Bay 12 Games Forum

(Male Voice) "Oh... hey, it's you again. How are you? I'm fine. It's been a while since we've talked, why don't we catch up?"


A young man lays soundly asleep in a bed in a grey, sterile room. A meager glance of the area reveals some chairs, a table, and some kind of containers. Everything but the bed appears to be made metal. On the Northern wall is a small displacement that could appear to be a door of some kind. On each side of the bed is a counter, with some possible personal belongings on them.

Rays of light pour from a luminous sphere on the ceiling and onto the man's crisp brown hair. The sheets of the bed are entangled and rough, and there is no pillow. You can hear the sound of something or some things banging on metal from a muffled distance.

"Clang-clong-clang-clong-cling!"



What should this man do?

What job do you think you would have?

Someone's gotta make that cheese.

So in my latest fort I've decided to use a new approach to digging; making a "nerve" center of the fort near the surface layers with recreational centers, dining rooms, a statue garden/art gallery, a zoo, and some other stuff to keep dwarves happy. To the west of the nerve center I have a building district. Mason's workshops, carpenter's workshops, siege workshops, and anything involving production of items used for BUILDING stuff will go here along with their respective storage rooms.

To the east I have the crafting district; Kitchens, stills, clothiers, tanners, crafting workshops, etc. will go here. This is naturally the biggest district, and there are a lot of storage rooms underneath the actual workshops.

To the south I have the smithing industry. I took into account that I would later want to pump magma here. Usual smithing/metalworking workshops go here.


Now, underneath the dwarven nerve center is where most of my design went to. I designated areas for channeling and digging to mark where I wanted everything. Down here is where all of the living quarters would be, with some of the noble rooms already planned out. To design the entire fort, it took at least 1 hour to 30 minutes, possibly less, but it was a significant chunk of my time.





Then, Dwarf Fortress decides to kick my groin. While my miners were excavating my designations, I stumbled upon something horrible... HORRIBLE while I was digging the stairs to the bedroom complex; ALL of my designations were eaten alive by a gigantic cavern that I unearthed! This is one cavern that I will not appreciate, even though it seems to have plentiful cave water which is pretty cool seeing I can make a well over the water.


tl;dr: A cavern f*ed my fortress design over.        Has this happened to anyone else before?

I once had a successful fort go up to 3 years in a 3-week timespan and I was happy with it. But I got bored of it eventually because there were no sieges or ambushes at all, so I abandoned it and tried a new location. Now most of my time spent playing DF is getting midway through Year 1 then abandoning the fortress because I get bored of it.

The main problem I'm having is my inability to stick with a fort long enough for it to actually establish into something. Because of this I've never breached the 2010 HFS (nor do I know what it is!) and I've never had a siege, or established a dwarven economy or anything like that. I'm open to suggestions as to how to make building my fort from the ground more interesting!

I have a small little question; what happens if there are two or more paths to a certain location that have the exact same number of tiles in distance? Like so;

#########
#   @   #
#  ###  #
#  ###  #
##  +  ##
#########

Which path gets chosen? The left or right? We're assuming + is the start and @ is the finish, though it won't matter if they swap places.

Because I couldn't find or make a good DF-related St. Patricks day card, I found this little guy drinking booze with a beard. VERY DWARVENLY.



Happy St. Patricks day, enjoy your booze and wait like a bomb's about to go off for DF2010!

For those of you who speak only dwarven:

So he's into gaming, a lot apparently. When we were talking about various different games, he somehow got into the discussion about Nethack. It struck me; if he likes Nethack, he'd probably like Dwarf Fortress... Unfortunately I didn't have the balls to mention it. You think I should recommend him to it? If he's a Nethack player, one would think he'd love Dwarf Fortress just as much.

Like the topic suggests, I happen to have a very 'tarded soldier. Why? Well, he's a legendary wrassler/macedwarf who can beat the Fortress Guard around senselessly (He happens to be a HE, while I make it a habbit to have all of the Fortress Guard female, including the Captain of the Guard. Dunno) but can't stand near the entrance of the fortress for two god-damned seconds before going off to guard the booze stockpile. He's no longer the squad commander because he just drags everyone to mindlessly protect the booze with their steel armor and weapons, studded with pig iron with images of elves. Screaming elves. My dwarves seem to like screaming elves.

So, is the dwarf who can't stop guarding the booze a bug or is he going renegade on us and protecting the booze whenever he's on duty? How can I make him focus on more concerning matters aboveground and part with the booze?