Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm looking to place a stockpile in a convenient location and fill it with precisely 9600 masterwork large serrated steel disks. If I'm interpreting the wiki right (please tell me if I'm wrong) then large serrated disks have a volume of 100 and bins have a storage capacity of 6000, so 60 large serrated can be fit into a single bin. This means that if every tile of the stockpile has a bin on it, the stockpile only needs a paltry 160 tiles.

The problem is with that "if every tile of the stockpile has a bin on it" bit.

You see, in spite of me having a great excess of bins, I've noticed that most of...actually, they all have at some point or another...my bin-using stockpiles don't use as many bins as they could be using, even when there's more items lying around that using bins would make room for in those stockpiles. I'm pretty sure that if I tried making a 160 tile stockpile, it just wouldn't work because it would refuse to use 160 bins.

So the question is: Is there a way to force a stockpile to use as many bins as possible/needed?

If I dig a pit 3-z levels deep, build a floor on the second level, fill the second level with magma, pour water from the first level onto the magma and then mine the resulting obsidian, will the rooms I carve out have obsidian floors? Asking because I need to know how deep to dig a certain pit.

I figure it's only a matter of time before this forum is flooded with questions about the new edition, so perhaps it would be wise to try to condense them all into one thread. Also, I have some questions myself but have sworn off DF until the holidays, so asking people who've actually played is the only way to find out for the next few weeks. My specific questions are:

Here is the new version we've been working on all year!  The flow of fortress life is quite a bit different now -- specific breaks and parties have been replaced by taverns and performances and needs and inebriation.  You can designate a tavern, temple or library from a meeting area zone, bedroom or dining room using the new Assign Location option.  The location list ('l') will let you know what sort of furniture and items you need, and you can set tavern keepers, scribes and other occupations there as well.  You'll need to set up a drink stockpile and a chest for goblets in taverns for drink service to work properly, but dwarves can still drink without a tavern as before.  You can assign multiple rooms/zones to a single location.  There's a lot more -- see the feature list below.
.....
   (*) Ability to designate taverns, temples and libraries in the fortress
   (*) Taverns and libraries also exist in adventure mode and world generation
   (*) Tavern keepers can serve drinks in both modes, goblets can be used by dwarves to drink (in taverns or otherwise)
......
   (*) Tavern visitors include mercenaries, monster slayers, bandits, diplomats and performers
........
   (*) Alcohol causes inebriation, erratic behavior, unconsciousness, death

Will dwarfs still drink straight from the barrel if no mugs are available, and will doing so cause an unhappy thought like eating without a table? Will using a very valuable mug inspire happy thoughts? Will I gain any material goods from serving visitors in my tavern, or will I just be giving stuff away for free? (not exactly a problem given how easy farming is) If I make my one and only communal dining room sufficiently large, will there be any downside to turning the whole thing into a tavern? Will the new effects of alcohol prove detrimental to our forts of alcoholics?

   
        (*) Performances include stories, poetry, music and dance (you can view activity descriptions from the unit/job list)
        (*) Art forms are randomly generated for each civilization
        (*) Instruments are now all generated, instruments can be used in both modes
        (*) Most instruments are constructed from multiple pieces using different materials

So, am I going to get a new source of happiness/stress relief out of this, or just a new kind of hauler?

        (*) Personalities and values lead to needs which can be met by various actions in both modes

Can I get some more specifics on this?

   (*) New knowledge system divided into nine branches (though it has very few practical effects so far)
   (*) Fortress scholars can advance knowledge, form master-apprentice relationships and write down their findings
   (*) Fortress scribes can copy works in your library
   (*) Scholars can visit your fortress libraries, bringing knowledge from around the world
.....
   (*) Dwarves read books in the library (they don't need to be scholars)
   (*) Values can be passed in writing (both modes) and through adventure mode arguments (uses some conversation skills)

What does knowledge do, and how do I advance it? What does "values can be passed" mean? Will my dwarfs turn into treehuggers if they read too much elven poetry?

        (*) Children play with toys now, and they can also play make believe, in both modes

Will children get unhappy thoughts if they have no toys to play with? Will they gain thoughts from using high value toys? Will playing train any skills or attributes?
   

   (*) Temples can be defiled in both modes, dwarf temples can be assigned to particular gods

What is the benefit of temples?

That's all I got. So, ask questions, answer questions and share anything interesting you've noticed.

Has anyone else ever stopped to think about how tight the tolerances and universally enforced the standards are of our little dwarfs?

Any boulder or log, for instance, can be chiseled into anything that can be made from stone or wood. When made of the same material, a statue of a dwarf hugging a badger weighs the same as a statue of a dwarf surrounded by elephants. In fact, all statues made of the same material weigh the same, regardless of their subject matter; this is also true of figurines. No matter how low or high quality a bed or chair is, we never hear about ones that are uncomfortable or awkward to use because of their size. Any chair can be used to eat at any table without any issues, regardless of the quality of either; you never hear about about tables being too tall or too short for the chairs they are paired with. If a hallway, whether natural, carved or constructed, can have any one specific door built into it, then it can have ANY door built into it. And mechanisms.....oh, don't even get me started on mechanisms. There are some other examples I can't think of off the top of my head, but what I'm getting at is that the dwarfs of Dwarf Fortress have achieved perfect interchangeability with everything they produce. For a medieval-ish society, that's incredible.

Now I know what some of you want to say next: "That's just the case because DF is currently incomplete; in future editions, there may be chairs and tables that don't go together and so on and so forth." That may be true. It may also be true that we currently don't have a gender-based division of labor because DF is incomplete and that we may see it in future editions, but does that stop us from imagining our dwarfs' society as being almost completely meritocratic? Nay! So let us reflect on just how astounding it is that our little dwarfs can be so incredibly uniform in everything they produce.

As a result of a construction accident , my mayor ended up in one of my cage traps. After freeing him, I checked him for injuries, and......well.......before you ask, no, I don't have the combat reports.
Now to be fair, after he became mayor, he basically stopped interacting with people outside of his job and just hung out in his little mayor house all day, never going to parties or meeting halls for any reason, so he was never going to achieve his dream, but still.

So, yeah.

Top that one, I dare you.

In the last 10 in-game years of playing my most recent fortress, I've spotted 4 ways to make dealing with animals more time efficient:
1) When building cages as buildings, there should be an option under the expanded view to make only cages with creatures in them visible. I would really like to not have to scroll through pages upon pages of empty cages.
2) I would also like to not have to scroll through pages and pages of untamed crundles and various untrainable creatures, so for the above and for pastures, there should be an option to make only tamed and trained animals visible.
3) In all of the above and in the animal screen, there should be an option to sort animals by species. This would reduce time spent looking for a bunch of animals of the same species that became part of your fort at very different times.
4) Also in all of the above, there should be a way to check the animal's description for husbandry purposes (ie; to make culling undesirable individuals and herding desirable individuals into the same pasture quicker).

Every Voracious Cave Crawler I've tamed has turned out to be blind and thus unable to breed. Is this because they went blind upon brief exposure to sunlight, or is this a bug?