Bay 12 Games Forum

I like to use '5' for going down a z-level and '0' for going up. Makes it a lot easier to only use one key and have it right where my navigating hand is anyway. I tried once to have macros to go up/down ten levels with shift, but it never quite worked to my satisfaction.

Am I the only one who wants a sort of Dwarf Library for Fortress Mode? Like, a writing skill and all that.
The thought of a Dwarf Author is hilarious to me.

It's not terribly undoable, it's just taking some of the history that's already floating around in memory and translating it into book form. Authors could write biographies or autobiographies by going through a figure's history. They could write the history of a site, region, or group. They might feel spurred by the abduction of Foolfoot Walksabove to write a history of all the attempted abductions the fort has had with a brief overview of each of the victims. Or a list of ghost stories if you haven't been in the habit of honoring the dead in a timely manner. Or all the cool fight sequences such-and-such a squad has been in. Or an amazing masterwork steel throne might inspire them to catalog and describe all the chairs of the fort.

Most of this stuff would be pretty dry "so-and-so lived in X city and in the year 189 he moved to Y town", but artistic license - based on the author's preferences and soul attributes - could add some detail. The author could wax eloquent when one of his friends or fellow-worshippers did something awesome and clam up when it's an enemy. They could get things wrong if their Memory is low or even outright fabricate if they are a skilled Liar. The possibilities are endless!

Setup a simple minecart loop that links to a food stockpile in the cell.
   ===
   ===
<-.-S-.-S
Carts can jump single gaps as long as the tile they are being pushed from and the gap are separated by a single track tile. Alternatively, cheaty ramps work as well. The minecart is filled with food elsewhere, jumped into the cell, unloaded, and pushed back out. That way, you don't have to manually watch to make sure that there's food in the cell and all your food doesn't accidentally end up quantum heaped somewhere. Additionally, a timer can be put on the cart so that it only gets sent once a month/quarter/year instead of all the time.

Yes, it would be the detail. The sheer anal retentiveness of a game that keeps track of each individual strand of thread and pile of vomit is mind-boggling.

[quote author=SixOfSpades link=topic=130211.msg4522331But if you're envisioning an "isolation capsule," where the dwarf sees nothing but his raw materials and maybe his dinner dropped down to him, and he drops his finished works to somebody else, that's a fast road to micromanagement hell. Consider how many times haulers move things. Now consider that you would have to Dump/Unforbid every single one of those things.[/quote]
Minecarts help a lot with this if you are willing to give the dwarf a helper or let a spouse move in. Have one route for food, one for input materials, and one for output. The first brings in food to fill the pile and then pushed off after a certain number of days. The second simply drops stuff off as it whizzes by. The third arrives empty and is loaded with whatever the product is and empty barrels. The assistant's only job is hauling, freeing the crafter from wasting a single minute from their shop.

Have you tried "autounsuspend start" instead of "start autounsuspend" ?

If it says "not loaded" (after you just typed autounsuspend) that's afaik the response of the script, not the response of DFHack.

It gives out a pile of errors referencing autounsuspend.rb and ruby.rb when I try 'autounsuspend start', so I guess the fault must lie there. Since I know nothing of Ruby, I guess I'll just have to wait for someone else to fix it and do without.

I always get murdered after the first siege. This way of building doesn't provide much protection. But it's nice to know somebody else tried this too

If you're going to try this, I strongly advise a military-oriented setup.

Bring 8 Iron Ore, 30 Flux, and 38 coke in some form; probably coal or just wood or even an axe. That'll net you 30 Steel, which will make 6 breastplates and 12 shields. Make 6 of your dwarves level 10 in armor and shield and have them do nothing but train after the first minimal habitation is built. The one remaining dwarf ought to be skilled in weapon- and armor-craft. The shield skill levels up for both attacking and defending; being still allows them to hit harder (iron would serve as well). Bring enough food so that your people don't starve. You won't get anything much really done until migrants show up.

That's about it. As your military reaches legendary, split them up and have them teach apprentices, gradually growing the army.

Admittedly, casting obsidian in the sky is... kind of hard.

Not really. All you need to do is construct walls to cast the mold in, build an iron mine cart, dig down to the magma level, build a pump out of fire-proof materials and use it to fill a channel with a track through it with magma. Then you run the minecart through the channel to fill it, have it dragged up on top of the casting walls and dumped into the mold. This may need to be done more than once. Then a dwarf (or dwarves) can put water on top of that, after which the cast can be deconstructed, allowing the obsidian chunk to fall into the hole and reconstitute itself as the proper material.