I have finished my second fantasy fiction novel, the Empire of Spikes. It is the sequel to the previous book in the series, which I am calling Krypt Legacy, the Staff of Zelzhin.

I am also adding a link to my book series to the main thread.

I have spent most of this year working on going through my vast dictionary in order to add an adjective, verb and noun for every word in the game. The reason I have to do this is that a bug is present in the game that causing the translations some names generated by the game to be partly blank because it is looking for the missing word-forms. However the amount of monotous work required to add the missing word form in is quite extreme, so I have cut the release in half.

My shield dwarf fortress next to the sea is still around (called Gobbledbeaches) and from it I learned of another bug in the vanilla game. Apparently you cannot have more than two elected positions in a playable fortress, there was supposed to be 12 elders/deep lords because of lore inspiration but actually the twelve positions were being divided between two people, so I have simply reduced the number of these positions to two per fortress.

In other news, I have now finished the editing my 2nd fantasy novel, the Empire of Spikes, the sequel to my first novel the Staff of Zelzhin. It should soon be released on Amazon self-publishing. I shall probably take a hiatus between finishing book 2 and starting book 3 to finally complete the drudgework of going through the dictionary. Then I can put that same effort into making graphics and finally end up on Steam Workshop. If I am lucky the adventure mode release will be out bt that point with it's own portrait graphics so I won't have to seperately make the portrait graphics for my creatures in a different release.

Ran into an interesting issue with reactions. I was having to use boxes to store dimple dye, which while playable isn't how the game is supposed to work. Turns out that Toady changed it so that bags are no longer considered a type of box with a special token. Everything should now use bags again, except for gunpowder which really should use boxes because of safety concerns.

I am sorry that I seem to rendered all modded games prior to Version H nonfunctional. Sorry about that, save compatability didn't use to be a problem but times change. I lost my desert rock gnome game with their glass tavern, but now I have a shield dwarf beachfortress game that appears to be a GOD HOW DEEP IS THAT THING! Aquifer that I have yet to breach despite a whole year of work.

I had hoped just to spend my Sunday playing the game and *not* modding but then I started my new seaside fortress I was informed that I might be eaten by creatures called STPs.

The lesson apparently is I cannot use this token in names for creatures.

Here goes version J.

Another day, another release.

I have long wrangled with the dark pits problem and spent much of today reloading the same world in order to see what fixed it.

The main problem was that dark pits civs were only settling along rivers, an earlier change I introduced to help distribute sites better across the world and fix what I call 'carpeting'. Dark pits fail exponential growth rather badly which is their core problem.

I also had to compromise with the lore to make certain creatures that are supposed to be carnivores into omnivores (gnolls, goblins) in order to make them stronger by giving them farming tags.

Dark pits babysnatchers are also now back, which makes the last release rather funny.

I had about half an hour free, so I felt like generating some new world for some reason. I noticed that while dark fortress civs are not doing exactly well in general, fachan and ekodu were doing particularly badly. It turned out that those civs somehow still have babynatcher tokens, which explains why they were doing badly.

Basically the vanilla goblins, being immortal and not having to eat have advantages over all the modded dark fortress civs except the Itarin (also immortal and not eating). Babysnatching weakens a civ because it fills it's historical character roster with foreign creatures that cannot leave to create new sites, slowing down their expansion.

I shall now go and see if bandits cause similar problems for civilisations. They may also be going if they are. Hopefully I can edit those tokens without changing the meaning of the seeds, it I can it will make things a lot easier.

Here we are again, I have been having trouble with language mostly, words not translating because the game is trying to use forms of the word for which there is no actual translation in the file. Another problem is civilisations, particularly gnomes calling themselves things that according to my files they shouldn't be calling themselves. The fix to the first problem is to go through the files and add in noun, adjective and verb forms for every word. Problem is, this is a mammoth project I predict will be over sometime in February.

I also decided to ditch grammer and throw away the hyphons because they are frankly ugly and mess up the search functions of the game. For now I release a fix for two bugs that I had noticed while playing my rock gnome game.

Was the mod correctly installed? Giant flying foxes should not be turning up as a playable civs because they aren't. I had lots of world-gen crashes, but no missing entity files, everything seemed correct but it still crashed in world-gen.

You are supposed to not select any of the vanilla files for entities, creatures, plants etc. You *are* however supposed to select the vanilla files for graphics. Perhaps your crashes are caused by not having the right combination of mod-files installed in your save-game? You cannot change this I think once the world-creation is initiated.

I appear to have screwed up everyone's pig tails by overwriting a certain section of their code, sorry about that......

It seems I screwed up by not updating the leather-fix reactions back to the vanilla ones. Leather fix was a mod that allowed large animals to produce more than one unit of leather by turning skin into a glob like fat. I, knowing the problem had been fixed in the new version switched skin back to not being a glob, but not the reactions.

Normally I would have to apologise, but nobody downloaded version C, so nobody to apologise too. Merry DF Christmas continues.....

Merry Christmas everyone! (it is still Christmas ).

Christmas Day was sacrificed on the altar of the mod (okay I exaggerate, mother still made me Christmas dinner). Christmas Eve was sacrificed too, as were several days before that but now we have the version for the new classic version.

The reason it took so long has little to do with massive raw changes between version and everything to do with bugs and file corruption. Basically some new bugs were added in this version and required files to be altered to a work-around.

The other issue is that my files, just to scare everyone are full of invisible file corruption. The proximite solution is generally to isolate the offending data entry into a completely different file, or a different part of the file but that solution is really a carpet-sweeping exercise.

I think I need a full rewrite of my files, which means manually scribing (not copy-pasting) everything from the original files into brand new files, so none of the invisible file corruption can survive since the original data is purged and only the meaning remains. In the process I would be able to tidy up the present mess of files into a smaller number of files based upon nature and contributor.

The logical next step is the steam release, but I think that is actually just a graphics/music pack for the present classic version. That means I have to add graphics for everything I added into the game and at the same time I can purge the data as described above. The lesson learned seems to be always modify backups and always test a duplicate of the backup that you then delete.

As ever, attempting to play your mod 'just for fun' results in new bugs being found and fixed.

It seems that highnesses were being incorrectly translated as lownesses, I spotted it when the game apparently (it didn't) named about half of the world's mountain ranges lownesses. Fortunately this kind of bug can be fixed in-game without messing up old saves, just overwrite your old save games with the new language.txt file and it will be fixed with no problems.

It would be best if you all brought your own bugs/suggestions/questions to me using this comments section because it is presently my only real means of communation with you all. I can't use the classic forums for [reasons better forgotten] and while I did use the Steam forum before now the Steam game is actually out I feel it is inappropriate (the mod is not supposed to be run on the Steam version yet).

I am presently pausing active development until the New-Old-Version comes out, so I can update the mod to work on it. Once that is done, I will then do the labourious toil needed create a Steam version of this mod, which will have the extra bonus of giving me my own Steam page.