Bay 12 Games Forum

I modded boots to be [SHAPED], which was supposed to help with getting them to wear footwear under them, and then I modded chausse to be available to dwarves and also so it's an armor item and thus not reserved by civilians. And of course it didn't help much.

Out of my whole squad of 8, literally 0 of them were able to figure out how to wear 1 chausse and 1 boot each on both feet. I'm using exact matches and replace clothing. I started out with boots as the more important of the two and when I produced chausse after they were already wearing boots, all of them wore a chausse on 1 foot but not the other. When I started producing more boots some of them ended up worse than before, namely wearing chausse on each foot, but a boot on only 1 of them.

I also modded mittens to be military-only (as in, [ARMORLEVEL:1]) and they don't seem to be struggling with those. Footwear is however still a nightmare. Backpacks and flasks also tend to be problematic, as they will sometimes get a [material] specific backpack or flask assigned (according to Dwarf Therapist) and the only fix I was able to figure out for this was discharging and drafting them again.

Are there any known solutions to this, including modding?

I recently got back into the game after a break of what feels like two years, and I'm trying to figure some stuff out that may have changed or that I've forgotten.

1. I'd like to get rid of nobles systemically. As in, no killing them off or anything, just to keep from having them appointed or elected in my forts. I'm fine with one of my starting seven being expedition leader for the foreseeable future. I avoid acquiring holdings (I understand I have to mount expeditions for that, and I just haven't even looked into that feature so far), which is supposedly how I'm going to keep from becoming a barony and the like. Correct me if I'm wrong here or if that's the way to go.

I took out the [ELECTED] tag from the mayor position and this apparently didn't work as expected: one guy just appointed himself mayor as if nothing happened. Should I get rid of the mayor position altogether, or will that mess up things during worldgen?

2. Is it finally possible to give my civilian dwarves uniforms that don't collide with equipment automatically assigned to miners, woodcutters, and hunters?

3. Any tricks or mods that enable me to force prepared meals to have two to four unique ingredients? Roasts made of minced dwarven sugar, minced dwarven sugar, minced dwarven sugar, and minced dwarven sugar were funny at first but got old fast.

4. Thread made out of hair doesn't seem to get stored in cloth stockpiles. Is there any way to correct this, or do I have to manage it via garbage dumps?

Thanks in advance for any help.

1. How do I tweak likely relative populations and site numbers of civs? I tried fiddling around with these entity tags:
[MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER:100]
[MAX_POP_NUMBER:10000]
[MAX_SITE_POP_NUMBER:1200]

The results are completely erratic. Most of the time humans are the most populous, sometimes it's elves. Since I'd like to make it easy to embark surrounded by hostile civs (I also introduced a giant civ that's crudely modded from the goblin entity), I'd like them to outnumber dwarves, humans and elves but not to the point where they usually go extinct.

Maybe introducing more entities would make this easier? I'm thinking that this would seriously increase the risk of non-hostile civs going extinct though.

2. How do I make sure other civs are hostile, other than giving all of them the [BABYSNATCHER] tag? I'd like them to be hostile towards each other as well, whereas making them baby snatchers would cause them all to team up against those without the tag.

2a. Does the [BABYSNATCHER] tag still work for, well, snatching babies post-worldgen? I literally never see those anymore, despite making sure that my progress triggers allowed for them to actually show up before I get sieges:
[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POPULATION:1]
[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PRODUCTION:3]
[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE:0]
[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POP_SIEGE:1]
[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_PROD_SIEGE:5]
[PROGRESS_TRIGGER_TRADE_SIEGE:0]

Thanks in advance. I guess I should point out that I'm playing 43.05.

All right, so I haven't played the game in years and I'm a bit out of the loop. Plus I forgot a lot and am going to need to pick your brains for a refresher.

1. Shouldn't all otherwise butcherable animals be available for, well, butchering, whenever they die of reasons other than old age? I had a couple of stray livestock that died in an accident, the corpses were available but were never butchered. They weren't even outside, plus I had gathering refuse from outside enabled anyway, so that couldn't be a factor. I also seem to have hunted animals left to rot outside, but maybe this is a size consideration? As in, are things like owls that only leave a skull when butchered supposed to be ignored?

I vaguely recall butchering horses and possibly other animals used in sieges way back when. Meaning that they were clearly not hunted or slaughtered but killed by traps, siege weapons or by dwarves. That seems inconsistent with the behavior mentioned about. Unless the relevant factor is whether they got killed directly or indirectly by dwarves?

2. I read that pond turtles are guaranteed to spawn in even dwarf-made bodies of water above ground, yet I always get "there is nothing left to catch in the (...) swamps" even when trying to fish in ponds that were there on map since the beginning. This hasn't just happened in evil biomes, so that shouldn't be a factor.

3. I guess this is a display bug, but what's up with prepared meals sometimes showing "not edible" in the description? They seem to be getting eaten without issue, but should I be worried that somehow dwarves will starve if they eat them?

Thanks in advance for any input.

EDIT:
4. Invaders: I got goblins listed as my neighbors during embark but they didn't show up in this game at all despite me being close to the end of my second year and just having gotten a titan to attack me. What's the deal here?

I've modded humans and elves to be hostile (via the addition of baby snatcher and item thief tags), giants to form civilizations (by pasting the goblins' entity with a few changes) and also modded kobolds so they don't go extinct, though I removed their active season tags midgame. I've also removed any relevant ambusher and sieger tags so they hopefully go straight from thieving/snatching to sieging.

Most contact I had was from kobold thieves. It seemed as though having one race "attack" you disables all other races from doing the same until next season. Thus I disabled their active season tags in hopes of seeing more of the other hostiles. So far I had a few pairs of elven, human, goblin and giant thieves, so it seemed to work correctly.

But now there's a couple of problems: in autumn of my fifth year I had giants siege me. I fought them off, saved and disabled the dwarves' active season tag (since I only traded to meet migrant and progress trigger requirements) and for the following couple of seasons I had no contact with goblins, elves and humans whatsoever (I gave each of them one active season in hopes of getting variety, so I don't get attacked by only one race for a year). Now it's exactly one year after my first and only siege, and the giants came back. But they scaled down their operations: they went from sieging to thieving again.


What I'm asking here is: is this to be expected? Or are there possible pitfalls in modding in hostility that I may not have been aware of?


EDIT: I'm looking at my progress triggers now. I set values there for trade as well (I remember only using population and production factors back in 40d) but seeing as how meeting one of those triggers is supposed to be enough, I don't see how that explains my attackers being so lackadaisical. But I'm mentioning this in case the mechanics have changed or this trigger is known by someone to behave strangely.

UPDATE: And I'm now getting ambushed by giants despite there being no ambusher tag to be found in their entity. This doesn't make the least bit of sense anymore.

I tweaked my entities here and there, the most important change being probably that I made humans, elves, and goblins all baby snatchers and item thieves. Then I also included a giant entity, based mostly on goblin data.

Now I've embarked and checked the civ screen. My king consort is apparently a giant administrator. This sparked my curiosity so I exported my worldgen data and looked at the populations. Apparently, dwarves are virtually extinct with a mere 35 (not counting my starting 7) surviving, while goblins, elves, and giants seem to be the most populous. What's particularly interesting is that giants seem to have thrived best in a dwarven town (I modded everyone to settle in towns so I could use shops when playing as a dwarf) called Fellmachines:

   1110 giants
   209 elves
   402 cats
   10 donkeys

This is in sharp contrast to populations of native giant towns being almost consistently in the double digits.

I then looked at my world history and virtually every ruler is listed as having no children (did a search for that phrase and it turned up 4213 hits). Most of them had never married either.


Does any of this make sense? I thought this thing about no children was caused by excessive baby snatching and that maybe it didn't list abducted ones, but that's farfetched. And more importantly, it wouldn't explain why barely any ruler got married.

I've modded blowguns to be usable by dwarves. I know they are probably far inferior to crossbows and bows, but they, and especially their use by little people, remind me of Diablo 2 fetishes and that makes me smile.

But so far the blowgunner bandits I've encountered held stacks of blowdarts in their off hand. Is there a way to make them use quivers?

First I've played for around ten years with invaders off. From when I enabled them some five years ago, I've had a couple of minotaurs, one cyclops, three or four forgotten beasts and some miscellaneous cave dwellers attack me. Doesn't seem like much, but I'm not really complaining about that. What I have a problem with is not getting enough goblins and kobolds.

I've so far had one measly goblin ambush numbering fewer than ten men, and a good dozen kobolds, though never more than three at a time, try to attack/loot my fortress. Needless to say, I'm pretty disappointed. I've since removed their respective babysnatcher and skulking tags, as well as set their population progress triggers to one for the purposes of sieging (which I've more than got covered, according to the wiki, due to having a population of over 50). Either this does nothing, or I need to generate a new world, though I assumed I didn't based on being able to modify active seasons on the fly.