Bay 12 Games Forum

Water block just sounds so...wet. And lame. I guess it has to do with the liquid being called water and the 'stone' is the frozen version, but just the name shouldn't be that hard, right?

It's a bit of an eyesore as it is, but i really wanna make a fortress out of ice.

Obviously all the elves are dying of thirst midbattle because they refuse to use waterskins, they take 250 guys because 230 of them are needed to make a elfline back to a water source, but a croc kills the last guy and they don't have a back up plan, then the demon and goblins just need to wander along the line smacking the prone elves to take credit for the kill.

Only problem with that theory is that elves are 'at one with nature' and crocs wouldn't attack them.

If your maps doesn't freeze, you might be able to build enough screw pumps and windmills out of wood to let you pierce through the aquifers. Aquifers take in water like they put it out so you should pump from the aquifer into the aquifer.

Build a circle of pumps around a 3x3 area, get them all going at the same time and build constructed walls out of wood on the inside of the 3x3 area to stop water from flowing in (you'll need to build a staircase in the middle tile). Pump out 3x3 areas and add walls in blacks around that area so you can expand the dry area so you can do build a 3x3 shaft through the second aquifer.

Pumps and windmills don't need mechanisms, but you'll have to build the windmills right on top of the pumps.

Thats should work, at least in theory. Would be a big undertaking though.

Meat kinda sucks as trekking provisions. It will wear no matter what. So if you spend too much time checking out all the hovels in town, *poof* theres no way you can ever get provisions there again. Makes it nigh impossible to survive traveling the length of one of those excellent tunnels 'tween dwarf/goblin habitations.

One solution would be to have the shops and barrels contain prepared meals instead (which would make more sense than slabs of meat if you ask me). The problem with that would be what the meals should consist of, since they need more than one ingredient. Maybe there is a simple way to have meals consisting of whatever random meat they would otherwise have.

Another solution is to let the adventurer make his own food, be it cooking his meat into much more durable meals himself, gathering edible plants in the field (har har), fishing, or butchering up the corpses of those dumb cougars. All of which would require some form of fortress mode skills.

So, while we're waiting for the rest of the skills, could we just have one for now? Herbalism, butchery or fishing+fishcleaning would be good.

Fishing could require you to use vermin as bait, giving worms and beetles a more practical use than as deadly projectiles. Course you'd have to clean the fish too, and thats more tricky to 'balance'. Maybe you'd need some sort of equipment to do it.

Herbalism could be used to make your 'natural knowledge' of what a plant is into something you can't tell at a glance until you got some skill. Skill could affect the chance of pulling out the plant such that it is usable.

Butchery could require you to have some sort of bladed weapon equipped, and skill could affect the percentage of usable material you are able to get out of the corpse. Like whether you can get a usable skin or not (well usable once you can tan hides too).

Cooking is just too complex to do in the field. It should be left alone until the rest of the fortress skills are available to adventurers.


Personally, just some way to pick edible plants will do for me. It doesn't even have to be a skill. That or prepared meals instead of meat in towns and in your backpack to start with.

Goblin civs are darn confusing in the legends log. Humans sometimes too.

When there are two armies of 'creatures' fighting, it's hard to tell what the heck is going on. I politely request that the legends screen list the subject's race and possibly gender after their name. Probably just the race for battles and stuff, the race and gender for the big historical figures list.

Would also make finding (semi)megabeasts on the historical figures list much much less of a hassle. Maybe Deity and Force as 'races' for the gods instead of what they are depicted as. They shouldn't need genders as that would depend on the depiction.

It's funny when they get those ridiculous losses but 'the attackers won'.

Also funny when every soul but one of the defenders die, but 'the defenders won'. "Wait, wha?"

Creatures still do whatever attack you gave them in the raws (burn, fire, etc.) but other than that, it seems they're still all average entities. As in, everything, be it dragon or gnome, has the exact same strength.

I don't know about that. Dragons seem to do a lot better in the surviving department, all the titans, hydras and bronze colossi tend to get themselves killed while rampaging. I always get more dragons surviving til play time than any other megabeast, though questing adventurers in worldgen are pretty good at dragon slaying. Pretty appropriate if you ask me.