Bay 12 Games Forum

Dig down to a good level to search for ores (flux layers or granite layers are my favorites, gabbro is good too) and dig a grid of tunnels looking for ores. I would recommend the tunnels being no further than 20 squares apart or so. When you hit warm stone, stop, dig around the edge to get the shape of the magma pipe, being sure to NEVER dig into a warm stone layer. Now go to the surface over the middle of the area of warm stone and start digging a stairwell straight down. You'll breech the pipe eventually without risking your dwarves.

Congratulations, you now have access to the most useful material in the game. Be sure to put a floor over the top of the shaft you dug down, otherwise the imps just might decide to come play in your booze stockpiles.




Alternatively, download reveal. Same effect, 1/200 of the work.

It would be nice if the animals page of the stocks menu was sorted by both animal and gender. If you only want one stud animal and all the females for breeding stock, you currently have to dig through the menu and mark all the unwanted males. It could be done much faster if the list was sorted.

Also, pets should be at the top of their species, regardless of gender, just to make it easier to see if one of your immigrants brought along a male that can be used as a stud or a female for breeding.

Currently, the optimal solution to nobles that demand impossible things, is to never give them a police force, and then ignore them.

The optimal solution to nobles that demand impossible things is magma.

There's a reason concrete beams include rebar, dude. Concrete is especially brittle, but still- schist, granite, microcline, magnetite- I can't think of any layer/large cluster stones that would really work well enough to hold most of the people on this forum. And remember we're talking about dwarves too; they're crazy mother****ers who haul stone around all day and kill skeletal colossi.

Dwarves in mythology are usually fairly strong on top of this. It's unlikely any dwarf wouldn't be able to break a thin rock bar. Of course, dwarves can be restrained by a lead chain, it's not like DF physics are accurate.

Metals are fairly easy to find. Look for embark zones with flux stone or granite, they're usually heavy with all sorts of metals. Worst case, embark with some copper nuggets. They're cheap, like 6 dwarf bucks.

Quote from: Grendus on July 26, 2009, 06:56:54 pm

It's always seemed strange to me that you get less metal back from melting than you spend making the item. The great thing about recycling metals as opposed to paper or plastic irl is that you get almost the same amount of metal from melting that you spent making it. Metal is only lost slowly through rust, wear, breakage, etc. A solid piece can be melted down into liquid metal of the same mass.

It's a game mechanic thing.  If you could turn 1 bar of gold into a statuette, then back into a gold bar you could repeat the process ad fuel-initem* until you were a god at making gold crafts.

And you only ever dug one bit of gold ore out of the earth.

*That is, as long as you have fuel

Agreed. Magma as an infinite energy source is awesome, but it screws stuff up. However, if there were no magma forges or magma smelters, I would consider it perfectly acceptable to simply forge and melt a craft over and over, so long as you're willing to use the charcoal.

Right,  but I mean make a new crossbow named "Hammer" with no ammo capacity?

It's not possible to make a ranged weapon that uses no ammo or has no ammo capacity. However, you can mod in a weapon with the blowgun dart tag as ammo. Since blowguns aren't currently used, your dwarves will never use them as a range weapon, however it's quality will be based on the dwarf's crossbowmaking skill.

Edit: it's also worth noting that said weapon will not be usable for training, as your dwarves will try to practice at an archery range but find no ammo. You can remove the ammo tag without having to regen the world though. It's doable, just unnecessarily complex.

I like the idea of faeries being used as a light source. Another idea would be with medicine to have bottled faerie blood be used as a salve for wounds (would reduce pain and shorten healing time slightly). Would be kind of dwarvish to dissect and process them into something useful.

I like the bed reworking, honestly, the current system seems screwy. You can't make a soft bed out of just wood, you need at least a matress and blankets if it's cold. Plus, beds can just as easily be made out of metal or even stone (though stone beds would be a pita to haul around).

I'd remove the stuffing idea though. None of the animals in the game beyond some hostiles have feathers, you can't fill a leather matress with water (dwarves lack the technology to waterproof large leather containers, and waterbeds have to be heated or they're freezing cold). I've always assumed that just like plants grow without fertilizer and dwarves never poo, some stuff goes on behind the scenes we don't see.




As for Pilsu's other suggestions: in order...

The engraving change I like. I would add that the value increase from engraving should be reduced, however block walls should be engravable while raw stone walls should not. Making stone blocks should take longer to compensate.

The clothing change I like. However, the leather system needs to be reworked, currently a kitten gives as much leather as a cow. The smallest butcherable animals like kittens and groundhogs should give one unit, while large animals like cows should give a lot more. This could be easily coded in by basing the amount of leather a skinnable animal gives on it's creature size in the raws.

As for the decoration changes - YES!!! I love it. It will take some time to implement, but I honestly think that being able to issue your dwarves, say, steel crossbows with ivory handles would add a lot of depth to the game.

The ammo suggestion was one I was thinking about suggesting. I like it. The damage bonus from flint and obsidian needs to be reduced though, considerably. Stone should be somewhere between copper and bronze, and should also include flint as a sharp stone. Arrows should also be re-stackable, or else quivers should have a maximum number of arrows in them and dwarves will fill the quiver until it's full (so 30 stacks of 1 Steel Arrow or 1 stack of 25 Steel Arrows).

There's another really good thread about non-metal weapons. Stone axes, spears, maces, and knives were very common in early days, they should be implemented. Wooden spears and clubs should also be implemented. Stone and wooden weapons should break very fast against iron or steel armor though, their main weakness is they're fragile.

Yes to cave spider silk value and danger, yes to phantom spider silk (and it should be tradeable), yes to obsidian value, yes to speed. Overall pretty good. I would add though that dwarves should buy and use crafts when the economy is started. Dwarves should want mugs to drink booze from, dwarves who like music should spend some of their spare time learning to play instruments, child dwarves should want toys, and dwarves should collect crafts when they have extra cash and wear them.

Masonry should stick with making furniture. Architecture, currently a weak skill, should be applied to making walls, and when walls are destructible architecture skill should contribute to their strength.