Bay 12 Games Forum

Gangs of fearless Keas dive bombing humanoids, for no reason or purpose, before making off with anvils and wheelbarrows.

Maybe he's watched Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Maybe. But God himself could part the heavens and announce that Toady One saw a budgie through a keyhole once and I wouldn't believe him.

Has anyone else seen something like this? I'm concerned about potential glitches since this seems weird. Although it was also exactly the kind of FUN I play DF for.

It happened as I said in the title: first dwarf caravan shows up, they come to the trade depot as normal. I trade with them, am pretty pleased to both have all the low quality mugs I've been making carted off the screen and to get the food I bought from them. I remove the broker from the depot and go on with my life.

Then I get a message telling me that a werebeast has arrived, just like any normal one. The world I'm playing in is lousy with weretortoises for some reason so I'm not too surprised. I send my workers inside, set the drawbridge to close, then zoom in on the werebeast.

He's right in the middle of my trade depot.

I have no military. I barely have a wall to cower behind. So I'm just not part of what occurs next: every member of the trade caravan, merchants too although I don't think they did so voluntarily, gets into a massive fight with the weretortoise and manage to kill it. He has a rainbow of metal bolts sticking out of him by the end.

When the dust settles all that's left now is one merchant, who is wandering around my fort like he's supposed to be here but who is still listed as a merchant. I'm very concerned that this guy will prevent future trade caravans from the dwarves.

On the plus side I now get the entire contents of the first caravan. On the down side that includes all the mugs I traded them.

I'd include a screenshot but I'm playing on my other computer.

So who knows anything about how this stuff works?

I've been playing around with it lately. I made a fort, built it up to a barony, then retired it for a new one which I got up to a duchy. By the time I went back to unretire the original fort to see how it had changed over the years it had been conquered by goblins. Apparently immediately after I founded the new fort. Given the way invasions work it now strikes me that it would probably be quite an accomplishment to be able to retire a fort, go away for a decade or so, and come back to see what level of changes happened.

I can verify that a few things were altered. When I went back to reclaim the ruined retired fortress, a lot of my former dwarves were still there. Unfortunately I reclaimed as a rival dwarf civilization so they were all hostile. I was able to ascertain, before he completely finished caving in the heads of my settlers with a pick, that one of my legendary soldiers had been promoted to Hammerer (a position which, for obvious reasons, I tend to leave unfilled).

Other than that it was just like any reclaimed fort, with stuff strewn around, but I imagine that was because it was ruined. No sign of goblins either, but apparently the dwarf population was not completely wiped out.

When just playing around with it and reclaiming a fort as quickly as I could after retiring it I didn't notice any changes at all.

Does anyone know if the population cap in the init is preserved after the fort is retired?

I'm looking to try out some new mods, preferably some of the weirder ones, but I really don't like the ASCII graphics. Does anyone know some good mods that have their own custom graphic packs or that are compatible with some existing ones?

so it's Schrodinger's description then?

Yep, the act of observation causes their dwarven wave form to collapse.

So does that mean there is no way to retire an adventurer in such a way that they might potentially migrate to my fortress?

I'm not sure, what's so cool about him?

Your inability to appreciate beauty must be a deep burden.

Also, while I've got you guys, is there a way to make the bullets explode on impact rather than just drop like arrows?