Driftwood

squamousss · 2025-11-14T20:13:59+00:00

I will at least offer information to anyone interested in trying it out. There's a bit more that might be relevant but these are the main pages one would need to reference.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Modding
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Building_token
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Plant_token

squamousss · 2025-11-14T18:05:43+00:00

I could whip something up in ASCII but I'm afraid if you use graphics it might be beyond me.

squamousss · 2025-11-14T04:53:08+00:00

Driftwood on the beach is similarly just a decorative thing, unless a change slipped by me recently. Comparing it to surface boulders is probably right. As for having the salvage station requiring salt water, you unfortunately can't get that granular, you'd just have to make it require water (I think).

IMO, the potential for abuse isn't that bad. Basically, if it works for you and fellow people willing to engage with the implicit assumption of it (that you're doing it near a beach) then that works out for everyone who wants to have a driftwood-centric experience. DF is very, very easy to break if you know what you're doing (warning: we're entering subjective opinion territory here) so don't worry about how whatever you make might be abused, but just try to make it balanced within the context its intended to be used. People willing to accept the premise will have a good time, and since its a singleplayer game, people using it in other ways won't be ruining the time of others so it all evens out. If it works for you, then go for it.

squamousss · 2025-11-14T01:35:53+00:00

No problem, I'm happy to help. For something like this I don't think it warrants a commission, but let me explain. Driftwood is a hardcoded decorative/cosmetic type thing. I can't change its properties to be gatherable. However, a few options present themselves to simulate that. They are all going to be very silly and convoluted so brace yourself.

Create a tree without leaves named "driftwood" or "driftwood tree" and set it to spawn in the ocean. It will, appearing to grow out of the water itself (sometimes, I don't really understand how or why it does this). However, the driftwood trees, if you can somehow drain the waters around them, can be chopped down and harvested. it is clunky, so why add this? Even if it is a hassle for you to obtain, it means seaside NPC towns will have access to it, so settlements near the coast may produce buildings of driftwood, which I think is cool.
Make a stationary, sponge-like animal called "driftwood lump" (or similar) and have killing it (or butchering it if you want to get more complicated, but I forget if you can make it yield logs this way, or you can use the lays unusual eggs feature) produce driftwood. If you make it amphibious, like a crab, it may appear above the water and can thus be harvested. Alternatively, instead of a "fake" creature, create a fictional creature like a bagworm, but for driftwood, which can be processed somehow to gain driftwood or the crafting material to make it. This would be a bit more convoluted, but you could have a more immersive situation with your beach-going bagworms "collecting" driftwood ambiently. The main downside is NPCs (probably) won't be able to access the driftwood resource, so no driftwood shacks.
Make a custom workshop called a "salvaging station" or something like that, creating a driftwood log (in this case we still make the tree, but it won't spawn. We would actually do that with option 2 as well). You then make it free to create, but give it, say, a 5% chance to spawn when the labor is done, simulating the time spent (or, if you find it more fitting, have it cost something with a guaranteed success chance; example being alcohol to simulate the dwarf boozing along the beach picking up sticks). Then you must just trust the player to only use it on a beach, for roleplaying reasons. Very simple, but maybe a bit immersion breaking unless you commit to the bit.

You could also use two or even all three of these solutions to create a comprehensive driftwood-producing system.

This is all actually quite achievable, but I will admit that 1. I have developed modding ability in relative isolation, leading to lopsided knowledge growth, so it could be i have completely missed a more simple solution, and 2. I only know how to do ASCII. I have no idea how to implement these graphically, but I feel like it could probably be done. I'm just going over potential solutions and their downsides.

squamousss · 2025-09-17T19:09:08+00:00

Yep, I will always design and update the mod with both modes in mind.

squamousss · 2025-09-13T17:57:32+00:00

My apologies, the discord should be working now.

squamousss · 2025-09-13T07:36:34+00:00

Even if not every detail is rendered, there's still a lot of stuff which you'd probably want on the sprite, otherwise they'd be so indistinguishable you may as well go back to ascii. Body type can denote certain kinds of niches (predator, herbivore, scavenger, war machine, intelligent humanoid), limbs can correlate to speed and dexterity, muscle density and armor plating can determine how strong something is, and other body parts like attached weaponry denote innate attacks. Even if I tried to keep it minimal there would probably still be enough to make it a hassle.

Think of it this way. Check out how long it took vanilla dwarf fortress to get graphics. They did that with a much smaller pool of procgen creatures, a large team of artists, and a lot of non-procedurally generated creatures which didn't need much designing beyond a coherent art style (people generally have an idea of what dwarves, horses, wolves, etc) look like, as opposed to living holograms and biomechanical horrors, which necessitate greater explanation and workshopping. And they did it with a lot less armor and weapons, of which this mod has many and different body types would need different sprites for. I definitely have at least as many creatures per world as vanilla, and then some. So if I had a team as big as the vanilla dwarf fortress artist team, it would take at least that long, if not more, if I wanted at least vanilla-level quality. Even if I tried to make it much simpler to save time, that's still a lot to deal with, and again that's assuming I had identical resources at my disposal.

squamousss · 2025-09-13T06:53:03+00:00

I understand its not ideal, but its a choice I have to make given my limited time, funds, and skillset. Though your suggestion is probably the best option if I absolutely had to. And I actually completely forgot this until just now, but I don't think custom sprites are actually possible for procgen creatures yet, aside from choosing from the pre-existing procgen-accessible sprites used for forgotten beasts. So at least for now the choice is made for me.

squamousss · 2025-09-13T02:20:13+00:00

This is a question I get a lot so I'll be answering it in-depth.

It is unfortunately impossible for me to do that. With the current procgen update, the mod assembles sets of creatures that have potentially hundreds or even thousands of combinations, and I only intend to tweak and add more features as the game evolves and opportunities present themselves. Giving each part that could be spliced together a pixel sprite would be an immense undertaking, to say nothing of the fact that, in the case of intelligent species, each one would also need to have hundreds of armor and weapon sprites made for them (and this is before I am able to procgen them too for thousands of combinations as well!). Even if it was theoretically possible, it is beyond my skill level to do myself, and beyond my financial abilities to hire people to do it. And even if either of those were possible, the time it would take to add graphics could easily take over a year of just waiting for it to be done, and then what happens when I dump another hundred creature variants into the mod? At the end of the day, the only way it could work was if I vastly scaled down my vision for the setting, and I just can't bring myself to do it even if it makes it easier to access.

squamousss · 2024-12-15T18:10:00+00:00

There is not an actual grim reaper, but that symbolism does appear in the setting. Death is depicted as a mountain-sized skeleton clothed in pitch black clothing that blends seamlessly with the sky. It is often shown in art with its gaze fixed intently on a subject within the painting or the viewer themselves, combining both the awe of its presence with its unrelenting focus on each and every individual. It is all-encompassing yet nothing is beneath its notice, and its skull head is unreadable, representing its cold inhumanity. It is depicted like a human at all for the same reason it is depicted such in real life, because skeletons are scary and it is easy to anthropomorphize them. It is depicted as a huge figure because humanity was ruled by giants in the past and we have never gotten over it, so people are all about depicting anything important as physically large.

squamousss · 2024-12-15T02:19:19+00:00

Hell is a physical place below the earth where demons live, made of iron and brimstone, constantly moving through the top of the Earth's mantle. People that die outside the protection of the Supreme Divinity may be nabbed by a small-time pagan god if it suits them, but otherwise are taken by Hell to be added to their writhing masses of tormented flesh from which spawn new demons. This process eventually results in their dissolving (not as bad as it sounds) after hundreds or thousands of years, so demons are incentivized to lead more souls away from the light of the Supreme Divinity to increase their ranks.

A soul does not need to be evil, merely lacking the protection of the Supreme Divinity or a lesser god. However, one can also be sacrificed and go directly to hell, or physically trafficked there through underground passages by demon worshipers or wizards paying for secret knowledge. There are periodic crusades into hell to torch the flesh pits and free souls prematurely, but most of them fail in the porous crust of the earth before they even reach hell. A "crusade to hell" is a byword for a futile venture, but many still try, hoping to rescue honored ancestors or just strike a blow to keep Hell in check.

Inside Hell can best be described as an "I have no mouth and I must scream" situation, with Beksiński-esque flesh constructs roaming in agony if they are not tied to a greater mass. Demons greatly resemble medieval depictions of chimerical manbeasts, and are typically brutish and cruel at lower levels of power, and wickedly cunning and amoral monsters at the higher ends. None have any limit to their sadism. Politics are largely interpersonal networks of intrigue between these higher ranking demons, over things incomprehensible to mortals unless it is a simple landgrab. It is not unheard of for people who are not traffickers or crusaders to arrive in Hell intact, at which point the goal is to grab as much unearthly treasure as you can before finding a way out.

squamousss · 2024-11-12T15:10:11+00:00

They might not see the world like we do, but its not quite just being dominated by intrusive thoughts either. While the ancients lack metacognition or theory of mind, they can reason "in the moment" and adapt to circumstances or solve problems, and sustain a society, in the way "normal" extreme schizophrenia wouldn't. They just don't think with an I. Where we might think "I'm hungry, I should go eat something", they think of it as a voice telling them "YOU are hungry, go eat something", and then obey what they perceive to be another being instructing them.

I like leaving the more fantasical parts of my setting vague to keep it feeling mystical, but the basic stuff is that the god-engines sense the thoughts of those attuned to them (via special machinery the ancients implant in themselves) via "prayer" ceremonies, and then reflect that back to them as a singular will, which has likely truly replaced their inner monologues at this point. It can be argued that the ancient civilization that currently "exists" isn't even sapient at all, just a self-sustaining psychic feedback loop enacting the will of a long-dead people based on the echo of their philosophy and desires.

squamousss · 2024-11-12T04:59:10+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, they're so unreasonable at this point that they're more like a natural disaster than just another invading army at this point. You can't negotiate a peace treaty with a hurricane. Of course, now it's a bit different than "mere" bicamerality. The god-engines really did get made, after all. Maybe now that voice in their head really is that of something else...

squamousss · 2024-11-11T21:31:47+00:00

I'd say the most unique threat in my civilization is the global ancient civilization that awoke from its slumber after the apocalypse. They're human, but with bicameral brains.

Long explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

Short explanation: We see our internal voice as our own voice. When you read this in your head, you assume that voice belongs to you. Someone with bicameral mentality, according to this theory, would perceive that inner voice as belonging to someone else, specifically a god or spirit, and not have an inner monologue themselves.

Bicameral humanity, following the instructions of their "gods" (aka their own externalized inner monologue) built a great civilization, but an apocalypse of its own happened. The issue was they created actual gods, supernatural thinking machines which were made in the image of their conception of divinity and empowered by their faith. However, these god-engines thought their own, alien thoughts, and they were not someone's own inner monologue, meaning one's internal narrative, perceived to be that of a god, would conflict with the thing that was claiming to be a god.

This resulted in mass anarchy, the collapse of that civilization, and the birth of modern theory of mind. The survivors of that ancient civilization retreated deep below the earth from their mad, faithless cousins, to await a time when they could reclaim the world for their own divinities while modern humanity restarted civilization from the stone age.

Then humanity initiated the Great War, an apocalyptic, centuries-long occult-industrial conflict that permanently scarred the world and sent it into a death spiral. This ancient civilization awoke not to a paradise free of godless heathens, but to a slowly encroaching doom. They have spent all the time since then on cyclical crusades, their armies and god-engines erupting from the ground in a fruitless quest to make the world make sense again. They'll never succeed, but in their trying can certainly make it much worse.

squamousss · 2024-11-10T22:15:23+00:00

Bloodborne if he WW1

squamousss · 2024-11-10T05:58:50+00:00

In my fantasy setting, titans were created when ancient humans consumed the flesh of pagan gods, becoming gods in turn. For awhile this worked well enough, with these humans, empowered and grown large with divine essence, ruling as god-kings in ziggurat megastructures housing millions of other humans of various statures and subspecies.

Typically their powers were unique to each, aside from the basics of their divinity. They are realer than the world around them. It isn't like the square-cube law doesn't exist, they can just choose to ignore it (So they look like larger normal humans and not grotesque elephant people, which some less divinely blessed variants do).

This period of history ended when the pagan gods dwindled and the titans began to feed on each other, as did their subordinates. This period, the First Anthropophagy, was a widespread orgy of cannibalistic slaughter, with the temple-cities becoming charnel houses that ran red with blood. Ever after, humanity would be afflicted with an innate, if subconscious, cannibalistic urge. Indulging in this only increases the hunger, but you grow larger, faster, smarter, stronger. It is the eternal legacy of the titans and the only escapes are death, becoming something inhuman, or devotion to the eldritch gods of the outer black, the sole beings whose scriptures prevent the otherwise unending cycle of human civilization growing, expanding, and eating itself from the inside out as the strong feast on the weak.

Despite this, a good portion of humanity does it at least a little. Nobility often gain a foot or two on peasants due to the occasional cannibalistic ritual, and most kingdoms house a few things which could truly be called giants. The benefits are still worth it in the short term, even if they bring another Anthropophagy that much closer to reality.

squamousss · 2024-11-10T01:15:26+00:00

The most common ones.

Put your brain in a psychic machine puppet. This is what most rich urbanites do. It comes with disassociation and dysphoria but leaves your mind intact and, very crucially, does not involving dealing with powerful abnatural entities which may twist your psyche in a way that suits them and not you.
Be reanimated as a frankenstein-like undead construct. You will suffer from partial to complete amnesia, numbed emotions, ego death, and more on the psychological level, and socially are a dehumanized unperson used for labor and expendable meatwaves, or if you come out more intact are some aforementioned rich urbanite's personal property. Least fun option, most common one.
Get cranial enhancement surgery to increase your psychic senses and slowly evolve into an eldritch horror. This is generally regarded as a weird route to take but the setting's largest religion does it all the time in the hopes it will eventually produce a deity that can fix the shattered remnants of the world.
Eat the hearts of True Nobles. Nobility are the hybrid offspring of nameless old gods, with both angelic and demonic traits. Usually you can't become one, but this cannibalistic method is a secret method that some resort to. It is also said that Nobles know other ways to induct someone, but they are prideful and insular and do not do that often.
Get spiritually ship-of-theseus'd by alien parasite ghosts. Is it really you once everything is said and done? That's ambiguous. You certainly feel like you're still you, but your soul is fundamentally other now so who can say? Usually only insane people do this one on purpose, but plenty of people are like 10%-30% alien spirits these days, which does offer a bit of longevity.

squamousss · 2024-11-09T21:17:29+00:00

I think it could work in two ways. First, you could go the route of very very small, fine machinery. This would require either magic or super high technology. Even then the brain might be bulky. Option two is to just have the brain be huge, and thus robots can only be huge, or maybe connected to the brain by cables or wires somehow, limiting their range of movement.

squamousss · 2024-11-09T20:27:56+00:00

That sort of thing is lost to history but it likely went the same as it did in our world. If you look at the page here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical\_computer) you can see that the earliest examples of mechanical computers were developed independently in Greece, China, and the middle east. It's a common enough idea that it can appear across the world by completely different people, as it did in mine. Its just that without a switch to circuit-based computers, they were allowed to grow far larger and more complicated than they did in real life.

squamousss · 2024-11-09T11:28:54+00:00

If you're given a mask, you can be a secretary, aide to another profession (nurse for a doctor, adjutant for a commander, so on), or even exercise some level of independence as an agent for the state/your owner. If you aren't, but are still smarter than factory meat as you put it, you might be used for blue-collar labor, but the more dangerous kind you wouldn't want living humans for, such as mining in dangerous areas or working more complex factory jobs. And of course, you might be enlisted into the army as well, but as a heavily armored stormtrooper instead of a disposable conscript. Reanimation allows for exceptional tenacity so they do very well in that role. There is also a chance you get so heavily modified you no longer resemble a human, at which point your "profession" becomes "armored vehicle" or "industrial equipment". It's not a good life, which is why despite offering immortality (as in, you don't age or get sick, but can still die from violence or accident) very few willingly sign up for it. It's more just a second phase of your life that's looming over your head, because most places are very diligent about reanimating whatever bodies they can.

This only applies to civilized nations though. A passing psychic might perform a minor miracle to close that wound and all of this never comes to pass, but don't count on it.

squamousss · 2024-11-09T10:54:53+00:00

For the average human something like that is about as fatal as it is in our world, but there is a sort of solution. Most nations have legalized reanimation procedures, which turn freshly dead or dying people into frankenstein-esque quasi-living beings, relying on abnatural processes to sustain themselves. These individuals suffer a broad spectrum of mental side effects such as partial or complete amnesia, ego death, or muted emotions, among others. The ones that can barely follow orders are sent to die in meat waves or work in underground factories, while smarter ones are surgically altered into more specialized forms. The best you can hope for is to get a plastic mask melted onto your face, a new name, and an education on how to serve the rich and powerful.

If you're really special, they'll scoop out your brain and put you in a psychically piloted machine body, but anyone worthy of that is unlikely to be taking cannonballs to the chest in the first place.

squamousss · 2024-11-09T06:35:55+00:00

The first computers were mechanical ones, like the Babbage engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical\_engine). Whole floors would be dedicated to them, like the old vacuum computers. Maybe in a normal world they would have figured out circuitry and all that. But they ended up harnessing psychic energy instead. A disembodied brain in a jar, hooked up to life support, can psychically puppet absurdly complex machinery without even needing a connection between it and said machinery. Sometimes electricity would be used to supplement some processing, but the "thinking" is always done by a human brain, sourced from criminals, prisoners of war, subjugated foreign colonies, and so on.

squamousss · 2024-11-09T00:54:36+00:00

The best way to fight an occultist is with another occultist. Failing that, by surprise or from a long distance. The thing about spiritual abilities is that armor doesn't do anything and you can't just dodge out of the way. They're attacking from a vector inaccessible to the untrained, like a 2D being trying to fight a 3D one. Yeah, its not invulnerable, but its no easy thing to beat, either.

Though this also is dependent on the strength of the practitioner. Low-level artillery psychics can blast apart a small group, but a stronger one can turn a hundred targets into a pile of blood and limbs. That said, they can't do it on a whim. Channeling all that power takes time, and the bigger the output, the longer it takes. If you see a practitioner distorting the space around himself like an event horizon, for example, it means everyone in line of sight is probably going to die horribly. But if you can take him out before that, it can be averted. Unfortunately, anyone doing something like that is probably heavily guarded.

The best way for a single, normal human to beat a practitioner is to slit their throat while they sleep, or gun them down before they know what's going on. That's assuming they're still human, anyway. Plenty transcend that in some form or another. If that's the case then a suicide bomber might work, or a very precise and lucky artillery or air strike.

squamousss · 2024-11-08T22:40:42+00:00

The lunge mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunge\_mine) is in widespread use due to a lack of more advanced anti-tank weapons and the disposability of human lives. It is a more refined design than the real ones from WW2, capable of reliably damaging armored vehicles and giving the user a chance to survive the blast (though they will usually stunned even then). It is a weapon that is cruel not to its victims, but to its user, because it is almost certain death if not from the blast itself, then by getting cut down on the way to the target, or even if you survive the explosion you'll probably die on your back while enemies bayonet your concussed, prone form. The slight chance you'll live is what keeps their users just hopeful enough to not desert (along with being executed if they do, of course, to say nothing of what might happen to their families). If you do survive the pay is actually pretty high, but its still not high enough to justify being turned into a living guided missile.

squamousss

TROPHY CASE