Bay 12 Games Forum

I did give the dwarves a beautifully designed burial grounds in 40d, always at the bottom z-level of the map. This is screwed up now because of the caverns and magma sea, and so I started to desecrate the remains instead.

As in: I've started to atomsmash dwarven corpses by now (to get rid of the skeleton objects and their formerly belongings), but the dead will get a coffin, sooner or later. Rather later than sooner though.

What I enjoyed best was to place those coffins at the sides of the entrance of the fortress. This provided a cheerful mood for all those caravans that entered the fortress, I imagined.

I'm still on 40d because I keep reading about all of the bugs/crashes/etc. on the new version.  But at the same time, I really want to see some of the cool things like the forgotten beasts...

Which bugs are still annoying in the current version (I hear that I can't have bone/shell specific stockpiles, for example) and how are people working around them?
I consider the military interface as a bug (you need to have a PhD in Dwarf Fortress to use it). My workaround is defense with traps.

Most of the other bugs, like the insanely oversized immigration waves, or the insanely breed-active cats and other household pests, you can eliminate with some modding.

The bone/shell stockpiles are not that much of an issue, really, but that may be because I am using a crematorium mod to get rid of the vermin remains and have modded some of the other refuse types so that they can actually be used.


Are dwarves still getting covered in 20 pages of historic blood splatters that never get cleaned up?

No. The dwarves are clean, but once their starting clothes have rotted away, they'll be stark naked and never don any new clothes.

The ground, however, will be covered in layers of historic blood, pus, ooze slime and other things. That never seems to go away anymore.


If I play the same kinds of forts as before (200+ dwarves), will my FPS be better or worse than it is on 40d?

If you keep the embark as tiny as possible (2x2), then you should be fine with those 200 dwarves, I guess. I've never done that myself, though.


Do you have to use a trap hall to manage goblin sieges?  I've heard that crossbows are weak and goblins are strong now... but maybe it depends on whether you have steel-clad wrestlers (or whatever the best fighters are right now).

I do that, but I also used the same defense technique in 40d.


And I don't know how healthcare works at all outside of random reports like someone with a broken thumb having it sutured 80 times to no avail.

Yes, healthcare can be problematic. Mostly because the skills of the doctors rust away in all those years without any injuries, and then they're all noobing over those broken thumbs.


And I'm not sure if channeling out magma requires a sacrificial victim or not due to the removal of channeling as I know it.

No sacrificial victims necessary for the magma plumbing.


So what are the main problems people have in the new version and how manageable are they?  I mean, 40d still has plenty of problems, but I already know how to handle most of the ones that matter to me.

My main problems are still the same as in 40d:
- population explosion
- kitten explosion
- other pet explosion
- stockpiles filling up too rapidly

New are:
- goblin corpses can't be crafted into bone bolts immediately, not without some modding
- forgotten beast "explosion"
- all volcano pipes look identical
- phantom aquifer sand on ocean biomes. Lets say that the embark screen told me that the ocean would have a sand layer on top, being an aquifer. However, I am looking at a beach made of basalt, no sand to be seen at all.
- nudist dwarves. I liked to produce pants and shirts for the dwarves.
- skills rusting
- attributes decaying
- it's extremely likely that civilizations become extinct during worldgen now.
- subterranean farming requires mud = some minor irrigation activities before you can get your first plump helmet farm. This makes glacier/tundras so much more interesting to embark on
- arctic sea tends to be made of solid ice
- no towercap/fungiwood/etcs will grow voluntarily below a (frozen) ocean, no matter how deep down below that ocean your new towercapfarm is.
- desalination of water is extremely buggy now. Sometimes, pumping cleans the water, sometimes not. But no matter, they are drinking that salty water anyway, provided that it comes from a well.

Actually I haven't had any human or dwarven caravans either so that might have something to do with it.

Your civilization is extinct, and your fortress and those 11 immigrants are the last dwarves of the world. If you press "c" and look at your civilization, you'll see that you don't have any leaders at all.

The humans may still be alive, only late.


If I wanted to have 30 dwarves, I wouldn't set the cap to 30.

I would set it to 1 for the first year, then check out how many little buggers arrived in the 1st year (probably enough to increase my population above 20 already), and then set it to "<current population> + 1", if I actually wanted more immigrants.

As long as it isn't a biome without any shrubs or trees and as long as it does have some sort of drinkable water source on the surface, you'll be fine if you embark with 1 copper nugget, and perhaps some rocks for convenience.

If that doesn't strike your fancy or you just have to embark on that glacier with some ocean tiles nearby, then bring some food, some drinks, some wood, maybe a pickaxe instead of the copper nugget, and some rocks perhaps.

A couple of cows is also never really wrong to have, and perhaps one tomcat kitten or so.



Don't forget to give the dwarf that you like best one point in Appraisal so that she will be the expedition leader though, instead of Urist McFatsoIdiot who was a bit higher on the list of the initial 7.

Yes, and it happens with doors, floodgates, and the other objects to which you might want to link to as well.

The bug isn't that it's actually linking to you what it did show you in the end - the bug is that the camera doesn't switch properly to the objects in question when you're selecting your bridge/door from that long list.

The list displays stuff in building order - oldest bridges at the top, youngest at the bottom. Try to remember in which order you've built them or just build your setup slowly and always select the bottom-most for the time being.

This isn't related to savagery. Sometimes, the civilizations just go extinct. It's because there are titans roaming around and occasionally slaughtering entire villages, and because the villages of the different species do wars against each other. It seems to be more likely on smaller worlds than on huge worlds though, with pocket regions/islands being the worst.

What you should do, if you're not too keen on playing "the last dwarves of the world", is to closely watch the map that your world generation gives you. If you see an omega symbol, then you're fine and the dwarves are still alive and kicking. If you instead see a bunch of mu ( µ ), then just roll a new world.



What I find weird in the story of the OP is that the elves arrived in autumn instead of spring. That's unusual and at first I thought that perhaps the elves might've taken over all the leader roles of your civilization, while staying true to their treehugging native personality. That would've been weird, because they're normally adapting to the philosophy of the host species.

Have you locked them out of your fortress when you closed the entrance?