Bay 12 Games Forum

Have you noticed the quern takes a long time to complete a job? Is it better than a millstone? Why would you build a millstone instead?

I did a fun test. 7 dwarves, nothing but tools, bags, and food. They cut trees, mined stone, and made 1 quern, 2 millstones, and a mechanic's workshop. Then, I started one dwarf on milling some plants at the quern. The other 6 started working on 3 mechanisms, and building the walls and floors to support a windmill. Once they got all of that done, they built a windmill, a gear assembly, and two millstones. Then, I started a dwarf on milling plants in both millstones.

The dwarves at the millstones beat the dwarf at the quern, who was still milling the same plant he'd been milling all this time.

The downside to a millstone setup is that it requires mechanical power, and that involves making either a waterwheel or a windmill. This is a downside for two reasons:

• this takes more materials (though, while the difference between these and a quern's cost of 1 boulder is large, the actual material cost is pretty ignorable).
• this creates potential entrance points for invaders, who can fly up to your windmill and fly down through the axle or gear assembly, or swim up through where your water wheel is located to access the inside of your fort. Neither the windmill nor waterwheel block movement through the machines, and the axle, gear assembly, and millstones are likewise easy to walk through.

Want to be more secure? It's possible. If your flowing water source is a brook, then as long as you refrain from breaking the surface anywhere except under your water wheel, you can easily wall off the water wheel and millstone setup with underground access and count it as secure from anything except that which is already in the brook's water. The wiki's water wheel page details ways to make a wheel setup underground, secure from invaders. Windmills are sometimes easier to set up, unfortunately they stop working if they lose access to the sky (they do still work with walls all around them, but that doesn't protect you from fliers). The best you can do to secure a windmill is internal security in the underground passages that allow your dwarves to access the mill, or to access the mill only on the surface, accepting that during a siege it will inaccessible and likely destroyed.

The security concern just doesn't exist your first year, and in the first month you can easily have a mill setup built and providing your fort with valuable grain and dye. Then, as you have a more robust fort below ground to protect, you can start working on making sure your mill is not an access point for invaders.

Or, you can build 7 querns, and all of your dwarves can spend their whole first year milling fewer than 30 plants. Maybe you can already tell that I have a low opinion of querns.

I found them! They are all gathered around a pile of gubbins. They are very friendly, I've talked to most of them. I brought up the rumor that their group is occupying this site, and they say it is terrible. I say it must be stopped with violence and they agree. End of discussion. I found the boss.

I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do now. It seems wrong to just decapitate him in the middle of asking about his family, but I did come here to kill every last one of them, I assume. That's what's implied when someone says bandits have been threatening their people, right? Is there a better way to handle them?

For those of you out there looking for more modding experience, here's an idea! If I don't get any interested takers I'll get around to making it myself when I get the time, so if you want to get started please call dibs.

The Mechanical Ice-Maker (call it whatever you like)
It's a 2x2 workshop that converts liquid into frozen blocks which can be used to build things and such.

Materials Required: 1 building block (you know, any stone/wood/bar/block/etc), 1 metal or glass pot & 1 metal mechanism. Maybe require these to be magma-safe?

Looks Like: An X, a barrel, a tile that looks like the floor under it, and a tile that looks like and visually acts like a constructed gear (the active/inactive state change when the workshop is powered may not be possible, I don't know, but if the workshop is powered this gear part should indicate it). The X and the barrel are next to each other are impassable, which is important because like the pump it is very likely that water or magma will need to be adjacent to the X.

What it does: When a liquid is added to the workshop and the workshop has power and it has an empty bin, it turns that liquid into frozen blocks of that substance until the bin is full. These blocks would be a new item which has the same properties as a glass block, but is frozen cold (or in the case of obsidian blocks, just not as hot).

Operations: Each job in the workshop requires an empty bin to be added by a dwarf with hauling labor enabled. The workshop's job list would be: "Freeze adjacent liquid", "Freeze water", "Freeze lye", "Freeze booze", "Freeze blood/ichor", "Freeze poison", etc. For most of these, a dwarf will add 5 units of liquid to the workshop, either by bringing a barrel or getting water out of a well or something with 5 trips using a bucket. The first job, "Freeze adjacent liquid" is done without any dwarven input at all. If a liquid is pooled adjacent to the impassable tile (the X) it draws out 5 units. I'm pretty sure this means it will only work with water or magma, which makes ice blocks and obsidian blocks, respectively.

Output: When it's done you get a bin filled with 5 identical blocks of whatever frozen liquid was used up.

Power: This workshop, like the mill, requires mechanical power for it to accomplish anything. 20 power seems right. It should take about as long to freeze a liquid into a block as it does for a mill to grind something (so, 5 times that long per job since each job is 5 blocks).

The Purpose: Basically, free money. Blocks are worth more than raw stone/wood/etc, weigh little, and can be stored in bins. Set up some water wheels and a half dozen of these ice makers all connected to a water source, and you get a bunch of ice blocks you can use to build walls and junk. Sure, you could have one mason's workshop and a novice mason turning your granite into equally valuable blocks, perhaps even in less time if the stone is closeby. But using a river to make them automatically is just cool. Also, it's a use for all those barrels of blood the moronic elves keep bringing, and a use for mechanical power. Also, it doesn't require any skill at any point, just item hauling, which is perfect since blocks don't have quality.

I'm on the fence about how persistent the temp should be for the frozen blocks. On the one hand it's realistic that chunks of ice mined out during winter should melt into a puddle when warmed up, so it makes sense that frozen rum should do the same. On the other hand, that's not as useful; and considering ice made into a constructed floor never melts even if you pour magma on it, we're already dealing with fantasy materials. If there were a way for a floor and walls made of frozen blocks (or nethercap) to change the temperature inside, you could build cold rooms to store your perishable frozen blocks. But I'm guessing that's not possible, so the blocks should be imperishable.

One problem I have when playing is that I tend to focus on a few "pet projects" and neglect the growing migrant population, putting too few of them to use. I had a few ideas on how to solve this problem:

1. Eventually it's not that hard to have each dwarf specialized in only one skill, and have one (or a small number) of dwarves who are the only ones performing that skill. Because really, you probably don't need more than one thresher, and that one dwarf probably doesn't need to do much else once he has 190 neighbors.

2. Dwarves will socialize without anything else to do, which could have positive results (babies everywhere!). So, multiple skills being performed by one dwarf is not ideal for all dwarves.

3. If I start with a checklist of "professions" I want assigned to a single dwarf, prioritized so that I'm filling the list from top to bottom (generally), it will be hard to not make proper use of each and every dwarf.


So, do any of you use something like this? If you were to make a list, what would it look like? Any other thoughts?

My dwarves finally finished my first big project: a pyramid used to entomb the dead. I suppose it would have been awesome-dwarfy to make it a big pyramid just for one tomb, but since all the walls are constructed, and so can't be engraved to improve their value, I used this for cheaper tombs and common burial areas. The interior is made out of microcline, encased in orthoclase ramps, with a cap made of silver. I set this off on the other side of the river from my fortress entrance to make it extra-pyramidy.


Here's a screenshot of the base level of the pyramid. Off to the right you can see the bridge and the fort's walled-off fishing/water source/water wheel structure.


This is the second level of the pyramid. As you can see, I have planned tombs and coffins for common burial. As you ascend common burial becomes the norm, with a small plot for pets at the top. The tombs aren't finished, as they still need cabinets and coffers, but I'm trying to select the best the fort has to offer so it may take some time. No worries though, I haven't started to drown nobles yet.


Here's what Stonesense shows us.

When it's cold out and the sun is setting, it's a bad time to swim out to an island.

Every time I go into the mountains I end up alone. It's not because my adventurer can't handle himself, it's because ALL of my companions make a bee-line for every single giant eagle, yak, and goat they see, resulting in them getting lost, fighting too many things till they die, or just being so weak from nonsense that when the raiders attack us I'm the only one to survive. (of course this happens in other places; horses and camels are more deadly than they look)

Is there a way to get the companions to not attack things? The dangers of the world are nothing compared to the stupidity of companions.