Bay 12 Games Forum

Ah, see, here I thought you meant use DC to force a mood on a dorf, then cause him to require only bones, and then forbid all bones but the cat's. Hence my scepticism. Still, though, no matter how you slice it, the kitty's bones are still at the bottom of the well...

Since you brought that cat on embark and it adopted one of your dwarves, it's likely you just ran into this bug:

000132 □ [dwarf mode][pets]   cats aren't buried and that makes the adoptee sad

Cats that arrive with immigrants get buried properly.

I'm not at all sure I did bring him on embark, he's just been around as long as I can remember =/ The engraver in question likes cats for their aloofness, so it may have been an on-site adoption (although I didn't know dwarves named their pets upon adoption).

Actually, dwarves won't dump things into a hole if the zone is solely over the hole - the zone marks where they stand. That's why if you center a 3x3 zone over a channel, it'll display only 8 of the 9 tiles as eligible for dumping uses.

That said, hilarious anecdote.

Ah, k. Guess I hadn't encountered that yet. (It was confusing to my facial musculature. I was grinning and sadfaicing at the same time.)

Surely the most DWARVEN way to honor a dead cat is to make an Artifact out of his bones and skull. Maybe a Cat-Bone WarHammer.

Yes. True. However, I'm unwilling to tinker with the universe quite that much... (Can you even specify output item types with Dwarf Companion?) Also I don't have any legendary hammerdwarves who'd wield it.

It's fine if he dies, he had a long and fulfilling life, but the ignominy of being pitched down the well is just too much. I don't even do that to goblins, man. (Although to be fair they've usually been separated into their component parts well before they ever see my wells.)

Starting up Dwarf Companion now!

Marble and obsidian.

How else are you going to make a chess board? 

Due to lack of both of those stones, I made mine from dolomite and slate. Yours is more awesome though D:

Hmm. I don't usually consider the impact of building destroyers on traps that complex, or the inside of my base for that matter (I try and take them out before they get that close) but yeah I see what you did there.

The intuitive solution would be to build two bridges, back-to-back, that raise towards each other. And of course that makes me wonder if stuff that ends up between them is crushed out of existence too.

The wall will be on the opposite side that the bridge is raised in.

Wait, wut?

╔═╗
║+║ Bridge lowered
╚═╝

╥..
║.. Bridge raised to the left
╨..

..╥
..║ Bridge raised to the right
..╨

Et cetera. Same side, not opposite.

How do you handle the massive amount of rocks excavated? Should I designate exterior stockpiles for all of the low end stuff?

Some players consider this an exploit, but especially for stone it's highly useful: designate a small (as small as 1x1) activ(i)ty zone, mark it as a (g)arbage dump, (a)ctivate it and make sure any other garbage dumps you have are inactive. Then designate for (d)umping all the stone that's in your way (the hard way, by loo(k)ing at each tile with stone on it and marking each one individually, the less-than-hard way by selecting a dump designation (d-b-d), or the easy but perhaps too comprehensive way of going to the z-stocks screen, finding that kind of stone and designating all of it in your entire fortress).

This preserves your stone for making crafts out of, so you might want to make the dump zone somewhere near your masons'/craftsdorfs'/mechanic's workshops. Another option is to use a dwarven atom smasher, which eliminates the stone so it doesn't cause you lag (essentially a 2x1 raising bridge at the smallest, over solid floor, which crushes anything under it out of existence when it comes down).

And if I create a custom stockpile for some rocks, while some stockpiles are for all rocks, will the special rocks be placed preferably in their custom stockpile, or not?

I don't know, but I suspect the pathfinding involved here may be slightly odd; I think things get placed in the closest stockpile that accepts them, so that may turn out to be either one depending on where the target stone is to begin with. You can edit stockpile settings on-the-fly, though, the same way you add tasks to a workshop (the q key) so I'd suggest simply making a specialized stockpile for the stone and then disabling it on your other stone stockpiles (if you end up using them at all: see above method).

Gabbro is growing on me, for the cool stuff you can get from it. As is dolomite. It's not so much the fact that I'm building a fort out of stone that's twice the value of regular stone, it's that it's bright friggin' white and so the vomit stands out nicely.

Never found pitchblende =( I want nukes, damn it all. I insist that my next fort contain a nuclear missile, or reactor, or both. There will be much referring to Wikipedia in the process.