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Topics - j.brigante

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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Fey immigrant

« on: January 22, 2007, 12:30:00 pm »

First spring wave, an arriving craftsdwarf enters a fey mood before setting foot into the fortress and makes himself a felsite trumpet... instant legendary stone crafter, but I wonder, should a dwarf enter a strange mood THAT quickly? Was he so amazed at the sight of the entrance door? There was an insane amount of movement on the outside, since I was scrambling to get the road done before summer while fending off some elephants a bit to the north, maybe that triggered something? No fancy decorations on the trumpet to tell.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Food hauling crisis unavoidable?

« on: January 21, 2007, 07:56:00 pm »

I had this extremely well-planned fortress going on - defensive structures before the river, some temporary quarters before the chasm, and almost everything else between the chasm and the magma river. Workshops near the dining hall which had direct access to my kitchens/stills/food stockpiles (and with a big booze/prepared food stockpile in the middle of the tables), and quarters all around. At least one dedicated, experienced brewer and cook working full-time (not even "health care" and "cleaning" turned on) while novices took care of the other kitchens and stills, and food haulers kept things from becoming cluttered. But alas, this fortress, like the one before, was to face starvation problems, and this time it wasn't my fault.

It seems to me that the first problem was that, having placed my farms near the river, everyone would drop the harvested plants in the middle of the hall when hauling everything to the big food stockpile in the heart of the fortress, because they ALWAYS decided midway that they should do something else. An entire crop withered this way. I could (and can, and will) build new farms after the chasm in my next fortress, but still, how annoying - and it won't solve the greatest food-related problem with post-chasm fortresses, which is that buying food becomes useless - apparently all that meat bought at premium price from the human caravan will always rot, unless one transforms the entire main hall of the fortress in a series of food stockpiles with the "take from" option, hopefully, making the haulers bring it all the way to the kitchen. Now, that wouldn't be a problem if the human caravan brought food in barrels - I really wouldn't like to lose 100+ pieces of meat this way again.

Anyway, I got so annoyed that I opened the pits and watched every single stupid dwarf burn. But hey, at least I got to see my top wrestler, not yet elite, strangle a demon to death - and become elite in the process. Alas, he was torn apart seconds later when trying to take on two demons at once.

EDIT: I forgot to add that, after a point, my cook started to hunt for ingredients fortress-wide instead of taking what was right next to him. Maybe because I had a seed stockpile near the farms, and had allowed cooking plump helmet spawns?

[ January 21, 2007: Message edited by: j.brigante ]

DF Gameplay Questions / Booze thieves?

« on: January 29, 2007, 06:22:00 pm »

What is this with dwarves running away from the dining hall with barrels of booze so they can drink somewhere else? And what's even more odd, usually they go to some random noble's office, if not to even more bizarre places. One of them even left the fortress, took the road and was already past the river when he decided to eat something and went back inside. Any thoughts?

DF Gameplay Questions / Ahh, what a lovely da-BLEAAARGH

« on: January 27, 2007, 04:16:00 pm »

The entrance to the fortress is filled with vomit, because almost everyone that is "on break" goes outside all the time despite "being nauseated by the sun", and despite the fact that there's a magnificent statue garden inside. Am I missing something? Are they doing that on purpose so their ale-filled stomachs become empty again so they can drink some more? Is this the result of serving +cat tallow roast+ for dinner?

DF Gameplay Questions / The Elite Wheelchair Division

« on: January 25, 2007, 06:48:00 pm »

Well, not quite - they can still walk and fight just fine, and they never complain, but it looks like that EVERY SINGLE DWARF that achieves "elite" military status gains an instant "spinal bruise", which, of course, will keep them from ever sparring again. What's odd is, now I've had three elite wrestlers in a row suffering such injuries, and only 1 novice with permanent damage (brain-damaged hammerdwarf). Is the RNG hitting my elites in the back with large, heavy blunt things?

EDIT: OK, so just because I found that odd, now I've got two brand new non-elite (but very promising) dwarfs with spinal injuries, so it's all even again. The RNG *always* strikes twice. Still, it only reinforces the alarming trend of crippled soldiers.

[ January 25, 2007: Message edited by: j.brigante ]

DF Bug Reports / "Owned" food rotting again and again and again

« on: January 30, 2007, 02:50:00 pm »

"Dwarf cancels eat: taken by mood". Said dwarf abandons his *dwarven syrup roast* on the table and goes off to work on his artifact... and his roast rots. OK. Then the rotten roast rots once more... and stays there. And it rots again. And again. And again. And apparently it won't deteriorate completely, nor will anyone take it to a refuse pile, until it's "unclaimed". All the while, the walls in the dining hall are turning purple with so much miasma.

EDIT: ok, so apparently it finally deteriorated away when I wasn't looking. scratch that one.

[ January 30, 2007: Message edited by: j.brigante ]

DF Bug Reports / Dwarves running to the top left corner

« on: January 30, 2007, 11:30:00 am »

For some reason, from time to time some dwarves mix up their routes when looking for an object and start walking towards the upper left corner of the map - probably all the way to tile [1,1], though I can't be sure since some wilderness creature always scared them away when I followed them. Still, the point is - there is nothing in the upper half of the wilderness. But judging by the "job item misplaced" I get from time to time - with everything else being relatively in order - I bet some of them get there, find nothing and someone else takes that item haul job later, ad infinitum.

And what's even more odd- that has been happening for a while. I remember one dwarf walking in that direction not long after starting the game. For a while I thought they were going to snatch some random refuse from outside, but I already turned "gather refuse from outside" off for a while and not much changed.

Could it be that some items, for some reason, are creating "out-of-borders" placement information, and prompting dwarves to look for them in the first valid tile? Or maybe some pathfinding loop, which passes through tile [1,1] or near it?

EDIT: ok, so now there's a dwarf coming back from the top corner with an iron shield... which, I'm 99% sure, wasn't there. there is a lot of caravan-guard and goblin-sieger equipment near the road, but nobody ventured that far up north - some were elephant-stomped south of the road, but not to the north.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding it at all anymore.

[ January 30, 2007: Message edited by: j.brigante ]

DF Bug Reports / Aborting "make raw clear glass" wastes sand

« on: January 24, 2007, 10:10:00 pm »

And maybe other advanced-glass related crafts, too, though I haven't checked yet.

I had a dwarf haul a bag of sand all the way from the other side of the fortress, get the pearlash, start working and then suddenly stop for a drink. Since this was a must-have-clear-glass-NOW situation (glassmaker mood), I immediately assigned the nearest peasant to glassmaking - and he went off in the opposite direction. "What the hell", I thought, so I checked the magma furnace: pearlash and an empty bag.

Now, I know sand is an infinitely renewable material and all, but I believe that if materials don't go to waste if a dwarf decides to stop for a drink in the middle of something extremely important, then materials shouldn't go to waste no matter how abundant they are. Bug?

DF Suggestions / "I want this done NOW"-order... at a price

« on: January 28, 2007, 08:19:00 pm »

Maybe requiring some noble in addition to the manager, said order would make someone stop what they're doing immediately to do the specified action - probably with some side effects, i.e., causing more than one dwarf to attend the call and interrupt their actions before realizing someone already answered (should the action be implemented as to give the order to a random dwarf) or giving a small happiness penalty (if implemented as to allow the player to choose which dwarf is going to receive the order), so this option couldn't be abused with impunity. Maybe even both side effects could apply, so constantly ordering dwarves to do this and that and NOW would risk causing mass tantrums.

This, I believe, would give players some much-needed additional control in critical situations (deadlines for ridiculously difficult demands, drawbridge/moat lever-pulling during attacks, squad positioning when military dwarves are eating/drinking/sleeping), while still keeping the game from becoming a walk in the park for dedicated micromanagers, and - I believe - whitout having to crank up the AI to absurdly high levels of complexity.

Also, as of now, the manager doesn't switch already-estabilished queues around - I don't know if that's intentional, or if it simply has no sensible workaround (I can imagine a lot of potential problems with auto-switching queues), but of course, if there are (or there'll be, at least) ways to guarantee that a job bumped to the first line of the manager screen will get absolute 100% top priority without any additional input from the player, this entire proposal is somewhat pointless.

DF Suggestions / Booze/syrup barrels should count as "food" for

« on: January 27, 2007, 09:29:00 am »

Fact is, after harvesting and storing the last autumn crop, and moving all the prepared meals to the dining hall, my now "jobless" food haulers won't move all the booze from the completely cluttered stills, nor relieve the farmer workshops from the piles of barrels of syrup that are making working there impossible, and when I turn "item hauling" on, they are more likely to rush outdoors to loot goblin corpses, or maybe to the barracks to store single bolts in bins, instead of doing what they should. Shouldn't booze and syrup be considered "food" for these purposes, as in, moving these should be the work of kitchen-based haulers?