Bay 12 Games Forum

I believe that non-dwarf citizens (that you naturalized through petitions) are unable to migrate to your new forts.  So one thign to do is have a non-dwarven army comprised of conscripted human bards and dancers.  While the rest of your military is jumping ship to join your new fort, the humans, goblins, elves, whatevers will stay put. v World-activated forts no longer need food, either.  You can just turn everyone into a solider and equip them before retiring- they'll survive attacks better this way. 

Another nifty thing pretains to books.  Whenever a book is written in your fort, it becomes available to the entire civilization.  I remember embarking a second fort in the same civ, and the first caravan brought a book that was written in my first fort! It was a book about a boot about the founding of my previous fort written by a dwarf with a nickname... it was made out of materials I didn't use, but definitely a book written by my dorfs.  I just found this idea really nifty- I can pretend I'm spreading knowledge knowing that my books are on the dwarven caravan!

If I don't pretrain my scholars, they always wind up as historians. They'll discover source reliability and write books about their earlier books about migrating to the colony/its founding.

Or, if I let my embark-doctor beva scholar, everyone that follows will pretty much be a medical researcher.

Basically, as you add fresh scholars, they get into discussions with the existing one(s) who control the topic... So your curious cheesemongers just copy the discipline of their seniors.

If you want to train more in a specific discipline, it's best to make a new library with just them. Otherwise, you'll get 20 historians, 15 doctors, and the odd fluid engineer or chemist from related skill experience.

Regardless of remoteness, the dwarven caravan will always come visit your fort.  The caravan may be scared away by a siege or bumped into a traveling army, but it will always -attempt- to visit you.  Human and elven caravans will abide by the ~20 tile rule and not travel to remote locations. 

Eh? Why do people bother bringing a cook on embark? Quality of meals is meaningless outside of trading, and most foods are edible raw.  I usually don't bother with a cook until the second year when I have nothing else to assign a dwarf, and would like to stretch existing food supplies (seed cooking) to meet the needs of a burgeoning population.  You don't even want to buy out the first caravan, anyway.  Most of it is junk and you typically don't have the population to quickly sort through the haul without suspending the rest of your operations.  Then when massively overproducing wealth, you get earlier attacks before your military is firmly established.  And naturally, you get swarmed with more migrants that you then have to scramble to accommodate. 

I usually take a single miner, as I hate making dirt forts and don't want to delay carving out my stone halls.  I also don't like leaving huge empty spaces carved out of the dirt.  Sometimes s/he is also my mason.  When new migrants come I'll shift either mining or masonry to another dorf.  I don't like keeping the bottleneck of having the two together.

I then take a social dwarf with appraiser that I want to be my administrator/mayor, mostly because pissant cheesemongers coming in later waves becoming mayor pisses me off.

A pair of smiths.  Weapon/armorsmithing both require much work to level and are very important to the fort.

Sometimes I take a doctor instead of an armorsmith.  Armorsmiths have much more work to do than weaponsmiths, and thus level up quicker without grinding.

Grower or herbalist.  Unless the area is evil/low on vegetation, I'll tend to take the herbalist..  In an area with high vegetation, an herbalist will massively outperform a grower early on- and then there are the fruit trees on top of that...  I'll either get a farmer in a future wave, or just pick someone to level up farming later. 

Then, a mason/architect/mechanic

Finally, a carpenter/woodcutter.

P.S. how are cave crocs even remotely a threat? Just don't enter the caverns without some traps in the entrance, then set up a "croc catching station" where you place a smashable item (junk wooden door?) behind a wall of traps somewhere else.  Crocs/trolls will make a beeline for it and get snared.

If you really want zero-power, you could have used a magma piston.  I would say its less tedious work than a pump stack- it just needs more grunt work in the vein of massive channeling.  The bottom pump can easily be dorf-powered.  It all comes down to exactly how much magma you want.  You can get elaborate, automated magma-minecart delivery without power if you heavily exploit impulse ramps.  However, this is very tedious to set up properly.  It'll get you a steady stream of magma for whatever you are planning, though.  If you just want a few tiles, you can easily use a couple wheelbarrows and have a few magma-powered workshops up and running before the first dwarven caravan.  If you want massive tons of magma, a pump stack is typically your answer.  A magma piston can bring up moderate amounts with no power, but again, its very much a mega project when digging a 10x10 channel down ~100 or more floors without losing anyone. 

I've never understood how minecarts are more efficient than wheelbarrows for this.  A dwarf runs all the way down to the quarry to load a stone into the minecart, then needs to put away a sock or get a drink so it runs all the way back.  Once the minecart is full an additional dwarf runs down to push it.  So if a minecart holds X stones, then they make X+1 trips to move it.  With wheelbarrows you get X trips, all at full speed for the entire trip.  None of this even accounts for additional investment of building track and so forth.  It's been a couple of years since I've built a mine cart for anything other than magma, so maybe something has changed with priorities?  What is it I'm missing about minecarts?

Burrows. You'd typically pair this set up with a burrowed in stone hauler or two. Otherwise, yeah, it'll be just like textiles- dwarves will drop everything, cross the fortress, and haul cloth one at a time. A different dorf for each one.

Aye, bags are needed for far too many other things, like seeds and sand, to bother using them as furniture.  They are also far more annoying to make.  You have to grow the fiber/sheer the sheep/collect the silk, process it into thread at a FW, then process that into cloth at a loom, optionally dye said cloth/thread, then finally make the bag at the clothiers.  To make a stone coffer you... dig out your fort and turn the excess stone into a coffer.  BOOM.

Leather bags are a tad easier to make (butcher->tan->BOOM), but leather is so hard to produce in large quantities, that you tend to ration its use for quivers, backpacks, and cloaks. 

I mean, if you really wanted to you could still give everyone bags to use.  Say, you rushed textiles and used them as the basis of your trade economy, so mass producing high-value dyed cloth is easy for you.  Just give it a different keystroke from boxes!  I have to do annoying things like mass forbid bags before mass designating 100 chests, then deal with the cancellation spam of farmers losing seeds and the glassworks coming to a hault. 

Quote from: nuggetemily on April 23, 2016, 08:38:21 am

Werehamster kingdom, obviously. All shall bow before the fuzzy ones.

I couldn't not. Post it art is best art.

Spoiler: WEREBEAST KINGDOM (click to show/hide)

ALL SHALL BOW BEFORE EMPEROR NIBBLES

I think I love you, man! :p

Seriously though, don't kill them.  You have two general options to keep them productive.  You can either use them as gulag miners with a system of airlock bridges (open one airlock, haul stone from the mines/close first bridge and recover with main fort) to safely retrieve stones from.  They won't take breaks for food/drink, but you should still make empty chapels/taverns for those needs. 

Or, everyone's favorite, elite werehamster berserkers! Keep them training behind a bridge, just dropping in weapons and armor.  Also wall in the piece of furniture you definie the barracks from- the room will maintain its definition, but the armor stand will be protected from werebeasts.  Then, whenever a siege or some such happens, you can release the rodents of war! Even if you don't send them out transformed, the main advantage is their regeneration.  They'll never need to be retired due to going blind, losing limbs, receiving motor nerve damage, or any such nonsense.  So long as they survive until their next "time of the month," they'll spring back from anything- including necrotizing syndromes! Obviously, they can't survive getting their heads cut off and they can still bleed to death on the battlefield, but otherwise they are super-soldiers.