Bay 12 Games Forum

Just a quite heads up for others on Wine, you will need to get a copy of msvcp140_atomic_wait.dll and then run winecfg to use it.  If you search the Steam forums, you'll see some instructions.

Another quirk of wine seems to be that the sound volume is *very* low. Now sure why.  I noticed it in experimental, but thought it was fixed in beta.  I might be mistaken, though (I often play with the sound turned off).

I guess the Linux release is imminent, though, anyway.  However, I think this is all relevant for Mac users.

Wow.  I haven't posted here in a long time :-)  I *have* been playing a fair amount of DF lately.  In many ways I'm with muldrake.  I *like* figuring out how to make the fortress a utopia.  I just realised today that I actually play DF like it's a puzzle game.  For example, I'm still obsessed with making meals and having absolute control over it.  So I have 1 kitchen per recipe.  Seriously.  1 booze (or anything in a container, really), and 3 solid non-container items (there is a bug where they will always take things out of the same container once they choose it, so you can't normally use containers for kitchen stockpiles).  I link all of them to the kitchen.  Then I have a manager job to make the meal once all of the ingredients are available (working out how to specify that in the manager, exploring all of the possible ways to specify "at least one pond turtle", for example -- it's not how you would think it works -- took me ages).  But like I said -- bug where it just keeps taking the same thing out of the damn container, so I get a meal with 4 finely minced pond turtle instead of pond turtle roast basted in peach cider with red spinach leaves (which you can't grow, btw!) and fisher berries.  Also there is a design flaw where once something is in a container, it can *never* be moved out of that container while it remains in a stockpile.  The upshot of all of that is that all of my food stockpiles can't have containers.  But I'm drowning in fisher berries... What to do?  Ah ha!  I can make a still that makes fisher berry wine (and a fruit -- if you want to control it exactly, the still can make exactly one plant and one fruit.... and why aren't fisher berries fruits???  Because all non-real fruits are plants, silly!)  So what I can do is make a stockpile that contains a single barrel for fisher berries.  It gives it to the still and I have a condition that I make it if I have more than one fisher berries (which is a plant, remember -- important for specifying the condition in the manager) and at most 60 fisher berries (the amount that fit in a barrel) and less than 2 seeds.  Then I have a single tile (non-container) next to the kitchen.  So what this does is make fisher berry wine if I need seeds.  Otherwise it waits until I grow enough fisher berries that it doesn't fit in the barrel -- which means that it goes into the kitchen stockpile.  Then I keep making meals with it.  This basically regulates the number of seeds that I can have and acts as a regulator so that I always have enough fisher berries that I can get seeds, but only have a few extra (basically what will grow on my one tile of farm in a stack) that will end up in the meal.  And if you think *that's* fun, you have to see how I regulate cooking liked foods that must be in bags (like seeds)!

I can honestly get the vast majority of my dwarfs eating amazing meals that they prefer and get great happy memories.  Such a fun game!

Um... well.... it is for me.  I suspect this is not the kind of thing that most people enjoy doing when they play the game.  Obviously, what I'm doing is downright crazy even if I think it is fun.  You don't have to be this obsessive and you can do a lot with the game more casually.  But my point (finally) is that many people don't want to play the game as a work flow simulation/sandbox building game.  Older versions of the game supported different gaming styles and I think it's fair that those people are unhappy that their favourite gaming style isn't as easy to play any more (in some cases it may actually be impossible).  On the other hand, I *love* the direction the game is going (well, you could make my puzzles a bit easier and I wouldn't mind), so it's a delicate balancing act.

P.S. Selling the fisher berry wine (that nobody likes) in claystone rock pots to the Elves.  "Trust me!  It's a slice of Dwarven tradition handed down from our forefathers... Oh... you don't need those stupid sun berries do you?  We can take them off your hands in exchange".  Trying to make sure your claystone rock pots don't end up holding fisher berries and breaking your automation math is also a fun puzzle...

Cheers!  I typed that in the car when it was about 36 C and I was having trouble concentrating :-)

I just want to point out (since a lot of people don't know) that you can feed grazers if they are on a restraint or in a cage.  Just enable the "Animal Care" labour on some dwarfs and they will feed restrained grazers with vegetables or prepared foods (no matter what it's made of).  Factory farms are a thing in DF!  Dwarfs get a good thought from feeding animals.

I know this is quite old and marked for removal by the OP, but I thought I'd point out a couple of things.

- If you set your population cap to 1, you will get no migrants (but see below)
- Not having a trade depot means the caravan will by pass your site.
- It's easy to turtle and keep the door locked so your outpost liason doesn't come in contact with your dwarfs.
- If you choose an almost dead civ, your outpost liason is unlikely to come anyway.  Almost dead civ might be thematically !fun! (don't think about it too much!)

I've run challenges like this quite a bit (dwarf outcast scenario).  It is very fun, especially if you don't give them much.  For example, if you only give your dwarfs a pick, a barrel of ale, a barrel of pond turtle meat and a battle axe, they will have to tunnel all the way to the cavern layers to get mushrooms to make booze.  And with no access to water...  So you can make it really quite difficult if you want.  Running a fortress with only 7 dwarfs is also quite fun as you get to know them quite a bit.  Also it *really* limits what you can build as you have nowhere near enough labour force for everything you need.

I highly recommend giving it another try!  But, as I alluded to, you could also have a very *special* challenge in that you allow migrants, but each group of migrants would have to be completely isolated from each other ... say for 1 year.   So each migrant group would have to make their own fortress and avoid the other fortresses (easiest to have physical barriers rather than burrows I think).  Then after a year, they could tunnel towards each other.  I think this would also be quite fun and potentially even more difficult to manage.

1. I don't think you can sell artifacts, so it's a moot point ;-)  Might as well use it since it will give dwarfs good thoughts to do so.
...
4. There is no way that I know of to ensure that bags are never used for picking up seeds.  What I do is make a stockpile for cloth bags (with no bins) and have it give to the glass furnace.  If you want to reserve 10 bags, then make the stockpile 10 tiles in size.  Usually I make these bags out of a specific cloth, or dyed with a specific dye, but you don't have to.  Then I have a manager job at my clothier's to make 1 bag every time I have less than 10 bags (and if I've picked pigtail cloth for sand bags, then I can make it based on pigtail cloth bags -- you get the idea).  I have that job repeating every day.  Then every time a dwarf nicks a sandbag to do something else, a dwarf makes a new pigtail bag and delivers it to the furnace stockpile stockpile.

It's a shame that you can't stop dwarfs from using whatever bag for collecting seeds, but you can use stockpile links to control every other bag usage.  I admit that this kind of logical puzzle is half the fun of the game for me and while it is tedious to set up, it's not micro managing per se.  (And before PatrikLundell mentions it, yes, you *do* have to actively manage growing/shearing of the cloth materials, which sucks ;-) ).  BTW, never use bins for things that are connected to manager conditions otherwise everytime a dwarf picks up a bin you end up making more of that thing :-P

I often give this advice, but I'm always hesitant because it is not fool proof.  The key to keeping the deaths down for tavern keepers and performers is 3-fold:

1. Give them a consistent high priority job.  Serving alcohol is usually low priority, so if you have something that happens steadily in your fortress you tavern keeper will be called away.  Making them a grower is a good option as is having a workshop with a job that resets every day.  I suspect that making them your manager will also drag them away every day, but haven't tested it.

2. Move the alcohol stockpile far away from the tavern.  Dwarfs can walk about 120 tiles a day unencumbered.  This means that if you alcohol stockpile is 50-60 tiles away from the tavern, then the tavern keeper is limited to about 7 drinks a week.  Usually this is enough to stop harm.

3. Limit the number of cups.  They can't serve a drink unless a cup is available.  This one is tricky because you need cups around or else you will get bad thoughts, but you can get creative about how they are deployed and it helps a bit.

The main thing as PatriKLundell said is that the tavern keeper targets their customer/victim based on proximity *when the get the job*.  If you move the tavern keeper around between jobs, then they are much less likely to serve drinks to the same dwarf time after time.

I've had fortresses that have gone years and years and years with tavern keepers and no deaths using this system.  But it's not foolproof.  Eventually you are likely to get a death.  I still enjoy them for RP purposes.  I haven't used performers, though.  I should try that...

Just a quick note: "Wandering" need is satisfied by hunting, fishing and plant gathering.  ob_keeping_this_on_topic: This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to manage stress -- no discernable feedback between what's wrong and what you need to do to fix it.  Although if Loci is right you can just ignore the wandering need and it won't have any impact on stress.  It's all very confusing.