Bay 12 Games Forum

Welcome to Scorchedgravel - Home Of The Final 7
===

So, I've been inspired to try doing a community fort with a twist. Is it possible to survive/revive as a civilization with only seven dwarfs, no migrants, no trading, and enemies all around? Let's find out.

We're in a badlands volcano with access to all ores, but we're a dead civilization, and the game has been modded to prevent any trading of any kind. We're currently on 43.03, and I will update as new DFHack versions become available. Our goal is to survive, birth the next generation, and perhaps reclaim our greatness in the world. I plan to play until this story gets a satisfying conclusion, either win or loose. I may retire the fort and run adventurers depending how the plot goes or what not.

I will also take dwarfing requests, though with so few, its first come, first serve and RPing is welcome. That being said, let's not recycle names, unless its in a bloodline (i.e., NCommander II can only come from the parents of NCommander I, and I'll be using nicknames shown in the "middle" in d_init.txt

If the plot requires it, I will use DFHack to make things happen in addition to bug fixing. The save has already been DFhacked to make sure dwarfs will marry (as generated, I got six straight dwarfs who won't marry, and one bi dwarf who would marry That's been changed into six dwarfs who will marry, and one bi dwarf who would marry).

Table of Contents
 - Introduction (this post)

Year 550-560
 - The Final Seven + Breeding Mechanics
 - Caverns
 - Survival Plan
 - Towards Winter
 - Marriage Among Buzzard Problems
 - The Next Generation
 - Of Forgotten Beasts and Hammerdwarfs
 - Road to Atlantis
 - The Swimmaster
 - Digging The Future

Prelude
---

This is a masterwork dog leather journal owned by Kogan 'NCommander' Kelnakuth. On its covered is adored images of seven dwarfs. The image related to the founding of Scorchedgravel, the last Dwarven settlement.

---
1st of Granite, 550

Rigoth keeps bothering me to fill this stupid thing out since he found it, since as our leader it's my duty to leave records. Do I look like a record keeper? I'm a weaponsmith for Usen's sake. Or at least, I was before we fled.

Yes, Rigoth, I'm filling it out, yes, I know you can read over my shoulder. Fine, I'll explain how we got here. _{Micromanager ...}

Let's backtrack, in our world, there were four sentient species. Dwarfs (that's us), humans, tall upright apes driven by ambition and greed, elfs who the legends tell us fought to protect the woodland, and goblins, who worshipped the demons below.

My grandfather told me that in the years before the blight, humans, elfs, and dwarfs for the most part got along. Sure, we had our differences but we could trade, mingle, and let bygones be bygones. Dwarfs lived in mountains, humans claimed the planes, and the elfs had the forest. We all fought the goblins. We had balance.

About two centuries ago, something changed. The elfs said the rythem of the world had changed. Those of us close to the earth, well, we called it The Blight. As my dad taught me, evil can only take root where there is discontent, hatred, or worst of all, ambition. As such, when the Blight began to sweep the plains, it found the most fertile soil of all: the human heart.

What had been cities and keeps began dark pits, and towers. Wars began to rage across the land. The elfs were first to go, slaughtered down to the last man, woman, and child. Then they came from us. As hillock and hillock began to fall, we tried to fight back, we thought our dwarven steel would be no match for human's copper and iron weaponry. We were right, but for every human who fell, two more took their places.



Faced with an unwinnable battle of attrition, our last king, Urist Othilmorul, had the entrances to our last mountainhall collasped, in the hope that we could hide and protect ourself. For over half-a-century we remained buried under tons of stone. Our enemy however was willing to dig us out.

The attack came early in the morning when human miners breached the cavern layers from above. None of us had known what was happening. In the confusion, I ran deeper in the cavarns and hid. When I finally came back, all I found were humans and corpses. By the grace of Usen, I was able to grab some supplies, and snuck off. By chance, I stumbled upon a tunnel built by the Roads of Roaring before the blight. That's where I met Rigoth.

Rigoth was a mason from the fortress of Grapemachines. They had been attacked at nearly the same time we were. Appartantly the humans had coordinated their strike to wipe us all our in one fell swoop. Although I would not find this out until much later, he was a distinct relative of our current king, a trait that would be helpful later.

As we moved away from Grapemachines, we found others who fled the attacks. Some had supplies, another had a wagon. Knowing that no existing fortress was safe, we ventured into the uncharted depths beneath the earth. At our height, we were over 30 dwarfs.

Repeated attacks by forgotten beasts, jabberers, trolls, and other horrors have dwindled our numbers. After a month, we were down to just 12. We eventually found a natural cave to the surface. I argued that the caverns would kill us. We took to a surface that I hadn't seen since I was a kid.

Using old charts, we've headed south, away from any known settlements. I think we're close to the edge of the continent.



In the year since we've gone topside, we've lost five more. Only seven remain.

I fear we may be the last of our kind.

15th of Granite, 550
===

Disaster! As Solon tried to navigate around a sunken volcano, our one wagon cracked and broke! The wagon began to slide down the hill before falling into Armok's sweet embrace.



Rigoth and Solon proceeded to having a shouting match over this stupidity that I had to eventually break up. I don't know if it was her fault or not, but yelling is not going to help. Both sides are still rather angry.



Until someone goes through our supplies, I can not say for sure much we've lost, but I can tell that our sole anvil, as well as both a pick and an axe survived. I do have an accounting of what we had before the wagon went over though ...



Wherever we are, we're going to stay ...

So, having recently gotten back into both DF and DFhacking, I decided to take a crack at seeing if I could retrofit an older fort from 0.40.xx to have working scholars and performers, and I'm pleased to say its at least partially possible:

This is probably most interesting for succession games and such but some people like to play forts for a long time so I thought I'd write it up. This most exists for people to test with and help

What's Needed
 - DFhack
 - Patience

What Works:
 - SPecific item creation, i.e., bone ring, etc.
 - Scholars ... scholar
 - Making bookcases, paper, scrolls
   - Pulping/slurry works
 - Books, scrolls, etc.

What Doesn't (Yet)
 - Quicklime
   - I managed to add the reaction, but something went wrong. Instead of quicklime, I end up with a !!dwarf!! and a !!bag!!
 - Performers
   - Instruments, styles, etc. are generated as part of worldgen.
Untested
 - Paper plants
 - If scholars come visit now that your library works
 - actually getting drunk bar fights, should be a quick raw edit, but I'm not sure all the tags needed.

Unknowns
 - Getting items via trade


WARNING: This worked for me, but any major hacking with DFhack always can cause save file corruption and such. Be careful in hacking your saves.

1. Editing your raws.

First, you need to add the necessary items to your raw files. First, you need to add the new reactions to reaction_text.txt:


And the tools to item_tools.txt:

2. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR FORT! Load your fort up, but don't unpause on load. Open the DFHack console and type:

devel/inject-raws tool ITEM_TOOL_SCROLL_ROLLERS tool ITEM_TOOL_BOOK_BINDING tool ITEM_TOOL_SCROLL tool ITEM_TOOL_QUIRE tool ITEM_TOOL_BOOKCASE reaction MAKE_QUICKLIME reaction MAKE_MILK_OF_LIME reaction MAKE_PARCHMENT reaction MAKE_SCROLL reaction MAKE_QUIRE reaction MAKE_SHEET_FROM_PLANT reaction MAKE_SLURRY_FROM_PLANT reaction PRESS_PLANT_PAPER reaction BIND_BOOK reaction CARVE_BONE_FIGURINE reaction CARVE_BONE_RING reaction CARVE_BONE_EARRING reaction CARVE_BONE_SCEPTER reaction CARVE_BONE_AMULET reaction CARVE_BONE_BRACELET reaction CARVE_BONE_CROWN reaction CARVE_BONE_GEM
Follow the prompts. Immediately save, and reload your fort. If you can load, unpause, and don't immediately crash, you're in business. Now you just need to add the remainder of the tags to get it to work.

3. Add the necessary tokens to entity_default. You need to do this under the MOUNTAIN section for dwarves, and under PLAINS for humans. Simply copy and paste this block


4. Make plants slurriable. You need to modify lots of plant entries for this, but for testing purposes, you can just open plant_standard.txt, find the pig tails entry and replace it with this:


That should be enough to get paper. I'll get the rest of the raw edits up for getting things like quicklime (which doesn't work right) posted and see if anyone beyond me actually cares about this.

Given the success of the Marksdwarf version of this, and realizing people have issues getting training to work *at all* with melee dwarves, I wanted to write a second guide that goes into much more detail and explains the skills much more in-depth:

If you just want to know how to get training to the point you get reliable badasses, skip down to part 2.

Large parts of this guide are based on research on this thread by Urist Da Vinchi (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?action=printpage;topic=97090.0)

0. Understanding Military Skills

Melee is controlled by 17 different skills, plus an addition four which are used in training, these are as follows.

Weapon Skill

These control how lethal a dwarf is with a given weapon. There are five dwarves normally use, and an addition four that can sometimes rarely crop up in migrants, or modded games.

 * Axedwarf
 * Hammerdwarf
 * Macedwarf
 * Speardwarf
 * Swordsdwarf
 
For clarity purposes: Morningstars use the mace skill. Crossbows in melee use Hammer, blowguns and bows use Sword.

In addition, if you use foreign weaponry, the following are also important
 * Knife User - Controls knifes, daggers, and large daggers (large daggers are the only large weapon dwarves can use)
 * Lasher - Controls whips, and flails
 * Pikeman - Controls pikes.
 * Misc Object. User - Controls basically everything else.

If a dwarf somehow gets a equipped with a non-weapon in the weapon slot, they'll use the Misc. Object User skill. There's no assoicated lord title with this, but it appears to work just like all the other ones above. Headshots was famous for having a dwarf that picked a backpack as a weapon, and thus maxed it out. Shields are use the Misc. Object Skill for cases when a dwarf bashes someone in the head with a shield. If you want to max this skill, give a dwarf two shields and let them train. As long as the criteria are met, dwarves will do demonstrations related to misc object user in addition to the above.

It is possible, though not confirmed, that a dwarf set to pick up "Individual Choice, Melee", and has points in this skill (due to tantruming or such) may choose a random object and pick it up. However, its not recommended to use either individual choice options, you sometimes get ranged dwarves using an axe, or a hammerdwarf who likes bows.

Furthermore, in theory, some dwarves should be large enough to actually wield a pike, but due to a bug, will never attempt to pick one up. The same applies to 2H swords, and several other weapons in fortress mode. Adventure mode seems to ignore size issues in this regard for the most part, and thus its practical to have a dwarf use a pike there. Once a dwarf hits level 12 (Great), they become a master of that weapon, and are collectively known as weaponlords. The key difference is lords do not get bad thoughts on being on patrol duty. The age old bug of training causing patrol duty thoughts has been fixed to my knowledge; I haven't seen it in any recent fort.

The bug about large dwarves not being able to use large weapons is here: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=5812
In older versions of DF, fighters who became legendary were known as champions. This no longer exists in the traditional sense, however, once you have a baron, you can appoint a champion but as best I can tell, it doesn't appear to actually do anything (I tend to make my most badass dwarf the title thought).

Fighting Skills

A weapon skill is not enough, they need additional skills to survive and use in combat. The next group I call fighting skills, with a "weapon" skill related to unarmed combat.

 * Discipine - controls if a dwarf will breakdown in fear and retreat. Higher is usually better (marksdwarves with this at high levels probably will charge into melee)
 * Biter - How strong of a bite a dwarf has (and they WILL train this, see below)
 * Dodger - Controls how frequently a dwarf dodges and how successfully
 * Striker - How strong a dwarf punches
 * Kicker - How strong a dwarf kicks

There's also two special skills that go with this:
 * Fighter - Superskill; exact usage is not clear, but if it works like archer, it controls if a target dodges, and response. No one has successfully scienced the specifics of fighter, but it will level up the fastest of all them since ANY combat action will boost it. Ranged equivalent is Archery
 * Wrestler - "Weapon" skill of unarmed combat. Wrestler is the only dangerous skill in sparring, but all dwarves in melee may attempt to do wrestling moves in addition striking with a weapon, this will level up consistently through demostrations and sparring.

Defensive Item Usage

There are two skills that relate to armor and shields

 * Shield User - controls how often a dwarf autoblocks with a shield. A dwarf with Legendary+5 Shield User basically prevent anything from connecting that can be blocked with a shield. Even with low levels, a dwarf will use shields *a lot*. Unfortunately levels up slowly.
 * Armor User - controls armor movement penalities. At legendary, the weight of armor is negated. Also appears to control the chance of something glancing off (this is a relatively recent change). Levels up at a glacier speed, though dwarves DO give armor demostrations; four years of training which had everything at Legendary+5, and armor user was still at 6 ...

Demonstration Skills

Demonstrations can be drastically more effective than sparring *if* the associated skills are relatively high.

 * Teacher - determines the amount of experience given to students during a demonstration.
 * Student - determines the amount of experience actually applied to a skill from a demonstration.
 * Observer - exact effects unknown; in adventure mode, increase chances of spotting an ambush. In fortress mode, this levels up during sparring, and will *drastically* level up if you get into the rare condition that dwarves are watching a sparring match. (as in, will go from zip to level 10 if the sparring match lasts awhile).
 * Organizer - Controls the speed as which a demonstration "starts". Very little usage. With no skill, it takes an in-game day for a demonstration to start

Toady specifically commented on Teacher and Student in the release notes for one of the DF2010 releases

Release notes for 0.31.12 (July 25, 2010):

Aside from the major bug fixes listed below, I made skill increases a little faster during training.  Part of the problem is with how classes work -- the teacher and student skills are important, and they can heavily amplify the effects, so the gains for people without those skills were small.  Now it'll be even more extreme that the base rate has increased, so we'll have to see how that plays out in forts that get good teachers.

Other Military Skills
For completion sake, the following are military skills, but are either unused, or related to ranged dwarves
 * Marksdwarf/Bowman/Blowgunner - controls crossbows/bows/blowguns. Weapon skill with range controls how frequently a target hits
 * Archer - Controls if a target dodges and such (was recently scienced http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=150323.0)
 * Ambusher - Technically a military skill. Controls how effectively a dwarf sneaks. Normally only used by hunters in fortress mode.
 * Military Tactics/Coordination/Balance - Military Tactics is used in worldgen, Coordination and Balance are unusued, but presumably relate to mounts.
 * Tracker - Unused in fortress mode
 * Thrower - Used when a object is physically thrown. Thrown opponents uses the wrestling skill. Never trained via demostrations or sparring.
 * Miner - pick weapon skill. Shows up as foreign under the uniform screen for whatever reason. As mining is considered a civilian labor, you'll end up with an elite wrestler vs. Elite Pike User. If they do demonstrations with picks, its possible you could train a miner to legendary without a single mining designation.

Other Important Skills
 * Crutch-walker - If a dwarf looses or breaks a leg, they will get a crutch through the hospital, and level this skill up, it levels stupid fast. If a dwarf attacks with a crutch, it will use Misc Object Skill.
 * Swimmer - Controls what happens if a dwarf dodges into water. If none at all, they'll be stunned upon landing, and almost certainly drown. At novice, if they land on a ramp, they can move back onto solid land if they don't drown while stunned. At Adequate and above, they will not be stunned and get back into the fight. A fall into water that's multiple Z level *can* prevent the fall from being lethal, a dwarf will immediately swim straight up, then to solid land. Dwarves will path through water that is 3/7, but no deeper. At 4/7 to 6/7, they can swim without drowning risk no matter what. If 7/7, if the tile above is "Open Space", they also will not drown if not stunned.

To summarize: if you want your moat to not claim your dwarves lives in case they dodge: make it two 2-level deep (more is better), with open space above and that they are level 2 or better in swimmers. Assuming they only fall one Z level, this will avoid them slamming down one Z level.

Unknown: if dwarves drink water while swimming, or will eat their provisions. It might be completely possible to get a dwarf to punch out a shark with the right setup though.

1. Understanding Demonstrations, Sparring, and Individual Ranged Training

Dwarves actively have (in general) four possible jobs they can be doing, in roughly this order of priority
 - Group based training
 - Individual Training (they also do this if there off-duty and don't have another job to do)
 - Sparring
 - Archery Training (if equipped with a bow, the squad has bolts, and has an archery range for the squad)

Group based training, individual training and sparring require a barrack to be defined for that squad with "Train" enabled. Archery ranges don't count as a barrack for this. Individual training and demostrations train ONE skill at a time. Demonstrations can only happen if the leader of a demonstration has some experience in that skill (Dabbling is enough to meet this). Dwarves will only attend a demonstration if its a fighting skill, *or* its the weapon they're currently equipped with (that is to say, if you have a squad of two dwarves, one with a spear, and one with an axe, you'll never get axe or spear demonstrations. Ranged dwarfs will attend demostrations for their weapons base skill; so marksdwarves will attend hammer demonstrations. They will however start and attend wrestling demonstrations as all dwarves can wrestle; this is also why wrestling levels up as fast as it does via demostrations; a dwarf can always wrestle.

For sparring, a dwarf must be at least novice in their weaponskill. Dwarves with unequal skill levels *will* spar, but not frequently. If two dwarves are very close in skill levels, they spar much more frequently, this can be maximized by using position assigning. This is actually a good thing as demonstrations tend to be more effective once teacher and student get high enough. Furthermore, three and four way spars are possible; I suppose you could get a ten way spar, but I've never seen it happen, and 3/4 dwarves sparring together are very rare.

If multiple dwarves are under a train order together, and some are sparring, they may choose to watch (I believe this shows up as Watch Combat or something similar in the u menu, its very rare). When this happens, those watching will have their observer skill skyrocket. I'm not sure if they get any other skill gains by watching; I can't reproduce it frequently enough to science it. If a marksdwarf spars (this is very rare, possibly a bug), they'll use their crossbow as a hammer and gain hammerdwarf skills. Sparring is always safe *unless* a dwarf has open hands. The problem is that wrestling skills are valid when sparring, and the dwarf choosing to suplex or throw a dwarf, which sends them flying. This won't happen as long as all dwarves have a weapon and shield. If you're training wrestlers, have a hospital handy; the injuries usually aren't bad unless they hit a wall.

It is unknown if the old issue that injuried dwarves (even grey) never spar is still true; I haven't noticed it either way, and most of my training happens by demostration vs sparring.

Demonstrations require that *all* the dwarves in the order are present, and others will wait until that happens. The practical upshot is that demonstrations take a very long time to go with the default settings because if one dwarf is sleeping, the others will wait for the sleeper or just do individual training. Due to a bug, the time increase is calculated exponentially (dfhack had a tweak to fix this). In other words, "Train, 10 minimum" will cause them to train so slowly that you'd be lucky to get a novice after a year.

The following skills *can* be taught via demonstration:
 * All melee weapon skills
 * All ranged skills (including Archery and Crossbow. Seems to happen very rarely since will compete with Hammer as a trainable skill, but it is possible to train an elite marksdwarf without them firing a single bolt)
 * Dodger
 * Biter
 * Kicker
 * Striker
 * Misc. Object User (maybe, I don't remember if I've seen this recently)
 * Armor User
 * Shield User (maybe?)

Fighter doesn't appear to cause demonstrations to form. Armor and shield also do not appear to cause demonstrations to happen; these skills only level up during sparring as best I can tell.

As stated above, a weapon demonstration will not happen if two dwarves in the same order have different weapons. You can use that to reduce demonstrations and get dwarves to spar more frequently.

Experience Gains

In summary, here's what to know about the types of training:
 - Individual Combat Drills raise one skill by a little bit, they're the slowest way to get anything to raise and appear to raise one skill at a time. You want to avoid these to the extent possible
 - Demonstrations raise one skill factored by teacher and student. In addition to the skill demonstrated, dwarves gain some student/teacher experience, causing future demonstrations to become even more effective. Thus if you can get them to do and complete demonstrations quickly, this will outpace sparing for training. However, not all skills can be demonstrated. If you embark with a student/teacher at 5 and no other skills, they will become a weapon level at novice within a week. This allows for rapid replacement of losses once you have your initial set of badasses.
 - Sparring simulates real combat. Its not clear if experience gains are the same, but this will train all skills a dwarf can learn a little bit.
 - Archery training gives 8XP per bolt. If combined with my ulitimate marksdwarves guide, you'll get elite marksdwarves in about a year.

2. Equipping Your Badasses-To-Be

Professions To Watch
Wood cutters, miners, and hunters use weapons as civilians. Draftings these guys might give a massive equipment mismatch spam. To fix, disable their civilian labor, and if necessary forbid the item they're carrying.

On Armor
There's a LOT of confusion about armor and dwarves. There's a great armor chart on the wiki (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Armor) that shows what covers what, but its still slightly confusing on what you can equip your dwarves to be.

Here's the first thing I recommend. DON'T USE METAL ARMOR FOR NEWBIES.

I'm serious. With older versions of dwarf fortress, the weight would slow them down, but not enough to make training ineffective. The hauling update caused armor encumbrance to become much worse; an untrained dwarf in full metal will move so slowly that training will become a crawl. For raw recruits, use leather. My default embark these days is a proficient leatherworker, and a supply of dogs to train up an animal trainer, which become war dogs, then slaughter then.  Leather counts as armor, so it will train armor user during sparring, but not have any additional weight penalties. Bone should also work as well, but I've never made armor out of it. Contributions welcome on weight penalties due to bone armor.

Strictly speaking, a metal shield and weapon will slow them down, but not nearly as much as a full set of armor.

A full set of leather armor is as follows:
 - Leather armor (that's what its called)
 - Leather helm
 - Leather gauntlet
 - Leather high boots (if your civilization can make these; I haven't seen one in a long time that can't, this may no longer be factor)

Failing high boots, you need leggings and low boats. Each piece costs one leather, so that's four for the set. For a 10 dwarf squad, that's 40 pieces. If you make leather shields, add another one to the cost.

Make sure you use exact matches when you specify it on the equipment screen, or some dwarves will consider clothes a proper replacement.

When To Switch To Metal

Admittedly, this is a matter of taste. By time they hit weapon lord status, a dwarf's physical attributes are pretty damn good, but my training methods leave armor user wanting. Regardless, I'd switch them roughly around then if I have metal production ramped up. While they'll still move slower than normal dwarves, the additional stat gains allow them to move fast enough to not bog under. Metal armor also seems to increase armor user training rate.

How To Equip With Metal Armor

Each piece of metal armor covers a specific slot of the dwarf. Unfortunately, with metal alone you can't get 100% coverage. Masterwork steel is the best material for most armor because you can mass produce and import it, and its superior at deflecting budging blows; I then use candy robes ontop for full coverage *and* increasing deflection of piercing and sharp weaponry. Unfortunately adamantine robes degrade; this IMHO, is a bug, and either a small raws tweak -or- a dfhack plugin can be used to fix it. However, it only takes one piece of adamantine thread to make a robe, so it is by far the most economical of it, and it still takes 5 years to degrade entirely.

Assuming your civilization can make high boots, this is the best coverage you can go for
 - steel helm
 - steel mail shirt
 - steel gauntlets
 - steel high boots
 - steel breastplate
 - steel greaves
 - adaminite robes

This gives great protection at the lowest weight possible. Appartantly rigidness is now important in dealing with armor based on new science and breastplates and greaves are very important. It costs 10 bars of metal for the full set (3 for the breastplate, 2 for the mail shirt and greaves, and 1 each for the gauntlets, boots and helm), plus an additional two for a shield and weapon.

You can add breastplates if you wish, but they may bug up. See below for an explanation.

Robes can bug up due to the equipment mismatch problem listed below. See below for instructions.

On Weaponry

There's a lot of debate of what weapons to use. Here's roughly whats best at what, and note no weapon wins all around

 - Axes: Most effective on organic enemies the same size or slightly larger than your dwarf. Does slashing damage
 - Swords: Most effective on enemies that have to be beheaded to kill like bronze collisi.
 - Spears: Gets bonused on kebashable enemies, and ones that dwarf your dwarves. Use on forgotten beasts, titan, megabeast and demons!
 - Hammer: Does bludging damage, very effective on full body zombies, as well as armored foes the above can't get through.
 - Mace: Does bludging damage, slightly worse than hammers, but much higher chance of mangled and finally putting down killable undead.

Dwarves will get attached to a weapon over time, but will *still* obey uniform requirements. If you get a dwarf that gets stuck welding something you don't want, as a last resort, set the squad down, tell them to use civ clothes. They'll either store the weapon in a stockpile, or in an weapon rack, at which point you can forbid it or mark it for dumping. It is unknown if named weapons get the bonuses normal artifact weaponry does.

Provisions

Dwarves can carry food and booze if they're in a squad and will use this instead of going to a stockroom to get something. I recommend doing so, though beware the bug below on this. To carry food, they need a backpack, which must be made from leather and costs one piece each.

Booze can be carried in a waterskin made from leather, or a vial or flask made out of metal, porcelain, or glass.
 
Equipping Troubles (and why mall shirts, breastplates, and robes bug up)

Dwarves tend to be idiots on equipping things and do it in the wrong order. The full problem is described in the following bug:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=1445

In effective, instead of trying to put things on in the order they have to be worn, they'll put them in in the order the item was produced in your fortress. So if you make breastplates before mail shirts, they'll put the breastplate on first, then fail to put the mail shirt on, spamming equipment mismatches and getting stuck. This also happens if you try to assign socks or something to a dwarf. There is a workaround.

When you create the uniform, exclude the breastplate from the uniform, and then add your squad members to the squad. Then go to each dwarves individual equip screen, and add the breastplate. This prevents them from switching their equipment to different items. You have to do it 10 times each, but you only have to bother when doing equipment changes. For the same reason, if you want to switch a dwarves equipment fully, stand down the squad and make sure they have "Inactive - Civ Clothes" in their Inactive schedule, which will get them back in base clothes.

The same thing applies with robes. If you're trying to get to get mail shirt, breastplate, robe, have the mail plate in the uniform, wait for equipment to finish being picked up, add the breastplate, wait, then the robe.

Also, if you want to give them socks, assign the socks, then the shoes. Leggings might also have the same problem, not 100% sure; if so, its socks, then leggings, then boots.

Backpacks equip reliably for me, but may give others headaches. Quivers are known to bug up with metal armor due to this reason. To fix the above for backpacks: remove all food/water assignments, they won't claim a backpack if not ordered to carry supplies. Quivers are more annoying, you have to remove the bow, and then add it last. Waterskins go on the armor itself (strangely), and thus shouldn't bug up as long as everything else is equipped properly.

I always recommend using "Replace", and Exact Matches on equipment when using metal, it helps with the screwups. Leather armor doesn't overlap, and is fine to leave over clothing.

Dealing With The 'm' Menus

Welcome to the worst part of this guide. The military menu will hurt, but I'll try and make it as quick and painless as possible. We'll take this screen by screen, and I am going to recycle part of my ulitmate ranged guide here.

We'll start with defining a uniform. Pull up the n screen. In this example, I'm giving leather equipment for spear dwarves. Create a new uniform with 'c', and call it something like Spear Training. Make it look like this, using 'M' to select the material.



Now press 'p' to go back to the positions menu. When you create the squad, it will ask for a uniform. This is misleading; the game *only* applies the uniform to the first dwarf selected. We'll fix that in a moment. Select your recruits, like so, then switch to the 'e' menu. Select your squad, then press 'U' (that's captain U) to bring up the uniform selection screen.

This example shows it correctly for marksdwarves:



If done correctly, you have Weapondwarf 10/10 on the top. If incorrect, you'll get 1/1 Weapondwarf, 9/9 Wrestlers. Remember the equip bugs above if you're using this screen. You can mix and match dwarves in a squad. If you do so, you'll see the count on top as something like 5 axedwarves, 5 speardwarves. Uniforms and equipment are tied to the actual position, not the dwarf. This is counter-intuitive, and may cause issues if a dwarf dies, a replacement is drafted, and his equipment is forbidden.

Switch to the supplies screen and set this as you feel. I recommend three food, and carry booze. Note: they don't always seem to claim waterskins effectively. I'm as to unsure of the cause or a fix.

Switch to the schedule menu. This is where the magic happens. The default order of Train, 10 minimium, is *wrong*. Use x to delete out the orders, the game will show "No Scheduled Order" in its place. Repeat for all months.

The schedule should look like this:



Press o to give an order. Press o until Train comes up, then set the minimum to 2. 3 also works well if your dwarves have some skill in teacher and student. Generally, I don't bother. It should look like this:



Press Shift-Enter to give the order. Repeat 5 times so all positions are covered. This forces the max demonstration size to be two, working around the inverse square problem relating to training times. They'll finish demonstrations quickly, leveling up student and teacher at a decent click (as well as organizer), and cause them to hit lord status in about a year, legendary 1.5-2 years from start. If you want to encourage more sparring, see the footnote.

Give the order a custom name so you can spot it easier, and copy and paste to all months.

It should look like this when you're done.



Activate your squad, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

---

Appendix: Attempt to encourage more sparring

The Train, minimum 2 order causes dwarves to pair off with each other, using whoevers available at the time. By assigning a position (by pressing right, then selecting positions when you GIVE the order (you can't edit them later)), you can pair off two specific dwarves. If you make a squad that's half axe, and half sword, they will not do demonstrations related to their weapon skill, just their fighting one. This should encourage more sparring, but it hasn't been fully tested. Furthermore, pairing off dwarves into sets should also encourage them to spar more in general because their skill gains should be consistent with each other at all times.

So, I was fuzzing aorund with DF's memory and .... I kicked off the Dwarven Economy ... in DF2014






I knew the economy code was still semi-present in DF, though it supposedly caused the game to crash the instant it was kicked on.

It's not 100% functional; dwarves don't claim rooms, my guess because they never take the Go Shopping job to get one (I've yet to get this to kick off), but they do pay from their account for food, and will pay for pets. Shops are buildable but due to the same Go Shopping stuff, never claimed.

I'm still O_o;ing over it. Maybe when I finish with dwarfvet, I might see if I can get this fully functional (and rewritten to be less broken, k).

Given this involves a DFHack plugin and there's no (known) way to get animals to take the rest token, moving it there.

Now, I know I'm in a minority, but from a role-playing perspective, I liked the concept that nobles were useless, made demands, and didn't work. Due to a longstanding bug, aside from making their name purple on the units list, appointing a dwarf to baron and such didn't actually do much aside add addition mandates.

Long time players (23a/40d guys) should remember that nobles are supposed to be lazy (as are their spouses). Quiestust found and defined why these guys don't become lazy. With DFHack, and a little knowhow, you can restore this behavior:



Technical Explanation For Layman Terms:

Under 40d, nobles immigrated to your fortress instead of being appointed within, which caused them to be generated with specific professions. Dwarf Fortress looks at the profession to know if a specific dwarf is a noble, and if so, if they should be lazy. When this was changed that baron is appointed from from within, the appointment code does not properly change the profession to one of the specific recognized types to force laziness. This is similar to the long standing Lords loosing their status bug, due to a holdover that weaponlords would live only to fight.

Over time the internal numbers that control profession change, to ones that are non-sensical for nobles (MERCHANT, TRAINED_HUNTER, TRAINED_WAR, MASTER_THIEF, THIEF, DRUNK, MONSTER_SLAYER, SCOUT, BEAST_HUNTER, SNATCHER, and MERCENARY).

Furthermore, the noble system was rewritten without this bit of code being triggered (noble professions appear to work via a different vector (I haven't quite figured this out yet, but its mostly irrevelent for this disuccision). I strongly suspect this is why the Dungeon Master noble failed to function in DF2010/early DF2012 as well, though I haven't tested it

 If you want to return this behavior to the game, and make your nobles properly lazy, you must tinker with the dwarven soul. The procedure is fairly straightforever. First, select the unit on the unit list you want to make lazy, and manually clear out all his labors.

Then, in DFHack, type: gui/gm-editor, and switch back to Dwarf Fortress.

You'll get this rather scary looking screen:



Be careful editing anything here, you could possibly break your game or worse.

Move to the profession line, and press enter, and type 105. Do the same for profession2, then press escape to close out. The screen should look like this:



If you look at your now modded dwarf, he will laze about doing nothing like a proper noble.

As an added bonus, if he should otherwise loose his position or die, you get this wonderful gem.



This also has interesting possibilities for mods, since if you leave any labors enabled on a dwarf, they will continue to do them, even if they say the noble will not work.

I'm currently tinkering with other bits of the DF units vector; my current goal is to see if I can get animal caretaking to work by just getting the hospital to handle it (which I realize is weird but actually making animal caretaking work will require a fair bit more work).

NOTE: Just to be clear, I take no credit on discovering how this works, just wanted to write it up incase anyone else wanted to use it in a fort, Quiestust has all the credit for this

So I recently read through Towersoared, and to say the least, I feel inspired to build my own megafort dedicated to stunning architecture just sheer dwarfiness. Call it an ode to Dwarf Fortress and the awesomeness it can create. I however have never built a fort like this before, so I'd like to socialite some advice from the local building gods.

My current idea is to have one dwarf be a prophet, and his six followers building a temple to Armok itself. Hem from the earth itself (i.e., entirely created via channelling/digging/very careful designation). In the blueprint I'm designing, the temple itself is open to the air, and exists as a 94x84 (the temple itself is smaller) spot in the ground (roughly). With four pillars and the surrounding walls engraved with the history of the world, and a magmafall illuminating the cavern in which it sits.

(I'm not sure if I want it exposed to open air or not yet, input welcome).

Here's my biggest concerns:

* When channelling downward, what's the best way to prevent dwarven stupidity. I've found doing one level at a time helps, but I've still had a few accidents this way.

* What's the best way to go up? (I need to hollow out the pyrmaid to Armok, and the four surrounding pillars will be hollow. My first idea was to build stairs in the pillar itself, engraving both the inside and outside, but I'm not sure how to remove the stairs afterwards ...

* I think I'm going to use a 5x5 embark for building, as I have other ideas I want to implement (a watchtower, perhaps built over the temple), but I'm worried about FPS issues and lag. I'd debating removing a cavern level in worldgen, which might help gain speed back, but I'm not sure what I loose by removing level 3 of the caverns ...)

* While I'm normally an ASCII player, I've switched to using a graphics pack to get 16x16 graphics (so a square looks like a square; one of the largest issues I've had with me

In addition, I'm a little stumped on the best way to do things like designs and such; I understand the how part, but I guess I've never been great at the drawing part (and I have issues visually which stone is which.)

Any ideas/advice/thoughts that this is insane welcome.

(as a note, my current scratch forts with fastdwarf to test my quickfort blueprints have come along somewhat nicely; I may post a screenshot when the current test one is done)