Bay 12 Games Forum

They get their dining room bonus when they eat.  When you use the zone function to make a meeting hall, which you can do over top your dining room if you want, will give your dwarves a place to hang out like they love to do without triggering parties.  Placing some nice stuff in that zone, statues, glistening weapon traps, sarcophagi, will get your dwarves some positive admiration thoughts.

I think the way it works, one dwarf throws the party and instead of generating an invitation list only friends of the dwarf bother showing up.  Hah, and kinda contradictory to that I am pretty sure a friendless dwarf won't bother arranging a party.

EDIT: While on the topic, using the ore of metal to make furniture is much more efficient, even with magma.

Raw ore is treated like stone, and cannot be used to make bins or barrels.  A hematite statue is pretty sweet though.

Sure, if you don't have magma or coal, metal furniture won't save you any wood.  But if sieges are killing the traders and you barely have enough wood for beds, fire up the forges with coal or magma and make some copper barrels.

Metal bins and barrels are great when wood is limited.  Obviously use your least valuable ores, copper, lead and so on.  Far as I know everything (exception chains, buckets, blocks) use 3 bars like Logical said, via the wiki.  Real dwarves drink their ale from lead barrels.  If you just need some cabinets or an armor stand, use rock.

3. Boxed processors come with their own fan, radiator/heat sink and usually even thermogel. I would advise buying a bigger case though. You're buying a mid tower, which is fine, but a full tower would hold your PC cooler. I've got a big server case with a 120mm fan, but this isn't really that necessary unless you want to overclock.

You might not need a much bigger case.  A single core 45W CPU isn't going to be such a thermal monster.  I think its most important to pick something you'll like looking at.  I like simple, clean cases.  Other people like lots of LEDs and windows and things.  Picking a case with 120mm fans (they are available on some mid towers too) is great for keeping noise down, they spin slower than smaller 80mm fans while moving more air, keeping noise down is important to me.

Be sure to familiarize your self with the refuse orders ... err, <o>rders; <r>efuse I think.  You can toggle what you want to save or automatically dump, <Dump other> governs the dumping of remains and chunks and other refuse.  Make a stockpile for your other refuse, one of bones and shells indoors and another for corpses and body parts somewhere outside.  Since you have been successful setting up your garbage dump zone, I figure getting into the orders menu will help you set up some more automation.

I am about to put something together myself.  I'd suggest you consider getting a AMD 780G board and forgoing a graphics card altogether in favor of the intergrated.  If you want to run some fancier games down the line, you can always drop a new (and future cheaper) vid card in. The 8600GT I don't know alot about, but you'll probably have to swap that out if you do want to run something fancier, which'd be a waste.  I've heard the 780G is pretty nice IGP.  Gigabyte and Asus both make a nice mATX 780G Board ~ $90.  And for $13 more you can get the 4050e CPU, Dual Core 45 Watt part.  That single core 1640 is pretty spot on if you just want to play DF and keep a budget.  Just stay away from Vista, cause then you'll need dual core and another 2Gb RAM.

Hard drives, 500GB is really the sweet spot for $$$/Gig.  If you don't mind paying 4x per GB or to keep the budget, get the 80GB, otherwise, 500GB is so much more practical.  $79 / 500GB = $0.16/GB ... $40 / 80GB = $0.50/GB.

Rolled up a pocket world dominated by a Sinister Ocean.  Named The Stupid Ocean.

So, uh where'd you go on vacation?

You know, the stupid ocean.