Bay 12 Games Forum

If you're already pulling out 4chan lines...

/in on legendary thread.

What does it mean when you suddenly go into a "fighting trance"?

Sometimes when you enter an area you get messages about various monsters running into trees or fighting each other.   How do you find them?   Or do you just have to wander around the entire area looking for them?

Why does the landscape sometimes show up in black and white and sometimes color?  It usually seems to switch when I go up or down hills.

What is so great about discovering a river that the game has to have a pop up to inform you?

How do you move faster on the overland map?  Is there a way to move from one known area to another without having to laborously move there square by square, each movement taking a dozen seconds or more?

Thanks for your help...

My first adventurer, after my first pack of dwarves died of thirst caused they couldn't be bothered to walk to the stream any more.

Please excuse my newbie questions, I've been looking about the wiki but can't find answers to everything.

What do amulets do in this game?   I found a "Cow Leather" one.

Also, how do I wield other weapons I've found?

There's no way to free the poor doggie while he's sitting in the animal stockpile?  I have to have someone lug him somewhere else first before I send someone else to release him?

How do you let an animal or monster out of a cage?

quote:

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Originally posted by Skanky:
<STRONG>
You either have sand or you don't. If you don't, you can edit any soil layer you do have to contain sand.</STRONG>

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...so you can trade for one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater leather, but there's no way to trade for a crucial substance that unlocks several specific parts of the game, unless you start with it, or cheat?

That seems like a weird oversight in such a well thought out game.

A bit of background, for those of you who care to read.  If not, please skip to the bottom with the actual questions.

My second fortress has being going wonderfully.   5 years, and all we lost was our first miner early on, when he went underground and refused to come out until he starved to death.  Since then, the worst we've had to deal with has been kobold thieves.  

This period of peace has been very useful for learning the game, and as I picked up the mechanics, I busied myself creating a happy, productive dwarf paradise.  

Production is running smoothly, and we're three quarters of the way to the million mark.  My team of engravers has smoothed out every inch of the main floor, and the legendary engravers have been etching it over.   Every room is covered (or soon will be) in masterwork or near masterwork engravings.  Every bed is made by our legendary carpenter (and mayor), and every cabinet and coffer is made by our legendary mason.  Every dwarf is ecstatic, except for a few grumpy ones who are mearly happy.

But into this paradise, horror appeared.

First, a fisherdwarf went into a fey mood.   Far from the first, but this one was different - he kept demanding things we couldn't provide.  First cut gems, then rough gems, then more cut gems - but no specifics.  He also demanded shells, though we haven't seen a turtle since the first year of operations.

I had miners dig new channels to find more gems.   When we found them, he took one, then went back to calling for more rough gems.   He ignored all the cut gems we had sitting in our stockpiles, and though I rerouted my other fisherdwarves to fish from ponds instead of the river, we didn't seem to find a single turtle.  Eventually the poor fool went mad (without any announcement), and interrupted half the fortress before dropping dead.

While I was dealing with that, a dragon showed up.   He arrived on one of the highest levels, and instead of taking the long way down to the fortress, he entered one of our access tunnel shortcuts.  I quickly locked the door, and the dragon waited there patiently for a season as we doubled the amount of traps lining the corridor.   I opened the door, and the dragon still waited there.  So it remained for a while.

There was a wardog chained up down the corridor, and eventually one of her puppies wandered over.  The dragon lept, and was immediately caught by the first cage trap.   Sadly, the poor puppy was mauled, badly wounded but not yet dead.

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My questions:

1)  How do I raise up an army?   Before the dragon arrived I started two dwarfs off training as wrestlers, and once I saw it was working and they were sparring in the barracks and going up in skill, I added three more.  But for the most part, only the first two train, occasionally including the third, and sometimes the fourth.  I've never seen the fifth dwarf train.  The first two have climbed the levels, and the third recently made it out of recruit stage, but after a year of training, the other two haven't gone anywhere.  

How do I get them to train?   If I recruit more dwarves, will I keep having the same problem?

I've dug out another barracks by the (sealed off and heavily trapped) tunnel to the chasm.   How would I get some of them to train there instead?  Will different dwarves train in different barracks at the same time?

As for my marksdwarves, it's a similar problem - only one of them ever treks out to the archery range, even though I've provides multiple targets.

2)  That heroic puppy saved the fortress, and as a reward, she's lying on the ground with a punctured lung, writhing in pain.  I have an animal caretaker in my ranks, and I've turned off all his jobs except animal care, yet all he does is stand around with "no job".  How do I get him off his ass and out to help the animals?

3)  What do I do if I have another dwarf in a fey mood with unreasonable demands?   How would I get shells if there are no turtles to be caught?  With plenty of cut gems available, why did he keep demanding them?

4)  I want to build a sculpture garden, and I want it to be pretty.  So I made a storepile around the mason's workshop with nothing but orthoclase and microline stones.   But my legendary mason ignores them, and used mudstone instead.  I have several dozen mudstone statues lying around, but none of any other type of block.   On top of that, the mason doesn't even consider any of the mudstone in the stockpiles, but takes his sweet time wandering down into the tunnels and dragging one back up from there.  

How do I get my mason to use the stones of my choosing?   For that matter, if I wanted to make statues out of platinum or some other economic stone, how would I get him to do that?

Conversely, I'm training another mason by having him make blocks.   He ignores the worthless mudstone, and instead keeps grabbing the microline and orthoclase for himself.  How do I keep him from doing that?

5)  I can't find any sand on my map, and I can't find sand on any of the liason trade request lists.  How do I make glass??   I want to make windows and an alchemist's lab.

Thanks for taking the time to read this long post, and thanks in advance for any advice you might see it fit to give me.

[ January 15, 2008: Message edited by: Night Stalker ]

Oddly enough, even when I mined out more rooms on my main level, the haulers kept going down to the bottom to get stones.

But your solutions worked, and I thank you for it.  My fortress is looking cleaner by the moment.   I expect to be back later with more newbie questions...