Bay 12 Games Forum

So I like to play generation forts with no migration.  I hadn't played for a while, so I picked up the newest version with the latest LNP.

I'm discovering that no-migration forts are unfun because dwarves eventually stop taking non-workshop jobs.  They won't dig, cut down trees, or haul.  My latest fort, the last caravan almost left with nothing because only one dwarf would haul items to the depot.  I can't dye cloth because the dwarves won't haul the many, many empty bags in the fort to the empty-bag stockpile linked to my quern.  However, they will plant seeds, harvest plants, construct whatever I ask in workshops, and visit the temple.

Is this a matter of unmet needs?  They get unfocused and/or distracted after a couple of years, because setting up a new fort with only 7 dwarves doesn't leave a lot of extra time for me to cater to their needs.  They'll still take workshop jobs without a problem.

My first fort took 4 years for the dwarves to go on strike, and my second one took only 2.  There's no possible way for me to get a needs-fulfilling fort up and running in only 2 years, and I'm not even sure that unmet needs are the problem in the first place.  Is this intended behavior, or a bug of some kind?  Are generation forts just infeasible these days?

The short of it is this: in .42.06, pasture management has become an absolute chore.  Animals don't move around at all except to relocate from one patch of grass to another.  This means that there is near-zero traffic and near-zero trampling of live and dead weeds, leading to the pasture becoming absolutely choked with weeds if I don't intervene.

The only way I know to deal with this is to construct dirt roads over the weeds, either in 10x10 blocks, or individually over each weed tile.  Neither one is optimal, as option 1 destroys good grass as well as weeds, and option 2 is incredibly tedious.

Is there a better way?  Is there a way to make grazers move around and trample stuff the way I remember them doing in .40.24?  Areas where my dwarves path through a pasture have some of the healthiest pasture in my game, but I can't make them be everywhere.  Or is there a way to make dead weeds disappear in less than a bazilion years?  I seriously don't remember this being such an issue in the prior version.  I recall areas where there were no animals becoming very weedy, but a pasture with even a few animals would remain good because the animals would trample the weeds and get rid of them.

What causes this?  Work has become really sporadic.  There are queued jobs and these dwarves register as either No Job or a green worship job, but they won't pick up work.


This happened once on another fort last year, where I couldn't get anyone to do anything, and I just abandoned it.  I am super-happy with this one, though, so why won't anyone but the glassmaker work?  Labors are enabled.  I tried disabling and then re-enabling wall/floor construction, because those floors are the most important task right now.  No change.  If I cancel/re-build the floors, occasionally a dwarf (just one) will come out to work on it.

Sometimes I can wake the dwarves up.  I ordered five querns to mill plants.  The dwarves hopped to that, and then those five dwarves deigned to go complete those floors.  Then I built 3 more floors.  Those floors are being ignored.

What's up?  What causes this?  Is it fixable without going back to an earlier autosave?

Several years ago, game time, the human caravan stopped showing up.  I didn't think anything of it, because stuff happens in the world sometimes.  However, about two years after the last human caravan, I suddenly got a series of announcements telling me that a black bear had guzzled about 200 units of booze.  No booze of mine was outside the fortress.  I zoomed to the spot and found a black bear unconscious and dying of alcohol poisoning at the gate of the defensive wall.

After the most recent dwarven caravan left, I found some wagon logs and a pile of goods at the same location at the gate.  Apparently a wagon was scuttled there.  It had to be the most recent caravan, because two grazing animals in cages were still alive in the pile.

There's nothing visible at that spot, or anywhere else on the map that looks unusual.  No combat reports or announcements were provided to me.  I have a hypothesis now that the last human caravan, or part of it, is somehow stuck in limbo, and that's why the caravan stopped showing up (because the game thinks one still exists); the black bear stole invisible-to-me liquor from the invisible-to-me wagon.  The dwarven caravan narrowly escaped this fate by scuttling one of its wagons.

Is this something that has happened to anyone else?  What could be going on?

Is there a way to track down the exact cause of a crash?  This fort is 67 years old and has suddenly become extremely unstable.  One game year ago this happened and I reverted to an earlier seasonal autosave and gave up two seasons of progress, which seems to have temporarily resolved the problem.  Now it is happening again.

To be clear, I'm not interacting with the game when it crashes.  I load the game and let it run, and it sometimes runs for a few days and then crashes, and sometimes it crashes immediately, but it always crashes and always fairly soon after load.

It's probably the good ol' tree growth crash, but how can I 1. find out for sure, and 2. locate the tree that is causing the crash and destroy it?  If I have to abandon this fort I'll probably just abandon the game instead.  This instability is completely unreasonable.

Is there any reason to prefer short swords over battle axes for some applications?

Would anyone mind explaining for what reason a prepared meal is labeled as "Not edible," and how I can avoid creating inedible prepared meals?