Bay 12 Games Forum

Ideally the hook would be able to write the commit message so that it has the current game date in it...

Man, I can't believe nobody has mentioned burrows.

Get to the burrows menu from the main one by pressing [w]. Add a new burrow with [a]. Press [Enter] to start defining it.

Place two corners of the burrow, much as though you were designating mining tiles, only burrow tiles have to be visible. You want to place the burrow so it covers all the tiles that you do want your dwarves to be in, and none of the tiles you don't. This may be slow, but at least you can designate across z-levels. Draw a big ol' box that contains your whole fort, then press r to enter erase mode and trim off the bits of the box that aren't in your fort.

Now hit [ESC] to exit, then [c] to add citizens to the burrow. A citizen of a burrow can only path within the burrow. I'm thinking you'll want to add everybody.

Feel free to re-edit the burrow after adding citizens. You can use this feature to selectively permit portions of the outdoors.

I know I'm going to regret asking, but losing is fun, so...

I've got a new embark, Delldye, in a fairly hospitable clime. Thus-far all my fortresses have been all about surviving safely and have therefore gotten a bit dull and I eventually forgot about them.

What should I do with this one instead?

Dwarf Fortress Map Compressor is throwing SIGSEGVs all over the place so here's a plain PNG region map: https://zacharyspector.com/delldye.png.
Region parameters: https://zacharyspector.com/delldye-param.txt

When first learning the game, it's necessary to read each menu item and think about it--even if most of the time what you think is "I don't know what that means, I'll go back to it later".

This is a fact that's not likely to change, as arranging a scenario where a given option is *not* needed would require laborious manual map design or new world generators. Those are only sensible options if the game is feature-complete.

Nonetheless there's a simple way to make the process of learning the interface much easier, and it doesn't even require an overhaul of the in-game help system. Every single menu in the game should be navigable with the +, -, and Enter keys on the number pad.

The most obvious benefit is the cognitive savings of not having to look up a key mapping in order to select a given option. This may not sound like much to the sort of person who's already proficient in Dwarf Fortress, but it's significant.

Another benefit is that if you get the player scrolling thru menus early on, you have them already in a pattern of behavior that requires them to consider the meaning of the option that the menu cursor is on, as they move it about.

Right now it's pretty easy to read a menu too quickly and not notice that there's a difference between "stockpiles" and "stocks," for instance, and proceed to play the game wholly ignorant of the stocks screen. If the player doesn't want to look up shortcuts, and "lazily" goes through the menu by scrolling it, that kind of mistake is less likely to happen, because it's no longer practical for them to skim the menu.

The sort of person who actually wants to memorize the shortcuts should still have them, of course. But, just because I'm interested in a complex game like Dwarf Fortress, doesn't mean I want to memorize a bunch of arbitrary shortcut keys. I'm mainly interested in the game world. Perhaps I have a much better memory for rules than for keys.

Incidentally, this feature would make it feasible to play the game with a gamepad. I tried to do this once, and just about mapped the top-level menu and view scrolling inputs, but I couldn't get the control scheme to cover the various modes in the designate menu for instance.

Well, yes, I did that with [T]. But when I do it with [K] I find that there's a Cloth Bin there, with adamantine strands in.

Somebody collected the strands into the bin and then dropped it.

What the hell.

I dunno how practical it is to actually buy a computer with this criterion, but the bus speed seems rather important. My eeePC with a crappy 900MHz CPU still got better performance than my "gaming optimized" Intel laptop because it happened to have a faster front-side bus.

I don't think it would be fun to have realistically simulated bodily wastes. However, I do want to build some elaborate plumbing for my fortress, beyond wells. So filth should be handled in an abstracted sort of way, like-a so:

Toilets are built in much the same way as wells. They won't work if they're not over water. Before going to sleep, your dwarf will try to use the nearest toilet; if it's easier to go outside the fortress, he'll do that instead. If he succeeds in reaching either toilet or outdoors in time, nothing happens, but if he goes to sleep before pooing, there's a 50/50 chance that he will start generating miasma. Just miasma, there's no actual waste item.

The plumbing needs to drain somewhere in order to work. For this, I think it would work best if the water tile under the toilet were marked "dirty" after use, and if there's already a dirty water tile under the toilet (or well!), it will not function.

Would this still be too repulsive?

I dreamed that the z-axis was no longer restricted to 32 layers (or whatev). So I happened upon a bottomless pit and decided to zoom all the way to the center of the planet. It was really bright.

I remember hitting K to see what the planet's core was made out of, but I don't remember what it was called. It was represented by a buncha X'es.