Wherein Jake Talks About Modding

Toady is continuing his work on bug fixing, and has already made significant progress. He's fixed several particularly heinous bugs, including one that causes the game to crash if you try to talk to someone, and one that makes it so vampire dwarves don't disguise themselves when they try to move into your fortress.

Now that bug fixing is making progress, I can start talking about modding.

Dwarf Fortress, like many modern video games, makes its code available for modifications by the players. Dwarf Fortress has two aspects of its code. The "hard coding" and the "raws".

The hard coded parts of the game deal with the basics of Dwarf Fortress, such as "water flows" and "the moon exists". Raws deal with the more fluid parts of the game such as "rocks don't explode" and "blood isn't a solid", and are easily modified by the players.

This post will focus on modification of the raws, as only Toady really has the ability to modifiy the code in any way that makes sense.

                           Using the Genesis Mod, I created a minotaur adventurer and visited an orc town.


In the Dwarf Fortress modification community, there is arguably no one better than the forum user Deon. He is most popular for creating the Genesis Mod, which adds dozens of new monsters, creatures, plants, races, and interactions to the game. He used the raws to add new castes and subraces to the Dwarven people, and has added potion brewing, powerful magic, and alchemy to both Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode.

The new release introduces several new tags, which modify creature and item behavior, such as NOT_LIVING and OPPOSED_TO_LIFE, which tells the game that a creature isn't alive and actively wants to destroy living things.

Interactions have also been added in addition to the reactions that were the standard of previous versions. Reactions essentially allow an adventurer or a fortress citizen to create items using other items, or (through modification of the raw files) to create items out of nothing. Interactions, however, are the first true taste of magic in the game.

As of yet, only three interactions are featured in the game. One allows necromancers to raise the dead as walking corpses, another allows dragons to breathe fire, and another allows spiders to spin webs. Modification of the raws allows for interactions to do much, much more.

                                    My minotaur adventurer being mauled by a crapload of bogeymen

Interactions are made available to characters via syndromes, which have been updated since the last release. Syndromes are no longer used for making people vomit blood or ooze pus, but can now be used to make people capable of performing interactions.

Combining syndromes and interactions allows for adventurers to read the secrets of life and death in order to gain necromancer powers, and syndromes like lycanthropy and vampirism can be spread through bites and blood.

These new features are very good for Dwarf Fortress' thriving modding community, and many people (including myself) are looking forward to seeing what gets thought up.