Bay 12 Games Forum

I would take a close look at your kitchen settings and disable the cooking of both alcohol and brewable plants. That should alleviate the worst of your problems.

Oddly, his clothing appeared to be fine, considering I traded it off on the next caravan. Perhaps he burnt off his feet and bled to death through his stumps?

So a sufficiently large cistern gives you a terrifying flash flood device? This...this must be weaponized!

Last post I found on this was in 08, so my apologies if I missed one sooner.

I've been having a minor problem recently, I keep forgetting which trash dump I currently have active, the one with the magma or the one without the magma. It suddenly occurred to me, why not have separate zones and designations for Garbage dumps and Dumping and Incineration chutes and Incinerating? Cleaning out the heaps of rock and metal in a room is something where I'd rather not have it all go in the magma, but goblins corpses do go in the magma.

Also, generalize Melt as Recycle, clothing is torn back down to leather and cloth, metal is melted, ect. Possibly one more for torching wooden items into charcoal.

Ooooh we could have Elf Christmas then, where the elves bring fuel for the forges!

Basically just reiterating an old idea, but I think it could use some light of day.

Filling the bottom with water, while not as fun, is just as effective if deep enough. Bonus points when the elves/goblins realize they're drowning in a sea of their prior attackers corpses. I must say, setting up water to knock people in does sound fun.

Just my two cents long winded rambling, but I'm of the opinion that requiring more post-farm food processing (milling, cooking, threshing, ect) and more diversity would be a better approach, possibly with the caveat that as food becomes more processed it reduces in quantity. Probably something like the social caste system discussed elsewhere, where dwarves get more demanding for higher quality food as time goes on. Essentially, in year one, your dwarves are content with gnawing on plump helmets. Year two and they're going to start wanting some variety, year three will see demands for meals, ect. Possibly incorporate crops that are strictly for flavoring.

Obviously some dwarf busy work would probably be a good idea as well to prevent a single farmer from maintaining 100+ crops simultaneously. Perhaps once multiple object carrying gets implemented <chorus of angels> a farmer picks up as many seeds as he believes he can tend to during a season, plants them at the beginning of the season and spends the remainder of the season tending them until they mature at somewhat the same time. Effectively a dwarf of a given skill level can grow about a given number of plants per season, which gives us a solid controllable way to manage the food output of farms.

As mentioned earlier, anything that just slows down production or increases the required size just means that we as players will simply scale up as needed. I think having dwarves steadily demand (at threat of being at the brink of tantrums) more and more variety and complexity to their meals is a good way to encourage players to make better use of cooking, hunting, fishing and trading for foods and flavors not available locally, as well as encourage a natural expansion into different types of food. Sure, a farm cuts it for a bit, but soon you're going to want a hunter bringing in some meat, another small garden topside for variety, a couple fishermen in the caves hauling in...whatever it is that lives in that water. Your trading can supplement this as well, I've noticed in a lot of my fortresses that the humans tend to bring a lot of ocean food that I'll never see. Who knows, that legendary cheese maker on stone hauling duty just might get his chance to shine even.

This is the approach I tend to take, where I've got a couple of hunters, a butcher, a couple of fisherdwarfs, a fish cleaner, a farmer, a miller, a thresher, a couple of cooks (I could probably use more). If/When standing orders for milking and cheese making become available I'll probably implement those as well, although with the hassle of re-queuing and milking bugs at the moment I don't bother. Not counting the indirect effects of my craftsmen via trade, who bring in exotic far off food and drink, I have eleven dwarves as a part of my food production. Cut farming production somewhat and toss in the dairy industry (should we have/do eggs?) and I could easily have 13-15 dwarves for food production. At the moment this is hardly required, it's simply an old habit from the RTS Stronghold where having more food types made a happier more taxable populous. I think tweaking dwarfish psychology to desire diversity and quality is the way to go though.

In short, cut production and encourage diversity.