Bay 12 Games Forum

It's a good idea to have an above-ground meeting place (or, at least, an underground one which has the roof dug out), but it's not a good idea to make it your fortress entrance.

Reason being that if you get attacked, you want to be able to issue a "Soldiers Go Outdoors" order, which prevents non-military dwarves from straying into outside areas. If your main entrance is inside, you're liable to get a bunch of civilians standing around going "herp derp derp" while a rampaging band of goblins slaughter them. Ideally you should dig out the roof above your main entrance passage, and make sure that there aren't any "indoor" areas in a direct line-of-sight from the entrance - this makes it much easier to force your civilians inside where it should be safe.

Try changing the grid size in the init file. Divide the horizontal and vertical resolution of your screen by your desired tile size, and use that for the grid size. That should force the game to stretch out the tiles to fit, which will basically give you fewer, larger tiles on screen at once.

Safest thing to do is exploit the fact that the top level of a magma pipe has an obsidian floor which overhangs the magma on the level below. So you can dig a tunnel on the lower level which goes right up to the edge of the magma pipe, and then channel the final tile out from the floor above.

Also, make sure you have a magma-safe grate, or a wall segment with fortifications carved into it, in the tunnel - that will keep nasty fire imps and the like out and stop them killing all your furnace operators.

So I have one glassmaker, two forges (one of which has "Collect Sand" as a repeat task) and I try to queue some stuff up through the jobs screen. And what happens? It queues tasks up on both forges at once, bumps the Collect Sand task down the list, and then keeps stopping production because the stupid dwarves have stopped collecting sand. ARGH.

Is there any simple way to make sure I only get jobs queued up on *one* forge and my dwarves *don't* stop gathering sand, or do I have to just manually add tasks only to the forge I want in use? Because that gets really old really fast when I'd trying to create a whole assload of glass trap components and stuff...

Make sure you're not doing any other masonry jobs at the same time, go into the Stones section of the stock menu, and flag everything except Bauxite as "economic". That'll forbid everything else from being used to make stuff, then when you're don you can set Bauxite to economic so it doesn't get accidentally used up.

Personally, I try to keep only one type of stone set to non-economic at a time anyway, because I'm a bit anal about having all my furniture the same colour.

Edit: Actually, it appears that I've got a mod installed that I didn't know about, as by default not everything can be flagged as economic/non-economic. My bad.

Your tutorials have been really handy... I haven't been using the play-along files, but the ones about stuff like magma are really helpful in explaining some of the more complicated (and potentially fort-destroying) concepts.

I can't remember if you've covered it in one of the earlier parts, but something about water would be really helpful - it's a great way of ruining a tremendous amount of hard work with one mis-dug tile...

I found obsidian on one of my forts long before I had a metal-bashing operation set up, and I thought it'd be a great idea to make some obsidian shortswords for my military to train with.

One pile of mortally-wounded champions later, the problem with this idea became apparent.