I remember being completely confused by the four mountains concept, maybe I'll make another attempt at understanding it soon.

Made a quick edit to the page to include the links to the historical dev plans.
I'm not sure whether the mood system that was brought up at IVANCON was originally planned by the devs (I think it was) or was a new idea by the IVANCON guys. I've gone with my gut and placed it under the original devs' section.

No, but it's a fact that all the variants are fun even if some of them make the game easier.
As it is, the official build of IVAN that still used ASCII art was considered easier than 0.50!


I can agree with this - efforts are being made to move more of the code into the script files to make it easier to mod, but perhaps very, very far down the line we can look into making a truly modular mod system. At the moment the focus is on just adding more content to vanilla.

Yes please, I've been asking about whether we could do this since about when the fire system was introduced!
It would also have other applications, like emptying acid on a wall or object without needing to break the bottle.

I like it. Also a good opportunity to fit in some jokes or easter eggs since the book is so rare anyway.

EDIT: I just had a thought that we could have books or stories that appear to do nothing, but actually give you knowledge of some mythical creatures that don't appear normally in game. This way you could polymorph into them, despite them not appearing in normal play.
I'd like to include the Mola Mola story (an abridged version) maybe as part of fejoa's idea or maybe as its own book. This could give you the knowledge of the Mola Mola but you'd never be able to get enough INT to polymorph into it.

My time to shine!

I made a collection of pages about this on the wiki, taken from documentation and artifacts left by the original devs in the source repository. Have a browse through the History tag if you've got a moment.
Here's some direct links:

• Artifacts
  
• Cities
  
• Items
  
• Monsters
  
• Worlds (dungeons)
  

Edit: Noticed I missed some monster ideas from some of the oldest dev files, going to update the wiki now.

EDIT POST

I deleted my old post because I realised I'm a huge dummy.
I was going to say to Chiko that you can't make subvariants of potions because I tried it almost exactly a year ago and it didn't work, but that's not true. I found out that I had simply made a typo and that's why they didn't work.

Here's the code again, fixed this time:

potion /* materialcontainer-> */
{
  ...
  
  Config VIAL;
  {
	DefaultSize = 10;
	Possibility = 600;
	NameSingular = "vial";
	DefaultMainVolume = 20;
	DefaultSecondaryVolume = 200;
	SecondaryMaterialConfig = { 11, WATER, HEALING_LIQUID, OMMEL_URINE, POISON_LIQUID, VALDEMAR, ANTIDOTE_LIQUID, VODKA, TROLL_BLOOD, OMMEL_SWEAT, OMMEL_TEARS, SULPHURIC_ACID; }
	MaterialConfigChances = { 11, 15, 25, 15, 5, 5, 30, 5, 20, 15, 15, 5; }
  }
}

I've tested it out now, and they work fine except for one problem: they turn into broken bottles when they shatter.
This is, because as I mentioned in my now-deleted post, bottles and broken bottles are entirely separate entities and a bottle that "dies" turns into a broken bottle entity. Since vials are sub-entities of bottles, they also turn into broken bottles when they break.
There's no way to fix this without messing with the source code, but for most intents and purposes this is a quick way to test out the balance of my vials/flasks suggestion.

Do note the above code is just lifted almost wholesale from regular potions, particularly the materialconfigchances part which would be our balancing factor. So don't worry about those numbers too much.

EDIT: I uh, should've considered this earlier but vials don't play nice with d!pping between each other. It doesn't crash the game, but dipping a vial into a bottle takes a full 500ml portion... despite the vial only being able to hold 200ml.
So in order to correctly implement additional liquid containers, we're going to have to make the dipping function more modular too - currently it looks like it just transfers a flat rate of 500ml of fluid into/onto whatever you specify. Regardless of anything other than the container already being full.
However it should be noted that the smaller capacity of spawned vials actually is taken into account by the game correctly - when shattered or drank, the appropriate amount of fluid is spilled or consumed. It's just the dip and vials-turning-into-broken-bottles functions that would need revising.

This idea has been bounced around the forum a couple of times.

The idea I had to address this was to introduce a new subtype of bottle called "flask" and these would be much smaller doses of liquid (say 100ml) that are likewise quicker to drink. Enough to heal you but not enough to regrow a limb.
Then we'd make bottles of healing liquid or troll blood much rarer, since they contain enough for 4 full limb replacements. The addition of flasks would also add another dynamic to the liquid separation mechanics, since you'd have even finer control of how much liquid to distribute in order to address your needs, unlike now when in most cases chugging down even a half portion of potion makes most of it go to waste.

As it is, bottles being 1 litre makes them pretty big. Doesn't it make sense for more specialized fluids to be more commonly found in smaller amounts?

--

With your suggestions there though I'd be more in favor of limbs only regrowing when you consume a potion at full HP, or more specifically if the amount of health restored by however much you drank heals you to full but there's enough "overheal" on top of it to restore a limb. That makes more sense than having to annoyingly waste a dose on say 5 or less HP to get your limb back in a stressful situation because of some arbitrary boolean set for "is this guy's HP full".

I still want the ability to apply a bottle of liquid to dump it all over yourself or an adjacent tile.
Obviously that'd be my first thought for trying to extinguish a fire quickly, but I'm sure the application of being able to dump out potions would lead to all sorts of interesting things happening.

Especially things like new players trying to put themselves out with valdemar and blowing their arms off or just making the fire bigger.

EDIT: I realise we'd need to actually code in the ability for puddles to react properly since environmental puddles and splashes on equipment don't seem to do anything but rust metal right now and can't explode even if they're flammable.