Bay 12 Games Forum

Wooden wall grates make great fences for your crop/livestock fields. Also balcony railings.

Oof, this is brilliant, can't believe I never thought of this

Ah yes I'm sure the issue is that the caves are blocking other sites. I'll keep fiddling with the numbers until I find something that works.

I embarked on a few caves to test, and interestingly enough almost all of them had two groups of goblins. One group was marked as "hostile" and would attack upon coming into the line of sight. The other group would be marked "temporary resident" (I think? I'll check this) and was non-hostile until attacked first. I think the hostile ones were bandits and the non-hostile ones were the owners of the cave?

I almost exclusively build surface cities, so maybe I can help!

My first tip is to always immediately build a small structure around your first food stockpile with a door or bridge, so your dwarves can hide from danger. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten 3 years into building a metropolis, then 10 goblins show up and kill everything because I've been building a grand cathedral instead of a saferoom.

Secondly, always turn your rock into blocks, because you get 4 blocks per stone, and they are lighter so they are transported faster. Keeping this in mind, its usually better to put your mason shops in the mines, then the block stockpiles on the surface, for faster building. If you're using wood, I don't think blocks offer an advantage other than its more difficult for enemies to climb.

It seemed to me, for example, that I had to individually craft each and every floor tile individually to start a new building on the surface.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. You know you can make up to a 10x10 floor at once. Once you're constructing (b>C>f), you press u,m,p,h to resize the construction. Also, I always build walls first, and only floors where necessary, until the entire building is complete. Then you can go back and add the floors. It's faster this way because you often make last minute changes to the placing of walls, and then you have to go back and remove floors, which is tedious.

Lastly, you don't have to put everything above ground (unless you really want to). For example, consider building a workdshop building, with the raw material stockpile in the basement, 1 z-level into the ground.

I hope this helps!

You said FPS is a major concern, but imo a lot of these suggestions feel slightly too gamey, and limit your design options.

Would you consider using a much smaller pop size, so you can keep your fancy rooms and hallways as well as your FPS? I pretty much always play with a pop-cap of 50, sometimes 30, and set the visitor cap to 20.

I believe tantruming dwarves can also destroy windows, so you might want to include some sort of failsafe (e.g. an emergency drain hatch in the magma reservoir, linked to a lever with magma-safe mechanisms) in order to minimise the risk of filling your fort up with magma.

I think windows into the magma sea is a cool idea.
Does anyone know if a grate in front of the window would work? I personally prefer passive fail-safes, so you don't have to be actively pay attention to ensure safety.


Specifically, will tantruming dwarves deconstruct grates, and will the three grates be enough to ensure no magma gets passed them into the room?

What is the most fun version of DF in your opinion

A lot of the older versions of DF are fun in their own ways.

If you want a polished older version, 34.11 is pretty fun like others have said. It had all of the things that gave DF its old reputation, and was free of any damning bugs. The types of threats you encountered felt more varied than in the current version, especially with the constant stream of thieves and later ambushes. The rate of military exp gain was much lower, and the rate of tantruming higher. The game just feels so different when the constant threat of death makes fortress security priority number one. This is the version I always go back to.

I have to agree though that the most recent version is certainly the most engrossing overall, and the dynamic world adds an incredible amount of depth that is missing from older versions.

use any mods?

One change I always make these days is going in the raws and changing [PERSONALITY:STRESS_VULNERABILITY] to higher values. It's pretty rare that you get stressed-out dorfs otherwise, so this adds a bit of a challenge.

Cool! Thanks for the help

It's a way of keeping track of changes to a set of files, so that multiple people can work on them without overriding each other's changes, and can keep their changes compatible with other changes to the base

Thanks for the response. You say it can keep multiple people's work compatible, but what differentiates that from some pop file-storage/sharing medium, like google docs, where your changes are saved instantly and others working on the document see that and do their work accordingly?