placed over every murky pool going off into the sky with various breaks and weird ramps and trouble). I'll cook up some new pictures when that's ready, once I'm moving on to the next part. That's probably farm/village map issues, as the town updates have slightly obliterated the older ones and the zoomed travel map looks silly away from market towns.
11/17/2011 Today'll be getting the town-to-town roads properly respected within the internal city road network. A side effect so far has been that the road networks now can go inter-civilization based on the trade links, so there will be connections through most of the trading human towns as well as roads from human towns to dwarven sites. The earlier road networks were limited to towns within the same civilization.
11/16/2011 There's a new Future of the Fortress post here: 11/16/11. I'm currently messing around with how the rivers in town look, as it's all silly blocky right now.
11/14/2011 As an adventurer you can run around and call out vampires that you learn about from the citizens now and occasionally be troubled by their followers. It's all pretty thin, but it's what I felt like I had time for -- the game isn't really ready for dealing with wider issues that come up with cult/tyrant ruler vampires, so I'm going to move on to the final town cleaning now. There's quite a bit of it, touching upon town building generation errors, market testing, optimization, sewer placement problems, weird tower placement, rivers in town doing strange things and not having bridges, strangeness on the town travel map, etc. It's a slog, really, but a slog is all that remains now.
11/13/2011 Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #17, where we discuss DF play styles: talk thread, play styles thread, DF Talk page with download.
11/11/2011 I should be starting the cult work tonight (that is, cleaning a few issues and then making them matter in adv mode). There was an aside where I decided to make the vampire teeth lengthen when they are feeding, which I hadn't settled up to this point. After having their hair fall out by accident and having their faces morph around a bit, I got it working. The appearance/size modifier effects for interactions/syndromes are reasonably general, and there are a few conditions that syndromes can check now (such as drinking blood), so you could add a snake bite now for instance that makes dwarves that haven't had a drink for two years go berserk and grow them three times their normal size and bulge out their eyes. Not that we are putting anything like that in the vanilla game now, and there aren't that many conditions (it's sort of an eclectic mix based on the stuff that is tracked as counters on dwarves), but there are plenty of uses for that kind of thing. Anyway, yeah, vampire cults in adv mode should be fun. More as it goes in.
11/09/2011 I have to run a few tantrums and test out the new hammerer, but that should finish off the justice rewrite and also dwarf mode vampires for this release. The hammerer is now an appointable position from the beginning, though you won't need one until you actually decide to punish somebody for a hammerable offense. I like the idea or at least the possibility of having a more official hammerer that's attached to a barony and has a way of dressing and a family hammer passed down through the generations, etc., but we'll have to wait for that sort of thing to be a priority within the larger framework again. The last vampire stuff I need to look at are some outstanding issues with world gen cults and making that have something to do with adventure mode.
11/06/2011 There is now a "Report Crime" job, and dwarves that either witness a murder or find a murder victim will try their best to report to the sheriff, at which point you also get a death announcement to let you know that somebody has been murdered (these are the only deaths that don't get announced immediately by people finding the body). Unless they witnessed the sheriff committing a crime, in which case they think twice and don't report it to the sheriff. It still gives a death announcement after a week or so, but you don't get witness information. The last thing I've got to do is to set up the justice screen with all the witness reports for your perusal and give you the ability to level an accusation. Without trials etc., which we aren't going to spend time on (and it's hard to get lots of specific dwarves in the same spot at the same time, so I'm not sure we'll ever get to that in any proper way in a fortress), the accuse button will send a dwarf straight to the punishment phase.
11/04/2011 I'm having miners carve little twisty tunnels out of sight and then using my debug button to chop them into pieces, and then having people find the bodies, or get haunted by the unhappy ghosts (which confirms death), or being witnessed as they die. I split the unit screen into 4 categories (citizens, pets/livestock, others, dead/missing). I suppose there's more to do there, but it is a start. Next up the sheriff will have to get involved.
11/01/2011 Here's the Bay 12 Report for this month. The mission continues.
10/31/2011 Unfortunately for the dwarves, I had my first fatally drained of blood yesterday. This leaves the justice implications for all of this that I mentioned before. We're going to start by trying out a new system for dwarven death announcements involving dwarves being announced as missing rather than immediately being announced as dead, until the body is spotted and the death is confirmed. Having something like that in place will be very useful for many future additions, but the disturbance it'll cause to labor management and burial arrangements have to be considered, so we'll be attempting to tread carefully through the issues. I think having a lone dead dwarf announced as missing within a week of death shouldn't disrupt the fortress too much, and you'll see any event that threatens multiple dwarves immediately since the others will be able to instantly confirm the first death (leaving it exactly as it is now, with detailed death announcements, combat reports etc.). Witnesses of crimes won't be able to confirm deaths immediately, as that would let you zoom to the scene and the culprit, so confirmation of those'll have to wait until the crime is reported or a period of time passes. I suppose if the sheriff witnesses the crime (and so has no need to report it), the vampire screwed up and deserves to be caught -- if the sheriff is the vampire, then you screwed up and will need to rethink your assignment. If a body cannot be found (as in a cave-in), missing dwarves will be presumed dead after a time, before ghosts start showing up most likely, so you can have time to memorialize them, but failing that the appearance of a ghost will also serve as a death confirmation! As it stands, all "missing" dwarves will actually be dead, but it'll be fun to add situations where that isn't necessarily true later on. Dwarves snatched by the goblins might fit into this, since they'd be "missing" -- there's a balance of concerns, since having the "a dwarf has been snatched!" announcement is good to see, to avoid false bug reports if anything, but I think working to make a new system that covers everything is going to be the better alternative in the end. It would be amusing to make a hunter or miner that hasn't seen another one of your dwarves for a year or two be marked as missing, but that might be going too far, he he he.
10/28/2011 I've nearly finished the vampire-hiding migrant changes I mentioned before, as well as others as the need has arisen. Vampires choose fake birthdays for themselves, based on the year they arrive and their apparent age at the time they arrive. Entire non-vampiric historical figure families will show up now. I had one couple show up with their seven young children, each with a "relationship" list two pages long of various historical cousins and uncles. Next I created a new world and started up a dwarven adventurer. Because dwarven sites on the world map are still blank, you start in a human village as usual. I walked day and night through the wilderness to get back to one of these blank sites and finally stumbled drowsily into the mountains, where it let me retire. I then created a dwarf fortress from the same civilization and waited for immigrants. It was only year 3, so without a large roster to choose from, my dwarven adventurer showed up to be a hard-working citizen... although he fell asleep on the edge of the map since it hadn't reset his drowsiness. Any dwarves from your abandoned fortresses should also show up in subsequent forts, whether originally historical or not, as long as you are with the same overall dwarven civilization. There were a few strange happenings that I still have to clean up. It might be an older bug, rather than a result of the new changes, but one of the dwarven caravan guards did haul off and waste my entire starting group while I was testing, and I've still got to add likes/dislikes to the incoming historical figures. Hopefully that'll all be straightforward enough, and feeding can begin tomorrow.
10/25/2011 I thought feeding was next up, but I've been working through making vampires in the fortress harder to spot... they are practically shiny as it stands. They walk faster than mortal dwarves, and they have unusual world-gen-only skills and visible kill lists from historical victims numbering in the dozens. I'm disguising that stuff and adding assumed identities for critters to use, as an extension of the physical form stuff I was talking about in September. Vampires that are hiding their identity in your fortress will intentionally walk at normal speeds and their historical kill lists will be hidden, although you might spot them running fast if they are in your military and fighting with an opponent. I'm going to make immigrants come with more varied skill lists, possibly with some rust (the vampires have rusty skills at times, from world gen). You might also get some historical newcomers that aren't vampires. I'm sure there'll be remaining holes in the disguise, beyond what's intentionally there to help you out, but I'll try to catch the obvious ones I think to check. I've tried to keep the identities separate from their users, so you could have multiple critters use the same identity later on, either as a sequential hand-me-down or in competition at the same time.

Demons that impersonate gods have been updated to use identities, finally, so they'll actually put on a little act for you when you go to talk to them. The one I was testing impersonated a death/lust god named Bekat the Adorable Skull. Before it took over the human civilization, it used to live in a cave, and I found a book it wrote about the cave in the castle tower. The demons all have horrible personalities, so it was a mean little book. Zach thought it was being foolish -- I don't suppose its god disguise is a very good one, if it's going to complain about its old living arrangements like that.
10/24/2011 After testing out the numbers for their resistance to physical damage, the first thing I did was clean up the aging code for vampires. The default behavior is now for their physical body to not age at all, so child vampires will stay children for example, whereas the old behavior was growing old and never dying. The system put in place will also make it easy later to do anti-aging effects (like fountains of youth etc.) as well as supernatural aging where somebody advances ten years after something happens while also knowing what age the creature "should" be (so that time might "catch up with them" in the future).

Then I did the blood conversion testing, which involved a lot of lapping up vampire blood off of various arena surfaces. It can only track the vampiric status of historical figure blood, but you can get historical figures in the arena if you control them as an adventurer first, so I'd create a vampire, control it, go back and create a new and powerful human, control it, kill the vampire, and then lick all the blood. And hopefully become a vampire myself, which eventually worked. The historical figure blood tracking issue isn't a problem during regular play, because all vampires are historical figures as things currently stand.

The last thing I got to was getting the historical dwarven vampires from world gen to come as migrants on occasion. Next up will be getting them to feed. This will leave one of your own dwarves routinely doing troubling things to the rest of your population, without you knowing immediately who is responsible. In order to make this a fun thing rather than an annoying thing, we're going to revamp the justice system a bit so that you can have crimes that have been committed (in the Justice screen, say) where the perpetrator is not known. In this case, the plan is to then have a witness to a bloodfeeding be able to report that to a guard/sheriff/etc., and then that'll be available for you when you decide on somebody to accuse/arrest/punish. You'll be able to accuse the wrong dwarf, and we might have the vampire or grudge-holding dwarves level false accusations that'll muddy the witness accounts a bit. It should be entertaining once it is tweaked and tested, but first I need to get the guts of it in.
10/21/2011 The last few days have been routine cleany. Getting statues placed in the tombs, messing with traps and sorting out treasure containers, stopping mummies from crawling all over the place, that kind of thing. Now I'll be cleaning vampires and adding whatever else they need to make them at least minimally interesting for the release. This'll mostly be work with dwarf mode troubles. Bad news visitors and bad news in the graveyard. The main issue will be making stopping an active-yet-secret vampire fun and not a tedious coffin-checky sort of thing.
10/16/2011 It's Future of the Fortress time over on the forum, with a new post here: 10/16/11.
10/15/2011 I managed to go down a fairly long dead end with my tombs-in-catacombs maps that I had to scrap entirely, and then redo, but I'm through that now and it ended up better than the first way I tried it, with more wrapping around the catacombs and 3Dness to them, so that's good. Hopefully I can wind up the rest of the mummy cleaning quickly and without further incident.
10/09/2011 Various cleanup on the resurrection effect and effect targeting, which mostly involved me killing people over and over in the arena and raising them up, or surrounding an imp with ettins to make sure the fire balls went to the right one. I'm to the tomb map improvements now. The first thing will be to allow it to stuff a proper tomb map down into the catacombs on occasion, rather than the simple rooms it uses now, using the pyramid code. The trickiest part coming up is getting it to handle changes to the tombs (and by extension, many other sites), since it doesn't save entire maps most of the time now.

I managed to roll over my ankle stepping off a curb into a parking lot, but the immobility isn't affecting my work schedule, so it's much better than the flu.
10/06/2011 The necromancer/invasion/books part is done. Next up are mummies. The main things to do there are to improve their tomb maps and to add some variety to their curses. We might also activate some mummies during world gen, which would open them up to mess with you during dwarf mode.
10/03/2011 The transcript of DF Talk #16 is up at the DF Talk Page, courtesy of mallocks.

One more zombie invasion thing to do -- something fun. And then I have to decide if I'm spending any more time with books. Then it'll be mummies.
10/01/2011 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.

One of the last necromancer bugs was that the towers would get different maps depending on which side you approached them from. Today I traced this to the same being true for tree placement, which was the case because it looked around a 5x5 rectangle to determine how much water was available in the soil, and that 5x5 was crossing the 48x48 map boundaries (so tree placement depended on which segments of the map were loaded, causing all subsequent map generation to fail to be consistent). Easy to fix, but hard to find, since the only obvious symptom was towers having different internal walls (overall tower placement precedes tree generation).

On the more amusing side, I went to a tower at night, and all the zombies were sleeping. But they can't sleep or be KO'd in any way, so they were actually just pretending to sleep. They didn't attack me, but I didn't get any attack bonuses either, aside from the one for them being on the ground.

There was a general whose wife was the leader of a civilization. In the year 8, she was kidnapped and turned into a bleak horror. Over the decades, the general became obsessed with his own mortality and sought out the necromancer's tower, becoming a lowly apprentice in return for eternal life. Years later, he wrote a 30 page essay about his horror wife called Victory By The Creature. He also took an apprentice of his own, a former queen of the dwarves, and wrote a touching and concise 282 page biography about her. You end up with quite a few formerly important apprentices, since it only concerns itself with the secret worries of important people at this time -- a technical hurdle which needs to be worked through now or later.
09/29/2011 Today was the day I thought I'd finish necromancers, but I'm a few days behind as usual. In any case, I'm finishing up my invasion tests tonight. Then there are a few tower bugs for Friday, although month-end stuff like drawing up crayon art takes a good chunk out of the day. We should be to mummy cleanup soon though.

Here's an interview with dinosaurcity.
09/25/2011 Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #16, recorded in August, concerning legacies of forts and adventurers as well a bit of planar talk: forum thread, DF Talk page with download.

I went back to the last werewolf notes that I mentioned on the 17th and finished them, culminating with a retired werewolf adventurer attacking a fort, killing the fisherdwarf and infecting a few others. I'm doing the last necromancer notes now.
09/23/2011 I wrote up another Future of the Fortress Q&A post, 9/22/11. Zombies survive much more readily now after some changes to their physical attributes, so the starting dwarves can't clear out an entire invasion on their own anymore... I broke the "Cannot follow order" message for soldiers into about a dozen hopefully helpful messages. Stopped it from littering the unit list with animations (it now tries to reuse defunct units that were previously animated) and other clean up.
09/21/2011 Today I made a debug button that converted every dwarf but the first into a zombie that is also the first dwarf's child to test out the various negative thoughts from before. Those thoughts are more specific now as well. Messed with corpse chunk naming conventions, so that it won't just say "bronze colossus's bronze" for instance, when a hand is lopped off, say, and this helps with partial animated skins etc. Randomized the rest of the interactions and finished off the example folder that'll show you the format for each of the categories. Jumped the gun on books a bit to make necromancer towers more varied (thought I was going to do grammar first, but physically, that was unimportant). We had a wizard game from a long time ago with fun little generated books, so we went for that. As usual, it'll be more interesting later, but you can currently read them and learn. If you can read.
09/17/2011 The werewolf note page is down to one third of its former self. The largest thing I've added for them is a sort of transformation rolodex to maintain appearance properly when werebeasts return to their original form. It had the genetic data, so it would mostly put them back together right, but it was resculpting their hair and throwing different lardy rolls on them and so on. Now they return to the same condition, minus wounds. I suppose I could add wounds in as well, but it'll be a feature for now. Hopefully this or an adjustment of it will be usable for more subtle disguises/illusions/identities we wanted for thief/crime thingies later on, kind of how the multiple soul support is sitting there. I also ran and adjusted several more werebeast attacks to get those working better. There are just a few adv-as-werebeast quirks to work through now, and I can finally check one of these off with some finality.
09/13/2011 The player-controlled dragonfire worked on all those elves in the arena, and things will actually catch on fire now instead of just melting. Forgotten beast webbers work properly (they are broken in the version you have now, as many of you know). Various cleanup on the interaction interfaces. I still have a page of issues for each of the new night creatures, and six and a half pages for the cities/markets/underground, in addition to the animal stuff. At least things are moving along again.
09/10/2011 I revisited the new system for material breath and got webs and fire up in some form, which was a question up until now. A web spray is a new type of material emission in the interaction system, and it differs from the gaseous ones in that in leaves an item behind (how things already work), and that'll be available to players as well. I'm still cludging the fire, since it isn't a material the same way the others are, but it fits into the new interaction stuff and will be available to adventurers (via mods or however) in the form of fireballs, fire jets, and dragon fire (the current system again). I'm not sure when it'll move out of mod territory and into vanilla, but at least it's all up to date now. Magma crabs were also machine-gunning their magma globs and firing at all visible targets at once... that's sorted now. I'll probably look at fireball damage as well and a few other longer standing issues there.
09/06/2011 As you might imagine, I came down with something as well after the trip, but I finally got back to DF again, starting with some cosmetic issues with secret slab descriptions. I'll be continuing on with other cleanup now. It's still a very long list of random issues, so I have no idea when it'll be ready.
09/01/2011 Well, we managed to schedule our little trip out to the museums in New York more like storm chasers than tourists. All of the people we wanted to meet were flooded or stranded, but there were a few days that we went to places where we wanted to go, so it wasn't a total loss. The Sunday flight was cancelled, but we've made it back now. Mostly. Zach is running 103.5F and I'm still trying to catch up on sleep, but I think development should return to an okay place within a few days, and I'm unaware of anything unusual going on for September, so hopefully we'll just have a normal productive time.

The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
08/24/2011 Here's my most recent Future of the Fortress post, 8/24/11, answering several questions that were asked about recent developments and other things.
08/21/2011 Raising little bits and pieces and adventure-moding them in the arena continued to expose various problems. At the worst of it, knocking out an animated head's teeth caused two copies of the head to fly out and land on the ground, which would then be raised (complete with teeth), continuing the process until the arena was a churning mass of heads. I tried the butcher command in the arena, and the necromancer managed to raise both a skeleton and a walking hollow skin... which I suppose I'll keep since it makes about as much sense as a walking skeleton. So... keep the necromancer away from your raw skin stockpiles, he he he. He didn't raise a muscle meaty mess because the butcher cuts that into stacked meat, which is no longer a corpse item, and he won't raise (corpse item) horns/shells etc. because they don't have grasps or heads (which is the current raising condition).

Out of the arena, back in the necromancer's tower, I raised a dead necromancer, and it was properly missing its arm and was also dragging its guts (as he had been in the last moments of life). I travelled to a new area, and when the zombie came with me, it immediately began dragging its guts in the new location, so that was good. I guess that's why some animated beings are depicted with stitches. Perhaps later on you'll be able to sew them up so they can give a good first impression.
08/17/2011 My adventurer fought through around sixty zombies in the tower, killed the necromancer, learned the secrets of life and death, and then raised various limbs (not my own). Then I talked to one of them, and it told me that it was peasant. It was flattered but had no need of my services. I imagine its little fingers were shaped into the form of a mouth and they flapped back and forth while it spoke with a high-pitched voice. I guess there's still work to do.
08/15/2011 The next step is to work through the proper placement of the slabs containing secrets in the sites they are hidden in and then to get the adventurer reading them. Hopefully that'll all happen tonight.
08/14/2011 I've been doing site embarks to test out the necromancer towers as part of my read-the-slab-for-powers effort, and there were many problems to be sorted out. First the tower I was testing collapsed, then it was empty, but eventually I got those bugs fixed. My seven dwarves were able to dispatch some dozens of zombies without difficulty, which might be a problem. The zombies killed the fortress dogs first, and the necromancer raised them, but it wasn't enough. I had my dwarves go to the top of the tower and remove one of the walls and so that they could use the blocks to set up a little balcony, but they were interrupted by a bunch of peregrine falcon women.
08/12/2011 Raising upper halves of people as well as cursing people in the arena. When you initiate an interaction, you basically go down the list of its targets that aren't pre-specified and it respects various things about the maximum number and range and so on as you go. The examples I've been working with are fairly simple, but if your interaction does six different things to six different selected targets, it'll all still go through. I'm not done with that yet. In particular, I need to do the learning secrets part of it. Then I should be able to raise halves in the field, which'll be something available in the vanilla version.
08/10/2011 My kitchen flooded today, which was fun. It was a valve on the washing machine I guess. Scamps remained dry, though every towel in my apartment is now soaking on the floor.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a pre-release silence as speculated, just a busy silence. I don't think I've really been unswamped since late last month, although there are signs that it is finally quieting down. I've made progress on adventurer interactions, but I don't have any funny stories yet.
08/08/2011 LASD wanted me to announce that there's a Dungeon Crawl Tournament going on this month, and Taxus is organizing the participation of Bay 12 people in this forum thread.
08/04/2011 We've decided to go ahead and add the ability to perform interactions as an adventurer now, whether they are a basic property of a modded adventurer race or something gained through a curse/secret, etc. Obviously this would have needed to go in at some point, but it was unclear if it was going to happen for this release. I suppose the current peak of this feature will be learning to be a necromancer and then animating your own severed arm as a permanent traveling companion. That's going to be my test case, anyway. That'll probably make your arm into a historical figure with its own entry on the legends screen. I'll have to see how that works.
08/02/2011 There's one last problem with the city gates not being connected by roads occasionally on the zoomed-in map (even though they are connected in play), but I should have that finished in another hour or so. That'll be the end of the zoomed-in city maps.

There are still all sorts of things to do of course, mainly cleaning and tweaking the new critters, and possibly adding a few more of them (I think people have expressed the most interest in the stalkers, for example, among the night creatures we talked about that haven't been added yet). The goal of making these caravan arc releases somewhat short is obviously a failure, but I'll just keep plugging away at it.
08/01/2011 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
07/29/2011 I had a visitor for a day, and there has been a lot of email, so I don't have any significant progress to report. We have a record number of crayon art requests this month, both numerically and as a percentage over story reward requests, so we'll also be busy with those during the next few days. Hopefully I'll be able to get a little bit done on DF itself. It has been a cool month overall though, and we should be back on track shortly. Here's a blog post on the images in the recent magazine article for those that are curious.
07/27/2011 Here are a few more (three, four). This shows the larger scale travel map instead of the building list, and then moving out into the forest to the point where the zoomed in city map vanishes.
07/26/2011 Here are a few preliminary pictures (day, night). In the brown part with the paved white roads, you can only move along the roads themselves. In the green part you can walk anywhere, ignoring the lines. It isn't ready to navigate you to specific buildings at this point, just to show what's around you as you move.
07/25/2011 Finished the army drudgework. Now I just need to tweak a few map icons etc. and I should have the first picture up, hopefully for next time. That'll leave us with rapidly travelable towns, prepared in a way that still respects the road network and intervening obstacles.
07/24/2011 Almost done with the army coordinate rewrite. In a shift of perspective, here's an interview Boing Boing did with the NYT writer Jonah Weiner where he discusses the recent article.
07/23/2011 I'm in the middle of rewriting the army code to support the new zoomed-in maps (your traveling group is stored as an army for homogeneity's sake). I suppose I'll work on the animals for a few days once this works instead of doing them this weekend.
07/22/2011 Here's an online version of a New York Times Magazine article that's going to be bundled in with the NYT Sunday paper on the 24th. It was a pretty involved process, from the author Jonah Weiner essentially staying in my apartment for five days and calling everybody I know and more people besides, to working on the ASCII portraits on a weekly publication's deadlines, to the two hour fact-checking phone call. The Talk to Me exhibition (of which DF is a small part) is opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art as well if you are in the NY area and want to check that out sometime in the next few months.
07/21/2011 I jumped in on the town travel map. It is used in place of the old travel map when you are in a city, since many of your moves on the old travel map would not match with the road network. A full-sized town on this map is 51x51 instead of 17x17, so it is zoomed in three times (I should have usable pictures in a few days). There's room to show a list of nearby shops/buildings/sewer entrances as well, and once we're done it should also be able to help you navigate to a specific known building of your choice on the other side of town.
07/20/2011 World gen heroes are quite a bit more active now, and to balance that out they go down into the town undergrounds a lot more (so the megabeast kill rate seems about the same). This leaves more dead criminals and heroes down below, and now their items are available in adv mode. There are some world gen heroes that have no skills by the time they decide to go on their first adventure, and so end up with the "recruit" unit type and have no weapons at all. I'll need to update that a little, sometimes. Maybe some world gen heroes should be that foolish.
07/19/2011 Fixed up a broken temple and some predator-type critters that weren't being placed down in sewers correctly. Added ability to do designations over Z levels (e.g. long up/down staircases).
07/18/2011 Back from Redding! The meetup was entertaining and I enjoyed meeting the fans and answering questions. Seeing cave bats is always a plus. We didn't get a lot of pictures on our camera, and the few we got were subpar, but I've posted a couple in the meetup thread here. If other people got pictures and would like to post them there, that would be cool. Now I'll be back to DF programming and regular dev logs.
07/11/2011 A bit more frenzied tangent, some loose ends with the old tags and basic raws laid out for another dozen sponsorship critters. Two more things came up that I'll need to handle tonight and tomorrow, so it's definitely going to be a little light until the meetup. Just one of those weeks, but the trip to California should be a nice cap on it.
07/10/2011 I hadn't worked on the month-end project for many month-ends, but I was sort of overcome by something I had to work out and ended up staying up through the night until one in the afternoon putting it in. Animals tomorrow instead. Even without the odd frenzied tangent, time will be a bit tighter in general now with the meetup coming, since I've got a (routine) vet appointment and some B12 stuff to do in the next few days and then the meetup next weekend.
07/09/2011 Various underground beasts that would normally inhabit simple burrows randomly scattered around the map can now move under the cities and cause trouble from there, assuming they have something like a sewer access from the river. Adventurers in world gen attempt to contest them and leave their own bones behind if they fail -- I still need to get items placed from those events, and I need to make the quests doable, which will involve adding better travel maps for the city and so on. Animals for two days now.
07/08/2011 Finally found and fixed a typo that caused buildings to rarely straddle block boundaries, confusing it about the elevation and causing it to burrow a portion of the building all the way down to the underworld. Saw my first animal people down in the dungeons and sorted out problems that had stopped leaders from the outcast criminal groups from appearing. Tonight I'm hoping to get some unintelligent monsters and some objects down there, and then it'll be the animal weekend.
07/07/2011 The transcripts of DF Talk #15 Mini are up at the DF Talk Page, courtesy of mallocks.
07/06/2011 Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #15 Mini concerning the meetup and some rambling: forum thread, DF Talk page with download. Here's the meetup thread mentioned there. Please vote in the thread if you are planning to attend -- we need an approximate headcount.

The forum is mostly fixed (this is all due to help from Janus). The option to hide signature images is still malfunctioning. If you have problems with your text box when making a post, clearing your browser cache should help. I'll be updating this thread as things change.

I got my first outcast criminal type people down in the dungeon. It forms these groups in much the same way as bandit groups forms, and we'll also be getting bandit groups coming out from the wilderness and settling in such places on occasion (which should include kobold groups). We'll also be getting underground animal people and some predators to lair there, and some other stuff to keep things interesting.
07/05/2011 I just upgraded the forum to SMF 2.0, but the process has broken some of our optional packages (spoilers, etc.). There might be some downtimes until it is all fixed. I'll be continuing to work with that until it's handled one way or another, with some help, although I don't anticipate getting it sorted out tonight. In the meantime, I'll be working on dungeons and things.
07/04/2011 Here are my replies to the questions in the Future of the Fortress thread from the last few months. As usual, there's quite a bit of information here, some of it unique to the posts.

7/04/11 6/05/11 5/27/11 5/18/11 5/11/11
07/03/2011 Did some arena testing on the batch of 8 critters. First I gave squids the brains I had forgotten... squid men don't have skulls, so when I set them on each other there were a greater number of deadly kicks to the head before they all drowned in the air. I also spent a few hours collecting questions from the Future of the Fortress, and I'll be writing up replies to those over the next few days.
07/02/2011 Here is a preliminary market. I need to fiddle with it a bit and get a few more goods in (note the merchants standing by empty bins at the bottom). It would also be nice if they didn't have a dusting of prickle berries on the top of each fruit stand so that it wouldn't be uniformly green like that (that market there actually has strawberries, fisher berries, rat weed...). In any case, now it'll be two more days of animals!
07/01/2011 The skeletal form is taking shape, and soon the flesh will be hung. Twisting catacombs meet dank dungeons, stinking sewers flow beneath bustling city streets, and all fear the creatures of the night. The basics are in place. Now we must hammer them into form. Congratulations to the generous!

The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
06/30/2011 After a little mixup with a flag that turned the shops into market areas and the market areas into shops, I've got people hanging around with meat and produce, as well as cheese and other agricultural products when those are available. I need to tweak how buying and selling works so that it doesn't need a money chest and table, since those would look even more silly and eat up too much space. The remainder of today is going to be hectic with month-end crayon drawings, email and the report and all that, but I expect to get another good session in on markets before the next animal weekend.
06/29/2011 Sidetracked by tangential B12 stuff, so I only got the market area placed and the basic seller types selected. Hopefully I can unbury myself tonight and get some more done.
06/28/2011 Okay, we'll finally be starting up on markets now. These should have all of the food products that didn't appear for sale in the last images, as well as some exotic goods (we don't have caravan movement in yet, but there is a stockpile of exotic goods which will serve the purpose for now). Perhaps we'll get some livestock in there as well.
06/27/2011 The transcripts of the latest DF talk episode are up at the DF Talk Page, courtesy of mallocks.
06/26/2011 Continued along with the material breath interaction rewrite as planned. One more day of this and we'll be on to markets.
06/25/2011 Did the tower doors, fixed another open wall bug, tweaked ruin furniture. Back to animal tags now. I'm still cleaning up the material breath interaction rewrite, which seems to indicate that adding tags for every animal is going to be very hard to finish in any kind of reasonable time, if they all turn into large projects like this. Once this batch of eight is finally handled, I'll have to think about what's going to work for the remaining 112, but spending two days on every one during the weekends would take longer than two years, so that's not going to work.
06/24/2011 I made my way into an old ruined town with missing rooftops and wall sections, down through a sewer access and into the catacombs. After passing various remains set in wall slots, I found a coffin in a separate tomb area with a slab commemorating the deceased's slaying of a giant spider that had been causing trouble 100 years ago. Cross-referenced with legends mode and it all appears to be working, so that's good. Most of the slabs could use some work though. I think I'm going to do tower access doors next, and continue on with my tweaks tonight, then do animals for a few days. Then we can start markets!
06/23/2011 I properly situated bodies tile-wise down in the catacombs, more or less as with the external tomb sites I did before. There can be lots of bodies down there. It would be scary if they all started moving around. I think every historical figure that didn't die off on a battlefield or fighting a megabeast in a cave has a findable burial site now, although there's a (high) cap if history really favored killing people off in a particular place. I'll have to check if that's ever really an issue, but it hasn't been so far.
06/22/2011 Fixed up several town errors (another disconnected temple, open walls, sewer walls rampaging through town, etc.). I've just been embarking on towns and observing the wreckage and coming back and fixing them. There's still more to do there.
06/21/2011 Ride along on Cado's Magical Journey in the new Threetoe story. It has been posted up in the story section and there's a forum thread as well.
06/20/2011 Squid ink addition turned into material-flows-as-interaction rewrite, which is longer but allows the breath cloud/glob/cone stuff to be added as interaction powers now, which will doubtless come in handy. It also makes material breath have body part requirements, which they were missing. Fire breath hasn't been integrated yet. I suppose webs should be as well, but we'll have to see what happens. Back to towns for now.
06/19/2011 Added contact and cleaning effects to the interaction framework and linked them back to red panda grooming, narwhal tusking, and kitty cat head-bumps, with the ability to do touch-range curses/powers as well. I'm also going through and setting up preliminary raw files for the other 112 (or whatever it is) sponsorship critters so that I don't get too far behind, but at the moment I'm still preparing abilities/new tags for the batch of eight from last weekend.
06/18/2011 Here are some city images at the tile level. I'm still not happy with the underground, so this time, we'll go up rather than down. You'll notice no bridges and perhaps a few improper doorways as well, but there are plenty of shops and citizens and furniture and buildings. The first town comes complete with microcline walls and castle.

Portion of Town 1 (schematic)
Town 1, elevation 119
Town 1, elevation 120
Town 1, elevation 121
Town 1, elevation 122
Town 1, elevation 123

Town 2 with area highlighted (schematic)
Town 2, elevation 133
Town 2, elevation 134
Town 2, elevation 135
Town 2, elevation 136

Town 3 with area highlighted (schematic)
Town 3, elevation 116
Town 3, elevation 117
Town 3, elevation 118
06/17/2011 Got the keeps and temples properly connected up to their respective dungeons and continued to mess with the appearance of the town. I should have some pictures with tomorrow's log before I get started on the weekend animals.
06/16/2011 Cleaning up temples mostly today, since they had all sorts of map problems from being scrunched down a bit from their former size into the current lots. Fixed another profession selection issue and another sewer issue. There are various odds and ends sitting around.
06/15/2011 Starvation was leading to some ghost town issues that weren't being handled when it populated the buildings (it would spread people out too thinly), so now there are lots of abandoned buildings in the busted towns which should lead to lots of interesting adventure opportunities. Various elves and humans co-habitating, although it saddened me to see an elf bone carver running a bone craft shop. I guess the forest got knocked all the way out of that one.
06/14/2011 After fixing some gem bugs, I arranged the furniture a bit, currently working on getting people's professions to line up with their shops correctly, slow-going with some snags. I suppose this is the sort of day that doesn't usually get a dev log.
06/13/2011 I did about half of the aforementioned sponsorship tags, and I'll finish up the rest next weekend. The cabochon rewrite extended to allowing each entity to pick from among the shapes defined in the raws for all of their gem cutting purposes, with different entries for non-precious stones vs. gems (to keep them cabochon'd on rock, we can handle exceptions later). Dwarves have access to "anachronistic" cuts (brilliant cuts etc.), while humans have access to roughly period cuts (I let them peak at rose cuts and briolettes), as far as I can tell. Tonight I'll be back to messing with furniture and so on, and hopefully we'll be on to markets soon.
06/12/2011 Tonight is the second session with the sponsorship beasts, and we've got our tag goals set. The idea is to get cleaning and social/competition interactions (like narwhal tusking) linked to the interaction framework we used for necromancers etc., so that it'll be easier to put them in and so that they can gain features together. That should take care of red pandas and narwhals. We were going to throw in cabochons this release anyway, so the forum suggestion for ostrich gastroliths seems opportune. Hoping to get diving in for peregrine falcons (somewhat like the kitty behavior, but with more diving). Armadillos and tortoises will have their defense mechanisms. Kiwi will eat bugs. We're going to do something with squid ink as an escape mechanism (not sure that we'll go any further with it).
06/11/2011 Should be getting through kiwi men and squid men by Sunday-Monday, passing through red panda men, ostrich men, narwhal men, peregrine falcon men, giant tortoise men, and armadillo men along the way. Once the basics are done, we'll see what we have time for in terms of new tags. There are 120 animals left to do (with 240 giant and person versions), so it feels like we're definitely at the point where extra tags are going to have to be selected with care if I hope to get this done before the end of the year while also getting regular releases up.
06/10/2011 Celebrating dad's birthday today, so I won't get to much else. I'm going to do some of the sponsorship animals next to avoid falling further behind on that. I'll probably make that a weekend thing now.
06/09/2011 Found my first tower-cap bed in a human's bedroom. It had an image of the foundation of a dwarven mountain hall in giant toad bone. An iron scourge made by the goblins made it to the back of the warehouse as well -- it commemorated a skinless demon becoming the law-giver of the goblin civilization. I also put in some extra precautions and tweaks so that dwarves form markets properly and are more survivable in world gen. Kobolds as well.
06/08/2011 Items are divided up now between the shops. I still need to do the storage for extra imports and generally clean up and arrange the objects better. All of the leatherworker shops I visited in my test dealt strictly in dog leather clothing, so they might need a little work diversifying their livestock and hunting during world gen. Certain goods need to be sold off and spread around among the citizens or the treasury a bit more as well. Right now the local gems that haven't been traded away are all still at the gem cutters shops, and it was like going into one of those plastic ball pits shopping there.
06/07/2011 I set up little rooms in the houses and got the furniture divided out roughly according to the size of each place and the purpose of the rooms. Instead of being generated from scratch, the items all come from the site's world gen stockpiles now. The information stored there includes the source civilization, so a family could be the proud owners of a dwarven stone cabinet, for example, complete with dwarven artwork with the right materials, and the number of dwarven stone cabinets in the town would be the precise number that were traded in over the years. What I'm working on now is dividing up all of the objects that were produced at the town (that weren't placed in houses) among the shops. It selects the type of shop based on the overall town specialization information that is built up during world gen. This leaves some excess foreign items that would normally be associated to caravans/etc./etc. Those will be placed in general shops and warehouses for the time being (and the market when I get to that in a bit). The same should happen with extra food.
06/06/2011 Fear not. The night creatures will still come for you, and more will come before the release, but now is the return of the mundane. How can a ghost shake your furniture if there are no chairs to shake? How can you defeat the vampire slaves if there are no people in the town? The building blocks of the boring are also the building blocks of terror. Don't stop believing.
06/05/2011 Imbo Trussedringed was born in the year 8. At the tender age of 23, he became the high priest of Kas, the god of storms and lightning, in the capital Calmgroove after the first high priest was burned up in dragon fire. A few years later, he got married and over the next many years fathered six children. Aside from a run-in with a troll attacking the city, times were uneventful, until the year 53. Profaning his own temple, Kas cursed him to prowl the night in search of blood. After eight years of fairly unrestrained murder in the capital, he fled in the year 63 to the village of Brimstools, where he bled one person before moving on with settlers to eight different villages, working as a fishery worker or a scout, scores of victims left in his wake.

Finally he arrived in Scarrub in the year 103, having outlived his wife and all of his children. Over the next two decades he killed a dozen people. Villagers began to become suspicious at his lack of aging, but he enticed them with the promise of immortality to join the Sect of Control, a cult he had founded to cover up his misdeeds. This allowed him to last until the year 137, when his agelessness and forty murders made village life untenable. With the support of his followers, he challenged the law-giver Melbe Leaguemuscle to a duel in the capital city, winning easily. People recognized him as the former high priest and were shocked at his 129 years of life, but before it could come to anything he laid down a series of oppressive edicts, and for the next 15 years ruled as a tyrant, having his dinner brought to him from all of the towns and hamlets of the Realm of Names. He only partook every week or two, but by the end, over the century of the curse, seven hundred seventeen people were dead. The dragon only ever got fifty.

In bug news, the zombies in a necromancer's tower became suspicious after the necromancer failed to age and he fled into the hills.
06/04/2011 When somebody becomes a vampire during world gen, which still happens via the profaning mechanism for the next few days, they now feed on people within their town, causing their deaths. The ones I've got now all pass for their original creature type and still maintain all of their original positions. I've set up a little reputation profile now for these historical figures vs. the site entities, and it tracks the number of unsolved murders as well as the year they first appeared at the site after stopping the aging process. It'll periodically look at the number of weeks without aging and the number of murders and compare that to the population. The smaller the population, the more likely suspicion arises. At that point they can flee to another site where they are unknown or, lacking options, retreat to the wilds (or the sewers/catacombs once I do the sunlight tag, which I haven't finished yet). We're going to work a bit more with that -- hopefully we can see immortality cults and vampire tyrants willfully feeding on terrified subjects where we're beyond suspicion in rare instances. We'll see what happens tonight.
06/03/2011 Still doing tags. It takes a little longer since there's an interaction on a creature that activates a syndrome which activates another interaction on a body material that activates a syndrome, and that sort of thing in a few different permutations, but I think the moving parts are working now. It was easier with the werewolf since it had its own creature definition, but I have attribute modification and material force multipliers working as syndromes now, in addition to the strange ingestion stuff. I still have to do a few of the tags I mentioned from last time, but I think I'm going to move forward to vampire world gen actions tonight, since I won't be able to test the tags in their proper environment until I have the vampires running around anyway.
06/02/2011 I started the vampire process by adding ingestion syndromes. These'll be used to give the option to make drinking a vampire's blood a way to pass along the curse, but since it looks at item materials and contaminants and so on, when we get to poisoned apples/alchemy/etc./etc. that'll work without any additional fiddling. It should also simplify some modding workarounds (any added food material or liquid material can be given ingestion syndromes). I'm also working through various additional basic tags that the vampires'll need (for instance, having pieces of the syndrome shut down in sunlight, like the ability to transform, or making sunlight activate pieces of the syndrome, like burning to death, depending on the random choices it makes). Once the basic tags are done, it'll be on to their world gen behavior. Some of the styles of vampire will be able to pass for being alive, even maintaining their old positions for different lengths of time, and some of them won't be able to at all.
06/01/2011 +++Ñ+0+

Deeper and deeper into the night. Join us, on a trek into terror. What could be creepier than the ghoulish, blood sucking freaks -- so evil they cannot bear the sun. Insidious, the more domesticated of their kind can pass for the living, sending their slaves to do their bidding after sunrise. Vampires are next on the list. Followed by angry ghosts and constructed monsters. The night will live undead.

The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
05/31/2011 Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #14 concerning the new night creatures: forum thread, DF Talk page with download. Here's the meetup thread mentioned there. We should have some more details in that thread soon.
05/30/2011 A werelizard came and savaged my dwarves, before being hacked up after it turned back into an elf and failed to flee. Two of my little guys died, but a third victim survived, pale from blood loss, but without any life-threatening injuries. Then it was time to watch the little moon indicator at the top right of the screen. White )... gray )... dark gray )... blank space... dark gray (... gray (... white (... O! My fisherdwarf was interrupted by... werelizard jeweler!?
05/29/2011 I finally got myself transformed into a weregoat, pumped up with enough axe skill that I could bifurcate my attacker after the switch. Then I walked into the keep, and the lord kind of freaked out and tried to stab me with a boning knife, but I managed to bite him and verify that the curse passes on a second time (he won't transform until the next full moon since it takes two weeks for the curse to kick in). I've also put in material force adjustments, so that a creature can be made weak to certain materials and strong against others. Quest givers currently give you this information, and the strength of werebeasts against their non-weak materials isn't so crazy as to make it impossible to beat them if you get ambushed. That can be changed when we have more going on, and the weaknesses can be made more interesting later.
05/28/2011 That world had a fourth generation weregoat, so it seems the contagion is working. I tried to get myself transformed into a weregoat a few minutes ago, but there are still some kinks to work out with the in-game transformation. For instance, I misplaced a few lines of code and all of the castle guards ended up switching genders and getting entirely new appearances ten times per step. The fixes shouldn't take too long though. Then it'll be dwarf mode attacks and material weaknesses, and that should be enough for these guys.
05/27/2011 The lunar phases can be applied to any syndrome effect now, including the werebeast transformation, and this is now used for the curses in world gen. We're not going to try to integrate werebeasts with the town now, since the rampages will be too uncontrolled during play. You might not be able to find them until they are in werebeast form even in their lairs, in adventure mode, for the time being, since it would be anticlimactic to kill them in their normal form -- which they are in most of the time. Once they can integrate in towns, that'll change. I haven't done dwarf mode attacks yet, but I'm hopeful that those can work with the lunar phases even with the compressed time frame -- if the werewolf stays transformed for a few days, they should be able to make a beeline for some poor dwarf and savage them and flee, for example, especially if they are given a modest speed boost. We'll have to see. Up next though is the contagious aspect of the transformation! That should increase the entertainment value significantly.
05/26/2011 Mostly I've been slogging through bugs with the randomly generated interaction framework, but I did manage to get it to the point where the high priestess of Awlist profaned the Blockaded Cathedral in the city of Streamnourishes. Awlist, the goddess of oaths, cursed the high priestess and transformed her into a wereskunk. I haven't done the periodic part of the transformation yet, so in this case, it was just a permanent change. The wereskunk, immortal, went on to terrorize various townspeople and villagers for 150 years and still lurks off in a lair someplace.
05/25/2011 For the original werebeasts in world gen we're starting with the "profane the temple" route. Unfortunate historical figures will rarely do something silly enough to be cursed with a horrifying affliction, which'll happen to be transforming into a ravening beast man on occasion. Until we have more going on in world gen, it'll be more or less random which people decide to offend the gods. There could very well be other routes to werebeastdom before the release is up (bitten by evil region creatures, poaching the wrong critters in the wrong place, etc.), but we have to begin somewhere.

The general mechanism is an interaction as before. Instead of having a regional or secret knowledge origin, this one has a deity source, with a hint to use it as a major curse (as with the mummies). The difference being that deities will currently only consider using their major curses when somebody profanes the temple during world gen. Not sure if you'll be able to profane temples as an adventurer. The were-forms are created randomly and linked to generated curses, but the tags are all available for modding as well.
05/24/2011 O~"~~"~Ñ~~

When the cold moon shines down on the black marsh, the poor, tortured soul is transformed into a hideous night creature bent on mayhem. The were-capybara is only one of the myriad lunatic monsters that terrorize the living. Is it the moon or some other force that triggers their madness? And the bite, the bite that passes the curse along to the unlucky survivors. There is a way to defeat the foe, be it silver weapons, or even water. Find it quickly, lest your dwarves go howling into the night.
05/23/2011 The first thing I noticed when I entered the pyramid was two groundhogs lying in pools of their own blood. I guess they should keep the door locked if they don't want the wildlife gumming up the traps. With my keen observational skills, spatial sense, focus and intuition, I was able to spot even the traps that rodents hadn't set off. Various ancient corpses were set into slots in the walls, including the odd dwarf. Eventually I reached the sarcophagus, surrounded by bodies that had been disinterred from the catacombs beneath the city and set here along with their fallen queen. That should have been warning enough, but the alpaca bone figurine was too tempting. The moment I seized it, the queen arose, and with a gesture her followers rose with her. I managed to spill her desiccated guts with my trusty axe, but that didn't stop her from animating my body after I was dead.
05/22/2011 After pawing through some treasure, I was arteried in the leg by a giant axe blade, then cursed with bad luck and boxed in the face by a mummy. The defenses have improved, but a bit more is required.
05/21/2011 In the midwinter of 73, Teme the Law-Giver led one hundred humans and 33 townie elves against an assault by various forest creatures and their wild elven masters. Teme's defense was successful, but he was struck down by a grizzly bear. The humans constructed the Tomb of Planes and interred Teme within, where he lay for 100 years. Then I went in there, took Teme from the coffin and put the body in my backpack. Obviously the defenses will need to be improved.
05/20/2011 Imagine the citizens of the empire, banding together under force to build giant monuments to their king. In these elaborate crypts, the dead rulers will be entombed with their families and all their valuables. Centuries later it would take a hero to brave the night creatures dwelling within and seize the treasure. A hero, or a fool.

Slogging through map issues with crypts. I hope to raid the first one tonight!
05/19/2011 I situated the tomb structures, but instead of testing that and moving on with their specific tile maps, I got to fix a world gen crash bug that I bumped into, a convoluted mess of pointer corruption that took some hours to pin down. Fortunately, it was a longer standing bug from a few versions back, so that should solve one of the intermittent world gen crashes people had been having in the current release.
05/18/2011 The entity positions have a new tag that says that a historical figure that died holding the position is important enough to be given a special sending off, assuming the entity does that kind of thing in the first place. The ones that build separated outdoor tombs (humans alone at this point) use the monument sites and place as many mausoleum structures as will fit, so the sites should be an interesting assortment of things. If it doesn't place a special outdoor tomb for whatever reason, it tacks a tomb in whatever catacombs or dungeon area is available, otherwise they get thrown in with the other historical figures. I was considering doing that thing where the ruler commissions their own tomb while they are still alive, but I thought it would be confusing to have empty tombs sitting around until we have active construction sites in the game, so right now all of the tomb structure are built after people die. Next I need to set up the specific site maps and disturbance events.
05/17/2011 I'm setting up independent monument burial sites for people, so that in addition to the catacombs down below, they can also build pyramids and things, like we used to have. It should be entertaining. I've also got arm and head animation mostly working -- I set up two lines of necromancers in the arena and gave them adamantine swords. The forces clashed, and then a roiling pile of severed limbs and heads and bodies jumped into the fray until one of the sides was victorious, with their new little buddy parts wandering around aimlessly near them.
05/16/2011 Down into the deepest, scariest crypt, maybe in a far off jungle temple, maybe in a huge maze forgotten beneath the capital city itself -- this is where you seek your fortune or perhaps to probe for the darkest secrets of ancient sorcery. What you find instead is terror. You have disturbed the resting place of a powerful being, sealed away for centuries. Watch as he raises the dead and sends murderous spirits to haunt you to the ends of the earth. You may escape, only to find that you have succumbed to a terrible curse, unable to show your face again to the world of the living. It is your choice. Will you choose adventure?
05/15/2011 The goddess of blight, disease and death was named Spothrib Sweatsucker. In the late winter of 41, she created a brass slab engraved with the secrets of life and death. It was named Suckmucus the Dead Manges. She gave it to her pupil, Issha Goodpondered, who learned from it and then hid it under the town of Wanderedwreaths before fleeing into the wilds to start raising corpses from battlefields. There the slab remains!
05/14/2011 There will be a brief interlude today as Toady One works on all the boring loose ends that have piled up. Time enough to reflect on the magnitude of the next version. This release will be massive, filled with all the night creatures we left out last fall. Dozens of new interactions. But beyond the technical stuff, just imagine driving a spike through the heart of a thousand year old vampire lord. You can't understand how fun this is going to be. We will have to wait till the Slayer of Night Creatures Arc to unravel most of the elaborate curses that keep these creatures alive. Right now all you have to do is hit them with a shovel. Still, wait till you see a hundred Ñs slowly trudging toward your fort. Exciting times!
05/13/2011 The dwarves' dog tried to hold off the zombies, but they tore its head off. Then the necromancer raised it, and the dwarves were attacked by a headless zombie dog, in addition to the others. The head was not animated. I haven't gotten to that yet. But generally, the framework for critters that have usable "interactions" (curses etc.) being able to use them in play seems to be working. In getting zombies to appear in the tower, I had to make towns generally respect multiple entity populations (for instance, many different groups of bodies raised from various places), which was something I had to do for this release anyway, so shops will be a little faster once I get back to the market stuff.
05/12/2011 They make little towers and send hordes of undead to attack your fortress now. I still need to make a modest effort on their tower maps and make sure the necromancer and buddies are working in all respects for adventure mode. It is good to have masses of humanoid zombies back after some years of absence.
05/11/2011 The immortality power works, and the ones that can raise the dead run off by themselves soon after, eager to play with their new friends. Next I'll be focusing on the actions of their group now that it is established.

The dead arise tonight!
05/10/2011 Set up the knowledge structures for historical figures, gave them a little place where they can perform some extra independent actions beyond their civ concerns, and got them occasionally worrying so much about death that they begin to seek immortality, the secrets of which they can receive directly from any available death god of their pantheon at this point with a little waiting and luck. Once I get their powers working, I'll go back and make the secrets available in a few more ways. Then it'll be on to letting them cause trouble for dwarves.
05/09/2011 I set up the raw structure for the necromancer stuff. It works the same way as the dead being raised in evil regions, except now the interaction type is a "secret" instead of a regional power, and this secret can be learned in various ways. The general idea is that by learning certain secrets, a historical figure in world gen gains various traits -- in the example it is immortality and the ability to animate the dead (via a syndrome which negates aging and imparts the ability to perform an "interaction"). The secrets are at first imparted by gods or demons or megabeasts with the proper sphere alignment (death in this case), and then the secrets can be passed down in writing (if permitted by their tags), probably in the form of an artifact stone tablet/slab or something until we have books, so that direct supernatural intervention isn't always required, especially in longer history worlds. Secrets can also be experimentally researched by world gen people if their tags permit. The vanilla secrets will all be generated during world gen, but I'm also including some examples for people to look at for raw editing. I don't want to post those now because the format is still fluid.

There's no reason why a historical figure that gains immortality and the power to animate the dead should immediately become an antisocial evil tower-living guy, but we'll have to wing that part until we get to the personality rewrite in Release 6. However we do that, they should be able to harvest the bodies that it saves everywhere now, especially in places like battlefields where the dead are going to be more accessible, although it might be fun to do a kobold-style site infiltration in world gen to raise some bodies down in the catacombs to attack a city from within or something. We'll do whatever few things we have time for, and then we'll move on to the next night creature.
05/08/2011 Here is the scenario: long ago a powerful king discovered the secrets of life and death. Whether it was from an evil god or his own nefarious research, none can say. All the people knew is that while he reigned, the dead walked the earth. Legions of undead zombies risen from ancient battlefields built him a mighty tower from which his ghastly armies stalked the land. Will the dwarf fortress be next? Happy Mother's Day!
05/07/2011 I starved a dwarf and it came back (as a friendly undead peasant...). To avoid crossing various streams, animated corpses now keep track of the historical figure that was the source of the raised body, even though the historical figure's soul is detached from it (and available for ghostage). So relatives can still be properly horrified by a raised body without it actually being the person in question, and they might be haunted at the same time, oddly enough, provided that evil region animation continues to have nothing to do with the soul stuff. This'll also let it animate multiple severed body parts separately, though it'll also need to understand not having a central body part before that'll work. It would be cool to have arms crawling around though.
05/06/2011 Continuing along with all of the undead updates. More creature tags are available for addition (or removal) in syndromes, and syndromes can now either flash an arbitrary tile or change the underlying tile of the creature for the duration of the syndrome effect (for instance, the walking dead alternate slowly between their creature symbol and a dark cyan night creature symbol). Tonight should see the first evil region corpse raisings in dwf and adv mode, then I'm going to go back and make it happen in world gen for anybody that happens to die there. That'll conclude the recreation of the pre-existing evil region dead, at which point we'll move on to using the interaction/curse framework for new things.
05/05/2011 There are about 150 little places where the old undead come up, in terms of their properties and so on, and I've just been updating all of those. A few that apply are in the raws now -- for instance, the old zombie speed modifiers (it can't try to figure out the speed from the state of the bodies, since few of the bodies should work in the first place). First sighting of a new zombie from the fort wilderness (reindeer).
05/04/2011 Here are the latest posts from the Future of the Fortress thread, with various informations that might be interesting to dev log readers that missed them.

5/04/11 4/06/11 3/12/11
05/03/2011 The first of the test interactions is underway, recreating the animated dead that are already in the evil regions, with the additional effect of intermittently raising any corpse that is in its area of influence during regular play. I suppose without a specific flag, it'll reraise defeated corpses that are still intact after a while, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
05/02/2011 The first step is to add "curses", which might be based on or a subset of the current syndrome system used for poisons, and to use these to replace the skeleton and zombie flags. Even though most or even all of the curses will be randomly created during world generation, there should still be raws for them that support everything that's going on for modders as well. The old skeleton and zombie flags should be able to be legacy'd in for old saves. Once the framework is done, we'll start adding new sorts of night creatures.
05/01/2011 ÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑÑ ñññññññññññññññ

Catacombs, dungeons and sewers (1, 2, 3) now wind their way beneath the city. Next we fill them with all sorts of monsters, including a mass of assorted night creatures! Vampires, were-beasts and armies of the living dead will terrorize adventurers and fortresses alike. These creatures can pass on their curse, condemning their victims to a half-life of suffering and dread. In the cities there will be haunted houses and vengeful ghosts, as well as powerful beings only awakened when their vast crypts are disturbed. In the evil wilderness the monsters of night will lurk behind every tree.

The month end report is up.

Also, there will be a Bay 12 meetup in Redding, California on July 16. Tarn and I hope to see you there!
04/28/2011 Aside from some general busy-ness, I managed to bump my head up against the wall a bit trying to get the dungeons and catacombs and sewers and underground layers and topography and rivers and buildings to all play nice together, but I think I've got it working now. I need to mess with the dungeon layout a little more and then that'll finally be done. World gen tracks crops of the dead now, numerically and by cause for each site, so if all the starved dead from the last hundred years in a city happen to be raised, it can only happen once, and the catacombs should reflect their populations correctly.
04/23/2011 There's a DF meetup in Redding, California either in June or July, and Zach and I are going to drive down there. The date is about to be fixed, and there's a forum thread here.

Here's a fairly short Dwarf Fortress Talk #13 concerning cities: forum thread, DF Talk page with download.
04/20/2011 With the construction of sewers drawing to an end comes the beginnings of catacombs. These will twist and turn and mix with other underground structures creating fertile ground for quests and adventuring. We are also going to take some time to include some of the undead types we didn't have time for last fall. Prepare to meet the walking dead, both in adventure and fortress modes. The rest of the features (markets etc.) should be put into place shortly afterward.
04/14/2011 The cities more or less show up in tiles now, and I've been fiddling with storm sewers under the paved roads for the last few days. They should be entertaining adventure environments, especially if the people forget to grate off the outflow and critters get in from the river.
04/09/2011 Here are some more city schematics. These are all cities with 3-gated walls and very basic castles, and all but the last have a narrow river with several short bridges. That sort of thing is fairly easy to vary, but in this set I've varied the amount of city instead -- the pictures have higher and higher populations as you go down the list. It's more homesteady and less manorial than the older village pictures. In order to expedite how it works with the rest of the world map/movement/etc., it still respects 48x48 tile sections, though that can soften a bit in the future. It should also be able to handle curved road segments without other adjustments (they are all straight now since that's the fastest type to throw in). The river is blocky since I didn't bother constructing the specifics from the fully realized map, but I'll be messing with that more when we get to real tiles. The next set of pictures should involve the actual in-game tiles if everything works out.

City
City
City
City
City
City
City
City
City
04/04/2011 Here are some basic city schematics that DF produced. There is still a lot of work to do. Each pixel is exactly one in-game tile. These are all cities of the maximum size, but it'll also be able to produce towns that are partially drawn like this and partially the old fields and so on. The different buildings will be workshops and houses -- there aren't any really large ones because we haven't gotten to manors/taverns/inns etc., but the system can easily encompass that sort of thing. Those buildings are for future releases though. The buildings often enclose yards where several families will keep their pigs and other beasts and birds. Later these yards will be used for additional buildings and they'll also be expanded out in this release and merged with roads to support things like market squares.

City 1
City 2
City 3

After I clean up the gates a bit, I'm going to move on to channels and bridges, and then I'll be working on the more specific details of the maps that you can see when you walk around.
04/01/2011 Here's the report for last month. This month we will be creating new cities with development pictures upcoming.
03/28/2011 This one is mainly crash fixes, including an old, rare world gen crash I wasn't sure I was ever going to get a handle on, so I'm happy.

Major bug fixes
- fixed crash related to an items vs. temperature optimization
- fixed world gen crash that could happen if all the beasts were killed
- fixed world gen crash caused when a prisoner escapes from a site at the same time the last person to arrive at the site commits murder
Other bug fixes/tweaks
- made dwarves a little more proactive about seeking a diagnosis for health care that might have been interrupted
- cave dragon gets claw attack, loses stance strike skill
03/28/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.25
03/27/2011 Here's another one.

Major bug fixes
- stopped bamboo flicker
- stopped dwarves from ripping patients out of traction to bring them to bed
Other bug fixes/tweaks
- made it display traction state in health screen
- decreased triggers for cleaning a bit to try to stop paranoid over-cleaning of patients
- fixed key conflict for clay crafts/statue
- corrected NECK_SPINE bodypart token
- made rodent man bite use teeth properly
- dragon/hydra natural stance skill removed, given claw attack
- corrected baby guineafowl to "keets"
03/27/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.24
03/26/2011 Here are some fixes for the last one, with some additional bug fixes thrown in.

Major bug fixes
- Stopped large pots from forgetting their stockpile assignments
- Cleaned up some more resting/infinite job issues with hospitals (surgery in particular)
- Stopped plant regrowth underground from deleting ramps and stairs, and stopped plants underground from regrowing in magma, deep water, and some other situations
- Stopped buckets from occasionally becoming filled with many, many units of water
- Stopped goblin siegers from fighting amongst themselves all the time
Other bug fixes/tweaks
- Fixed some issues with natural skills not being applied
- Handled some more instances of overstockpiling by the hospital zones
- Fixed erroneous interlink between furniture/ammo stockpile interfaces
- Made enraged announcement show up for prone-to-rage critters
- Some more quick speed tweaks (assorted, but not much: bucket save from 27/28FPS -> 31/32FPS)
- Gave rodent men their rodent teeth and added them to the subterranean entity definition
- Gave reptile men teeth
- Changed penguin wings to flippers
- Made platypuses amphibious and made them swim underwater
- Changed sizes for most giant variants of animals and gave some thought preference strings to ones that didn't have them
- Added missing "mundane" tag to penguins and domestic birds
03/26/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.23
03/24/2011 Here's the second large bug fix release for 0.31.19. And here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #12: forum thread, DF Talk page with download.

Major bug fixes
- Fixed a linux crash from units leaving the map with a kill order on them
- Fixed a crash from tileless burrows
- Fixed adv mode crash on service conversation option
- Made healthcare work for dwarves that need crutches
- Made healthcare/hospitals handle plaster/casts properly
- Stopped creatures from attacking across several Z levels
- Stopped hospitals from stocking everything, ignoring the item caps
- Stopped pots from storing almost infinite numbers of items
- Stopped inaccessible spam from cleaning jobs with soap
- Made fish appear in many situation where they were erroneous missing (old forts will still be off, unfortunately)
- Stopped massive lag from certain ghosts
- Fixed up bone artifacts
- Cleaned up persistent activities and squads that were lingering
- Sorted out an issue with combat/training bolts
Other bug fixes/tweaks
- Made pots show up in the trade depot list
- Better stockpile options for stone, blocks, metal clothing, etc. and fixed some broken existing options
- Cleaned up some issues with glass items
- Wooden/bone crossbows specifically selectable from uniform screen now
- Made migrant hunters recognize their crossbows properly
- Changed how skills are applied to job products -- attributes are accounted for properly and skills should work in adv mode now, but you'll notice a different distribution of qualities in the final product, especially for no/low skill when differing attributes are involved
- Stopped surgery cancellations over patient not resting in some circumstances
- Ungummed up the hauling system from certain stale jobs
- Made lavish etc. meals take the proper number of item piles
- Made magma forges available more regularly to mood dwarves
- Stopped raw processing from including backup files
- Fixed some capybara and panda typos and tweaked giraffe and reptile eggs
- Cleaned some trouble with grass regrowth and generic "grass" tiles
- Made recentering hotkeys work in other dwarf modes (ones with x cursors)
- Fixed broken readout for completed jobs in unit health screen
- Cleaned up spam from rest jobs from webbed dwarves
- Fixed broken key in hospital zone mode
- Moved underground camp creatures from civ list and stopped their items from being counted in fortress wealth
- Stopped underground theft announcements in hidden areas from being displayed
- Fixed various ugly blank "" names in legends mode
- Fixed a random number overflow from creatures with no attacks
New stuff
- Sponsored animals included: penguin, platypus, badger, moose, along with related buddies
- Rodent men underground
- Invader mounts/monsters have first names
03/24/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.22
03/19/2011 I have a few more bugs I want to look at, and some sponsorship beasts to add, and then I'll put up the next release. Here's the latest:
- fixed up bone artifacts
- stopped crash in linux from critters with kill orders on them leaving the map
- stopped a crash from tileless burrows
- cleaned up a lag problem from ghosts and some other general lag issues
- made recentering hotkeys work in dwarf modes with cursors
- stopped surgery cancellation over patient not resting in some circumstances
- fixed fish availability problems based on temperature (old saves will still be missing them)
- made adv mode crafts use skill properly, involved an attribute rewrite which will also affect dwarf mode
- fixed ,"" style names for historical figures in legends and gave invader mounts/monsters first names
03/13/2011 I guess we're about halfway to the next bugfix release. Here's the list from the last few days:
- made dwarves get crutches properly
- allowed dwarves that can't stand even with a crutch to move around instead of never moving again
- stopped webs from cancelling rest job
- made "apply cast" job use water properly
- made hospital stock plaster properly
- a few fixes for hospital zone/health interface
- stopped invisible underground creature camps from counting towards wealth
- stopped invisible underground creature camps from popping up in civ list
- stopped theft announcements from invisible underground creature camps
- fixed some empty name display issues from legends/civs
- fixed more stockpile category etc. issues
03/09/2011 I've started work on older bugs now. I have a few more stockpile tweaks to do, and then I think I'm moving on to healthcare. Here's most of what has been done:
- stopped some misuse of combat/training bolts
- stopped bad haul jobs from choking up job queue indefinitely
- fixed problem causing attacks to occur through multiple z levels
- made mood dwarves recognize magma workshops/furnaces more regularly
- fixed problems with glass material properties
- allowed assignment of wood/bone crossbows from uniform screen
- made incoming hunters understand their quiver/ammo, fixed armor problem there
- cleaned lingering squad/activity info
- cleaned up some wood/metal etc. issues in stockpile settings
- stopped loading of non-txt files in raw folder
- fixed random buffer overflow from attackless creatures
03/06/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.21
03/06/2011 This is the first bug fix release for 0.31.19, where I've focused on new bugs. The fixes are listed below. It also includes a few sponsored critters (pandas and capybaras), as well as some of their wilder relatives. Pandas are restricted to bamboo grazing and capybaras can vocalize in adv mode (bark, whistle, etc). I added a mineral availability parameter that you can set from Create World Now or from the detailed parameter screen. There are a few more things I can do there, but any extensive rewrite is going to have to wait for 3D veins and mine maps (Release 2 in the schedule). Barring any catastrophes, we'll be moving on to the old-bug-fixing now.

Major bug fixes
- Stopped the game from treating every tool like a container for stockpiles/adv mode
- Stopped hive product collection from removing hive building tag
- Stopped birds from claiming multiple nest boxes when a nest box is deconstructed
- Fixed crash with unusual egg laying
- Made pastured animals spread out more during grazing and allowed pets to be grazed
- Fixed situation where some stockpiled items were not available to jobs (lye, etc.)
Other bug fixes/tweaks
- Stopped weird bone-glazing situations
- Made llama/alpacas get sheared properly
- Stopped dwarves from cleaning up wax cakes in stockpiles
- Stopped heroes in world gen from picking fights with dead megabeasts
- Stopped various tug-of-war fights over animals by different jobs
- Stopped wildlife from claiming nests
- Stopped masons from using clay
- Fixed up a situation where the same params would not generate the same worlds
- Made potters apply their skill to statues etc. properly
- Added a clay category to stone stockpiles and cut some inorganics out
- Added wax to food stockpiles pressed material category
- Added wax goods option to finished goods pile
- Made empty pots go to the furniture pile
- Made pots available for brewing
- Fixed some erroneous names of groups of object in the stocks screen
- Made ash glazing use the correct amount of ash (0.31.19 saves might have half-exhausted piles that act up a bit until they are used)
- Stopped extra grass types being stacked on a tile during regrowth
- Stopped aboveground grass from growing in tunnels
- Stopped "grass" from appearing in some underground areas
- Made grass grow back properly in desert etc. areas (0.31.19 saves will get too much regrowth now)
- Stopped grass ramps from flashing in no-varied-ground-tiles mode
- Stopped pet/tame vermin from spawning many copies
- Reordered the new units in the unit list
- Adjusted value of bees
- Stopped vermin assignment to pastures
- Made pen/pasture interface give status of animals (caged, etc.)
- Stopped dwarves from encrusting honeycombs with jewels, etc.
- Corrected egg liquid densities/text error
- Stopped text export from listing zero population animals
- Fixed some issues with red reactions and other jobs not being listed in the workshops
- Allowed object melting and yarn rope jobs from manager
- Made it select the active zone properly when you enter activity zone mode
- Made zooming to units go to the proper unit when multiple units are in the same tile
- Cleaned up some pronoun trouble in personality descriptions
- Properly initialized banditry information (can cut down on some inappropriate dwarf/elf banditry)
- Deer antlers
- Sheep text lines up with there shearability now
- Fixed some creature description text and other small raw tweaks (see file_changes.txt)
- See file_changes.txt for new raw tags
New stuff
- Sponsored animals included: panda and capybara, along with related buddies
- Added world-wide mineral availability parameter
03/06/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.20
03/01/2011 Here's the report for February, and here's a list of recent changes as we approach the first bug-fix release for 0.31.19:
- made empty large pots go to the furniture pile
- stopped random tools from being claimed by food stockpiles as containers
- made pots usable for brewing properly
- stopped outdoor grass from growing in tunnels
- stopped grass ramps from flashing in varied tiles off mode
- stopped generic "grass" from being placed in some caverns
- made grass regrow in desert/tundra/etc. properly
- made ash glazing exhaust ash properly
- stopped egg-layers from claiming multiple boxes and other issues with deconstructing a nest box in use
- stopped "lays unusual eggs" crash
- made pastured animals seek out grass more thoroughly
- allowed pets to be pastured
- fixed various problems with coverings/glazings
- stuck yarn rope into manager screen
- reordered unit list professions (in particular the new ones)
- stopped vermin items/pets from spawning copies of themselves
- fixed a problem causing worlds to generate different results at times
02/22/2011 I finally finished editing Dwarf Fortress Talk #11: forum thread, DF Talk page with download.

Since the last log I've fixed several more bugs with the new release. Here's a list of most of them:
- allowed skilled potters to make good crafts on par with other skilled workers
- stopped meat cleaver and other inappropriate tools from acting as containers
- stopped bees and vermin from being assignable to pastures
- made penned animal interface indicate animals' current situation the same way cages/chains do
- stopped dwarves from encrusting honeycombs with jewels etc.
- stopped mason from using clay for tables etc.
- stopped shearing/milking/pasture/cage jobs from fighting with each other
- hive product collection from removing the hive's building tag
- stopped megabeasts from coming back to life and continuing to kill people
- fixed problem where alpaca wool was not treated as wool
- adjusted overinflated bee values
- stone stockpiles now include a clay category and some irrelevant materials were excluded
- added wax cake to pressed material list in stockpiles
- added wax option to finished goods stockpile
- stopped dwarves from trying to clean up wax cakes in stockpiles
- stopped regrow from adding extra grass types on a tile
- made it select the zone under the cursor zone properly when you enter zone mode
- one of the text exports no longer lists 0 population domestic animals everywhere
- added egg yolk/white liquid densities, fixed name error there
I'm going to be running all over town tomorrow, but I should be back on track after that. There are still some new release bugs to handle, then I'll be on to older issues.
02/19/2011 I worked on some crashes for a while and finished a number of the easier bugs (overzealous nest box claiming by random beasts, some raw/key errors, and a few display problems). Tonight and for a few days I'm going to be continuing on with bugs from the new version until we've reversed most of the new damage, and then I'll be working on old bugs for a bit. Here's a further update from the forum.
02/16/2011 This is the first release of what we once called the Caravan Arc, where we'll be changing how trade and the economy work. The entire release schedule is up at the development page. This particular release doesn't have visible changes to trade -- just a lot of world generation infrastructure. People eat and starve in world gen now, though it doesn't matter afterward. Subsequent releases coming up will be making use of these changes during play, but don't expect too much there this time. There have been many other changes. Seeing most of them will require generating a new world.

There are lots of new domestic animals. We also added giraffes, rhinos, honey bees and bumblebees. Bees were the winner of the animal sponsorship drive and they had many associated jobs, so we didn't try to get into the other sponsored beasts, but we'll be adding those in with every release.

Animals can be placed in pen/pasture zones, and grazing animals will need to graze on grass (they can also eat underground fungus found in many open cave layers). Pastures should be made large enough to provide ample grass and to prevent animals from being stacked on top of each other. Animals crammed into one place for too long can become grumpy and violent, but the animals will stay in the pastures without much tending (a dwarf may occasionally run over to an animal if it wanders off the pasture border to walk around something). There is no way to trade for hay or animal feed at this time, so don't expect grazing animals in new forts to survive on glaciers or the deepest deserts. Many deserts have patches of grass (or succulents) now.

Sheep, llamas and alpacas (and trolls for goblins) can be sheared and the wool can be spun into yarn. Chickens and other birds will lay eggs in nest boxes if you place the boxes in accessible areas. You can mill rocknuts into paste and press the paste for oil (which goes into jugs). Pressing occurs at the new screw press building.

You can make many of the more clayish soil types into earthenware ceramics now (and you can make fire clay into stoneware and kaolinite into porcelain). If a fort embark location has clay above the aquifer (or any clay if there is no aquifer), it'll be displayed in the embark readout. I didn't get very far into glazing, but you can ash glaze and tin glaze (with cassiterite). Earthenware jugs need to be glazed to hold liquids. Stoneware and porcelain jugs don't require glaze but can be glazed. You can also make large pots out of various materials, and these act like barrels (they are associated to stockpiles in the same way, etc.).

Honey bees can be collected and kept in artificial hives (which you can make out of various materials). You'll need one natural hive on your embark location to get started, but after that you can split the colony into new artificial hives. The process is fairly automated. You just need to place the hive buildings and a beekeeper will do the rest. You can adjust a few settings on each hive to control which hives are held for splitting and which are collected. You'll need to have jugs around to collect honeycombs (the royal jelly holds up the process otherwise), and you'll need another jug to collect the honey. Wax cakes can only be made into crafts by a wax worker at this time.

The site finder records the best hit in each square now, and you can stop the finder at any time and browse the results. The categories and readout have been changed up a bit. Minerals have been redistributed on the world map, though this might not be satisfying as I was expecting to get a bit farther with dwarf mode trade. Adjustments might have to be made there until trade is updated. We'll see.

Animals and plants occur with more or less contiguous ranges now, respecting biome. There are specific grasses. The evil grasses are probably a little extreme and seizure-inducing. I might throttle that back.

I'm starting the first one to two week bug fix cycle now, so there weren't a lot of bug fixes for this release, but creatures, items and vegetation don't pick up as many contaminants now.

There are new options in the graphical map export from legends mode, and I fixed a bug there with village maps getting cut off.

For a list of the new tags available for modding (container reagents in reactions, etc.) see file_changes.txt or the new stock reactions.
02/16/2011 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.19
02/13/2011 Scamps investigates the cake
Scamps investigates the cat
Scamps investigates the catnip
Scamps investigates the shoe

Things should be ready in... 4 days maybe? It depends on how the tests work out, but that's the time frame.
02/08/2011 Scamps is two! He is going to be spoiled by toys in a few hours. Zach got him a giant jar of catnip and a black rat toy with glowing red eyes. I got him a large plush cat to wrestling with. There might be additional gifts waiting for him at the party location.

No ETA on the release, but the tests are going well. In laying out the caravan arc releases and considering the release schedule for the army arc, we thought about the version number a bit -- it has kind of been ignored since April, even if it should have gone up to 0.33 or so by now. So I made of tentative weighting for all of the version 1 goals versus the 0.69 remaining to get to 1.00, and we should eventually see some numerical progress now, probably to 0.32 by the non-bugfix release after this one. We won't make it to 0.32 this time (just 0.317, he he he).
02/05/2011 Here's the report for this month, and here are the last couple of posts I made in the Future of the Fortress thread.

2/03/11 1/02/11

Nothing but testing and cleaning up left to do now.
01/30/2011 We haven't forgotten you. To that end, we have concocted a new short-term schedule for a series of (relatively) quick releases leading up to the completion of the caravan arc which can be seen on the new dev page. Bug fixes are a priority and will be the main focus between releases. Your sponsored animals will be a part of the process, the honey bee being a major feature of the upcoming version with more to come in each release.
01/28/2011 I've been a bit under the weather with a cold, but it's not H1N1 this year so I'm happy. Remaining thingies to sort out with bees are mead, stinging and, after some more reading, splitting colonies over time so you can grow your apiary up to a respectable size without grabbing wilderness colonies every time (though it'll be faster to grab those when they are available). A given fortress can only sustain so many hives -- without actual flowers for now it's just going to be a cap after which they aren't as productive. I'm not sure exactly what it'll look like, but if you are collecting half of your hives and then splitting the other half back into those hives over and over I wouldn't be surprised. Incidental problems with swarming and mites or whatever might be fun for later, but it'll probably be pretty mechanical this time around.
01/23/2011 The first of the sponsored animals is underway -- it involves a side industry of beekeeping. Bee colonies found on the map can be collected and placed into clay/stone hives (the tube-style hive I found on Wikipedia, he he he -- I imagine woven hives will make it in when we have the materials for it, and I might throw in wooden hives now too). Artificial hives with colonies will yield honeycombs made from wax and pressing these will yield honey and wax, although it won't yield wax now if I don't actually have a use for wax that can go in now. We don't have flowers yet -- just a requirement that bees be kept adjacent to an open outside tile. Since collection destroys the colony with our non-modern hives, you'll have to collect new colonies of bees after your honeycombs are pressed, but new colonies will be available on the map over time in areas with bees.
01/16/2011 Prepare for ceramics. You will now be able to construct anything from a jug to a mighty castle wall starting with simple clay. You will be able to make different kinds of ceramics from earthenware to porcelain as well as fire them with different types of glazes. Imagine a great hall filled with your own terracotta army.
01/11/2011 Now you can take rock nuts, for instance, mill them into a nut paste, then put them in a screw press to get oil (into a jug) and a press cake. Both of these can be cooked and the oil can also be made into soap. The press cake shouldn't be as yummy, probably, or maybe it should be restricted as animal feed, but currently it is just food. Jugs are currently anything but clay pretty much, and clay is the next step.
01/07/2011 Here are the results of the sponsorship drive! Thanks again to everybody that contributed. I should finally be getting back around to vegetable oil and clay now... and bee-keeping, obviously, he he he.
01/01/2011 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted. This makes ten years that we've been putting out games online, and it's all thanks to you guys that we've been able to do it for so long.

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Dwarf Fortress started October 2002, this log was started around the same time as the "back to the dwarf game" thread.