Bay 12 Games Forum

Creature graphic support in DF is great... until a creature dies. Then it reverts to the tileset character. Then most creatures are displayed as a letter character that in no way resembles the creature corpse it signifies. So my idea to solve this is to sort creatures into a categories, with a category for each letter, both upper and lower case. The letter used will in some way resemble the creatures of that category. This would also be usable as an alternative to a graphics pack, with a reorganized mapping of creatures to glyphs. I've looked through the wiki, and most letters, plus a few additional characters are exclusively used to render creatures and text, so all these would be used for these new creature tiles. One limitation is, due to limited choices it is likely that the character letter will not always match the creature it will depict.

Example categories:
Bears.
bats and look alikes.
Sharks.
beaked men.
Whales and whale men.
cats.
humans, material men, and animal men that look more human than animal.

I'd like some feedback on this idea. Has anyone attempted this before? Would you use it?  One thing I am unsure about is with TWBT, is it's possible to make the characters not resemble the original letters at all (as an alternative), or it there are still things you want to be legible in tileset, even with TWBT?

It seems the Moose and Hornbill pages have too much template generated content. Trying to edit the pages gives these error:
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Not sure what can be done about it, so I thought I'd mention it here.

So I embarked near an evil biome with endless evil mists.

Some got into my fort, lot of fun was had. Thralls attack dwarves, dwarves fight back, dwarves become thralls and keep fighting. Thralls fighting each other instead of my dwarves meant 1 dwarf managed to survive until migrants arrived. Then the thralls were walled in.

Now some time has passed, built the fortress up. But the thralls are still fighting, in my old main staircase. That's annoying; I liked my old staircase, and I want it back. So how do I get the thralls out?

They scare off civilians, but don't run after them. I worry if I send a military dwarf in, he'd just join the fight until he too became a thrall. I do have access to an aquifer, so maybe i can flush them out?

Any suggestions?

This discussion was started in the Future of the Fortress Thread, but is out of place there, so a separate thread is needed.

Do you think it's worthwile for Toady to accept Bitcoin donations?

With the focus now on Adventurer roles, I thought to ask the community which hero roles you look forward to most. Which arc has the features that you look forward to, both in adventure mode, and fort mode?

I've got a bunch of cages from trading, both empty and occupied that my dwarves don't seem to want to haul down to the animal stockpile, and I cannot figure out why. I tried reconstructing the depot, but that only moved the cages to the edges. There's also an ettin in a cage trap with a similar problem.

That it should not be possible to dig anything in sand is a well known anomaly. Here's a simple fix that doesn't require turning sand into fluid.

It requires a few changes:
1) Sand does not provide support to any tile except the one directly above it. Digging in to a sand layer from a stone layer under it causes a cave in.
2) Sand does not cause cave-in dust.
3) Mining sand from the side causes a cave in if there are sand wall tiles above. This is harmless to the miner, but he will have to mine the tile out again. Sand floor above would also cave in, but it just disappears -- this can be done using the cave in mechanic, or as a special case.
4) Falling sand triggers tiles orthogonally-above to cause a fill event. during a fill event, if able, a sand wall will become a ramp. Then, an additional sand ramp is created on the tile that was emptied of sand. If it is already a ramp, a wall is created instead. This may trigger another cave in, but only after all fill events happen. The order of fill events can be random or based on the coordinates of the event.
5) This does make it possible for one tile of a workshop to suddenly become floor-less. The easiest resolution is to make this make the workshop deconstruct in this case.
6) Disallow staircases carved out of sand. Dwarves must use ramps. Down stair cases are allowed.

I have a dwarf in my fortress that got injured in a goblin ambush. He's got motor nerve damage, sensory nerve damage, and lost the ability to grasp. Before the injury he was a militarily grunt, so he doesn't have useful civilian skills. My problem is I can't get him to do anything. If I assign him a bunch of skill he announcement spams about being unable to get equipment, and doesn't start doing anything. Even without assigning anything, he will often spam about being unable to move his own stuff. The only thing I've been able to get him to do is bookkeeping, but that doesn't keep him occupied. All my other dwarves are working but he just lounges around in the dining hall.

What jobs should he be able to do? How can I make him useful?