Bay 12 Games Forum

I applaud the effort to test claims scientifically, but there are a few problems:

1. Why use an artifact adamantine spike at all? If you have adamantine, and a weaponsmith that just made an artifact, it's trivially easy to get an ordinary old masterwork spike. The whole idea of testing some variable (such as weapon material) is to eliminate all the other variables so you can be sure the variable you're testing is what's actually making the difference. You wouldn't compare an adamantine spike against a cat vs. a wooden spike against a horse, would you? Then why compare an artifact adamantine spike to a masterwork wooden one? Make them the same quality, so if the adamantine spike does consistently perform better, we'll know it's due to material and not quality.

2. I think Girlinhat has the right of it, a lot of those critters are so tiny a well-placed sneeze could off them, they aren't good tests of weapon effectiveness. If you look at only the larger critters - namely the horses and horse foals - the adamantine one comes out well ahead (12 hits vs. 23 hits to kill in tests 1, 6, 9, almost twice the effectiveness). On the other hand, if you look only at the largest creature, i.e. the one horse test, it's 8 hits vs. 4 with the wooden spike looking twice as effective. With only 1-3 tests against large critters, luck is more of a factor than anything else.

So all we can really conclude is that the sample size is too low, and you need more tests on large critters with equal quality.

Dig out a drainage sink going straight to the caverns (or aquifer level if you have one) and then open it to the river at the point closest to the corpse. Be sure to build grates to catch the items as they're sucked into the sink by the flowing water, and set up a floodgate to shut it off for collection (and to preserve FPS, and also because items getting dragged by water flow can be a bit iffy, and you might need to shut it off and turn it back on again once or twice to get them into the sink)

If you have an aquifer level this is almost certainly the easiest way of doing it. If you don't, you'll have to compare the effort of digging a drain to the caverns against the effort of building a manual pump-battery.

Diagram for clarity with U being the up stairs, C being the corpse, R the river, F the lever-activated floodgate, - are regular passages and ### a drop-shaft floored with grates extending to aquifer/caverns.

   U     RRR
###    RRR
###-F-CRR
###    RRR
          RRR

I'd recommend this as the easiest solution; although you don't actually need to drain to the caverns, you just need enough space for the corpse to get pushed into your reservoir before it fills up. I actually recovered a corpse with something like this:

           RRR
 ........  RRR
U........X^CRR
 ........   RRR
            RRR
R for river which flows top-to-bottom, C is corpse, U up-ramp, . is mined out space, X is a lever-controlled floodgate, ^ is the last spot you channel from above after the rest is complete. Open floodgate, corpse should quickly get pushed into your reservoir, close floodgate. If the reservoir fills completely by the time you close the gate, just channel out more space on the sides to let the water spread out to a safe depth.

It worked for me on the first try (however my river did curve slightly as you can see in the diagram, that might have been lucky), even if it doesn't for whatever reason, you're no worse off than before - can always retry or move to a more complicated recovery method.

Oddly enough, there is no "special sword" on my stocks screen. I have a Proficient Record Keeper, set to highest precision, with my inventory records fully up-to-date... and all I see on my stocks screen are my four Picks (for my Miners), two Axes (for my Woodcutters) and one Crossbow (for my Hunter). No mysterious weapons.

I think my embark might have just nicked the edge of a "curious underground structure", with the really interesting part of it left off-map.

I'm pretty sure that's not possible, the structure should be centered on a given tile, you get all of it or none (unless it's bugged, always possible I guess). Also Toady finally fixed the old bug where the sword would show up in your stocks at embark, now you actually have to go find it at the bottom of the structure.

The pay scale on that is kinda depressing considering the requirements.

Note those are pounds, not dollars - that's $49-59k in the US. Good for a postdoc (typically pays less than industry) with no experience requirement.

And as a side bonus, it's very dwarven research - I wonder if those kinds of folks ever play DF? Or would this game seem too horrifically inaccurate to a guy who works with real magma, I wonder - I've met real musicians who don't care for Guitar Hero, for example.

Graphics pack (see signature) updated to CivForge 2.42.

[Edit: Hold on, missed something. Now the graphics pack is fully updated to 2.42 and uploaded.]

You do realize that your graphical edition is about 75MB larger than it needs to be after unzipping, thanks to some unnecessary files: mainly a few bitmaps depicting DF worlds, and a gamelog.txt with more words than the entire Song of Ice and Fire series? I hate to sound overly picky (although it does slow downloading/unzipping a bit), but I notice these things in particular because I run DF off a USB drive with limited space. Which is, incidentally, very convenient if one plays on more than one pc - unlike most games DF will run directly off a USB, no installation or even copying needed.

Based on your description, 2 seems like the way to go, easy to use and it makes sense. If it was a big general library, I'd need woodcrafting and farming books when all I want to do is train doctors, and then it could only train one dwarf at a time - I'd need several sets of odd books to create enough general libraries to train an entire medical staff at once.

On the other hand having book stockpiles separate from the "library" is a bit.. unintuitive, and one thing the game doesn't need more of is extra items and stockpiles to keep track of. Having the item simply be a component in creating the workshop seems like a much 'cleaner' approach.