Bay 12 Games Forum

I embarked in a zone with an aquifer, partially because I like having an infinite source of water and couldn't find a good spot with a brook but mostly because it seems like 80% of the worlds I generate are covered in the damn things. In order to pierce it, I used 12 pumps to dig a 3 tile wide staircase and a perpetual motion machine (they still work!) to power it. Now I have 12 enormous wooden corkscrews leftover.

Is it worth even putting them in a weapon trap? I know that the combat physics rewrite made material the dominant force on the battlefield. Is it even possible for a wooden corkscrew to pierce the iron armor goblins wear?

In the most recent version, DF 0.31.05, I've tried three methods so far. Pumping was the closest to effective, though it was also the hardest - 12 pumps, 30 tiles of axel, 8 mechanisms, dozens of cancellation messages, and I think the reason I failed was because I didn't realize aquifers now put water diagonally (at least, that seems most likely... I got through the aquifer but when I started digging deeper it flooded). I tried the ice method, but due to a bug ice walls leave "open space" above them and you can't dig stairs into ice walls, making it useless. I then tried a cave in, which aside from sucking my farmer off the edge and killing him created 25 "black sand" tiles instead of the "Loamy sand" tiles I dropped, all of which were aquifers.

So how the heck am I supposed to get through aquifers in DF 2010? 75% or so of all the worlds I generate are covered in them, so far it's looking like the only ways to get through them are to embark on volcanos or remove the aquifer tags from the raws. Is there any method that's currently doable?

Two suggestions here really.

The first is that there should be some option in the game to view the raws associated with any object. So if you see, say, a skeletal vulture and want to know things such as it's size, you could do so without having to minimize the game. Granted, as the raws get more complicated this will become less useful, but for veteran players or players studying what tags do this could be very useful.

The second is to allow the players to input comments or descriptions in the raws (maybe surrounded by [DESCRIP][/DESCRIP] tags) that come up under their own tab when view in game. These could be anything from flowery descriptions to warnings ("This is a Spirit of Fire. Run away little girl.") and would allow modders to create a semi-tutorial or add depth to their creatures without having to make the player access material outside the game to keep track of it.

I started a game with a bunch of gang members. After winning (or nearly winning, I got tired of going out, datenapping a conservative, brainwashing, and releasing over and over) with the flawless winning strategy, I wanted to try a more violent approach. Where's the best place to train them in combat without running the risk of facing stronger opponents?

In defending a fortress against a siege (Dig Deeper mod with marble deleted), my marksdwarves stopped patrolling across the drawbridges over the entrance when enemies were under it. I suspect that there's a bug in the line of sight and firing code where they're freezing because they can see an enemy (and thus think they can attack), but when they do an attack command they're told "oh hey, there's a drawbridge between you and your target".

My mayor just demanded a clear glass window in his dining room. The second I met that demand, he immediately demanded another. Would he notice if I removed his last one and put a new one in there? My map is a mountain next to a desert, and the tower cap farm has zero yield (which is strange, I've very carefully kept all the young tower caps alive by restricting the squares they're in, and they are all alive), so wood is at kind of a premium especially with half the barracks beds filled with wounded soldiers.

I checked with search, although there are other suggestions none of them are from 2009 even. No point raising the dead.

As a fortress progresses, it starts to get frustrating seeing a dozen "This relates to the re(re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re)election of Urist McExpeditionLeader to mayor of Waytoooldfortress" or "This relates to the foundation of Waytoooldfortress". When a fortress has survived dozens of sieges, battled megabeasts, crafted a page worth of artifacts... there should be more than just a few references to them drowned by the politics and the singular event of founding the damn fortress.

I propose that every time an event is decorated in a zone, it becomes slightly less likely to be engraved. A single variable keeping track of how many times an event has been immortalized would be used to weight a dwarf's decisions about what to engrave. Of course, some events should be more likely to be engraved than others, even if they've been done over and over. Very important events, such as megabeast sieges, battling the clowns that come out of the [REDACTED], killing champions or, even better, kings or local leaders would possibly start as both more likely to be engraved initially and take longer before the weight against them being engraved becomes noticeable.

Engravings should represent the history of your fort. A fortress is more than just founding and elections, most of what makes a fortress a fortress is the battles, crafts, weddings, and other portions of dwarven life. Weighting events based on how many times they've already been drawn would make the drawings more broadly represent the life of your fortress and just plain more interesting to read.

If you're like me, when you have magma you probably set up extensive magmaworks. You probably set up at least half a dozen smelters, a few magma forges, and maybe a set of magma glass furnaces and kilns if you're going into glass making. This causes problems with the task manager though, especially when you're trying to, say, create a dozen sets of chain armor for the new recruits while at the same time producing metal crafts for the human caravan next season. The manager will queue up armorsmithing tasks on every forge, and since dwarves always try to do non-repeat tasks before tasks set on repeat, your metalcrafter may sit there waiting for the armorsmith to finish the 9 steel helmets queued ahead of his brass craft order. Even worse is when a forge has certain dwarves forbidden via preferences, so armorsmithing tasks could be queued on a forge that only the metalsmith can use.

I propose that tasks either be assignable to a specific workshop (so you could set the manager to queue up a series of armorsmithing tasks on JUST the armorsmith's forge) or be able to set a workshop to refuse any tasks except ones given directly by the player.