Bay 12 Games Forum

Paper is bugged in RL.  No way should you realistically be able to cut yourself on it.

An alternative solution would be:
1) create more picks than you have need of miners.
2) set several dwarves to the mining labour.
3) Once you have leveled up your mining skills, deactivate mining on your excess miners and put them in the military.

You now have your true miners, who do nothing by mining, and your military miners, who only mine goblinite.

If tool and equipment quality affects work speed and final product quality, then "workshops as areas" would make upgrading them less hastle, as you could just place a new anvil/table/etc in the area, rather than having to deconstruct and reconstruct the workshop building each time.

Another advantage would be is some jobs didn't use all the equipment in a workshop, then multiple dwarves could work there simultaneously.

Example: forges and smelters are combined into a single "smithy" workshop.  To create a smithy:
1) Create a "smithy" zone.
2) Place an anvil in it.
3) Place a furnace in it (this could be a mason-created item).
4) Optionally, place box in it.  (This is where tools, and possibly reagents would be stored).

Some metals can be beaten without heating, so you could have a smith beating out native copper blades while a furnace operator smelts ore to produce better metals.  Additional furnaces and anvils could be added as your industry expands.


The bootstrapping problem could be dealt with by making the "necessary" equipment not absolutely necessary, but giving a speed and quality penalty to any jobs done without them.  (E.g. 5x time and zero-quality only).

We can imagine Urist McMastersmith arriving as an imigrant to a fortress, only to find they embarked without any anvils or metalworking tools.  So after rolling his eyes, he dumps a pile of charcoal on the ground, ignites is, and uses to heat up some iron bars, which he then bashes into shape using some handy stones (which, as any adverturer knows, can be found just about anywhere).  After several days of this, he has a crappy, no-quality-modifier anvil and smith's hammer.

Now, he can get to work properly, although he still can't make his best items as his tools are sub-standard, so after banging out a few copper axes for the woodcutters (who had previously had to resort to pushing trees over, because they had traded their axes for booze on embark), he makes a better anvil and hammer, installs them in his smithy, and gets to work.

Meanwhile, he has also apponted an apprentice (i.e. the player has activated metalworking on another dwarf), who can use the old anvil.

If anvil quality affects product quality, e.g. by granting an effective skill boost, then the relationship between skill and product quality would need to be adjusted to keep the overall work quality balanced.  There could also be a limit to how much of a bonus a dwarf can get, based on their current skill.  So a dabbling smith gets no bonus from an anvil, and a small bonus an -anvil-, but higher quality anvils don't give any more benefit than a - one.  A legendary smith, on the other hand, would get increasing bonuses from anvils all the way up to masterwork (and/or, maybe get a penalty for using inferior quality anvils).

Personally, I've just removed the [GRAZING] tag from all the animals that have it.

Becuase at the moment, the whole concept is broken.  As it is, carnivorous animals are easier and cheaper to keep than herbivores, which is the opposite of reality.

How can a dwarf produce a workshop that seems to have many tools in it from just one peace of material. It doesnt make any logical or practical sense.

A quick-fix for that, without completely overhauling the current system, would be to require more items for making the workshop, and for the dwarf to require tools to use it.

E.g. a butchery would require a table (instead or as well as the stone/block), and a butcher would require a meat cleaver or such like.

Or a forge would require an anvil, a bellows, a furnace (possibly just a rock/block to represent that), and a bucket for quenching, and the smith would require a hammer.

Also, workshops in the current state of the game provide no difficulty what so ever. They can all be build from almost any of the accessible items and they are an instant jump-start to any industry, thus making them a bit unfair.

I don't see how it is "unfair" that you can easily build a workshop.  If you want a bit more work, the "extra components" described above would do that.  But I don't see the point in introducing "fake difficulty" just to make it harder to start an industry.


Over all, I'm not really sure how much benefit this idea would have.  The only obvious ones I can think of are:
a) It could make micromanaging worker skill levels easier. 
Because at the moment, if you have several forges set for low-skilled smiths, and several set for high-skilled smiths, then it can be a bind assigning jobs to each forge separately.  Whereas with this system, you could have one workshop area with six forges, set that to low-skilled dwarves, and set the whole area on "copper caps, repeat".  And then set up a separate master smithy with three anvils, set to high-level skill, and assign all your steel and gold jobs to that one.

b) If dwarves need to use tools in their work, it will make storing the tools easier.

Add [LARGE_PREDATOR] to elephants?

1) If I make an item of clothing that has the [UNDER] layer, but the [HARD] and [METAL] tags, can I create an item that provides the protection of real armour, but which civilains will wear without being put in a squad and issued it?

2) What determines the size of clothing items (as in, whether they are "large" "small" or normal)?  If I modded dwarves so that different castes were significantly different sizes, would I be able to make suitible clothes for all of them?

I've just found a mangled (XX) diorite door in one of my garbage piles.

How did this happen?  I didn't think doors could get mangled.