Bay 12 Games Forum

I played a fortress last night in the new version as was able to get it up to about 30 dwarves before three ambushes took me by suprise. No slow down problems. Playing adventurer today, and when I hit a castle zone I am able to take about one in-game step every 5-10 real life seconds. Haven't played adventurer much - is it that much more computer intensive or are castles just full of stuff to move around and keep track of?
Anyone else having massive lag in specific areas?
Also had a CTD while exploring the fort I abandoned, but I was doing lots of other stuff on the computer at the time so there's no science there.

Glass is a little incorrect in DF.

Window glass (aka "clear glass") is not made from sand and pearlash.
It is made from sand and a clarifying mineral. In the case of window glass, this is usually calcium carbonate. Alternatives include selenium, and manganese oxide.

All the pearlash would do is help with the melt.

In addition to green, and clear glasses, other noteworthy glass formulations that have bee available since antiquity are blue, red, yellow, brown, purple, and orange. Some being vastly more toxic than others.

For instance, red glass was extrmemely expensive, because it is made with fumed gold as the colorant. It is however, quite dinnerware safe.

Orange is flat out toxic, being made from cadmium sulfide.

Yellow has many possible sources, the best being selenium and cadmium.

Green has 2 flavors: iron, the most common impurity that makes green bottleglass green, and chromium, which produces a very intense, powerful emerald green.

Blue can come as "aqua" type, made from copper oxide impurity, or "ultramarine", made from cobalt oxide.

Purple comes from manganese.

Brown comes from iron in an oxidation environment. (Green from reduction.)

The most common clarifier used to decolorize window glass in the roman up to the victorian era was manganese. In trace amounts the manganese forms colorless complexes with the trace iron impurities commonly found in sand, removing the green color. Depending on the degree of iron contamination, potentially large amounts of manganese are needed. This distinctive formulation of glass turns purple under exposure to UV light, such as sunlight, very very slowly over the course of many decades. Selenium is more forgiving, and turns a dull straw yellow to dingy light brown instead when large quantities are present.

Creation of opaque glasses requires antimony trioxide, or some other opacifier.

Given the supplies available in df, the following colors of glass should be available:

Iron green (bottle glass)
Ultramarine blue (cobaltite)
Deep red (gold fume)
Aqua blue (copper)
Brown (iron, oxidation env.)
Clear (with flux stone)
Glow in the dark "vaseline" (uranium from pitchblende)

However, I doubt that toady will risk even more bugs in the glassmaking system by creating all those variants.

Thanks for taking the time to write all this out. You must know your stuff.
So where do the kitten leather bags figure into the process? You didn't mention that.

My friend and I were talking about newer Mercedes diesel engines, and part of their efficiency is urea injection. Don't really know what that means, but it got us to talking about ways to inject urea, and he suggested storing a cat in the glove box, and my first thought was that will totally work, cats won't starve to death in a cage!

DF has sent a party of seven to my brain.

In my experience they won't come up to the surface unless that is the only clear path to your fortress.

What I tend to do when my forts are mature and I have access to magma is to mass dump all my buckets when I get job cancellation spam, and remake a ton of them with a cheap metal like lead or copper. far less micromanagement and ensures that I don't get help up from making soap. I have also had good luck with making prisons into baddass hotels - a 3x9 or 6x12 etc room with a chain in the middle of a 9x9 floor area, bed to one side, and 'stripes' of food stockpiles the length of the room. One has only drinks, the other has only prepared meals. Engrave the walls and put expensive statues in the room. The 'prisoners' will be happy with all the company from people coming to drink, the value of the room, the bed and all the food they can eat. Seems like overkill but I would rather lose a dwarf to a hilarious accident or spontaneous dismemberment than to dehydration because you can't alter the priority of jobs, especially when your nobles are demanding items you can't produce. Think of it as the revenge of the working class.

it's like the one about the ant and the grasshopper. the ant works hard all summer while the grasshopper lounges. then winter comes and the grasshopper starves because he doesn't have any food.

except in DF, the dwarves (ants) work really hard to prepare for the hard times, and then when things get hard the grasshopper comes to your fort begging for amulets and spews mucus all over that melts the feet off your dwarves and the grasshopper gets to live the rest of its life on a pile of dwarven skulls.

pretty sure that's in aesop's fables somewhere.

Do all dwarves automaticly change their equipment if there is better one available? For example a dwarf wielding bronze pickaxe will automaticly swap it to steel pickaxe if there is one available? If no, how can I do it?

To be sure I'll ask - if my dwarfs have "no scheduled order" in some month, they will be doing their stuff or still sit in barracks or train?

Also, I still see only one dwarf training and the others sitting in barracks. At least their happiness changed xD

Last question, because wiki didn't anwser me

How do I get rid of flies or stop them from spawning in my meeting hall (on food stores)

I guess caging goblins and letting your soldiers train on them (by releasing them from cages or so) will work way better than letting your soldiers train on archery targets? xD

In the (m)ilitary screen, under (e)quip, there is an option to set the (P)riorities for squad equipment. Generally fortress guard, then militia commander's squad, then the other squads in descending order pick their equipment. You can change that - for example, if you guard squad are all marksdwarves because beating criminals with wooden crossbows hurts less, they will pick the best armour, and you don't need your marksdwarves to have all the best steel boots and gauntlets. It seems to me that all dwarves are constantly trying to pick up the best equipment they are allowed, so if you are working on steel stuff for them, the squad with the best priority will pick up the new pieces as they are made, the next member of the squad picking up what they dropped, so on down the list of squads so your last recruit in your last squad is wearing a copper mail shirt, a silk thong and nothing else until goblin christmas comes along. For miners it doesn't matter what their pick is made of, and I have never noticed them switching.

Dwarves with no scheduled order will train sometimes and do their civilian labors sometimes. I remember seeing somewhere that when they are skilled enough dwarves will stop doing civilian labors and just train all the time, but I have nothing to back that up.

If only one dwarf is training, check the (s)chedule screen, (e)dit orders, and use -/+ to adjust the number of squad members training at any one time. Active dwarves will also walk around filling their backpacks, filling waterskins, picking up equipment and sleeping, so you may have to check on each one individually to see what their up to. If you are (v)iewing a dwarf and it says 'Soldier (cannot follow orders)' where it usually says a dwarf's current labor, there is an issue with alerts, schedules, orders or barracks. Often happens with marksdwarf squads if they don't have an armor stand, weapon rack or cabinet designated as a barracks.

No idea how to get rid of flies. I have noticed that having lots of cats tend to reduce the amount of flies I have indoors, so it may be that flies are attracted by vermin. You can't see vermin but they do have an effect which is why risking a catsplosion  is usually a good idea.

Marksdwarves train way faster shooting live targets than archery targets. It can be difficult to manage their ammunition, and if half of the squad is out of ammo and you order them to kill a target, the ammo-less squad members will try to path to the goblins to bash them with the butts of the xbows. You can build a pit with no way out surrounded by fortifications and pit the gobs into it.