Bay 12 Games Forum

Join the club.

I have all the same symptoms as you, but I also must give dwarfs jobs that fit their personalities. All of my masons, smiths, and crafters must appreciate art and natural beauty or strive for excellence. All of my military are males who can handle stress (I don't want any mothers carrying their baby into battle).

I've found four things that help.

1) Dwarf manager. Others have already explained the necessity of this program so I won't go into detail.

2) Edit the init to a lower population cap and only raise it when ready for new immigrants. I HATE it when I start getting everything set up how I like it only to get a wave of 20 useless immigrants, forcing me to stop what I was doing to check everyone's personality and gender, and give everyone jobs and titles.

(IMO this game would be much more enjoyable with a slower default population growth rate - I wouldn't mind getting 3 to 5 new immigrants a year. This would give more incentive to keeping dwarfs alive, make larger populations more of a reward than the nuisance it currently is, and give newborns and children more value.)

3) Make a backup copy of the beginning save and location for the inevitable moment you get fed up and start over. On this save I have my fort almost completely drawn out with mining designations. This is a huge time saver.

4) Take breaks. It's easy to get burned out if you play nonstop for too long.

Your masons will drive you mad with suspended constructions unless you take care of any monsters. If they so much as sniff a giant rat that can't possibly reach them, they run away and force you to keep un-suspending whatever it is you want done. Marksdwarves and cage traps are usually good counter measures. You might have to tweak the station position of the marksdwarves for them to have line of sight.

The way to do this without modding the game is to set up a specific stockpile near your mason's workshops accepting only the particular stone you want them to use.

Just keep in mind the way pathing/selection works. To a dwarf, the stone one z level up, directly above the workshop, is closer than the stone 5 steps away. Even if the dwarf has to walk 100 steps to reach it.

The key to safe aqueducts is to understand water pressure. Generally, water will rise up to the level of the pump unless it has somewhere to drain. And it's always a good idea to build an abundance of floodgates, fortifications/grates, and escape stairways/ramps in case a dwarf falls in.

Wow you used up an ENTIRE PIPE? Are you sure it's not a pool? How hard was it?

I wouldn't make any plans on specific material type until you've exhausted your mining efforts. Instead of gold, you might find a lot of platinum or silver, or most likely a combination of precious metals. I recommend that you be flexible.

Some good ideas:
-Study up on how magma safe materials work and when they're necessary (use the wiki).
-Build redundant floodgates and access tunnels in case you forget something.
-Build an emergency/maintenance drain to a large open space (mine is a chasm, but a large dug out room will work).
-Build fortifications that block creatures from passing through AWAY from the pipe. Vermin can spawn outside of the pipe, but only out to a certain distance.
-When you build your workshops, position the dark green X over the channeled magma. This way dwarfs shouldn't be able to fall in the magma by accident and anything that gets past your fortifications shouldn't be able to come out.
-Finish the whole structure before letting the magma out of the pipe, and try to imagine how things will work first.
-Imagine it as if you were there and not as a video game.

I wouldn't call it a beginner move, but if you're already comfortable with pumps and water pressure you should consider pumping the magma directly from the pipe. Otherwise you're going to have to wait a year to use the stuff because it moves so slow and you need at least 4/7 under a magma forge for it to function. Pumps greatly speed up the flow (some say as fast as water, but it's not quite that fast in my experience, which may be due to the speed magma "respawns" in the pipe).

Just remember to build the pump and gears out of stone and metal because wood will slowly burn away. I like to make them out of magma safe materials because even though it's technically unnecessary, I consider it a bug that they're not needed.

I had planned to do something just like this on my magma pipe map full of excess garnerite (nickel).