Bay 12 Games Forum

For a challenge, try the single pick challenge in a nasty biome.  In the thread on the front page, there's a reanimating tundra with aquifer and titans that show up by summer.  If you don't bring that one plump helmet, walling yourself underground won't save you.  You can get food from the pack animals, but that's hazardous, and without stone vermin will eat it quickly.


In the thread, it was eventually decided that freezing biomes are easier, because freeze drilling is a good way to pierce an aquifer, though it leaves you exposed to fliers.  A hot biome that will evaporate any murky pools and has no vegetation or above aquifer stone was decided to be the nastiest.  Red sand deserts, black sand deserts, and wasteland has the potential to be nasty.


For extra nastiness, pick a saltwater aquifer.  Without embark booze, surface vegetation, or caverns, there are no drinks, which kills very fast.  You can drink saltwater by desalination with a screw pump, which permanently uses all three wagon logs, so any workshop tasks will have to be completed, and you will have no building materials until you hit stone, unless you can deconstruct your pump for a block without losing water, without using a door or anything else built, and limited space above the aquifer.  According to the wiki, you can drink saltwater with a well.  This only permanently uses 2 logs, giving you a workshop, but you need a rope, and since no pack animals are she arable, I don't think that can be had til the caravan.


The one pick challenge thread had methods to pierce an aquifer of at least 3 levels I think without permantley using any logs, and I think the only requirement was a building material, so the desalination pump might be able to be deconstructed to make that and then you could pierce the aquifer, reach the caverns, and be home free bar random disaster, but it would not be easy, especially in a hazardous biome.  Any reanimating biome can be nasty, because you have the potential to lose all access to the surface if you don't find a mass zombie disposal system (one such system described in the one pick thread), which limits growth to actually waiting for children to mature and prevents you from accessing any materials not found locally, unless you can somehow get caravan goods.


In addition, if you somehow find a terrifying Oceanside embark, you even have the potential to get zombie giant sperm whales trying to squash your dwarves, which if you play it right gives you access to what I think is the single most potent minecart projectile in the game.




Sure, a water cannon would make more sense, but do you have no pride?!  You could flatten your enemies with a giant sperm whale, which would promptly reanimate and continue the slaughter.  And you would have the satisfaction of having dug it all out by the hair of your beard, and a lot of luck, if you have zombie giant ravens in the locale.

If I do a Christmas tree of stuff off a central vertical gear shaft, I could put in as many mechanisms as I please, i think, by stacking several z levels of stuff to drop.  It would be a pain to build, though.


The best machine component to drop would probably be native gold mechanisms.  Not much less dense than platinum, extremely abundant in most places, and you don't even lose value since it has the same value as smelted gold, which can't be made into mechanisms outside a mood.



But in any case, an easier way would be to have a building destroyer break an active gear, rerouting a minecart path to dump waste stone from a dumping stop in the ceiling, or if you want more scattering, cycling bridges could be used to fling it in a more random fashion.

But do the contaminants actually go anywhere, or do they just stay there to contaminate the next dwarf (OP's problem)?

Well, since someone else already necroed the thread, I'll ask:  has anyone tried the flaming minecart method of well cleaning yet?

Why would you smooth a wall that you plan to dig out?

I often smooth rooms and hallways that are more or less complete but might be added to later.  Like the office block probably has a smoothed hallway, and if I get another noble that wants an office, I'm going to have to dig through the smoothed wall of the hallway to add a new room.

Given the new plant raws being added to the game, adding a large number of new kinds of potential dyes and things to dye, as well as the vague talk of someday phasing out the traditional plants and fungi that provide most of the good dyes in dwarf fortress, it seemed like a good time to talk about dyes.

I'm starting a new thread because the most relevant thread I could find on the topic was this one, which is going on 6 years old, and isn't really about the same thing anyways.  I like the suggestions in that thread, especially the bit about there being a distinction between dyeing proteins like wool or leather and dyeing plant based fibers like cotton or linen or rope reed, with silk possibly being universally dyeable.  Technically, I have a feeling that Pig Tail cloth is chitin based and should require different procedures, but that doesn't seem like a distinction worth making.   However, the clothing industry is already pretty formidable, and it wouldn't to be good to add too many weird rules and requirements that wouldn't make any sense to someone who didn't already know that, say, lichen purple is only usable on wool and silk.

I made a post in FotF about this, with several offtopic ramblings, but here are the relevant portions:

To finally actually get to a more or less relevant topic, here are the colors you can achieve from plants currently in the game, with sources for most colors:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

TL;DR: most of the dyes available are some variant of yellow-beige-orange with alum and green-grey with iron, which is pretty typical of any given sampling of plants (that's by far the most common category of vegetable dye).  The brightest yellows are probably from pomegranate husks, mango leaves, and chicory, with alum for all of those, the best green is probably from Chicory with iron, but I know you can get a good green from fennel greens with iron, so I might have to look into relatives of fennel, like carrot greens with iron.  The best orangey color is probably from persimmon, but it's not very bright.  Perhaps carrots or carotenoid rich yams might be made to work.  With a good red, orange could be made from a bright yellow, but aside from beets, I can't think of any in the real world plants we currently have on hand.  Blues can be gotten from black beans, if those can be included under the category of string bean (same species), but we don't have any indigotin sources in game yet, and I think our only good blue is dimple cups.  Purples can be gotten from beets, which doesn't work well, or from lichens which haven't been added, or snails which haven't been added.


Banana sap (and presumably Abaca) - brownish to reddish, from tannins.  The Fe'i banana is apparently used for a reddish dye.  One source suggested it is useful as a mordant for other dyes, which is typical of tannins, though of course they also contribute their own color.

Coffee - browns, from tannins

Guava - pale rosey brown with alum or no mordant, slate grey with iron mordant (as with any iron mordant, this will be destructive to protein based fibers, making them scratchy and brittle) [source]

Rambutan - can be used to dye fiber a sunny yellow, using alum I assume [source].  Iron will give greys or greens.  "Young shoots are used to dye yellow silk to green. A dye     called ayer banyar, made from rambutan leaves and fruits     and combined with other ingredients, is used for dyeing red     silk black." [source]

Tea - has been popularly used to make reddish browns, especially for making paper look old.  Iron mordant will give dark greys

Avocado - beige yellow from fruit skins, beige rose from pits, no mordant [source] or pale rose pink, no mordant [source]

Pomegranate fruit husk and pith - beige brown unmordanted, intense mustard yellow with alum [source], as usual with yellow dyes, darker greys can be achieved with iron, at the possible expense of fabric softness

Cherry bark, also apple, apricot, peach, plum, and any other fruit tree in the rose family - creamy yellow to rose pink with alum or no mordant [source], greys and grey greens from iron

Persimmons (unripe fruit) - somewhat brownish earth toned rose [source] probably grey with iron

Walnut - a very deep intense chocolatey brown, very wash and light fast [source]  This dye was widely used because it fixes very well to most fibers and has the benefit of being somewhat toxic, so it inhibits insect damage (though not at all dangerous to wear)

Black Beans (not mentioned, but a cultivar of Phaseolus vulgaris) - a nice strong blue, like a slightly less intense indigo, alum mordant [source]

Beets - magenta red, more or less what you would expect from the color of beet juices, mordanted with vinegar.  Color can be adjusted by varying pH, but the solution must be acidic for the dye to bind to the fiber. [source] Presumably you could also vary the color by starting with differently colored beet cultivars.  I have my doubts as to the light fastness of this dye, as according to wikipedia, betanin, the primarily pigment molecule, "degrades when subjected to light, heat, and oxygen" [source]

Carrots - I don't know about orange carrots, I don't think it works well, but apparently purple carrots give a very nicely colored purple dye [source], but I have strong suspicions about wash and lightfastness

Chicory - mustard yellow (alum), yellow-green (copper), bright yellow (tin), forest green (iron), creamy biege (no mordant).  There are reports of a blue dye from the leaves, but this seems to be untrue. [source]

Onions - give a nice warm orange yellow from the skins

That's all the new plants, I haven't looked through the old plant list, but I know it has some worth mentioning, like an intense yellow from mango leaves and deep browns and blacks from oaks.  I'm sure I missed lots of stuff too.

I'm going to have to go through the list of real life plants we already had and see what other colors we can get, but I think we're still going to be short on good reds, blues, purples, and saturated oranges from real life plants, and I'm not sure about the green from iron mordanted chicory, as I've never seen it, with the only sources for these colors being dimple cups for blue, hide root for red, and blade weed for green, with there being no sources of purple or orange.

Blue could easily be added with either indigo or woad, as well as a few real life mushrooms (more steel blue than indigo or woad).  Purple could be done with overdyeing of a red and a blue, from many, many kinds of lichen when let to soak with ammonia (more on that later), or from certain kinds of predatory marine snails, like Tyrian purple, which has been suggested before in a neat little thread from 2011.

Red could be gotten from madder, a plant widely used in ancient europe to produce a deep orange red, and was actually the dye used for roman soldier's uniforms (modern reenactments are usually not orange enough, and resemble cochineal, which is from the new world).  It could also be gotten from several scale insects, cochineal in the new world and kermes (origin of the words crimson and carmine) in the ancient mediterranean.  I don't know how producing kermes or cochineal would work in dwarf fortress, bot what would work, and would be much cooler anyways, would be a largeish subterranean insect or mite (also a good source of red dye, though too small and hard to gather to have been used IRL as far as I know) that would be a cavy sized subterranean grazer.  At adulthood, they could be gathered up and piled in a wheelbarrow and hauled off to the screwpress for processing into barrels of crismon dye, or alternately they could be killed and dried and then milled to a powder (I think that is closer to how it is done for cochineal and kermes, and the other DF dyes are already powders).


Of course, not every plant in the game than can be used to dye cloth should necessarily go in as a dye, since most of them are more or less the same (yellow-beige with alum, green-grey with iron), and some of them are clearly better than others (mango leaves and pomegranate husks are both excellent strong yellow dyes when mordanted with alum, while black walnut is the best dark brown), so probably no more than a few of each color to make sure every climate has some dyes available, and some colors being rarer and harder to produce outside of locations with specialized ingredients (purples from wild sea snails being a good example) and consequently more valuable.

Anyways, I have to go to class.  I will expand this post later to flesh out possible dyes with plants that are in or are going to be in DF, possible sources of dyes, real and fictional, that might potentially be added, lichen and mushroom dyes, which are good dwarf appropriate sources of some more difficult colors, like purple, and probably more stuff besides.

Also, tangentially relevant, since linseed oil will very soon be a thing, oil paint is just one reaction away (pigment plus oil = paint), and paints and paint pigments are a long and involved topic that has been suggested many many times.  I'm not sure it merits a new thread, but I'm not sure which of the old threads to necro.  Anyone have any ideas or want to take the initiative?

Any ideas, corrections, flames, etc are welcome.

Removing [multiple_litter_rare] from your dwarves should make it easier to get statistically significant amounts of data.

Perhaps you could split preferences into something like there is now, with whimsical and random things they happen to like (but fewer of them), coupled with things they have been exposed to.  When they first encounter something, they would make an initial decision about it based upon some vague random preferences (likes shiny stones, likes dark stones, likes blue, likes fish, likes stronger flavored booze, dislikes mucky brown stones, dislikes pink gems, dislikes exotic animal meat), with some appropriate tags added to the various materials.  With further exposure, they might decide they like something a little more, or eventually get sick of it if there isn't enough variety.  Perhaps a personality trait could control how much they would come to accept whatever you give them, and their willingness to like new things.