Bay 12 Games Forum

I embarked with plan on making surface 'town'. So far so good.

Except ... I would like engraved dining hall. Luckily, stone boulders are on surface and they can be smoothed, but found out another thing:

Some tiles also had stone pebbles, but those tiles got converted to normal, smoothable stone tile by constructing and deconstructing floor tile. I would consider this bug (althou it is nice as feature too ...)

Do i have some other, non obvious, ways, to get more smoothable/smoothed tiles on surface area? My hall has for enough tiles for about ten quality engravings, but they are fairly randomly placed and thus severelly lack in symmetry department.

(ps: it is incredible that you can have legendary engraver without ever having to dig ...)

Simple things:

Let us 's'ave modified stockpile settings under name and then 'l'oad it. Ideally, simple files stored in configuration folder which could then be easily shared.

Why?

Pretty much every stockpile I use gets heavily modified, basically, only wood stockpile is untouched.

Food one, for example, is fine when you just embark, but soon enough you want to make stockpile only for finished booze and only for brewable food items. And usually accompanied by making stockpile for empty barrels only. (And another stockpile for cooakble items and cooked meal).

Also, furniture stockpile with stone only items or wood only items.

Another typical thing is stockpile for unusable metal armor dropped by iron ore with two legs which also carries 'normal' ore, special bars stockpile that carries smelted metal and special bars stockpile for fuel.

These settings are usually identical amongst different fortresses, and could be shared by community.

I would like to so some stockpile magic:

Say, I have carpentry with small 3x3 wood supply room next to it to cut down carpenters downtime.

I also have big 10x10 wood stockpile near entrance to fortress to collect chopped down wood.

What happens is that dwarves prefer to put stuff to closest stockpile, which is big "buffer stockpile" and that leaves small production stockpile mostly empty unless i deforest wood to point where buffer stockpile is full.

Ideally, dwarves would prefer small stockpile near workshop and even move wood to it from bigger, lower priority stockpile.

Idea is to have fast small "L1 cache" stockpile which is fed by bigger, slower "L2 cache" stockpile which collects supplies.

So, is there way to do this? Other than removing and replacing "L2" stockpile every so often?

I would like to use similar feature for lots of stuff (for example, central kitchen with big food stockpile with small food 1 or 2 tile stockpiles with higher priority all over the place - i.e. near patrol points or near important 24/7 industry positions). Or say having small 1 tile ammo stockpiles near archery posts that get resupplied from central ammo factory. I just have this vision of civilians running arrows, lunches and booze to my brave military dorfs.

Idea is to have big buffer to which excess production goes and maintain well supplied endpoints at all times.

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Also, I have several stockpile types that I use pretty much all the time - booze only food stockpile for example, ranged weapon only weapon stockpile ... is there feature to save such presets? Or some macro library to create them automatically?

Is there way to prevent destruction of constructed wall when cavein happens? Specifically, I would like to build wall tile and drop it in middle of lake and have it survive fall intact for no particular reason.

I am working on my military atm, and i have two questions:

first, how to manage equipment? My military approached size when checking manually each dwarf for backpack, quiver, actually having armor etc etc especially when cross training of drafting idlers to be trained (i like to train all idlers in variety of military skills just in case i need quick draft) ... is just unfeasible. Is there way to simply find out something like this:

Your military dwarves want: 3 quivers, 6 waterskins, 1 axe, 4 plate helmets, 2 leather gloves. Indicating that they are set up to use that equipment, but lack it.

Another question is:

IS there way to designate stockpiles only for "narrow" or "large" items? Goblin "gifts" are mixing with spare equipment in armor stockpiles I set up for dwarves.

So, I finally got decent fortress going, a bit cheating with using hard cap of 25 dwarves, but now ambushes started happening. All is well, enemies are handled easily by my squad, but:

I often (as in, always) loose my hunter dwarf to ambush party as he is the one who discovers ambushing group. Assigning several dogs does not help much with survivability. Should I give up on hunting?

I planned to use war dogs as early warning system/slowdown, placed at strategic locations in pairs/quadruples. But it does not work well as they die way too easily before backup can reach them. I also assigned several (~4) war dogs to military dwarves, but they too die very far. It take it that war dogs are useless?

Ambushes seem to occur a lot when caravan arrives, sometimes as much as three concurrent ambushes happen. That disrupts goods hauling as i use o-i to keep civilians safe until ambush was dealt with. Any tips?

Defeated ambushes leave lots of equipment that dwarves just can not use. What to do with it? Trading it away is tedious and even giving it as gift to traders is impossible thanks to weight limit (not to mention that trading session triggers several ambushes and thus nets even more stuff), their weapons can be used for weapon traps with I started building, but what about rest? Also, equipment of fallen goblins is set as forbidden (as well as mine fired shots), any tips on how to claim it all except z stockpile menu? Maybe I am too much of packrat, eh?

Also, where do ambushes enter map? And Immigrants? Is it random? What happens if i dig channel all around at the edge of map and fill it with water, making it island: will enemies, traders, immigrants, etc. be unable to enter map? If I leave several tiles adjacent to edge free, will everyone enter map at that sport, and that spot only, making it easy to channel enemies to deathtraps?

This leads to: I plan to create several death traps if i can channel enemies effectively to them, notably "pool of death": idea is to build tall reservoir with water and big room with pressure plates: when plates are triggered, floodgate at reservoir would open and doors to room would close, drowning everyone in it, then dwarves will reset it with lever. Is there way to test if this construction will work other than waiting for enemies?