Bay 12 Games Forum

It occurred to me that I could build with defense in mind from the start and be less productive, or perhaps I could build outward, layering on defenses as I go.

I agree setting up a workshop-and-production fortress first is only common sense. I'll admit I've never really bothered with the less productive, more defensive start. If there turns out to be a serious need for defensive later, I use the outward defenses strategy: I wall-in the "easy way" into the fortress, and make the only alternative a trap-lined tunnel, when it's needed. A row of lever-controlled floodgates (one floodgate behind the other) also seems to work: building destroyers take a certain amount of time to get through each floodgate, giving me enough time to wall the hallway in at the end while they mess around getting through five or ten layers of closed stone gates.

If the magma level is open a little, it is possible to have a magma vermin set a kitten on fire. I've never seen them hit a feline itself (cats and kittens eat the vermin, so I tend to stable them down in the magma levels to keep the vermin down) but if they set something near a cat on fire, (such as the weaponsmiths second best pants, which he left abandoned on the ground near the forge) it's possible: !!XtrousersX!! -> !!kitten!!..... In my experience, !!kittens!! and !!cats!! immediately go up all the z-levels and climb a tree, leading to forest fires. Damn them.

Carrot wine isn't bad, but I recommend using medieval carrots (either red, or white) and not modern carrots (orange) due to flavour issues. It's not unlike radish wine, actually. Turnip wine is strongish, but I've only had it with heavy amounts of spice. So I'm not sure what it's like without lots of spices getting in the way. Probably like carrot wine and radish wine, to be fair. They have a clean rooty flavour, quite enjoyable.

Tomato wine was a disaster. Something to do with the amount of pectin we had in the brew. I recommend using really, really ripe tomatoes for the juice, and straining it well. We did neither of these things, and probably that's why it was so bad. I still like bloody marys, though, which are tomato juice and alcohol, basically.Be careful not to use beer yeast for wines. At least we didn't make that mistake.

And if you really want to try something awful, go look up coq au vin. Putting a chicken in your beer just seems so damn dorfy.... a pity it's not in the game.

As with fowl, make breeding chambers, and lock a couple in, with nothing to do, until they've socialised, brooded, and hatched some young. Just make sure there's something to eat in there other than scrambled eggs....

Quote from: LMeire on May 14, 2017, 05:39:17 pm

Quote from: I.M. Err0r on May 14, 2017, 01:13:17 am

Yeah, all the random animal organs and tallow would be a little off-putting.  "Minced cat tallow with finely-minced kea brains." Mmmm...
...

Isn't that literally just a sausage without the casing? Couldn't be too bad, maybe a bit artery-clogging but there's certainly worse ways to die in this game.

At least sausage has the decency to have its contents ground into a more appetizing mulch first.

That's what "minced" means in Australian, does mince not mean coarsely ground in other places? And I'd call roast minced tallow and assorted meats a "rissolle", and I think Americans call it a "hamburger pattie".

Does people generally only play 0-5 years on a fort before restarting?

I like to keep my forts waaay longer than that, and that gets very hard due to the nature of the game code. I don't think hardware is really ever the issue, it is a software problem. And it will stay that way until Toady takes some time to study/re-code etc. unfortunately it is way more fun to code new features. So that may take some time.

Nope, but I often get bored with a fort if it's ten years old or more.
It's not an fps thing, it's just the realisation that I want a new challenge, and that my current fort can't offer that challenge. I might let the fort run in the background for a while, or I might move on to a new fort with new challenges. I'll usually keep playing that world, in a different fort, sometimes even a different civilisation, but I've got a lot more worlds to choose from now that I've been trying to mess with cooking "the perfect world" for me.

It's always good to encourage new players. It's a lovely little review you've written there. I'm glad you're using the DF font, and not a tileset

The thing I'd mention to your readers is the wiki, and you've done that. It's essential.

Two questions: I thought wooden training axes didn't cut trees down any more. Maybe I'm wrong about that? The other thing I have to ask is why there stills are "under farming workshops"? Is the game different in a windows machine? Because for me, I build a still with b-w-l, and farming workshops with b-w-w. How does that make stills be underneath farming workshops? Am I missing something significant?

Also, as someone who brews in the real world, I don't consider a still to be a place to make alcohol, but a place to make it stronger, so it took me a while to understand what a DF style still was for: I had to be told by the wiki. Yeah, I guess I was a bit thick.

....You might also want to warn them not to dig a fort on an aquifer as their first try. Aquifers are great, but they require a certain amount of learning curve first....