Bay 12 Games Forum

Can towercaps grow when there is stone on the tile.

That's a negative, they cannot.  You've got to clear it all out.  If you don't want the work, dig out the TC farm area in soil or sand.  If you don't have any of that, you can use any of the techniques on this page:
http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Stone_management

I tend to build a few drawbridges and use them for atom-smashing.  If I'm near a pit of some sort (magma pipe, chasm, bottomless pit) I might chuck them down there instead, depending on dwarfpower and distance.


My own question
How the heck do I make a hyperlink in my post?  A word that can be clicked instead of a URL.

From the wiki:

A healthy adult dwarf consumes approximately 18 units of drink per year

For more information.
http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Drink#Consumption

@silhouette
There was zero wood on my map.  It all initially came with me from embark or from traders.  This is the fortress in which I had lost 25 dwarves by the time my population was 50.  Most of those were related to lack of wood.  There was a bit of a tantrum chain (not quite a spiral) that started with a moody dwarf going berserk over not having any wood.  Everyone was already on edge,  of course, because they didn't have beds and several other dwarves had gone insane already for not having wood.

To make life even better, while digging my tower cap farm I

Somehow, I survived all that to get to work on the tower that will look oh-so-dramatic against that mountainous background.

Thanks, silhouette.

I had thought about doing that as well, but it's a bit late for that batch of females.

Not that I'm too worried about using them for the military.  I'm playing vanilla DF and the goblins aren't a threat to my fortress.  If I didn't want to, I'd never have to go outside again.  I've got a huge underground tower cap farm (100x200) and am working on a megatower.  I'll be posting VF pictures of it eventually.

Edit.
For the help, have a preview.

In addition to everything in the FPS article, try to keep your fortress space compact.  If dwarves have to trek halfway across even a 4x4 world on a regular basis, you're going to take a hit.  Take the extra time that first year to found your fortress where you want to build.

This is the only reason that I use reveal.exe.  The wiki utilities page can tell you how to get and use it.  Very useful when I want to embark on an underground river or magma pipe, but don't want to spend years trying to find it, especially when it could turn out that I need to move my entire fortress to increase FPS.

Don't make huge rooms unless you use d-o to create high traffic lanes.

If you want an underground river, dam it up right away and don't let the cave creatures breed out of control.  Killing them off and damming the river helps immensely.  (To dam an underground river, collapse a ceiling of the exact right size into the water.)

If you want magma, turn off temperature.  Sure, it's cool to toast enemies with it, but if you're having FPS problems you shouldn't be pumping it much anyway.  You can still use it to process goblin gear.  Just save, turn on temperature, reload for a couple minutes, then save and turn temperature back off.

Animals are fine to keep caged as long as you're not breeding them.  1x1 pits let them keep breeding, but whenever you butcher you'll probably let them out inadvertently.  Try putting the pit in a room with your butcher's workshop.  Let the butcher go in to do his work, and lock the door behind him.  That will help him work faster and not have to go chasing animals halfway across the map.

When you do exploratory mining, arrange the shafts so you can wall them off later.  That way you don't have dwarves and pets pathing down there uselessly.

Force caravans to enter the map at a single, nearby place.  That prevents them from pathing from the opposite map edge.

I don't find that high cliffs cause that many problems.  Nor chasms, once you clear out the creature that live there.

HFS related:

There's more, certainly, that you can do.  Most of it won't have as big an effect as turning off the temperature, using (at max) a 4x4 embark tile, keeping pathfinding short, or keeping the population low.

Edited to add more from my personal experience.  Amalgam beat me to the wiki article.

Another Edit:
If you don't mind having vermin and keep you dwarves generally happy in other ways, don't bring cats.  If dwarves bring male cats, fine.  If they bring female cats, arrange an accident for the feline friend.  It's worth it for framerate.

50 living + 25 dead = 75 total dwarves.

25/75 = 1/3

It's also accurate to say that I had 1/2 as many dwarves dead as alive.  1/3 is 1/2 of the remaining 2/3s.

There are three kinds of people: Those who can count, and those who can't.

Seems to me that using a line like that is just setting yourself up to make a mistake.  But don't worry about it Kanddak, the phrasing made me for a moment when I first posted.

I'm a big fan of the six room clusters from the wiki.  They're so incredibly dense.  If you build a stack of them (42 beds per level) at the center of your fortress, dwarves never have to go very far for everyday tasks.  Best of all, my five year old computer can handle a hundred dwarves at 50 FPS.

Off to one side, alternate workshops and storage as you see fit.  To the other, put your entrance, the barracks, and another room (well, statue garden, central control lever room).  Utilize z-levels in whatever way is convenient.  On the third side, farm, putting food stockpiles and your legendary dining room in a stack above/below the farms.  On the fourth orthogonal side, place anything else that will get a lot of use.  One of my "sides" tends to be used by a magma pipe other underground feature.

Noble rooms can be placed a bit farther away, since most of them don't do anything anyway.

These are pictures from Beercastle, a succession fortress I just started with two friends.  This is after the initial year in which I basically ignored production to make as big of an initial imprint on the fortress's design as possible.


For every level of housing, you get 42 3x1 rooms.  Three levels of that are all that my 100 pop cap fortresses will ever need.  Clear out the rock and do some smoothing and they'll be "modest" to "spendid" depending on if there were any ore or jewels left in as natural walls.  Engrave them after your engraver is legendary for better results.

I need to work on my Noble housing.  The large rooms off to the right are what I use these days.  They're efficient enough, but I'm starting to want to use something a bit more imaginative.

Build half your fortress water themed.  You could make glass blocks and build underwater structures with enough engineering.  Perpetual motion machines powering waterfalls would be necessary.  Capture some live fish to place in indoor aquariums.  The other half should bristle with spikes of cast obsidian.  In fact, build a many z-level deep reservoir next to the ocean and fill it with cast obsidian, then mine half of your fort out of that.  Channel some magma all the way to the schizophrenic fortress to use in magma falls, pits, or just for decoration.

Important parts of the fortress should be right on the split - half inverted aquarium, half obsidian.  Like the entrance.  Put a big waterfall on one side, and an equally big magma fall on the other.  Perpetual motion is your friend.  The king's chamber and arena are good candidates for split rooms as well.

When you capture enemies, flip a coin.  Side x, water; side y, magma.  For something more interesting roll a four sided dice.  One, magma; 2 water; 3, arena; 4, go free.

If you haven't embarked yet, name the fortress something appropriate.  If it were me, I'd name it Sheogorath.

Those are my initial ideas, so you should take any that sound interesting and build upon them with your own.