Bay 12 Games Forum

I ended up talking to a guy that handles the business end of pearl farming who used to run a hotel in China.

Has dwarven pearl diving made it onto the to-do list then?

An enormous array of pumps, axles, gears and waterwheels/windmills will always solve the problem!

The key is quick enough pumping so that the water is pumped out faster than it flows in from the rest of the aquifer. In the same way it is technically possible to pump out a "hollow" in the middle of a lake or even the ocean as the water isn't instantaneous, so I suppose it would theoretically be possible to drive a tower down from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Bit of a mammoth task though, you'd need tens, hundreds of powered pumps and many would drown in the process.

Make yourself a nice wide road (7 tiles or so is a good start) from your gates to the edge of the map. Then start paving (with roads, not "floor") the main corridors inside your fortress as well -eg the stockpile->trade depot, outside the main dining rooms etc.

t'll have the added bonus of having more wonderful roads for dwarves to stop and admire and go "ooo, a road!"  at.

I'll have a go.

Requesting a PM when it's my turn (assumming they pop up obviously so are useful as reminders - I've not  had any pm's here. :cry: )

Oh yes, forgot about that! I think you'd need to have strategically placed small wood stockpiles though, as wooden walls won't burn. Or at least I don't think they will, they're immune to magma at any rate, not sure about dragon fire.

Meat - you can't salt but you can sell the merchants lavish elephant roasts stuffed with minced kitten and alligator....and a rock salt block, "so they won't go off."
 
Sadly though treecaps only grow if you've discovered an underground lake or river - simply flooding an underground area won't work. Something about spores I believe.

Keldor has been taking our traders lead and is snoozing his way through his year.

The only things I can think of for speed are:

1) The carp - there are always quite a few of them in the river, I doubt they are the main cause but they won't be helping!

2) Pathfinding/object number - The underground bits of the fortress are rather confused and cluttered in places. I've read numbers of stockpiled items can effect FPS as well, and we have a vast stockpile of food - it was around 14000 when I last played. I've no idea if it's true but I could see how that might cause some slowdown, the game having to keep track of that much food (along with all the other goods) and for dwarves to decide what theu're eating, drag it down to the dining rooms etc. Might be an idea to turn all the fields to fallow for a year or three and see if that helps?


But as Jools says it's ok on the whole as it's still more than playable and it gives plenty of time for contemplation of new projects - and as the OP says you don't have to do a whole year if you don't have time, just do what you can.

As it should be really.