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Dwarven Material Science
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balance, graphics, material
Tags: Weapons, armor, plants, reaction, workshops
File Size
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10.827 MB
20 Dec, 2024 @ 11:19pm
12 Jan @ 4:27pm
17 Change Notes ( view )
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qscrew
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Dwarven Material Science

Description
Short summary

Some error causes updating the mod to corrupt save files. I'll determine a fix eventually but doubt it will be one-size-fits-all. DF is a world of many wonders.

DMS2024 revises the vanilla weapons and adds new weapons and armor. It's semi-compatible at best with many other mods, since it comes with its own creature graphics for the new items, but I avoid changing the base files as much as possible. This mod is a compilation from my annual holiday tradition of tweaking DF. It's not terribly serious; the name as well is a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Credit and thanks are extended to the delvers of the bay12 forums and the many dwarven scientists who went before and struck the earth.


General changes

Melee weapons
  • Added paddle, knuckles, club, short spear, partizan, trident, bardiche, bastard sword, great flail.
  • Whips, scourges, and daggers are slightly less piercing. Flails are improved. A tad.
  • Contact areas are randomized via duplicating attacks and tweaking them.

Ranged weapons
  • Added sling, short bow, long bow, stone bow, siege crossbow.
  • Less armor penetration with cheap ammunition. More from good metals with high quality.

Armor and shields
  • Added skinsuits, doublet, heavy/armored overcoat, living overcoat, hazard gloves.
  • Added mail collar, mail sleeves, hauberk, collarplate, living breastplate and gauntlets.
  • Humans, elves, and goblins may arrive more or less heavily armored. It hardly matters.
  • Dwarves got some of the new armor pieces as uncommon clothing, too. Fingers crossed.

Environment and economy
  • Added the blockworker to produce stone goods more efficiently but at lower quality.
  • Added two plants to produce faux wood or laminate wood via pressing and glueing.
  • Added regional effects to Good surroundings. They are not harmless, however.
  • Added magical grass to limited terrains. GRASS.MOD.2024 was to humor myself, sure, but I also did do it. There is grass.

Graphics
  • Item and layered graphics are done. I probably will not touch portraits. That's work.
  • All craftsdwarfship is of acceptable quality.


Full description

I mostly wanted hired adventurers to live longer and gain more glory from rummaging through my caverns. So, I improved the two-handed weapons. This buffs invasions, so fighting in sieges became part of my holiday hobby (which distracted me from updating this, but just about everything has that effect, so nbd).

Meanwhile, I wondered what it means to "balance" combat in a game where weapons perform functions rather than compete directly. In Dwarf Fortress, a flail is not a good-or-bad weapon, it is a flail. It expresses the characteristics of "a flail" and inflicts a specific type of damage ("pulping"). Can you put that on a tier list? Should tier lists be pulped?

Even so, I put a lot of numbers in a spreadsheet and used it to generate my weapon raws. You can check that out here. It's kind of hilarious:
Spreadsheet with data [docs.google.com]

Or if you're chartmaxxed and all but not exactly spreadsheet tribe:
Just the summary [docs.google.com]


Next steps

Creature graphics probably can be made more compatible with some clever tricks. There are quality of life changes and direct patches to crap behaviors; this could go in a "vanilla patch" direction rather than a "vanilla plus". But I suspect the final version of this mod will take whatever lumpy shape best fit its jaggy niche before I wandered off into the sunset for another year. Currently, I mostly swivel around in my gamer chair and forget to test anything.


Change notes

2025-01-11
- Nearly every weapon and ammo type tweaked (based on watching adventurers die).
- Added the "training paddle". You know you wanted training paddles. For training.
- Have mostly accepted that there's just tons of things you cannot do with DF raws.

2025-01-07
- Continued my slow crawl toward comprehending the innards of DF. Fixed things.
- Added workshops for new elf-friendly or mega-unfriendly wood industries.
- Wrote a project doc and start of VCS. Things should be less dumb from here.

2024-12-30
- Elven warfare concept around higher endurance and parrying seems fine.
- Region interactions seem to require weekly occurrence; replaces monthly.

2024-12-28
- Added new armor and shields for dwarves, humans, elves, and goblins.
- Added armor graphics while half-asleep so may have made mistakes.

2024-12-26
- Good-aligned plants added with graphics and syndromes.
- Good and evil weather patterns and magical influences added but not tested.
- New armor with dwarf graphics, though primarily intended for humans and elves.

2024-12-22
- Testing on cross-mod compatibility shows CUT-ing all weapons causes problems.
- Going to get weird with it: All item names are now suffixed with _MODDED.

2024-12-21
- Restored missing seed products from glue and lamination reactions.
- Simplified the wood laminate process, generally.

????-??-??
- Urist wakes, never having slept.
13 Comments
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qscrew  [author] 11 Jan @ 3:10pm 
I took a couple days to play the game and notice issues but didn't get to test my fixes. Starting in the savage desert with no wood and bootstrapping a faux-wood-only carpentry industry was painful but doable. Declaring war on the elves anyway, well, that's just a special treat.

Dwarven civilizations seem to flourish or collapse more often with this mod enabled. Either case is interesting but maybe not everyone's ideal. Mysteries abound.

Where do we even go from here.
qscrew  [author] 11 Jan @ 2:59pm 
This is almost anti-adventure-mode in its basic design. I'll be joining the adv crowd soon though as that's my preferred way to play.

It's Quarreler 2.0 with the added feeling you get when you go to someone else's house and they have lots of weird snacks
Edetha4 9 Jan @ 9:36am 
Hello, may I ask if this works with the adventure mode beta?
DPh Kraken 6 Jan @ 5:08pm 
A triumphant return of Quarreler! Caught me off-guard till I realized who the author was.
Digganob 6 Jan @ 2:09pm 
Thank you, that fact really is a big help. It should provide a good start for my own tests, at least.
qscrew  [author] 6 Jan @ 1:33pm 
Relative again, but humanized to a scale that assumes the weapon is weapons-metal grade. 4+ is real AP where a 10 is considered top-tier. 3 should penetrate weaker armors like shell. 2- are getting closer to tissue layers like hair rather than "armor" penetration.
Digganob 6 Jan @ 8:27am 
Ah, that is an eminently practical test. I'll try that out, thanks.

I would ask, though, what does your "AP" stat mean in your spreadsheet lists? Did you record at all whether certain APs penetrate certain armors? Or is it simply relative?
qscrew  [author] 6 Jan @ 1:20am 
I wouldn't try to map out too many interactions. There's probably only a couple that matter. The vanilla weapons are a good reference with very many Internet Opinions about them already, and there was a dfhack user script from a while ago for testing weapon attacks.

Still, you also can use the spreadsheet to test what attacks penetrate by just making one omni-weapon with every edge and blunt contact area, then putting type/area/depth in the substitution field via formula so they show in the logs. Put the output raws in a mod, spawn 100+ creatures, end the test before too long, and read through just the initial 30 ticks or so. Not exactly automated, but rapid iteration nonetheless.
Digganob 5 Jan @ 6:16pm 
That is a clever idea. I thought of something similar, just trial and error, finding the minimum it takes to get through different armor, in the object testing arena.

But the factors which go into the question are numerous, and I lack the math skill it would take to extrapolate from my results.

There's also the problem of quality! Sadly the OTA lacks that option. And then, I don't know if momentum sums the momentum of both creatures, or just the one attacking.

I think the only practical solution is to do those specific tests, as you suggest. So I can find that my "iron mace" can crush an iron helm, but just barely not crush a steel helm. Then leave variation to attack modifiers like heavy attacks.

I have also considered different attack types, instead of "slash attack." Something like an "overhead attack," which takes an especially long windup, but not a slow recovery. Making attacks which can stack with other modifiers, for less predictable combat.

Thanks, in any case.
qscrew  [author] 5 Jan @ 5:40pm 
Digganob, I made this with a material-agnostic approach in mind. That can help generalize the results for a single material, but that's about it. The results are relative and unitless so have no rationalization. A higher score is a better one, but if two weapons are made of two materials, then the spreadsheet can't answer anything about them, anymore.

The actual performance of a weapon in-game is subject to a lot of breakpoints. It either can or can't get through armor. One way this approach could have included those breakpoints is to add a weapon that models the behavior you're interested in and name is as that behavior -- "crushes iron helm", etc. I think I added a skill named SCIENCE or something to filter out those fake weapons. Determining the properties of that weapon, though, is totally up to you to do.