Bay 12 Games Forum

Retracting bridges over downward stairs makes for an excellent indestructable hatch cover.

Normal hatch covers (made out of stone or wood or metal in a normal workshop) can be destroyed by building destroyers. Bridges are not targets for destruction. They'll keep out even a forgotten beast.

Evil biomes are heavily procedurally generated. An embark might have just regular rain and snow as weather. It might rain harmless elf blood. It might rain brown sludge that causes dwarves to be mildly dizzy with no long term effects. It might rain slime that instantly causes everything to dissolve. Totally random.

Evil biomes may or may not have undead. Some evil regions are swarming with infinite undead, where new ones appear the moment the prior ones are dispatched. This makes small embarks on these biomes exceptionally difficult. The undead are relentless. They never sleep, never run away, and there's always another one. You will be under constant attack from day 1 of your embark. Other times, evil biomes have regular living creatures and no undead walking on to the embark from the edge of the map. You might get harpies instead of red pandas, but harpies at least die and stay dead.

Some evil biomes can have spontaneously regenerating undead, where non-mangled corpses will spontaneously get back up. You may have to kill the same cave crocodile 15 times before it finally stays down for good.

Sometimes you get clouds. Clouds are not raining elf blood or green sludge. Clouds are different. Clouds can be harmless, or they can be instantly lethal, or they can turn living creatures into husks opposed to all life, and the dust in the cloud spreads and infects everything.

And to add to this, evil biomes can have different effects at different z-levels! You might get a safe biome at ground level where the undead do not reanimate. But go up just 1 z level and now everything is reanimating and there are husks all over the place.

---

All of these variables are independent from each other. There are so many factors that embarking on an evil biome is often luck.

Note that evil clouds can take a while to show up. Evil clouds might appear only 2-5 times a year, so you might think everything is okay at first, then in autumn a cloud rolls on over your trade depot.

The above findings are based on my personal experience from having played DF for more hours than I'd care to admit, going even back to the 2nd version before spontaneously reanimating undead were even a thing.

Funny thing is, I think I'm the person who suggested spontaneously reanimating undead in the first place. I think Toady One read my suggestion thread and actually did it.

On some embarks I regret my suggestion! Undead ogres who will just not stay dead are no joke!

Avoid heavy aquifers. They're a pain to dig through without pumps or clever tricks involving freezing temperature.

Light aquifers are fantastic sources of water that aren't too difficult to dig straight through.

When digging down, designate a 2x2 or 3x3 up/down stair going down like 10 Z levels or so. From the surface all the way down 10 levels (or however deep you want your fortress). This is deep enough to get through all soil layers and to stone, where all proper dwarven forts should be constructed. At the bottom of this up/down stair mine out a room. A 10x10 room is big enough.

Water from the light aquifer will fall down the up/down stairway into this empty room. The water will spread out on the ground and will passively evaporate away without building up. As an added bonus, this creates mud which can immediately be used for underground farming.

You can dig out the rest of your fortress from here. Extend that 10x10 room out with tunnels leading off of it, other rooms, storage, workshops, bedrooms, etc.

Then on the surface build a bridge over the down stairs tiles at the surface. You can't block them all off. You will need temporary access around the bridge. Build a lever somewhere safe in your fort, underground. Link this lever to the bridge and pull the lever to retract the bridge. Now build constructed floors on the down stairs tiles that are not covered by the retracted bridge.

This secures your entire fort with a bridge. Pull the lever and the only access to the surface is cut off in a way that cannot be destroyed by building destroyers.

Just make sure to retreat everyone inside before doing this! Make a burrows for the underground area and restrict civilians to this burrow. Then once everyone is inside pull the lever. Seal off the surface.

You could set up an automatic garbage disposal.

Have a minecart route with just one stop adjacent to your garbage pit. Put a track stop on this tile pointing to the garbage pit.

Have the route stop pick up anything you want from any stockpiles in the fortress. Dwarves will haul those items to the mine cart where they are instantaneously dumped into the pit.

The bottom of the pit could be the magma ocean or an atom smasher with a repeater (wave motion repeaters are highly recommended). Either way, whatever goes in the pit is gone forever. Including wayward seeds.

As a check to make sure you're dumping only things you want to dump, try having a dumping stockpile. Make a custom stockpile that accepts all things you want disposed of. Have this custom stockpile pull from the others. Then have the garbage chute mine cart route pull from this custom stockpile.

By making a new stockpile that accepts only the things you want disposed of, your dwarves will separate out and haul the seed bags to this stockpile. They'll sit there for a bit prior to being dumped. This allows you to inspect whats being dumped so you can be sure only garbage goes down the chute.

You can pick fights with other civilizations if you want more sieges. Send a squad to attack them and the civ will declare war on you.

A word of caution: once war begins there's no ending it. There does not seem to be any way to stop a war, so it will be sieges from that civ for the entire rest of the game.

You can declare war on anyone you please, including humans or elves. Even other dwarf civilizations if you really want to. Just send a well trained, well equipped military squad to attack one of their sites.

About the military. The menu did indeed have the option of changing the armor of the dwarf individually. I would of hope that there could be an option "Just take what is available". I know I bought some armor and weapon from the last caravan I just don't know how much of each I have and the military menu doesn't make it easy.

You can indeed do this!

Make a new uniform. Give it a new name. Call it "anything" or "random stuff" or something like that. This is your hodgepodge uniform.

Set the uniform to equip 1 piece of armor, 2 mail shirts, 1 leg gear, 1 set of foot gear, 1 set of hand gear, 1 set of headgear, 1 shield, and 1 melee weapon individual choice.

The broad categories of "armor" could mean anything. This could be a mail shirt, a leather chest piece, or a metal breastplate. Note that dwarves can equip up to 3 mail shirts at the same time, so this allows for a dwarf to equip any combination of 2 mail shirts plus another piece of armor.

Leg gear could be greaves or leggings. Could be made out of metal or leather. The dwarf picks whatever is available.

When using broad categories like this your dwarves will prefer to equip the highest value item in that slot. Highest value is typically better. Adamantine costs a lot more than copper.

For mature fortresses if you want to very specifically choose what your dwarves equip, make a new uniform with specific gear. Have your dwarf equip 1 steel breastplate, 2 steel mail shirts, 1 steel helmet, 1 steel greaves, 1 steel gauntlets, 1 steel high boots, 1 steel shield, and 1 steel battleaxe. Note that you do need to set the specific material for this uniform so its not just a random breastplate, its a steel breastplate. This will force dwarves to load up on all the same gear while excluding everything else. This is useful once you're mass producing steel.

However for early fortresses its better to go with an anything goes uniform, where its not picky on armor type or material. Dwarves pick up whatever they can find.

Its the loyalty cascade bug. I had one where a failed strange mood resulted in a berserk dwarf. The berserk dwarf was promptly struck down, but then so too were about 20 other dwarves.

Fortunately with the new guildhalls its not that bad. You can train up new dwarves remarkably fast just by having them train in the proper guildhall.

I have new migrants going from zero metalsmithing skills to expert in everything in just a few years, and doing so only by learning from other dwarves in the guildhall.