===============================================================================
What is The Long Night?

The Long Night is a total overhaul mod which takes the game Dwarf Fortress and transplants it into a post-apocalyptic scifi future where the fragmented descendants of humanity struggle to survive in the broken remains of an unrecognizable earth, filled to the brim with genetically-altered monsters, rogue machines, warring states, and countless other threats. Central to the game experience is the use of N-matter; a programmable, infinitely mutable form of matter which forms the foundation of every civilization, and the process of transcendence, through which individuals can cultivate internal N-matter to develop new cybernetic augmentations, and slowly obtain an immortal posthuman body which can survive the chaos to come. Of course, for every such madman who would seek such a thing, a thousand more live as mortal humans and struggle every day to make ends meet. Play a mercenary scoundrel, a village of hydroponic farmers, a biomechanical mech pilot, a posthuman barbarian, and much more. Countless stories wait for you in the far future of pan-humanity.

===============================================================================

If you like what you see, please consider donating to my Patreon so I can continue to work on it: https://www.patreon.com/themodsmith

INSTALLATION:


To install it, drag and drop it into the 'mods' folder in the dwarf fortress main folder. If there is not one, make one. DO NOT PUT IT IN THE installed_mods FOLDER, THAT IS NOT THE RIGHT FOLDER.

This mod is an entirely self-contained experience. When selecting it for world generation, DEACTIVATE all other raw files, including the vanilla ones, from the selection. The Long Night comes with copies of those raws within it, meaning it needs nothing else from any other folder to function. All you need is the mod to be active. Feel free to experiment if you really want, but if it causes problems I can't help.

Also, it comes bundled with custom worldgen and colors data. Copy the worldgen data into the worldgen file in Dwarf Fortress\prefs (if you do not have a prefs folder go to advanced world generation and hit save, this will generate one). You do NOT need to override any pre-existing worldgen templates. When you load the Long Night mod, only choose from these world presets in Advanced World Generation unless you really know what you are doing. If something goes wrong and you haven't used these to gen your world, I won't be able to help you, because that can cause a lot of problems I can't fix. You don't need to delete these if you want to generate a vanilla world, just don't choose them when generating a non-Long Night world. These parameters may change, requiring an update, but I will announce in the changelog if that is done. If you do not have a prefs folder, got to advanced world gen and SAVE the parameters. That should generate one.

The colors are not as necessary, just choose them if you prefer that palette.

===============================================================================
Temporary Guide Here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZEDdWxlc0h2S2Ye5hiNMUPXjz-VYNc-xLsWD-18NgFA/edit?usp=sharing


===============================================================================
Changelog:



Changelog has been moved to the website.

But is currently here until this is moved to the main branch on steam. For older changelog entries, check the changelog on the home website.

8.25
-DFHACK UPDATE REQUIRED!!! Big performance boost to ruins generation, courtesy of the DFhack team! Adventure mode should now be more bearable, and starting a fort won't take as long. But for adventure mode especially this is a huge win. I know most people don't play it, but i have done a lot to turn it into more of a real game, and am hoping that it will be more appealing now. Bear in mind that there is still room for improvement, but this should help.
-Fix to paper-bearing plants being used as clothing
-Fix to shield effects targeting the wrong NPCs
-Fix to some NPC sites losing their ruins under specific conditions
-Fix to light source scripts not working properly in some conditions
-Fix to some interactions being able to target everyone on the map
-Fix to some announcements that have been uncolored all this time now being colored. If the "X cover" is spammy, sheathe your weapon in adventure mode. That makes it stop.
-Fix to geopolitics. In the vanilla game, alliances dominate and squash anything not a huge goblin civ. Without those in this mod, the world becomes stale and peaceful. Now, alliances only form between civs of shared governing philosophies and dispositions, and are further gated by government type, distance, and disposition. Regional blocs can appear, but the world should remain interesting and more prone to conflict.
-N-matter can now be made from more combinations of materials. The original three still work, but hyperbiology, nanites, and hardlight can be substituted.
-Colors are now unified under a single descriptive theory. No more chartreuse, you get "vivid yellow-green", and so on. Gives colors a timeless feeling, I hope. Also, procgen plants can now yield dyes! Discover new colors from your local environment. In addition, all clothing spawned onto NPCs by my scripts will follow intelligent color theory pertaining to neutrals, saturation, loudness, and so on. No clown suits, and any clothing worn by a soldier will be a proper uniform dyed a consistent way.
-New workshop, the bioprocessor. Use that to process plants into "wood", or plants/wood into valuable materials. Reactions should be self explanatory.
-Plants will now either have EC (edible crop) or EG (edible growth) in their names, if that is applicable. those are the plants you can farm and eat.
-Armor reworked. Instead of all stat boosts being handled by an exoskeleton or powersuit, those are removed. Power now comes from actual armor parts. Legs negate armor weight, arms negate weapon weight, helmets increase vision, cores allow for stat increases to be unlocked. "Lopsided" armor increases particular stats; a superheavy leg pair worn with ultralight everything else is incredibly fast, but full equally sized sets offer sensible, balanced stats. When you equip exo-items, a message should appear telling you what it does, both in fortress and adventure mode. Apologies if it gets a bit spammy, I'm still fine-tuning the announcements.
-Finally purged a lot of old DF words, added new ones to the list. In addition, all naming systems are a lot more diverse and hopefully interesting. New worlds should have a bunch of really cool names and titles in theory, would appreciate feedback on this.
-Generated words and names should sound MUCH better. The generator will respect better syllable placement and make less babble.
-A bunch of shapes added.
-Armor descriptions finally in! Click on a piece of armor to know what it looks like. Every civilization will have a unique, iconic style to recognize them by, and each will have a few full sets of armor, with a random chance for extra pieces. With every civilization having a unique technological material it uses for weapons and armor, and a variable set of weight classes across these levels, I hope each offers meaningful aesthetic differences and gameplay variation that makes getting to know the civ you are attached to more appealing. That said, let me know if anything is confusing or difficult to parse.


8.21
-Fix to janky menu for multibarrel shots
-Fix to weather debuffs, they will ignore if you are underground, but NOT if you are just in the shade of surface ruins.
-Clothing spawner will gear visitors and your guys, in fortress mode, with weather-appropriate fabrics. NPCs should generally dress smartly for the weather they are in.

8.2
-Fix to NPCs going prone when they don't need to.
-Many new melee weapons, and all of them are now mechanically different in terms of strike force, attack, and recovery. More polearms for one, along with cleavers, estocs, mauls, hatchets, clubs, and fist weapons.
-SPNT classification rating changed to HUMN/Human. That's what the rating actually meant. Sophont as a word just means something on intellectual level comparable to a human, wwhich many things which weren't designated SPNT were. So, HUMN denotes one that exists within the spectrum of human qualia, and is considered as belonging to Pan-Humanity. It is a shorthand to let you know this is an intelligent being who is basically a normal person, with all that entails. This will be more important in the future.
-Change to worldgen. I have opted to add equators back to the map for two reasons. 1. tropical biomes can't actually exist without them, they are treated as temperate no matter the temperature. This gives me double the amount of biomes to play with, and put species in. 2. With the new feature below, temperature gradients become more of a meaningful gameplay mechanic, and this helps the player prepare. Lore-wise, of course, it has nothing to do with the equator. The chunk of the world your story takes place in is just one part of a goldilocks zone between a heat-generating phenomenon like active megastructural growth or a captured micro-sun and a barren void, like how ecosystems form around thermal vents in the abyss. Plasmachines for example will now be more common in "tropical" (high heat) biomes, while holomachines will prefer colder climes, and -caste species will gravitate towards mild or temperate regions with some extremophile civilizations found elsewhere. In an ideal world the "tropics" would be a point in the center of the map, but I can't do that yet.
-textiles and leather now have their own generic grading system. They are built around cost, protection, luxury, heat resistance, wetness resistance, and cold resistance. Note that civilizations will be granted a fraction of these each, one suited for the biome they spawn in. That means you will be less suited to surviving in biomes your civilization does not belong in, which will especially matter for -castes.
-Complementing the above, plants will now be procedurally generated! Find strange flora (and other sessile organisms) out in the wild and try to live off of them. Hydroponics no longer exist but this is temporary, I am working to find a way to insert them without crowding out procgen plants. Until then try to use these and tell me how they feel.
-Temperature will actually matter now! Very hot biomes fatigue and burn your guys over time unless properly equipped, cold does the same, and wetness is irritating for now but will be worse later.
-weapon ID- system overhauled. Instead of one cool feature, you get 2 now, -HED/BLD/FLD and -SYS/LCH/FRM. -HED/BLD/FLD handles damage types, -SYS/LCH/FRM is cool utility features or additions to attacks. Click on a weapon to read its description and learn how it works. Cool new functions include wallhack addons, strikes that ignite on impact, and underbarrel grenade launchers/shotguns.
-Shields now also have special IDs, the -WAL suffix. FLMWAL, SHKWAL, ENTWAL, and so forth are effects that trigger when an attack is blocked. They also have a gun variant, which will fire a projectile at anyone whose attack is blocked by the shield.
-new weapon, the mortar. A dedicated grenade launcher to complement the underbarrel variants
-silencers added to carbines, snipers, and pistols under the SLNSYS modification. They grant you one free shot before alerting enemies to the sound.
-whip weapons now use the duelist skill
-The cycaste archetype has been removed. In terms of appearance, all its variants are basically identical to cybermachines but with human organs in them, and if you want to be a normal cyborg you can be a nucaste, and if you want to be a freaky flesh robot you can be a demimachine. Having tested them more and tried to fit them in a niche narratively, I just don't think they suit the setting for the cost that they demand. That said, brain-in-a-jar sub-archetypes may return later, folded into the nucaste and demimachine archetype families.
-Techniques will now correspond to weapon families. Nanite users get bullets, railgun rods, sabots, and micromissiles. Energy users get beams, plasma, and flame gouts. No more solid globs of metal.
-Weapons with large magazines, like rotorguns, will now give you the option to burst-fire. In the old version