Bay 12 Games Forum

However I haven't been able to find any instructions on how to use them, it doesn't seem to be as simple as pasting hex. Would someone who knows point me in the right direction please, alternately does anyone have a binary that already has these applied?

Binary editing is a skill I am always willing to share.

My favorite old hex editor is Frhed, which can be found here: http://frhed.sourceforge.net/en/

First, BACK UP YOUR DF DIRECTORY, or, at the very least, any binaries you're going to be hacking.  Hacking binaries can cause the wrong kind of FUN.

Then, open up your Dwarf Fortress.exe file in Frhed (or the hex editor of your choice).

Now, search for the address of the patch.  An address is just a location in the file -- only we programmers put it in fancy-pants hexadecimal, because that's how we roll.  The address is the first value in the patch instruction.  So, for example, if it looks like this:

007E5CFC : B0 C0 42 -> 20 4F 7D
The address will be 007E5CFC.  In Fhred, you can get there by Edit > Go To... or Ctrl-G.  You'll want to punch a little "x" in front of it, to indicate that it's hexadecimal.

Now, if you have the correct version, and the correct patch, you should now see the values after the address, and before the little arrow.  Those are the values you want to replace.  Be SUPER CAREFUL, here.  This is not just data.  This is a binary program executable.  These are machine instructions.  If you goof them up, there is no telling what will happen.

So, in my example above, we should see "b0 c0 42" in Frhed.  If you are at the right address, you can literally type the corrected values (in this case, "20 4f 7d") right into the editor.  Yes, it is that easy.  Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Now, save, and try it out.

You now have phenomenal cosmic power.  Use it wisely.

Bravo, Rafal99!  That fixed my crash.

Holy cow, I tried all kinds of things to fix that.  You saved my poor dwarves.

I have a ten-year-old fortress, where the food stockpiles have just plain stopped working, regardless of what subsets of food they store, and regardless of what Z-level they are on.  I can put a general food stockpile RIGHT NEXT TO a farm field full of ripening plants, and Dwarves will still walk over the plants to harvest them, flash a question mark, and then walk away, because they can't find anywhere to put the plant.  Before someone helpfully suggests to me that I need to turn on "Allow Plant/Animal" in "Additional Options," this is turned on, for ALL of my food stockpiles, and these stockpiles were working fine for many fine years of Dwarven fun.  Now, my prepared food and drinks stockpile is running out of goods, my prepared meals are rotting in my kitchens, my vegetables are rotting in the fields, and my meat is all rotting on the butcher's block.  It is a tragedy to waste all this good stuff, and I don't think my 161 Dwarves can survive like this indefinitely.

I have tried ripping out these stockpiles, and re-placing them.  I have tried making new food stockpiles.  I have tried reducing my number of food stockpiles.  I have tried making the food stockpiles less specific.  I have tried putting a food stockpile immediately right next to the food source.  Absolutely nothing seems to work.  Food Stockpile and store-in-barrel jobs never even show up in the job list.

My questions are: 1.) Has anyone else run into this recently? (I found a post from 2007 that sounded passingly similar, but there was no resolution in it for me.)  2.) Has anyone found a good workaround?  I would like to rescue this fine fortress, but I don't know how, at this point.  I'm afraid that if I start a new one, this will just happen again.