Bay 12 Games Forum

It seems this bug is longstanding and I'm encountering it with a near certainty after playing for long enough: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9593

The caravan shows up, does its thing, and leaves peacefully. Or it tries to leave peacefully. Items are still visible in the stocks menu listed as not being owned by me, but by visitors. I can order these items to be dumped. I can zoom in on these items, which are located near the edge of the map. However the caravan is now stuck. The caravan people are now invisible/stuck, cannot be interacted with, cannot be killed, and because they haven't left the map I'll never get any new caravans ever again.

Any workaround for this? Any way to get them unstuck? Its really annoying. I'm having to savescum to prevent caravans from breaking, and every year there appears to be a chance for them to break. Its a dice roll every year, and the more years in game that roll by the greater the probability that this occurs. Then from that point on caravans are broken forever.

This is without getting cute with the map. There's no surface construction other than a downward stair and an armor stand. There's no trickery with magma or liquids. Caravans are kept safe underground during their visit. They just break all on their own, forever preventing trade.

The creature probe (cprobe) utility identities these invisible traders on the edge of the map, there in memory but unable to be accessed. They don't show up on the units list either. They're just stuck in limbo, still counting as being on the map even though they're no longer able to interact with anything.

As both a space saving technique, and also to encourage marriage with my population to sustain a long term fortress I've taken to building communal bedrooms. Its almost like dorm style housing, where multiple dwarves will share the same room.

Dwarves who become friendly enough with each other may get married and have children together, and the way this can be encouraged is by having a lot of idle dwarves in close proximity with each other.

If this is taken too far then your fortress will become vulnerable to tantrum spirals, but if you limit dwarves to a small number of very close friends tantrum spirals are not a problem. Dwarves living in the same room will be very close friends, but they will generally not know dwarves who live in other dorm rooms.

This is the bedroom design I have been using:
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
XXB B BXX
XX     XX
 D S S XX
XX     XX
XXB B BXX
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX

Each room will have 6 beds with each bed zoned for a bedroom. A total of 6 dwarves will live in each dorm. In the middle there are masterwork statues of whatever material is most readily available and also valuable. Two masterwork silver statues, for example, will cause regular dwarves think of their dorm room as a personal palace without upsetting nobles.

The entire room is also smoothed to also increase value. I don't do any engravings, but engravings or constructing the floor out of valuable metal blocks is another way to boost the room value.

In order to encourage dwarves to stay in their rooms when idle I do not have a meeting zone. Nope, no meeting zone at all. Without a meeting zone dwarves will go back to their rooms when idle. While they're in the room they can also admire the high quality furniture and chat with friends.

This housing method seems to work very well. The entire fortress becomes ecstatic over the quality of their bedrooms, dwarves get married very frequently, and there are no problems with tantrum spirals.

Edit 8/15:
Quantum industrial complex in practice in my current fortress:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-29675-quantumindustrialcomplex



Here is a design to compress your entire industrial output and storage into a small and compact industrial complex all located on the same level. Note that in this design I'm using 3 workshops of each type. You do not need to use as many workshops, or you could use more, so this design can be scaled up or down at will.

This design heavily abuses quantum stockpiling from mine carts. When a mine cart hits a track stop that has dumping enabled, all items will be dropped to the direction the stop is programmed to dump items. This is completely safe and will harm no dwarves. No mine carts are ever out of control as all mine carts are guided. No pushing or riding, only guiding allowed. You will not have any fatalities due to mine carts with this factory complex.

Another perk of this factory complex is that it requires zero wood. You don't need to make a single bin. Due to the quantum nature of storage and the new hauling behavior involving bins, using bins will significantly reduce efficiency. Not using bins actually improves efficiency.


And now onto the design itself. Behold, my dabbling skills in MS Paint!


Here is the key for the tiles:

Black = walls
Brown = workshop
Green = stockpile
Yellow = minecart tracks
Blue = booze

(Apologies for the poor quality for the flowchart. I find that MS Paint is actually very good for drawing thing on a pixel basic, which lines up to a per tile construction in DF. Its very poor for flowcharts.)


Don't allow any stockpiles to use bins to make this work. No bins! Nope. You don't need them. The central stockpile acts as the sorting depot. It accepts nearly every type of item in the fortress.

Items from the main sorting stockpile are divided up into multiple different 1x1 quantum stockpiles using minecarts. The quantum stockpiles are next to relevant workshops to boost efficiency.

You will get a lot of haulers doing short hauling jobs, moving things a few steps each time. Once a cart is full the cart will be guided to its stop, where it will dump the items next to the stockpile that uses those item types.

The main sorting stockpile will of course require input in order to function. In order to supply it bones and skulls for crafting as well as stone and ore build a mine cart route and track from your butchery workshops (likely located near your kitchens and dining hall) and from your quarry area (including obsidian mine). These mine carts can be dumped right into the sorting stockpile still using the quantum method, and then reloaded into carts on other destinations.

To further separate out what items are stored where, I build two stockpiles that store finished goods, weapons, and armor. The stockpile on the side of the forges, jeweler, and crafts workshops accepts only masterwork and artifact grade items. These items are decorated continually so they menace with spikes of bling. The stockpile on the smelter side accepts low quality finished goods, weapons, and armor. Periodically just mass designate that entire 1x1 square for melting, and put the smelter to work melting down the goblinite or low quality rejects from your forges should any weapons or armor fail to live up to expectations.



Not addressed in this stockpile is the manufacture of clothing items. I suggest creating a small area that includes pig tail farm, 1 farmer workshop, 2 looms, and 1 clothier workshop. Also include a stockpile for pig tail plants and pig tail seeds.

Then create an additional stockpile that accepts clothing items only. Have that same stockpile also act as a refuse stockpile which accepts no types of refuse. This means no refuse will be hauled to the stockpile, but any clothing items on it will rot away to nothing. Allow the clothing/refuse stockpile to use bins. Clothing will be continually produced and recycled in this room. Excess clothes will just go away on their own with no intervention needed. Dwarves who need new clothes will pick it up before it has a chance to rot. Clothes not needed will rot away over a period of months.

So I've been building a mighty zombie pit for fortress defense. All undesirables are tossed into the zombie pit. Its not the fall that kills them, its the hundreds of endlessly reanimating zombies.

This leads to a massive accumulation of zombies, partial zombies, and precious scrap metal at the bottom of the pit. Getting the undesirables into the pit is trivially easy. Cleaning out the entire pit is also trivial.

But I don't want to clean out the entire pit.

What I want to do is:

A) Extract valuable iron from the pit.
B) Do NOT destroy the zombies, they need to be recycled for the next sieges.
C) Do not let the zombies escape the pit.

I considered using a combination of bridges and water, to cause creatures to flee to dry ground if possible. The iron would sink to the bottom, and I can use bridges to cover the top of the pool while dropping out the bottom of the pool. This works fine for living creatures, but zombies just don't care because they don't need to breath.

While I can just brute force it and barge in with my military to murder all of the zombies, this inevitably leads to a massive mess, as hauling away the iron is continually interrupted by zombies, and zombies end up leaking out of the containment pit, body parts, panicking dwarves, and legendary soldiers with axes chopping zombies everywhere. I've tried this, and it causes the entire fortress to grind to a halt and descend into mayhem. Its not dangerous, its just not productive at all.

Slaying all zombies with spike traps does work, but they reanimate so fast no hauling can be done. If the spikes are not continually moving, there will be zombies up. If the spikes are moving, haulers cannot enter.


Any thoughts on anything I've missed that may allow for the sifting of zombies, keeping the zombies contained and safe, while allowing the valuable metal to be recovered?

Requesting fortress critique:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-11095-minedances
Population 200.
Year 66 from embark.

This was made with the old version of DF. I'm still waiting for the current version to stabilize with the bugfixing before I really start building big.

Exploration into the caverns is limited due to how much time was spent on building the main fortress but the main fortress is more or less finished, so all that is exploration into the deeper layers of the map.



Edit;
Mods/tweaks/adjustements used for the game:
---prospecting, allows conversion of large amounts of junk stone into metal
---classrooms, allows dorfs to train different skills, consumes nothing except for time, generates nothing except for xp
---added in additional hostile goblin and elf civilization, gave hostile elves metal, can be under siege by 3 different civilizations at the same time
---removed clothing from game for everyone to reduce clutter
---used DFliquids to produce the obsidian around the edge of the map, same effect as building drawbridges along the edge of the map but saved a whole lot of time. For bridge and ice version, see http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-27291-gatehouse
---used Reveal to scout map prior to digging to know what depth to dig fortress to
---turned off invasions while digging out map to free up enough labor to dig out the entire map in a reasonable timeframe as well as to avoid interruptions

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-10374-bodicespots

All done! Or pretty sure I'm done.

Year 65, population 375. The demon hordes have been defeated. The dwarven king proudly leads his elite military, slaughtering demons, goblins, and elves with frightening ease.

The underworld is mostly tamed, though not quite. Its still dangerous due to some uncovered glowing pits and of course the demons that appear.

Elaborate cast ice fortress is finished. There aren't many buildings above ground, but almost all of the fortress is below ground anyways so there may not be much point in building above ground structures.

At this point about all I think is left is to perhaps finish my megaproject to tame the underworld, by sealing the remainder of the glowing pits and to set up regular military patrols to engage and hunt down the demon hordes.

Demons are also good eating! A single demon will produce a vast amount of meat. You can probably get 500ish meals from a single demon.

In a freezing climate where there is ice all year round this actually works extremely well for building above ground stuff.

Some things I have noticed:

---You only get 1 fill pond job per pond zone, so it works best to make many, many pond zones. I usually make a series 10x1 zones. Once the pond zone is finished you will start getting notifications that they cannot fill the pond. At this point you can just delete the zone and the fill pond job goes away on its own.

---It takes 2 buckets to make a tile of solid ice. The first bucket makes an ice floor. The second bucket makes the ice wall on the level below.

---Make your water source as close as possible to the construction site. It needs to be underground so it doesn't freeze, but closer means things get cast from ice more quickly.

---Water in buckets will last for a surprisingly long time before freezing in the bucket as a chunk of ice. Its really not an issue unless the bucket is dropped and left outside. If the water in the bucket does freeze just order the ice to be dumped, and the chunks of ice will be taken to your garbage zone.

---Put your bucket stockpile right next to water source and produce a large number of buckets to ensure there is always another bucket to be filled.

---You can cast ice over a ledge. First the ice floor and then the ice wall is cast at the Z level right below the pond zone. This means if you're dumping buckets of water off of a 2 Z level high wall, you will be forming a solid ice roof and the area underneath will be completely ice free, and even safe to walk over as the ice is being cast over their heads.

---You can cast ice walls right to the edge of the map. Effects on creatures spawning there is unknown, currently undergoing testing.

Halp, I'm stuck in a rut.

I keep building ginormous great halls, Mines of Moria style, with large, highly efficient rooms going off of the main hall. The great hall is the meeting zone, central to the industrial, agricultural, bedrooms, and nobles wings of the fortress.

While these layouts are extremely efficient and immensely productive, they're boring.

I want to try something that is much more decentralized, with perhaps numerous meeting zones, everything sort of all jumbled together, yet nice looking. Almost bunker complex style.

Anyone have any inspiration?