Bay 12 Games Forum

When do these caravans show up, anyway? I know there's something about it being once a year, but I can't tell how fast time is passing.

Press "z" to bring up the fortress status and then look in the top right. You should see a day, month, year, and season listed.
Usually, humans show up during summer and dwarves show up during autumn/fall. Humans can take a while to show, though.

Make sure you have a trade depot built, and that it's somewhere easily accessible.

Also, why do my miners sit there doing nothing as well? They have picks, unlike poor forgot-to-bring-an-axe over there, and stuff to mine, but they just sit there, looking sad.

The most common reason for this is that they can't get to the area you want them to mine. Make sure that there are proper sets of stairs built so they can get to the appropriate altitude to mine. Stairs have to be made in pairs, or they won't function.

[ February 17, 2008: Message edited by: MOOMANiBE ]

I recently put into action my evil plan regarding dumping the contents of a magma vent into the ocean (although making a giant obsidian island will have to be put on hold until I find some bauxite, or steel mechanisms get put in so that my floodgate doesn't melt after a minute of use).

I have the magma going in on the same z-layer as the ocean waves, but the waves and the magma don't really interact properly at all. The magma turns the z-level below it into obsidian, effectively creating an artificial beach head, but the ocean waves that come in simply "hit" the magma and turn into mist, rather than steam, as if it was a solid object. The magma seems to be entirely unaffected by the waves, and rather than hardening it simply sits spreads right out into the ocean as if the waves weren't there.

I'm aware the presentation arc is years and years away, and that it's planned to fix up all this stuff, but the "b" menu is, at this point, rather messy, and I think a re-sorting of it would help a fair bit in making construction more accessable.

Primarily, we need a "Furniture" subcategory of some kind. We have a submenu for workshops, right? It seems wasteful to clutter up the root build menu with Armor Stands, Beds, Seats, Coffins, Doors, Cabinets, Weapon Racks, Statues, Tables, and Archery Targets.

I'd like to see a sort of viewable scale on the world map that shows the "potential" of areas on the map. What I mean by potential, is that it would be some sort of risk-vs-reward scale for players. Higher potential areas might have more ores, underground features, gems, and other things useful to players, but also might contain groups of monsters or other difficult situations. This would allow players to strategically decide where they want to place their base, and how dangerous of a time they want. New players could start in safe, but fairly ordinary areas, while players looking for a challenge could get challenging but rewarding situations out of high-potential areas.

If randomized, this could also allow for more feasible settling of varied areas while still finding interesting things to do, as opposed to the sort of "find a lava vent" or "find a named mountain" thing we seem to have going now.

Edit: Important as well, is that it allows for mid-level gameplay. That is, medium rewards for medium risk, which is very very rarely seen at this point.

[ November 05, 2007: Message edited by: MOOMANiBE ]