Bay 12 Games Forum

I would think the easiest calculation would be based on water, but not all that complex stuff with water consumption (He forgot to add in evaporation of water over a month long period )

Basically, a dwarf can still wade at 4/7 depth, and an elf can wade at 6/7 depth.  If his calculation is correct, that means dwarfs are over 10 feet tall, which would throw off his water calculation in the first place.  Also elves would be over 15 feet tall.

So, lets say a dwarf is a bit over 4 feet tall, and an elf is a bit over 6 feet tall on average (Both reasonable numbers I think) then each 1 depth of water would be 1 foot, so each z level is roughly 7 feet.

Simple and easy.  Thus for the 60 foot high pillars, you'd need 8-9 z levels.

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Actually looking at that other post again, it says that tiles are 2.5 feet wide, and each 1/7 of water is about 11 inches or so, which sounds about right to me.

Yeah, just tried doing something similar lately.  Tried making an artificial waterfall, but it seems that you can't pump through stairs (for some reason) so it didn't work out with the design I had.  Oh well, at least I got two wells made from masterwork components that are both about 8 z-levels deep, so yeay for indoor water supply.

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Is there any way to play that map that was marked out for the tutorial but pick your own settlers?  The map has an excelent mix of 1. lava 2. water 3. trees 4. flux 5. iron and I'd really like to get to use that under my own terms, instead of with the stuff pirate picked out (Which is great for your first time, but I have a very very very different play style when it comes to what I take to start out.)

I'm 99% sure that your problem is that you are cooking your stuff before you get the seeds back out.  For example:
You bring along 30 plump helmets.  1 in every 3 helmets is used for brewing and 2 in every 3 helmets are used for cooking (2 used in easy meal), so from your first 30 plump helmets you end up with 20 prepared food, and (5*10) = 50 ale.  You get no seeds from the cooked helmets, so you only have 10 from the brewery to plant.  Then when those 10 are collected, you get the same process again, with fewer and fewer seeds returned every season.  Eventually you only have 1 or 2 seeds and everyone starves.

The simplest solution is to disallow plump helmets to be used for cooking via z-> kitchen -> c over plump helmets so that 'cook' is turned to red.  You'll also want to do this with any other plant that your bakers want to try and cook, as you'll run the risk of destroying too many of your seeds (unless your fortress has hundreds of seeds saved up).

Also, you get 1 seed per plant processed as far as I know.  This means that in the case of a stack of 5 plump helmets being brewed, you'd get not only 25 ale in a single barrel, but also 5 seeds at the brewery.

Well, I can track my involvement in DF from when Penny Arcade linked to that set of tutorials, and I must say they were excelent.  A few small things missing, and a few things with too much detail (Nobles section was a bit long if I remember right) but anyway, have since then been able to move on to sustaining a fortress of over 100 dwarfs with generally less then 5 or so idlers.

I still refer to it from time to time as it is a handy resource on how to do some things that would otherwise require trawling through tons of threads.

I do suggest adding a section that involves pumps.  Pumps can be very difficult for new people to get from all the questions about them.  Maybe include things like a pump tower and creating artificial waterfalls (complete with perpetual motion power).

Perhaps the best defense against early goblin attacks is to simply have your depot near your entrance.  You have visiting merchants there about half the time, and they are all armed.  I had my first goblin siege ever completely thwarted by a caravan that just happened to arrive at the same time.

And when the caravan is away... well I guess my 3x15 front entrance of rock fall and cage traps will just have to do.  Took care of my first dragon and hydra that way without casualties.

Missed that reply on the second page before I did mine.  Yeah, I knew I didn't want to make my well too big because the waterfall would tie some up, just wasn't sure if it would be a bunch of 7/7 tiles or 4/7 or if all the tiles would even even actually be filled much at all or what was going to happen.  Ok, time to stop reading this thread and actually build it.

P.S.  So it is currently set up that my waterfall and well are 46 tiles, all of which presumably won't be completely full, so I should add a bit more well space, right?  More then just 5 extra tiles though I'm guessing.

Build an access tunnel that runs away from the edge and build your door/floodgate/whatever there.

or alternatively you could build a well of whatever size you like and manually fill it with buckets (this actually doesn't take that long with several dwarves, you just make a bunch of 1x1 pond zones and each one will generate a fill pond job)

Well, the well is just an afterthought of a way to get rid of the extra water since I know the waterfall won't require all 51 tiles of it.  Ah, hey, just had an idea.  I'll build a pump to get the water from the pond to my waterfall system, and manually run it until I get the effect I want.