Bay 12 Games Forum

'Aqizzar' doesn't stand for anything.  This is the first forum I joined in a couple years, and needed a new screenname.  Way back in the nineties I used QZR as a tag for reasons I can't remember, and a minute of pondering bought me some vowels.  Aqizzar it is then.

And for those who don't know, the avatar is from the classic Lucasarts game Full Throttle.  Not an internet toughguy thing.

So I ordered my dwarves to gather refuse from outside.  Then I realized they were charging to their deaths, so I ordered them to ignore refuse outside.  Obviously I had to draft/undraft to get them to stop.  But as soon as they get back to the meeting area they run outside again to grap corpses.  After futilely wrestling with the AI for a few minutes, I just set the order to ignore refuse entirely.  And they keep running.

Curious, I just leave them to it to see what they're thinking.  Each time they get out to the item they're trying to grab, the pause for a minute, then run back to the meeting area empty handed, and start a stockpile task again.

I can't get any dwarves to stop playing relay tag with bodies outside, no matter what I do.  Anybody else have this problem?  Advice?

In one of my very first forts, I was jacked by three kobold thieves while I was still unloading the wagon.  All my dwarves were off hauling so nobody made it back in time to catch them, and one of them stole my starting anvil.  Really.  From a dwarven perspective this is plenty sad.  To me it was hillarious - I have this great image of three kobolds, grinning and cackling, as they huck their way home toting an anvil over a mountain range.

Then a few weeks later, the carpenter bought it to a lucky fire imp.  Misery ensues.

Where it gets sad is that, I guess kobold raids are based on how much they get away with, because later that same year, a team of seven kobolds with spears showed up and stormed the entrance.  They slew three dwarves outright, badly wounded two others, and killed all the animals except for one cat they mangled as they buggered off.  So one guy tries to care for his two hideously wounded friends unlucky enough to survive, while a cat with a pierced lung follows him around feinting.  Eventually, both the injured guys died of thirst, despite their friend's effort.  I didn't have the heart to watch the last guy linger on and abandoned - I like to imagine he went back home with his poor cat.

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/User:Bartavelle/DwarfCompanion

Mind you, the instalation process is hair-pullingly contorted, but it works.

38c

Not sure what to tell you, except that I'm forbidding some stacks of cave wheat, ordering milling, and the miller grabs forbidden stacks.  Same with brewing - his inventory shows {Cave wheat}, Hauled, the still then shows {Cave wheat} TSK.  Should be easy enough to reproduce.

To further experiment, I made sure cave wheat was the only plant allowed for brewing, then forbid every stack I had and ordered him to brew.  Even with cave wheat now not listed in the kitchen menu, he grabbed another forbidden stack and set to work.  I then forbid every millable plant and ordered milling, and he grabs forbidden stacks.  Process to barrel and to bag do the same.

However, I then made sure that only plump helmets were allowed to be cooked, forbid all stacks of it, and the cooking task could not happen.  For what thats worth, cooking apparently respects forbidden plants just fine, along with syrup, meat, or any other ingredient.

I started a fortress on a one-tile volcano - it had everything, water, magma, flux, chasms, and sand in 5x5.  I was like, "Oh man, I'm gonna make the most super-duper fortress ever!"

Embark.  You have located Somethingorother Gobbledygook, "Orbgates the Anonymous Hole of Janking", a cave.  I think, "Well, that's a new one.  Even better then.  I can nab some cave creatures and have the best zoo in the world."  I check the unit list for significant residents and find a Cyclops chilling out in the very bottom level of the cave network.  Surely he won't even notice a few dwarves milling about six stories above.

Apparently, Cyclopes make up for depth perception with super-hearing, geo-vibration sense, and bad temperment.  As soon as I unpause, he marches right the fuck of his winding pit and yells at my poor, optimistic dwarves to get off his lawn.  I draft everybody, assign dogs, and order the attack.

Five real time minutes of watching a one-eyed hillbilly kick lawn gnomes later, the farmer is hiding in a crevice two screens away, the horribly mangled smith is praying for death in his brief moments of consciousness, and Mr. Cyclops is dragging himself around the map trying to nab the remaining kitten, with nothing to show for the fight but a weeze.


For some reason, it still doesn't compare to embarking on a haunted glacier, spawning right on a skeletal polar bear who ate the entire party one by one.

Yep, I'm not forbidding the barrels, I'm going into the barrel and stock menu and forbidding specific stacks.

I absolutely must have sand.  I started making glass in my past few forts, and I love the way it looks.  Naturally magma is high on my list of priorities, but I've recently tried going back to basics and just starting somewhere good looking without using Prospector.

I like having lots of cliffs and Z-levels.  I've got a beefy enough computer that pathfinding isn't a problem, but mostly because I like having half my ore-searching duty done for me.  And making baroque cliff-face fortresses.  Ironically, I seem to have terrible luck finding iron ores.  And the only fort I've found a big magnetite cluster lost the whole starting team in the first year to a kobold ambush...