Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm going to resurrect up this old thread in order to share a little bit. Having spent my evening wrestling with uniforms, I thought I'd share what I've learned. Hopefully at least some of it is correct. A little bit.

First of all, the wiki's page on armor is quite helpful … once you acquire the patience to actually read the thing. The way the game handles worn items is apparently hellishly complex. The first and biggest gotcha that's hidden in there is this: Dwarves cannot wear chain leggings and greaves together. I'm fairly sure this is a change from 40d, or maybe I'm just an idiot.

Point the second: Apparently dwarves will not pick up equipment that isn't in a stockpile. Because I did some shuffling of storage, I ended up with some bins full of steel caps that were just sitting around, not inside a stockpile. None of my dwarves would equip the caps. It wasn't until I made a stockpile for them, and they were moved to that stockpile, that the dwarves noticed that they were available.

Point the third: While in principle you can layer armor pretty elaborately, in practice it seems not to work out perfectly every time. For instance, I've told all my dwarves in my hero squads to wear the following, with the "replace clothing" option turned on:

Leather shirt
Steel mail shirt
Steel breastplate
Leather cloak

Steel cap
Steel helm
Leather hood

Silk loincloth
Leather trousers
Steel greaves

Leather gloves
Steel gauntlets
Silk mittens

Silk socks
Leather shoes
Steel high boots

All of this works … in principle. Some of my dwarves do, in fact, find and put on all these things, in the right order. But some seem to get confused. I have quite a few dwarves who are wearing one sock, or both socks but only one boot, or a boot on one foot and a shoe on the other … whatever.

I haven't figured out yet if there's any rhyme or reason to it. I thought at first it might have to do with sheer bulk; maybe my smaller dwarves aren't capable of putting on all of that at once? Then I got the feeling it might boil down to preferences; maybe some of my dwarves just hate silk.

I'm going to continue to fiddle with it, because I'm so OCD it hurts.

I can't hang with this crowd, but in the most recent goblin/ogre siege of Certaintomb I saw a little something neat. A hammerdwarf armed with a silver war hammer one-shotted a goblin, hitting it in the head, fracturing the skull and pushing the skull into the brain. This was, of course, instantly fatal to the goblin, but the neat part is this: The hammer became stuck. She hit the goblin in the head with her hammer so hard the hammer got stuck in the goblin's skull.

Of course I was tempted to nickname her Maxwell … but she's already got like four names already, and that'd just be showing off.

It's a reasonable question in Dwarf Fortress, yeah. 

I don't see anything relevant in the logs. As an experiment, I just created an outdoor burrow and restricted the whole fortress to it. A couple of the dwarves who came out left amazing streaks of pus wherever they went. I checked their inventory, and in addition to their all-over water covering (from walking through the wading pool at the entrance) they were also covered with "a spatter of so-n-so's dwarf pus," including in places like the liver and the lungs. I followed one in particular back inside, and he kept his pus but didn't track it anywhere, possibly because spatter-spread is off by default in the config file and I haven't turned it on.

So it seems maybe a few of my dwarves do have a disease of some kind, but none of them seem impaired, and they're not listed in the health screen as having an infection. And this has been going on for about four years, in-game, so it hardly seems life-threatening.

Any suggestions? Or should I just ignore it?

Okay. Seriously. Seriously.

Just as I thought I was starting to get a handle on the ebola outbreak in my fortress — population down to 74 from 90, including two offenders who were punched to death by fortress guards when the jail filled up, but moods were stabilizing and nobody had exploded in a shower of gore in nearly a month — the game crashed.

The game. Crashed.

I'm not a proud man. I will savescum with the best of them. But I prefer it to be my choice, thanks.

At least I do seasonal autosaves. Thought I can't remember exactly when the last season-break happened. Was it before or after the uninvited guest that started the whole thing? I don't recall. I'm a little scared to re-open the game. I'm not sure I can handle seeing my fort fall into chaos a second time.

Is there any chance you strapped pieces of buttered toast to your cats' backs and then, like, forgot about it?

I attempted to mod my dwarves to heal from nerve damage. I've got a dwarf in hospital now with "ability to stand lost" and "motor nerve damage" from a severed nerve in the left foot.

He's been there a year. I decided that I didn't have the patience to wait for the healing to happen — if I even modded them right! — and locked him in his hospital room to starve. The resulting tantrum spiral brought down my fort so … well, yes. I savescummed back to the start of the season. Because I'll be damned if Little Spanky McBedRidden is going to be the catalyst for doom. Again.

Last time I cage trapped a giant, I built the cage into a niche outside my dinging room and walled it up.

For the love of God, Montressor Urist!

One of my hammerdwarves just clocked a goblin ambusher so hard his back tooth came out, sailed over the wall surrounding the garden and landed with a bloody plop right in the middle of my sun berry patch.

I love this game.