It's like regular childcare, except with more dogs, and less care.
Also, this is a horrible inhumane idea and why didn't I think of it.
Dwarf Fortress.
The only game where throwing babies into a pit with crazed dogs will be considered a beneficial concept.
While I applaud the spirit of Science, the only results we really got out of the last one was mental scarring. While I'll admit we'll probably get a serious Discipline spike in the survivors (Which is useful as Hell now) I doubt we'll get much else out of this.
While I applaud the spirit of Science, the only results we really got out of the last one was mental scarring. While I'll admit we'll probably get a serious Discipline spike in the survivors (Which is useful as Hell now) I doubt we'll get much else out of this.
So your saying that apart from the useful stuff, there will be nothing useful? Cant argue with that logic.
While I applaud the spirit of Science, the only results we really got out of the last one was mental scarring. While I'll admit we'll probably get a serious Discipline spike in the survivors (Which is useful as Hell now) I doubt we'll get much else out of this.
So your saying that apart from the useful stuff, there will be nothing useful? Cant argue with that logic.
My gut feeling tells me the results will likely not be particularly useful in that for the amount of effort put in, you won't get much back but I could be wrong. That's what science is for.
The big problems I foresee are the risk to the fort caused by the chronically low moral of many of the mentally damaged children and the sever damage to the parents' moral caused by occasionally losing said children to madness or injury. You will also have children that will graduate with poor social skills and who will not do any work while they are busy being locked up in their "childcare" area until adulthood.
The big flags I have noticed for a dwarf going crazy have been attributes such as being prone to negative thoughts, prone to rage, prone to anxiety etc. You can have some dwarves that lose half their family and walk away from it with their mind intact and others that try to tear down your fortress because some goblins you shot, snuck off the map with a few of their masterwork bolts in their leg. I've learned to always keep dwarves that are prone to negative thoughts and fits of rage etc. out of the military. They generally aren't worth the risk and do better in less stressful rolls. They are also far more likely to tantrum and go mad rather than ever reaching the point where they "don't care about much of anything."
I guess it really depends on the type of training system you speak of whether it is likely to succeed or not. There are ways to train children without damaging them such as using misters throughout the fort to raise moral and simultaneously train swimming and its related stats. Generally I have found that maiming, killing or harming dwarves is counter productive and I leave that to the goblins and forgotten beasts rather than going out of my way to do their jobs for them.
How about putting all children in same place and see which ones survive? Just remember give them nice furniture and food. Clothing is optional, corpses aren't...
Actually, considering what we discovered from the Hell we put children through in the old days, we're better off redesigning the whole thing from scratch now. Instead of locking the kids up alone, maybe just put windows in the crèche, stick an arena on the other side, and have the kids watch the live training. That might build up discipline with less risk than the prison cells.
I want to add more to this thread seeing as I did my own experiments in the old version, and found a different method to be more effective, with a little more management.
I'm planning to build a Dwarven Boarding School again once I get a stable fort running in 40.xx. DBS was something I tried in my last 34.11 fort: it was a large enclosed space for all fort's children, complete with beds, drinks/food, tables and school uniforms (cloaks and hoods) in opposite corners. Separating all these was "the Classroom", basically a mild danger room with training spears poking at students every time they went from food stockpile to dinner table or from bed to booze barrel. Of course, some spent most of their days in the Classroom anyway, just dancing to the merry music of wooden sticks hitting bone.
The purpose of all this was to have all students reach Legendary levels in basic Dwarven skills (Fighter/Dodge/Armor User) before adulthood. That was the plan, at least; ultimately it failed because I didn't want to micromanage burrows everytime some student passed out in the Classroom with a broken wrist or two and needed hospital care. That, and some of the students were starting to dehydrate because the drinks stockpile didn't have enough barrels for 50+ students. The best students had reached Expert skill levels when the school was closed down.
In future version of the school I'm planning to include a mini-hospital inside school premises. And a much, much larger drinks stockpile, of course.
With the change to dwarven skulls in .40 (they're no longer paper-thin), this may actually be the most workable and useful idea. If even children no longer suffer fatal injuries to wooden training spears, a realistic danger room environment may be the least exploity and most effective way to accomplish all of the listed objectives. Tragedy training through injury, combat skill training, and maintenance of sanity through quality booze and friendship and stuff.
I'm open to all possibilities. We're here to make this happen ordie tryingkill dwarves trying.
it would be great if the newly expanded plant lists allowed for actual uses for plant extracts, and the alchemy workshop.
Couple that with actually useful products for treating infections, and you have a winner.
Sadly, I dont think Toady has herb lore in his bag of tricks, and probably feels uncomfortable adding such things.
(but I would happily give him a mod to look at, if he put the mechanism underneath for me to hang it on!)
I want to add more to this thread seeing as I did my own experiments in the old version, and found a different method to be more effective, with a little more management.
Define 'more effective.' Did it accomplish the goals listed above, or do you think a different set of goals is more achievable/useful?
I'll try to work it up in a new fort and see if it works out ok still, and post up my findings and everything else then.
I'll try to work it up in a new fort and see if it works out ok still, and post up my findings and everything else then.
Sounds good. I'm planning several projects, one of which involves a light danger room-type setup as Staalo tried. I'll post again here when I have some more information, screenshots, and maybe preliminary results.
-snip-
Yes, yes, maximum child desecration...
My patient is now mighty and tough, competent in all skills and speaks about horrifying death.
yeah ... though the new climbing thing is really interesting. force the kid to have to swim through 7/7/ water and climb a wall to get the food, have what else he/she needs on the other side of the little moat, perhaps passing through a coinstar as well (does underwater coinstar work ?).I'm gonna do that, RIGHT NOW!
12 years of climbing and swimming and/or dodging coins has got to build up something.
This is what I love about Dwarf Fortress. This epitomises it.While I applaud the spirit of Science, the only results we really got out of the last one was mental scarring. While I'll admit we'll probably get a serious Discipline spike in the survivors (Which is useful as Hell now) I doubt we'll get much else out of this.
So your saying that apart from the useful stuff, there will be nothing useful? Cant argue with that logic.
Well, we won't really know until we try.
-snip-
I've got a Fortress surviving into autumn on 40.03. I might contribute too if I can keep it going long enough for children to appear. I got a summer migrant wave that had eight adults, how (un)lucky is that?
If you can work fluid logic well enough to figure out timers, we might be able to use a living enemy to scare the kids. Just gotta time it so the enemy's only exposed in short, regulated bursts that don't keep the kids from taking care of themselves. First thing I'm going to do once I get my forges churning out battle gear is to build a hospital wing and an adjoining childcare wing that can feed injuries into it if need be. Assuming I get any kids in my fortress in the first place.
If you can work fluid logic well enough to figure out timers, we might be able to use a living enemy to scare the kids. Just gotta time it so the enemy's only exposed in short, regulated bursts that don't keep the kids from taking care of themselves.I'm not into dwarven mechanics, but we could just put the enemy behind a window and drawbridge, link the bridge to a lever and expose the child until it's hungry or thirsty and order a dwarf to close the bridge. Needs a lot of micromanagement, though.
Since this method was pioneered by a forumite called "McDonald", I vote for McDonalds Play Place or something to that effect.
Girl in Hat started the dwarven childcare concept in the previous release, and many people ended up making significant contributions, and before that kids were put into daycare that was literally an atom smasher or lava pit by the more cynical members of the community.
I think leaving it as Dwarven Daycare is best - naming it is unnecessary and is more likely to do harm(besides dorf child deaths)/has more potential to offend people.
Just look at any academic community to understand what I mean.
Besides, literally everyone knows what dwarven childcare is because of the popularity of the old thread.
I do want to congratulate ALL the people in this threat, on their contributions thus far though. :)
Yeah, for me it's either a perfect embark or instant !!FUN!!.It's the living world. Even at embark it's hard to maintain 100 fps. Optimization is one of Toady's big objectives but until then I just can't handle fort mode in .40
Have any of you had extreme performance issues? In 34.11 I was able to run DF at several thousand FPS, now I rarely hit 100.
Can dwarves climb statues? Or maybe engraved walls? My previous subject managed to escape although there was no rough walls in his chamber.They can climb smoothed walls in a pinch I hear.
They can climb smoothed walls in a pinch I hear.In adventure mode testing it's entirely impossible to climb smooth walls. Block walls are exceedingly difficult to hold onto but smooth walls don't even give the option. If there are rough walls above them though it's possible the child climbed on those.
I recommend putting retracting bridges in the food slot. Either one of them, controlled by lever, or two stacked together. You can make an airlock arrangement (rig one bridge, flip the switch, rig the other), or if that's not good enough to keep them, have two separate levers.
Yeah sorry I meant block walls, not smooth.They can climb smoothed walls in a pinch I hear.In adventure mode testing it's entirely impossible to climb smooth walls. Block walls are exceedingly difficult to hold onto but smooth walls don't even give the option. If there are rough walls above them though it's possible the child climbed on those.
I recommend putting retracting bridges in the food slot. Either one of them, controlled by lever, or two stacked together. You can make an airlock arrangement (rig one bridge, flip the switch, rig the other), or if that's not good enough to keep them, have two separate levers.
Yeah sorry I meant block walls, not smooth.
Hm, the child would be okay if spears didn't cause pulping. Hits only cause bruises, but the head explodes in gore after a few hits.It seems like you should scale up the spear frequency by starting off slowly, or allow some wounds to heal between stabbings.
I switch the spears off when he gets knocked unconscious and he's fine with only bruising, but when I left him lying there one time he got killed in 15 seconds.
Can I somehow force a child to wear a hood instead of a cap? This subject constantly gets knocked out.
Can I somehow make the child wear both? Several hoods are lying by it.
not with vanilla DF
Are you absolutely sure that a cap and a hood can't be worn together?
If you can work fluid logic well enough to figure out timers, we might be able to use a living enemy to scare the kids. Just gotta time it so the enemy's only exposed in short, regulated bursts that don't keep the kids from taking care of themselves.I'm not into dwarven mechanics, but we could just put the enemy behind a window and drawbridge, link the bridge to a lever and expose the child until it's hungry or thirsty and order a dwarf to close the bridge. Needs a lot of micromanagement, though.
You can make a clock with a werebeast (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=115221.msg3547687#msg3547687). Obviously it only ticks once per month.
I remember the first day care thread being far less... nice. Where's the use of magma to remove fat from dwarves?
I'm wondering, can you assign pets to children? If, so then you could give them a pet, then drop the pet into a goblin holding cell next to the childcare where they can watch it being slaughtered.
Does that help the niceness problem a bit?
I remember the first day care thread being far less... nice. Where's the use of magma to remove fat from dwarves?All right, let's cut off their legs to force crutch-walking (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=135129). They'll get maxed-out Agility and Endurance that way, even without weapon training, and crutches can be used in combat to train Misc. Object User. You'll probably have a few captured werebeasts by the time they grow up, so they could even get their legs back.
I remember the first day care thread being far less... nice. Where's the use of magma to remove fat from dwarves?All right, let's cut off their legs to force crutch-walking (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=135129). They'll get maxed-out Agility and Endurance that way, even without weapon training, and crutches can be used in combat to train Misc. Object User. You'll probably have a few captured werebeasts by the time they grow up, so they could even get their legs back.
The patient must wear full metal armor...
That is optional. If we can accept the relatively high amount of casualties, we could use a similar design but limit the amount of weapon traps to one or two giant axe blades, which would yield us about a 35% chance of hitting the legs with one weapon component or 60% with two. The casualties are intended given that the original complaint was about insufficient brutality of the training course.I remember the first day care thread being far less... nice. Where's the use of magma to remove fat from dwarves?All right, let's cut off their legs to force crutch-walking (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=135129). They'll get maxed-out Agility and Endurance that way, even without weapon training, and crutches can be used in combat to train Misc. Object User. You'll probably have a few captured werebeasts by the time they grow up, so they could even get their legs back.QuoteThe patient must wear full metal armor...
Do kids even pick up crutches?
Do kids even pick up crutches? Also, can they train Agi and End while standing still in a training cell? Needing to keep them moving around to train up their crutch skill / attributes sounds like a lot of micro-management, whereas flooding the cell in 4/7 water should also train up the same stats without micro.
Also, random chopping of body parts with serrated blades sounds too random to be effective. As far as I understand it only targets feet because they're unarmored body-parts. I think they'd be as likely to lose a hand or a head as a foot if they get slice up without body armor. So you might get 10% usable subjects out of that treatment. The other thread got 40% fatalities even with armor.
I'd need to see some evidence that this actually trains them up in the relevant stats while they're actually kids.
PTW
I need to stop describing the methods in here to non-DF players.
I'm happy to return and find that the thread has more-or-less exploded in my absence. !!SCIENCE!! is proceeding apace, it would seem, despite the spotty updates and frequent crashes of various kinds.What have you observed that indicates attributes are not being inherited?
I believe we have enough preliminary data to say that:
- It is unknown whether or not children are at high risk to danger room-type mechanics. Results have varied.
- Pathing seems to be a significant issue when attempting to train swimming/climbing.
- Modding in additional children seems to be a good way to enable large-scale testing.
I would add that dwarven eugenics is entirely unproven. So far as I have been able to tell, no dwarf inherits any traits of any kind from their parents. That may have changed from DF2012 to DF2014, but I doubt it. It would probably be in the patch notes. Eugenics is probably impossible.
I'm hoping to start with 40.05 tomorrow when Toady releases it and start a new fort for the purpose of testing. I'll probably disable invaders for the sake of science. I've been traveling for the last few weeks, which is why I've been mostly absent from the thread.
What have you observed that indicates attributes are not being inherited?
You can make a clock with a werebeast (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=115221.msg3547687#msg3547687). Obviously it only ticks once per month.
That were beast clock is brilliant, but circumstantial - ie you have to 1) have a werebeast, and 2) you have to capture it.
But you can bet if I get one in this fort, I will try to capture it to set this up, as it is, again, brilliant.
I've found that reclaiming a fortress is far quicker than trying to set one up.
I took reelya's suggestion and made a pet dwarven caste.
So on this embark I have 75 test subjects to begin when I come to science.
Brought some adults along too for extra help hauling, and menial jobs.
I have reservations however, as I'm not sure if they will react the same way as a standard child would, as the tame child's personality seems to be hidden, and possibly disabled due to the [PET] status.
We'll see once I'm properly set up I guess.
What I would give for DFhack to make things easier and more convenient right now though...
Alright, so I've drawn up a couple of designs for what I think will work. It is by no means compact, and I've built multiple fail-safes into it too, so we can lose as few kids as possible. Generally sacrificing children is a widely encouraged thing, but when these kids are the next generation of super soldier, we want them as intact as possible.
Unfortunately I'm at work, so I'll upload them later.
In my boarding school first ten students have reached Competent levels of skill without injuries. Looks like all that attention to protective clothing is paying off. I'm now thinking I could have installed more training spears to the spike traps after all; the progress will be slow from now on. I have now accepted twenty students more and will be increasing the number gradually to find the full capacity of this facility.Great job, now we need to multiply this, and/or replace mist with magma mist to melt their fat :D
Instead of a swimming pool design I'm now installing banks of mist generators in hope that they'll train a noticeable amount of Swimming along the years. At least they'll keep the students even happier than now (they're all ecstatic despite being constantly whacked with wooden sticks).
According to combat reports a five year old student just teleported to a straight corridor 30 squares away, skidded along the ground for six squares hitting a cat twice along the way and slammed hard against a wall. I don't know what happened here but since she bruised a muscle I'm going to have to mark this as the first injury of the project.Excellent, it is off to a great start!
Cats are a constant problem since they keep sneaking into the training area through multiple airlocks. Like real world cats, they seem to hate closed doors above everything else and will keep meowing behind a door until someone goes through and lets them slip inside. So far I've lost five cats to impaling and general exploding into gore.
Cats are a constant problem since they keep sneaking into the training area through multiple airlocks. Like real world cats, they seem to hate closed doors above everything else and will keep meowing behind a door until someone goes through and lets them slip inside. So far I've lost five cats to impaling and general exploding into gore.
The solution is lever-controlled doors / airlocks. Or floodgates.
Unless there was a change that I missed since .40 dropped, dwarves don't actually train climbing by climbing, but only by catching themselves when they jump or fall.
My interpretation of the wiki page is that they gain exp from climbing (except trees), AND from catching walls (including trees). I haven't had any experience with this personally though.
I suppose if you had soldiers with high climbing skill, you could send them to battle invaders on a narrow bridge with deep but narrow pits on either side. If the invaders dodge, they fall to their deaths. If the dwarves dodge, they start to fall but grab the wall and climb back up. Kind of a dodge-fall trap without the traps. But it's got sooo many ways it could go wrong. Other than that, I don't see a whole lot of value in training climbing.Dwarves don't grab the walls mid-flight. It's a bug (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7055) with the AI.
Keith
a poison-spitting Forgotten Beast
Ok, so the scare closet didn't work with crundles I managed to catch from the caverns; for some reason they simply didn't scare the students at all. They simply carried on calmly with their business even when I released few crundles running around the classroom in panic. I'll have to catch something bigger; maybe I can get at the cave crocodile I spotted in the first cavern, before the FB stomps it too...
Meanwhile, I got some more dropouts but my star students are now at Professional level, almost halfway to Legendary. There are now 55 students attending and the logistics can handle that nicely; I'll keep adding students until all 92 children are in.
The fort is running at around 14 FPS with twenty mist generators and a hefty water reactor running non-stop. This might take a while...
I suppose if you had soldiers with high climbing skill, you could send them to battle invaders on a narrow bridge with deep but narrow pits on either side. If the invaders dodge, they fall to their deaths. If the dwarves dodge, they start to fall but grab the wall and climb back up. Kind of a dodge-fall trap without the traps. But it's got sooo many ways it could go wrong. Other than that, I don't see a whole lot of value in training climbing.Dwarves don't grab the walls mid-flight. It's a bug (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7055) with the AI.
Keith
Tested the nuclear reactor in Arena. When dwarves jump out of someone's flight path, they just step away and switch places with other dwarves instead of actually jumping.
Because of that, the only kind of a chain reaction you could cause is a dangerous and completely useless one, where dwarves fail to jump out of the way and end up getting send flying themselves, and several such failures in a row are extremely unlikely to happen unless the dwarves in question are unconscious.
Conclusion: dwarf-based nuclear reactors cannot be designed in such a way as to train dodging.
X_X right. Excuse me while I go hide my shame at forgetting about Dwarven Quantum Entanglement Mechanisms (just mechanisms for short).
Also, I have a 40.09 fort now, just to test childcare. Popcap set to 50, childcap set to 100. Aquifer has been pierced, about to drill the main stairwell down. After that it's on to dining room, bedrooms for the general pop and then Friendly Ultra Nice pods for the kiddies.
Since no one else here seems to be doing solitary confinement I thought I'd try it out :)
Note to self: when all students are best friends with each other, it's not a good idea to let one of them be insta-vaporized by a Forgotten Beast. With half the school now flashing red, I'm announcing a special summer break for partying and sleeping in own rooms. I'd hate to have a tantrum spiral with these guys...
The students are now very close to Legendary. Few Grand Masters with lots of High Masters and Masters coming behind. Once I'll deal with the current unhappiness the first graduations should not be far.
Grand master and high masters in what skill? :o
Note to self: when all students are best friends with each other, it's not a good idea to let one of them be insta-vaporized by a Forgotten Beast. With half the school now flashing red, I'm announcing a special summer break for partying and sleeping in own rooms. I'd hate to have a tantrum spiral with these guys...
The students are now very close to Legendary. Few Grand Masters with lots of High Masters and Masters coming behind. Once I'll deal with the current unhappiness the first graduations should not be far.
======
=H+ccD
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H hatch
+ floor
= wall
D access door
c chain with cat attached (one with male, one with female)Grand master and high masters in what skill? :o
Fighter and Dodger. Armor user is lagging one or two levels behind with most students but that too is coming up nicely.
Nice.Spoiler (click to show/hide)
a collection of 1x1 pits could be an effective way of stopping pathfinding while retaining breeding.
Have you tried corpses yet?
Have you tried live goblins or similar? I changed my plan so that the climbing wall features a captured gobbo behind a window. Gobbo is made visible using same repeater as waterfall. Also, do injuries/throwing punches train discipline? If so I may not need the gobbo at all and can simply rely on the kid brainshotting a few poults to get his discipline up.
Also, does domestic poultry take fall damage? I only ask because I could get a higher rate of traumatisation with ducks due to them having a higher breed rate than cats, but I'm not sure as to whether they will take falling damage or not. If not, I'll just set up some door traps in the caverns so that I can eventually replace cats with scores of cave crocodiles.
A herd of rutherers just appeared in the second cavern; I'll try to capture one of them and see if they're scary enough.
Also, does domestic poultry take fall damage? I only ask because I could get a higher rate of traumatisation with ducks due to them having a higher breed rate than cats, but I'm not sure as to whether they will take falling damage or not. If not, I'll just set up some door traps in the caverns so that I can eventually replace cats with scores of cave crocodiles.
Is it even possible to train discipline this way? I have only ever seen military dwarfs gain discipline. Not civilians. Bravery mattes when civ dwarfs with no discipline are about to panic ot not but can that trait be trained changed at all?
They aren't. Dwarves routinely walk past rutherers without freaking out - or, so has been my experience. I haven't actually seen any post-.34. Let me know how it goes.
It is possible to train discipline by exposing sentient creatures to death. I have seen small stat gains in discipline from my dwarves on occasion. It may require the death of other sentient creatures; if so, the cats won't work.
Can animals be assigned to children, or just adults? Because giving all of the students fuzzy little friends to "accidentally" wander into the training room might work for at least some of the students.
The Searingmines Dwarven Boarding School is proud to celebrate its first two graduations!
By graduation I now mean reaching adulthood with Legendary in at least one of the skills in curriculum. That will have to do; the military academy after this will build that Discipline and Armor User nicely.
Without further delay, I present you the graduates:Spoiler: Sodel Paddlegods (click to show/hide)
Legendary+1 Fighter
Legendary+1 Dodger
Great Armor UserSpoiler: Zas Girdergleamed (click to show/hide)
Legendary+1 Fighter
Legendary+1 Dodger
Master Armor User
Interestingly, they both seem to have somewhat similar personality. Is the personality set permanently in birth or could it be shaped by childhood experiences?
Both Sodel and Zas are now equipped with quality steel/candy gear and are sparring happily in one of the spare barracks. In time, they'll be joined by other graduates, until all nearly hundred students have grown up.
A zombie should be the real ticket.
Easier to collect and contain than a FB, is garanteed to be hostile, and creates bad thoughts just from seeing it.
The deal is that it somehow needs to be on a chain. It has been my experience that dwarves don't react to something they see through a window or a fortification. They have to actually be near something with no barriers between for them to bug out. This is curious, because military dwarves will shoot through fortifications, and FBs will emit through fortifications-- but civvies feel perfectly safe inside fortifications, even when there is crazy all just outside them. That's been my experience anyway.
A chain would keep Mr Skullhead contained, but fully ambulatory otherwise. A gap between Mr Skullhead and Urist McTeenybopper would discourage idle pathing, and still allow direct line of sight.
But how to have a zombie on a chain?
Do things that die on a chain, stay on the chain after being raised as zombies? Clever abuse of a necromancer might work if it does.
For Zas...
"She doesn't mind a little discord.." haha that's what we like to hear in Dwarf Fortress!
A potential innovation:
Create a long shaft (20+ z-levels) that opens up into your Daycare center. Make sure an elevated platform of spikes (alternatively, a masterwork adamantine statue you can imagine represents Armok - you'll see why in a minute) is between your children and the 'blast zone'.
Now, dump all your captured, hostile sentients - elves, kobolds, goblins etc - down the shaft. They should all impact the spikes (alternatively, a statue of Armok now eternally bathing in blood) and explode.
This hardens children against death, trains dodging (avoid the chunks!) and hopefully will terrify the little beardlings out of their minds as hostiles pass within a few tiles of them very, very briefly.
A potential innovation:
Create a long shaft (20+ z-levels) that opens up into your Daycare center. Make sure an elevated platform of spikes (alternatively, a masterwork adamantine statue you can imagine represents Armok - you'll see why in a minute) is between your children and the 'blast zone'.
Now, dump all your captured, hostile sentients - elves, kobolds, goblins etc - down the shaft. They should all impact the spikes (alternatively, a statue of Armok now eternally bathing in blood) and explode.
This hardens children against death, trains dodging (avoid the chunks!) and hopefully will terrify the little beardlings out of their minds as hostiles pass within a few tiles of them very, very briefly.
With the climber skill, would there be potential for the enemy to catch the walls during their fall? If so, the shaft would need to be 3*3, and have them dropped down the centre tile
According to the wiki... nothing is stopping the confetti from hanging onto the party-decorations if their climbing skills are high enough. Climbing just gives a chance to suspend the in-flight status by grabbing onto an adjacent tile. So yeah, the shaft should be 3x3.Or use some smoothed natural stone. I'm pretty sure that's impossible to climb.
all social skills
I'd believe dropping other sentients could work... maybe some kind of automated goblin salsa machine would harden students enough during training?
I'd test it but I'm still not getting any sieges... perhaps it would work if I'd mod [CAN_LEARN] tag to wolves or dogs?
Hrm. I think the drop chute method can still be used to train discipline due to (possibly a bug; sauce (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=7161#c28460)) dwarves still panicking at the sight of horrifying corpses. This does not seem to work with all corpses, only with specific ones dwarves find terrifying - of which the notable ones are trolls, ettins and forgotten beasts. Further testing may be required with these specific species - regular creatures are not known to cause the same effect.
tl;dr further testing required, change the corpses to a more frightening species (like trolls) and try dropped captured (and stripped) invaders.
As I said; you only get discipline gains from certain corpses. The ones I can confirm give it so far are Trolls, Ettins and Forgotten Beasts. However it may be a bug, and thus may be fixed in future.
Question for Staalo - do you dump leather armor in the school with your children so that when/if their clothing rots, the only thing to replace it with is leather? Because if so, you can force them all to equip leather armor until they're let out.
Question for Staalo - do you dump leather armor in the school with your children so that when/if their clothing rots, the only thing to replace it with is leather? Because if so, you can force them all to equip leather armor until they're let out.
I'd believe this would be easier with a steady supply of captured invaders.
Its worth noting that in my "death causeway" project at about 20 sentient deaths some of the survivors got "doesn't care about anything anymore". Doesn't look like it takes very long.
Its worth noting that in my "death causeway" project at about 20 sentient deaths some of the survivors got "doesn't care about anything anymore". Doesn't look like it takes very long.
I had to waste nearly twice as many lives to get the first "doesn't really care about anything anymore" statuses. But it's getting there... I'm just hoping I don't run out of dogs before that.
If I totally run out of upliftable animals, I'll have to send the squads to clear out some cavern wildlife again... maybe some troglodytes or animal men will move in.
Its worth noting that in my "death causeway" project at about 20 sentient deaths some of the survivors got "doesn't care about anything anymore". Doesn't look like it takes very long.
I had to waste nearly twice as many lives to get the first "doesn't really care about anything anymore" statuses. But it's getting there... I'm just hoping I don't run out of dogs before that.
If I totally run out of upliftable animals, I'll have to send the squads to clear out some cavern wildlife again... maybe some troglodytes or animal men will move in.
In theory, modding and capturing animal men won't be really necessary. Goblin sieges will provide sufficient horrific death.
I meant training skills with [CAN_LEARN] modded in, as I'm now doing with dogs; that was the idea of the "Cujo" project. But let's not derail this thread...
Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.
Growing is better taught to specialized kids rather than all kids. You only want new farmers occasionally, and you want the new recruit to start as maxxed out as possible.
From what I've gathered, it's basically a danger room with food, drink, and beds on various sides so the kiddies have to traverse the area with spears. This has managed to train defensive skills pretty effectively. A few years of it seems to be almost as effective as a week or two in a regular danger room, except it doesn't train weapon skills. But this can be donetowith kiddies, instead of waiting until they're adults.
Various attempts at exposing them to caged/chained/visible critters seem to be largely unsuccessful in improving discipline.
Modding puppies to be sapient and dropping them so they splat seems to work, but has limited application in the real world (for DF definitions of "real world"). This would probably be effective with a decent supply of actual sapient creatures, like goblin or elven volunteers.
Some success training climbing may have happened, but probably is of limited value. There has been discussion of training swimming, but I'm not sure if anyone has implemented anything.
But I haven't been paying close attention to everything that has been done, so I may have missed details. I'm currently working on research into which animals are the most effective for food production, which isn't nearly as amusing as dwarven childendangermentcare. :)
Keith
Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.
Have you read the thread where swimming can be trained during sleep? A careful application of pressure plates should allow some amount of water control. The main thing is trying to split 4/7 water out and dump it in a room, easily. I have solutions for this, of course, but it's kind of fidgety.
A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to? If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?
Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.That's what the tragedy training is for.
A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to? If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?Toady has said they won't take jobs that require climb pathing. I would assume they'd go for it, but I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a 'job'.
Maybe 1x1 sleeping pits filled by bucket brigade then, with ramps for getting in and out. I take it they will actually go to sleep in the water, or does it need to be filled once they're asleep?They won't go to sleep in water, but they will remain asleep in water.
Difficulty makes ZERO difference. The time spent on a task is what determines gains. Every frame that they're on a task, is gaining skill. If they're hungry and tired and taking a long time to complete tasks, then they're gaining more because it takes longer.Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.That's what the tragedy training is for.A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to? If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?Toady has said they won't take jobs that require climb pathing. I would assume they'd go for it, but I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a 'job'.
Rough stone, bars, and logs are the easiest to climb. I don't suppose difficulty influences skill gain?
So, how do dwarves climb, ever, if they don't take jobs that require climbing?I've witnessed it during fleeing/attacking. They might conceivably use it to return to a meeting zone, but IDK.
Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.That's what the tragedy training is for.A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to? If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?Toady has said they won't take jobs that require climb pathing. I would assume they'd go for it, but I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a 'job'.
Bars, logs, and rough stone are the easiest to climb. Blocks are difficult and smoothed walls impossible. I don't suppose difficulty influences skill gain?
At least they won't try tor return to their burrows by climbing, even if the only route would be by that way.
I like the "swimming when sleeping" idea. It would be easy to build small individual rooms with auto-filling reservoirs of 7/7 water; these would then equalize into larger spaces of 4/7 water when students comes to sleep. Draining would be a challenge though...
I might build a system like that in the next iteration of the school; right now the dodge trap swimming pool design is proving crude but effective enough.
Have you read the thread where swimming can be trained during sleep? A careful application of pressure plates should allow some amount of water control. The main thing is trying to split 4/7 water out and dump it in a room, easily. I have solutions for this, of course, but it's kind of fidgety.
A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to? If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?
I like that. It wouldn't even have to be the same shape and size, just a volume of 7/7 water that would fill the room below to 4/7 height. That would even be doable without levers so it's suitable for dozens of separate rooms.That design has problems:
#~# < water source
#X# < floodgate 1
#~#
#~# < reservoir area
#~#
#~#
#O# < 1x1 raising drawbridge
### < wall grate or fortification, minimize chance of kid getting squished by drawbridge
#B# < Bed
#X# < drainage floodgate
### < drain tunnel / grates
At least they won't try tor return to their burrows by climbing, even if the only route would be by that way.Do dwarves even attempt to return to their burrows? I thought they just stayed in them if they were already inside (or rather, they won't take jobs outside them.) Civilian alerts, maybe.
Do dwarves even attempt to return to their burrows? I thought they just stayed in them if they were already inside (or rather, they won't take jobs outside them.) Civilian alerts, maybe.
Just wondering. I know this is "child care" and "schools/daycares" are the current priority, but I recall a very good super soldier program that could be added as a "College" for our "students." Basically, a Dwarf was sent into a room with a cave-in trap prepared. They wore full steel plate, except on one leg. A cave-in was triggered and sent the paralyzed beard flying backwards onto a weapon trap with serrated steel discs, surgically removing the leg. The Dwarf is then rushed to the hospital, given a platinum or other heavy crutch and is given work hauling around stones while hobbling with his crutch. Once the subject has developed proper crutch-walking skills, they can hobble faster than a normal Dwarf can run and have gained much strength and speed from hauling. Would it be viable to add thisThat is awesome for people like me who embrace the cruelty.horrible practiceGraduation Program?
..and have gained much strength and speed from hauling.Hauling doesn't raise attributes, does it?
I thought it did. I might have to double check, but I thought it did. In the case that it does not, it'll still train crutch-walker and they'll probably have superDwarven attributes from the program...and have gained much strength and speed from hauling.Hauling doesn't raise attributes, does it?
Everyone here is a sick, emotionally deprived, psychopathic, child-hating inhumane being. +1 now that I'm here.
Idea: lock the children in towers (with windows and a roof, food and water) in the countryside so that they can see the slaughter of all the goblin sieges. this way, there is no danger to the children and they can still see all the blood and gore. although this doesnt train combat skills, you could lock a cat in there as well. or give the kid a LOT of pets and then kill them one by one within view of the tower. Engrave the tower, give him a bed, table, chair, chest and cabinet with all the furniture being good quality. this should give him/her good thoughts from the furni, and bad thoughts+mental hardening from the loss of his pets and view of the gore. bonus points for having a marksdwarf floor on top of the tower with a door that is unlockable by lever and a shitton of bolts and a crossbow locked in the marksdwarf floor.
Stilts keeping the tower up&seperated from the rest of the world and out of reach from building destroyers
1st floor: day/night care. lines represent windows
____________
/ \
| |
| X |
| |
\_____________/
2nd floor: replace the windows with fortifications
____________
/ \
| __ |
| [XD | X represents stairs surrounded by walls. with a door
| | locked via lever
\_____________/
Then build a roof over the top
I had a kobold attack and one of their partial mangled skeletons ended up right outside the main entrance.. In a fort of 80+ dwarves virtually everyone walks past it bravely, though I still get a couple horrified-dwarf messages every once in a while (they make me happy)..
Now I've set up a stockpile for skulls and skeletons around the kobold, waited for it to get full, then removed the stockpile and forbid all the bones (worried they may not panic about stored body parts, just in case..)
I was just wondering, how old are the kids when their mothers stop carrying them? Because we could make an all-female hunter/crossbow squad. The newborns would get to see death from a safe distance every single day untill they're too old to be carried. And then they enter the school. This should also train observer and discipline...
I used to create military families just so that the babies, a parent, or both would die and harden the surviving members. It worked fairly well.I was just wondering, how old are the kids when their mothers stop carrying them? Because we could make an all-female hunter/crossbow squad. The newborns would get to see death from a safe distance every single day untill they're too old to be carried. And then they enter the school. This should also train observer and discipline...
In general, mothers stop carrying the babies when they become children, and 1 year of age. But immigrant mothers often seem to stop carrying their babies when they reach the edge of the embark area. Those babies spend the remainder of their first year crawling around trying to catch up with their oblivious mothers.
The problem with exposing babies to death is that there are not many (if any) ways to give a baby happy thoughts. I've had times when my fort is full of happy dwarves, and one very unhappy baby who has seen death a few times. I'm always afraid that baby will soon grow up into a very unhappy child who will immediately start tantruming, punch someone popular in the head, and start a nasty spiral.
It really ought to be possible to convince dwarven mothers not to take their babies into combat. This isn't friggin' take your kids to work day.
I don't recall seeing any babies get killed in combat lately, though. That used to be pretty inevitable if you had mothers in your melee squads.
Keith
The results weren't what I expected. Discipline was trained very slowly but no noticeable tragedy training happened. I'm now unsure what caused the students to max out their combat hardness so fast.Combat itself will raise hardness. I've observed danger rooms to make a dwarf 'not really care' within 4 months if done right.
Combat itself will raise hardness. I've observed danger rooms to make a dwarf 'not really care' within 4 months if done right.
Can you expand on what "done right" means? Could this require the trainees have a weapon/shield to parry/block attacks (obviously not possible for children), or did you have your trainees wearing incomplete armor so that they would sometimes sustain mild injuries? I think I've heard that being injured can raise hardness, but I have no evidence to support this.The results weren't what I expected. Discipline was trained very slowly but no noticeable tragedy training happened. I'm now unsure what caused the students to max out their combat hardness so fast.Combat itself will raise hardness. I've observed danger rooms to make a dwarf 'not really care' within 4 months if done right.
BTW, my earlier atrocities have come back to haunt me. I forgot that I still had the sentient dogs modded in and... well, just look what the caravan just brought in:Spoiler: What have I done... (click to show/hide)
It was inevitable. Will they do actual work if you buy them? Seems very useful indeed.
It would be nice if someone else could verify this method. I have too many variables affecting the outcome so I can't be completely sure if the method actually works like I think it does.I will definitely test this with my fort whenever I get time to play again, but I'm not sure when that will be. I have quite a few children in need of training, and so far I've just been letting them run free, so none of them should have any combat related skills yet. I can set up two training rooms and put teeth in one to make sure they really do have an impact. But again, this may not happen for a few weeks, so probably someone else will do it first...
I migrated the save to 40.12 and the students stopped expressing their horror of teeth in the combat logs. This might mean that the tragedy training is not working anymore... is there any way to get numeric values for combat hardness?I guess that means you just have to start wars with the elves and/or humans to ensure a constant stream of rotting corpses for them to be horrified with?
How are their attributes?
Look at them using Dwarf Therapist, particularly under the "Military" tab as it lists their physical attributes. If you mouse over the tiles, it should have a tooltip that shows their exact attribute number compared to their maximum attribute - not every dwarf can reach the same strength max.
Strength and Agility, according to Wiki. Agility seems easy to max out with danger room training but Strength looks like it will need some additional cross-training.Did you say screw pumps? I heard screw pumps.
Did you say screw pumps? I heard screw pumps.
I just train my soldiers to pump operating, because they have a nice orange appearance that sets them apart from others.
Just a slight bump for this thread; has anyone any new ideas regarding turning children into terrifying mentally scarred killing machines?
Searingmines Boarding School continues its slow progress. I expect next batch of graduates to reach Legendary in Swimming, Observer and Armor User, and way, way too Legendary in Fighter and Dodger. That's the skill set I've now settled into, with Climber and Grower training proving too troublesome to get working with existing facilities.
Nearly half of the students have now graduated and the youngest children are now seven years old. That means about five years to completion, plus the necessary military academy year or two. I'm still trying to figure out what to do after that.
While waiting graduations I've been busying other dwarves with various supporting tasks: there is now enough masterwork steel and candy gear for over hundred fully equipped dwarves and food stockpiles can easily take the strain of half the fortress just sparring all the time.
Lately I've started breeding programs with Minotaurs (not too successful) and War Elephants (too successful!); at this rate I can give each graduate his/her own pet War Elephant. Shame about the Minotaurs but maybe the students will be content to play with just the two of them.
He has a negative view of people that exercise power over others. Huh, wonder where he got that... :PSpoiler: Eshtân Tangledcobalt (click to show/hide)
Concerning the needed "Endless supply of intelligent creatures" for tragedy training--
I understand that you have provided this using a modification to dogs to add the [can_learn] tag.
A means of appropriating or home-growing sufficient numbers of intelligent creatures without modding should now be the focus, since the proof of concept stage has completed.
Some animal-men creatures are egg-layers. Such as, for example, cave-swallow-people. However, for containment purposes we would prefferentially want egg layers that dont fly. Say, serpent people.
I don't know if serpent people still claim nestboxes or not. If they do, they could provide a useful alternative to intelligent dogs.
Egg layers produce large clutches more often than not, making population growth a theoretically viable option.
A pet with [EQUIPS] and masterful fighting skills would be a potent anti-siege weapon.
If children can adopt pets, can't they be used for tragedy training? If along the walls of the "school" there are windows or fortifications to rooms with available dogs or other pets, wouldn't the children adopt them? Then the pet can be atom-smashed etc... for tragedy training.As is usually the case in DF, it seems the solution to the problem is mass murder of puppies and kittens :P.
EDIT
After a little bit of cursory testing children can in-fact adopt pets, which I was unsure of before now. (see picture below)Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Thank you! Though I fear that some of this "research" will go to waste when the next version with its 119 emotions rolls in. I'd guess at least the combat hardness value will be scrapped at that point.
I wonder if the emotion calculations will be retroactive? In that case I'll probably have a fortress full of frothing insane super soldiers, driven berserk by childhood traumas. What FUN!!!
I'm constantly amazed, amused and horrified by this thread. Well done. Spartan child raising was for pussies, dwarfs got the real thing
I've found in some limited situations that when dwarves are sent to fight re-animated zombies even having professional discipline did not prevent them from experiencing mortal terror many tiles away (10+). If by chance (and good fortune) you get your hands on a zombie it could be released into a room full of trainee's, who would only overcome their terror and kill it when their discipline is high enough. Ideally the zombie would be relatively harmless, like a reanimated head or skin.
Just use 4/7 water. The drowning isn't helping any.
"You're doing that wrong."Sigged!
'OK FINE, WHY DON'T YOU DO IT?'
"I'm a dog."
I already have an ordinary swimming pool in use. What I was aiming with this setup was to test out a mention in a Wiki comment page about recuperation and drowning. So far no success with that.
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+C .#
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Z0#########
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#_.....##
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So, your fort of totally insane dwarves thinks that the dogs are intelligent and talking to them, but the dogs don't actually do any work. It sounds like you have have created Wilfred. You just need to make the dogs use a custom language with most words replaced with swearing.
...
So, your fort of totally insane dwarves thinks that the dogs are intelligent and talking to them, but the dogs don't actually do any work. It sounds like you have have created Wilfred. You just need to make the dogs use a custom language with most words replaced with swearing.
...
It must be all that fungal booze they're quaffing all the time.
Oh, and I have tried all kinds of monster-behind-fortification and corpse-pile-in-the-classroom type scenarios; for some reason they didn't have any effect on the children, even if some visiting adults were freaked out.
Luckily, after all those atrocities with talking dogs all of my students are already fully traumatized. I'm now merely fast-forwarding the game to get the last few students graduated and to finally wind down this boarding school project. After that I'll think up some suitable ending to the fort; there isn't much point to play further without invasions and Searingmines is starting to lose its new fort smell anyway. Maybe I'll abandon the fortress and hope that some graduates will migrate to future forts, or just take all of them to see the circus as a graduation present.
-Snip-I think it would be interesting to see how your ninety or so Legendary Dwarven Fighters impact the world after a fortress retirement. Give it a few years in world then check up on them. Brings up the question of restarting a Dwarven Civilization. Would your legendary Dwarves make enough of a different to halt a Goblin advance in a world where they were dominant? Stuff like that. Interested to see what comes of it in any case.
-Snip-I think it would be interesting to see how your ninety or so Legendary Dwarven Fighters impact the world after a fortress retirement. Give it a few years in world then check up on them. Brings up the question of restarting a Dwarven Civilization. Would your legendary Dwarves make enough of a different to halt a Goblin advance in a world where they were dominant? Stuff like that. Interested to see what comes of it in any case.
-snip-That's a shame. I still thing it may be interesting to see where they pop up in the legends, but that certainly leaves a little to be desired when it comes to the active world.
I don't really understand why you would want to do military training on children below 12 at all
I also would be interested in the medical data of the successful graduates of staalo's experiment. What development you had in your medical staff?
The way I see it, you trade increased speed of education for casualties among dwarf youth.And the downside is?
Looks like I murdered all those puppies for nothing.
I'll have to continue the research in another fort since this one is running out of students. Almost all children have now graduated and it's time to plan for the endgame.
Since I'll have to gen a new world to get all the goodies in .40.14+ I'm starting to warm up to the "going out with a bang" option, the one that involves taking all children to the circus. I'm curious to see how their training will help when playing with the clowns.
Wow. Only 1/4 of the military forces survived, but more than 1/3 of your graduates survived. Were the graduates wearing the same armor as your military?
Wow. Only 1/4 of the military forces survived, but more than 1/3 of your graduates survived. Were the graduates wearing the same armor as your military?
I would do that but it just bugs me, I'd rather have it make more sense than gain the extra bit of coverage from the 2 extra mail shirts and 5 extra cloaks.
Anyone find a way to break the attachment to the children? I have mothers and fathers whining about their kids being locked up in small rooms with dogs and food.
IF you can find a way to make them climb at a specified location.
A new development on reddit (http://imgur.com/Jh8qU4K) leads me to believe we can have breeding sentients.... IF you can find a way to make them climb at a specified location.
Basically you get them climbing and have vertical tunnels directly below them down to your training area. Periodically the creatures will breed and the babies will fall down and splat into your training area, covering your recruits with the blood of sentient babies. If that doesn't toughen them up then nothing will.
I'm trying to get hold of the original posters save to see precisely how it happened and if it can be reproduced with say.... elves.
Just read this entire thread. I am simultaneously horrified, amazed, disgusted, and jealous.
Great work Staalo! Bravo.
Is there any update tragedy training after the emotions update?
Exciting. Can't wait to hear the status reports from this latest endeavor into the latest generation of Dwarven Child Care Curriculum Development.I think it says something about what this forum has done to me that I read "Care" as "Lava".
I'm still waiting to see if there's any effect on the hardening status; this might take a while.
Can you investigate whether actual witnessing death is handled the same as "witnessing death" from seeing corpses in stress levels?
Interesting! And while too late, it might have been useful to use a control volunteer in an identical room without the stressor?
Have any other skills or personality traits changed?
Five months into the tragedy repeater experiment, while school construction continues.
The test subject got a "Stressed" status when his stress level climbed over 100 000 from looking at the goblin skeletons over and over again. Apart from that there were no stat changes. It's time to let the poor volunteer to get some rest and recuperation for his PTSD.
Conclusion: showing dead bodies will not bring any gains in hardening like it did in the earlier school, instead it will stress the students until they'll slowly go insane. Countering the stress from horrification events will be very hard to counter with luxury furniture and fine rooms.
Next I'll try to find out if seeing the actual death of a creature will harden the next volunteer. I'll also have to stop using the word "harden" in this context.
People should really desensitize to seeing the same skeleton over and over. I mean a skeleton might stress you out at first, but eventually it would just be background to you if you saw it over and over, especially in childhood. Kids grow up on farms and see animals slaughtered and don't freak out.
All sixteen of the fort's children are now attending classes.
These are migrants or children of already married couples? Or have you had any success with fortress marriages + birth?
<cruel dreams>
If this is .19, the parents need to be within 1 tile of each other to initiate pregnancies.
Locking mumsie and dadsie up inside special booths should suffice.
Presumably, in DF, pregnancies are initiated via sufficiently vigorous fistbumps on the parts of dwarves as they walk by each other.Or beard contact.
You could use OBS (https://obsproject.com/) (free) to make a youtube vid and there are tools to turn those into gifs if you want.GifCam (http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/) would be easier.
Wait, isn't there a water repeater that is like super fast to stop?
...so after saying that of course I had to try it.
I dropped the Special Guest Lecturer Fimshel Clobberfathers the Scratches of Sieging into a class of twenty eager students who immediately started pounding the colossus with unprecedented vigor. As I had suspected the students' punches glanced off harmlessly from hard bronze but surprisingly Fimshel didn't manage to hurt them either, save few bruises. Only when the students started tiring after a week of hard lecturing the big guy got hold of few of them, twisting their ankles or elbows the wrong way. After the third injury I let the militia in to deal with the colossus.
The bravest of the students are now Expert Strikers, with an assortment of other combat skills. Not a bad trade, I'd say.
Bronze colossuses can't learn, so they're safe at least in that sense. That and their relative invulnerability makes them ideal training partners... provided that the trainees are tough enough to start with.
Thread is interesting but I really don't want to read through 37 pages of this, however hilarious and sadistic it is, so I have a question: what are the facilities that my Children's Creche should have? I already read about dorms, mist generators and a food stockpile, but what else? Should I spikes or live animals for training? What is the best way to train tragedy resistance?
Spear traps vs dogs vs turkeys? Also how many wooden spears per trap?
Or, you could do as I did: embark near a few necro towers and litter the area with cage traps. With any luck you'll catch a necromancer who'll reanimate anything for you. I now have two that I hope to put to good use reanimating hair for my students.
One downside for this approach are constant undead sieges. When one bunch of bacon leaves another soon follows to continue the Thriller act on the surface. They keep my dwarves from harvesting wood for the training spears and are generally a nuisance since my three-dwarf militia can't yet match forty zombies in battle.
I was eventually so frustrated I resorted to dfhack liquids and dumped a sheet of magma over one undead army. That took care of them but the resulting wildfire burned down most of the trees and left the surface a wasteland of ash striped with trails of elf grease.
Was the grease from elf zombies or just elves?
Skin can be very lethal. It seems that it retains the original creature's mass without taking into account all the missing bits when it wrestles. Water buffalo bull skins are particularly lethal. Best just to animate some horse hair or something.
Skin can be very lethal. It seems that it retains the original creature's mass without taking into account all the missing bits when it wrestles. Water buffalo bull skins are particularly lethal. Best just to animate some horse hair or something.
Can't you cut the zombies to pieces with discs (bonus points if it is a pig tail)? And does it currently work? I remember people posted about dwarves ignoring vital needs such as drinking while locked in eternal combat with zombies.
Hair can re-animate, and sheep wool can be harvested to re-animate via Farmer's Workshop + cage traps all around.I don't think animated hair can even be hit/killed. Everything passes through.
Hair can re-animate, and sheep wool can be harvested to re-animate via Farmer's Workshop + cage traps all around.I don't think animated hair can even be hit/killed. Everything passes through.
While the seventeen children of Moonpalace are getting their Observer grades out of the way in the militia barracks, hundreds of training spears are slowly getting installed into the latest edition of Basic Training Room.
I'm again using the same basic layout: a large cross-shaped room with a swimming pool in the middle. This time I'm trying out a minecart repeater for the spear trap automation. The traps will be triggered in twin checkerboard patterns by two pressure plates; in theory this should increase training speed by ensuring more hits over time.
There will of course be an emergency shutdown lever but I'm still unsure about speed when I have to rely on lazy dwarves to walk over the lever and pull it to stop the bloodshed. That's why I'm planning to build an in-school hospital again, just in case.
In the process of making 500+ training spears, my carpenter has created dozens of masterwork pieces. Would you recommend using these masterwork pieces, or make more spears using a fresh carpenter?
Remind me, do dwarves only gain observer when watching sparring? Or do individual drills work too?
Regardless, might I suggest having an 8 room version of your current setup, Staalo, and implement the swimming trainer from the other childcare thread in one of the extras (trains climbing somehow), and in another you have a communal barracks for the whole fort, particularly marksdwarves. Adjacent to this you can have a single tile room built with fortifications or, better, bars around it. That tile contains a pressure plate which holds up a bridge which keeps back a minecart which upon launching double-shotguns an undead creature into the 1 tile room. The whole process can be fully automated - no player interaction. At the same time or slightly sooner, another undead is deposited by the same mechanism into the children's dining hall. The military will aggro, and go after it, but not before the kids experience some first hand combat. The military cleans up when they arrive and the kiddies can get back to recovering. All this is timed off the first undead's death by marksdwarf, which is a fairly long timer. Shorter substitutes are available, but the first UD dying is a solid indicator that there are miltary units nearby to clean up.
In terms of full automation, you need to keep a stockpile stocked with undead in cages. Best way to do this would be to set up a minecart QSP set to take corpses and refuse and dump them down a hole. In view of the bottom of the hole sits a necromancer behind fortifications and glass windows (in case a building destroyer part gets chucked down). At right angles to the necro's little chamber is the trap corridor, filled with dozens of cage traps followed by a decent amount of weapon traps to get rid of excess undead.
Thus you have an undead producing factory feeding slowly into the daycare.
If you want less threatening undead you might want to have another necro sitting at the top of the chute 1z below the minecart itself and on the same side. This way he will see the stuff only once it gets thrown down and reanimate it as it falls past. If you make the fall 30z levels, the undead will explode on impact and give you nice small bits to work with. Alternatively, just drop cavies down the chute to be reanimated, or set the refuse pile to only take hair. Your choice.
I know you have no problem with micromanagement but if this factory works it would be an excelent step towards this being practical for everydwarf.
In the process of making 500+ training spears, my carpenter has created dozens of masterwork pieces. Would you recommend using these masterwork pieces, or make more spears using a fresh carpenter?
Custom stockpiles are your friend in this case. Make a stockpile that accepts only low quality training spears next to your training room, and set it to take from the main weapon pile (or wherever your training spears are being kept). Since the building material screen does not show quality, but does show distance, this makes it easy to pick out the right spears: any that are close by will be low quality. Just be careful if designating multiple spears per trap that the distance doesn't jump up. In that case, switch to a different, closer spear material.
....All hostile beings are fit for guest lecturing...
Poor bronze colossus. He'll never stand a chance.
Huh. Interesting. How are you planning to stop them from beating the wool?
(http://media.oglaf.com/comic/grandmaster.jpg)
(Beware, the site this comic is from is nsfw)
I feel like somebody should crop out the last panel of this. I can't atm, sadly.
What comic is this?Oglaf. Again, NSFW. Really NSFW.
I assume you pulled up gui/gm-editor and changed the name of the wool to Fluffy, right?
Though I'm still uncomfortable with the use of the phrase "vigorous wool pounder"...
I'm... less comfortable after your description of the wool pounding btw.
Congratulations on the success with fluffy. (Always was convinced, that working schemes would end up far less violent than most imagined.) Did you try normal wool (as opposed to hair) from shearing, looks like you arrived at the ram head wool in a convoluted way, kill ram, kill zombie head, butcher head, wool reanimates?
Congratulations on the success with fluffy. (Always was convinced, that working schemes would end up far less violent than most imagined.) Did you try normal wool (as opposed to hair) from shearing, looks like you arrived at the ram head wool in a convoluted way, kill ram, kill zombie head, butcher head, wool reanimates?
Actually it went something like: shear ram -> necro animates wool -> children punch the wool to pieces -> necro animates head wool. And there's no shortage of violence, it's just... ineffectual violence, what with Fluffy being invulnerable and incapable of harming anyone.
I just noticed the refuse pile now contains Fluffy's nose wool, Fluffy's left ear wool and Fluffy's right ear wool. Looks like the students managed to do at least some damage at some point.
Decided to share that with one of my favorite Scottish authors, Charles Stross, figured he'd get a chuckle out of it at least, (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/the-biggest-little-sf-publishe.html#comment-1967982) since the thread was a big mishmash of unfunny crud.
Has !!SCIENCE!! been done on leg removal of dwarfs? ... Can they dodge without legs? Legendary Crutch User Legendary Dodger would be... funny as hell.
I have half an idea that it should be done as a graduation ceremony, because if I recall correctly becoming a vampire locks in a dwarf's attributes and prevents them from rising or dropping afterwards. So it would make sense to raise them as high as possible before making them vampires. On the other hand, vampire dwarves never need to sleep or eat and can't drown, so that would make regular daycare activities substantially more efficient while also probably raising social stats a bit more (which has apparently become an issue).I'm fairly certain the attribute lock is currently broken.
Is that based on fort evidence or adventurer evidence? The latter would make more sense, but whatever.Probably adventurer. Fort mode vampires are a pain to get a hold of, let alone test.
I had a period where I was experimenting with vampirism heavily.
Yeah, adventurer mode, I can't recall getting capped after turning and I had a period where I was experimenting with vampirism heavily.
Has !!SCIENCE!! been done on leg removal of dwarfs? ... Can they dodge without legs? Legendary Crutch User Legendary Dodger would be... funny as hell.
Military training already maxes all relevant stats. Crutch walking brings no benefits to trained out dwarves. The crutch itself may be used as a weapon, but even a heavy crutch isn't in any way better than common weapons (even with the current broken system of handling impact damage).
Has !!SCIENCE!! been done on leg removal of dwarfs? ... Can they dodge without legs? Legendary Crutch User Legendary Dodger would be... funny as hell.
Military training already maxes all relevant stats. Crutch walking brings no benefits to trained out dwarves. The crutch itself may be used as a weapon, but even a heavy crutch isn't in any way better than common weapons (even with the current broken system of handling impact damage).
Missing limbs makes a dwarf need less armour thus lighter. A fully trained crutch walker will go faster than a dwarf with two legs.
There was a separate thread where someone made an entire fighting force of one legged dwarfs. However it isn't easily applicable to children as you can't selectively remove their limbs as easily (armour and saw blade traps were used)
Has !!SCIENCE!! been done on leg removal of dwarfs? ... Can they dodge without legs? Legendary Crutch User Legendary Dodger would be... funny as hell.
Military training already maxes all relevant stats. Crutch walking brings no benefits to trained out dwarves. The crutch itself may be used as a weapon, but even a heavy crutch isn't in any way better than common weapons (even with the current broken system of handling impact damage).
Missing limbs makes a dwarf need less armour thus lighter. A fully trained crutch walker will go faster than a dwarf with two legs.
There was a separate thread where someone made an entire fighting force of one legged dwarfs. However it isn't easily applicable to children as you can't selectively remove their limbs as easily (armour and saw blade traps were used)
So if there's a dwarf missing a leg, would the weight of his legwear half or are legs one entity when armor is mapped?
Staalo, did you ever get any deaths to falling while you were training kids to jump off into the pool? One of my adult miners in my current fort just leaped to avoid a spear and fell, crushing his throat and bleeding to death on the way to the hospital. I have shamelessly savescummed but unless that was a complete anomaly I'll need to make some changes to the way I'm doing things.
How are people getting the children to hang around the desired areas? I'm wanting to passively train observer skill but can't find an easy way to force the kiddies into the barracks.
How are people getting the children to hang around the desired areas? I'm wanting to passively train observer skill but can't find an easy way to force the kiddies into the barracks.
Burrows will do that for you. It requires some management with burrow assignments, though, if you're running multiple simultaneous training programs.
I'd recommend to just put the military barracks into the main meeting area right from the beginning; that way you'll train everyone in the fortress to high Observer levels before you'll get the other training programs running.
Next improvement to the Boarding School will definitely be a remote supply drop system. I'll just have to figure out how to get rid of the empty booze barrels.Give the boarding school an adult director or groundskeeper whose job is to remove the barrels?
Can babies be kept alive without parents these days? If so it should be possible to use minecarts to separate the two to keep the babies safe from their malevolent parents. I grow tried of mothers charging into battle and using their week old babies as troll bait.Usually minecarts lead to a different kind of separation for babies, though. Can they reliably survive even a featherwood cart collision?
By combining minecart riding with a pressure plate and water you can wash the baby safely away to a separate location. There is no need to have the actual minecart hit the baby again.... I think we're all trying to move on from that.Can babies be kept alive without parents these days? If so it should be possible to use minecarts to separate the two to keep the babies safe from their malevolent parents. I grow tried of mothers charging into battle and using their week old babies as troll bait.Usually minecarts lead to a different kind of separation for babies, though. Can they reliably survive even a featherwood cart collision?
Since most of the children passed their Legendary Dodger grades without further incident, they're now continuing their education in live combat classes. This time I've kept a closer look at who's fighting and who's not, in hopes of seeing a pattern there. So far there isn't much to tell.
The two cowards with low Bravery scores never fight, despite all the Discipline training they've had. In addition to those there seems to be a changing group of borderline cases who sometimes charge headfirst into combat and other times just run around in panic. It looks like in beginning of each combat every student goes through a complicated decision whether to fight or flee, with multiple traits affecting the outcome. So far I've noticed that non-fighting dwarves tend to have at least one of following traits (names from Dwarf Therapist):
- low Bravery trait
- doesn't value Martial Prowess
- low Excitement Seeking trait
The fight/flee decision seems to be in force until the current threat has passed in one form or another. I have witnessed only one situation where a non-fighting student has started suddenly fighting and that involved a student getting enraged after getting a severe beating from a goblin invader. Few ticks later the goblin was very dead and the injured student went to get a new pair of trousers and a drink, in that order.
After some additional testing: yes, normally peaceful trogs and ogres do indeed become hostile towards children if they even glimpse one of the militia members through fortifications, even when said militia member has no way to attack anyone in the room. This makes things somewhat easier.
Presence of military seems to be the key to trigger combat with normally nonhostile participants in this case. I can well afford to put a recruit "military observer" in special viewing booth while I go through my er, stockpile of peaceful sentients. Looks like I'm again swinging deep into the dark side with this research...
Some children are looking very much ready, even with years still to go. My most promising student, five year old Ingish Pagedpatterns has the following skill levels at this point:
- Legendary +5 Observer (lvl 78)
- Legendary +5 Fighter (lvl 41)
- Legendary +5 Striker (lvl 36)
- Legendary +5 Dodger (lvl 22)
- Grand Master Kicker
- High Master Armor User
- Professional Biter
- Adept Swimmer
I'm toying with the idea of founding a separate colony in the third cavern for the most advanced students and let them handle all the unpleasant wildlife down there. Let them run truly feral for their last years of childhood and accept them back to dwarven society only when they come of age.
Three students are taking horrors of battle worse than their fellows and have to take constantly time off to cool down their stress levels. I'm micromanaging them and after every few bouts moving them back to the old training room to enjoy the luxurious surroundings and the company of their younger siblings. So far I've managed to keep them away from Stressed status.
Two of the easily stressed students are obvious cases with high Stress Vulnerability trait values but I'm a bit mystified why the third one, nine years old Kogan Gatesaviors is suffering so much. His Stress Vulnerability is average, Bravery is among the highest in the class and he has no other obvious traits that could affect the outcome. I wonder if his low Tolerant score could make him anxious about meeting members of other species (and killing them!)
I kept getting deaths to throat crushes on the fall into the pool while running a danger room/pool combo as my fort's main meeting hall. Replacing the floor with wood did not stop all fatalities. I'm fairly sure the dwarves in question were wearing throat-covering gear but I'm not entirely certain. Any ideas for fixing this?
Plus, pro tip: always have a double or triple airlock of pet-shut doors to prevent cats from getting into the training area. Stopping the machines to evict dead cat bits from the spears can be a bit of a hassle.
Well, well. I just had to go and boast about not having had any trouble with my training equipment... now my tiny hospital is overflowing with casualties after the latest training session. At least one of the students, five year old Erush Cloisteredtributes, looks like she's permanently out of the program with her severed spinal column and other injuries.
Note to self: when the combat training room is full of dead enemies after a successful session, DO NOT INITIATE EMERGENCY FLUSHDOWN. Seven students were caught in a shower of crundle and troglodyte parts and the results were predictably ugly.
Hmm, can a high-skilled student that has been killed in training (KIT) and reanimate to be a guest tutor, retain its skill levels?
The Student punches The Tath Thomoacik's neck in the lower body with his
right hand, bruising the muscle and bruising the spleen!
The Student bites The Tath Thomoacik's mutilated corpse in the lower
front teeth and the severed part sails off in an arc!
I gave a decapitated and reanimated werehyena for my children to play with and was very puzzled about these combat reports. Further investigation revealed that the necromancer had not only reanimated but also cloned two whole humanoid bodies from the parts. This opens new possibilities; with proper slicing and some luck it could be possible to get INFINITE ZOMBIES from just one corpse.
EDIT: The fight was a lengthy one but what was left over was two identical "Tath Thomoacik's mangled corpses." I'm afraid the students may have messed these corpses beyond reanimation but still it was an interesting phenomenon... maybe it had something to do with the corpse being a werecreature? Something interesting could be achieved with a necromancer, a were and some webbed weapon traps.
So basically, the two most sustainable sources of student training are werecreature zombies and trogs (necessary for desensitizing students). If I still understand this, it's still just a cross-shaped room with beds, booze, food and something else on their own places, with bridges topped with repeating wooden spikes over water connecting those areas. For advanced combat training, a separate room connected to the first, with a military member visible through a fortification or window and a necromancer capable of reanimating things in said room is necessary, along with yet another room for introducing new sparring partners.
Oh, and congratulations to Kogan Gatesaviors for being the Dwarven Boarding School of Copperfell's first graduate!Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Kogan is one of the migrant children so he's had less time to hone his skills than the fortress-born students will have. There are some true monsters coming up in few years.
Here's his final score card:Spoiler (click to show/hide)
His attributes went up quite a bit during the training; most of the skill-related attributes are already maxed out:Spoiler (click to show/hide)
He has seven kills in his name, six troglodytes and one troll. I'm going to compare the final kill counts as students graduate. I'm also going to monitor their size when they grow up as it looks like this kind of training breeds some huge dwarves. Kogan is at very hefty 92 910 cubic centimeters and there are some ten year olds who are way over 110 000. In comparison my burliest militia veteran barely clears 90 000.
I'm pretty sure that last bit is... utterly astounding. Aren't dwarfs supposed to only be about 90,000 cubic cm as the very maximum peak of dwarven largeness?
I'm pretty sure that last bit is... utterly astounding. Aren't dwarfs supposed to only be about 90,000 cubic cm as the very maximum peak of dwarven largeness?
According to this wiki article (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Weapon#Size) the maximum is 93750 but then there's this, for example:Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Of course Dwarf Therapist could report the sizes wrong, somehow.
Since quality of mechanisms determines the skill of a weapon swing,would using low quality mechanisms for the spears lower the chances of injuring the children?
Since quality of mechanisms determines the skill of a weapon swing,would using low quality mechanisms for the spears lower the chances of injuring the children?
In theory yes, but since all training spears are harmless except against naked flesh the mechanism quality is not an important factor. Or, if I understood the combat system correctly it could even be beneficial since the spears would become harder to dodge and would hit armor more often. Armor user is always slower to train with this system.
If someone is building their own training room at the moment I'd suggest to try and build it with low quality spears and Masterwork mechanisms to test this out...
I'm pretty sure that last bit is... utterly astounding. Aren't dwarfs supposed to only be about 90,000 cubic cm as the very maximum peak of dwarven largeness?
According to this wiki article (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Weapon#Size) the maximum is 93750 but then there's this, for example:Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Of course Dwarf Therapist could report the sizes wrong, somehow.
One student even got a parsnip seed straight through her heart; she got better.I don't know what I find more astonishing: this quote or the fact there were no fatalities in a coinstar room with ill-prepared inhabitants. Skulls can cave in from seeds obeying gravity.
I don't know what I find more astonishing: this quote or the fact there were no fatalities in a coinstar room with ill-prepared inhabitants. Skulls can cave in from seeds obeying gravity.
In an attempt to train Armor user faster I whipped up a quick coinstar room using all those useless seeds from the stockpile. I should have researched that one better; the effect from high velocity flying seeds was almost like standing in front of a shotgun blast. Turns out leather clothing isn't quite enough to stop a projectile with even the tiniest mass, like a single seed.
Three students are now hospitalized because of the incident. One student even got a parsnip seed straight through her heart; she got better.
that one supersonic parsnip seed. She didn't even bother going to the hospital with such a minor injury.Now that's an important detail that tips the astonishment scale squarely to your student.
IIRC, seeds uses the stats from the plant themselves and are more dense and damaging then anticipated.
Hey Staalo, have you ever tried individual rooms for the children?
i am planning having individual rooms with furniture of the children's preferred materials to increase the good thoughts
So what did you use to do that? I'd like to try that if it's not something too hackish.Mode set > arena > assume control of child > mode set > adventurer > dfusion > change adventurer.
On a whim I decided to dig a straight tunnel from the training room to surface. If something hostile appears I can then just skip the bothersome caging business and just have them walk directly to their lecture.
I also want to be able to yell at some point "The enemy is coming! RELEASE THE CHILDREN!"
That's awesome Staalo,i wonder if if youll have to import her armor? =)
Big Ral has finally hit a plateau with her growth. Looks like her final adult volume is going to settle down to a bit over 140 000 cubic centimeters which is about twice the size of a normal adult dwarf. Maybe there's an ogre somewhere in her family tree?
Apparently, a human is 70 000 cubic centimeters according to the wiki (although it also says a dwarf is 60 000 rather than the 90 000 commonly quoted here, so I'd take it with a grain of salt). But yeah, giant dwarf.Nah, the 90k is from the giant childcare graduates, not the average dwarf. 60k is the average.
Isn't the size measure we have based on blood volume or something? I'm not entirely sure it's accurate. Although, you'd expect the real value to be more than that, not less.You take the base 60,000 and adjust it for all of the appearance modifiers (tall, broad head, etc.) then thicken the muscle layer with strength and thicken the fat layer with "energy storage." kane_t reverse-engineered the energy storage algorithm in the DFHack thread, and it's based much more on the Recuperation stat than it is on anything else (almost to the point of being a bug).
Wait. Giant dwarves, fueled by reanimated souls and nigh invincible in combat...Where have I seen this before...hmm (http://www.goblinscomic.org/10242014/).I'm gonna need you to scream for me.
I haven't been following the thread for a long time and the first post doesn't have much recent information. Can someone summarize the recent developments?
You could force three different sieges at the same time.
Sieges wouldn't be enough anyway. Even ordinary militia veterans make short work of huge invader forces and these kids start at that level or higher before they start their military training. When the graduates get armed and armored I'd believe the clown car is the only real challenge in an unmodded game.
There's still time to think about it. It will be several game years before the last of the 82 students will graduate so I'm in no hurry. I had to cap the births few years ago so I could actually finish the school project at some point; otherwise the overly fertile citizens of Copperfell would have filled the fortress with their future superdwarf candidates.
The first graduates have already finished their military schooling by hitting Legendary in Discipline, Shield user and a weapon skill of their choice and they are now learning a civilian skill. Each of the graduates will be assigned a single useful skill which they will again force train up to Legendary. I'm sort of tempted to just retire the fort when everyone is ready and enjoy the super-migrants in my next fortress.
have any of the graduates married each other?i could almost imagine their babies using the mother as a shield while she trains
If you have graduating kids with high Discipline/does not care about anything , you could put them into a hauler squad briefly to dump the bodies safely before making them military dwarves.
If you have graduating kids with high Discipline/does not care about anything , you could put them into a hauler squad briefly to dump the bodies safely before making them military dwarves.
That would have been one solution, but there are only few graduates at the moment. It would have taken months to haul all the hundreds of teeth and body parts to somewhere out of sight. Instead I just disallowed corpse hauling from the more nervous dwarves and let the happier ones do the grisly parts. The general fortress wellbeing suffered quite a bit but at least no one went insane from the horrors.
Can you just dig a 5z pit nearby with an atom smasher at the bottom? I believe 5z is enough for anyone above to witness what's below; even if below reanimated.
I ment to copy the save and open the HFS on one of them while taking graduates into a new fort on the other one.
Hmmm... I suspect the next game version will again throw a lot of earlier child care methods out of the window. Toys for children? Inconceivable!
You say toys, I say "small projectiles for coinstar-esque training".
You want zombie training subjects and necromancers?
Raise civs to like 150 or 200 on a 33x33 world, raise secrets higher than 20 as it's just a cap, I think I use 66 or something, then play around with other parameters as you like, you'll get a bunch of death gods and thus tons of tower neighbors to play with.
You can't have werebeast vampires. Both interactions make you immune to the other.But still, you could do this with either werebeasts OR vampires.
Why would you even want your vampires to drink? It doesn't do anything. (Well, maybe it reduces certain roll penalties.)REALISM
To make them drink from animals, though, you need to put them to sleep. I don't know if they need to be sleeping or if passing out from pain works. I would recommend capturing an FB with something that causes drowsiness/unconsciousness/pain. I have 5 or so, including one with spit that causes only drowsiness. Next version, I'll do some !!SCIENCE!! if I can get a vampire visitor.You could always drop a load of fertile cats in with tons of cat food and make a miniature catplosion inside the vampire-soldier housing room. Eventually the cats/kittens have to go to sleep, and the vampires will have tons of stuff to feed on.
Cat food? Pets falling asleep? Have you actually played DF? Neither of those things are in the game.
To make them drink from animals, though, you need to put them to sleep
I used to strangle wild animals when I was thirsty and far from a town then drink while they were knocked out.
I play the adventure mode mostly.Cat food? Pets falling asleep? Have you actually played DF? Neither of those things are in the game.
Quoted for truth.
Playing the game is actually more fun than playing the forum :P
It wouldn't be a good idea to vampirize the students until they graduate, on account of the process halting all growth of their stats.
Question: Wouldn't it bee a good idea to turn the "trained" children into vampires by giving them a mug of poisoned water once they "graduate"? (Or become thirteen/twelve years of age?)
Sorry, I was just grabbing a drink, what were you saying?I used to strangle wild animals when I was thirsty and far from a town then drink while they were knocked out.
You're still talking about Dwarf Fortress, right? Right?
But, I suspect the fortress mode vampire AI will only use sleeping dwarves for feeding.
Staalo, did you ever get any deaths to falling while you were training kids to jump off into the pool? One of my adult miners in my current fort just leaped to avoid a spear and fell, crushing his throat and bleeding to death on the way to the hospital. I have shamelessly savescummed but unless that was a complete anomaly I'll need to make some changes to the way I'm doing things.
I did have some broken bones and I think one liver pierced by a rib from falling badly into the pool, but no deaths. That was in the first version with bare stone floors; since then I've built my pools with wood floors before filling them with water. Willow works great since it's light and commonly available.
To make them drink from animals, though, you need to put them to sleep. I don't know if they need to be sleeping or if passing out from pain works. I would recommend capturing an FB with something that causes drowsiness/unconsciousness/pain. I have 5 or so, including one with spit that causes only drowsiness. Next version, I'll do some !!SCIENCE!! if I can get a vampire visitor.
This thread is awesome. Try reading random posts out of context and fill in the rest with your imagination.
I had trouble laughing at anything again for weeks after the "I'm still finding dog bone doctor teeth everywhere" comment.
I keep noticing an odd thing with my graduates. I have put them all through a period of skill grinding after their military service, to train one useful fortress skill up to Legendary. That gives them something to do and raises their value as future über-migrants in the next fortress. I was mentally prepared to flog several thousand low quality trinkets to traders while the graduates struggle through low skill levels.
Funny thing is, they seem to produce masterwork items more frequently than other dwarves, starting right from Dabbling level. Sometimes the very first craft/weapon/armor/etc. they produce comes out masterful and they continue dishing them out like master craftsdwarves after that.
Do attributes affect crafting quality as well as the relevant skill level?
Painted here in goblin blood is a masterfully designed image of of Urist McStudent and a zombie troll by Urist McStudent. Urist McStudent is decapitating the zombie troll. The painting is decorated with crundle vomit, voracious cave crawler ichor and troglodyte guts. The painting is studded with manera teeth. The painting menaces with spikes of blind cave ogre bone. The painting is signed with words 'FOR DADY URIST 4YRS.'
+vooo KEY:
+vCTo o - wall
+vCTo + - floor with spikes
+Dooo v - trench with water
+vBSo C - chair
+vBSo T - table
+oooo B - bed
S - statue
D - door
That's what we were missing, just when I started to think maybe we weren't completely monstrous for the shit we do in the name of childcare, proper eugenics and arranged marriages get folded into the mix somehow.
Necrobacon isn't an absolute necessity for combat training, even if it helps. Just seed the surface and all three caverns with cage traps and you should catch enough aggressive critters to give your students some taste of real combat. Cage trap corridors leading to the inner fortress have proven irresistible for crundles, troglodytes and the like; they'll even wait patiently for your haulers to reload the traps before stepping into them.Oh thanks that's good advice. Hmm yes I do need to get a trap corridor in the caverns. I currently only have a single cavern cage trap but I have many many cage traps seeded about the surface for catching any unlucky necromancers that may wander through. I have an Ettin already. Have you done any testing with Forgotten Beasts as sparring partners?
So, we're discussing whether to do combat training by undead or horrible cavern creatures, trapped and unhappy.
Does the training even involve actual weapons? :P
I have an Ettin already. Have you done any testing with Forgotten Beasts as sparring partners?
Now I'm considering starting a breeding facility for hostile/wild critters a la Mermaid or sea monster farming... Possibilities.
Any particular critters that are too dangerous for kiddies? What sort of skill levels do you recommend for certain un-baconed critters? I'm aiming for as few child casualties as possible, given how high adult mortality rates have been (tantruming axelords are both magnificent and terrifying).
Maybe I should make the combat area necromancer-observed? That way I can pit living combatants in and have them reanimated directly if they don't get pulped.
Which reminds me: in your experience, are most fatal wounds to living combatants pulping hits to the upper body/head or "and tearing the brain" kinda hits? (important for deciding whether to drop things onto steel serrated disk traps then reanimate the gibs or using them as living dummies first). Also does rekilling sentient corpses seem to count for the "doesn't care about anything anymore" trait?
Quick question: Is there any practical difference in skill gain between 10 training spears per tile and 1 training spear per tile? Because I'm using 1 spear per tile and I just realised I may be shooting myself in the foot. The spears are also mostly linked at this point, so changing them to 10 per tile would be a significant investment in time.
I'm curious, what would your guys' opinion be of me using the corpses of the fort's own dwarves as training dummies before picking up the pulped pieces later to be entombed?
Wait, I've killed a lot of hydras.That's just wrong. Sigged.
*counts on fingers*
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
...why do your hydras have two more heads than mine?
Does that mean male hydras... oh god dammit Staalo I didn't wanna go down this road.
Sorry, I was just grabbing a drink, what were you saying?I used to strangle wild animals when I was thirsty and far from a town then drink while they were knocked out.
You're still talking about Dwarf Fortress, right? Right?
But, I suspect the fortress mode vampire AI will only use sleeping dwarves for feeding.
Btw, do I have cat blood on my face?
Why the featherwood bridge?
Oh, right. No double entendre intended. I don't know how that one slipped through when I edited the post several times already.
They are dangerous enough even when someone isn't giving them too much head.
This thread is my... Amour(k)?*Puts on pun-resistant Armor(k)*
:V
So how about them libraries? Can children read? What are our ideal dwarven values (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Personality_trait)? Should we instead turn them into mindless killing machines who care nothing for peace, friendship, family, and leisure? -50 Nature goes without saying.
I'm kind of torn on anger propensity. On one hand, it's extremely dorfy to have them be extremely unstable, rage-prone berserkers. On the other hand, it's not beneficial to the perfect solider. Decisions, decisions. Maybe we should encourage those already inclined, and put them in their own special squad: The A(rmok) Team?
I have been working more on "happy productive citizens with superpowers" angle with my forts. Military applications are only a bonus.A -«+wooden menacing spike+»- sharpened at both ends. It menaces with pig's head. On the object is an image of a dwarf and conch. The dwarf is holding the conch.
Now that the new version is out it looks like implementing Dwarven Child Care would again be fresh and interesting. With children acting more like children will it be like Caillou or more like Lord of the Flies? I'm suspecting the latter based on what I saw during my first adventuring session.
A -«+wooden menacing spike+»- sharpened at both ends. It menaces with pig's head. On the object is an image of a dwarf and conch. The dwarf is holding the conch.i rarely ever sig people...but.....
With children acting more like children will it be like Caillou or more like Lord of the Flies?I find Caillou far more irritating than Samneric.
dwarven coming of age:
"pick up that rock"
"ok"
"YOURE A MAN NOW"
The central premise of this new fort will be to force all dwarves to take a short swim each time they move from their bedrooms to their workshops. The main purpose of this is to train babies in swimming, thus increasing their stats and possibly achieving growth more extreme than what Staalo has already achieved, due to stats maxing out earlier.
The central premise of this new fort will be to force all dwarves to take a short swim each time they move from their bedrooms to their workshops. The main purpose of this is to train babies in swimming, thus increasing their stats and possibly achieving growth more extreme than what Staalo has already achieved, due to stats maxing out earlier.Minus "babies" part, it's pretty much Decontamination Chamber, which if implemented well, is a Good Idea. Just with a little more splash.
I think the main reason this topic has become inactive is that we've pretty much figured it out. Separate necessities out into areas only reachable with a bridge of repeating training spears over water. Put in children. Maybe add a hospital just in case.
Bah. Those nerfed zombies of .42.05 will make training with undead very tedious. They barely lasted few seconds before this but now they'll be almost worthless. I predict a manyfold increase to Required Kills Before Legendary (RKBL) ratio; lets just hope .42.05 sieges will be plentiful.Dwarf Fortress: where rabid schoolchildren are a safe and practical biological hazard disposal system.
It could still be workable to build the advanced training room on reanimating ground. Then simply dump all potentially zombifiable material into it and let the students mash it until it no longer reanimates. That way it also works as a safe disposal method in evil biomes.
Bah. Those nerfed zombies of .42.05 will make training with undead very tedious. They barely lasted few seconds before this but now they'll be almost worthless. I predict a manyfold increase to Required Kills Before Legendary (RKBL) ratio; lets just hope .42.05 sieges will be plentiful.Dwarf Fortress: where rabid schoolchildren are a safe and practical biological hazard disposal system.
It could still be workable to build the advanced training room on reanimating ground. Then simply dump all potentially zombifiable material into it and let the students mash it until it no longer reanimates. That way it also works as a safe disposal method in evil biomes.
I think the main reason this topic has become inactive is that we've pretty much figured it out. Separate necessities out into areas only reachable with a bridge of repeating training spears over water. Put in children. Maybe add a hospital just in case.
...and have them fight monsters and zombies barehanded for a decade once they toughen up a bit. A well-rounded education really helps later in life.
In the current version there seems to be a bug regarding playing children and burrows, but once that's settled out all the recent child care methods in this thread should work in .42.xx.
Did you do any test yet in terms of Lil`Urist playing with steel toy hammer to use as deadly weapon versus guest lecturer yet?
How about gold mugs before the fix?
But even wooden bolts should at least do something.I don't see the problem - Dwarven Children are learning to completely disregard wood as something that exists, which is much more dorfy.
Hmm...I suggest a monthly gladitorial-ish fight against a single, disarmed prisoner of some kind. Goblins should work perfectly. Those who die are not strong enough for our purposes >:)
How about low quality ballistæ firing low quality copper bolts?
The child army is mostly grown up now, and I'm in the process of gradually winding the project down. They'll still get to meet the clowns during their final class trip to the circus.
We can make the bolts out of past soldiers. Then we get a return on investment.
Were you going to do a Eugenics program from these above average stats adults?
Were you going to do a Eugenics program from these above average stats adults?Iirc attribute stat caps are inherited, not current attributes - albeit a test would be nice.
Perhaps use catapults as another intermediary if a "light" stone still bruises use a heavier stone. Who doesn't love throwing rocks in their childhood?Given the coinstar experiments, I'd fear for the paper-thin skulls.
Oh, hello. Looks like this thread was necroed recently (before it was promptly beaten to a pulp again by mitten clad little fists, I presume).
Catapults as a training tool is an interesting idea; another one could be automated minecart shotguns launching trash across the training room. Although I'd believe anyone resorting to this would have to accept a few casualties.
After Copperfell became unplayable I have been building small boarding schools into my later forts with moderate success. One trouble with this old method seems to be playing dwarves' tendency to remain in one place, oblivious to the world around them. Earlier when the children just milled around aimlessly they were constantly hit by training spears throughout their childhood but now they'll just dodge randomly until they end up on a tile where there are no spears and stay there. That tends to slow training speed significantly compared to earlier versions.
I have tried to tempt the children by placing the only source of toys right in the middle of the room; that helped somewhat, especially when they sometimes dropped their toys while dodging into the swimming pool. Placing some goblets into same place also managed to get children off their corpulent backends. But still, basic training isn't as... entertaining as it used to be.
Has anyone else had problems with dwarves forcing open locked and even lever-operated doors to get into the school? I've had to start using floodgates in place of doors.
Looks like Toady has added some new features to combat in .43.04; I've witnessed limbs being twisted by impact force and clothes being literally shredded apart by repeated attacks. This might make danger room training quite a bit more interesting in the future...Thats nice to hear, i really want to read about the Übersoldiers fighting against hell!
In other news, I got a new computer and noticed that I can play the old Copperfell save again. The game is plodding along with sedate 10 FPS but that's still better than crashing every game week or so. Maybe the kids will get their circus visit after all.
How much 7/7 water tile we talking about?
Have you used portable drains yet, those are so convenient.
Do platinum toys result in remarkable impact? platinum toy hammer anyone?
So danger rooms are no good any more, how about the coinstartm? Is that still effective or is it deadly too?