Bay 12 Games Forum

Others have already mentioned that roads don't work, but dirt roads actually show that when you paint them, as they leave holes in the road where boulders are. It's most easily seen when trying to paint a single tile wide (or high) road, as a dirt road that's broken into multiple pieces can't be placed.

Another quirk is that water may fail to flow through vertical bends (definitely n bends, but possibly u bends as well) because DF doesn't realize that water should flow through. Presumably water flow happens only if there's some water that actually moves (i.e. a tile with less than 7/7 water somewhere along the line). I've had perfectly valid setups just fail to get the water through the bend when I've opened the drawbridge downstream of the bend, but so far I've been able to recover by toggling a drawbridge upstream of the bend, as that atom smashes a tile of water, which restarts the flow.

Apologies for the derail: anyone interested in the OP should skip this.

Answer to Thisfox' question:
- Firstly, specifying details in workshops has been a thing for quite s few years now (at the latest it was introduced with Visitors, as that required the ability to specify "clothing" size, but it might be older still).
- I use workshop orders on repeat for most things, but I use a rather convoluted DFHack script for booze cooking/preferences ingredients cooking. To some extent I use (soon to be removed) workshop allocation lists to make "clothing" so I don't have to specify size (humies to one clothier's shop, dorfs to the other [any gobbo and elven clothiers would end up here as well, should there have been any petitioners from those races]). In the few cases where I've set up "recreational" craft shops I've allocated the therapy subjects to those for the duration of the sessions.
-I've found that for anything that's sufficiently complex that you'd want to use a Manager to deal with it the Manager fails to provide the required detailed control. Things it can't do in a reasonable manner: Brew booze until there's a sufficient stock of that particular kind (you can brew booze until general conditions are met, but not ones tied to the product: I think you can set up 70 orders to control each kind of booze individually, but it might even fail at that. You can't even have the Manager shear animals, as it spews cancellation spam all the time (manually setting it up once annually results in one spam report each year). The Manager doesn't respect workshop uses (show when auto collect webs is used, where the orders are placed in all looms, rather than the one close to the webs), and can't count (use auto loom, and you get cancellation spam when you have multiple looms, as the Manager places one job in each loom for every single thread produced, unless there's a job there already). The Manager also spreads all different qualification jobs over all workshops of the same type, so if the bone crafter goes on a prayer bender all craftdwarf shops soon stall because the top job in all of them is bone crafting ones.
Also, I try to run my fortresses on a seasonal cycle, so different kinds of jobs are done during different seasons, with winter being reserved for R&R, which means all jobs are suspended in the workshops, to be unsuspended when spring comes along. This goes hand in hand with the handling of the broken military training schedule, where I manually set squads to off duty and removes them from their barracks (to get them to perform R&R rather than individual training), and then reverse the process when it's time to go on duty (and I mostly have military training as a month long session during the R&R winter season, rotating 3 groups of squads, unless I'm preparing throwaway invasion squads (since you typically can reclaim only about 1 militia member from each squad sent on conquest).
I've probably missed a number of additional reasons I don't use the Manager in this rant...

I believe someone did point out a case where the Manager could actually be useful, but I've forgotten what it was (as it was too long before I picked up DF to actually play it again).

The militia system is frustrating (and is supposed to be improved before/in the Premium release). I suspect they won't look for their equipment until they're changing their activities. Like Thisfox, I've seen the morons shed their armor when reaching a station location (in the caverns...) and then sneak off to get one replacement piece when ordered to go to the next location and then return to the squad after picking up that single piece, and they'd probably get fully equipped eventually if I had had the patience of ordering the squad around for a sufficient number of months.
I'd try to remove the squad from the barracks to get the buggers to stop training, which ought to result in a number of piles of clothing on the floor and dorfs filing away to pick up one armor piece. If they're on duty they shouldn't have anything better to do than to pick up the rest of the pieces, but if they're off duty they'll probably take up civilian jobs (including hauling) while occasionally picking up additional uniform pieces. They'll also haul off their civilian clothes one slow piece at a time over the next several months.

The vector in the individual contains the instruments that individual is proficient with, and shouldn't care about which civs those instruments belong to. Going through what your dorfs know is likely to still fail to uncover some of your civ's instruments.

Another non tool way to find instruments would be to perform the check on the embark screen, with my primary target being to see what instruments you can make the dorfs proficient with, and if that option doesn't exist, I'd turn to the selection of stuff to bring on embark, which should include all instruments (and their parts, but that would just be redundant clutter).

I'm not aware of any script written for that purpose, although it should be possible to write one. Each civ ought to have a list of the instruments belonging to it, so it should be possible to go through that list.

The manual method is to go through every workshop capable of producing instrument parts and note the names. All instruments containing more than a single part are assembled in the craftdwarf shop, but the single piece ones are visible only in the workshops that produce them.

Obviously, you should be able to do it manually using gui/gm-editor. "Obviously" since it's a tool that allows you to look at all mapped data structures in DF, and thus you can get at essentially any piece of info a script can reach.

Do you have any specific defender abilities in mind?

It sounds really hard to get the balance right here. My biggest fear is that cavern dwellers might be able to dig into your fortress before you are ready and willing to discover and open the caverns yourself.

Anything that allow the player to counter the new attacker abilities. Historically sappers have been attacked with poison gas, fire (with the attendant gases), explosives, and military assault as a minimum. All of those are probably hard to implement. Useful siege artillery capable of collapsing tunnels would be another alternative.

The easiest to implement is probably invader inability to dig through constructed walls/roofs/floors, as well as keeping them unable to deconstruct those. I suspect, however that a water or magma filled moat reaching down to hell would work, but it's a lot of work which isn't tossed up in the second year (apart from it also completely sealing the fortress off from the surroundings that you might have wanted to have outside the fortress, but connected to it). Even "just" sealing everything in a constructed shell is a multi year task few would be done with at the time of the second gobbo siege (i.e. after the 10 member "we're coming for you" one), let alone for the first summer necro ones.

I see no reason for why cavern critters should dig at all. It just messes things up with a high risk of making DF unplayable (in fact, I'd rather have the underworld capable if breaching out of spires into caverns than cavern denizens digging up into the fortress). Once the cavern tribes are revamped from complete losers waiting to be killed into some kind of hostile force it would make sense that they might be organized enough to dig, but that's arcs beyond Myth & Magic.