Bay 12 Games Forum

Con

Quote from: Lav on February 08, 2010, 01:00:28 pm

When the site has a river, only one side (usually the one on which you embarked) will be available for caravans.

So if you try to force caravans to the other side of the river, the game will claim that the depot is accessible, but caravans will refuse to arrive.

Remove some statues from the second road so make it wagon-passable, and the caravans should start using it.

Shouldn't be necessary; if it's just the side of the river that matters, I should be able to force the caravan to come in from the north if I move the access road from the east side of the river to the west side, since the caravans seem to prefer the southwest side.

Confirmed; wagons came in from the northern access road, west of the river. Apparently that's all that's necessary, which inconveniently restricts possible trade depot locations.

1. Should say how much road you need on the screen, but I believe it's about 5K dwarf bucks. Don't know how that translates into amount, but pave a road from your depot to the edge and you should be good.
2. Yeah, that's the best non-stupidly-micromanaged system I can think of; input stockpile, output stockpile, and workshop between them. There are a few exceptions I'll make, with cloth workshops next door to each other, smelters and forges side by side, but that factory setup is the one I'll use in future fortresses.

I notice you have a river running through your site.

While I haven't experienced this myself, I have heard that when you have a site straddling a river (as opposed to a brook) you may need to provide caravan access to both sides of the river.  This may be due to the caravan not being considered to have access to the edges of the map on one or the other side of the river.  Try providing a path to the other side of the river and see if that helps.  I can't see any other obvious reason why the path would be considered blocked.

I do have access to my site on both sides of the river, plus a bridge across the other dry river. The northern path serves the east side of the river, and the southern side can be accessed from the west side, aside from a bridge across that river outside of my fortress. You can get anywhere on the map without getting your feet wet, and if I removed those statues blocking easy access, you could get a wagon into my fortress from any part of the map, trees aside.

Terribly sorry about any quality issues, but here's the northern path.
That should give you the idea; there's a few statues on the right side, tight enough to prevent caravans from passing between them, then a channel when it gets too close to the edge to build anything.

And the southern path.
Again, not all of the map, but the area between that path and the edges of the map are clear enough to permit wagon travel, aside from the green glass statue smack in the middle of it.

Quote from: Bardum Idith on February 06, 2010, 09:48:42 am

fine door > parents   

Actually, I think it's more due to that "talked with a friend" and perhaps "made a friend" things. That's because I was under the impression, that those thoughts only showed up once even if they happened repeatedly, so for all you know, she could have talked like a dozen times with friends recently, all of them consoling her or whatever.

It's still ridiculous that they'd be able to console her to the point of being ecstatic even after the death of both parents, but perhaps she (or dwarves in general) is being depicted as a sociopath or something.

Yeah, that's it. Dwarven psychology is craziness; they'll balance out at pretty OK, because on the one hand their entire family got eaten by elephants, but on the other hand they just saw a really nice door. Not even their own door, inasmuch as dwarves are allowed to own anything aside from the shirt on their back, but a door belonging to some other dwarfs entirely whom they don't know.

My favourite point in the game, aside from the excitement of sieges, is a tie between the first year or two, when I'm just getting it all set up and initialized, and the point between 50 and 100 dwarfs, when the fun of megaprojects and expanded industries start to appear, with spikes during trading time when I get "ZOMG! A new and interesting pet! Thank you elves! OMGWTFBBQ! A new crop! I love humans! Glee! More gems and rock than I know what to do with! Praise the dwarves!". In short, the fun times are when things happen, be they goblin assaults, construction, or industrial expansion.

So perhaps this should be obvious, but what does it mean when the name of a crop is highlighted in red for a plot?  Also, about how many plots/size of plots should be neccessary per dwarf?

Red writing indicates that you can't plant that crop at that time; sweet pods can't be planted late in the summer, quarry bushes are forbidden in late autumn, and nothing can be planted late in the winter.

As for size of plot, that depends significantly on other factors. Judging by what you've said, your fortress is new and fairly small, so 5x5 should be more than adequate, especially if you cook the alcohol into prepared meals. I'm running a 200-dwarf fort on the equivalent of a 6x6 plot and have room to spend on fiber and dye crops.

Edit: Just as a f'rinstance, a 2x3 plot, intelligently set up to maximize food output, can grow sweet pods or quarry bushes for spring and summer, quarry bushes in autumn, and plump helmets in winter. Leaving aside the plump helmets, the sweet pods and quarry bushes would produce, over those 9 months of growing, 6 crops per tile. If we assume an average size of 3 plants in a harvested stack, this leaves us with 6x6x3 plants harvested, or 108 plants. Since sweet pods can process into 5 units of dwarven syrup per plant, and quarry bushes process into 5 leaves, we can have 540 units of cookable food, which will become 540 +quarry bush leaf roast+, and make the dwarves much happier than raw plump helmets. Make another plot for brewable plants, and you should be able to support up to 75 dwarves before you need to expand your operation.

Cloth images can only go on cloth items like clothes, backpacks, bags, or cloth ropes.

Correction; you can sew images on leather or cloth items, in either leather or cloth, though you cannot sew two images on one item, AFAIK. Thus, you can have a cloth bag with cloth image, cloth bag with leather image, leather bag with leather image, or leather bag with cloth image, but not a bag with leather and cloth image. Also, you can easily sew images on cloth/leather crafts, to boost their value even higher. I'm doing so right now primarily as a means of both consuming cloth and maximizing value for trading.

Edit: Now I'm wondering just how cloth decorations are valued, between the quality/value of the cloth, the quality/value of the dying of the cloth, and the quality of the decoration. Must experiment further.