Bay 12 Games Forum

I turned down a baron once.  I lost the ability to request goods from the caravan.  I wanted a ton of leather and it was a nuisance.  I accepted the barony when it was next offered.

Being commodity poor can be a pain, but there is almost always a workaround. It's just a matter of figuring it out.

Oh no. You shouldn't be attacking angry animals. Only pick the most benign, harmless ones who wont attack back.

Apparently wombats can be bad news.

It's odd to think you're having this problem.

Dwarf, legendary+5 in mining, fighting, observation; middling in dodging; agility >50 on Dwarf Therapist scale; had been crossing a 7/7 water-filled "brook" four-tiles wide without any problem for the last thirteen years; and she runs headlong off a bridge and into a channel with 7/7 water -- ramps not removed, so she was on a ramp -- and drowns faster than you can say "Jack Robinson." Probably more than 50% of my pump operators have been washed away and drown. All but one of the survivors were washed off and canceled due to dangerous grounds.

I don't have the processing power for big forts, so all dwarves are military dwarves, and I assume their gear adds to their clumsiness, but even dwarves in civilian clothes will trip and fall off anything into anything at any opportunity. 

There's something seriously wrong with the armor- and shield-skill leveling, by the way. Not sure why I'm bitching at you about it, but I regularly have seven-dwarf squads train 2-minimum for a decade and their armor skill is only half-way to legendary. My civilization is getting displaced by goblins faster than the Vandals were displaced by the Huns, and I haven't seen a single invader in ten years.
     "A'right, goblins, it's time we trounce those rubes at Wavelashed. There's only twenty-four of them, and one of those is an infant. Who's with me?!"
     "Uh, sorry, boss, but they don't call themselves The Veiled Tools for nuthin'. Them's some bad mutha--"
     "Shut your mouth!"
I'm trying to get a good foundation before I re-try my candy-cane-finding scheme. (I got two good hits last time, and while I was vaguely aware that fire imps were a thing, I had never imagined what they and crundles could to fps.) I've no clue how to train up armor & shield without actual combat. I guess I have to give the new buffoons a few years to train up and then go kick a hornets' nest.

sigh  The fellas at the Mountainhome were like, "Yeah, take charge of the expedition, it's easy. Everybody else does the work, you just tell them where to dig." And here I am, contemplating attacking a human necromancer tower just to prep the team to dig deep and kick up a dang Forgotten Beast. I could be a legendary engraver by now, but I had to listen to those jerks...

I've never messed with water much because everybody who gets near it dies. But I decided to water my badlands and see if something grew. I raised a platform for a windmill, put the screw pump at ground level next to the brook, and there's no option to turn the pump on or off. It just runs. And runs. And runs.

I was able to make a channel break feeding back into the brook, so the fort won't flood, and it is neat to see; however, water and fps don't play nice, plus I want to muddy up the rocky ground. So, how do I turn it off? Is the obvious deconstruction the only option?

For future reference, are there gear linkages that allow switching on/off, or is build it and take it down the only option for pump control.

Thanks in advance.

New fort, trying to find candy wiki description. Computer can't handle much, so I have a population soft cap at 15. Three kids born in the fort puts me at 18 dwarves. I keep rejecting a baron, and suddenly realize that I haven't heard from the humans or my civ in years. (At war w/ elves, so there is an upside.)

One dwarf killed by forgotten beast that snuck into the fortress. One dwarf killed when he tripped into magma. Two legendary dwarves killed when the floor they were channeling collapsed and they went into the magma as well. And now I can't pump water into that magma pool because a new web-shooting FB is lurking outside my pump room, and I don't know how to deal with that. Another in-game decade spent trying to trap the dang thing.

Fourteen dwarves. Several seasons with not even a mention that no migrants arrived; I've got space for one.

And now somebody stole a crappy named bronze shield that I'm glad to be rid of. I don't want the thief, who confessed, beaten to death; I don't want the fortress slaughtered by an FB because of a weak link -- so everybody but the children are seriously lethal.

Fourteen dwarves. Three of whom have parents in the fort. Is that enough for a breeding population? Sigh.

It depends on the offset of the grid.

Kill me now. LOL. My guess was that the embark region is an 8x8 of tiles_2x2, so that a move of one tile_2x2 is two clicks of movement u-m/h-k, which would keep me on the grid. I'm not assuming that is correct, nor that my description makes sense. From that I'm guessing that I have a map that is 2x2 of tiles_2x2 if and only if I move my embark square in even steps in the region. Again, I'm guessing about that. My Dwarven Geometry* locates 16 centers of 16 squares, but my foundation isn't bedrock.

To get this think about the possibility of the centre 2x2 squares being the larger cane-bearing square.... My limited experience in finding candy-canes suggests that the actual cane square is further divided into a 2x2 square.... These smaller squares (64 in total on a 4x4 embark)....

Okay, that's still better than completely random, assuming the center-of-the-square thing is still correct. I've seen it scattered about forums, the wiki, and the reddit threads, but we'll have to see how it goes.

I set up my grid, mined it out -- thank goodness for macros -- and drilled down dead nuts into a candy cane. It's hard to argue that n=1 is a good sample set. My grid is easy to subdivide, my pop has a soft cap of 15, my visitors are capped, my invaders are capped, I'm mining as little as possible, and I'm not collecting tons of stuff, so hopefully my fps will stay high.

I can't keep track of where things are nor can I picture the geography of the magma sea, so the grid is my main hope of sanity. Like gold, the stuff I'm looking for is basically useless; if I can't make kit for 15 military dwarves, now 18 when the kids grow up, what use is it? But finding it is an itch I must scratch. Gods, friends, drink, and a little work seem to make for a happy fort. Adam Smith would be proud.

*Have you read "Taxicab Geometry"? Construct a circle in Dwarven Geometry, i.e. the set of points equidistant from a center point. Dwarven eyes may be round to them, but to us they look square. Kinda creepy when you think about it.

Well, defining overlapping rooms for every armor stand and marking each with TIQ made some sort of difference. Shields and armor were hung on the stands. And off-duty dwarves seemed to be at least partly kitted out because when I set them inactive for manpower, my fort came to a standstill as they all went to drop off their stuff in the barracks. And even though the dwarves were being more responsible about their stuff, their weapons and armor still showed up for trade. It was a small fort with few items, so it had to be their gear because other weapons and armor didn't exist.

That's all I got because other things happened that presented an option to me: Delete and start over, or take an axe to my laptop. My fifteen-dwarf fort, part of a large and vibrant civilization, got a queen less than a year in. She wasn't satisfied with her rooms no matter how many lead statues I stuffed them with, because that's all I had, and she kept saying I wasn't meeting her production edicts, even though I was. Then I got invaded, and since the squad-move-station just doesn't work -- My last fort I had 41 dwarves who were legendary+5 in discipline and twenty of them got slaughtered by clowns because they either jumped the gun or wandered off to move a trinket from one stockpile to another -- I made burrows at my defensive choke points, set the squads to defend burrows, and activated the alerts, at which point EVERYBODY turned into civilians and wandered off. Luckily the invaders wandered off as well, so I turned off the alerts, deleted the alerts and the burrows since starting fresh seems to be a necessary step for every problem I have, and EVERYBODY donned their military kit and stood around defending burrows that didn't exist. So I disbanded the squads, and I guess they were heartbroken that they had to turn in their regimental neckties or something, because they just stopped working. I hope it hurt when their universe got deleted, because they are bastards.

I hate this game so much.

Possible that you didn't set the military clothes and weapons to replace their civilian items, and insist no substitution? Or would that still have no effect on the outcome?

I go back and forth with over/replace, trying to solve the perennial equipping problem, so I'm sure I've had all four combos of over/replace exact/partial when selecting items for trade.

Interesting new development, though: I went through and set ALL the armor stands and weapon racks as rooms covering the same enclosed space, and hit TIQ for individual and squad equipment storage, and I'm now seeing stuff on the armor stands. Like, most, if not all armor stands. I've never seen that. The weapon racks are clean. Although as we speak I caught someone taking a steel mail shirt off an armor stand to store in a stockpile. And another. And a steel gauntlet is on an armor stand but tasked for stockpiling.

I've seen an adult take a toy from a child and stockpile it only to have the kid pick it up, and then an adult takes the toy again and stockpiles it. Rinse and repeat.

Between the thirty or so clowns I have trapped in the first-layer cavern and my mismanagement, my FPS is not good at all. I think the dwarves' universe may be slated for a bad case of vacuum decay. I can start over assigning stands & racks, eliminating stockpiles for anything matching military equipment, and see how that goes. I think I can be happy with what I've done and start anew.