Bay 12 Games Forum

I was thinking about it -- or just wait until she gets injured and slurp up the blood on the ground.  But I think it might be fun to travel around as a normal human with a vampire companion.

To bring it back to the theme of the thread, I'm having difficulty figuring out how to distract the other companions while she gets some "alone time" with unconscious opponents.  Don't really fancy having her get thirsty while we're all asleep...

I only use vanilla, so I don't have legends viewer, but I'll give you some techniques I've developed recently. Keep in mind that I'm still a relative novice at this game.

First, the biggest tool I have are my own notes.  Usually I have another window open with a text editor where I write everything down.  In fact, I never play DF without that open.  I'm constantly writing things down.  Tools (as much as I've seen them) are great, but nothing beats your own organisation because it's geared to what you want to know.

One of the first things I try to understand is the way the geography works.  The most important thing to realise is that geographical locations have names (duh ;-) ).  But buildings (locations in fortress mode) can have names, sites (basically cities and forts) have names, and regions have names.  As far as I know, region names are basically not used in fortress mode.  Like I said a location can be a tavern, temple, keep, etc.  There will be between 0 and many locations in a site.  Locations will be mentioned in Legends mode for various things -- usually when it was built, or destroyed, or when someone started working there, etc.  There is no easy way that I know of to search for locations with vanilla DF (which is a gigantic PITA).

Sites are cities, hamlets, fortresses, etc, etc.  There is a map function in vanilla (sorry, I don't have legends mode set up for anything right now, so I forget the key presses).  It is important to realise that the map function *only* lists the sites using the native language of the civilisation.  Usually when I'm trying to get an idea of what's going on, I'm switching back and forth between getting information about a site and looking at the map.  Unfortunately, when a site is mentioned in legends, it is usually shown in English.  So you need to keep a list of the sites you are interested in and what they are in the native language (or you could learn all the languages in DF!)

Regions are long, mostly contiguous sections of similar geography.  So you will have a forest, or plains or hills, or mountains.  Sites are in regions.  Regions are mostly useful in adventure mode where it gives you a basic idea where a site is (if you can remember all the regions!).  The map in adventure mode will let you see what the regions are.  In legends mode, there is also a tool that shows you where all the regions are.  As far as I know, regions never change over time.  Sites, on the other hand, do.

In the map function in legends mode, you can walk through history 10 years at a time and watch the influence of different civilizations.  Strangely, most (but not all) of the civilization names on the map are in English.  If you want to find a site on the map, the way I have found to do it is to look up the year that the site was founded in the site functionality (the first entry in the site legends).  Take note of the civilization that founded the site (keep in mind that in addition to the civilization a group will found the site -- I think the group is listed first and the civlization second --- soooo many names...)  Anyway, once you have the civilization, go to the map and dial it to the time just before the founding of the site.  Take a look at where the civilisation is.  Then go forward 10 years.  Something will change.  You may have to turn off the civilisation display to see it easily, but a new site will be added somewhere.  Just flutter back and forth until you see it.  When you hover over the space with your mouse, the name of the site will be displayed (disputed sites may have many names -- yay!).

Finally, as I said, in addition to civilisations, there are groups which do various things (mostly found sites... can't think of anything else off the top of my head).

Armed with all this, you can troll through the legends.  The main thing you need, though, is a reason.  There may be 40,000 individuals, 200 sites, 40 regions, 500 groups (numbers pulled out of my nether regions) and they *all* have crazy, impossible to remember names.  You *can* just randomly choose someone and start piecing together stories (I suspect Toady does this when he is developing), but that's pretty hard.

Instead, I have found that it's easier to start with either adventure mode or fortress mode.  For example if you start a fortress, you initial dwarfs will be poofed into existance.  But you can note the region that you started the fortress in.  You can note the civilization that you belong to.  You can write down the name of the queen, etc, etc.  Then, copy the save directory, retire your fortress (in the copy!) and run legends mode.  From there you have places to start.

For example, what beasts roamed the region where your fortress is?  Who are the nobility in your civilisation?  How many sites have they founded?  Where are they.  Once you get immigrants, you can look them up in fortress mode to see where they were born, where their parents live, etc, etc.  Warning: you *will* be spoiled for certain things like if they are a vampire, etc.

Lately, though, I'm finding that adventure mode is actually a better legends mode.  What I did in my current main game is start a new world in adventure mode.  I wandered around to see the different regions and fought the beasts in the area.  I got to know some of the people in the fortress, etc.  One very cool thing is that once you talk to people in a site, you can then tell stories about that site.  Once you talk to a person, you can tell stories about that person.  As I discovered, you can also do a kind of divination by carving bones about any person or civilisation and getting a random story about them.  Along with your notes, it lets you get some background.

After exploring, dying/retiring *then* start a fortress.  Place your fortress somewhere you've been to before.  This helps you understand what's going on a lot better.  Also, if you make a tavern you can listen to the stories of travellers.  Similarly, if you build a library you can read the books about far away places.  Write them down in your notes, retire your fortress and then adventure to go *see* those places!  Go find the cousin of your legendary mason.  Etc, etc.  Warning: unretiring a fortress is not without bugs, but I haven't found anything massively terrible... yet.

For me, I get completely overwhelmed by the absolutely huge numbers of strange names and can't keep track of anything.  This kind of slow revealing of information makes it a lot easier.  Especially if you wander back and forth between Murkpalaces a hundred times and meet members of the Mighty Pinnacles of Strawberries 40 or fifty times, you start to remember them and get a sense of what they are.  But if you bury yourself in exponential randomly generated names, it's pretty difficult to keep track.

Hope that helps!

It will never happen to me.  20 FPS is the *max* I can tolerate because otherwise I have no freaking idea what's going on :-).  I've played quite happily at 10 FPS on purpose.  I think I'm just a control freak...

I'm still learning, but the one place where I seem to need armour is when I have multiple opponents with ranged weapons.  Inevitably I'll get stuck with a few bolts.  I wonder if a shield is enough when you have good skill (haven't experimented).  Another place where armour is useful is a helmet for situations where you get punched in the head.  I know it is distasteful, but I wonder if a grown wooden helmet might be optimal ;-)

For steel bolts, you need to select "Forge steel bolts".  It's not a designated material; it's a different job.  For wood, if you just want whatever wood then specify "Make wooden bolts" and don't designate a material.  If you want to make it out of some wood and not others, then unfortunately you have to designate different jobs for it.

Let's say you want to make willow bolts and then when you run out of willow, to make cherry wood bolts.  You need to queue 2 jobs and designate one willow and the other cherry wood.  Prioritise the willow over the cherry and restrict bolt making to a specific workshop.  The thing that won't work is that you can only set the limit on either the specific bolts of that material *or* bolts in general.  So I think the only way to do it is to prioritise steel bolts over wooden bolts.

The way you do  it is set the condition for steel bolts to at most X.  Then add a condition to both wooden bolt jobs that say *at least* X steel bolts and *at most* X+Y bolts (where Y is the number of wooden bolts you want).  This is all a PITA and I can only think of a few specific instances where it might be necessary, in which case I think I would forgo wooden bolts ;-)

Although the proper term is "sandbox", I often feel like dwarf fortress (especially fortress mode) is like a big doll house.  It's not a game in the way that chess is a game.  Instead it's a toy that you can play with and let your imagination wander.

Dwarf fortress is utterly full to the brim of completely useless detail.  The detail interacts with its environment in equally useless ways.  For example, in early summer the cherries blossom.  Over time the blossoms fall to the ground and some of them get carried away by the stream.  You can see it in all of its ASCII glory.  The only thing it does for the game is help with FPS death, but it's beautiful in its own way.

I have been mining schist.  You can think of schist as a brown rock.  If you google it and look at the images, it's definitely a rock.  In dwarf fortress is is found in the ground in exactly the place you would expect to find it... and it's basically useless other than being a rock.  And being brown.   Why is it here?  What is the point?  I have no idea, but I build walls out of it.  Brown walls.

But if dwarf fortress were just this, then it would not draw me in so much.  Dwarf fortress is not just an insanely detailed doll house.  It's a *magical* doll house.  It tells you stories.  The stories are crazy and magnificent all at the same time.  Sometimes the stories are funny.  Sometimes they are sad.  Sometimes they are epic.  Sometimes they are just insane.  Dwarf fortress is the only game that I play where I can entertain my wife by retelling the stories that it tells me.

For me this is what's good about the game.

I'm not entirely sure, but I have claimed the sight that I built.  Then when I went to a neighbouring town, I was able to ask people there to become my hearthspeople (everyone I tried refused because they were already a guard, etc)...  I got killed quite soon after that and haven't had a chance to try it again.

I've done this a few times now and there are some caveats (some obviously intentional and some not-so-intentional).  I found that if I retire the fortress and start with an adventurer from the fortress, I am not allowed to sleep there for some reason.  It's not a huge problem, but it means you can't use your old fortress as a base to work out of.  If there are no close by towns, you will need to get travelling companions so that you don't meet an untimely end by the boogey men.

You can solicit companions from your fortress as normal, although the times I've played I haven't had a high social standing so everyone said "no".  I *think* that the easiest way to recruit companions from your actual fortress is to make sure that they are doing militia duty (patrolling, training, whatever) when you retire.  This will turn them into mace dwarfs, etc, instead of growers.

While you are adventuring, your fortress will get many, many visitors.  When you unretire, these visitors will still be there.  You might also even get new citizens while you are away (I even got a goblin citizen once!).  If the caravan comes while you are away, there is a chance that the merchants will become part of your fortress.  They are a bit like performers in that they do nothing other than hang around in your locations.  Presumably they can petition for full residency after 2 years, but I haven't tested that theory.  Sometimes visitors will be "hostile".  They will mostly do nothing but stand around.  If you get attacked, they will come to your aid and not attack you.  The only time they will attack you is if you attack them or if there is a loyalty cascade (in which case some of them will attack you).  Eventually they seem to leave the map (just like normal visitors).  It's a bit creepy (especially if they are standing around in your bedrooms), but they don't seem to be harmful.

When you unretire a fortress, all of your citizens, pets and livestock will be randomly distributed on the map.  This is potentially bad news if you have dangerous creatures locked up somewhere.  I believe (but haven't tested) that creatures in cages will no longer be in cages.  Almost everything in containers will be removed from the containers.  So if you have lots of stuff in bins, then they will be taken out of the bins.  The worst aspect of this is that all of your booze will be on the floor.  So before your retire your fortress, make sure you have a reasonable stock of plants so that your can restock your booze.  Also make sure that you have access to water in the mean time. 

I found that it took me about 2 months to clean up the mess when I unretired a fortress.  It's not really a bad problem.  One other bad downside is that your manager work orders will all be cleared.  I run virtually automated forts, so this is a pain, but it's also fun to make the orders so I don't mind so much ;-)

As for running in adventure mode... It's kind of fun to run an adventurer from the fortress (you will get a new dwarf, so basically it means a "special" immigrant).  The main reason it's fun is that they know all the people in the fortress and you can tell stories about them to learn their back stories (without having to go into legends mode).  I have not had a vampire yet, so I don't know if it will betray their secret or not.  Travelling around is quite fun and you can learn about the history of your surroundings by telling stories.

The other nice thing about doing this is that you can explore and learn about the musical and poetic forms of your culture.  In fortress mode, it's pretty much impossible to understand what's going on.  But in adventure mode, you can browse through the songs you know and it will tell you which instruments it needs, etc.  This is really useful for knowing which instruments you need in your taverns and temples.

I'm currently trying to play through a kind of "campaign" where I started with an adventurer in year 5 (so that there is not much history, art or locations to overwhelm my feeble brain).  I played him for a month or so and then he sustained an injury where he couldn't use his right arm.  I then retired him and built a fortress right next door with the idea of building a hospital.  Once the hospital is built, I'm going to move my adventurer in it.  Eventually he will probably get restless and upon hearing a rumour that becoming a were-beast will cure his arm he may set out in search of one....  Well... that kind of thing anyway.  I'm also curious to see if strategic placement of fortresses coupled with incursions into opposition locations can eventually allow my civilization to conquer the world.