Bay 12 Games Forum

If I understand your logic, you seem to be assuming that pressure plates toggle the floodgate they are connected to.  They don't.  Pressure plates send an 'open' command when they trigger, and a 'close' command when they are no longer triggered.  A pressure plate can't hold information.

Then you aren't building a raising bridge.  How are you designating the direction to raise?

I want to bve absolutely sure there is nothing wrong with this..
So.. any hints of what could be wrong or missing?

It's not clear what you are trying to do.  If you want to add a new metal to the game, you can do it one of two ways.  IF you want a metal that can be made from mixing or processing some existing raw materials (like how steel or bronze is make) you would create the metal in the inorganic raws, and then add reactions to make that metal from the raw materials.  You'll need to add the reaction to each entity which you want to be able to make that metal.  Alternately, to make a metal that can be smelted directly from an ore, you'll need to create two new materials:  the metal, and the ore which it is smelted from, and then add METAL_ORE:whatever to the ore definition.

So, will it now be possible to do a proper Thomas the Tank Engine mod?

"So, why can't we tame these ones?"


"Well, they're giraffes.  Everyone knows giraffes can't eat fast enough to keep themselves fed.  Silly notion anyway, giraffes grazing.  They can barely get their head low enough to reach the grass."

"Wait, if they can't keep from starving, how are these ones alive at all?"

"Cause these are wild giraffes.  Only tame animals need to eat.  Everyone knows that.  Tame them, and they'll just starve."

---

Cilob's Journal, 16th of Sandstone

Six more immigrants arrived today - much to my surprise, as the Trader had advised me that we would get no more.  Of the six, only one is related to the great inbred family slowly taking over the fortress.  The other five are unrelated, though two are married to each other.

None of them have any skills of use.  I have assigned them all to masonry duties.

Our ongoing animal trapping project had some great luck today, after those useless giraffes we've caught something that we can actually use.


Of course, after these three were caught in the traps, we had the usual hilarity as the rest of the flock crowded around the cage traps and refused to let any dwarves close enough to retrieve the cages.  I decided to take this opportunity to send the new squad in and see how well sword-armed dwarves fared against them.


Our soldier sliced the first one in half with a single blow, and didn't take much longer to kill the others. I'd call that decisive.  Against unarmored targets, the cutting weapons are far more deadly than hammers.

Cilob's Journal, 19th of Galena

I have asked Cain to examine the corpse of the minotaur, or at least what our militia commander left of it.  He has concluded that the creature was likely young and inexperienced, and after consulting the historical records declared that it did not match the description of any of the minotaurs known to have attacked the mountainhomes.  It it likely that the creature had never fought a dwarf before today.

Cain also reported that the creature died slowly, from many small blunt impacts, none of which were enough to kill it alone.  While I can't say that the suffering of such a monster bothers me much, it does seem to me that hammers alone are not an efficient way of killing a creature of that size.  As several of our recent immigrants have skill with swords, I will be creating a secondary squad of soldiers armed with swords.

It has also been mentioned to me that steel is not the best material for warhammers.  It is however the only metal (along with iron, which is no better) we can produce in large quantity at the moment.

Now that the minotaur is dealt with, I must deal with the humans.  I am not surprised to see them here, as Brightwater is only a short distance from a major human civilization.


The humans are here to trade.  Their advance scouts must have told them of our location.  Fortunately, they are friendly.  I am hoping that they will eventually be willing to give us some more information on local threats and monsters, creatures like the minotaur that attacked us they might know of.  For now, we can trade some of our crafts for supplies.

I have ordered brought to the trade depot some of Rachel's cut gems and polished stones, some masterfully prepared food by Will_Tuna, and even a few strange totems that Geb carved from spare animal skulls.  We traded them for some metal bars, lumber, some of the foreign booze the humans drink, and a selection of cloth and leather.

I have also received a suggestion recently, in the form of a note written in a child's handwriting, though quote neat and polite for that.  The suggestion is for a mechanism to drop goblins to cripple them before letting our soldiers attack them.  This appeals to me greatly.  I will have to study the geological survey notes to find a location where the aquifers will let us dig a pit deep enough.

In my experience iron is rare, but if you have it, you are likely to have a lot of it, near the surface.  If you've dug all the way to the magma sea and haven't seen it, your embark site probably doesn't have any.