Hello!
This time in Main Screen News, we have activity zones. These are places where dwarves perform tasks or socialize without requiring construction materials like workshop do.
Dwarves need buckets of water for a variety of reasons, they can also fish, gather fruit from trees with stepladders, dump unwanted items, fill a pit, pond or moat with various beings, keep animals in a pasture, grab sand or clay for further use, fix each other up in the hospital, train animals, or just hang out.
The process begins by painting a zone:
This currently works by placing rectangles or free painting with the mouse. The Classic version also has a wall-sensitive paint we'll pick up later. This zone has been designated as a meeting area, where dwarves will come and chat. Importantly, the meeting area can be given a specific function with the assign location button (one of five icons that still have Tarn-placeholder-art in this image, the rest done by Meph.)
Here I've pressed the assign location button, and we have four choices.
The space below gets filled with locations as you create them. You can have as many locations as you want, and the same location can be attached to multiple zones to create larger multi-purpose complexes under the same umbrella.
I've selected the temple option and scrolled down through the deity list to the organized religions.
These are currently listed in chronological order, which is why we see a native dwarven religion for this world, the Creed of Sport, above a deity selection, Utag Loafivory. Utag Loafivory is a human god of trade, wealth, and hospitality that made their way to the dwarves several decades prior, through a few different organized religions, and two of our dwarves are members of the Utag religion "The True Stick-Fellowship." I'll pick this one for our new temple.
Annnnd the game leaned heavily into the hospitality aspect - "The Sanctum of Lunch." Very good. There's a new Tarn icon there to go into location details, where you'll be able to rename the location if it comes up with something unfavorable, as well as setting priests and other attached occupations.
Unlike placed buildings, zones can overlap. (I recorded the gif at 10FPS in GifCam, so it's a bit choppier than the game itself.)
This doesn't come up all the time, but if you do decide to overlap zones, you can now switch between them in a few different ways with the mouse, as seen above.
We also have the ability to repaint zones, if you'd like to expand a given zone without creating it again from scratch, or even move it somewhere entirely different.
The boxed text is from a tooltip, which is also a DF novelty! There are many tooltips available here, and we'll continue adding them as we go.
Zones can be suspended temporarily or removed permanently. Zones are currently visible only from the zone mode, as in Classic DF, so they won't clutter up the display otherwise.
- Tarn
Kitfox's Note
Hiya!
PAX Online is coming up, and that means Tarn will be on some panels... and they're completely online and free!
This is our entire schedule in terms of PAX panels, but there are two that will involve Tarn in particular:
- Sept 12, 4:15pm EST - Meet Tarn Adams
- Sept 15, 6pm EST - Procedural Generation
EDIT (Sept 12): Updated times to say EST, which originally said PST. Sorry!
All information on where to watch, description, and who else is involved in the links provided. Here's a thread of links for the other panels we're involved in too. Hope to see you at a few of them. :)
Cheers,
Victoria