Bay 12 Games Forum

Did you get a dwarf caravan?  If you did, you'll get migrants.  If not, then you'll have to grow your population the old-fashioned way and try to bring the world's dwarf population back up.

One thing unsettles me a bit when I read your posting, GuudeSpelur.

You repeatedly call dwarves useless or useful, based on the profession with which they arrived in your fortress. This  made me wonder if you had realized that you can just assign other labors to the useless dwarves. For instance, you can turn the oh so useful fish dissectors into useful miners or glass workers by just assigning that labor to them. Press u-p-l (at least, I think it's this combination of keys) on such a dwarf, and then select the labor for him. Or use a tool such as Dwarf Therapist for this, which makes it much easier.

Peasants don't have to stay as such  for their entire lives, fish dissectors can become your most valuable legendary miners after just a few months of digging in the dirt. Yes, they start out as complete noobs in their new profession, but they learn most of these skills extremely fast.

Yeah, I know that you can do that.  The problem with all of the "useless" guys is due to my playstyle.  I'm very good at managing a small population, but when migrant waves start adding up I have problems making jobs for everyone. Thus, people with "useful" skills are immediately picked up while the people like dyers, millers, etc. get left behind to party for months because I don't know what to do with them.  I generally don't have problems with peasants- they end up as recruits or I use them to replace legendary miners so I don't get so much leftover stone.  However, in that fortress I was digging through some valuable stuff that I wanted a lot of (I found some native aluminum, gems, etc.) so I didn't end up using them.  Also, every time I decided to make someone into a profession that I needed a migrant wave would come with somebody already trained in that skill.  For example, I set someone up as a mechanic to pump out all those mechanisms, and just when they got to novice a migrant mechanic showed up.  I'm working on this problem, so I should be able to cut back on the parties and thus all those relationships that drive people to tantrum spiral.

Especially with glassmaking, I expect to make my own legendaries instead of waiting for a mood to do it for me provided I have magma for 0 fuel costs. Some professions are very hard to train up to legendary from scratch in 40d (due to scarcity of resources), but glassmaking certainly shouldn't be. I produce raw green glass which also trains up my jewelers (who I usually also have to train up from scratch).

Yeah, I did assign someone else to glassmaking, but that was a cursed process on my map.  For one, sand gathering took place near the entrance to my fort- the frequent ambushes made gathering it dangerous, and my miners were working on the magma pipe so they couldn't dig out a safer area to gather it.  Then, in order to get wood for charcoal I had to go outside, into the goblin corpse and fire imp infested wasteland.  Forest fires were frequent, and I chopped down all the trees that were within a safe distance. Even though I requested it from merchants the wood in my stockpiles ran out quickly because of barrel/bin and bed requirements.  I just decided to wait for the first guy to recover instead of risking a lot to have one guy make terrible products for a while.

I also ended up stopping crafting anything that wasn't for noble requirements or basic necessities, because the huge stockpile of goblin clothing (why do they all have either 700 dwarfbuck pairs of socks or two 600 dwarfbuck cloaks on them?) I got from harvesting my traps.  Pretty much all I had running at any given time was food creation, mining, masonry, carpentry, and carving <goblin bone bolts> to load my weapon traps.  Hence the huge parties.

So yeah, I'm working on my playing skills.  Hopefully I wont have many more fortresses that end this way.

I'm assuming that you're playing the most recent version of the game here, but the problem is that the tutorials on the wiki are for an older version of the game with an entirely different military system.  In the current build, to draft a dwarf you need to appoint someone as the militia commander in the Nobles menu (press shift + n).  Make some random person you don't plan on making fight be the commander.  A new position will open up called "arsenal dwarf" and "militia captain."  Fill arsenal dwarf with someone you don't plan on having fight, and have the militia captain be someone you DO.  Then, exit the noble screen and press "m."  Go to the squad labeled "militia captain" and press "c" to create it.  Then press "a," make the squad active, then exit the military screen.  Press "s" (squads), "a" (picks that squad), "k" (attack order), then either "l" to pick from a list or just put the "x" over the fox at hit enter.  Then, press whatever button it is to confirm the order and then watch as your militia captain turns the fox into blood and a corpse.  When you're done, go back to "alerts" in the military screen and deactivate the squad so the captain can work again.

There, that's how you draft someone to kill a fox in DF2010!

Oh, what fun it caused!  No, magma did not flood my fortress, but it did set off a chain of events that ended in its abandonment.  This was in 40d, by the way.

It was a pretty average fortress for me, meaning it did fine until the goblins started ambushing.  Then, my newly-legendary glassmaker decided to go outside, got four red injuries, but got miraculously rescued.  He was then recovering for an indefinite period of time.  Then I got a legendary Leatherworker from anther mood- who promptly discovered a goblin thief and got an injured spine, leaving him in the same state as my glassmaker.  My next mood was a possession.  Those three details are important.  Anyway, after the first ambush I made a death corridor of traps that held them off pretty well and had a three-dwarf squad of 2 axedwarves and one hammerdwarf that could be stationed around a corner to get anyone that got through.  That also worked pretty well for a while.  Then my magma finally reached the pit underneath my smelters and forges, and I started having some REAL fun.  First, my four of my dwarves decided to run down the stair that I just realized I never deconstructed into the magma pit to "Clean" up the molten rock.  Three ran into the magma and burned to death.  The fourth, my bookeeper (remember, legendary ones are ultra-mighty and superdwarvenly tough) got out.  His wife was one of the ones that burned to death, and not even my legendary dining hall could placate him.  He threw a tantrum, and managed to beat a peasant to death in a fistfight in about three seconds.  That peasant, who had refused to do any labor I assigned him, had become very popular among my population.  This set off a MASSIVE tantrum spiral.  Within one dwarf month, half of my population of 70 was dead.  Of course it was the essential half.  My growers, miners, craftsdwarves, masons, metalworkers, etc. were the casualties.  All that was left were woodworkers, dyers/herbalists/millers/etc., mechanics (useless because I'd made a huge stockpile of mechanisms already) peasants, a siege engineer, children/babies, my military, and a few other things I'm forgetting.  Then, because apparently the goblins were content to watch my dwarves kill each other instead of invading, the first wave of migrants since the goblin ambushes started a year and a half ago showed up (with a dungeon keeper).  This promptly brought my population back up around 85 (it was a huge migrant wave).  There were some useful people in that wave- another glassmaker to replace the one that had been in a coma for almost two years, more stonecrafters/masons/etc.  In fact, the new glassmaker immediately went fey.  I started feeling optimistic- my fortress was reviving!

Yeah, fat chance.  The migrants got ambushed by fire imps and lava men.  Half of them immediately were blasted with flames and/or died in the massive forest fire that started.  The glassmaker made it to the fortress with a broken toe, and immediately started making his artifact.  He churned out a WTFvaluable glass sarcophagus.  It was worth somewhere in the 70,000's.  Yay! A new legendary glassmaker!  Only, he decided to go rest to recover his toe.  Wow, thanks.  This game seems hell-bent on denying me any dwarves with legendary skills.  Anyway, another tantrum spiral started, and it started effecting my military.  I stationed the most stable one to defend the workshops, and that worked for a while.  I locked a bunch of the berserkers and tantrumers in the dining hall while everyone else was ordered to go dump stuff.  They ended up killing each other very efficiently, and then my war dog pack tore apart the survivors that broke the doors.  Then my original legendary glassmaker woke up, just in time for the magma glass furnace to power up.  I sent him over to start making glass stuff to get some valuable furniture for my replacement mayor and dungeon master, when the workshop guard when berserk and slaughtered him.  I didn't see how it could get any worse, when...

"A vile force of darkness has arrived!"

esc -> Succumb to the Invasion

When I named it "Anguishedhalls" I had no idea how appropriate the name would be.  It was almost as appropriate than my fortress "Metalbane" in .31. That time, a "goblin ambush" (it was one goblin and five humans) broke into my fortress and killed a bunch of dorfs.  This started a tantrum spiral, so I started digging down so I could breach a cavern to send everyone that wasn't insane so they'd be safe.  While that was happening, one of my axedwarves hulked out and killed all of the berserkers and especially destructive tantrumers so quickly that it wasn't a problem any more.  Just before he became an axe lord, I beached the cavern.  Yay!  Then, a forgotten beast that was a flying glob of molten metal flew out and killed everyone.  I'm not sure how it stayed together...

I hate tantrum spirals.  Why can't I just run out of food or lose to a massive siege for once?