Bay 12 Games Forum

I recently embarked on the side of the mountain and dug down to the third cavern area, where there was a Curious Structure jampacked with the zombiefied versions of various underground half-man creatures. Immediately after I got the message of having discovered the thing, they promptly mobbed and tore apart some Plump Helmetmen before gradually wandering off the top of the map. There were nearly a hundred; now there are five. The place is a ghost town. Where are they going? Why? Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Incidentally, there was also an issue where an underground lake was flooding an adjacent area that wasn't supposed to be a lake bed, but I fixed that with Dwarven Engineering and casualties.

I had a female dwarf with two entire pages of cousins. Apparently her grandparents had no less then ten kids. And her great-grandfather was apparently some sort of priest (with thirteen children) who got turned into a vampire after defiling a temple and has now murdered 122 victims and continues to kill into the time of his great-granddaughter. His wife became a general, leading her people in numerous battles against the Unwelcome Hex of The Hell of Counselling before succumbing to old age. It just keeps getting more awesome the more I read it.

There could be a limit of how many holidays there are in a year and/or have some be major or minor. We've got Christmas, New Years, and President's Day, but we don't celebrate them to the same extent. Maybe the smaller ones give a Happy Thought if the Dwarf is able to celebrate them and nothing if not and the larger, more important ones give Unhappy Thoughts if the Dwarf can't.

Alternatively, there could be events that are only comemorated some years. A great Dragonslaying might only really get attention once every ten years or on particularly round anniversary.

In any event, it ought be possible to cancel or postpone festivities in case of Siege or whatever. There also ought to be a way to see what holidays are coming up so that appropriate materials can be provided for the celebration.

Also, the player should be more involved and not just have holidays happen. You could look up legendary figures and create a celebration in honor of their achievements on the anniversary of when they happened. It'd be neat to have a big feast in honor of your own fort lasting ten years or drink to the memory of your last fort being obliterated.

Also, fish have always been and still are deadly. Except now they're not apocalyptic :p

Speak for yourself. I just had a fort wiped out by a school of Zombie Bluefin Tuna. They cleared out thirty dwarves in five minutes.

I've gone back and forth between having 5x6 mass grave rooms (because you can fill them with a single max-sized order!) and long passageways with nooks every other square for coffins. I tend to like having enough empty coffins for the entire fort so that the dead can buried and not stink up the place and/or inspire rage in friends and relatives. I usually keep a "graveyard" room conveniently nearby for limbs that predecease their owners.

Farming ought to require more labor. Right now, a tiny patch can feed a whole fort. There ought to be some labor-intensive preparing that turns mass raw food stuffs into edible meals.

Maybe a dozen plump helmets need to purified and processed to make mushroom paste. Maybe ten sheaves of wheat need to be ground down down to make a loaf of bread. These kinds of reactions would require both that larger areas are set aside for framing and that it can't all be done by one to three dwarves.

It'll look like this:
[REACTION:ENCRUST_ARMOR]
[NAME:encrust armor]
[BUILDING:CRAFTSMAN:CUSTOM_A]

[REAGENT:gem:1:SMALLGEM:NONE:NONE:NONE]
[REAGENT:armor:1:ARMOR:NONE:NONE:NONE][NOT_IMPROVED][PRESERVE_REAGENT]

[IMPROVEMENT:100:armor:COVERED:GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:gem:NONE]

[SKILL:ENCRUSTGEM]
Replace ARMOR with WEAPON or HELM or SHOES to encrust things besides bodywear.