These are just some ideas I've been tossing about for a while - Most of them are silly and completely crap. Enjoy and/or use them if you like... or not... The pictures are just helpful guides in what each mount is trying to somewhat represent and are indeed not the mounts themselves.

Squathole Mount -
The "Mick Truck" - 75 cigarettes

A Mack truck is a large and powerful industrial truck. The Mick Truck, based on the mack truck design, is much squattier and quite a bit uglier, but not lacking in brute horsepower. Driving around in this mount while fighting causes you to literally ram the truck into your foes, scoring your first hit, after which you'll need to jump out to attack. If possible to code, it may also allow you to score the last hit necessary to kill the monster as you climb back in and back over your foe.

Improbable Central's Mount -
The MACHINE! 200 cigarettes

A builder's, logger's, miner's, decorator's delicious wet dream. A traveler's soggy nightmare. Better than walking if you really need to get anywhere, but once you get there, a generous buff to building a site makes this baby irreplaceable. It also very randomly aids you in battle for no reason by attacking with one of its many oversized industrial grade appendages.

AceHigh Mount
"The Coin" - 500 cigarettes

Each step of one's journey, the coin is flipped and you appear very quickly in the next grid. Your current form, circumstances and altitude are completely improbable... Travel costs are 1% for ALL terrain types and you have a VERY solid chance of surviving the trip. Most of the time. *Cough*

Example:
Normal effect - 30%
You flip "The Coin" high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you slap it on your wrist, the world goes dark a moment and as you remove your hand you notice you are now in a new location in the direction you wanted to go! How improbably convenient.

Random effect - 15%
You flip "The Coin" high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you slap it on your wrist, the world goes dark a moment and as you remove your hand, the light returns and you notice you are now in a new location in a different direction than you wanted to go! How improbably inconvenient...

Random effect - 5%
You flip "The Coin" high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you slap it on your wrist, the world goes dark a moment and as you remove your hand you notice you are now completely made of delicious bacon and you are now in a new location in the direction you wanted to go! How improbably convenient... for your enemies... (Buff: 20% offense Debuff: 20% defense)

Random effect - 5%
You flip "The Coin" high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you slap it on your wrist, the world goes dark a moment and as you remove your hand you notice you are now a Large Armored Tank bristling with armaments of doom and peril. You are now in a new location in the direction you wanted to go! How improbably inconvenient... for your foes!!! (Strong Buff goes towards any round of random combat occuring on the grid)

Random effect - 5%
You flip "The Coin" high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you slap it on your wrist, the world goes dark a moment and as you remove your hand you notice you are now made of gelatin and in a new location in the direction you wanted to go! How improbably inconvenient. You best run from even the slightest conflict in this fragile yet jiggly form.

Nothing effect - 5%
You flip "The Coin" VERY high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air... and it keeps going. You keep staring up at the sky for a while until you just plain feel silly. Just to make sure you're not completely mad, you check your pockets and find the coin back where you first pulled it out. You have gone no where, but irreplaceable time has past, draining your stamina. How improbably inconvenient!

Very Tiring effect - 5%
You flip "The Coin" Very high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air, crackling with green energy and gets caught by a serious gust of wind... It gets swept in the direction you were attempting to go, so you do what anyone would do in this situation: run like hell after it. You follow the coin visually while dodging through the underbrush, scraping against briars, banging into trees and tripping over cleverly concealed rocks jutting out of the ground. Clearly, the world is working fully against you catching up to your coin. You propel yourself through dangerous and illogical paths, all the while following the green light of your coin that is now floating back down to the ground a good distance from where you originally launched it. You dive, throwing your full weight forward, to catch your coin, not fully considering prior that the coin would probably be just fine if it hit and bounced along the ground. Feeling completely victorious you stand up tall and hold your coin high in the air. After the glorious and heroic moment passes, you take account of your body. You've lost some health points and quite a bit of stamina. But you caught your coin, damn it, and that's what counts!

Deadly effect - 1%
You flip "The Coin" VERY high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air, growing very large, very quickly. Before you have a chance to avoid it, the coin falls back down to earth and forms a localized crater where you once stood. When you come to, you find yourself on the failboat already feeling more than a little "flatter" than usual.

Deadly effect - 1%
You flip "The Coin" VERY high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air, crackling with green lightning energy till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you move your arm to slap it on your wrist, a giant hand appears above you in the sky. Not realizing this, you slap your wrist extra hard and your world becomes dark, flat and full of pain. You awaken on the rotting wooden deck of the failboat and remind yourself to be a bit more gentle when you slap the coin on your wrist in the future.

Deadly effect - 1%
You flip "The Coin" VERY high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air till it comes to a stop in your palm. As you slap it on your wrist, the world goes dark a moment and as you remove your hand you notice you are in a new location, in the direction you wanted to go... about a mile above the surface! How improbably inconvenient. As you plummet towards the surface, your thoughts of anger and frustration quickly become thoughts of regret that you didn't choose the Budget Horse instead. You would have saved yourself 498 cigarettes and a blind date with gravity that you are pretty sure is going to end in tears. Your mad flailing descent ends just as disappointingly as you thought it was going to. When you come to, the gentle waves of the ocean and wooden boards of the Failboat welcome you back to consciousness. As per your normal fortune with blind dates, gravity has left you penniless, save for "The Coin", which you do NOT chuck overboard, no matter how much you feel like it at the moment.

Rare Awesome effect - 1%
You flip "The Coin" EXTREMELY high into the air. It rings and whistles through the air, crackling with green lightning energy and... a Dark storm appears suddenly brewing over your head, swirling about the coin. After a few random cracks of thunder and green lightning split the sky, a particularly large bolt strikes you dead in the forehead, empowering you and changing your form into... the legendary CMJ himself. You instantly win any battle on this grid and your health bar fills completely to the brim. Being now a temporary avatar of the mighty CMJ, the island deems you worthy to go where ever you please, giving you a list of places you could reach via a one-shot-teleporter. Like a complete bad ass, you catch the falling coin in your teeth, wishing a location in your heart of hearts, and find yourself instantly there in a flash. Sadly though, you are now just yourself again, but feeling the power still brimming within your Coin, there's always a chance of it happening again. Maybe next time!

Heh, love the suggestions. Especially the midget truck, that really would be great. Would also like to hear your suggestion for cyber city 404? perhaps a robot dog or a segway type thing?

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Neko-desu!

Not sold on the coin at all.. 1% raises my travel costs significantly on many days, and doing the math:

There's a 15% chance I go the opposite direction I want to go, a 10% chance I lose stam, and a 3% chance I get boated. It's not uncommon I travel close to 100 squares a day, especially when cratehunting. The odds, with this, are not good at all, and 500 cigs is insane for something as useless as that thing.

As to The MACHINE!

What outposts to Scramblers come from? Could have sworn they were from IC.

The Mick Truck's kinda cool, but the combat thing would probably be limited rounds until your grille is clogged with blood or something, because getting hit by a truck probably isn't much different than getting hit by an elephant, and that's really OP.

(But oh, man. It could be like having 2 elephant guns at once holy shit)

Anything that guarantees you the first round of combat is also fairly unbalanced to begin with, because it trivializes higher rank DKs.

Maybe THE MACHINE can come from CC404? Sounds like an awesome mount! Horribly slow, painful, even, but super powerful dwelling builder! Oooo, combine that with a Builder's Brew and people would run out of work before they ran out of stamina! I can just imagine Beeps finishing every single building job on the entire island! He'd be pouring the Brew right down the fuel hatch like liquid Schwartz!

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Something something unintelligible gibberish something.

Horatio? Oh, Horatio?

Where are you, Horatio? I have some lovely tea for youuu.......

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Thank you.

I... did that the other day. Thanks to you and Alex bringing up cookies. I became a horrible, cookie-fueled building robot. I think I did work in about 30+ dwellings (Skipped ones where I'd have to gather a material they weren't near).

Four straight hours of construction madness.

Here's a tip, people: I've got enough cookies to do this again. You may want to look into making sure you've got materials stocked.



I call this the Season 3.

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Goat Collector

I warned ya. I didn't title this thread "greatest mount ideas evar". Just sayin.

Ah. My bad. Yes, I said IC, but meant CC404. Bad ass robotic builders mount. What kind of builder's buffs would you like on it? Something this amazing should at least come with fries...

As for getting a first hit on the higher DKs, I've been through 16 so far, so I certainly don't have a lot of experience about what makes it OP. I didn't think it would be any worse than the kittybike, except that the kittybike has a cap of 20 turns, whereas the micktruck would just have one hit per battle. I like the idea of the grill getting so caked with gore that you decide to avoid hitting anything with it for a while. Maybe 20 fights have the effect, what sounds good to you guys?

To respond to the 1% move stam cost on the coin, I've been using the kittybike for a good while and having just now bought the scrambler, I can see why you might not like the coin. The 1% stam for movement could be any number (like .1%) , but the point of using the coin to teleport between spaces was to make ALL travel over ALL terrain cost next to nothing. If travel doesn't really cost you any stam normally, but the effects are more random, then there's a both a reason to get one AND a reason to avoid just systematically hopping to every tile on the map. If the 30% doesn't sound good enough, try 50%. 1 out of 2 times you go where you want to go. 1 out of 6 or 7 times you end up going a direction you didn't choose. 1 out of 20 times you go the way you wanted, but with an unintended side effect (buff or debuff) and 1 out of 100 times you get boatmurdered in interesting ways. Its all to make travel interesting for players who just can't get enough improbability in their lives. Its like the cake or death buff, but you're traveling.

I think I read somewhere that CMJ had considered a mount that changes as you play like the budget horse. THAT is the kinda mount I'd be most interested in getting and maybe designing. Something that starts like a fat old donkey and ends up something like Ixion from FFX would be pretty epic. Or maybe a mount that uses your DK count to change into a mount worthy of your stature, with the mount over 100dks as something to be envied by all. I was kinda hoping the budget horse would do this, since its something that can really grow on and up with you. Maybe have a redeeming story for the mount after 4 or 5 changes so you don't have to go to hell anymore . In this game, story and random events actually matter more to me than just being the most epically powerful.

Oh, one thing I'd like to add - The "fall to your death" thing doesn't seem like it would work in canon. Remember, we're thrown out of aeroplanes when we start, and our fall is cushioned by the Improbability field. Which isn't to say that there aren't plenty of other ways to end up on the Failboat. Hell, the teleporting coin could just take you there.

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Goat Collector

I like that too. I have to admit to having spent too much time using the teleporter in WoW, which has the LIKELY result of you appearing where you wanted to be, but really high up so as to cause certain death. Having it teleport you into the Watcher's private galley aboard the failboat while she's eating cheerios in her PJs might also be fun too.

As for technological limitations per the storyline, I'm curious what else I might have missed. I really do want to keep my ideas towards the cannon of the story. Feel free to call it when you see it.

Read the main page and the museum. Those give a pretty solid idea of that sort of thing.

Also, that's why you have the flexweave underlay.

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Goat Collector

Ah, a fellow DF player! Nice to see another Disciple of ToadyOne.

Am I the only one who was sexually excited by the GIANT SAW THING?

... Yes...? Oh. Uhm, well, just ignore me, then.

ORLY?

Go walk the ledge behind the waterfall. You can most definitely fall to your death.



And 1% is still too high to really be worth it. That is statistically guaranteeing that I'm going to be boated almost every day by my goddamn mount. That's not a risk/reward thing, that's really goddamn inconvenient. Cake or Death, I do once a day. Travelling, I do a hundred times a day.

For The MACHINE!, I don't think it should ever come to fruition. We've already got builder's brews. Providing yet more construction buffs will make building too easy. Even if you're not doing the cookie exploit, you're approaching the point where you can recreate DunB in a single goddamn day, and that's trivializing building. You're not supposed to snap your fingers and have a mansion and a yacht!

Let's remember that players' skill levels are much, much higher than Dunbernarding's inception. It obviously doesn't account for how easy building seems to be now, but back in those days, people were working with 20-30 skill. Now, lots of us people have 70+ skill in them. 0 is 5% stam, 33 is 4%, 67 is 3%, and level 100 is 2% per action. A day with 120 stamina as a nonrobot, you can do only 12 carpentry actions at 0 skill, but 30 carpentry actions at 100 skill.

Yes, well. Unmodified vanilla modules notwithstanding. Otherwise, I need to start talking to this Ramius bloke about all this favor I've accrued.




Yes and no - Without the cookies, you can get gobs of a material in a day, or do a good amount of building, but if you want a quality dwelling, it still takes time. The Billboard shack currently has about 75-80 rooms, with at least 100 more planned - at least to the "This will need to be added" stage. I've been working on this every couple of weeks. The room and exterior descriptions currently total approximately 80,000 characters. Between the work needed per-room and the amount of deco, I can do a good number of constructions in a day, but with all the stamina-hoarding I do, I believe the maximum number of rooms I could build on a builder's brew alone is around 17 rooms, assuming that I already had the 1190 log and 340 stone required for it - And that's with maxed skills in both carpentry and masonry. To date, no one has maxed Masonry, and only seven people have maxed Carpentry. After my massive stint doing every job I could find, I'm still not maxed.

In short, yes, you could have a spacious house consisting entirely of undecorated rooms in a single day, if you use a Builder's Brew, had someone else use a Builder's Brew to collect all the materials for you, and already have your building skills maxed.

Keep in mind that there's also a number of factors that don't come into play:

• Quality, for one. If your rooms are described as "a big room it has a lot of some cool stuff in it" then stamina is no problem. A builder's brew will handle those without issue. Or even without one.
  
• The actual scale of the building. Related to the previous point, a small shack with a 3,000-character description is going to take more effort, both in and out of game, to make than "SuperDemons awesome Castle" which has a ten-word description.
  
• Again, materials. As I mentioned on Darkmoon's other thread, because of the stamina cost of moving large amounts of materials, especially amounts needed to build 16 rooms, it seems unlikely that someone would use a Builder's Brew, then spend half their stamina lugging 400 wood to their dwelling so that they can put as much of it as they can into a build job.

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Goat Collector

Did you ever stop and think that the MACHINE could carry 400 logs for you, given its special "log" shaped, "log" carrying cargo bay... for logs? Hmmm? maybe the MACHINE doesn't need to worry about carrying 400 logs because the MACHINE is just really that awesome!

I don't think you truly understand how awesome the MACHINE is and how much you REALLY want the MACHINE in your life. Just in case, here's another look:



Doesn't the MACHINE look like it could handle a few, measily hundred or four logs so you don't greatly dissipate your waning mortal stamina? Wouldn't you THINK that the MACHINE has a cup holder for your silly builder brew? HA! It has SIX! With a 7th built into the passenger side just out of reach of the driver! FOR SPITE!

The MACHINE doesn't need you flimsy creatures! The MACHINE isn't lonely. The MACHINE doesn't have feelings or anything... stupid... humans... KILL EM ALL!!!!

...*sniffle*...

...the MACHINE needs a hug... /pout

These mounts (as well as the existing ones) would do well with a leveling system. This would determine how long it would take until a mount either improved to the next level or ultimately left (with a loose random modifier to throw off predictions). Mounts like the Budget Horses would level up as they travel on easier terrain (using the EXP gains they leech from you as normal), the Meat Mount would level up with HP stolen in battle, and the Coin mount could level up accordingly to the stamina you spend traveling with it (giving less chance of a bad action as it gets more powerful, much like insults). Mounts that eventually leave will still leave, with a marginally raised chance every level they manage to gain (for example, a MMMM has a 1% chance of leaving on every New Day for each full level exceeding 25).

Not every mount has to level the same way, and it would tickle me if a trading system (between players) evolved from the concept.

You could say you would be able to sell the mount back once you think it'll reach a certain level and disappear (remember, not every mount gets any refund!), and that's simply another game gamble. You gain cigarettes from your exchange, and can buy a far less powerful but fresh mount. You choose how far you want to take it; no one can say you can't give the mount back to Mike.

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http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/560/004/989.gif

Almost missed this. DF keeps me sane between the days of II. Apparently, Minecraft is along the same twisted humor and something I need to play. Gotta take a break from donating to II so I can afford MC, but... I neeed moar builder brew to wash down moar cookies!!!

Seriously though, we need a good monster submission for "a pack of enraged homicidal elephants" that lunges at you with "ivory tusks of doom"... Maybe a tribute fight to catsplosions bursting forth from a wooden cage followed by a Cave Dragon.

Or more likely, I need to make a "Dwarf Fortress" building somewhere on the map depicting the average life of a booze-fed army of dwarves. So much potential. So few cigs...

So i had an idea for making the mick truck a little more fair? since i heard some people were concerned that getting a first hit every time would be imbalanced somehow, perhaps make it so (for example) the truck had a 70% chance of scoring the first hit, 20% chance of just rolling past them doing nothing, 5% chance of getting a very powerful (near lethal) first hit, and 5% chance of slamming into a tree and injuring you instead. I think that would be an acceptable level of risk/reward right?

And perhaps after a full day of fighting, when the grill was caked with assorted gore, you could have the option of scraping it clean and keeping whatever shreds and scraps of meat you could salvage?

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Neko-desu!