Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm thinking of trying to make my central staircase go through my cistern.  If I want my dwarves to see it, then do I need to surround it with walls made of clear glass bricks or can I simply put up glass windows?

The wiki makes me think that if I melt down a non-adamantine giant metal axe blade that I will get more metal out of it than I put in?  Is that true?

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Trap_component

I commented recently that my game crashed on me.  I was told in the forums that this is common.  But I've been playing since August 15th of last year.  I had one crash, the first time I tried to use truetype fonts, so I didn't try to use truetype fonts again.

But since that crash, my game crashes all the time now.  And it started when I learned a new DF trick.  I learned how to use a metalcrafters forge.  Up until this point, I've been selling mechanisms to the caravans for all my military needs.  But as soon as I set up a metalcrafting industry, the crashes started.

Is this just my imagination?

How do I stop horses, goats, and donkeys from climbing up into trees?

Just cut all the trees down?

Yesterday I had a really well going fortress.  I was poking it on the laptop while I played WvW in GW2.  I fought off two minotaurs, but then goblins came, and I ended up with a sodlier who had a cut leg!  The horror!  So I made a hospital.  The hospital needs a well, of course, so I made a cistern.  And then I went back to GW2.

Now that my entire fortress is a giant cistern, I'm wondering what my next fortress will be like.  And I'm thinking about ramps...

In theory, I can make ramps all the way down to the caverns, and build my trade depot there, right?  The ramps need to be 3-wide on the straights, with larger corners if I've read the forums and wiki right.  If I buy lots of food and beer, and maybe five picks, I can in theory get to the caverns and set up farming there to start with as well, right?

In a previous fort, on my old computer, I lost of dwarves because badgers kept falling out of the sky and crushing the dwarves while they were taking a shower.

My newest fort, on my new computer, was hastily cobbled together.  Packs of wild badgers flooded into the dining room, at least 50 units from the surface, fought my dwarves, and died in droves there.  Then my dwarves refused to remove the bodies.  I had no coffins, and the orders at the workshop went ignored, but years passed and not a single ghost ever appeared.

Did the badgers eat their souls?

I think I've figured out basic defenses enough for some longevity.  I've settled on a defensive trench with a drawbridge, and I undercut the trench below my fort to prevent climbers.  So now I'm looking into getting metal and cloth industries going.  Cloth doesn't look too hard as long as I remember to turn off cooking all my seeds.

Am I correct in thinking that I should save the top layers (flux stone?) for making iron with later, and burrow down to the lower rocks to start making flutes and mechansisms for the traders?

I have a stream.  A 'k' on the surface says "open space", a 'k' below the open space says 7/7 water.  It is like that everywhere I check in the stream except the banks.  As I understand it Urist doesn't do 7/7 water.  But he can cross it just fine.  He stays in the ground level, in the open space, and, I'm guessing now, magically floats across?  What is going on here?  Shouldn't Urist need to go down into the water instead of walking on top?

I have recluse-man webs up in the sky.  If they didn't move around and change in number, I would have assumed they had been up there when I chopped down all the trees.  But I don't think that is the case anymore.  The webs definitely change in number up there, and I'm pretty sure they move around too.  There are no trees left.  I wiped them out, repeatedly.  The webs are three z levels up.  I've also never seen a recluse man on the units list.

A giantess came.  I sent two squads out.  An epic battle ensued.  A couple of my dwarves died in the early fighting, but that's it.  The giantess and all my injured dwarves are now in a field together.  The rest of my military can't path to attack the giantess because there are too many injured piled up around her.  I'm building a hospital as I type this in the hopes I can get some of injured moved away so more military can get to her.  Is this a good idea, or should I maybe try to force some to be archers and just position them near her?  Or will they shoot all their friends to death?

Interestingly, my last fortress was retired because something came up from the caverns.  My military beat it up pretty badly, but couldn't quite kill it.  It took refuge...in the hospital, which was built around the only vertical staircase I had, and it was on the stairs so no dwarf would go on the stairs at any level.  My military needed food and water, but couldn't get any because seeing it on the stairs canceled their attempts.  I retired before losing the fortress completely.  I'm sure the dwarfs I abandoned there got everything under control without me.

And, having typed this up, my giantess is dead!  The room for the hospital is built.  A rhinoceres wandered into it and died there.  And the corpse of the giantess is surrounded by a massive pile of buckets because all the attempts to feed and water the injured dwarves formerly around the giantess went poorly.  The only dead dwarves are the first two from the initial attack.  Since my hospital is just a room, and not actually designated yet, I'm a bit perplexed as to where all the injured went...

Ideas, suggestions, etc, are all welcome.