Bay 12 Games Forum

I know there have been df to minecraft converters, at least for previous versions.  Wasn't there a minecraft to df converter at some point, or am I misremembering?  Brief googling is only turning up df to mc, but I'm stuck on an ipad, so in depth searching is cumbersome.

I usually dig an exploratory shaft to the bottom of the map as soon as I have initial storage  shops, and living areas dug out, finding all caverns and magma as well as exposing ore so I can get some mined before the smelters are built.


If you do this, an important thing to remember (which I often forget) is to build hatch covers before you breach the caverns.  When you breach a cavern try to do it via a stair through the ceiling.  If you hit a column or wall and for some reason you forget to remove the designation before they reach the cavern floor (I do this a lot), remove the rest of your staircase (the designation, not the carved stairs) and backtrack to the highest hatch blockable cavern access, go to the side a few tiles (I like 5 to leave room for traps and later redesigns) and continue downwards, missing the caverns.  That way, you can seal off each cavern individually (building destroyers can not destroy locked hatches from below, though I suppose that could be considered an exploit).  It's also a good idea to put a hatch at the lowest level of your working fortress (usually either Z-20 or Z-30 for me), and every 20 levels or so on your staircase, in case of mishaps and you suddenly want the staircase sealed NOW.


It is very important that each cavern is individually sealable.  This was my downfall on my most recent fort.  It was a haunted tropical beach (with haunted ocean, though the worst I saw from it were the zombie horseshoe crabs that were the greeting party for my starting 7).  Through various mishaps, I had a tantrum spiral starting, 40 dwarves (I had very good luck getting migrants indoors), about 5 beds, and no more wood.  Right as I was getting more from the caverns, a three tailed fire breathing salamander showed up.  I was in the process of individually sealing the caverns, and the hauling had actually started for the necessary hatch cover, but due to the fact that I had idiotically made them out of native gold it was taking forever to get there, and the salamander was fast.  I ended up having sealing the fortress basement hatch at Z-30, cutting off all access to the caverns and giving the salamander free reign of the main staircase below the hatch.  He got in a fight with a tribe of ant people in cavern three (which had been busy fighting their own zombies after a six legged vomit beast ran into them earlier), and after that bounced back and forth between all three caverns, burning down what seemed like every tree in the underground before finally getting locked in eternal combat with a soldier ant person who happened to have a fungi wood shield and enough blocking skill to be seemingly fireproof, but was unable to harm the salamander with his tunnel tube spear.  As far as I know, they are still there, eternally burning down the fungus forests of the third cavern.  With no beds for hospitals, half my dwarves babbling (my fortress is littered with the clothes of the insane), and everyone too upset to actually dump the corpses, it quickly crumbled to its end as all the corpses piling up in the entrance hall began to rise.  I was quite sad, as I had a fell mood in progress, and I had had an actual kobold invasion (vile force of darkness has arrived), which I had never even seen before.  Of course, the kobolds were outnumbered by zombie elephants, but still, it was cool.

I've never found ASCII to be any more difficult than graphics packs because ultimately, aside from things like barrels and tables that  you see often enough to recognize instantly, most of the symbols in graphics packs are cryptic enough that I have to K to see what they are anyways, so it ultimately doesn't matter much whether a llama is an L or a tiny indistinguishable picture of a llama.  In fact, an L is much more recognizable than a tiny picture, which aside from its long neck ends up looking almost exactly like every other mammal.

This was way back in 40d that I was havering my misadventures with green glass floors.  I do love the glassmaking industry once you get magma, though.  It tends to be my material of choice for large decorative constructions.  A glass coloring mod would definitely be interesting, I know I've seen suggestion threads on the topic before.  Red glass would be very nice, and I always have more gold than I know what to do with anyways.  It would also finally give a use for cobaltite other than color coding my levers and doors.


By the way, Wierd, I've been wondering for ages.  What are the small white things around the snake in your avatar?

for the proper effect, the ramp must replace a straight track tile.

What do you mean by this?  Do you mean that you must carve a NS track in the tile first before constructing the NW ramp?

Urist da Vinci has a very interesting thread over in the modding sub forum about material properties and game mechanics as analyzed by dfhack.  Here he's talking about weapon momentum in traps:

Unrelated, about traps:

The velocity of a weapon trap attack is always 200, so the momentum is:

momentum=200*(weapon weight)

The mechanism quality doesn't seem to change the momentum of a hit (but does affect trap accuracy). Note that creatures will swing heavy weapons slower, but traps swing all weapons at a fixed speed. A weapon trap swings an axe about 10x faster than a dwarf could. Therefore, weapon traps will perform better when equipped with the heaviest weapons you have available.

Apparently, due to some oddities of trap mechanics, all weapons in traps move at the same (fast) speed regardless of weight, unlike wielded weapons that have a swing speed dependent on dwarf strength and weapon weight.


Therefor dense, low grade weapons metals like copper, silver, and bronze would make excellent trap components. Make war hammers, maces, and spiked balls from silver.  Spiked balls are largest, so should be best (requires testing), and are technically edged, but will be converted to small contact area blunt against armored targets.  Make serrated disks, axe blades, and other edged things out of copper, or better, bronze. 

The program was ultimately discontinued, as appropriate water flow was difficult to control, often resulting in the drowning death of subjects.

What was the problem? Did you have trouble reliably getting 4-5 depth?  Fill your 3x3 submersion training facility via a 2x3 measuring room in the z above.  2x3 is 42 units of water, meaning if spread out over a 3x3 area it would  be 4 on three tiles and 5 on six (you get the same 4 2/3 depth whenever you increase the area by 1/3).  Alternately, you could put lever controlled doors on 3 tiles of the room.  Fill the room, disconnect water, open doors, the area of the room increases by 3.


If you want more fine grained control over water depth than working in units of 7, use mine carts to dump the water.  For a one dwarf testing chamber, just make a u bend, with a grate for the dwarf to stand on one side and a chute to wherever the minecart's dumping from on the other.  Keep it filled up to below the grate with a diagonal pressure reducer on the water supply and a door to block it.  Station the dwarf, close off the water supply, and send some mine carts.  Since there are only two tiles being filled, connected by the full u bend, 1 cart = 1 unit of water on the dwarf's square.  How to automatically send a specific number of minecarts full of water on command (or better yet, on schedule) is left as an exercise to the reader.