Bay 12 Games Forum

There's good news for all the Dwarf Fortress hipsters, DF will never, ever, be cool.

"Dwarf Fortress hipsters"?

That word truly has no meaning now.

Thank you for, at long last, eliminating the word "hipster" from the English language. I mean this with all sincerity. You have done good this day.

I play more or less like that, though I'm more careful/protective about my defenses and keep my traps around.

So bad at finishing games. Off the top of my head:

Have actually finished: Diablo 1/2, Neverwinter Nights campaign (ugh, why?), Baldur's Gate 1, Disgaea, Rome Total War campaign mode, Fallout 1/2, Civ games (don't really count IMO), various Final Fantasies

Have not finished: Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, KOTOR, Dragon Age, Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, Etrian Odyssey 2, Etrian Odyssey 3, Starcraft (but that's incompetence), Dark Cloud 2 (forgot all about that game), so many more

Usually what happens is, I get all the powers, and then it's like "got what I came for! Good luck, world in peril, I'm out!" And looking at the games I have finished, a lot of them keep you from getting all the powers during the first playthrough. I guess that must be key.

You designate pasture zones for horses and other grazers. You can set up indoor pastures with a bit of work, or wait until you breach the caverns, and fungus will grow in underground soil and mud elsewhere in your fortress. Personally, I don't bother with that, and let the sieges/ambushes kill off my grazers; more than enough food from other sources in this game.

The practical upshot of how animal parts are handled is that you need to have a few more workshops set up to deal with the incoming materials, since the dwarves process them more slowly. Also you have to be prepared to dump skeletons your dwarves don't butcher (don't remember when that changed, exactly, but there it is).

Dude! Use the obsidian swords! They are excellent weapons!

(nitpicky details. The important part is above.)

- it almost doesn't matter what you give your soldiers in .40d if they've trained to be legendary wrestlers first. If you give your legendary wrestlers weapons, that just means they annihilate the goblins/megabeasts faster. Sometimes that's important (dragons).

- it will take a long time, a lot of luck, or magma forges to get a weaponsmith that's as good as one of your best stonecrafters. If you don't have a legendary stonecrafter already, you probably will pretty soon, from a mood. Legendary stonecrafters make very good obsidian swords.

- weapon differences are pretty negligible in the hands of legendary wrestlers, but spears are actually the worst weapons in .40d, because they are the most likely to get stuck in their target. That's why, in .40d, you have the option to have your warriors carry a spare weapon.

Short version:

Use the obsidian swords!

Yeah, I have to in DF 2010. The main thing I do is pick through migrants for athletic and/or skilled dwarves and name the good ones "Military Prospect" – since the number of migrants swiftly outpaces my ability to equip them, I need to keep tabs on who's going to make good soldiers.

Another thing I have traditionally done is name my first mayor "First Mayor" whenever he actually loses an election.

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I've thought about DF elves a bit lately and I think it's more their style to be really good with natural poisons

Interestingly enough many of the greatest poisons on earth have been artificial for both their availability and their wide area of use. While some civilisations made use of poison they never quite had enough to field a certain number of poison soldiers with potent poisoned weapons.

I am actually quite frustrated by the Elves' mysterous survival skills that betray all logic and reason. Sponsoring HUGE populations on essentially nothing except possibly hunting. Despite being a "Retreat" they don't migrate either.

So while I have no problem with them getting access to poisons from their poisonous friends (assuming they live in an area with poisonous plants and animals), I don't want magical poison gathering tricks unless they ARE outright magical.

Eh. DF flora & fauna is already heavily fantastic. I don't have a problem with elves harvesting natural poisons. Besides, all the poisons in the game currently are creature extracts, though dwarves ought to be able to mine stuff like arsenic if poisons become a real part of the game. As far as scale of use goes, the relationship between the number of entities DF works with and the population of the real world in the ancient/medieval era is... super wide open to interpretation.

Elves are weirdly dominant in world-gen right now but that stuff changes wildly from version to version, I'm not getting hung up on that just yet.

I used the wiki to get started with this game, so I never had any serious Fun – there was the occasional minor cave-in in the dining room – until I picked up 0.31.25 after about a year's hiatus. I had thrown up an interim line of stonefall traps to block my entrance until I could get a military and metals set up. Welp. Rocks fell, nobody died, sticks and stones broke no bones, and a six-goblin ambush squad carved through my entire fortress except for a tantruming child they'd overlooked, who died of starvation months later.

Fun!