Bay 12 Games Forum

In the sense that my Broker (and Manager and Hoardmaster) sits around conducting meetings with my Mayor all the god damn time instead of doing his actual work, which is brokering.

The humies are about to pack up and fuck off and he's sat down in the basement with his labor on "Attend Meeting". Not that I haven't tried this, but I think Captain Ironblood proved quite conclusively that drafting a dwarf does diddly squat to alleviate that.

My question is this:

Which administrative position exactly makes a dwarf do this? This is the second time it's happened while traders have been at the depot, under a different mayor each time. (I only noticed the mayor's different this time because of this issue, so perhaps they meet when a new one is elected, among other things? Not that it really matters.)

If it's the Broker that has to meet with the Mayor, then I'm obviously S.O.L., but if it's either of the other two I can appoint other bloody dwarves to that position and get some actual trading done, because if another friggin' caravan leaves because none of my dorfs could be bothered to go do some work I'm going to rip my beard out.

My years of high school Latin gave me a very lagged translation of your sig, such that I went from "vestri" and "nostrum" thinking "What's this...", to "totus" and the "oh no you didn't", to the final aha moment and the "OH YES YOU DID". Applause.

On-topic: wow, you guys are high-tech. The last and only time I did this (needed more tetrahedrite and needed it faster than exploratory mining was getting the job done) I archived the save, copied it out, revealed, scribbled rough directions to each vein in Notepad from stuff I already had (things like "7 blocks west of the bottom of bit.coal vein on -4, dig down to -8"), deleted the game and savescummed.

Exploratory mining doesn't irk me as such (my current fort, my second ever, is ugly as sin and ridiculously inefficient) but next game I'll probably try fancy (and immense) fractal designs and so get a wee bit more tedious about what I mine from where.

The only problems I've ever observed with powered machines is when trying to build a windmill such that it passes its power through a solid floor tile - build it hanging directly over a gear assembly or a vertical axle, and it works fine.

Wait, whut?

I'm racking my brains trying to remember if I ever tried it precisely like that and drawing a blank :<

Would that also apply if there was a screw pump directly beneath? Also, the center tile of a windmill is the only one that actually needs to be supported by a floor or machine, no?

I use wood for two things: 1) Beds, and 2) Fuel, or Pearlash (depending on whether i have magma and sand). Maybe Wooden Bolts if I have a ridiculous surplus.

Believe it or not I actually prefer to have my dorfs search constantly for veins of lignite or bit.coal. Then again I'm from Pennsylvania. Cum grano salis, et cetera.

I've also been trying to avoid the ire of the elves until I'm properly ready to dispose of the useless bastards (read: until my railgun's complete), though their liaison seems to have been dead for a while... I guess they won't take offense to over-eager logging if they can't complain to me directly, huh?

Quote from: Abaddon on February 23, 2010, 07:46:06 am

Quote from: Varisma on February 23, 2010, 07:36:06 am

Hurted? Are you 12?

I am 12, and what is this?

He/she was trying to be insulting, ignore it.

Considering that's a *chan catchphrase I think Abaddon is aware and equally unconcerned...

Anyway. I gotta say the metal industry is underrated. Of course, I have a couple smiths milling around with artifacts to their names and the associated legendary skill, which I imagine is even more important with metalworking than with any other profession, given the ratio of resources to finished products. (Less so on maps with magma, but mine is not such a map.) The worse your smiths are, the more resources you're going to have to essentially waste to train them up.

And then there's the Dungeon Master, who recently surprised me pleasantly by commandeering responsibility for the production of the silver short swords I intend to re-spec my champion wrestlers to. He made maybe one +silver short sword+ and the rest were no-quality or -well-crafted-. Perfect!

God DAMN it.

Didn't realize my dwarves were such proficient cooks.

There are consistently less than 200 meat/fish/plant stocks listed. (They're listed right under the 14000 prepared meals.) So when I bought a truly massive quantity of food from the latest caravan, the food stockpile (which is ruddy massive in its own right) was full, and it all rotted in the depot.

Did you know rotted food is auto-dumped? Neither did I until I happened to glance at my old masons' complex and see it stinking up the joint, as my stone dump zone was the nearest active one. And not only did the imported food rot, but a whole season's worth of above-ground crops too it looks like.

Of course, now that I think of it, all the "Urist McCook has created a masterpiece" spam should have clued me in. Fucking facepalm.

I like to think of myself as a dwarven Darwinist. (You know, survival of he who rocks the biggest hammer and all that good stuff.) So I disapprove of this namby-pamby noble-culling flim-flam. Instead, if they annoy me, I let dwarven nature take its course (by which I mean I completely refuse to intervene on anyone's behalf):

I don't build them rooms, I put most everyone to work (hauling shit or making blocks or detailing floors), and I wait for one to snap.

Watching the Hammerer being forced to beat his dear friend the Duke into a pulp (because the Duke couldn't stand having to sleep on the floor while the Dungeon Master got a platinum statue in his office and attempted to forcibly remove the Hammerer's spine through his anus (because, due to the fact that all the valuable dwarves were working, the Hammerer was nearest...)) was truly a satisfying display of the rule of "survival of the dwarfiest".

for water, you're gunna have to use floodgates, channels and screwpumps. as for the dwarves, split them up into 2 groups of 2.  make sure you have only one squad active at a time, and switch them up every now and again.

I don't think terraria work that way. It's just a name for a glass cage, the same way a glass door is a portal, and a glass flask is a vial. However, in much the same way that you can't use metal flasks to make an alchemist's laboratory, you can't use any other kind of cage but a terrarium to create an aquarium. For the purposes of the game, I suppose the dorfs fill it with as much water as the fish need once you've given the order to use it as an aquarium (much like they knock a hole in floors to let windmills transfer power, that is magically refilled when the windmill is removed). You simply assign a captured live fish to them like you'd assign animals to any other cage, I think.

As for the dwarves, I disagree. Breaking your squads up means more micromanagement (weapons, armor, squad stations) and they're actually quite likely to go get a drink at the same time, all things considered. Just keep your eyes peeled and switch up the leader. As for not keeping all of them on-duty at the same time, what did you train them to legendary for if you're not going to use them? It's not as if you can balance their absence with anything less than an obscene number of less skilled marksdwarves. Dorfs sometimes get an unhappy thought from being on duty too long, but given the fact that they're legendary and therefore exempt from the economy they're liable to be so happy that they don't even notice.