Bay 12 Games Forum

Size is the most important thing in wrestling, then strength. Where the aggressor grabbed to wrestle is mostly irrelevant for Throw or Take Down. Giant Thrips are giant. Therefore, they are capable of throwing a dwarf hard enough to dismember him. Mind, it's actually very rare for the combat AI to decide to do a throw so you had some exceptional luck with the dice (calling it 'good' or 'bad' luck is up to you).

You need a Sheriff/Captain of the Guard to get witness reports on vampire feeding.

Quote from: robertheinrich on March 15, 2012, 07:02:37 pm

But it made me chuckle a bit after I was quite frustrated that my recent fortress was eradicated while I was trying to pierce the aquifer and my last adventurer got both his arms cut off by thieves. Sometimes it helps to know that there are people out there who waste their time witn stuff much more pointless than I do.

I smell a troll... Smells like onions and unwashed hair.

No I smell something similar but not quite troll - someone who needed a quick frustration-dump and thought this thread would do the job. Well ok, that he then spoke his thoughts pretty much makes him a troll.

Caverns have stuff happening in them regardless of whether they have been revealed or not.  In fact, revealing the caverns after 5 years or so can result in caverns that have been almost completely taken over by fungal trees and underground crop shrubs. 

Crundle packs and Giant Cave Spiders will fight it out even if you never know, as will FBs and any hidden cave civ, and there is a reason the caverns will be covered in cave spider webs when you open them for the first time. 

HFS is the only thing where nothing spawns or moves until you reveal it, and HFS produces MASSIVE lag if you reveal and then seal it. 

Hmm, I might decide to make a new world based on the fork save's raws to eliminate caverns and as much of the surface vegetation as possible.

The accessibility of space has no noticeable effect.

What exactly do you mean here? Your data dump mentioned nothing about walling off the huge swaths of empty space you dug out. If you meant what I think you mean, then I have a fort that directly counters that statement. A large area of sand was dug out to train some new miners and FPS bombed. When I installed and locked doors to seal off the dug out space, FPS recovered.

I don't think I'll be able to get to 1,000,000 objects, as the game is getting extremely laggy just trying to look at some of these workshops that have 10,000 objects in them, apiece. 

Apparently, just looking at a workshop will cause lag based upon the number of items it can be related to.

Requesting a control: dump (but don't destroy) the items that are being churned out from the workshops. Alternatively, just deconstruct the workshops and rebuild elsewhere.

Ah heck, give me a couple days and I'll try to make time to run some !!SCIENCE!! from your fork save.

It might seem like that, but here's how the math looks on paper.

For bullets :

1 wood + potash* = Potassium Nitrate
Potassium Nitrate + charcoal = gunpowder
shells/bullets (= 1 metal bar) + 1 metal bar + gunpowder = bullet/shell

* I'm assuming you're getting the ash from vermin, not wood.

So you end up using 2 wood and 2 metal for 60 shells or 100 bullets.
4 wood/metal = 100 bolts/pellets
or 1 bone -> 5 pellets/bolts

So while bolts and pellets are more intensive on one resource. Bullets and Shells take more time and resources to build. I suppose I could make the gypsum -> sulfur -> gunpowder route a little tougher, but in order to get gypsum you either need dig into hard rock, which is in the caverns most time, or an embark with little soil and hard rock right under you, so you probably deserve an easier route at that point.

Actually, you have a reaction in your Burner workshop to turn wooden planks into charcoal. Also, I'm pretty sure the game won't care whether charcoal or coke is used so with a bituminous coal vein(s) on your embark... Strictly looking only at wood pellets, the maths is:

2 fuel + potash + some metal = 100 bullets
That's 0.5 wood logs (vermin ash, plank charcoal) or 0 wood (with Bit. coal). In my fort, I needed far more ash than the 'rate of vermin income' so I was burning logs for that but that's still 1.5 logs for 100 bullets. Both our calculations have assumed the player has metal bars at hand instead of having to smelt/melt it first (which adds more charcoal demand if no Bit. coal).


Hmm, I suppose if I think of the training ammo situation as "wooden pellets if you're fuel scarce, bullets if you're wood scarce" then this makes sense. It still feels wrong though that wooden pellets aren't the clearly economic way to train rifle skill, but that's just my opinion.

A vision or goal for what this fort is "going to be."  There's really nothing else you "need" to do, other than grow your fort organically to keep up with population growth and increase defense of your hoard as it grows more appealing to covetous goblins and the like.

DF seems to play out in three stages.  First is the panic "Oh god how does Dwarf?!" stage of noobhood.  Much Fun to be had.  Second is when you've got a handle on how to feed, protect, and grow a fortress.  You're stable, and you move to megaprojects to progress your mastery over construction and large-scale efforts.  Third is science, when you start over-analyzing the details and find order among the chaos, setting out specifically "I will not build a grand tower, but I will drop 30 migrants off a bridge and record their wounds in detail."

These two points sum it up pretty much: come up with a goal now that you know how to survive. Mind, not all goals have to be architectural. Creating a squad of lashers who all wear red capes and black shirts; commemorating the key events of your fort's history with individually selected statues; having all the doors in your fort be decorated with the 3 most common materials in your fort - these are all valid project ideas. Architectural (mega)projects just happen to be the most intuitive of goals to go for as it employs lots of would-be-idlers and you have a lot of control over how it turns out.

Ugh, all this thread does is make me want to try an exclusively male (or female I guess) fortress to prevent such... petty losses.

The modding sub-forum invented sex change drugs almost as soon as DF2012 came out. With a little raw editing, you can now have a single-sex fort with no child births ever while the rest of your civ reproduces as normal.

Hmm, yes I see what you mean about digging still being too easy - I like embarking in thick soil lands in vanilla DF. This carried right through for me as I found a sand layer and just dug out huge swaths of the 'soil' to get my infrastructure up. Having all soil have the risk of having dig-interruption 'drops' sounds fair - certainly it would encourage me to look for less soil so I can get to ore faster. Though since you want players to build above ground forts, I take it there's an assumption that players will always want to embark in high vegetation (shrubs and trees) areas?

On the note of resources, have you considered putting in a reaction to make many stacks of pellets/bolts at once, just as bullets/shells come in bulk? Currently a whole log has to disappear to get 25 wooden pellets/bolts. In my last Corrosion fort I had some 30+ riflemen who went through ammo very fast on archery ranges. Building lots of air rifles or crossbows and using wooden ammo to train up rifle skill sounds like the economic way to train an army in this mod but current pellet/bolt production is very resource inefficient.

Quote from: Psieye on March 11, 2012, 10:55:06 am

By the way, is it intended that shotgun shells make for better ammo capacity? Shells are produced in stacks of 15 which means a soldier will pack 2 stacks of 15 into his quiver whereas can only fit one stack of 25 bullets. Given shotguns hit harder than rifles, doesn't that mean the only reason to use rifles is the bayonet (and if you're resource-limited)?

If I recall right people will try to get to 30 without going over, I've seen my dwarves in vanilla haul around 25 bolts plus a stack of bone bolts.

Hmm, I thought the limit was up to 40 or so, but I never checked carefully. I wish quiver sizes could be modded, individually per ammo item would be better. Alas, we are stuck with one bullet being the exact same size as a shotgun shell in quiver-space.

This is kind of a nooby question but where do you make screwdrivers and screws?

Screwdrivers get forged at a weaponsmith's forge. Screws get made at the new "blacksmith's workshop" building.