Bay 12 Games Forum

(3) Things.

(1) Yaks (and other animals that need to eat) require grasses.  Grasses grow on the surface, but also on rough stone floors or underground soil, but only if you've breached the caverns (the mosses then start growing randomly, but will eventually fill everything out nicely).  Look on the wiki to see how much pasturage different animals need.

(2) Butchering is done at the butchers shop.  Once you designate the animal for butchering on the Z Animals screen, a dwarf with butchering enabled will come get the Yak and take it to the butcher shop, where it will be promptly struck down.  Be sure to also have a tanners shop nearby, so a dwarf with tanning enabled will take the raw skin and tan it.  Waste not and all.  A word of advice:  Put the butchers shop in a room with a door, that way if your haulers take too long getting to the meat, the miasma won't go beyond that room.

(3) All land animals use the same pathing.  If your dwarf can traverse it, so can a moose, a goblin, and a cat.  You can block animals movement by assigning them to a chain (they can move to adjacent squares), a cage (they get shoved in the cage) a pit (it just dumps them off the edge, if there's a path out, they can take it), or a pasture (they won't leave it voluntarily).  You can also block movement by "tightly closing" doors -- but they can still follow dwarves through when they pass through it.

Long story short:  Eat the yak, get chickens.  They don't need pasture.  Once you've secured aboveground pastures, or have breached the caverns, then you can start worrying about livestock like cows.

Vermin Corpses are Refuse, but if you're (D)umping them, then you must have a garbage dump activity zone (from the 'i' menu)

I'm not sure what you're asking.

It sounds like you're saying "as an alternative to ordered jobs through the manager, you can order jobs at the workshop exactly like if you had ordered them through the manager."

In many ways, dwarf fortress can never model real pre-gunpowder europe without massive overhauls.  For example, one grower working part time on a 16 tile farm (4 dwarves by 4 dwarves big) can, quite easily, feed 400+ dwarves, plus provide the raw materials for cloth and booze.  Even as recently as the late 1800s, it generally took one person to feed 2 people, in the best case scenario.  (wiki says in 1870 in the US 70-80% of the population was engaged in Agriculture - it's uncited, but matches up with what I remember from school).

Dwarf Fortress agriculture is closer to modern -- only 2-3% of americans are currently engaged in Agriculture.

This means that the average Dwarf settlement is much more productive than a human settlement of the appropriate time period, even assuming all other production figures are identical to humans.

There are a few.  Stonesense is a piece of visualization software.

Dwarf Therapist is probably the single most important helper program to get.  It allows you to quickly and easily assign and unassign jobs to your dwarves.  But that's pretty much it for adding to the interface.

DFHack is a collection of hacks, some of which will help to automate some of the more tedious parts of the interface

The workflow hack, for example, lets you set the minimum and maximum number of things your fortress should have for any given thing -- so it will add jobs when you run low, and remove them when you hit your max.  However, once you get used to the manager interface in the game, this looses a lot of it's luster, because it's not really all that hard to get everything you will ever need in any given category by year two or three.  You'll be amazed at how much food you can grow on 12 squares with one grower, especially once you start cooking.

The vein digger hack is probably the best hack out there, from a automate the tedious parts standpoint.  You put your cursor over one tile of a vein, trigger the hack, and the whole vein is designated to be dug out -- even the parts you can't see yet.

But, mostly DFHack is about hacks.  Making lava for your magma forges without having to transport it via insane pumpstacks, cleaning contaminants, making trees grow -- that sort of thing.

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So, there are two things I'm going to point you to:

The Lazy Newbs Pack and the Masterwork Mod.  Both come with bundled launchers that will launch the game and DFHack, dwarf therapist, and a few others.  Masterwork is a great mod still in progress that removes some things (like a million and one stone types that are virtually identical), but adds still more (such as more monsters, more weapons, more traps).  Both allow you to sub in a new font as a 'graphics pack' to make visualizing the game quite a bit easier if you're not already familiar with rogue-likes.  I would recommend Lazy Newbs Pack first, simply because when you run into questions (and you will), the answers will be on the Wiki and when you ask on the forum, most people will know what the heck you're talking about.

Once you can drive a fort into the ground intentionally, then you can start branching into mods, because then you can probably answer most of the questions that pop up yourself.

Easiest way to dramatically increase the volume of your stuff:  Cut your random junk stones into gems, and encrust with said gems.  You can get some really valuable rock tables encrusted in rock and rock and rock and rock and rock and rock (you get the picture), and all without using any metals.

It's not that the game ignores the popcap, it's that the liaison reports your forts population as of when he left, and when he comes back is when the migrants stop.

So you will pretty much always get at least 2 migrant waves, no matter what your popcap is set at, and you have a good chance of getting 2 waves when you hit your popcap.

So if your popcap is 80, and you have 79 dwarves when the liaison leaves the map, you're probably going to get two more waves, and, depending on fortress wealth, you could easily get 30 dwarves between those two waves, putting you way over your popcap.

Depends.  Everything except cooking separates out the seeds.

So processing a quarry bush gives you quarry leaves and seeds.  Cooking the quarry leaves doesn't also cook the seeds, since they're separate.

Turning Sweet Pods into Dwarven Syrup or Sugar also gives you seeds.  You can then cook the syrup or sugar.

Cooking Plump Helmets, however, destroys the seeds.  Brewing retains, though, so I doubt you'll ever run out of seeds, especially since you'll have likely built up quite a stockpile of them from the early days when you were growing plump helmets because they could be eaten raw.