Bay 12 Games Forum

Not exactly. You have to spare about 10-15% of your dwarves to keep everyone fed and watered and supplied. The best bit is how easy it is to give dwarves new work to do. If I want to suddenly double my farming capacity, I simply assign dwarves to that burrow, turn on the labour and build the farms. The haulers and stockpile settings take care of getting seeds in, harvesting, getting barrels, taking food out to give to other burrows etc.

It doesn't exactly reduced the amount of idlers but it does make it easier to give dwarves something to do that doesn't consist of mass-dumping stone.

Every single fort I make is starting to follow the same pattern and I'm struggling to willfully break it. I put my farms/food/dining hall in the same structure I usually do, big centralized areas and large multi-use stockpiles. I even follow the same order for building things - drawbridge, food, traps, trade, military, housing, military equipment.

I just don't think I anticipate scale well enough - each migrant wave I get I simply pile into a custom profession and leave them to do hauling tasks.

How do you guys manage to break out of typical design routines/fort constructions and make something more interesting and unique?

I have finished my aqueduct of death. I mentioned in the facepalm thread some of the difficulties I had in building it but it's finally done.

It's 3 z levels high and drops huge volumes of water down a shaft that runs through the center of my fortress. The inner shaft is lined with vertical bars for that feel-good misty morning. It allows my dwarves to watch a beautiful constant waterfall dropping from the sky with the occasional goblin mixed in.

Yes, I added a pit to drop goblins into the aqueduct. For FPS reasons I keep it off most of the time so they mill around looking helpless until I throw the lever. Then, they get carried over, fall to the bottom (a big cistern draining off the map) and, if they break their legs, drown. If they don't break their legs they usually survive. Currently got about 3 of them chilling around near the edge of the map, nearly drowning. Think I'll leave them there for a few years.

Eventually I plan to train up a few war dogs and drop them in. For now I'll just watch.

Edit: typos

Had a near miss last night. I'm building an aqueduct and have a 3 level pump stack. The wall for the duct is half finished so there are a few gaps. I'm building it from a brook and everything was going fine. I told my dwarves to finish the windmill and all of a sudden I see a rain of water and dwarves falling from my aqueduct. They were being pushed through (or jumping from) the gaps in my walls. Turns out you DON'T need to channel a brook tile to suck water out of it.

So yeah, the dwarves were running and falling everywhere like lemons and I didn't hook the damn thing up to a lever to turn it off. The water by this point was starting to flow down my entrance and flood my fort.

My last resort - send a guy to deconstruct the windmill. About twelve dwarves tried and gave up on the steps due to dangerous terrain until one guy battled hard against the torrents and took the thing down. Crisis averted. Just. Lost my lowest floor though, gonna have to pump it out.

Do ambushes ever get fed up and go home? Been holed up for two seasons now and they're still dancing around making streamers out of migrants. Haven't got facilities or equipment to train an army and can't access magma or water to build a trap.

The problem of the roof of a pod collapsing could possibly be circumvented depending on when it collapses. A double hull has been mentioned before but if it collapses AFTER the floor has stopped falling, having two water cisterns either side of an open top sub MAY allow the water to flow into the gap where the cieling should be and solidify AFTER it lands before crushing the dwarf inside. It would need to be at least as tall as it is wide, probably a little more, and I'm relying on water hitting the gap faster than magma. Might test it soon.

I don't think anyone has a right to be dissatisfied. It's not a game built for your satisfaction - not yet. Sure it's free and sure it's all well and good to discuss bugs and give feedback but dissatisfaction implies that you are owed something by the developers and you are not. The game is free, it's not a final version and you damn well don't have to play it. 40d didn't have many bugs so if it's stress free gameplay you're after, try that. Either way you can't expect a 2 year release being pushed for by the fans to be bug free and you certainly can't expect to walk up to a free alpha product and say 'I demand satisfaction!'.

I have a proper fortress on 40d but I'm trying to get accustomed to the new version where I can. So many things have been improved on 40d it's almost like playing a new game.