Ice/Snow+

[Chakravanti]

So yeah it's probably a long way off but I was thinking about food decay, regional resources and such and it occurred to me to see a few things done with ice when that rolls around next century.


- Ice & Snow - Snow is harvested from a 'snowy tile' which becomes a 'snowy grass tile' until it decays back to a snowy tile probably based on decay and 'weather' (a decay modifier in a new decay system!). Several snow could be used to pack food into a chest to make frozen food or frozen meat. It melts

- Frozen Food - Should probably modify the FEPs somehow. Hard to say until we see where the game is at then. Obviously certain foods wouldn't be able to be preserved this way and other foods would be. Perhaps it doesn't modify FEP's and this would be its advantage over say salting or smoking (which might add some tiny rainbow of certain FEPs depending on where the salt comes from or what type of wood is used to smoke it).

- Freezer burnt food - Just for you masochist dorfs.

- Ice chests - Crafted with Tempered Steel and special clamping tools that forge uniquely strong joints and bands that are required to hold the extremely thick and highly compressed hides of an exceptionally woolly northern beast. Because Ice will melt shortly after leaving the frozen climate zones anything frozen must be placed into an ice chest for transport. While frozen foods will keep for an extraordinarily long time this won't do for trading frozen foods outside the zones. Ice chests have two inventories one of which is 'ice stock' and snow or ice can be placed here. The chests spends the ice to keep the contents from thawing and must be replaced. Trading Caravans travelling long distances would then be able to have Ice chests which contain only Ice depending on how far the cargo needed to travel. They should have a very large capacity and be rather very expensive and difficult to produce but very efficiently do what they are designed to do and they should be able to go for an IRL week without having to be repacked with ice.

- Incidentally, ice itself should be a valuable enough commodity that it isn't a waste of space to take 'insurance.' This should be had nicely by the fact that keeping what you just bought frozen long enough till you're ready to use it will require additional ice. Then, there is 'tempered steel'.

Tempered Steel - The adamantium of H&H. Requires a forge, an anvil and an Ice bath. What it would do or be used for has a wide array of implication. I'm thinking Damascus steel here. Keeping things balanced however may prove difficult when providing a natural technological resource advantage to one location. Consideration would have to be given to unique 'high end' resources for other locations.

-Ice should melt/chests melt at half the rate when stored in a celler or mine.

[Irish_Pride]

- Ice & Snow - Snow is harvested from a 'snowy tile' which becomes a 'snowy grass tile' until it decays back to a snowy tile

Reminds me of minecraft.

[Punkk]

Ice-cream.

[Jackard]

The focus of these suggestions seem a little odd, and wasting the potential of a new terrain.

I'm looking forward to winter regions for cold weather debuffs, new mobs, fireplaces to warm your cabin, winter coats, snowshoes, sleighs, dogs, ice fishing... but none of the stuff in the OP interests me in the slightest. More decay? Tsk tsk.

Guess thats just my roots from survival games like Ice Troll Tribes.

[sabinati]

ice and snow should just be on mountaintops, at least until we get some kind of weather and seasons. and not these little mountains we have now. the area of snow and ice coverage should be about the size of those, with an area about 2-3x of that "above the tree line" with only a few trees and some scrubby bushes and such. obviously the defining characteristic of a mountain shouldn't just be a shitload of ridges.

ice should be packed in straw for transport and stored in ice-houses.

also, if there's winter, there should be ice-fishing.

p.s. you don't need ice to temper steel

[Zirikana]

Regarding the distribution of cold weather/climate:

-If there is going to be static biomes in the game, why limit it to just mountain areas? I could imagine the northern- and southern-most supergrids being wintery and snowy, with the central rows of grids staying warmer. With successive additions of grids, the "snowline" or whatever you want to call it could gradually start moving back towards the "poles". That could be a fun little climate change model to start with. Might be helpful in mapping a new world after a map reset too.

-If biomes are not intended to be static, just flip-flop between "warm" and "cold" between the northern and southern halves of the map.

Although all this is predicated on the idea that the map is at least loosely homeomorphic to a globe. If you throw that out the window, i suppose anything goes, and you could put whatever climate you want anywhere you want. At any rate, permanently "wintery" mountains with defined treelines would be awesome

[DDDsDD999]

Although all this is predicated on the idea that the map is at least loosely homeomorphic to a globe. If you throw that out the window, i suppose anything goes, and you could put whatever climate you want anywhere you want.

The world is shaped like a dong, so yes, anything goes.

[sabinati]

Regarding the distribution of cold weather/climate:

-If there is going to be static biomes in the game, why limit it to just mountain areas? I could imagine the northern- and southern-most supergrids being wintery and snowy, with the central rows of grids staying warmer. With successive additions of grids, the "snowline" or whatever you want to call it could gradually start moving back towards the "poles". That could be a fun little climate change model to start with. Might be helpful in mapping a new world after a map reset too.

-If biomes are not intended to be static, just flip-flop between "warm" and "cold" between the northern and southern halves of the map.

Although all this is predicated on the idea that the map is at least loosely homeomorphic to a globe. If you throw that out the window, i suppose anything goes, and you could put whatever climate you want anywhere you want. At any rate, permanently "wintery" mountains with defined treelines would be awesome

it doesn't really make sense to have different climates a couple hours walk away from each other

[Jackard]

I could imagine the northern- and southern-most supergrids being wintery and snowy, with the central rows of grids staying warmer. With successive additions of grids, the "snowline" or whatever you want to call it could gradually start moving back towards the "poles". That could be a fun little climate change model to start with. Might be helpful in mapping a new world after a map reset too.

-If biomes are not intended to be static, just flip-flop between "warm" and "cold" between the northern and southern halves of the map.

Although all this is predicated on the idea that the map is at least loosely homeomorphic to a globe.

It's been repeatedly said that the world is too small for that, and why would you want something so arbitrary and limiting to govern mapgen in the first place?

Last I heard the devs weren't interested in tropic/polar regions anyways.

[Chakravanti]

tropic no, polar yes. Polar or at least sub-polar fits the theme and I was quite certain loftar expressed interest in it.