Bay 12 Games Forum

It might be handy for some of the more ambitious mods like Dwarf Chocolate though, especially now that worldgen has much more direct impact on gameplay in Fortress Mode.

So I spent some time with Black Powder Firearms. And, I love it. Although I realized it would take hours to merge into Dark Ages. And, the number of reactions required for this mod is quite vast.

The thing about the reactions, though, is that most of the actually difficult ones are optional; gunpowder and firelocks can both be bought from the caravans, and you can substitute potash for saltpetre.

I'm planning on refitting a much simplified version of Black Powder Firearms mod for inclusion in a future version of Dark Ages.

Excellent. I look forward to seeing the result.

I have a system of sorts for this. Anyone who arrives with a pre-existing melee skill gets a uniform of chainmail over leather with a metal helmet, a wooden shield and "individual choice, melee". They're set to train for the whole of winter, when I usually have the highest number of idlers.

The rest of the fortress militia eventually consists of twelve squads issued a breastplate, a helmet and a crossbow. (Or some other ranged weapon.) They spend a month each training, spread out through the years so I don't have too many dwarves taken away from their other duties. I start by drafting my hunters, but then shove anyone not very useful for anything else in to fill out the numbers.

In the event of an attack, I have an alert to send the ranged squads behind fortifications around the entrance with the melee squad waiting in the courtyard. Everyone else is in lockdown in the "bomb shelter", a big room with beds, a dining area and lots of stockpiled food and booze that's guarded with traps.

I'd settle for ATTACK_PREP_AND_RECOVER applying to ranged attacks, personally.

You might want to grab a copy of Getting Started With Dwarf Fortress; it has the significant advantage of teaching you how to do everything the old-fashioned way with no third-party tools.

Yes, we have a professional-quality software training handbook instead of a game manual. Badass, isn't it?

The air guns being spring-powered instead of by compressed air was another necessary compromise, because for the life of me I can't figure out how I might go about simulating an air tank without resorting to the dark sourcery of dfhack.

And 'shotgun' instead of 'blunderbuss' came about because everyone who happens to install the mod will immediately understand what a shotgun is and what it's supposed to do; this is also why I went with muskets instead of arquebuses. (Arquebi?  )

Besides, the word 'blunderbuss' conjures up mental pictures of ridiculous-looking weapons resembling a trumpet with a firing mechanism, wielded by bad German stereotypes in old cartoons. And the direct, literal English translation of the original Dutch word is "thunder-pipe", which sounds even sillier and vaguely obscene.

Getting this error when you try to run DF?

./libs/Dwarf_Fortress: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL_image-1.2.so.0:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
As stated at Ask Ubuntu, in order to correct this problem you need the following packages:
libsdl-image1.2:i386
libgtk2.0-0:i386
libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386
libglu1-mesa:i386 (in 14.04 and later)
This probably applies to Mint, Lucid Puppy and any other Debian fork you may happen to be trying to run DF on if you're getting that error message, but I mentioned Ubuntu users specifically because it's the distro almost everyone has heard of.