Bay 12 Games Forum

Ok, so I started a new fortress, and I brought four cats with me, whom I mostly ignored. Five years later, I have a giant fortress with menacing adamantine gates, with a wealth of nearly four million. I have fifteen cats from two breeding pairs in five years, with no deaths to compensate for population expansion. My other fortresses have also never had more than twenty cat births in all their history, sometimes lasting as long as twelve years.

I’ve seen people recoil in terror at the very notion of bringing just two cats with you on embarkation, and I hear dread tales of high-end machines being brought to a screaming halt by unending legions of dwarven-brain-washing cats refusing to be put down or caged. Yet, as far as I’ve seen, cats are never more than an extremely mild nuisance for a fortresses frame rate. Have a large number of people here been playing some kind of grand joke on us for the past three years?

I've been using DF Tweak for a little, and I wondered: Is there a untility out there that allows for the creation of creatures, such as mega and semi-megabeasts on your fortress lands without needing to wait potentially years for them to show up?

On a recent DF game, I was lucky enough to find an area with both a large magma flow, and a river. What surprised me even more was the fact that the area had absolutely amazing deposits of gold ore. At least five veins right out in the open, and many, many more intersected during digging. Within days, gold stocks had skyrocketed into the hundreds. Even common peasents were eating off masterwork golden tables, while staring lovingly at masterwork golden statues. The mayor's office was a 3x3 room that also had 'royal' status on his requirement lists. Gold was flowing out of every wall in the fortress.

Unfortunately, the obscene wealth of my new fortress also meant it attracted vast ammounts of migrants, which in turn starved us to death, and caused a tantrum fit. The fortress died about three years after it was made, richer thenn sin, and as starved as a corpse. Now I've lost where it is again. Beh.

Anyway, my questions are thus. . .


I want to start a new fortress with another magma vent, and a river. However, I don't know how to find a magma vent without using the location tool. My fortressess tend to be big (11x11 starting tiles), but is there a way of seeing if there is a vent on my starting location before embarking? Also, I've recently downloaded Tweak for the game, but it dosn't work. Could somebody send me a tweak file that works with the latest Dwarf Fortress edition?

I'm confused as to which one to download, and I have a very slow connection, so mistakes are quite costly. Also, is there any way to copy the data and raws from a 3D version to 2D without damaging the game itself?

I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress for several months know, and I find I enjoy it a great deal for its immersive depth. Currently I’m trying out the Dig Deeper modification, but this is not the focus of the topic. While playing it I began to wonder about other possible modifications that might exist. After reading Boatmurdered, I was depressed at the bad A.I present in those early versions, but also mesmerized by the gargantuan fortresses that were possible on single map levels before 3D came about. Are there any modifications around that return the game to its 2D map style, with everything on a single vast Z-level, rather then multiple much smaller, fiddlier ones?