Bay 12 Games Forum

I think you are right.  Which presumably means that you can strictly limit the amount of alcohol served by assigning only a single mug to the tavern.  I may have to test that out.

Hmm... Sounds like you have too many mugs, potentially.  Assuming you don't have a tavern, dwarfs drink twice a month.  I'm not sure how long a drinking task takes, but let's say it is half a day to keep the math easy.  There are 28 days in a month, which means that all of your dwarfs will take 1 drink every 14 days (on average) and there are 28 "drinking slots" (i.e. times when dwarfs might be drinking at the same time).  If you have 28 dwarfs, then on average you will have 1 mug in use at all times.  If you have 280 dwarfs, then on average you will have 10 mugs in use at all times.

Obviously there is a chance that all of your dwarfs will want to drink at the same time, but that  probability is vanishingly small.  I don't feel like doing the statistics, and it's not going to be completely random anyway.  However, imagine the case with 28 dwarfs.  On average 1 mug will be in use at all time.  There is a reasonable probability that 2 will be in use, less that 3 will be in use, etc until we get to a very near 0 probability that all 28 dwarfs will be drinking at the same time. 

In practice, I make 5 or 10 mugs, which usually lasts me until 100 dwarfs.  I rarely play with more than that.  Note that you may need more mugs if you have a tavern, but I just realised that limiting mugs will limit the amount of alcohol your tavern keepers can serve and will reduce the number of deaths by alcohol poisoning.

As you said, I looked and there are a couple of bugs already that the describe the problem(s).  There is one that describes this issue exactly. Unfortunately it is marked "needs feedback", but appears to have been ignored since then (there is a *lot* of feedback in the thread).  It seems to be set as a very low priority, so I suspect it's not getting fixed soon :-(  The bug was originally reported in 2015, so it's been around for a while.

On the plus side, there seems to be no repercussions for killing everyone, so you can use it as live training.  Or you can RP it in a variety of ways.  Also, even though the excess merchants seems to involve scuttling the caravan, it does not seem to lead to the missing caravan bug.  Caravans and migrants continue to show up as normal (as least it does for me).  So basically the major downside is the elimination of some historical figures (as well as possible casualties on your side) if you decide to "clean up".  Probably this could be fixed fairly easily with a DFHack script, but I don't use DFHack, so I can't do that.

Yes.  All visitors to your fortress are randomly distributed and then marked hostile, even though they are not hostile.  You will discover if you look in lengends mode that the extra ones that weren't there visited while the fortress was retired.

There are 2 solutions that I know of.  1. Kill them all.  2. Put cage traps around and wait for them to walk into the cage traps (they do walk around a bit).  Incidentally, once they are in a cage, you can pasture them, so you can potentially use them as seige fodder (which is what I've been doing).

I *really* should submit a bug report.  Feel free to beat me to it ;-)

Most of the info comes from the experts on the forum.

Ha ha!  On this topic you *are* the expert, hands down, as far as I know.  I'm willing to be greatly surprised that there is someone who knows more about dead and struggling civs, but I will still be greatly surprised ;-)

FIRED_MAT-producing-items.

Basically 'a'dd item condition, 't' FIRED_MAT-producing-items.  Don't forget to 'q' to get the inequality correct and 'n' to set the amount.

For these kinds of things, you can almost always figure out what trait you need by looking at the next step in production.  For example Make clay statues has a 'r'eagent condition of FIRED_MAT-producing-stones.  There is a very occasional bug where the required trait isn't available, in which case you can't do it.  lye-containing-item seems to be one of those (it's lye-bearing-item in the list, which is not used :-P, and the 'p'roducts condition for make lye unhelpfully uses 'lye' which is also not used).

I have a world with exactly one dwarf in one of the civilisations (I'm doing a Youtube tutorial/let's play on it).  Basically, he was 2 when the civ was destroyed, but managed to survive.  At the age of 12 he became military commander.  110 years later I started the game.  Some interesting points:

On the legends history map, there were still areas claimed by the civ, despite that fact that both of their sites were ruined (one was reclaimed by the other dwarven civ).  I believe that when a civ is truly dead (i.e., when all the members are dead), there will be no areas on that map claimed by the civ.  Looking in the sites_and_pop text file exported by legends mode, I could see that there was still one dwarf living in the ruined, unclaimed fortress.

However, in another world, I have had members of an almost dead civ living in a goblin town.  They subsequently became queen of the almost-dead civ, while simultaneously being a member of the goblin civ.  After looking for other examples of this, I believe what happens is that when a dwarf becomes a disciple of a master in another civ, they gain membership into that civ, without relinquishing their own civ.  So you can have a member of an almost dead civ hiding away in a dance troupe, or whatever, until they suddenly become queen.  Potentially it can go the other way, where a goblin would study under a dwarvish master and when the dwarf civ got destroyed, the goblin could become king of the civ, while still being a member of the goblin civ.  I've actually heard reports of goblins becoming kings/queens of almost dead civs, and I suspect that's how it happens.

Back to my almost dead civ with the millitary commander living in the ruined city.  In my let's play, I started an adventurer to go and find him to interview him (with the idea of trying to write a book about him -- not sure if it is possible).  I just noticed when I looked at the updated legends save that after I started my adventurer, he suddenly became baron and then king of the civ.  So it seems that isolated dwarfs will not become king in world generation, but will become king once world activation starts.

I am considering starting a fortress in this almost dead civ after I meet with the now king, but haven't decided exactly what I want to do.  It would be nice to allow the king to reclaim his ruined city, but since there are no dwarfs, I think it is impossible.  The only way to do it would be to retire my fortress with the hopes that they would launch an expidition to the ruined fortress.  Or I could reclaim it myself....

And just to verify, I can not make an adventurer in this near-dead civ, but I *can* (last time I looked) start in fortress mode with this civ.  Not sure what would allow adventurers of this civ in the future...