Bay 12 Games Forum

Even a one-steel-disc trap will take many enemies out of the fight, as long as both the disc and the mechanism are high quality so that you maximize the chances of three armor-penetrating hits.  By spreading your discs out amongst multiple traps you can also lessen the problem of trap reset time.  Facing a siege, I'd far rather have e.g. three consecutive single-disc traps than one three-disc trap.  Otherwise gobbo #1 gets chopped to pieces, gobbos #2 and #3 waltz over the resetting trap, gobbo #4 gets chopped to pieces, etc.  If you're up against something like elephants, then add giant axes as a last line of defense - I've seen an elephant make it past two steel disc traps, sliced to ribbons but still moving, only for a giant axe blade to chop it in half

Note this was back in .03; the issue then was that partial skeletons did not rot into bones or skulls and could not be butchered/broken into constituent parts, which is bypassed when killing them via tower because of the kind of corpse it leaves (one that rots into bones instead of partial skeleton). In theory this should work in .06 as well, but I have not had an opportunity to try it yet.

It definitely works in .06 as well, at least for a game upgraded from .05.  From the many goblin remains in my refuse pile, two finally decayed down to just piles of (named) bones.  My bone-carver was happy to make goblin bone crafts out of these.  These were goblins killed in regular combat, although most of them were in pieces thanks to my axedwarves.

To irrigate with buckets, you typically need two z-levels, so that you can dig out an irrigation room above and a farm room below.  Channel out a few holes in the floor of the irrigation room, and make as many buckets (I use 4 holes for a 5x5 room).  Designate each of the holes as a pond that's not full. Your dwarves will now keep trying to fill the ponds, by throwing water onto the holes... where it falls into the farm room below.  Keep this up until every tile of your farm room has had water on it at some point, and is therefore muddy.

Things to watch out for:

• You're in a race against evaporation: you need to get enough water in to spread out and get all the tiles wet before it evaporates.  4 holes is enough for a 5x5 room even in a very hot climate, as long as the water source is nearby.
• You'll get "needs empty bucket" job cancellation spam if you don't have enough buckets, or if the dwarves take the buckets back to a stockpile every time they fill a hole (so temporarily forbid buckets from your furniture stockpile).
• Don't think that you can just channel out from the surface  The accursed sun will reach down into your farm room through the holes, turning the tiles underneath "light", and then your farmers will refuse to plant subterranean crops there.
• If you're really short on wood, you can micromanage things with one bucket.  Just activate one hole at a time, and get the water to spread out around the tile beneath it.  Once that region is muddy, deactivate that hole and activate a neighboring one.  Takes longer, uses more water, but if you only have one log you can still get a farm.

If you could see all skills and activate/deactivate all jobs of all workers on one single screen, maybe even assign workers into useful user defined profession groups there, it were a matter of seconds and no big deal.

You just described Dwarf Therapist

If your PC is freezing and you have to restart it, that could be a hardware problem rather than a game problem.  Dwarf Fortress is definitely CPU-intensive, and presumably memory intensive as well.  Is your CPU cooler working ok?  [Could freeze due to overheated CPU]  Do you have cheap memory? [Could freeze due to memory glitches]  Or a cheap power supply?  [Could freeze due to power glitches]

Is there a way of getting a chart in it for combat skills?
Apologies in advance if that was a stupid question.

Go back about 4 pages, download the combat grid view that someone created, then in DT do "file>import grid view" and point at the file. Some columns are broken, but it's way better than nothing

This is a masterful steel battle axe. It menaces with rotting shards of goblin brain.

You know, this just made me realize that the injury system is missing... something.  Right now if you get a good shot on an opponent's head, it's always a horizontal swipe that takes it clean off at the neck.  But what about the axe strikes that cleave someone vertically from the crown of their head all the way down to their sternum?  Extra awesome, and guaranteed to leave your dwarf struggling to pull its axe out of the (VERY) mutilated corpse

Yeah, it does. Where was the volcano in the world?

Here it is:



The island is a wilderness temperate conifer forest on peat and clay, with enough muddy pools to get started with fresh water.  The ocean is a wilderness temperate ocean.

As Jachim says (thanks Jachim!), be prepared for multiple collapses, as the ring of obsidian gradually moves inwards and seals off the magma in a vast flurry of steam.  For maximum awesomeness edit your announcements.txt to take out the pausing-and-recentering, then watch it happen from the surface.  When it's all over you have the ocean surface, then a z-layer of water, then the ocean floor with a sunken crater, then obsidian in the crater, then magma below the obsidian.   The volcano is just a vertical magma pipe going all the way down to the magma sea.  Oh yes, and instant adamantine, but can the king get to you since you're on a tiny island?? 

I'm trying to figure out how to build an offshore fortress above the magma.  The ultimate no-bridge method would be to dig down below sea level, tunnel under the seabed to reach the volcano, bring a magma channel back to shore, construct a pump-stack to pump it up to the surface, then start piping it out over the ocean surface to form an obsidian walkway.  Once over the cone, drop more magma to lay your foundations.  Then move all your dwarves over, and deconstruct the walkway behind you.  Voila, dwarves on a microscopic obsidian offshore island, sitting atop an active magma pipe.