Bay 12 Games Forum

People in general probably think it doesn't work for the same reason I thought it didn't work. They read the forums, see someone who claims it doesn't work, see other people (who are also working off hearsay) claim that it doesn't work, then think, "Oh, it doesn't work," and the mistake enters the common wisdom of the community.

There's someone who has a quote about the wiki reflecting passive memes and rumor rather than true Dwarven Science in their signature... It would appear that this is one case where that signature is all-too-correct.

I'm glad you tested that for me, since I'm pretty sure I've never done it myself  I thought I had seen someone sometime say that their wells didn't work when the top level wasn't deep enough, and other people chiming in to say that that never worked, which is why I said that. I was going to go test it myself, but don't have an active fort at the moment so it was going to take a while.

Anvils are classed as furniture, thus they will be stored in an appropriate furniture stockpile. However, each piece of furniture takes a full stockpile square, so if there is something on each square of your everything stockpile already (rocks especially) the anvil won't be stored.

Platinum nuggets are similar, except that they are classed as stone, specifically metal ore. Like furniture and wood logs, each stone takes up a full stockpile square.

You can't build back natural stone walls, but you can construct walls (b-C-w) in their place that look very similar unless they original stone is engraved. As a more advanced technique, if you can put magma and water in the same square both will disappear and leave a wall of "natural" obsidian in their place.

Bauxite isn't technically an ore, and in vanilla there isn't a good way to do that. For true ores and other economic stones, if you go into the z-status menu's stone list it'll list all of the ores and economic stones, most of which will be in red. If you scroll to one and hit enter, it will become green, allowing its use for construction. Hitting enter again turns it off. Unfortunately, most types of stone are not economic and are not on this list, so they can't be switched on and off.

There is a mod, however, that does make every stone economic by creating a custom reaction that uses every stone. I unfortunately keep losing my link to it so I don't have it myself, but it also usually requires a regen unless you can figure out how to mod an existing reaction (not hard, just have to know where to look and how). It isn't a perfect solution, either, since it's still all-or-nothing as far as uses for most stone goes, but is better than nothing sometimes.

Only the top level of water is counted for wells' activity. So, in your diagram there, the well wouldn't function due to having only 2/7 water beneath it.

the [ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_KILL:ACCEPTABLE] tag added to the entry of dwarves (under 'mountain') in entity_default in the raws folder will allow your dwarves to butcher intelligent enemies they kill, and [ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER:ACCEPTABLE] will just let them butcher whoever they please.

No it doesn't. I've been playing cats for the past couple of months, who have those ethics, and cannot butcher sapients.

Oh, thank you NecroRebel. That sums it up well. I'll just have to embark somewhere with a lot of fish and meat. And, [BONECARN] tag makes them eat bones? That's what it looks like you wrote.

I've never tried [BONECARN] creatures myself, but from what I hear, such creatures will indeed occasionally decide to eat a bone/stack of bones instead of "real" food. Apparently they'll also occasionally choke on it, so you might want to switch it to just [CARNIVORE] instead.

You'll have to learn how to manage livestock if you're going to play a carnivorous race, though. A couple of pieces of advice: first, meals are edible if they have even one edible part in them, so while your goblins won't eat roasts made from 4 tallow or plant products, even 1 meat used as an ingredient makes it edible. This means that you can stretch your food supplies by setting render fat and cook easy meals on repeat and having no stockpiles that accept tallow; your cook will take a fat, render it into tallow, then use that tallow and another ingredient (meat, hopefully) in the meal, which essentially just makes the tallow edible.

Second, embark with at least one breeding pair of large livestock animals if you can. Camels are the best common domestic animals, followed by cows and muskoxen, then horses, donkeys, dogs, and cats. If you can get your hands on a breeding pair of grizzly or polar bears, they're even better, though black bears are also quite good. Other creatures don't mature as quickly, so they're less reliable for making a suitable herd, are smaller so don't yield as much food, have a lower modvalue so are less valuable, or don't breed.

So, Kobolds are still hostile as well?

Yep; they're normally hostile due to [ITEM_THIEF], while goblins are normally hostile due to [BABYSNATCHER]. All creatures with [ITEM_THIEF] are enemies to all creatures without it, and [BABYSNATCHER] is the same, so everything will be hostile to you.



Edit: Generally, modding code can be added anywhere in the relevant entry. The only exception is things that overrule one another, in which case only the last one works. However, relatively few tags overrule another tag, so that's usually not an issue.

You should be able to... Wait, no. Holy crap, that's why goblins don't ride beak dogs anymore! Huh. Well, that's not really part of your question. Anyway, you'll have to add [PET] to Beak Dogs in addition to the other stuff sunshaker mentioned. That'll let you buy them at embark for 26 each, or 51 for war/hunting beak dogs if you add [trAINABLE].

Agreed with Sphalerite; you're going to have to cut down one of the walls on some level and replace it with the impassible tile of another pump such that that dummy pump tries to draw fluid out of a floor, thus making it active but useless.

You don't need gears for power transfer as such; on a power-for-square basis on horizontal transfer, more dummy pumps are just as efficient and it's easier, given that you have glassmaking, to get magma-safe pumps than magma-safe mechanisms.

@Sphalerite: The intake of all of the levels' pumps is through the central tile, and the output then fills the whole level, including the input of the next level up. It's an unorthodox and less space-efficient pump stack than the standard, but I can see how it works.