Bay 12 Games Forum

Great. In addition to Dwarfy physics, we've also concluded they use non-Euclidian geometry. When will the madness end?!

That could be difficult to answer if there's an infinite area but a finite border or a finite area with an infinite border.  (Or a finite (and toroidal) area with no border, but we aren't playing Asteroids here... )

A mineral scarcity option was introduced in .20 (?) after 'Entire Forum cancels Play DF: Throwing tantrum'.

That explains it.  I knew about it (because I'd heard it announced to aforementioned Entire Forum) but the only time I'd tried to access it was when I tried to show DF to someone at work (where I had .19 running a glacial embark) and thought I should try to worldgen something with a little bit more in the way of useful elements.


As to getting as much ore as you need, given current scarcities, the reported trick is to tend to 'suggest' to the liaiaiaison that you would like to buy from next year's caravan both the bars (whatever you can get of raw iron, pig iron and steel) plus all the items specifically of those materials (e.g. if you want tin, tin cages) so that (assuming you hadn't gotten an absolutely divine item that you'd spent a lot on and want to keep) you can melt it down and possibly add a little bit more to your bar-stacks.

[3xNinjed, but posting anyway...]

Just started a new game due to a huge overflow of seeds because I didn't realise they needed to be bagged prior to barreling.

I've made sure this time to plant pig tails asap with the intention of getting a base textiles industry up. I planted 5 and appear to have harvested 9 pig tails and now i'm out of seeds. My plump helmets seem to have no end of seeds but have no idea how to get more pig tail seeds.

Seeds can be obtained (where possible, which includes pig tail) as the product of plants being eaten/brewed/milled/farm-processed, according to whatever their plant can be used for.  Not cooking, although that shouldn't be the issue given you can't cook Pig Tails.

If you're wanting your cloth (and my memory tells me that there's nothing else that can be done with Pig Tails.. apart from brewing, which will also give you seeds), process the plants in the Farmer's Workshop.  You should get at least one seed per plant, which will get grown in the fields (Summer/Autmun only?[1]) to give you more to process, and should build up your stocks.

Just make sure that you don't have the seeds available to cook (by default it shouldn't be, but that would use up seeds to no gain except emergency food), and I think that un-harvested plants can rot in the fields and similarly lose the ability for seeds, so turning off "All Dwarves Harvest" might be a bad idea unless you have enough farmers, and even with that option on you may find everyone too busy to help out if you're like me and trying to keep everyone doing something else.


[1] Strange how above-ground plants can be grown[2] all year round, yet subterranean ones are sensitive to the seasons...

[2] Assuming they can at all.  My glacier embarks refuse to give me above-ground plants, even when I scrape back to soil.

Must be hard to read that fast, beofre the pages ash.

I stared at a torch, but all I could see were random images from flickr.

Quote from: thegoatgod_pan on July 29, 2011, 06:29:15 pm

Build a floor, it's faster and doesn't demand architecture

Yes, but it takes more stone.

I have had exactly one fort in which I did not have more than enough stone[1].  My usual problems are of the "I need 1000+ more sandstone blocks" variety, more OCD in nature than game-breaking.

If you can wait (although admittedly it sounds like you can't) building an extra bridge or twenty helps train up your designated architect.  To really speed things up (for the architect, or the masons[2] when it comes to floors) set down a stockpile of the appropriate materials and empower a dedicated army of haulers, when the first item(s) arrive there then you set it to be built.  (Don't shift-select bulk materials, but make sure that the distance to the material remains consistently low, ideally in single figures.)

Also, if you dismantle floors over a river, the materials are lost.  (Not, as mentioned above, likely to be a problem... Unless you used spoilermetal bars for them.  But it does leave an untidy set of materials lying on the riverbed, which my aforementioned OCD doesn't like...)  Build a bridge and dismantle it later and the materials used will sit happily on the side of the bridged gap.  Although possibly the wrong side.


The first thought I had (although the frozen river solution is doubtless the more correct) some sort of badly-assigned burrow so that all the fisherdwarfs were barred from going home to feed/sleep (although they do break that restriction when desperate, I believe).

I was also reminded me of "Urist McHunter cancels Hunt: Hunting for Vermin for food" message.

My first thought when I had only seen the subject, however, was that Fisherdwarfs are already insane.  One reason why I tend to treat any fish-related skills as dump-stats and treating fish-type immigrants as the peasants (or secondarily skilled guys) that they would be if they didn't have any of the dark-blue tendencies.

HTH, HAND.


[1] And that one was a soily 40D with mucho-aquifer, and the very first one that, for want of something else to do, I actually learnt how to properly grow crops and started to not suffer from the problems from which my screen-name is directly derived.

[2] Ignoring for now wooden or metal bridges.

I've seen designed proposed for repeatable cave-in generators.  [...] While the water hit the 'target square' where the cave-in would occur, horizontal launching of magma proved more difficult due to it's lack of pressure.

Not tried it recently, but I do know that there was a perfectly viable way of making "bridge only" delivery channels that (with one standard bridge as floor, and two raised bridges as walls either side) could deliver both liquids into the 1-tile gap between them where obsidian could form and (along with any unmatched water and/or magma) fall without having supported itself on anything.

Not exactly an efficient trap, BTW, but I've had something like the following prepared for subterranean enemies in a recent fortress, though it never got used.
  ########
  #>_ I_  ->
  #X ## ##
  #<_I^_>#
  ## ## X#
  #>_^I_<#
  #X ## ##
  #<_I^_>#
  ## ## X#
  #>_^I_<#
  #X ## ##
  #<_I^_>#
  ## ## X#
  #>_^I_<#
  #X ## ##
  #<_I^_>#
  ## ## X#
->   ^  <#
  ########
# = raw rock; <,X,> = stairwells; I = pillars; ^ = pressure plates attached to the pillar above them (as also are a number of levers, just in case; _ = bridge-floors onto and off from the pillar-hanging platforms.

(Optional hatches on the top of the stairwells, and bridges sideways (inwards and outwards from the diagram's side-slice) could prevent flyers, but would not guarantee that invaders stand on the pressure plates that send the raw rock down upon them.  Note also that resetting is non-trivial.)

If DF were 64-bit, we could probably dedicate an entire byte to the fluid levels. In other words, x/127 internally (represented as numerals from 1-9 in display, and a percentage on right?). This could act similarly to the grass we have, making it x/100 (101 possible values) to keep consistancy. Now we have water units = 1 water so there is no need to keep track of 10 units per the level.

Dampness has nothing to do with water levels. That should be part of soil or the underlying tile splatters.

No idea why DF being 64 bit would even have anything to do about that.

I'm also too tired (long story) to work out if it's your binary maths or my understanding of what you're saying that's flawed (x/255, Shirley, or am I missing some point?  And I don't get the grass bit at all).  Most likely me, but I am definite that the 64-bit bit is a wild goose chase.  I'm sure I'll regret this reply later, but hey.

So, about that sleep I desperately need...

I didn't see this thread back in June, so I'm a bit late to the game in describing how I'm currently setting up my observation posts (like Archery Towers, and usable as such, but currently populated with juvenile fowls, of various kind, as ambush-revealing guard-creatures.)

_________=_____#
Fortress <____=#
innards   #  H<H
__________#___________
#=Wall, H = Fortification, _ = notable floor, < = Up-stairwell, = = Hatch (over down-stairwell)

From the wall, and without any direct path to the outside (although still vulnerable, while building, to flyers), I'm building wall-lined walkways leading to hatch-sealed downward stair into the "bellygunner pillbox" in which the creature (and, as necessary, possibly an on-call archer) resides.

Building necessitates getting the lower level built first (in the above example, from the first floor[1]) with constructed floors and then an up-stairwell (or several) in the required position and surrounding it (or them) with Fortifications (using bridges or more floorways[3] to build the corners, and then when they're secured by other adjacent walls deconstruct the given walkway and replace with that wall's fortifications), keeping the supporting 'access' floor until the second-floor walkway has been constructed enough to 'latch on' to the structure, then gradually deconstruct the temporary lower-level access floor as the down-stairs (to be covered by a hatch, to make forbidden and pet impassible while the juvenile birds reside in them, to avoid certain auto-hauling and enemy-fleeing tendencies) make it possible to fill the gap with the last fortification.  The level above is wall-lined as and when material is available[4] and a stairway to the roof (the top down-stair being givne the potential to be hatch-sealed, of course) allows the top of the walkway to be protected.

I've also developed my own (probably not unique) way to make diagonally-extending walkways, that end up fully-sealed, without externally scaffolding them at all:

1) From the start corner to the end corner (located at a tile with an exact
 45-degree angle from the former) build a zig-zag of floors and designate
 walls within the corners.  (With a little (B)uild-(C)onstruction-(?)Whatever
 magic, including cancellations of specific crowd-placed items and
 re-designation of a different component, you can get it all designated in
 this pattern ready for them to complete construction with very little extra
 micro-management to that you spent a few minutes originally setting up...)

 XO
 +++
  O+O
   +++
    O+O
     +>+
      O

2) Make those internal-corner walls into chevrons/brackets of walls, and add
 some more walls as corners to the destination spot. (Noting that you could
 set this up in step (1), but separated here so as to allow minimal support
 to the downstair, as described further above, a little bit more quickly.)

 XOO
 +++O
 OO+OO
  O+++O
   OO+OO
    O+>+
     OOO

3) Remove the unnecessary floors, noting that all walls and floors (and
 stairs) that remain support all other walls and floors further out on
 the limb, and that walkway passage is still possible.

 XOO
  + O
 OO+OO
  O + O
   OO+OO
    O >
     OOO

4) Place walls into all those gaps, to form homogeneous walls around a walkway
 that can still be traversed.

 XOO
 O+OO
 OO+OO
  OO+OO
   OO+OO
    OO>O
     OOO

...Finis



[1] 2nd floor, to you left-pondians, i.e. the one at Z+1 relative to ground level[2] (often 'first floor', to you) in the above diagram.

[2] Though my first experiments in the system were of creating these "bellygunner" structures over excavated ground so that they could "hover" at ground-level over an ever-deepening pit, with the post-construction walkway being at first-floor level, rather than second-floor to support the first-floor fortification room.

[3] Deconstructed bridges return their material to safe-ground to one side of where they hovered over mid-air, but deconstructed floors drop their materials onto the floor below.  Given I usually arrange for it to be safe to recover, at various times of the dwarven year, I don't mind dropping the occasional stone below and cluttering up the place until I can bring it back into the fold.

[4] I tend to want to build in blocks of a particular stone.  A current fort has an main fortress area of sandstone blocks, but dacite blocks form the entirety of the extending bellygunner emplacements and their gangways at all points (and levels) beyond the extremities of the fort.  I'm actually more short on sandstone than dacite, mostly because I discovered an aquiver running through the sandstone deposits I was going to mine and enblockify.