Bay 12 Games Forum

Does the assigned lever trick not work for children? I know there's definitely a way to isolate kids.

There may be, but children cannot perform labours, and "Pull Lever" would technically be a labour. I could have gone into Dwarf Therapist and enabled child labours, but that would have been cheating.

To prevent disaster, since I typically have 50 idlers when there are no big projects going on, I ordered a dump on a large amount of stone in the mines. That way there were fewer chances an important dwarf would get bitten or otherwise attacked if the child turned.

I considered using burrows, but previous experience suggests (and the wiki confirms) that, unless it is a Civilian Order, burrow assignments do not affect movement, so I don't think children would respect them. I'll experiment with this later, though.

Thanks for the advice, I'll try something tonight after work.

I have started playing Adventure Mode recently (not the newest version, but still 0.40.xx) and I seem to be missing some key aspects that aren't explained well enough on the wiki. My main experience with RPGs has been Oblivion and Skyrim, where quests are neatly organized in a topic log and have goal checklists and will tell me on-screen when I do something important. Clearly this doesn't happen in DF.

I can work the combat system just fine (well... you know) and the keys are becoming familiar to me, but the questing system so far has been totally opaque. I am told about a camp where bandits live. I go to the camp and kill said bandits. I tell someone about how I killed them, and they say "It was inevitable." And then nothing happens. The "quest" doesn't go away, the camp stays where it is. I can still ask people about the camp and they might say some guys got killed, but apart from that there's no feedback.

I've got to be missing something, right?

The Roc seems to have gotten into a top-level mine shaft through a lake. I didn't know that was possible, but there you go.

My militia should now at least be able to catch up to it. Whether or not they have the advantage is yet to be seen.



Let's hope they get here soon.

Nefola Thiyiramithe Tise Equuyi the Roc has come - apparently - to fly randomly around the map, with an occasional break to eat one of my Dralthas and collide into my militia.



Look at him up there. Scheming.

Anyway, I don't want to hole up in my fortress forever, lest the cave adaptation get any worse. Does anyone have any advice for taking it down?

I do have an unrelated problem, anyway.

My announcements keep getting erased. After a full page is filled (possibly even before that), it just scraps the whole thing and starts blank. I can never go back more than one page, because there is never more than one page of history recorded. Have I got some invisible settings messed up?

Surprisingly, this one can't destroy my doors. Stone beats fire? Anyway, I'll give manual weapon traps a try, although my metal industry is somewhat backed up at the moment and I don't want to use wood (obvious reasons). In the meantime I'll set this place up as a drowning pit for fun times later on.

So I'm being 'visited' by a forgotten beast, and it's made of fire. My immediate thought was that it should be easy, since fire is fragile, so of course I send in a bunch of inexperienced hammerdorfs. For some reason only one dorf came to fight it, and the others sat around and did nothing. Next thing I know there are five unreported corpses in the caves and the beast is uninjured. (I later found out that they chose to fight it one-by-one.)

Luckily I've got some stone doors to protect the rest of my fortress, and I recruit some more dorfs and train them in a danger room. The next year, I send down eight Hammer Lords (forgot to give them shields, oops) and what do they do? One by one they fight it, while the rest wander around acting like they can't reach the kill order. A firey arm gets knocked off in one of the fights but the general outcome is not success. Three corpses later, I lock the doors and retreat.


After some reflection, I think the problem may be with the clouds of smoke and fire that this beast flail around whenever it fights; they may be screwing with the paths somehow, or preventing my soldiers from seeing their kill. Potential solutions involve building manual traps like spears into the floor and luring the beast into them, or setting something up with floodgates and hidden niches where the soldiers pop out and all notice the beast at the same time. But I'm not sure if this will work. Drowning it might be a better idea.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas?