Bay 12 Games Forum

Sure. I mean, imagine if a dwarven priest of a Family or Hearth deity could do a ritual to increase the inclination of dwarves to pursue families. Imagine an incense burner workshop inside the temple and when people show up, they do a reaction that generates an incense cloud that adds the family-mindedness syndrome. Then you can use the aphrodisiacs for the lucky couple afterward.

I use a double raising bridge over a gap for my depot. Inner gate stays closed, caravan comes in, outer gate closes, inner gate opens.

Also, using the trenching method, you can create a long causeway that you either trench or wall off to the edge of your map to your fortress gate. You can fortify a wall for archers by building fortifications that will allow you to safely fire into the causeway area.

My current fort has a surface entrance area that's about 28x28 with a Gate-Depot-Gate. Outside the depot is the elite barracks where ambushers and thieves are met with horrible death.

Arrayed around the surface are cage traps 5 with five spaces in between them for foiling ambushes.


It's pretty effective for catching most critters and spotting ambushes. Current biome is a savage cold broadleaf forest so I have lots of wood for cages and meat from training and domesticating giant birds. Hooray for 36 meat giant ravens!

You should be using blocks instead of raw stone anyway. They're easier to transport, provide decent mason experience for little wealth increase and more can be stored in a stockpile.

I use blocks like this: Large Non-econ stone pile -> small non-econ mason shop pile -> Block Mason's shop (Shop just for making blocks) -> Primary Stone Block pile -> Construction Pile(s)

When you set up your construction block piles use 'w' to assign several wheelbarrows to it. Dwarves will wheel bins full of blocks to where ever you want. Trick is to let the primary pile fill completely before adding a secondary pile, that way you'll have full bins to be moved. Each tile can hold 5 blocks in a bin, so you need to have enough room for all the blocks so you can designate all of the wall completely without selecting blocks from another pile

You can limit the number of haulers per stockpile by assigning wheelbarrows. For instance, assigning 3 wheelbarrows will make it so only 3 haulers will ever add items to that stockpile at one time. You have to add them manually but I found them pretty useful for my block and metal bar stockpiles. Make smaller piles to get more than 3 barrows at once. So a 3x6 is split into 2 3x3s, each set up to use 3 wheelbarrows.

Wish you could cultivate wood. Would love to get a featherwood plantation started just for bins and wheelbarrows.

For my block stockpile I have 3 1x3 stockpiles being fed by a larger block stockpile that acts as an overflow for these 3. I then link each of the 3 smaller piles to a construction pile for where I'm constructing, a 3x3 stockpile. If the primary 3 stockpiles are full, 9 hauling jobs will be created to use 9 wheelbarrows to fill a 9 tile stockpile for a construction project.

Been a while since I did any modding. A lot more you can do with reactions and stuff now. Didn't even know there was a tag like that for plants.

A script could find a tag in a raw that says [NOT_WILD]. The script reads it, and removes all biome tags from the plant. Before a map is loaded, it re-adds the tags. That's one way I can think of.

I have this problem sometimes. The issue is ramps. Dwarves regard the tile of entry from a ramp as valid which makes the dwarf stand directly on to the lower (or upper) area. So the dwarf will continually attempt to build from above and then move down (or up) the ramp and occupy the building site, resulting in cancellation. In my experience you can control where a dwarf stands when building by making other building designations in the area where you don't want them to stand (like an extra wall) and then manually suspend them. You might try designating these false walls in the area from above where the dwarf enters, this will hopefully make them stand where you need them to stand.

Basically your dwarf thinks that since it can stand in the northwest corner from above and move into the build site, that it can build from there. It can't in practice so it tries to move into the pit thinking there's nowhere else to stand. The easiest way to deal with this is to always build from the southeast corner to the northwest if you want your dwarf to remain outside a structure. The opposite is true if you want them to remain inside instead.