Bay 12 Games Forum

I got my military mayor to talk to the diplomat.  I had to delete the barracks and do a lot of "station here", "cancel orders" before he'd get the hint.

I've got some forgotten beast extract trouble that's making my fort a mess.  It doesn't seem too harmful; it causes injuries but they heal quickly, but lots of vomiting.  Children and pets seem especially susceptible.  I've tried drastic measures like throwing infected animals into the garbage masher and making all dwarves do nothing but clean for awhile, but it keeps coming back.  The vomit just makes more area to clean and they won't prioritize taking care of the source first.  I'm trying a large shower room to get the dwarves clean so hopefully they'll stop tracking it around.

An herbalist that's been resting since the early days of the fort got possessed and managed to drag himself down to the workshops.  I thought it might help him recover, but he asked for shells.  So he's just trading being stuck in the hospital for being stuck in the craftsdwarf's workshop maddwarf's asylum.

Also had some more forgotten beasts that just wouldn't die, so I had to wall off the caverns.  There's an ash blob (with a shell! I want it!) and some other thing that seems to have wandered off the map.  I've got a ring of granite walls around one of the caverns so they can still harvest tunnel tubes and whatnot.  The militia commander held the beast off until the drawbridge in the wall was ready and then ran for it.  The second cavern I gave up on entirely and sealed it with a wall of silver.  Now maybe cavern critters will stop trashing my magma smelters.

I haven't been able to get any baron, but I got my throne room with decorated adamantine throne and royal chambers ready anyway.  The political system must be confusing.  Three mayors, one of which is also the captain of the guard.  No king, but with the adamantine extractor using the throne room and living in the royal bedroom until a king appears.  At least the mayors are easy to please.  They only ask for catapult parts and bucklers.  Except for one mandate that I missed somehow and an engineer got thrown in prison.  He managed to last until the day he was released, and then died of thirst on top of the beer barrel.

I got a bunch of migrants.  Two of them were hunters, and both came wearing one of their boots and hauling the other one.  They're talented and high master ambushers, so it must be some kind of advanced one-footed sneaking technique.

So one miner bravely stayed behind to flood out the fort.  As she just barely made it past the goblins, limping slowly due to a leg injury, and slammed shut the door with the water only seconds away, I noticed there were only two goblins left, who quickly became bored and wandered off the map.  Now the Dwarves are struggling to set up a colony in the underground, starving, boozeless, going mad one by one while being accosted by troglodytes all for nothing. 

Oh well, at least it'll make an interesting story for the new migrants who just showed up, if they can find a way past the aquifer.  The original fort seems to be one of the few places were it was possible to get through it to the rock.  And the giant toad that just showed up in their tunnel doesn't kill them.

Maybe something like this:
- All coins produced are initially owned by the fortress/player.
- Instead of being paid by the job, dwarves have a fixed amount of pay they get every season.  They take this from the fortress stockpiles.  If they don't get any they get unhappy and work slower.  Maybe the player can decide which jobs get priority in case of no money in the bank.
- For transactions between dwarves like rent and shopping the coins are transferred automatically to limit coin-moving tasks.  It can just get zapped from one dwarfs's room chest to another's.  Maybe they can be treated as one object like "Urist's coin hoard" that changes in value when coins are taken/removed from it.  Coins are only physically moved around for transferring wealth from the fortress to the dwarves, or the dwarves to the fortress (through the tax collector).
- With the economy active you can trade goods for money instead of just bartering.  Maybe elves wouldn't have coins, but humans and dwarves would.

I think this could be good because with seasonal pay you wouldn't have to worry about whether your mechanic is going broke because they don't have enough jobs, and grind out a bunch of mechanisms you don't need, or something like that.  Food-making jobs are easily automateable, but ones that use rare materials or uncommon tasks are harder.  If you have a mechanic that rarely gets work you'd only be hurting yourself, but it'd be your choice to determine how many you want to pay for; you'd just have to do the overall task of bringing in enough wealth through mining or trading.

I like the idea of having coins around because a big coin vault deep in the fortress, heavily trapped and guarded seems like something a dwarven fortress would have.  And you could have things like dwarven thieves raiding another's coin pile when there's not enough guards or fortress morale is bad.  Or more skilled kobolds coming later in the game that can make it past the entrance and down to the secondary defenses around the valuables.

I'm pumping the magma into a reservoir on the surface.  I figure if I need to stop the magma I can just shut the pumps off.  After I pour it out on the next siege and the gates melt, then I'll put the bauxite replacements in.

And I just noticed a some messy carpenter left a pile of logs on top of the highest pump.  Hopefully that won't catch fire and spread to the windmills or something.

Yeah, I haven't played other games much since I found Dwarf Fortress a few weeks ago.  I've still got my unfinished save of Dragon Age, which is currently in the Dwarf Fortress.