Bay 12 Games Forum

High Master Small Animal Dissectors, though...

Dear panic-stricken citizens,

I know the zombie-cat is scary.  And he isn't far from the central stairway.  But that doesn't mean you have to drop everything whenever you hear a tiny croaking "meow" from 30 floors down.  You can still haul the crops to the still, they're on the same floor damnit.  Having to walk past the stairway is no excuse.  Your brave, possibly vampiric, military are sacrificing themselves to keep the undead feline menace contained.  Just take this opportunity to get the crops harvested.  And maybe get those doors installed.

Frustratedly,

Your fearless leader.

He isn't deserting, this is just another kind of strange mood.  There are 5 different types, and all have different messages.  He is probably just going to get some item he needs for his mood-artifact.

I also like flat embarks, but once I have my stuff inside (a hole right next to the wagon), and once I get things set up enough, I like to dig 4 3-wide tunnels, one to each side of the map, ramping up to the surface only at the very edge.  That way all caravans have an easy route in without being exposed to the surface for long.  I like to put two draw bridges in each tunnel, so I can air-lock them if needed, and I then tie all the tunnels together and make the combined super-tunnel wander a bit so I have room for traps/combat before it reaches the also-airlocked trade depot.  The trade depot is then the main entrance to my fort, although I usually have a large walled-in area on the surface that is connected to my farms and food-processing workshops.  This is where I have pastures, tree-farming, and possibly above-ground farming.  Of course I can seal that off too in case of fliers.

Underground farms are always near the surface, in dirt layers for laziness and to take advantage of putting them near any above-ground food production.  I then usually have farm workshops and a large butcher/leatherworker/soap-maker/bone-bolt-carver complex beneath the brewers and farm workshops.  Another level below these is my main food storage, and then the main dining hall. 

Workshop locations, bedrooms, and military-complex vary more by fortress, but these elements of design I really like, and tend not to get too far away from my standard on most maps.

Oh, and I try to use any terrain features to my advantage on most maps.  I love hollowing-out hills and rock-spires as above-ground fortifications and putting an "easier", more direct trap-filled entrance near them for migrants and invaders.

I've honestly never incorporated the caverns into fortress design much, although I suppose I should start using them for more than just a source of well-water.

I think I may have observed a vampire going to sleep!  Or perhaps an absurd series of false alarms.

Here is the situation: Sodel Amalurist came to my fort in the third immigration wave, and I believed him to be one of two confirmed vampires.  I have always nicknamed all my dwarves, but when I nicknamed Mr. Amalurist "John Hancock" (I have an historical theme), the in-game menus refused to acknowledge his new nom-de-fortress.  When I gave him the custom profession "Farm Hand", certain in-game menus refused to acknowledge his occupation change from "Broker".

Sodel Amalurist is 150 years old, he has been a member of approximately 50 civilizations, the mayor of a few and the "High Moss" of another.  His absurdly high social skills got him immediately elected mayor of my fortress Earthenromanced.  He loves doors, forbids their export, and mandates I make rock doors, so I think I'll keep him on as mayor.  But he worships a god (of light!) with a long history of turning people into vampires and were-Buffalo.

I made my two vampires into my militia and they patrolled for about a year without rest, food, or drink.  And their minor injuries all seemed to heal fine on their own.  So I'm pretty sure he is a vampire, although I admit to not having seen him drain anyone.

But he was recently injured in a fight with an owl-man.  He lost his left back tooth, and sustained a compound fracture of his second toe on the right foot.  He has been diagnosed by my not-yet-vampire doctor, and the wound is infected.  Anyway, he recently went to sleep in the hospital (on the ground, despite free dormitory beds, during a blighted-kitten-husk crisis).  Has he really not been a vampire all this time?  Despite all the evidence?  Or can vampires sleep when they are wounded?  I have saved a separate copy of the save, so I'm willing to do whatever !Science! is needed.  Please advise!

I always hate it when people in help forums don't really seem to read the problem posts.  It is worse than not saying anything, because a large volume of posts leads others to assume the problem is solved.

I and Fniff are both running Tiger, as has been said several times.

And Tellemurius, this is not a new problem and has nothing to do with what libraries are installed.  DrKillPatient is correct in that the library paths are the problem, but I don't know how to fix them, and I tried that lion fix a long time ago, and I think Tiger and Lion are also different from each other.  But I don't know exactly what the correct paths should be.  It is probably fixable, but I've never seen any indication that it is fixed.

My suggestion was that I got a new, (better?) error message, where doing what he does caused his error message a while back, even when it worked with sh df, I think, but there was an error if you tried to start it another way.  I still can reproduce his error message, but I wanted to know if he gets the same one as I do when he tries to start df with sh.

Inspector's Log:

Granite 1st:  It's been a long journey, but I've finally arrived at The Inn of Drowning.  Things are nothing like I'd expected.  A pleasant surprise in that the drowning trap seems well designed, even in the event of a malfunction, it shouldn't flood more than its own level.  But enough other things are off that I've decided to exercise my authority and take control of the fortress anyway.  As the shaman pointed out, stairs had to be removed to secure the windmills from attack, and I've already done this.  On my first tour, I thought the fortress had many unguarded openings into the caverns, but it turns out they built this thing in the caverns themselves.  The have a large "hunting" area and tree farm in the open caverns, and began to wall things off, but there are gaping holes in the defense, particularly against any flying creatures.  Their well-water is a mess, and I'm really not sure what the point of drawing well water from forgotten beast bathing pools is anyway.  There is a tube of water coming down from the surface, and then opening into the caverns.  Oh, and a tree seems to have grown where the wall around the windmill mechanisms was supposed to go, I'll fix that soon.  Securing the underground is first priority, but I have plenty to keep me busy the next year.  Rather than make an itemized list, I'll just see how much I can accomplish.

Slate 1st:  Well, things are moving, if a bit slowly.  The shaman was surprisingly willing to hand over power, I only had to offer to finish vaulting his dining room.  With some of my more ambitious safety projects, I'm going to need more miners anyway, so I have no problem with this.  I have decided, though, to only make the dinning room two stories high.  I'll be building a glass ceiling above its wonderful all-seeing eye, and that ceiling will serve as the floor for my office, so I can observe the workers on their leisure time.  I've secured the windmills from attack, and am nearly done securing the caverns.  What a job that is turning out to be.  The toughest part is how difficult it is to distinguish our sections of cavern from the dangerous areas.  I've ordered many of the small stalactites and stalagmites dug out, this should make it easier to see what parts of the cavern are dangerous, and will provide more paths for working dwarves.  I don't know how we can expect to grow many trees when they trample over saplings all day to get through narrow paths between rocks.  I've noticed that nearly half the fortress is idle, even when many varieties of tasks are assigned, and with the wave of 22 migrants that followed shortly in my wake, I think a career counseling session for many of these dwarves is next on the list, and then we can begin work on the major reforms.

I don't usually have catacombs, as such.  The vast majority of my dwarves who die (outside of fortress-ending catastrophes), die while involved in construction projects.  Especially magma and water related projects, but occasionally while testing bridges too.  So I put the tombs in some inaccessible-when-finished part of whatever they were working on.  A lot of coffins in my water drainage areas, magma reservoirs, and walled-up in the middle of sealed miner extraction tunnels.  I recently stuck a tomb on the outside of a tower as the one remaining bit of scaffolding 20 floors up.

In the event that dwarves die a dishonorable death not working on big projects, or not in the right timeframe to fit with the others in the water tank, I let them become ghosts.  I engrave a slab for them, and when the ghost gets too uppity, I place the slab over a boulder or other non-plant-growing surface in whatever above-ground pasture/farms I've walled off from the outside world.