Bay 12 Games Forum

It swirls in the direction the toilet is designed to swirl in, unless your toilet is the size of  an ocean basin and the coriolis effect is actually relevant.

It's been a while since I've tried it, but I've found that their zombie sense is not LoS.  Send a miner to dig under the zombie without breaching the surface, he'll notice and try to path to the dwarf, probably coming in through the front entrance (or your meat grinder, if that's what you left open) in the process.

I usually either make my macros per floor, if I have a complex design, or I make simple ones like "dig bedroom and move over", and I can use that on repeat to make ten rooms in a row, and designate the doorways and halls myself.


I believe there's a way to rotate macros, but I can never remember how, so I end up making different ones for different directions.  If you keep it simple, they're very quick and easy to make.

Edit: to answer the original question, since even with macros you have to designate by hand at least once, I personally rather enjoy making bedrooms, or at least the designating.  Filling with beds and activating them as bedrooms is pretty tedious.  I find the repetitive rhythmic key presses to be very meditative, and I like to make a game of figuring out more efficient ways to lay things out, like setting it up so you can use 11 step shifts instead of individual key presses.

One thing that I find helps is working backwards.  Designate a lot, and then use d-x to draw walls onto the designated space.

This is totally normal.  Creatures get titles from feats of badassitude (specifically, notable kills), but they get names if they are a pet.  Because people like to name their pets.  "Stray Chick" is an unowned generic baby chicken but "Asmel Rimadmebzuth, Chick" is the pet of one of your new migrants.  Make sure it doesn't die, they will be unhappy (or make sure it dies, to get the unhappiness out of the way at a manageable time and clean up your unit list).

If Asmel goes on to peck a goblin to death or something, it will gain a title in addition to a name.

Atom smashing applies to items, and also fluids.  Ice boulders, or any level of water can be smashed, but an ice wall tile is completely different, in the same way that a puddle of booze left on the ground if you forbid the booze and dump the barrel is not the same thing as 1/7 Booze, or any other fluid.  Solid natural wall tiles are handled completely differently, and are not included in the code that allows atomsmashing. 

A number of buildings are not affected by having their air replaced with solid tiles.  Pressure plates that have magma obsidianize on them (or presumably water freeze) continue working and appropriately detect the removal of liquid magma (or water) from the plate.  I seem to recall itg in his sky fort (fort nailed to the "ceiling" of the world, with accompanying bugs) circumvented connectivity issues (the same ones that gave rise to dwarven power mining, which has been fixed) by casting his workshops in obsidian, with no loss of functionality.

Basically, while you can not designate buildings over solid tiles, the later creation of solid tiles on top of the building does not appear to interfere with building functionality.

I think floor hatches are not size restricted, but most large creatures that you might want to drop are also building destroyers.

There is already broadly comparable functionality in the macro system (press ctrl+p to run a macro, press "ctrl+u, 5, enter" to loop the macro 5 times).

However, adding a less cumbersome interface for it, and applying it to most keyboard commands would just be absolutely amazing.  Frequently, I have digging designations that I want to extend over large but specific distances.  Being able to dig a 50 z deep staircase by "d, i, enter, 50>, enter" rather than noting the current depth, adding fifty, holding > until you see the desired level flash past and then go back to it, and then forget what level you started and and have to go back and double check it would be very nice indeed.  Also, being able to dig a rectangular room of 23x17 by, say, pressing "d, enter, 23 up arrow, 17 right arrow, enter" rather than have to count individual keystrokes would make some designations much less cumbersome.

My only objection is that it would be easy to bump a number key by accident and get bizarre and disorienting results the next key you press.  Maybe you could hold alt while typing the number, or have some key you press before typing the number?  Some visual indication of what number you have entered would also be helpful.  Maybe a number could pop up in a corner a la idlers and FPS?

If nothing else, this is something that could probably be done in dfhack.

By the way, for quickly scrolling through your fortress I highly recommend mapping <,> to the mouse wheel in addition to keyboard (I remap zoom to ctrl+mouse wheel).  I make it so mousewheel up makes you "zoom into" the earth, i.e. go down.  This makes scanning across z levels much less cumbersome.

The code might be there to make it so beaches are barren and sandy.