Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm used to the old version where I could turn out food in my early fort that was worth a bunch of dwarfbucks. In the new version I need an alternative.

I seem to remember reading that there's a certain craft that's good for making to trade, I just can't remember what or why. possibly mugs? one of my first immigrants was a high master stonecrafter, so I can start cranking some stone goods out, I just don't know what I should make.

so I'm running a fortress primarily on cheese and beef, it's going pretty well. I've run into a problem now though:

initially I had all my cows chained up right next to the farmer's workshops. worked fine.

now, i've got a ton of cows, so I dug out their own room a few levels down and moved all the restraints (and cows) down there.

the problem is, as soon as one of my milkers goes to get a cow from it's restraint to bring to the workshop, another dwarf intercepts them and begins dragging the cow back to its restraint, and they end up playing cow tug-of-war for eternity.

atm i'm just moving the farmer workshops into the same room, but is there anything i can do to stop this behavior?

I haven't felt restricted by the new embark points. just delete everything and then start adding what you want... really the only necessities (except those imposed by your location, like no trees) are an axe and a pick, maybe an anvil. the rest is up to you.

it's rather unintuitive, but cages go in animal stockpiles, regardless of whether they're occupied or not.

not sure if this is the case, but dwarves can go insane from being extremely unhappy. if he was already unhappy and then got injured, it might have been enough to cause him to go insane, and berserking is one of the four or so ways this manifests.

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:Insanity

yeah I just tested this and you should be able to dig new up/up+down stairs right below the constructed ones.

Z+0, with constructed up/down stairs

Z-1, couldn't see anything on this level, but designated up stairs to be dug

Z-1 success!

And I've found that my dwarves are less happy because every time they continue working past thirst and hunger they get a bad thought.

yeah this is kinda annoying too. they really aught to abandon a task just prior to getting a bad thought. or it could be in the Orders somewhere, like "dwarves cancel jobs to eat/drink/sleep" or "dwarves work even if hungry/sleepy/thirsty" so if you really needed to get a job done you could force them to work overtime, but the rest of the time you don't have to manually cancel jobs to keep them from starving themselves

I don't think this is confined to plants. I've noticed this behavior with cooking as well, I had a dwarf making cheese roasts and half the time he'd end up making 7 trips to the food stockpile because other dwarves would remove the cheese he was working with before he could cook.