Bay 12 Games Forum

I find it slightly amusing that people take patent law to be such an all or nothing when it is one of the areas where there is considerably more room for refinement and debate within the system. While I do want reform, it's one of the more flexible systems for IP and the tweaks needed to make it sensible are pretty reasonable in scale and implementation.

Trademark law is the one which is harder to make sensible without problems. And when I say problems, I mean hillarious nonsense.

Also, can they destroy bridges or hatches from underneath?

No, only things on the same Z-level as them.

In another thread, someone profiled DF and found most of the time is spent in pathfinding.  It is unclear if pathfinding is slow due to too many items or some other reason.

It would really depend, but we do know a few things.

The raw distance to an item is calculated in a relatively simple way; as the eagle flies mole burrows direct distance, ignoring paths. This value is what is calculated and used whenever a dwarf wants a certain item or material. Therefore, the selection method is;
1) Populate list of potential items.
2) Calculate distance to each.
3) Select the 'closest'.
4) Calculate path to this item.

One potential problem is access. Inaccessible items need to be excluded from the initial list. This means keeping track of what parts of the fort are accessible from others.

This would add some cost to having more items (more distances to calculate), but those calculations are relatively simple to work out. The path calculations themselves are considerably harder. I'd guess that adding more items would be a negligible cost at that stage (while still having some cost earlier), while anything that makes the paths themselves more complicated could increase the path calculations hugely.

Of course, the more animals and dwarves you have finding paths, the worse it gets.

If you use hammers, they tend to mangle without causing (much) bleeding.

Otherwise just equip him with a high quality helmet and breastplate. That will cover the upper/lower torso and head, leaving the rest open (including face/throat). Then use weapons of a weaker material than the armour. Higher risk of bleeding out after having a finger cut off, but placing the 'training' room next to a hospital might help.

The problem with coverage is that it's a) complicated and b) bugged. Or at least it was when all the discussions I've read took place. As such, it's probably going to change and maybe not worth putting that much effort into understanding.

There are three tags that govern how far coverage reaches.

[UBSTEP:0]
This controls how far 'up' the body an item of armour reaches. It only seems to apply to torso armour. Basically you can think of it as going out in stages along the body. It doesn't cover legs. It doesn't cover body parts with certain tags (notably [HEAD], [GRASP] and [STANCE], or the head, hands and feet). It can cover the children of such body parts (such as parts of the face, fingers and toes) if it extends beyond them. The upper body and lower body are counted as 0 steps away, and so both always covered.

Breastplates have a default of 0, meaning they only cover the torso.
Mail shirts have [UBSTEP:1], so cover the upper arms.

A number of clothing items have [UBSTEP:MAX]. What exactly this covers depends on a certain bug I haven't been following myself, but unless you are making adamantium robes you probably won't get that much extra protection this way anyway. This would mean, for example, they would cover the upper arm, lower arm, skip the hand, then cover the fingers. The same goes for facial features (and, oddly, the throat) after skipping the head and the toes after skipping the entire legs and feet.
The clothes with these properties seem to be robes, cloaks, coats, shirts and dresses. However, of these only robes and dresses also have [LBSTEP:MAX] (see below) and so I'm not sure if anything else would actually cover toes or not. Needs testing.

[LBSTEP:0]
This controls how much of the legs an item covers. Legs in this case are defined as [LIMB] body parts that end in a [STANCE] body part (eg, foot). Arms are [LIMB]s, but end in a [GRASP] hand instead. This only covers the leg parts. It doesn't extend to feet or any other attached body parts. Because the upper and lower body are effectively zero steps from each other, torso armour can extend this way easily.

Both greaves and leggings have [LBSTEP:MAX] and so cover the entire leg to the best of their ability.
Mail shirts have [LBSTEP:1] and so can protect the upper legs. A range of other clothes (including cloaks) and leather armour also have this.
As mentioned above, robes and dresses have [LBSTEP:MAX] and so cover the entire legs. These also have [UBSTEP:MAX] and so cover the entire body. Although not the strongest armour, a leather (or maybe adamantine?) robe or dress gives you maximum coverage.

[UPSTEP:0]
This determines how far up the limb a boot or glove protects. As with [LBSTEP], this doesn't cover anything but the [LIMB] tag body parts, but it does cover arms as well as legs. Because it only covers limbs, it doesn't include fingers and toes.

Low boots literally only cover the foot.
High boots have [UPSTEP:1], so cover the lower leg. If you consider the upper legs can covered by [LBSTEP] from above, you can effectively have an entire layer of chain armour on the legs from high boots and a mail shirt even before adding leg armour. This is why I go with greaves for a plate layer.
Gauntlets have [UPSTEP:1], so cover the lower arms. Because there is no other protection for arms as there is for legs, you need gauntlets and mail shirts to protect your arms fully.
Chausses are a very rare sock substitute, but they are the only items to have [UPSTEP:MAX] and so offer full leg coverage while being exactly the same size as regular socks. The perfect undergarment.


The whole method is pretty nifty with just two problems.
1) Fingers/toes/faces can't be covered by hand/foot/head armour.
2) They can be covered by MAX extended torso armour, despite it skipping the hands/feet/head.

the only animals that need medical care are cats... mr scruffles has an ouchie in his paw i'll tantrum the shit out of the workshops if he dies!

Bah, now who's the elf?

Nah, the main reason for vets would be keeping the rare creatures bought obtained from the elven traders alive. Getting breeding pairs can be hard enough even if they don't keep dropping dead.

This information on the wiki seems to be right. At least as far as arena mode goes. I think most of the violations of this are down to equipping bugs in fortress mode. As far as I can tell, dwarves are walking around with things equipped which aren't being read as equipped for the purposes of these calculations.

The outline;

1) You can only have one shaped armour piece (marked with [S]) per body part.
2) The total size of non-cover items must be lower than any armour piece's permit+size total.
3) The total size of all items of any layer on any body part must be lower than the lowest permit value (excluding that item).
4) The total size of all items on any body part must be lower than the size+permit value of any cover item.
5) All items are put on in order of their layer.

As an example, lets say you want to kit out your soldiers upper body. Try walking through this in arena mode to get a feel for it.

You start off with a steel breastplate. This has a size of 20 and a permit of 50. It is also shaped, so you can't add any other shaped items; no more breastplates and no leather armour.

Now you want to add mail shirts. Each one has a permit of 50 and a size of 15. You can add three of these if you want. It checks the size against each of the armour pieces permit + size (or rather, the permit value ignoring that items size in the calculation), like so;
- Against each of the mail shirts, you have 2 x 15 = 30 total size in mail shirts, + 20 from the breastplate, matching the 50 permit.
- Against the breastplate you have 3 x 15 = 45 < 50, fine.
Now if you add a fourth mail shirt these test will fail. However, because of the layering order (mail shirts being armour layer 2, the breastplate armour layer 3) the breastplate is added after the shirts. This results in the breastplate being dropped.

Because this reaches the 50 permit limit for the mail shirts, you can't add more non-cover items without substituting them for existing items. If you want a robe (size 20), for example, you need to remove two of the mail shirts to clear a total size of 30, which then lets you add an extra size 10 shirt, vest or whatever.

However, you can add cover layer items. In this case, cloaks. Each cloak has a size of 15 and a permit of 150. Taking into account the 65 size already on the upper body, we can add 100 size worth of cloaks. This lets us add 6 (x 15 = 90) cloaks over the existing armour.

Going through like this for the rest of the body (most of it is simpler) gives you a final setup of;

1 x breastplate
3 x mail shirts
6 x cloaks

2 x gauntlets
2 x mittens

1 x trousers
1 x greaves

2 x caps
1 x helm
6 x hood

2 x socks
2 x high boots

Of course, so long as the bugs are still around, we are likely to see dwarves wearing more than this or refusing to put parts on because they found their boots before their socks.

OK, the entire method;

1) Go onto the military screen and choose (e)quipment.
2) Check the currently assigned equipment with the (P)ri/Assignments option.
3) Make a note of the exact gear they are currently kitted out with that you want them to drop.
4) Go back to (V)iew/Customise equipment.
5) Pick the relevant equipment group, eg, (A)rmor, (W)eapon, etc.
6) Choose to assign specific armor/weapon/whatever.
7) Find the exact piece of equipment in the list that they are already carrying and assign it to them.
Remove the new assignment and they should drop the item.

Note that I haven't tested it so I'm not sure if you need to have a pause between steps 7 and 8. If it doesn't work, I'd say try waiting till the assignment is acknowledged (has a green tick next to it) before deleting it.