Bay 12 Games Forum

My meditations guided me more toward hitching them to a sleigh and going on the world's most creepy Christmas present delivery run.

Year 62.  Population 203.  Our seventh melee squad is in training, although it is only about half-full.  I've decided that, while having whole marksdwarf squads start simultaneously is best practice, the same does not hold for melee squads.  Thirty-nine of our citizens are children, and eighty-six are active military.

I originally thought that now would be a good time to start prospecting deeper into the earth, but then some things came up and I felt it would be better to have DF run in the background while I work on more important stuff.  So, not very much has happened lately.  I did, however, notice that I haven't seen any new above-ground critters recently, and realized that the goose and gander on my units screen is the same goose and gander that has been there for like 10 years.  They're stuck in a tree, immobile.  I suppose I could chop down the tree or something and make them move, and possibly kill them, but I kind of like not having random animals bothering me.  I've tamed the only useful animals on the map (alligators and rattlesnakes) and also the local stress-inducing trash bird (buzzards) so having no new wildlife to deal with is kind of nice.

The fort is currently in the process of generating a new wardrobe, and I got impatient and didn't want to wait for my GCS to revert to wildness.  So I installed a trained GCS in the silk farm instead, and made the pleasant discovery that it will attack a minotaur bait.  I had such poor luck with tame GCS in the silk farm in the past that I never bothered to test a tame one against a minotaur.  This will simply things somewhat.

They put a container there so that there will be one ready when they go to store something in the stockpile.  It's not wasted, and if the stockpile fills up, that container will be filled up, too.

The alternative, which I have seen happen, is for the dwarves to take their items to an empty container in the empty container stockpile, fill it up there, and then bring it to the food/whatever stockpile.  With food, especially, this is worrying, because the food is laying in a non-food stockpile for an indefinite period of time.

I know which option I would prefer to see.

If you want to raise training levels quickly, don't tame the babies.  Let them grow up wild, then you can train them over and over and over as adults.  You can always breed more later to domesticate.

Year 60.  Population 192.  Our latest citizen is Ral Gladnessrings, the 43rd child of Kol Stasisrope and Stakud Peacetongs.

We've activated our sixth melee squad and our second marksdwarf squad.  A couple more forgotten beasts have visited, bringing the kill list up to 28, and of course the goblins keep insisting on ensuring that my military dwarves don't care about anything anymore.

The fort has 4200 bars of soap.  I hadn't actually intended on cooking up this much soap, but, well, why not?  We still have thousands more logs and not a lot of use for them other than soapmaking.  There are 2000 more units of giant bat tallow on hand, and almost 3000 units of rutherer tallow, plus assorted lumps from lesser animals for a grand total of 8150 tallow.  My only regret: that block bins don't store more bars of soap.  It boggles me that a container labeled a "bin" holds only 10 bars of soap.  In my world, that's a single economy pack, weighing 1 kg total.

I'm considering what I might build out of all this soap.  Whatever it is, it needs to be epic.

"Acceptable" is identical to "required" if you have autobutcher on.

Yes, I'm sure.  I had eat_sentient_other marked as acceptable for two separate forts, and the most stressful job in the settlement belonged to the bone carver.  Random dwarves walking near the bone stockpile would often cancel jobs because: horrified.  I once checked the bone carver's thoughts in DT to see where all her stress was coming from, and she had bad thoughts from death like x125.

Once the bone is crafted into something else, it no longer generates bad thoughts, just as skins stop generating bad thoughts as soon as they are tanned.