Bay 12 Games Forum

Very cool!

I assume this relates to the reports of cavern invasions causing save corruption, and the line-of-sight code relates to what Putnam had found earlier about major FPS-drains on fortresses.

Looks like I might not have to disable cavern invasions in my latest fort after all, and excited to see if it has any FPS benefit for later-game / larger forts!

Just chiming in with my experience, though obviously it's quite a subjective thing.

I've only played since the 0.3x days, but have always done so with Dwarf Therapist, and never really liked DFHack's autolabor. I preferred the granular control of Therapist & creating custom professions, etc. and would enjoy figuring out where to sort each member of a migrant wave to use their talents best. However with the excitement for the Steam release I just couldn't wait and have been giving it a go anyways and I gotta say... at least personally, I think I actually prefer this system overall to using Therapist.

To be clear, I have complaints about the new labor system and Steam release in general: removal of "only dwarves above X skill level" option, not always listing all relevant skills / traits when selecting a dwarf (e.g. squads only show weapon skill, not amor/dodging/etc. Capt. of the Guard doesn't list social skills, etc.) a lot of menus I wish were searchable, or menus with dwarves listed where I wish I could click on a dwarf to see their stats page, really wishing there was a "cycle to next dwarf" button when viewing a dwarf's skills so I didn't have to jump in & out of the main unit list to hunt for a certain skill combination, burrows not able to designate more than 1 z-level at a time, no persistent event log, and more than I could list here.

However I consider all of that par for the course in terms of following a game like DF, hopefully some of those issues will get addressed after feedback, some might require modding to replace down the line, worst case some features will just be sorely missed, but the big thing for me is that even when Therapist comes out for the Steam version, I'm not sure I'm going to want to go back to it. It took a few days to wrap my head around the new labor system, but eventually after combining the default work details, setting workshop masters with a few extra workshops, using the specialization option on both certain work details and certain dwarves, and a few custom work details, I feel I generally have as much control as I used to. Or at least as much control as I wanted to? I haven't even made use of burrow restrictions in combination with all of this, which could add another layer on top, e.g. an "Mass production" burrow that only low-skill level dwarves are allowed in, to make sure any work orders on those workshops are things I don't care about quality for.

Using the workshop master + specialization on the dwarf in particular has been big for me, doing that is almost like setting a "mini-profession" without having to make a new work detail, since I know that dwarf will only work on the 1 or two things I have them set on, and I can control which work orders go to the shop they are master by setting its limits on general work orders. For skills that only use a single type of workshop, and that workshop is only used for a single skill, this has been great, E.G. a few kitchens & stills each with a master set who is "specialized", thus no need to make a cooking or brewing work detail. Or a metalsmith forge with a legendary weaponsmith set as the "specialized" master, set not to accept any general work orders.

Overall the way I'd describe things, at least how it comes across to me, is that the old DF + Therapist was sort of "High specialization, that you need to opt-out of if you don't want it". I.E. everything is very granularly controlled, and if you don't want each dwarf assigned to do very specific tasks, you would need to put in some effort to set things up differently, e.g. enabling a labor on all dwarves.
The new system I'd call something like "A very generalized, streamlined system, but you have the option to opt-in to high specialization for some or all aspects as you like". I.E. by default it just sort of makes sure everything gets done, whether or not its efficient or effective, which is probably great for new players but not what many veterans want. However when using enough of the new features you can get a ton of control back, in the aspects you want to.

I wonder if part of the issue is that veterans may see how the new system is set by default (super-streamlined) and assume that's the only way it can be used, without any options for fine control without making dozens of custom details like how you would use Therapist? Again, this is just my experience and not meant to take away from the many valid criticisms there are. I'm quite fortunate that most of the criticisms I have so far are things that don't happen to overly bother me much (or I've been able to tweak a bit with some modding).

Another way around this without needing to create tons of custom Work Details is the "workshop master" setting on workshops. Yes, we lost the old setting to restrict via skill level, but for many circumstances this can act as a sort of "mini-labor assignment".

E.G. I have a Metalsmith's forge dedicated to weapons with my Legendary Weaponsmith set as the master, and another one dedicated to armor with my best Armorsmith set as master. Now I know that weapons & armor will always be made by the best dwarf, and I can still restrict those 2 dwarves to "only do selected work" and they ignore hauling, smoothing, etc. to focus on forging, with a few caveats:

If I make some general work orders for weapons / armor / metalcrafts, AND I have my weapon forge & armor forge set to accept general work orders, the wrong dwarf may work on it. So I need to just always make weapon/armor work orders as workshop-specific orders, and for metalcraft orders, either also make those as workshop-specific orders on a new dedicated metalsmith forge, or set my weapon forge & armor forge not to allow any general orders and then those general metalcraft orders will automatically go to non-weapon, non-armor metalsmith forges.

It's definitely a big change from previous versions, but I've been finding a lot of control is possible by combining the work detail / workshop master / "do all tasks vs. do only selected" settings.

AFAIK trade wagons only show up once you have a baron now.

Yes that's a good point.

However, I only started getting the "inaccessible site" popup after I had become a barony (currently a county). Before I was a barony there was no popup/warning about "inaccessible site".

UPDATE: Moving the Trade Depot aboveground, right next to my 3 tile wide stone road which spans all across the map, now I'm getting wagons from caravans again.
In my case I think it may have been due to forgetting that even if you line up 3 doors in a row, they still block Depot Access (easier to forget without ability to check Depot Access )

Yeah I've been getting similar "Wagons bypassed your inaccessible site" messages on caravans sending only pack animals despite a 3-tile wide path to my underground Depot using ramps. I've even made some 3 tile wide paved stone roads all the way from my fort entrance to 2 different sides of the map, but no success. I'll try making another surface Trade Depot and see if that works, maybe the wagon is now more restrictive in how wide you need to make underground paths? Also tricky since there's no way to view Depot Access from a menu anymore that I can see.

I'm also very interested in this topic. I know military in general & marksdwarves & bolts specifically have always been pretty fickle, but I've been successfully using them up through 47.04. However, so far in Premium I have not been able to get any marksdwarves to pick up bolts, either by attempting to follow my old habits, or trying some of the rumored fixes for Premium such as:

• Place extra coffers in the barracks assigned to the marksdwarves for them to put bolts in
• Place stockpiles for bolts inside the barracks assigned to your marksdwarves
• Place separate stockpiles for metal or wood/bone bolts, metal in the barracks, wood/bone within an archery zone
• Use the default "Archer" uniform for marksdwarves, not a custom one
• Use "Move" orders to move your marksdwarves near the stockpiles with the bolts
• Toggle your marksdwarves squad from Off Duty to Active/Training to get them to equip bolts
• Click "Update Equipment" in the uniform menu for their squad

I've been trying all of these, but still no luck. However, I keep seeing messages from people on reddit, etc. claiming they have gotten marksdwarves to equip ammo, and often attributing their success to one of these tips, so maybe it is possible? It might be worth trying to get anybody who HAS gotten them to equip ammo to chime in and say / post a screenshot of exactly what their uniform/squad settings are, and what their barracks/archery range/bolt stockpile settings / locations are, and hopefully we could pin down a common trait? (Also a similar thread here, maybe we could try to consolidate info?)

Of course it's also quite possible that there's just some obscure bug that is active in most saves, but randomly not affecting some saves, in which case it wouldn't matter even if we all used the same settings

Yes, all the changes definitely are taking some getting used to!

Although between fiddling with making some new custom work details, specialising certain dwarves to only do assigned tasks, and assigning certain workshops to a master, I've been able to get quite a bit of granular control over labours again.

(For v50.01 of Dwarf Fortress, i.e. the Steam version)

DFFD download link.
Steam Workshop link.

This mod makes surface crops seasonal, and subterranean crops grow year-round (the opposite of vanilla behaviour). Also greatly increases most growing times for better challenge / balance. Finally, it makes dwarves never get rusty at their Planting skill, as they may go many months between plantings / harvests (similar to the tweak I had made for RavingManianc's Seasonal Crops mod back in the 0.3x days). (Note: fertilizer seems to affect yields at harvest, not during planting)

Changes:
All subterranean crops grow year-round, and take a bit more than one season to mature, and have their default harvest size changed from 5 to 4. Thus, you should set their plots to the same crop all year and expect about 3 harvests per year. To get the same annual yield as vanilla, you will probably need ~4x as much field space.

All surface crops require specific seasons to grow in (usually Spring, Summer, and/or Autumn), and have their default harvest size changed from 5 to 6. This also applies to "wild" crops found on the surface. They either take 2 seasons to mature and have 3 available seasons to grow, or take 1 season to mature and have 2 available seasons to grow. All of the 2 season crops share Summer as a season, so you shouldn't be able to "double up" 2 different crops in the same plot. Thus, you should set their plots to only plant a crop on the earliest season it is available, leaving all other seasons fallow, and expect 1 harvest per year. To get the same annual yield as vanilla, you will probably need ~8x as much field space.

Subterranean Crops pros:
+ Can plant at any time of year
+ Seeds are much easier to acquire
+ Underground farms can be easier to protect & defend than surface farms
+ Shallow crops should get around half the crops-per-tile yield of surface crops over a year, but Deep crops should get about double the crops-per-tile yield of surface crops of a year, requiring less space than surface crops
+ 3 harvests per year means faster training in the Planting skill for dwarves
+ Short growth time means you start getting some crops sooner

Surface Crops pros:
+ Surface farms are easier to construct
+ Surface crops should get around double the crops-per-tile yield of shallow crops over a year, so less space is required compared to shallow crops
+ Fewer but larger harvests means surface crops get better crops-per-dwarf-hour. Shallow crops require 6x as much dwarf-work to produce the same amount of crops, and deep crops still require 1.5x as much dwarf-work.
+ Larger stacksizes from the larger harvests apply down the production chain to food, drink, etc. stacksizes which translates to fewer hauling jobs, fewer items in the fort (which can affect FPS) compared to even deep crops.


This mod hasn't been exhaustively tested (since this version only just came out), so let me know of any issues. In particular, I haven't yet tested out exactly how the DF's new shallow / deep soil mechanic works, so this is all assuming that deep soil has normal yields, and shallow soil divides the harvest size by 4.

Thanks to the authors of all the previous mods for making crops seasonal, especially Claije whose "Seasonal Farming" mod I looked at a bit to figure out how to change some things.

Installation:
Unzip the archive into your \Dwarf Fortress\mods folder of the Steam version, then select it on world generation.
(Alternatively, adding "creature_seasonish_skill_rate.txt" and "plant_seasonish_crops.txt" into the "objects" folder for a mod in the "\Dwarf Fortress\data\installed_mods" folder that is currently in use for an existing fortress should also work.)