Bay 12 Games Forum

Aaaah of course.

Well, incorporating Quietust's input, I suggest you tunnel up to the waterfall, dam it with floodgates upstream, construct your tomb entrance (might I suggest a 3x3 stairwell in the center of your river, simply an up/down staircase surrounded by walls, provided the river is at least 5 tiles wide?), make absolutely sure it's floodproof (might want to extend the tower 1 z-level above the river's surface to be sure, and ensure bridge access) and release the floodgates. Voila, an entrance surrounded by rushing water.

How'd ya guess?  I have wondered what a dwarven mecha would be like. Like a dwarven version of the Gawain, Mordred, or Shinkiro. What would they do to it?

Anyway, I'm contemplating what horrible thing to do.

I'm guessing it'll be a fair few main releases before vehicles are implemented.

I'd imagine any vehicles would be a question of allowing the physics system to deal with things bigger than one tile moving around in a (semi-) controlled fashion, and mecha would require fluid (rather than radial) joints for the hips (and shoulders for that matter), or the legs would work but the thing would never move forward.

Power plants would be pretty simple if steam power were implemented, I'm thinking a dwarven nuclear reactor and a windmill setup, if dwarven physics remain suitably far-removed from reality that might even work indefinitely with a condenser.

Float Systems are right out, at the very least until an entire lift/drag system is implemented, and we may be on Pentium 10s before that can ever happen, what with all the calculations that need making. And Landspinners might be impossible to do owing to weight, unless the chassis are made from Hidden Fun Metal. (Wood is another option, but they'd be fragile.)

Conventional weapons should be doable with remotely-operable siege engines and individual item physics (a device comes to mind that pushes a single ballista arrow/stone onto a hatch that then opens and drops it into the center square of an engine linked to a cockpit lever) and hadron cannons and the like would be equated by dwarven coilguns, which would require some simulation of electrical current and magnetic fields.

Druid Systems however are already implemented Floodgates disappear entirely when not in use, link 'em each to a lever and you wouldn't even need a genius-level intellect to activate the appropriate ones owing to the pause button.

Yeah I give these things way too much thought. But then isn't that why we're all here...?

device to automatically detect children using weight-sensitive pressure plates

Holy hell, this is awesome. Plans please?

A durr hurr. Moving now.

Rat O'Wisdom cancels Move Topic: Sleep

So, I've got some saltpeter, I can make charcoal anytime, and I'm currently trolling my dolomite layers for pockets of brimstone in gypsum. But, like dwarven nuclear reactors, the best I can do is a pretty little mock-up of a black powder device.

My question: how would I go about editing the game files to make "gunpowder" a substance producible in discrete units from an Alchemist's laboratory from, say, 5 saltpeter, 2 charcoal and 1 brimstone? (Naturally, this would be a similar operation to smelting alloys; ie. with 8 input stones it would return 8 bars (or bags or whatever) of powder.)

Furthermore, could I then cause this substance to react explosively to fire, like booze apparently does but which I've been fortunate enough not to see do so firsthand?

(This may lead to later questions on modding and constructing a fuse, but we'll burn and blow up that bridge when we come to it. Also, of course the question of whether or not black powder should ever make it to a main version is still open to discussion but not necessarily relevant.)

If memory serves, that tends to mean you have an underground river or pool somewhere on the map that you haven't found yet (as you would definitely have noticed if you had found it). I'm not sure how the creatures are supposed to have died, though, so I could very well be wrong.

THIS JUST IN: BRACE FOR TL;DR

Most of the time, you're lucky to see one dragon in a fort's lifetime. That sort of suggestion is unhelpful and unrealistic in that there apparently is little you can do to make more dragons show up.

Oooookay. Thanks for the clarification and all, but allow me to respectfully point out the big grinning smiley behind my suggestion of more dragons. Lighten up, plzkthx.

Also, if somehow you generate a world with a gratuitous megabeast population (don't ask me how you'd go about doing that, but this is DF, you know someone probably already has), chances are all of them will find you eventually as they can move and your fort can't. And unless I'm much mistaken, Nist Akath had more than one dragon (before the Captain started using Dwarf Companion even, I believe), but whatever, you can chalk that up to either the utility or to the place being a ruddy legend if you're disinclined to believe it.

You can't. The wiki article in question is rated D for Dwarf, and should not be taken literally.

Hmm. Well, thanks for clearing that up. You'd think the made-up bits would have fairly little overlap with bits describing actual gameplay mechanics though. Oh well, according to the decorations article you can decorate repeatedly as long as you use different materials so that'll have to do.

How do I get my military dwarfs to wear things like Steel Helms or Steel Boots?

First, forbid all your armor from the Z-stocks menu. Then, order them to wear cloth armor, watch them to make sure they take off everything and forbid each piece as it comes off. Then pause, order the squad to the desired armor level, unforbid exactly those pieces of armor you want (it might help to do so with exactly enough for the entire squad, no more and no less) and unpause. They should head straight for the stockpiles and don the gear you want them to.

Or are all beastmen bugged to not reproduce?

If this is true, Toady needs to implement mecha. WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK WE ARE? =D