Bay 12 Games Forum

I had the same problem with my hunter not hunting.  Then I saw in another thread that the new version requires you to allocate ammunition to your hunters from the (m)ilitary screen.  Once I allocated some ammo my hunter went to work (I may have had to toggle the hunting labor after allocating the ammo, can't remember).

My new favorite defensive measure: The Clockwork Drowning Chamber! Kill goblins without ever issuing a "Pull the Lever!" command or stationing a squad nearby.

Your trap seems to perform its job adequately without going overboard.  It requires an absolute minimum of dwarf intervention, which will doubtless improve the safety record of your fortress.

Efficiency?  Safety?  Your dwarf engineering license is hereby revoked pending an inquiry into your apparent lack of dwarven spirit.  Seriously, though, good job.

I never got prepared meals? Do they have any advantages over just eating, say, plump helmets?

Happiness.  Prepared meals have a quality modifier (fine, exceptional, masterpiece, etc...) based on the skill of the cook.  Dwarves get happy thoughts from eating high-quality meals.  Happy thoughts can prevent tantrum spirals, placate irrational nobles, and otherwise keep your fort running smoothly.

Also you can sell high-quality meals for exorbitant prices to traders

Has Toady ever said that he's using A* for pathfinding?  I've heard him mention that his pathfinding could use some more optimization, but never any mention of the exact algorithm.

Assuming that Dwarf Fortress uses A* or something similar, it's not necessarily a big performance hit to create large open areas.  If that were the case then you'd expect to see huge framerate problems on almost all above-ground fortresses.  The A* algorithm does not consider every possible route to the destination unless it has to.  In fact, by open areas you actually reduce the number of iterations that A* must perform before finding the optimal path.

The thing that will really kill your pathfinding performance is having a bottleneck (door, stair, etc...) between two points in an unexpected location.  For example, consider a dwarf who wants to go to the dining room.  The dining room is west of his position and two levels up.  The A* algorithm will try to "guess" the best route to the dining room by assuming that he needs to go west.

But what if the staircase is actually east?  That can slow down the pathfinding in a big way, since it won't even try going east until it has exhausted most of the possibilities on the west side.  Centralized staircases, despite their popularity, are a good example of how to drive the A* algorithm nuts.  Fortunately most forts which use centralized staircases tend to use only a small area on each level.

Note that if Dwarf Fortress does NOT use A* then all of the above is moot, and open areas may indeed cause pathfinding lag.

I suspect that huge caves will wreak havoc on Dwarf Fortress's path-finding algorithm.  Be prepared for massive slowdowns.

If you don't mind cheating, you can always edit an existing reaction.

Thanks for the suggestion, but it didn't work completely.  The reaction produced an object called "shell", and my dwarves stored it in the designated shell stockpile.  However it must not be initialized properly because it isn't drawn on the screen  (it's an empty black tile) and my siege engineer isn't grabbing it.

Her furniture may not be a source of unhappy thoughts, but more happy thoughts can offset the unhappy thoughts from grudges.

I recommend using a drawbridge.  You don't need to dig a moat - just treat it like a paved road.  The advantage of a drawbridge is that you only need one set of mechanisms to control it, as opposed to linking three or more floodgates or wall grates.