Bay 12 Games Forum

Am now over 10 years into my first MW fortress. Great mod and thanks so much for creating it. Just wanted to post some feedback (v1.9.5)

The scriptorium seems to be broken. See my reply to Ivefan below. It would also be nice if the pages, essays and tomes were classed as books and not tools. Would really help in stockpile management.

The Great Magma Forge. Seems an odd way to have done things in that all items are made directly from raw ingredients. If you melt down volcanic items you end up with volcanic bars which you can't make anything out of. It would make more sense to add a smelting reaction to the forge to make bars and then use those to make the items.

Volcanic is not a material option available when setting up military uniforms.

Some magma buildings do not have any blocked tiles meaning there is an open magma pit for dwarves to fall into. It also causes some confusion about where you should dig the pit so that the workshop has magma access.

Some children have some labors enabled. I queue up items to be created and my legendary crafters sit around because a 3 year old decides to pitch in. They can be turned off by the Dwarf Therapist cheat mode or you can restrict the workshops to specific dwarves, but still..

Slade Clothing. It's worn by invaders from time to time. The invader gets killed and a dwarf likes the look of it and puts it on. Cue the dwarf moving at a fraction of his normal speed and short of using DFhack to unassign everyone's clothing or putting him in the military, I know of no way to get it off of him until it wears out.

Few other problems that I can't remember right now but overall I really like what's been done.

@Ivefan I had the same problem with the scriptorium not being able to write essays or tomes. They did become available to make early on. Looking through the raws there was some sort of tool involved in the process that had no name and sure enough my stocks included some items called '  tool'. These were quickly used up and then I could not write anything else. Nor could I find any way to make more. So I edited the raws to remove components from writing essays. It works, however writing a single essay now creates 750 in a single go. I can probably fix that by adding a reagent like a log.
There is also the problem with the new hauling changes that if you need an item in a bin and some dwarf picks the bin up to haul something, that item is now unavailable until the bin is returned..

I always have waterfalls coming down in heavy traffic areas with no problem.

First tunnel up from where you want the waterfall all the way to the river but stop a single tile away from actually breaching the river. Use up/down stairs to traverse z-levels since you will need access once you have finished tunneling.

Make sure there is at least 1 flat tile between the last wall at the river and the stairs going down. That's because you are going to construct a wall here. You'll then carve that wall into a fortification. This will stop any creatures entering the fortress via the waterfall. I have no idea if this blocks fish as well since there is no point to fishing until Toady gets the fish to repopulate.

You will now want to construct either paved roads or floors along the entire tunnel. This will stop trees popping up and blocking the flow. Once everything is ready, put in a floodgate so that you can shut the waterfall off if you ever need to. I prefer for it to be close to the waterfall rather than the river as then it will stop the waterfall almost immediately.

Once you are ready to set everything going, all you have to do is channel the final square away from the surface and let the river into the tunnel.

Now for the drainage. I keep to a 3x3 grated area but with the center square left unchanneled. You have to do this unless you want to leave that centre square uncovered which is not recommended. To make sure that there is no overflow, channel down at least 2 z-levels. Not only does this guarantee no mud, but the water pressure from the extra z-level means that your drainage tunnel will be enough to cope with any amount of water falling down in to it.

Your drainage tunnel can then be extended to the edge of the screen where you carve a fortification into the last un-mineable square to allow the water to drain off-screen. As with the first tunnel, you should construct floors or paved roads along the length of the tunnel to prevent trees from popping up. A faster way is to channel the tunnels instead of mining them. Nothing will grow on a slope. I always floor the tunnels as I prefer the look of them.

One extra tip I have is to mine out a side square or two along those tunnels. Build a floor and then put a floodgate into it. That way, once you have everything running, if you need a water source for something else sometime in the future, you can just mine a tunnel to the other side of the floodgate, link it to a lever, and take your water from the already existing water system without even having to shut anything down. I sometimes do this if I want to set up an obsidian making room later on, or flood out a large area to create a safe underground tree-growing area or extensive pastures.

I always set my waterfalls up fairly early as I use the water system to both fill up my well reservoirs and provide mud for my underground farm plots. I usually set up 2 waterfalls coming down in the middle of one of the most heavily traveled passages in my fortress, right at the doors to my main dining hall/meeting area. If I set the centre square that the water falls on to as restricted traffic, I have no problems whatsoever.

Hope you find this useful.