Bay 12 Games Forum

Regarding zoos, the wiki says "Take care not to cage animals there one of your dwarves finds disgusting!" Is that correct?

I bought a tame 'two-legged rhino lizard' from the elves (accidentally - it came with a cage I bought), and I've got several dwarves who are disgusted by 'lizards' (none who mention this particular kind of lizard, if that matters). But I put the critter in a cage in my dining room - along with all our puppies and kittens - and I've never had a bad thought from it.

Do dwarves get bad thoughts from caged creatures, or just from those they see running wild?

Also, you can make a room from a cage, but you can't actually designate it as a "zoo," can you? I couldn't seem to find that option, anyway. Will dwarves go there to admire the animals, anyway? Or should I make it a sculpture garden - which just happens to contain many caged animals - instead?

This will be near the top of my fortress, so there won't be much traffic through the room (i.e. they'll have to go there deliberately).

Bill

Well, since the "forbid on death" option was added, I haven't had to use "dwarves stay inside" once.

I still use it to call my dwarves into the fortress. Even when I've stopped woodcutting, herbalism, and fishing, my idiot dwarves insist on smoothing walls from the OUTSIDE. And they'll use any possible method of exiting the fortress, even if it requires heading directly into a bunch of bloodthirsty goblins!

Note, too, that I can't just seal off the fortress entirely, because then the goblins just mill around at the edge of the map. It takes some micromanaging to get the goblins to attack without letting my dwarves commit suicide.

I don't necessarily build doors into the structure on the surface, I use stairways from the underground portion of my fortress.  My dwarves have to pass through my Legenday Dining Hall to get from their rooms to the surface, even though their rooms are ON the surface to start with.

Right. I'm always careful to minimize the number of entrances into my fortress, too. On the other hand, I've found it useful to build distant 'boltholes' - alternate entrances in other parts of the map - so that my dwarves can escape ambushing goblins who get between them and the main entrance. These make nice traps for any goblins who chase after them, as well.

Of course, these also provide extra exits for those dwarves who insist on running out into harms way. And during one attack, I had two dwarves who couldn't make up their minds which entrance to use, and so dithered back and forth until a goblin bowman shot them.

My dwarves aren't too bright, you know?

Bill

Personally, I feel a fortress name is not good without hilarious randomness. If I get a serious-sounding name like "Stonekeep" or something I abort and embark again until the name is silly enough.

My current fortress is called Avalsolon - "Loveflags." I thought that was certainly weird enough!



Bill

Hmmm, perhaps you could designate high/low/restricted traffic zones so that your dwarves will reuse the same paths to gather the bushes and not trample any more tiles than they have to. Traffic zones won't stop a dwarf from going to a tile if they really want to, but if they're trying to get somewhere else (i.e. a bush) then you can force them to use certain routes.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I thought about that, but the bushes are scattered among the tower-cap saplings. Right now, my dwarves aren't using the area to get from one place to another (where traffic zones might work to keep them on a specific 'path'). If the herbalists can do their work at all, they'll have to spread out. I don't see how traffic zones would help with that.

Bill

About a week or two ago I posted about having more buildings cause negative effects.

One of them was that furnaces could produce smoke, which had a negative miasma-like effect, meaning that you'd need to strategically situate your Furnaces to avoid producing Smog-districts in the fortress.

These are dwarves. Maybe they should get happy thoughts from breathing furnace smoke.



Bill

Quarry Bushes, I think?

Could be. I don't know how I could tell, since they look like any other bush. And I don't see anything about it on the wiki.

I haven't been sending my herbalists after them, since I didn't want them tramping on the young tower-caps. But I might try it later.

Bill

This is my own fault, but I built a bolt-hole - and goblin trap - at the far end of my map and had one goblin ambush party enter at each end, both intent on killing the guard kittens. I raised the bridge at one end, and the first group all died on the traps inside.

At the other end, I waited until the 'Pull lever' job was activated, and then went to watch the fun. But the bridge stayed down, and stayed down, and... the goblins started to escape. The lever-puller must have gotten tired or hungry or something, and the job had switched back to 'inactive.' OK, that's frustrating, but when I went back to the surface, I discovered that half of my dwarves had left my nice, safe fortress and were rushing across the map to get to the bloody goblin gear, despite the fact that there were a bunch of angry live goblins to go with it! Doh!

Yeah, none of my dwarves had outside jobs, so I hadn't worried that they'd be outside. But I'd completely forgotten to set the automatic 'forbid' on corpses and their items! My dwarves could still have escaped, but the first one, instead of running towards the fortress (and safety), ran to the edge of the map (and a gory death) - apparently just because it was exactly the opposite direction from the goblins (instead of slightly at an angle).

Two others ran back and forth (dithering about which entrance to use, the safe one or the one with the goblins coming out!), until a goblin bowman crippled them both. They lay bleeding for a long time, until the goblins finally waltzed over and put them out of their misery.

Yeah, it was my own fault, which just makes it worse. I hate when I forget something like that!

Bill

Your best bet would be to find a nice soil layer, and channel out the roof of it - trees and shrubs will definitely grow on an underground soil layer which is suddenly exposed to the sky.  Happens pretty quickly too.

Shrubs don't seem to need the sunlight, either. After my guys found an underground river, I dug out a huge room in the soil on the other side of the map, without breaking the surface. I got tower-caps sprouting up immediately, which was nice, but I'm also getting shrubs. I didn't expect that.

I don't know what kind of shrubs they are, but they're growing in a completely subterranean environment which has never been exposed to the light.

Bill