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Messages - Astramancer

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151
Life Advice / Re: Computer power failure
« on: September 30, 2010, 05:38:18 pm »
Get a can of compressed air, open up the case, and blow out all the dust and cat hair (er... you might not have a cat).  I would suggest you either do this outside, or right before you vacuum, because you can get a ton of dust and hair out of there.  Your fan is a brushless motor with sealed bearings, so it's unlikely to be permanently harmed by the buildup of stuff, so blowing it out should work.

152
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Stockpile management vexing
« on: September 30, 2010, 05:34:27 pm »
Huh, never noticed the oldest stockpile first tendency -- which actually makes sense depending on implementation.  If it's just a loop that goes through all the stockpiles to see where something might go, then yeah, it would go to the oldest one first.

As for mixed-item bins, I seem to recalling hearing a while ago that if you dump the bin (but not the contents), they'll come grab the bin and leave behind a pile of stuff, which can then be resorted.  Dunno if I'm remembering right, but it should be easy enough to test.

153
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Stockpile management vexing
« on: September 30, 2010, 05:55:27 am »
From your descriptions, it sounds like part of your problem is you don't have enough dwarves laboring.  Do you ever have an idlers?  Do you have a massive mega-construction that you're building and everyone has masonry enabled?  Do you have a massive stoneclearing Dump in progress?

Any/all of these will result in at least some of the behaviors you're experiences.  Another issue that I've noticed is that dwarves tend to suck at taking stuff that's already being stored in a bin and moving it to the correct stockpile when you change the setting.  For example: if you have a bar/block stockpile and decide to remove Coke as an option for something stored there, and you then create another stockpile that's Coke-only, then I've noticed it takes forever for the dwarves to remove the Coke from the first stockpile.  If possible, it's best to try to make them separate in the first place.

You may want to consider having a few dedicated haulers -- like getting a dwarf or two with no labors except food hauling.  Assuming you have the stockpile space, this should keep your kitchen from cluttering up.

Also, seeing how much fuel you have using 'k' is probably the most inefficient way possible.  Assuming you have a bookkeeper who's done the work, you can just look in the z-stocks screen and get a count of all the fuel you have.


154
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's going on in your fort?
« on: September 29, 2010, 09:24:07 pm »
I accidentally knocked a hole in my mayors wall, next to his bed.  So I decide to patch it up by ordering a platinum wall to be built.  After 3 seasons of having a gaping hole in the wall, it was finally constructed!  By a dwarf standing on the mayors bed.  While the mayor was sleeping in said bed.

He didn't wake, though -- I guess he was tired.

155
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Flux stones and a beginner to smelting
« on: September 29, 2010, 09:16:10 pm »
Yes, to both.  You can request rocks, even flux rocks (they're not terribly expensive, but you also don't tend to get many of them because they're heavy).  You can also buy all the steel junk and mark it for melting, and you can eventually get steel bars out of that.  However, if you do that, only allow one smelter to melt objects.  This is because melting something results in fractions of a bar being left in the smelter.  They don't actually show up anywhere, but it is tracked.  So if you melt enough junk for 3/4 of a bar each in 12 smelters, you have no bars of reclaimed steel.  If you did it in just one smelter, you'd have 9 bars of reclaimed steel.

As for finding a good embark site... latest version family has an absolutely absurd amount of mineral wealth.  I used to embark on 5x5 flux layer sites and got maybe 3 veins of coal.  I just embarked on a 2x2 flux layer site, and have found at least 3 veins of each type of coal on my flux layers.  I have a 20x10 stockpile just for coke, and it's full, and that's only from 2 zlevels worth of coal!

The hardest part of finding a 'good' embark is finding one without aquifers.  So I kinda ... cheat and remove the aquifer tags from all the soil types in the raw.  No more problem :) It's now just a matter of poking around to find something I like (heavily forested, flux layer).

156
DF Suggestions / Re: Mine Vein
« on: September 28, 2010, 10:01:43 pm »
I thought of a great way to implement Mine Vein, and I haven't spotted anything this before, so here goes:

Use the manager.  Add a series of Tasks such as:
Mine X stone
Mine Gems
Mine Economic Stones
Mine Flux
Mine Ores
Mine Any Stone

And the manager would mark exposed tiles for mining if they fit the criteria.  The downside would, of course, is that you have no control over which specific tiles get marked for mining (of course, you could do that manually if it's that important).  The manager (in it's own inscrutable way) might decide that the metal ore on the far side of the untamed cavern is the best stuff.

157
Life Advice / Re: How do you keep an Internet Card Cool?
« on: September 28, 2010, 09:45:49 pm »
I also have a USB wireless card, and it does get crazy-hot after a few hours of working.

My solution?  I have it on a USB extension cord, and it's sitting next to the air intake on computer (it's got a big vent thing behind the faceplate, it's sitting in there.  It keeps it nice and cool - probably a combination of the aluminum grating acting as a heat sink and the air flow (mostly the airflow).

Try to keep the hard from sitting on something insulating, like carpet.  Try to sit it where there's airflow.  These will keep it from getting "wow, I can't believe I didn't get a blister from touching it" hot.

158
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Floor bars and Building Destroyers
« on: September 28, 2010, 04:13:55 am »
It's flow that can get critters through fortifications (though I think that gaseous or liquid FB's can get through on their own).  If the critter is next to the fortification, and flow pushes it, it will end up in the fortification, and flow will push it again, ending up with a magma critter on the wrong side of your fortification.

Unless you continually drain magma through it, fortifications will keep critters out except (potentially!) in the very beginning when your channels are still filling.

159
Life Advice / Re: Car Curiousity
« on: September 27, 2010, 05:43:02 pm »
Depending on where you are, you would have to pay taxes on the gains, however, that does take into account what it cost you to get those gains.  Plus, on this scale, it's probably going to be below the taxable amount anyway.  Usually such taxes are for Capital Gains - i.e. you're a business and buy something and sell it later for more.

160
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: It's only a little magma (how do I drain a magma flooded fortress?)
« on: September 26, 2010, 07:20:58 pm »
Yeah, collapsing something on top of the pump is probably among the easiest ways to stop the flood, as would finding a place where it's just one tile conducting the magma (like just after the pump, perhaps), channeling out above it, and dumping water on it to form an obsidian plug.

Once the source is stopped, draining should be relatively trivial... unless that part of the fort is built on coal.

161
Life Advice / Re: Ohhh noooooeeee.
« on: September 26, 2010, 07:18:15 pm »
If it's your 21st (in the US), then buy some alcohol, so that when they card you, you can pull out your ID and say "HA!"

162
General Discussion / Re: Awesome Coil Gun
« on: September 26, 2010, 04:23:45 pm »
Also, physical projectiles still have the advantage of indirect fire.  Rayguns are all and good, but you can't shoot someone over the horizon with a beam weapon.  Assuming that the aperture of the partial beam cannon is 100 ft off the surface of the water, then you can shoot something that's, what, 13 miles away (assuming it's sitting on the surface of the earth)?

It would probably be awesome for shooting down planes and missiles (and maybe other boats, but the whole "really well grounded" thing may cause problems), but it would be a terrible replacement for artillery.

163
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Topside farming in reclaimed fortress doesn't work.
« on: September 26, 2010, 04:15:27 pm »
Sunberries only grow in Good areas, right?  Maybe your topside farm isn't in a good area?

I haven't really farmed sunberries in the new version, so I'm not sure.  It's a possibility, though.

164
General Discussion / Re: Beautiful people are ugly
« on: September 26, 2010, 11:34:33 am »
In some ways, quality is a detriment.  This is because quality requires money. 

Throwing random numbers out here...

Say that you have a quality, well-written and popular show.  It has a market share of 20%, and advertisers will pay, say, $100,000 per % of market share.  So this quality show brings in $2,000,000 in advertising!  Yay!  But it costs $1,500,000 to make.

Now you have a trashy reality TV show that gets 10% of the market share.  So it gets $1,000,000 in advertising, but it only costs $300,000 to make.

Quality show:  Gets the studio a net of $500,000.
Trashy show: Gets the studio a net of $700,000.

Guess which one is going to be made?

Reality TV has the huge advantage of "it's cheap."  They don't have to be nearly as popular as other shows in order to make money.  Plus it's easy, and humans are, by and large, lazy.  So when confronted with the formula of "cheap and easy but still profitable," it's no surprise that the execs choose to keep reality TV at the forefront.  It's popular enough to be worth it.

165
General Discussion / Re: What happens if a black hole enters a black hole?
« on: September 26, 2010, 08:54:38 am »
edit: totally misread the second article

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