Bay 12 Games Forum

Honestly this should be expanded into letting your dwarves make any weapon. There's no reason they can't learn to make stuff like bows or blowguns or mauls, even if just to outfit visitors/mercenaries of other races.

Yeah, your home civ won't do trade agreements with you until you accept their offer to become a barony/county/duchy. Sucks when you get a holding immediately upon an embark if you hoped to rely on the Mountainhome bringing stuff you need and don't want nobles.

...But you can make agreements with other civs (if they send a trade representative) without becoming a "official part of the realm".

Well, hm. Guess I'll use this year to make some quarters for a baron and accept their offer next year.

I've had the dwarven caravan come twice and both times a duke consort has arrived. He asks me if I would like to nominate any dwarves for nobility. I've always said "no" because I don't want to deal with more useless assholes but I don't actually know if I need to say yes to get some stuff. I haven't had the outpost liasion draw up trade agreements with me either time the caravan has come--do I have to say yes to the duke consort to actually get trade agreements? The wiki is remarkably unhelpful in this regard.

Ultimately my problem is that the interface of .47 and before had issues, but they decided to "fix" those issues but just making you click stuff, not actually fixing the issues. My problem with the trading interface of .47 is not that I had to use the keyboard, it's that I couldn't search for the one thing I wanted to trade! Does the new UI fix the fact the military screen doesn't organize your dwarves by their combat skills and just throws you a giant-ass list where you check each dwarf and it tells you one random combat skill they have if they have any? No.

Real talk: if 0.50's UI update had been literally only adding a screen where you could easily search who has what labors enabled and enable and disable labors from it that would have already been a massive QoL update worthy of 30 bucks.

EDIT: Okay it turns out dfhack just literally has the above as a feature lmao wow how did I survive without this

One of the trickier parts of DF is making sure you fulfill your dwarves' needs, since they all have a ton and there's no way to know what they want without individually checking them.

I propose that there be a noble that dwarves can talk to, and their complaints are relayed to. "Urist is feeling depressed because he doesn't get to fight" and all that. Not something incredibly artificial and gamey, you'd have to make sure this noble is actually available. All of this could be in a little menu and then you'd know who would be a good recruit since they wanna fight, or who should go pick some berries because they like wandering, or who should get put to work creating stuff since they wanna be creative and learn a craft.

As it is, it's very difficult to keep track of these needs without making a ridiculously huge spreadsheet and obsessively checking your dwarves over and over, which when you have fifty other things to worry about can be an absolute pain--and not in the way where it's an intentionally abrasive bit of challenge to overcome, more just "I dunno what these dickheads want" thing.

My fort has reached 48 dwarves and I'm already starting to really feel the pressure. Everything happens very fast and keeping up with the demand seems incredibly hard. I have dwarves working damn near 24.7 mining out bedrooms, chopping trees, cranking out charcoal for forging, etc. but it feels like I never have enough hands to do what I want (all these useless children that do literally nothing since I'm on 0.47 do not help). I set stuff to be built and no one can do it because everyone else is busy doing five other things. The world I used for this fort is also seemingly damn near dead because I'm 2 years in and have recieved zero sieges, thieves, etc. I fucked up not building a trade depot fast enough for my first dwarven caravan and I had basically nothing to trade too and the next one is the completely goddamn useless elven caravan so WELP. I am cranking out as much crap as possible to trade but I dunno if the fort will even last that long.

I'm damn near out of food and drink and wow watching everything collapse after like 7 hours does not sound like fun regardless of the community motto lmao. I'm just waiting for everything to finally hit the tipping point and half the fort to die somehow.

I decided that it was far more worth it to just to play .47. I'm about 2 years into my fort and honestly surprised at how easily I settled in once I got used to the slight weirdness of the controls. My more pressing issues are stockpile nonsense like nobody picking up the ore I've mined or why these gabbro rocks still haven't been moved to the stockpile. I DO definitely wish that all these damn kids could do chores like in .50 and maybe the new labor system is better than me tediously enabling and disabling labors but until this game is entirely keyboard-usable like before I can't move onto the new version. Hell, I probably wouldn't even like the adjusted keybinds they'd use since they seem to be really hellbent on WASD instead of the arrow keys for...some reason.