Bay 12 Games Forum

Personally, I put barracks at every entrance to the fort and always keep at least 40% of the fort enlisted in the military. When possible, I enlist everyone to solve the clothing issues, leaving only a few for mining. But that's for extremely matured forts. The best defense is a great offense... or something like that. Traps are nice but I feel that the metal you spend making traps is better off as more equipment for the military.

In Masterwork you can request items from humans, elves and drow asides from dwarves. They are all capable of bringing 'Crates' of items, found under the Miscellaneous section. Dwarves can bring crates of steel and mithril, and a variety of other useful items. This can be quite handy later on. Elves can bring crates of the various woods, and also mithril. Elves can also bring exotic pets that may include magmalings, depending on the elf civs nearby. You can command magmalings to spawn magma where they are in the Alchemist Lab (this building requires research). This eliminates the need for fuel very early on (as early as year 2 depending on the elf caravan timings).

Drow and humans tend to bring worthless things as compared to dwarves and elves, so I generally ignore them unless I want some supplemental food/drinks. Bloodsteel that drow caravan brings cannot be substituted for steel in the production of mithril so they are doubly worthless, at least from my perspective.

Note that crates of the valuable metals such as mithril and steel, along with crates of armorsets are very expensive. You'd need to produce masterful roasts or crafts made of precious metals to purchase them early on. It becomes less of an issue later, just like in vanilla, where you can simply buyout the entire caravan (bad idea for FPS).

You need to Trade Warehouse (or was that Storehouse) to unpack contents out of the crates.

The special tag is what prevents caravans from offering the metal (hence why it also appears on things like pattern welded metals). The problem is probably related to the hard-coded nature of the tag expecting there to be only one type of special metal (adamantine) so when reading the raws, the game, for the purpose of moods, keeps track of only one metal with that tag.

I'm not sure why it would be orichalcum, though. There are other metals which both appear before (adamantine) and after (pattern stuff) in inorganic_stone_mineral. Maybe related to the orichalcum bar appearing first in reaction_masterwork (as a rare result of batch smelting various metals), since this might be how the game realizes that orichalcum exists as a bar for metal moods? What happens if you move the adamantine wafer reaction to the top of reaction_masterwork? However, you also said that only weaponsmithing moods favor these special metals; it was my understanding that once adamantine is discovered, all moods favor its use in whatever form (though they may not overlap 100%; that is, it could be that adamantine can be used in some moods that orichalcum cannot be, though I doubt it). If that's the case I'm not sure why it would be limited specifically to weapon moods.

Ahhh I should have taken a look at the other metals other than bifrost and orichalcum. I didn't realise stuff like the welded metals have the [SPECIAL] tag as well. But then again it would mean that more research is needed before I can confirm anything. I wonder if there's anyway to force a mood to happen...

Anyway, I speak of weapon moods only because I made weapon moods the most common moodable skill in my fortress by training everyone a bit in weaponsmithing. This issue also applies to other moods that take bars, such as armorsmithing. I frequently get orichalcum artifact armor early on because of this, so I figure it is not exclusive to weaponsmithing.

Back on the original topic, I've removed the [SPECIAL] tags from orichalcum and bifrost. So far had 6 weapon moods, all 6 did not call for either, instead going for adamantine. I would like to suggest that the next update remove these two tags so that the mood behavior is the same as vanilla.

I would like to put out a vote in favor of constructing squads with only a single kind of weapon. 

Previously, I had just had crossbow squads and mixed melee squads (figuring a random assortment of close combat weapons would be able to handle any kind of opponent) and it worked OK. 

My current (and soon to fall, for unrelated reasons) fort I made dedicated weapon squads (including a dagger squad and a scourge squad when I could scrounge enough up from invaders).

The effectiveness of the squads in combat was about the same (I would usually send my whole military after any threats that showed up), but the training speed was *dramatically* faster.  Where previously I had to wait for the King to show up with his retinue to get any Elites, now they were popping up after only a couple years (and with just normal barracks training and an occasional ambush; no "shaft of enlightenment", mass gladiator pit, wooden spear trap, or anything like that).

So on the whole, I would definitely recommend generating a bunch of separate squads, stick new arrivals in as matches their skill-set (making sure at least 2 per squad to encourage sparring), and let them train each other.

To add on to that, sparring in pairs is best done when scheduled like this:


Dwarves will be inclined to spar more if they are training in pairs. To make life easier, macro this scheduling and you can reuse it for all squads and fortresses.

Redownloaded MW, and genned a new world with no fortress defence races enabled, mostly default settings (turned off food variety, fear the night, smoke effects, battle cries, and all balance changes except harder farming. Enabled english names.) Also, I enabled human bandits.



The moment I try to scroll down to the next page, this happens. I am perplexed. I had one world where this worked, but I can't be sure if it was in v.4j or v.4i. But so far, none of the saves that I confirmed is genned on 4j works. I'll test more if I have time tomorrow.

Edit: Note that I started a new adventurer then retired him. I also ran a fort for 1 season before abandoning.

The game crashes when attempting to load an old adventurer. I created two separate worlds, ran a fort on each for about 5 years. Then I abandoned and started an adventurer, then retired him. When going back into advmode, I press the Up key to try and scroll to the old adventurer (since he'll be the last on the list) and the game just crashes. Hitting Page Down also causes the same crash. I am using fortress defense races on both worlds. Is this a known bug or has it got something to do with the fortress defense races?