Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, neither of those gives me the necessary info to do what I'm trying to do. Or really much of ANYTHING, for that matter.

1) If I want to dig a channel / remove stuff entirely.
"help shape" within tiletypes lists:
ANY
NONE
EMPTY
FLOOR
[bunch of other obviously irrelevant stuff, although I tried some of it]
FLOOR leaves a floor still. EMPTY does nothing at all. NONE does nothing at all. ANY does nothing at all.
So how do you channel, or at least remove the floor (don't care if I have to add ramps myself afterward, but I can't get rid of the floor)?

2) Painting a hematite wall? No idea, help and readme are useless.
"paint material stone: hematite"
"paint material hematite"
"paint material stone:hematite"
"paint material stone hematite"
"paint stone hematite"
none work. Always gives error or paints conglomerate??
The readme explicitly even says "paint stone microcline" as an example, which yields an error in the actual program (lol).

3) Neither the readme nor inline help even attempts to tell you how to change brush size. Would love to figure out that too.
brush 2
brush size 2
paint brush 2
brush
etc. do not do anything (or provide extra help on syntax)

I'm not an expert with DFHack by any stretch of the imagination, but I have noticed that materials are case-sensitive.  DFHack wants the name from the material token (which is always UPPERCASE) rather than the solid state name you see in-game (which is always lowercase in vanilla).  It makes sense to use "prospect all" to get a list of the local materials as exemplars.  If a material name has embedded spaces, enclose its token in quotes on the DFHack command line.

Hope that helps.

There are quite a few suggestions about books and learning skills.
Personnally, I think slabs would work very well for something like this.

For example,

After an artifact is created, the event and the process are documented on a slab.
If placed in a statue garden, admiring the slab gives bonus experience to dwarfs with appropriate skill.

The story/depiction of a heroic duel between swordfighters raises sword skill.

The story of a victorious battle motivates soldiers raising their courage stat.

The basics of  skills are studied by idle dwarf children working like a school.
This could initially require some dwarf to be present with a minimum in the appropriate skill or be directly bought from traders.   

 

If you're talking about essentially an engraving of a historic event, then maybe an artifact slab (or engraving) could be useful for skills.  Otherwise it seems exploit-y.

Actually while I'm here, can anyone tell me why this is from looking at these raws?

(snip)

I haven't created a creature from scratch in a while, so I'm confused as to why it isn't appearing. Errorlog doesn't catch anything; the creature just isn't listed.

If that is the entire file, it needs the filename (sans .txt extension) as the first line.  An easy thing to overlook.

Edit: And there should be a colon between SKULL and 5FINGERS in the body plan.  That should have shown up in the error log.

Alright I think I'll try that and just burrow all of my other civilians beforehand so they don't go running to their deaths. I think I'll start with dropping some shoddy Nickel statues on it 

"This is a nickel statues of the forgotten beast UninvitedGuest and dwarves.  The dwarves are dropping a nickel statue on the forgotten beast.  This statue commemorates the dropping of this statue onto the forgotten beast UninvitedGuest in 1059."

I wonder if you can have fortresses double as insane asylums. Not that we were anyways.

You build a wall around your fort and place a Note which reads "OUTSIDE OF THE ASYLUM".

Consult Wonko the Sane whether the Note should be inside or outside of the wall.

Quote from: MDFification on May 08, 2014, 04:23:13 pm

b) Constructed slabs should give a good thought to dwarves who see a relative memorialized there, creating additional incentive to create monuments.

Or a sad thought sometimes (e.g. if the relative has recently died, or if it was especially horrific). The reaction might vary depending on the circumstances.

I like the idea of (a) making slabs engravable to absolutely anything, and (b) making it possible to base a shrine on a slab. You could effectively force your dwarves to worship whatever you wanted.

These are memorial (or devotional) slabs, not propaganda posters.
"You know, at first all of the slabs said things like 'Remember not to make stonecrafts out of flux' and 'Don't stand where you're building a wall,' but lately they've been getting depressing like 'Militia life expectancy is now up to two weeks, join today' and 'Magma solves catsplosions'.  I'm worried about the overseer."

I have a mildly related questions.  I'm troubleshooting a mod that includes boil-away stone to gas dwarves with syndromes at appropriate moments.  If I have a group embark with the stones, they go poof as soon as I unpause the game, affecting anyone foolish enough to be standing next to the wagon.  If I use createitem BOULDER MY_MATERIAL, the stone usually just sits there.  Usually, because I have seen a rare puff of vapor maybe twice in all of my attempts.

My guess is that DFhack is doing its job correctly, but DF doesn't check every item's temperature every tick.  Is there a way to force a check, maybe having a dwarf attempt to stockpile the stone?

I'm with Ravendarksky that there was some inobvious line-of-sight causing the issue.  To your other point, FBs can and do run into other beasties in the caverns which can get them wounded.