Bay 12 Games Forum

Depending on how much you like to automate your fort, you will want more stockpiles. I like to have a rock stockpile, at least one wood stockpile, a cloth stockpile, and a designated furniture stockpile. Furniture shouldn't be too far from the (jeweler/mason/carpenter) workshops. The nice thing is that as soon as you have a stockpile for one or two specific items, any general stockpiles you have no longer need to accept that item, so they should be less cluttered. In practice, start with a general stockpile and begin specializing them out as you build your infrastructure.

You can also use stockpiles to customize some of the agricultural jobs. For example, create a stockpile for empty pots, a stockpile for pig tails, a still, and a farmer's workshop. Link the two workshops to the stockpiles as necessary, and create a work order for each one (disable general work orders). You can set the still to brew 8 plants once you have 12 pig tails, and the farmer's workshop to process 4 plants (or whatever ratio you wanted). Since you can't designate material for these jobs like you can with the mason workshop, I find this to help some. Admittedly it means a bit more micro, but it's invaluable if you're on an embark without above ground crops (such as a glacier) and want to maximize the return from the crops that you do have. A good compromise would be "this is my mill stockpile, this is my brew stockpile, this is my process to thread stockpile." Although if you do give this a shot, rename your stockpiles and workshops.

Those are both really good ideas, huh. The thing is no matter how sophisticated your fort is, there's always more to think ahead. Guess I'll read up on obsidian and its relevant mechanics. Thanks for the suggestions.

I feel obligated to mention the wiki's material science page. Idk whether it's still up to date, but I assume a good chunk of this still applies.

Tl;dr: weapon quality does matter (it gives a multiplier on accuracy), but weapon density has heavily diminishing returns. If I had to guess why:

Since momentum = velocity * mass, and lighter items can be swung faster, attack momentum is largely independent from weapon weight.

The momenta tables on this page also indicate this. I believe it is because the density itself is a small proportion added to a separate value:

M = 0.06 * Str * Vel / (1 + i_Size/(w_density*w_size) )

In other words, most of an attack's momentum comes from attack multipliers (like the x2 battle axes get), race size, and strength. Meaning that barring extreme circumstances or extremely small individuals, momentum increase from density is small.

It's worth noting that for a blunt attack to not be deflected, a weapon's material must have sufficient impact yield. However, since war hammers and maces have small contact area, this shouldn't be a problem. A platinum war hammer or mace should have almost three times the necessary impact yield to bypass this check against copper armor.

The matsci page is pretty dense but very informative, I'd recommend it.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I still appreciate making blunt weapons out of electrum, rose gold, or platinum, if only for cool points. If you wanted a good balance of impact yield and density, then my recommendation would be steel (very high impact yield) or bronze (for a solid mixture of density and IY).

I'm kind of assuming that the Axstut -> Axslut thing was intentional, but the "wrestling competition" got a really good chuckle out of me. It's all kind of in character and cohesive in a weird way. Normally DF isn't that raunchy, so this tickles my inner 14yo in a good way. DF continues not to disappoint.

As for the behavior in question, I can't quite tell if it's the bad kind of bad or the good kind of bad. It's definitely silly, which I think I'm ok with. If we're looking for realism, though, then yeah it's clearly an idiot plot. But... despite all the realism in DF, there's definitely quite a few empty heads. In my .47 adventure, there were three giants in a cave. So I battle the first one while stealthed, sneak up behind the 2nd (same room, facing the wall), who says death, something something... implying they could see the first dead giant (their mother, in this case), but somehow weren't aware that a battle had happened with a hostile.

Ran across a camp yesterday with a single elf. Assumed he was a fugitive werebeast, but he was quite friendly. After checking legends viewer, I found he had been framed for treason and exiled from his civilization. Quite glad that I [didn't] kill him!

the boss though might require giving them a noble status to entice out of doing this kind of work or convince them to let you join them for entertainment then make a musical troupe.

I actually did try to recruit him, but since he was the leader of his camp it didn't work. Didn't think to ask him to join me as a performer, but there are a few cyclopes left in that region so I may I'll revisit at some point.

Honestly with invaders turned on, I really dislike the caverns. It got to the point where I simply shut closed its access bridge, walled it off, and let the FBs and animal people have it out. Entertainingly enough, the FB all ended up losing, except for those who were literally blocked in place by excessive trees.

There was one spear-toting cave birdman whose skill hit legendary at some point. Those kinds of visitors really tickle my fancy.

It should be a limit on trees D: In narrow caverns, with just one or two years you cannot move anymore there xD

My last fort, I had two forgotten beasts who were straight up stuck because the part of the cavern they entered through was simply closed off. I nicknamed them Mr. Stuck and Ms. Stuck. Unlike pretty much every other FB, they were spared from the bloodthirsty bat people.

Now that you can start adventure mode with a party of adventurers, this makes training your whole party a little bit easier. Find a bridge or brook, do a lap with adventurer A, park him in the water, switch to adventurer B, do a lap, park in water. Rinse and repeat. Save often and try not to drown.

It helps the two characters' skills raise more or less evenly, and an equal amount of laps should raise endurance and toughness evenly between them, too.