Bay 12 Games Forum

What version are you playing? In some earlier versions dwarves would work until they were practically dying of thirst before putting whatever they were doing on hold to get a drink. And if they were working somewhere far enough from the booze stockpiles they sometimes died on the way there.

1: Have some rope reed, pig tails, or silk. If you're starting with rope reed or pig tails, you need to build a farmer's workshop and queue up a 'Process Plants' job. This will get you thread.

Once you have thread (either plant or silk, it doesn't matter) you need to weave it into cloth at a loom. Once you have cloth, you need to queue up a job at a clothier's workshop to make bags or socks or shirts or whatever.

2: Dwarves generally won't eat trapped vermin unless they're starving. A few dwarves with odd tastes might, but as a general rule, vermin is a last resort food.

3: Build a farmer's workshop and queue a 'Milk large creature' job. Obviously you need a milkable creature to do this. If it's not working then all the milkable animals may be outside the burrow assigned to the milker, or you may not have enabled the milking labor on any dwarves.

4: Dwarves don't seem to want to butcher anything dead unless it's RIGHT NEXT to the butchery, and even then it seems to be iffy. I don't know why, but someone else might be able to help. You CANNOT butcher goblins, elves, humans, kobolds, or other dwarves without modding the game.

Cartilage, nervous tissue, and hair have no use and will eventually rot away, but you can have your bonecarver make stuff out of hooves (via the "make horn crafts" job.)

You can't put anything besides your own dwarves or their pets in coffins.

I saw a thread about on the Order of the Stick forums. I thought the name sounded interesting, but the ASCII and the learning cliff meant it took me a while before I actually tried to seriously play it.

Anyway, somebody there linked to the story of Boatmurdered. I didn't really think much of it, so I bookmarked it and figured I'd read it later when I had nothing better to do, which I did.... And I was absolutely blown away. Boatmurdered it was finally convinced me to learn to play.

Mud.

1: Workshop profiles. Learn to use them.

2: I guess if you're THAT anal about how your dwarves are dressed, you could assign everyone to a military squad and create custom uniforms for everyone, but there's no penalty for your dwarves running around naked so meh.

3: Practice. It'll get easier after a while.

4: This is what drowning chambers and/or atomizers are for.

5: That's what the wiki is for.

6: Again, this is pretty much exactly what the wiki is for. It shall be your bible.

7: Dorfs are stupid and the game is still in alpha. Yes, it would be really nice to be able to set an option to have your weaponsmith automatically make coke and steel if the stocks are depleted, but again, ALPHA. Most games aren't even playable at this point in their development, much less as playable as DF is.

The solution here is to have a dwarf constantly making coke, another constantly turning out pig iron bars, another constantly smelting iron, yet another constantly making steel bars, and the last actually making stuff out of said steel.  You have a ****ton of dwarves, specializing like this isn't going to hurt anything.

8: Once again, the game is in alpha. If the game were a person it would still be in the womb. Don't misunderstand, I'm not a huge fan of the interface as it is, but complaining about lack of mouse support in a game at this stage of development is like complaining that a solid 2 ton block of steel with no motor or wheels gets bad mileage.

These problems are mostly due to a lack of familiarity with the game. Keep playing and after a while you won't even notice them any more.

Being that Platinum is the heaviest metal in the game, what is its best use apart from warhammers? I've found a small vein of it 4 layers under the surface...

It's very valuable (tied with aluminum for the most valuable metal in the game, second only to cotton candy.) Consequently, you can easily use it to cause the value of a room to skyrocket by putting some masterwork platinum items in it (mechanisms, statues, or make a well from all platinum components.) If you want the most bang for your buck though, you'll need a legendary (or near legendary) metalcrafter. Which isn't to say it's not absurdly valuable without being made into a masterwork item, but platinum is pretty rare, so you  want to make the most of it.

A couple bad thoughts are fine, and avoiding bad thoughts entirely simply isn't possible. If my dwarves' moods start getting into the pale yellow and red, then I take notice, but as long as everyone's at least content, I don't bother with it much.

Yes, muddying ground is annoying and an intimidating obstacle at first, but after you've done it a few times it's not a big deal. A quick and dirty (but easy and effective) way to do it is:

1: Dig out large area next to pond.
2: Breach pond wall.
3: Wait for water to evaporate and farm on resultant mud.

More elaborate ways involve mechanisms and doors or floodgates. This has the advantage of being easier to expand, but more time consuming to set up.

Or you can just say to hell with underground farming altogether and do all your farming on the surface.

I found the biggest stumbling block to be the new military interface, which, yes, looks really intimidating at first, but once you sit down and fiddle with it for a little while most of it makes a lot of sense.