Bay 12 Games Forum

Is there a magic tag I can add to queue up lazy dwarves, and visiting elves and humans for slaughter?

I discovered a book on Amazon about how to play DF.  With that, and google, it was all I needed.

I do.  That could explain it.

I successfully played for the first time a week ago.  There is a lot to absorb.  I've never even made mud...

But everything I read said I should have gotten a swarm to kill me.  I had the text appear that signaled it.  And while I had learned from my were-iguana expedition leader that no door was safe, that's about the extent of my furniture destruction knowledge.

This all ends in chair and bedroom questions, but first, the background!

So I'm a little over a week into DF after buying the book.  My very first post-book fortress I explored as much as I could.  One of my first explorations was straight down, just to see how far down it went, and what was down there.  I found two caverns, and then magma.  I even found some adamantine down by the magma.

A week later, I came across some well hidden information about what might be beneath the maga, so I made a new expedition of seven dwarves to go and check it out.  I gave them 4 picks, enough food and alcohol to hopefully complete their mission, and to fill out the point buy, one lye and one rock nut.  As for skills, they knew how to mine.  Not caring about their long term survival, I embarked on the first square I found without an aquifer, a mountain terrain with no soil.  My first order was to dig stairs down in a 2x1 pattern.  Two dwarves could dig, and the rest couldn't, so at worst I'd lose half my picks if any fun happened.  I breached two caverns before finding warm stone.  I knew, from my reading, that I had to look for adamantine.  So my dwarves spread out horizontally.  Once I found an area without warm stone I dug down again, and spread out again.  Once I found magma, though, there wasn't any adamantine to be seen.  I misread the map, and thought I was still above the magma level, so went I sent out exploratory tunnel into the magma chambers near the edges of what I had seen, my dwarf went missing and my tunnel changed color.  Oops.  I had three picks left though, so no problem.  I went up, explored horizontally, and came down again.  Pretty soon I had found admantine, and I set my dwarves to carefully excavating down it.  It didn't take long, and I found what I was looking for.

I expected the fun to be over quickly, but it wasn't.  Nothing there bothered to come visit my dwarves.  So, I figured I had better wait it out.  I had plenty of food and alcohol left, no way to farm, and whatever plant and animal matter lived near my wagon.

Fast forward a year.  My dwarves had dug out several large spaces in the mountains for storerooms.  Traders had come twice, and despite plying them with chunks of admantine, my lack of a trader dwarf just offended them both and neither would trade with me.  Migrants had come though, and one of the migrants brought an axe!  And so I was suddenly able to do something.  I constructed a bed first.  I put the bed into a corner and designated it as a dormitory.   Soon after, I had a chair.  I plopped the chair down and all of a sudden two creatures emerged from that deep staircase.

It was obvious the chair that provoked them.  Do devils in Dwarf Fortress hate chairs?  Would I have been safe if my dwarves had sat on the floor until the end of time instead?

But then there was the bed that had been built earlier.  One devil went outside and hunted down every single peahen there was living outside.  It was a holocaust of peahens.  The other devil, however, went to the bed.  And he stayed in bed for months.  My poor dwarves had to sleep on the floor in the hallway outside the devil's room.  I tried sending a squad in to evict the devil from the bed but ten dwarves with three picks and an axe didn't get very far.  As best as I can tell, the devil never bothered to get out of bed while he killed them all.  Or the next unarmed squad I sent in, or the rolling third squad (those poor migrants were conscripted one at a time as they made it into the fortress while the slaughter was ongoing).  Eventually, all my dwarves had fun.

But I'm left wondering, what if I had given the devil his own bedroom?   What kind of bedroom does a devil need to be kept in the fortress?  Same as a noble dwarf?  Better or bigger than a noble?  How many devils can I successfully keep in a fortress, anyway?

So I figured out how to trade.  My main problem is that the left side trading window, the one with the stuff to buy, isn't big enough to see the full name of the stuff.  I have to scroll around hitting 'v' to find out what items are.  I've tried hitting tab a lot, it does nothing.  I've tried resizing, it just makes the right side larger and doesn't affect the left side.  I can't find a place on the bar to grab and drag.

How do I make it bigger?

Sooooooo I played another six hours last night, doubling my time.  I told my dwarves to dig an up/down staircase straight down.  I encountered not one but two cavern complexes down there.  One of them cause me to have to reroute my staircase because apparently dwarves can't build one downwards from the ceiling to the floor.  Eventually, I hit hot rock.  So I did the obvious this, and I told them to dig anyway.

So now I have a staircase leading to a lake a magma that passes through two cavern complexes.  Those caverns have been open for quite a while, and nothing has crawled up my staircases to kill my dwarves.  Is that normal?  From everything I had read, I was certain that digging straight down would be disaster.