Bay 12 Games Forum

The message is for seasonal depletion of fish.  Your fisherdwarves will stop fishing in that area for the rest of the season.  The fish population will reset at the start of the next season.  Eventually you may exhaust all fish in a given biome, in which case you'll get this message the first time a dwarf tries to fish every season.

JMZ

I prefer malachite or copper nuggets to tetrahedrite, the ore is cheaper and I don't care about the 20% chance of silver.  I also replace half of the copper ore with cassiterite, if available.  This let's me make some bronze very early, and I can get 2 bars from 1 smelter reaction, which means less time getting the military going.

I also replace the axes (either type) with some logs.  A carpenter can turn them into training axes very quickly.

Sand and milk are very useful, since both cost 1 point on embark and have a free container.  I turn 10-15 sand into serrated glass discs for trade goods, and the milk into cheese for roasts.

Turkeys produce more eggs than any bird except chickens, and they're larger than the chickens.  Good for egg roasts early, then let the eggs hatch to get a huge mass of turkeys you can butcher for meat, bones, and skins 3-5 years down the road.

JMZ

Jumping in with some early analysis of my own.

Teacher, Student, and Concentration all seem to increase by a fixed amount for demonstrations.  The teacher gains a fixed amount in the skill being taught (half as much as they gain in Teacher), while the student gains a variable amount based on all 3 skills.  I wonder if the teacher-dwarf would get improved gains for teaching more than one dwarf at a time?

Observer trains during sparring (and real combat), and presumably gives a boost to EXP gains.  Can't be proven without detailed combat logs and more detailed tracking of EXP gains, though.

Conclusion-jumping:  Good teachers should go in the military early, good students/concentrators should join later.  Observation makes sparring (and combat) a better learning experience.  This was something I already believed, but now there is SCIENCE! to back it up.

@krenshala:  The point is to test our beliefs.  Sometimes we are proven wrong.  Just because "everybody knows" doesn't mean we're right.

Regarding Leadership, I've only ever seen gains on militia captains.  This doesn't mean other dwarfs can't gain it, I've just never seen it.  Having the leader of a squad gain Leadership makes sense, but sense and DF have a very tenuous relationship. 

JMZ

Today I learned that clowns are surprisingly easy to deal with - if you take steps to prepare for them.

This describes EVERYTHING in DF.  The problem is figuring out which things to prepare for first. (HINT: Booze is #1.  Everything else you will probably get wrong eventually, resulting in !!Fun!!)

I learned that *large, serrated steel discs* will at least triple the number of hauling jobs after a siege.  I really need to work on a Dodge This!(tm) trap.

JMZ

You can assign any dwarf to be the manager, at any time.  If you have fewer than 20 dwarves the jobs are automatically approved.  Your manager will need an office, even though he will never spend any time there.  If you have 20 or more dwarves, the manager will have to spend time sitting in his office with the task "manage work orders" before the jobs will be approved.  Dwarves who "like new ideas" make good managers, dwarves who "hate intellectual discussions" make very poor managers.  The organizer skill affects how fast jobs get approved once the manager starts managing.

For an early fort, just make a chair in your dining room into a 1x1 office, assign any dwarf who is at least neutral on intellectual issues, and start issuing jobs.

JMZ

1 seed per plant from brewing/eating/processing/anything that isn't cooking.  A stack of plump helmet [5] will produce 5 plump helmet spawn whether you brew it into dwarven wine [25] or let 5 dwarfs eat the plumps for dinner.  Process pig tail to thread and you get just as many seeds as brewing it into ale.

Planted seeds count towards your 200 seed cap, and show as red in the stocks menu.  Seeds traders have also show as red.  If you expand the list with <tab>, planted seed show as light blue.  The cap is 200 seeds per type, so you can have 200 plump helmet spawn and 200 pig tail seeds and 200 rock nuts and ... you get the idea.  The seeds go in bags, then the bags are put in barrels, so keep a few extra of both around when doing a lot of farming.

There are a few plants that do not produce seeds at all.  Muck root, bloated tuber, and valley herb are the ones I can think of off-hand.

JMZ

Dolomite has the highest melting point of any stone except raw adamantine, so it would be your best bet against fiery clowns. The best materials are dragon leather and bone, but it's difficult to get a door made of those.  Then addy, dolomite, periclase, fire imp, alunite, chromite, bauxite, and obsidian.  If you're really worried about fire types.  Wood doors would burn but shouldn't melt, which might also buy some time.

If you channel over one of the doors and dump a sock in the doorway, the clowns will stop.  They get confused if they can't make a dramatic entrance because the door is propped open.  Relevant thread here.

JMZ