Bay 12 Games Forum

In .40.03, I've noticed that when my dwarves dig a mineral or gem, the floor left behind from where the mineral block was is the default stone block of that layer. I discovered this when I carved my dining room into a tube of candy, and only had a phyllite floor. Anyone know if this is intentional or not?

I'm tentatively all for it, because it will finally get rid of those annoying technicolour dining rooms caused by a random vein of ilmenite, though it does technically make the game harder.

Hey all, I've been playing a lot of Adventurer mode lately because this new version rocks.
I've found that it's critically important to keep your encumbrance down, because the more you're carrying the fewer attacks you'll get relative to your opponent. This often equals death.

On that note, does anybody know what the lightest-weight food available is? Obviously I can just carry less food, but, ideally, somewhere out there is the featherwood of lunch. Do plant-based foods weigh more or less than meat? Are there any critters that make low-density steaks?

I plan on searching through the RAWs soon, but if anyone has any pertinent information to assist my search, that would be extremely helpful.

EDIT: even if slower movement speed no longer equals slower combat speed, it's still important to keep your movement speed up in adventurer mode.

Does anyone know if Leather Armour is any more protective than leather clothing covering the same area, like a shirt or tunic? I'm low on metal and high on leather, so wondering if there's any advantage (aside from wear) to making leather armour, which would have to be replaced when I get enough metal to make breastplates, to just making cloaks and things.

On a similar note: what's best between cloth, silk, and leather clothing?

First a story, then a plea for suggestions on how to avoid it next time.

Welcome to Hailoils, year 5. Here's the rundown:
Population: 250, including soldiers. 95 were children, though.
Military:
-20 danger-room trained, unstoppable, full steel armed and armoured axedwarves (the whole shebang; 3 masterwork mail shirts, a breastplate, etc. etc., legendary every skill)
-50 mostly untrained marksdwarves wearing their clothes, crossbows, quivers, and shields. I draft most migrants into this force, and only use them when I'm under a serious siege (fortress defense mod is on) and have to seal the fort from the outside
This fort was one of my best yet. It had water death traps to drown the trade depot (ha! elves), magma pumped up near the surface for forges to crank out the huge amount of steel arms and armour necessary for my troops, eight legendary miners. it was awesome.
It also had periodic 'profane gloom' clouds, which turned anything they hit into thralls. This wasn't a big problem because I built a really twisty/airlocked entrance and didn't go to the surface much. It basically just led to the occasional barn owl or dingo getting thralled and attacking. I had an array of cage and weapon traps to deal with these.

Here's what happened:
A cloud shows up, so I order everyone inside. I don't bother sealing the entrance, because I've found it to be unnecessary. However, despite the burrow command, one of my axe lords runs outside, maybe to grab some gear or something. He gets turned into a thrall instantly.
me: meh. He's replaceable, and he'll just get cage trapped as soon as he... okay, nevermind. The traps ignored him completely. He sprints clear over the cage traps and crossbow traps and serrated steel disc traps, they don't trigger at all. I know that the profane gloom thralls aren't trapavoid because I've been catching wildlife, so what happened there? Are thralled dorfs immune to traps?
I keep my elite troops training near the entrance of the fortress, so he has to go through them to get inside. At this point, I figure things are bad but not so bad - the military will cut him to pieces, but I might lose one or two.

What happened: in a few seconds, the ~10 dwarves there are unconscious or asleep(!?) (but not dead) and the thrall enters the fort proper. I activate the marksdwarves, thinking a hail of *silver bolts* will put him in place. I have pillboxes where they can shoot into the entrance hallway without being in danger.
He ignores the bolts entirely, and the militia empty their quivers. At 25 bolts per dwarf and 60 guys firing, he shrugged off 1500 bolts. He has a bruised lip and broken rib after all of this, and that's all.
The other 9 axe lords are spread around the fort doing stupid tasks like drinking, sleeping, and upgrading their equipment, and trickle at him one by one to be knocked out or crippled. It appears that the thrall couldn't get through their steel armour, but broke enough bones and severed enough nerves that these dwarves were out of the picture.

During this period, of course, he's slaughtering all the civilians he comes across.

In ten minutes, he killed the entire fortress, except for the comatose axe lords. It was fast enough that there wasn't a single casualty to madness or tantrum spirals.


...How did this happen? Those axe lords have killed FB's and GCS's and entire sieges of war elephants single-handedly! I understand that the thrall gets extra strength, but even then the weight of numbers was firmly on my side, right? And why didn't my traps get him? I thought thralls didn't keep the skills of their prior lives, right? so, this was all perpetrated by a completely untrained axedwarf. To be fair, I guess he is the first person I've fought in this game wearing *steel armour*, but my dwarves had it too and I have occasionally lost them in battle. I've held off the circus with militaries less powerful than the one I had.

My latest fort is having some weird stuff go down with regards to migrations. There are three things from the outset that make this fort different from my others:
1) I played this world in adventurer mode for a while before making a fortress
2) I'm modded to play as humans
3) My fort is settled on an ex-bandit camp that my adventurer cleared out.

So, now to the weird: About half of my migrants are, for lack of a better word, NPCs. They're listed as "friendly" in the unit list, I can't assign them labours, and their descriptions are like merchants' or enemies (ie, just the physical description, nothing about thoughts or anything). They also come carrying tools (like, boning knives and stuff) and pouches full of coins -- exactly like NPCs in adventurer mode. Upon migration, they just loiter about on the edge of the map, with no need to eat or drink. As they're all armed (many of them are in heavy armour, as well, with up to three mail shirts, swords, pikes, you name it) they've been making themselves useful catching and killing goblin thieves. Migration waves aren't exclusively normal migrants or NPC migrants, each has a mix of both. Some of the NPCs are children. One was a were-monkey, which transformed, ignored all the other NPCs, and attacked my real populace. The NPCs aren't included in my fortress population.

Also, slightly less weird but equally as cool: my regular migrants are badass. Every single one has multiple elf kills (and only elf, the civs were at war -- castles are full of elf slaves), high weapon skills, and elf hair/bone/nail trophies. This is hands-down my favourite fort because of all of this.

So, has anyone else noticed anything like this before? I know that migrants can be historical figures, which explains all the backstory elf-killing, but NPC migrants is weird (but cool).

And, whether you've seen it before or not, any suggestions on what to do with the expendable, lightly armed force I have building up outside? There must be forty or fifty of them out there by now.

Hey all, I was reading the "Draw your Adventurer" thread and got inspired to do a little doodling myself. Until yesterday, when I started this, I'd never drawn anything beyond a stick figure with any success - so I'm ridiculously proud of this, and felt like sharing.

This all happened in my fortress this week. It's not finished yet - I'll update with more pages when I have time.
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Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome. Let me know if you have trouble making out what's happening or reading the text, I'm still experimenting with the style.

So, I recently figured out a trick that will save hundreds of keypresses and a lot of time. When making lengthy vertical designations (such as stairs to the caverns), instead of hitting enter, enter, shift+., enter, enter, etc. you can just select "up/down stair," click on the map, and hold down the "move camera down a z-level" key.

The staircase gets designated in seconds.

This may be obvious to a lot of you, but to me it was mindblowing.