Bay 12 Games Forum

Just a question, what orders, exactly, do the soldiers have? I've noticed that some, especially patrol routes and defending burrows, have latency between when you set the soldiers to the proper alert and when they actually start following it. They'll even go back to civilian status temporarily, even if both their old alert and their new one have active military orders.

So, are your soldiers actually active soldiers? If not, you might try waiting with the soldiers on the proper alert for a bit. They might just not be paying attention at the moment.

The fact that your ambush squads mostly consist of lashers is somewhat unlikely, but not impossible. There's nothing you can really do about it, though.

The ambush squads aren't actually "appearing within minutes of one another," or rather, they are, but not the way you're thinking. When ambushes show up, all of the squads spawn at the map edges at the same time. The fact that they almost always get detected at longer intervals is a side effect of this and their transit time to your fort entrance, since each squad of ambushers is detected individually.

Finding a particular goblin to kill can be tricky. First, use your announcements screen to zoom to the dwarf that is getting interrupted, then see if you can't find the interrupting goblin manually. If you can, go into your (s)quads menu, select a squad with a, b, c, etc., set up for (k)ill orders, and then scroll over the offending goblin and hit enter. This will produce a kill order for that squad, meaning that all its members will activate and go hunt down that creature to kill it. Obviously, if you don't have any military squads, this won't work.

The other option to shutting that dwarf up is to make sure that no jobs are being taken where the goblins will be seen. This is most easily done by setting up a burrow and using alerts to restrict civilian dwarves from going outside the main fort region when a particular alert is set, meaning that until you declare it safe they won't go to do such jobs.

Or that.
You see, elves regard animals as low-value, and cloth as high-value. If they like you, they will bring more cloth. If not, more animals.

This isn't quite as true anymore.

In 40d, pack animals' carrying capacity was quite limited, binned materials (like cloth) was always loaded first, and if there wasn't enough weight to fit everything a caravan wanted to bring, they'd simply not bring the rest. So, if elves were happy enough with you, they'd load up their bins and bins of cloth, and have no carrying capacity left for all of the animals that they wanted to bring, so they didn't. If they didn't like you, on the other hand, they'd try to bring less stuff, so they'd have room for non-binned things like animal cages.

In 31.x, however, animals' carrying capacity was massively buffed (perhaps to compensate for the missing wagons), so you will practically never see an elven caravan that is completely filled with cloth. They simply can't become happy enough with you to bring that much cloth. So, now, if the elves like you, they'll bring more of everything, including worthless cloth and wooden armor, but also including precious exotic beasts.

I've also seen some people claim, and hints from ingame behavior, that traders will tend to bring more of things that you've bought before. So, if you buy animals whenever they come, the traders will be more likely to bring more animals. This also means that if you buy-with-a-100%-discount all of traders' cloth, they'll also start bringing more of that. As a result, it's probably better anymore just to treat elves more kindly than you might treat, say, goblin lepers, as they're not completely worthless anymore.

Most premade tilesets include everything that needs to be done to make the tileset work, as that is a fairly extensive project on its own. To make a tileset work properly from scratch, you would have to make or acquire the art, then modify most of the creature and material raw files to tell each of them individually which tile to use, then do some init setting changes. The game client in the tilesetted folder will just refer to all of the modified files by default; if you wanted to use your "original" download, you'd have to copy the dwarf fortress/data and dwarf fortress/raw folders from the Mayday one to the original one, but that would just turn the original one into the Mayday one.

The Mayday version probably has no sound because of the init setting changes. Go into dwarf fortress/data/init and find the init.txt file. Open it, look for a line that says [SOUND:NO] and change it to [SOUND:YES]. It should be very close to the top.

The current version of Dwarf Therapist's forum thread is here. To get it to run, you just load up your Dwarf Fortress game, then open the Dwarf Therapist client in a different window. It doesn't really "go into" the game, it just reads Dwarf Fortress's memory as it happens and alters it as you tell it to, so you'll have to either play Dwarf Fortress windowed or minimize it when you want to use Therapist.

I see the problem. Lignite is a form of coal; when smelted, it turns into 2 bars of coke, a form of fuel exactly like charcoal. You appear to be mistaking that coke for iron, so you essentially have charcoal, more differenter charcoal (coke), and pig iron, but no iron. Those dark-colored bars the weaponsmith is dragging to the forge are almost certainly charcoal or coke, not iron (they look identical).

Pig iron is useful only for making steel, so if you made that instead of buying it, you wasted some iron you did have. Iron ores in vanilla include magnetite (if present, it will probably be your main iron source as it comes in huge amounts), limonite, and hematite. People will also refer, tongue-in-cheek, to "goblinite," which simply refers to melting down the iron equipment that goblins bring when they die assaulting your fort to use as an iron source. In many forts, goblinite is actually the main iron source.

I'm not sure if Genesis includes any other iron ores, as I don't play it.

If you don't have a W by the goblins, you're not actually at war with them; they just try to kill you because they're jerks.

If you actually happen to be at war with the local goblin civ, then they'll send more and larger ambushes and sieges earlier, but due to their [BABYSNATCHER] tag, they're hostile even to people that they aren't at war with.

I've noticed that connecting levers to cages uses 2 mechanisms, but only returns one after the cage is opened. Can someone confirm this?

It takes 2 mechanisms to link a trigger to a building because it takes 1 on the lever-end and 1 on the building-end. When you pull a lever linked to a cage, it deconstructs the cage building, thus releasing all of the materials used to build it, namely the cage and mechanism. The mechanism for that linkage on the lever, however, doesn't get pulled off of the lever. You can recover both mechanisms (as well as the one used to actually build the lever) by deconstructing the lever. This is, of course, impractical if the lever was linked to anything else, but if you built the lever just for that cage, it's not that big a deal.