Bay 12 Games Forum

Hmm... never thought about modifying the other races to make them hostile rather than the other way around

I looked at the Troll stuff, and nothing jumped out at being all that different from, say, the cow entity (other than child/male name variants.)

I put a hatch cover at the top of my prisoner disposal chute. The dwarves will open the hatch to throw the prisoners down, but while the hatch is closed, it prevents any survivors in the pit from scaring your executioners into releasing their victims early.

Just a couple of little features I'd like to see:

First of all, why are we forced to abandon our fortress to use the Legends mode? With the enhanced worldgen stuff, there's all sorts of neat stuff happening in the background... but let's face it, with thousands of historical figs, you don't care about any of them all that much - until, of course, you want to look up the background of that titan you just killed, or find out the background of the Goblin regional leader you just captured. Unfortunately, as it stands now you have to savescum and abandon the fortress to look up the backgrounds of creatures you meet, which realistically is the only time you're likely to spend much time poking aorund in legends mode. Since legends mode is read-only for regional data, could we be allowed to access it without having to abandon our fortress, please?

Another thing I'd like to see is scheduling of duty shifts. (I mean the "on duty"/"standing down" setting from the view squad option on the military screen.) I'd like to be able to set my squads to automatically stand down during certain seasons, similar to how you schedule what is planted in a field. That would mean I could rotate squads on and off duty automatically to give them downtime, time to train, etc. (As it is I rotate my wall guards after every siege, which is both a pain in the ass and means it's my less experienced fighters who are always my first line of defense.)

Also, bug time: for as long as I can remember, the "Dwarves can go outside" order appears to actually refer to "Dwarves can go aboveground," not "Dwarves can go outside" as the text would seem to indicate. They turn back when they hit aboveground tiles, *not* outdoor tiles. This means that if you've build a structure, or a tower sticking out of the mountain, dwarves won't use it if they're ordered to stay indoors. (This is a pain in the butt as I often build structures outside  to defend my fortress entrance once my fort matures, and I often build a network of guard towers with marksdwarves in them connected by underground tunnels to guard caravans) I've totally pooched a number of fortresses because I extended the main stairway of my fort aboveground into a tower: if I order all dwarves to stay indoors (to prevent the fortress/royal guards from making suicide runs during sieges) then nobody can use not only the aboveground part of the tower, but the entire length of the stiarcase as it's considered indoors, but aboveground if it was ever exposed to the air (and this is IMPOSSIBLE to fix with constructions, as they won't change the underground state.) The same thing also happens for water freezing in winter - an underground river won't freeze, but if you open it to the sky - ever - it will freeze even if you pu a ceiling back on it again, and again, there's no way to fix it.

The only source of water on my new fortress' map is a brook. So I built a central shaft (the entire fort's below water level) to flood with water - the plan being to have floodgates up the height of the shaft which would close when the channel beyond (which would serve as the water supply for the floor) was mostly full.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to get pressure plats to close a floodgate when submerged.

I tried linking all the plates to their floodgate, and then opening the floodgate with a lever. I tried opening the floodgate with a lever *BEFORE* linking the pressure plate. (This is the method described in the Wiki) and nothing seems to work. Anyone have any ideas on how to rig this? Is it possible any more?