Okay, the way’s I see it there’s very little, if ever any, reason to go to a swamp. They’re not even particularly dangerous once your character becomes marginally competent, or acquires a reliable weapon like a repeating crossbow. They’re just… there. Now, one thing I also noticed was a lack of salt water in the world, which is strange because New England has large enough salt marshes to be mentioned by name in the generalised wikipedia article on salt marshes. I checked. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think partially stagnant pools of salt water might make it occasionally useful to make runs into a deep swamp with a jerrycan in one hand and a shotgun in the other. If only so I can keep making jerky without needing to constantly raid labs.
Doing so would also lay groundwork for larger bodies of salt water, which could present a greater challenge in the long run, by making sources of fresh water less readily available. Still, some reason to even consider checking out a swamp. As it is, they’re basically a dead zone on my map. Not dangerous/annoying enough to avoid, like blob pits, just… there. A vast expanse of ‘nothing to see here’.
tl;dr: Swamps are useless, so give us a renewable source of salt water.
This, it’d be nice to have salt available for a change. That said I’d also love a means to separate the salt from the water to go along with it. (Boil off the water then recondense it via a still?)
+1 to both salt marshes and natural salt deposites (which, I think should occure not only in sat marshes but also in some other places).
BTW, expanding biomes & stuff topic - are there any intentions to add small brooks branching from rivers/lakes and so on? Settle down in the forest, near tiny spring would be quite good addition.
I’d suggest to add a few swamp/marsh villages (the ones on wooden boards/supports) because if they were connected by single tile paths it’d make for interesting tactical/gameplay. For instance, you might be able to put loads of traps on the paths, but have no way to escape as it’s your only route.
It’d also give some interesting areas to go which are a bit more out of the way, but might have other dangers like crocodiles/zomodiles and whatever.
So, anyone with coding skill willing to give it a shot? I’d do it myself, but homebrewing creatures in Dwarf Fortress raws is about the extent of my ‘coding knowledge’, if you can even call it that. Still, salt water already exists, as do randomly spawned pools, so it doesn’t seem like it’d be too difficult to make pools of salt water appear in swamps.
Might take a look at it, doesn’t seem overly complex. Probably be a few days before I get on it though, someone else feel free to pick it up in the meantime.
That’s actually what I was hoping for, because we already have code for random water pool spawns in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, so why not put it to use and make salt water pools in swamps? You know, those little infinite water pools that sometimes appear by the roadside, etc. I mean, a specific biome that forms in the centre of swamps with these pools would be better, and you’d thus be forced to actually enter several swamp tiles to get your jerky on, but some form of ‘Collect salt water? y/n’ is better than none. Placing ‘salt water(5000)’ on the ground doesn’t make a lot of sense, imo, and I have no idea why you’d think anyone would do that in answer to this suggestion. Liquid items are pretty much only used for very small amounts of liquid, like the contents of a toilet cistern. Seriously, I’d assumed from the start that any kind of salt pool would use the existing system for scooping up water from rivers, only the end result would be ‘Steel jerrycan of salt water (100)’ instead of normal water.
Just going to note. A fine idea but…not -all- of New England has these, just to note. If your absolutely near the coast, sure. But if you get any farther away, you just have marshes. There are a lot of biomes you could get though, even along those lines. Sinkholes are possible. Quite a bit of Appalachia (which is in the New England area, contrary to what those whom live utterly on the coast like to think sometimes) has pocket-mines littering most of their older towns - entire houses can just vanish into them. There are whole towns in PA where it is relatively -expected- that, if you were to dig far enough underneath them, beneath the sewers you would find old mines. And lets not forget the many, many large lakes…