Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, I've spent some effort trying to get good flat volcano embarks as well. The first step is, of course, setting the minimum volcano number to the maximum (200), more volcanoes means you're more likely to find whatever ideal volcano spot you have in mind.

Turning volcanism x/y variance up a lot seems to help (the world I'm playing now was generated with 1600 each, maximum is 3200, got to try that sometime). With low variance your volcanoes tend to be clustered in mountain ranges (not known for being particularly flat..), but with higher variance you get them scattered in various random places, hopefully a few in flatlands.

Turning elevation x/y variance down should also help to get more flat land (I find I can't get away with much less than 400 each, or it just rejects everything). By the same logic, fewer full/partial edge oceans means more viable flat land for your volcanoes to spawn on.

In the end you'll still wind up with most volcanoes in sloped terrain, and the ones that do spawn on otherwise flat terrain often get a sort of small hill/spire created around them (this may be close enough for your purposes, if it's a relatively small spire you can mine it away and be left with a flat volcano), but you do rarely find a natural, completely flat volcano.

There are very likely other world gen settings that would help which I haven't discovered yet, but there's a limit to how far you can push things without getting every world rejected. Still experimenting myself..

Plant gathering is a truly great thing and I'll tell you why. If you want lots of different kinds of booze and are farming, you have to fiddle around with lots of farm plots, seasonal crop rotations and the like. Bleh. At the moment I have an entire soil layer dug out for my tree farm and as a by-product of keeping it stripped clean of plants I now have over twenty different types of booze in my fort. Nothing keeps dwarfs happy like a vast variety of booze, not to even mention the masterwork roasts, each one with different ingredients. So strip the land bare of plants, strip the caverns, build a tree farm and defoliate that too. Plants don't belong in the earth but in barrels, waiting to make your dwarfs ecstatic with variety. I don't even bother with farm plots anymore (although it is good to have some in place for emergencies).

I just wish there was a way to permanently designate an area for plant gathering and/or tree chopping, so that new plants/trees would automatically get designated for harvesting. If that was possible I'd use this strategy too, but the hassle of redesignating once a season or so for years on end gets to me; the only reason I prefer farming is that you can set it up once and forget about it for the remainder of your fortress' life.

You just build huge farm plots, more than you need for any given crop (and considering the sheer volume of food farms produce, a 'huge' farm plot isn't very big) and assign them to a variety of crops. Your farmers will plant in whichever plot they happen to have the appropriate seeds available for, and just leave any excess plots unused, it's completely micromanagement free. If any other food profession could be set up to support itself like that, I'd be using it.

A 0 skill medic with diagnose turned on, who barely cared for others with no empathy just diagnosed a patient with rotten lungs (for a small cut on thier arm) and then removed both lungs.  He did not survive the operation.  It seems that skill-less diagnoses can give false results.

My god, it all makes sense now. You know how your legendary miner breaks 7 bones in a cave-in then continues working, refusing to see a doctor? Or your military dwarf loses an arm and gets a dozen other slashes from goblin blades, gets infected, but never stops patrolling? No wonder, if this is the medical care they have to look forward to.

"Ach no, dinnae take me to them butchers in the hospital, nae so long as I kin still crawl to the ale stockpile on me own."

Amazing, how did they manage to carve so much stone out?

The article describes it as "carved out of a unique geological formation" - sounds like they started with a natural cave of some sort, then carved/smoothed it to suit their needs.

Seeing things like levers appearing in someone's name is, as far as I know, a bug - I know it happens when you try to apply an old tileset to a new patch, maybe other circumstances can bring it about as well. But anyway it shouldn't happen if you have an up-to-date non-buggy tileset - at least not to letters, the only characters I see getting replaced by graphics (with latest Mayday) are punctuation, which is still very readable.

Anyway, I thought the article was fair, but I wouldn't expect many NYT Magazine readers to start trying to find out much more about Dwarf Fortress by either playing it or coming to the forums.  I suspect the readership is probably such that this will serve as more of, say, an anthropological piece..

I agree with your analysis, the vast majority of NYT readers aren't ever going to play DF no matter how much publicity it gets, it's just not a game oriented at the average person. To them it'll be a 'human interest' story, hey look how those crazy gamers live.

That being said.. consider that a LOT of people read the NYT, 1.3 million people buy the Sunday paper, 30 million people visit the website per month. That's a lot more exposure than DF gets from websites where it is more typically mentioned (geeky gaming review sites, forums where stories are posted, etc.). If only 0.1% of those NYT readers are inspired to try the game, that's still a significant boost to an indie game like this.

Anyway I did my part, gave the online version of the article some comments on the difficulties a new player faces, and some links to the invaluable tutorials on these forums. I admit to still being cynical about most people getting into this game, it really does need a better interface among other things, but this publicity certainly can't hurt.

Interesting, seems like a bug/quirk of the map gen. Maybe it has something to do with the smaller river - you've got a normal river on low elevation that runs into a hill and cuts directly into it, creating a little canyon with sheer 17 z-level sides. Then it meets a major river that's on top of the hill, but the map gen decides that the major river can't be higher than the normal one, so the entire major river abruptly drops 17 z-levels straight down where it meets the normal river. The reverse is quite common on your map, a higher normal river leads into an abrupt waterfall down to a lower major river, this is harder to find though - nice work.

Really the rivers should just flow down the hillside, changing elevation more gradually, but DF's map gen doesn't seem to be capable of that quite yet - so we get perfectly flat rivers periodically interrupted by sudden waterfalls into a canyons with sheer sides. Anyway, logical or not the results are still impressive.

As far as friends I've referred:

Most of them: one look at the graphics, and said no thanks.

One: Mastered the basics, got a fort to survive a couple years, then lost interest - just the general hassle of managing 100 dwarves got to him. He's not really a fan of requiring a third-party tool to play a game, I convinced him to use Dwarf Therapist anyway, even then he got tired of 30 dwarf migration waves. He also mentioned some stocks screen/stockpiles frustration, just too many items and difficulty finding out what you actually have and where it is.

Me: Despite climbing the learning cliff, the interface still frustrates me, and is generally the cause of me abandoning a fort and quitting for a week/month/until next patch. Top frustrations:
-Military!! Yeah I've figured out the interface and gotten it to work, mostly, but I still wince and seriously rethink whether I want to continue this fort every time I  need to set up a new squad. The entire squad/military/schedule/orders interface is traumatizing.
-Trying to do lots of above-ground construction on multiple z-levels, i.e. mega or at least semi-mega projects - again I've figured out the interface and it works, it's just physically painfully to use (literally. my poor hands). I've lose interest before completing most such projects, just because of frustration with the interface.