Dwarf Fortress

Workshop wasn't the issue. Best I could tell, he took the entire supply of wool (which wasn't large). Couldn't really get more until the human caravan the next season.

At the moment it's already too late. I've locked him in and just want him to hurry up and die already. :P

How in hell did I generate a world that had one giant global aquifer?

Who watches the watchmen?

Is it on top of a mountain?

Nope. At one point I had an input of no aquifer I got zero sites found. Even on the bloody mountains. Even searching the hard old fashioned way yielded nothing but aquifer after aquifer.

Who watches the watchmen?

Maybe he added deeper aquifers to the world to make it more realistic. Embark somewhere an aquifer wouldn't usually appear and dig down. Volcano biomes are partucularly unlikely.

Also, I will watch the game, but I don't have time. I micromanage this game far too much, and would spend most of my time designing excavation projects.

edited 7th Jul '16 3:58:12 AM by war877

aww, and here I got the idea to make multiple forts just to create a river.

So, just to be clear, there's just one version, 43.05, and it detects the presence of 64-bit architecture and uses it if available?

So last night I discovered the newer feature of the manager that lets you set perpetual orders and conditions for them and set up stuff like if there is ore and fuel, smelt it. Is there a conditional that works for milk and wool-bearing animals, so it checks the conditional before spamming me when someone tries to milk/shear them?

Does anyone know the trick to picking up and reusing the belongings of dead dwarves? (Note to self, if you're going to build a drawbridge, don't procrastinate on the dang lever too long. :P)

If they're not forbidden, other dwarves should gather them and use/store them as normal.

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There's some "automatically forbid dead dwarves' stuff" option somewhere, so make sure that's not on. (Or leave it on and manually unforbid the stuff. Whichever seems more practical.)

One of the designations lets you mass-unforbid things (also, mass-forbid and mass-hide/unhide, if you ever want to do either of those things)

edited 10th Jul '16 1:36:17 PM by billybobfred

she her hers hOI!!! i'm tempe

New question:

Any reccomendations for building "safe" outdoor areas? The goblins wiped out my entire pasture, the ones I care about mostly being the sheep (I'd been butchering the non wool-bearing animals). I was able to pick up an ewe and a goat from the last caravan to start that up again.

Wondering too if I should even bother and just invest in a bigger pig-tail or other textile crop. That they double as a source of milk/cheese is good but eh...

Well, if you clear out a massive soil area underground and breach the caverns before sealing them again, you don't even need an outdoor pasture area. If you're going for surface specifically . . . walls. Lots of walls. Wall everything you sanely can and pasture the animals inside it all. Walls need to be at least two or three levels high, and have floors jutting out to prevent climbing. To make them most effective, go three levels high, dig out a moat at least five tiles wide, and keep the land fifteen to twenty tiles away from the moat clear of trees. Stick a roof over top of the wall to minimize risk from above.

Does breaching the caverns trigger something that lets you grow grass underground? Underground soil area, I've got.

Breaking into at least the first cavern layer is currently a long term goal but I only plan to do it once I've got my main fort stable (bedrooms for everyone, hospital finished, redundant workshops) and have a military that doesn't die to the first goblin attack requiring me to send in 20-odd unarmed cannon fodder to stop them.

...toward that end, acknowledging that steel is going to be very limited (plenty of iron and coal but have to trade for flux stone), what's the best use for the steel I will have?

Weapons. Steel spears if possible. Against Iron and copper those things are nasty.

Who watches the watchmen?

Breaching the caverns will make the local plant life in that cavern grow on any exposed soil tile in your fortress. Including the giant fungi. Before you do it, make sure to floor over any soil you don't want growing stuff. And any stone that's liable to get wet, too. Just in case.

And be careful that the fungi don't break through the ceiling. You'll want at least two or three levels above the soil area unless you're going to be vigilant enough to catch giant mushrooms before they grow multiple Z levels tall.

So, a reason to floor my dirt areas besides aesthetics. :P It's an ongoing but slow project. Note for the succession game: we're going to want multiple mason's workshops dedicated just to stone blocks. I'm going through them fast compared to the time it takes to make them (but worth it because each boulder = 4 blocks).

Giant fungi sprouting through the ceiling sounds like the kind of fun (Fun?) I wouldn't mind letting happen just to see. >.>

edited 10th Jul '16 7:21:10 PM by Elle

Of course. You want three or four of them, easily. I have the save, I just need to jump into it. Doubt it will be tonight, but I'm off tomorrow and planning on hitting it hard in the morning.

Incidentally, I just noticed that one of the troll invaders I caged is a 'troll pikeman' rather than just a regular troll. I've never noticed trolls wielding weapons before, is that a common thing?

Against flying enemies, the only way to be perfectly safe is to roof over your buildings and put drawbridges at the entrances.

Against normal ground-dwelling enemies, your best bet is a wall with an overhang. Walls can be climbed, but overhangs can't be. You can either dig out a moat and put an overhanging wall on the inside edge, or build a wall upwards and then an overhanging wall on the second or third z-level up. Be careful though, if there's high terrain (or trees) too close to the wall, enemies might still be able to jump across from there. To ensure that no trees grow outside you can always pave over the ground with constructed floors, although this takes a lot of material and labor.

Yes. Any connection with the caverns (even if it's sealed off afterwards) allows other underground soil tiles to start growing underground plants, regardless of what z-level they're on. The idea behind it is supposedly that the cavern air carries spores through that take root on exposed soil, but mechanically speaking it happens instantaneously and no 'spore' objects exist in the game.

3 Alternatively you can just make your underground pastures 1 z-level high. If they're only 1 z-level, the cavern trees are unable to grow, and there's no risk of breaking the floor.

edited 10th Jul '16 7:27:23 PM by Meklar

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Oh, by the way: in the job manager, the [d]etails screen for a task will allow you to set a specific material for a job if it's an option. That answers my stone-type question from earlier.

So before I jump back into Flagcarnal, there was something on my mind.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=159283.0

16x16 embarks are a possibility now. Not a great one, since you need a beast of a rig just to do it decently, but they are now a thing. That, my friends, is not a dwarf fortress embark. That is a dwarf COUNTY embark. And while they'd probably be better when you can designate areas to run themselves under an autonomous noble, you could automate them fairly decently now if you know what you're doing.

A brain exercise to discuss, perhaps?

That is four times the size of a normal embark area. The shear amount of area you could get resources from and experience events would be massive.

It would be impressive to have that kind of space to build numerous structures and resource locations.

Another thought that springs to mind is truly epic scale projects.

Like you said though it would require a pretty capable rig to run it worth spit.

edited 12th Jul '16 4:31:51 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

There's people running shallow ones with 35 to 50 FPS. Not too bad.

When Mount and Blade Bannerlords comes out, I am looking into upgrading my current hobby rig into a full-on modern gamer/visual renderer one. I might give one of those embarks a go eventually. Though I'd probably wait for embark scenarios and being able to start with more than seven people. What I'm really hoping happens before the 20 year dev cycle ends is that Toady gets the whole "send your people into the world" thing working, then doubles back and incorporates it into your own site. Given the whole Long Term Resident thing, it kind of exists already in a small scale. If he ties it to zones, you could set up a decent sized area of your own land to run itself, feed it people and materials to get started, then maybe interact with it in the same manner you interact with the Mountainhome. Then you could let it run itself but set parameters on what you want from it. Like tell it to export certain goods to your central fortress, and maybe tell it a certain number of soldiers it needs to provide when the war horn sounds.

There's already a desire from Toady for enemies to be able to settle your land with their own fortresses. That could tie right into this.

I need to upgrade my graphics card in the near future.

Who watches the watchmen?

more or less build specialized miniforts and minecart things between them.

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