Bay 12 Games Forum

I haven't played DF fortress mode since before the villainous plot arc.  Now the justice and investigation system is so different, I'm having trouble with crimes in my fort.

There's at least one vampire running around, but my Captain of the Guard hasn't caught them.  So far, all I can do is schedule interviews with everyone in the fort, but nobody has confessed and the bodies are piling up.  Furthermore, my investigator was so busy interviewing the whole fortress that 3 artifacts got stolen from my museum.  By the time she got around to interviewing for the thefts, the artifacts had all left the site.

What can I do to improve my success rate?  Scheduling 100+ interviews in the steam version is tedious, and requires 200+ clicks and endless scrolling.  So far though, it's the only thing I can do when there are no witnesses.  I thought about hiring a better Captain of the Guard, but it seems like nobody has any relevant skills.

I remember reading once that the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art set up a preservation system for DF releases.  There was some quote about how if all of Bay12 blew up, their curators would have a copy.  Does that still exist, and will they get archival access to the premium releases?

Why not have a less-intrusive animation in, say, the top-right corner of the screen?  Maybe something like this:

Not so much a 1400s-era possibility, of course, which might mean executive veto on that visualisation.

Actually, 8th century CE Persia had horizontal windmills.


They're called Panemone windmills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panemone_windmill

Given that windmills in the game transfer power downward through the central tile, this design would make a lot of sense visually.

Naming a site/group/object:
It's a very annoying fact that pressing "esc" on the naming menu saves your current selection.  My games are filled with stupidly named sites/groups/objects all because I pressed "esc" wanting to cancel the screen, but instead named by legendary hammer "icedcat the happy revival of confusion".

Adventurer log:
A small page, maybe in the quest log, where I can type notes about my adventure.  Currently, I keep notes on a physical pad of paper by my desk, listing all the places I want to visit, or naming the monsters I've killed that I want to tell people about.  It's strange that my adventurer can remember of bestiary of 10,000 different cave monsters, but if I myself forget where I slew that one dragon, I'll never be able to tell a story about that site again.

Finding people:
I hate trying to find someone in a busy town.  When I ask about how to find someone, all I ever get is "We are in Ringconfused", with no help on where the person is located.  When I hear that someone is in a town, I just give up on that quest, because my only option is to talk to everyone.  I understand that there are issues with "generic" population members knowing information about specific events, but what about a game mechanic based around physical descriptions?  Perhaps when I ask about the hunter Urist McWolfslayer, I could get a response like "I don't know where he is, but he shouldn't be hard to find.  Keep an eye out for... [You receive a detailed physical description of Urist McWolfSlayer]".  Then, maybe in the quest log, I could make my adventurer keep an eye out for people matching that description.  When someone matching that description enters my character's view, I should get an alert message (maybe one that pauses the game), and have my [l]ook cursor automatically hover over their position.  Perhaps the memory attribute could also be used here, as an adventurer with better memory could remember more people, and more details of what they look like.  An adventurer with poor memory might only be able to remember the hair color or something.

Dialogue filters:
I wish that the dialogue menus didn't have preset filters.  When I want to tell someone about the cyclops who bashed my friend's skull in, the only filtering options are "fight" or "conflict".  Really?  I have to scroll through pages of random wildlife combat because I can't just type in the name of the cyclops or my friend.

Confusing ramps in lairs/generated underground structures:
Every once in a while, I will come across a puzzling one-way ramp that is easy to descend, but hard to climb back up.  I'm not 100% sure why the geometry works this way, but sometimes I can only climb up a ramp by very carefully alt-numpad'ing in every direction until I see the option to move "NW (Above)".  Now that I'm used to it, it's not a big deal.  However, as a new player, I found this impossible to navigate.  I recall several early adventurers who I straight-up abandoned because I couldn't figure out how to climb the ramp out of a lair.  If possible, it would be nice to add some checks that prevent these difficult ramps from generating.

Standing up when someone is in the way:
When I'm walking around with a large crew of followers, it's annoying for my character to begin crawling on the ground when my friends get in the way.  Then, when I try to stand, they're in the way and I cannot get up.  It would be nice if there were some option to try and rudely shove someone out of the way to stand up.  If I do this to my companions, they should be OK with it.  However, if I do this to a stranger, perhaps it has a chance of escalating into a brawl ("Who do you think you're pushing?" or "Sorry for being in the way" depending on the NPC's emotions).

Coins and value:
I realize that this may be a little controversial, but I think there's a case to be made for treating all coins the same, regardless of civilization.  At the moment, coins are basically useless, because it's so hard to find someone to accept a coin from a given civ.  Since an actual economy is very far away in the development timeline, I don't see why their acceptance can't be relaxed until a real economy can be implemented.  After all, a gold coin from civ A weighs the same as a gold coin from civ B.  Does it really matter whose head is on it, if they both contain the same amount of gold?  In the same way that Toady removed ubiquitous boogeymen because it wasn't fun, I think universal currency acceptance would be a suitable sacrifice of "realism" (not that I think the current behavior is very realistic) for intermediate-term RP/fun until real economies exist.

you could also just turn off cave ins as those ice walls and the resulting Death that is the frozen ocean maw comes from water doesn't support ice walls and you're constantly moving on a natural bridge that notices there's no support and tries to fix that by crashing the chunk of land into the seabed splashing the water into the sky and instantly freezing it. also the process happens so fast that you only get like 2 ticks to react to it and you need to either be high enough that the cave in splash of water won't touch you or moving fast enough that you don't get caught in the freeze.

Thanks for the !!scientific!! explanation.  How can I disable cave-ins?  I'm not normally in favor of messing with vanilla df for my adventures, but given how BS these ice-walls of death have been, I'm willing to make an exception.

All the major web browsers are soon to enforce strict HTTPS checking for all websites.  Browsers already mark HTTP only sites as "Not secure", and now both Firefox and Chrome are enforcing stronger restrictions on cookies that get sent over HTTP.

I've read that prior attempts to use Lets Encrypt to get an SSL cert for the wiki failed because the advertiser networks didn't work.  These days, 3rd party requests from most websites have to be HTTPS, or else the browser will reject it.  Furthermore, Let's Encrypt is straightforward to set up and maintain, not to mention available free of charge.  With all the pressure that browsers will continue to exert against websites using HTTP, I believe now there is little reason to delay.