Bay 12 Games Forum

Recently started a glacier fortress for the first time, and have been getting by with only 18 dwarves figuring I was just getting a low number of migrants due to how secluded the fort was. Got suspicious after 3 and a half in-game years of no migrants and checked, turns out a few irl months back I turned the pop cap in d_init really low for a challenge fort and completely forgot not my brightest moment

In the process of draining a volcano and building a solid glass fort inside of it. Got my non-grazing animals moved over and an above ground farm built, but making progress is very slow (even 7 screw pumps take a while to drain out a volcano apparently). Also had a minor vampire infestation, turns out 3 of my dwarves (including my mayor!) are vampires, and the process of figuring this out has cost me ~8 dwarves. Hopefully the wave of vampirism is over.

The default population requirements for temples & guildhalls in d_init are way too high, so in a recent fort I tried playing with them set to 3:9 instead. For temples it worked great, but for guildhalls they were way too low, I probably had 15-20 guildhalls by the end with not nearly enough dwarves to actually visit them. I'm thinking of setting the guildhall requirements to 5:10 instead, but I'm curious if anyone has had any luck getting them to a good number yet.

Apparently at some point, one of my dwarves turned into a Necromancer? I have absolutely 0 idea how this happened, I'm pretty sure it must have happened in the first few weeks of the Year 4 Winter, and they were even one of my starting 7. Never had a Necromancer dwarf before in a fort, so looking forward to !!FUN!!

EDIT: 2 more of my dwarves are Necromancers now, and I new visitor is one too. This will be interesting

Had a Wereape show up to my completely defenseless fort in my third year. I start panicking, thinking I'm going to have an absolute disaster on my hands with multiple dead/infected dwarves and causing a massive stress problem (although I will say that my dwarves are way happier in 47.03 than in any fort I did in v44). Before it could do much though, a human crossbowman visitor who was on their way out ran into it, and held it off long enough that the only other casualty was a random guineahen. Sadly, the crossbowman died in the struggle, but soon after his valiant death the Wereape transformed back into a dwarf, and proceeded to be pummeled to death by ~5 random citizens (and a shockingly vicious peahen). Wanted to give him a proper burial, but sadly he wasn't a citizen so his corpse is just sitting in the corpse stockpile 

Also had a minor incident where a completely peaceful Troll walked up from the caverns into my fort without me noticing. Nobody was harmed aside from mild bruising/scratches/etc., and the troll was (slowly) put down from many civilians walking near where it showed up. Besides the dwarves however, there was also a cat that joined in the fighting who shook the Troll around by it's head 28 times. Something tells me I should be afraid of the animals living in my fort.

Are you near water?

Yeah the fort is on the coast of an ocean, it's the only time this has happened in the 5 years this fort has been running though

Is there any way to convert a tile into a specific soil type? I embarked in a super specific location thinking it would have sand but apparently the "sand" was just sandy loam and completely worthless.

The way I understand it is dwarves from the same civ all tend to look similar. So, as far as I know, it's relatively normal, maybe a bit unlucky.