Bay 12 Games Forum

The dwarven injustice system in general should be revisited. Beatings are far too lethal. Even tavern brawls often end in death. Dwarves have skulls as sturdy as lightbulbs.

A fist fight should not result in death. It should result in a visit to a hospital, not a tomb. A single punch should not cause a dwarf's entire head to explode into a red mist.

If punishments were a "break your legs" sort of deal rather than exploding heads then it would be a far less unforgiving system to the player. Having your legendary+5 armorsmith's head randomly explode isn't fun or enjoyable in any way.

Executions should be lethal, not beatings or brawling.

Statues are furniture, and you can encrust furniture with a jeweler's workshop.

It is helpful to have your gem stockpile and your furniture stockpile to give to the jeweler's workshop. This forces the jeweler to only decorate things in the linked stockpiles. Set the furniture stockpile to accept items you want decorated, and then have this stockpile take from your main furniture stockpile. Dwarves will haul to this special stockpile and jewelers will work until you either run out of gems or items to decorate.

Also note that you can select what kind of decoration you want to do. You can leave it up to the artist, have it be a specific type of decoration, or even depict a precise image you want decorated.

I've found great luck setting up different "castes" in my fortress using Therapist. You can make a new custom profession name with assigned labors, then save that setting and easily apply it to many dwarves all at the same time. This helps avoid the woodcutting/mining/hunting uniform issues.

The castes I use are:

Thanes: mining, stoneworking, metalworking, engineering, jewelers.
Woodsmen: woodcutting, carpentry, bow making.
Commoners: farming and craftsdwarves.
(Everyone does all hauling and all medical jobs.)

Note that commoners do not have either mining or woodcutting assigned. Commoners also have only the blue craftsdwarves professions assigned, and these are the generally low skill ones that have effectively unlimited resources to train on, such as making clothes from pig tail fiber. Commoners are recruited in to the military. Commoners are expendable.

Woodsmen are expendable because woodcutting is dangerous and carpentry is easy to train up, but because they have woodcutting assigned they do not join the military. Woodsmen also double as hunters when I want to do some hunting. I'll use Therapist and change out woodcutting to hunting for a while. Then back to woodcutting if I need more trees chopped.

Thanes are the valuable dwarves with the least replaceable skills. Thanes get all the best treatment and are also capable of defending themselves very well. A masterwork steel pick in the hands of a legendary+5 miner is devastating.

An underground tree farm can also double as a strip mine and animal pasture. Its easy to dig out multiple Z-levels on a mark. The entire Z-level. Just channel it out.

Make sure to construct up/down stairs for your main stairway! Constructed tiles cannot be mined. This helps prevent accidentally channeling out your access stairs and stranding your dwarves.

Then go from one edge of the map to the other. I designate it all as up/down stairs for the entire size of the cavern, and once the up/down stairs are all designated and mined out you can either channel it out one Z-level as a time, starting from the top, or you can construct a support pillar linked to a lever, mine out all connecting/supporting tiles, and pull the lever. Either way works.

All you have to do from there is flood it and drain it. Aquifers make this super easy. Make sure you have a drain built in advance.

This strip mining excavation will get you an enormous amount of stone, gems, ore, and open space. You can make a pasture zone and animals will graze on moss while still having a huge area growing trees. You don't need to farm at all. Just cover the entire thing in activity zones with plant gathering and your dwarves will continually harvest all of the naturally growing cave plants, easily enough to feed even a huge fortress.

These strip mines also make for interesting fortresses. Instead of flooding it, try building your fortress in this huge open underground area. Build it like the great hall of Moria. You'll have to construct all of your rooms/buildings within this artificial cavern, but you can get a lovely city with freestanding buildings while still being underground.

It's confusing because many "haggard" dwarves will have no bad thoughts in the top block except unmet needs.

I see the same behavior all the time. A wall of positive, happy thoughts and yet the dwarf is still haggard. There does not appear to be any way to reduce stress no matter how charmed of a life the dwarf lives. All the luxuries in the world, every need met, and still stress climbs.

The lack of control is whats frustrating. I understand if I screw up and doom everyone its my own fault. Flooding the dining room with pressurized water from an ocean is entirely my own fault. This doesn't cause me any frustration because cause and effect are linked.

Stress frustrates me because cause and effect are not linked. I have no idea what causes stress and I have no ability to reduce stress. I have zero control about this, yet I'm punished for it anyways. This isn't fun gameplay.

I'm not asking for a magic de-stress button (thought DFHack has one), I just want a clear path to calm dwarves and remove stress. I wish the game told me what to do so that I can do it. Does the stressed dwarf demand a zoo with a hippo and a parrot as exhibits? I can work with that! Just give me a path to fix the problem.

I'm not even a newbie player, and its still confusing to me!

Check my forum account. Registered in 2008. Been around DF for a while now, and the only way I've been able to cope with the stress system is to edit the raws to set dwarven stress vulnerability to 0, discipline as a natural skill to 15, and then add in a reaction to booze to make booze alter personality to keep stress vulnerability at minimum. And still, despite all of this, one siege or one rainstorm can ruin a dwarf forever.

I do not know how to reduce stress. Masterwork everything. Bedrooms like personal palaces. Temples and taverns and safety, and yet still stress inexorably climbs.

The only way I've ever been able to keep stress from inevitably climbing is to simply seal off the fortress like its a Vault-Tec vault.

I've found that TWBT kills my performance late game, and framerate death is a bad enough issue to begin with.

Disabling TWBT gives me significant framerate boosts. I think the multi-Z level rendering is whats hogging performance, and DF's optimization problems means every last CPU cycle is precious.

Try embarking on a 3x3 embark, where only 1 of those world tiles is land. This gives you 9 tiles to work with, but 8 of those tiles are ocean. Only 1 land tile also forces all visitors to your fortress to show up on a walkable section of ground, meaning you can very easily funnel all visitors past your military.

Typically, this one walkable world tile will be a corner. Then you dig down from this under the sea and you built your fortress in either the silt or stone layers. Dig down deeper and you will encounter caverns and the underworld.

I'm very fond of these embarks for my own personal fortresses.