Bay 12 Games Forum

Hence, I recommend that every time a wave of migrants arrives, you zoom to the location that they enter the map and inspect them one by one to enable their skills.  You will get a lot more accomplished that way than just having a bunch of idling haulers. 

It's even easier if you use DwarfTherapist, just pick group by migration wave from the dropdown menu and you can quickly scan all the skills and enabled labors from your most recent migration wave.  I don't think I'd be able to play without DT, it's such a time saver.

DF is an inherently messy game. Despite your best laid plans, you're forming a fortress around 'natural' terrain, and you're trying to- in effect- create a living machine that can survive a host of varying unpredictable assaults or circumstances. Furthermore, the peculiar rules of the game dictate certain features of the fortress that may not sit intuitively in your fragile human mind. The fort has not just to be efficient, but aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible.

A fortress is like a digital bonsai tree; albeit one that's grown in radioactive soil and beset by blackfly and aphids. The pleasure of it is not in attaining perfection; if it were, people would buy plastic, symmetrical bonsai trees. The goal is to find pleasure in the balance between the game's rules, yourself, and the form of the fortress as a conceptual unit. There can be no perfect fort, but there can be an optimum pleasure derived from it, as one can derive pleasure from a bonsai meticulously and passionately cared for.

I have had the same issue as the original poster, where I just have too many dwarves, too many things I want to build and get paralyzed with indecision.  I think this post responds to the problem perfectly.  At least I hope it will help me get past my own OCD reservations about fort design.

You could probably disable some of those workshops completely if you didn't need to be using them all at the same time.  I've heard that forbidding the piece(s) of material used to build the workshop will stop people from using it.  It'll still get the orders, but nobody will carry them out.  Once the production order is completely filled you could cancel any extra orders manually and then unforbid the workshops.

If you want to be able to use them all at once you could probably do something tricky with burrows.  Like make sure each crafter is assigned to the burrow with the workshop(s) you want him to use, and make sure the workshop you want making the bolts to be the only one that has access to wood inside its burrow.  Orders will still get sent to all the workshops, but hopefully they'll be autocanceled at the workshops that don't have wood inside their burrows.  I'm not sure if that'll work or not, but might be worth a shot.

This seems to work very well and can also be adapted to the surface. Create a surface burrow, assign multiple squads to defend the surface, and they will hunt the local wildlife.

By local wildlife I mean goblins. 

That sounds kind of risky to me, at least before you get some pretty tough soldiers.  Even with full steel armor I've had dwarves get maimed by goblin lashers or crossbow users.  I like the caverns idea.  I think I'm going to try that.  Cavern beasts seem to have little to no weapons or armor.

2. Only if his legs and arms are unable to be used in combat (for example, he has a headlock on four goblins, he will end up biting the fifth one)

I so want to see a dwarf headlock four separate goblins at the same time, that would be kind of epic.  I feel like at that point the goblins should be able to just walk away with the dwarf while still headlocked as long as they all go in the same direction.

I suspect the large glass production was just a coincidence.  You guys have gotten barons though?  I'm jealous.  Right now I have 3.7 million created wealth, 320K imported wealth, 89K exported wealth, and a population of 143 dwarves.  Still no baron.  My understanding was all I needed was a population of 20, with 10K of exports, and 100K of wealth produced and I'd be set.  That doesn't seem to have been the case though.

Does it matter if you smoothed the floor after it got muddied?  I've had a muddy hallway outside my farm for forever and my dwarves never clean it up, even when I have like 30+ idle.  I'm wondering if maybe I only smoothed the floor after it was already muddy and that's why they won't clean it.  It's pretty annoying too, ever since I've breached the caverns random fungi keep popping up and growing in the hall and even after they're removed the tile where it grew won't be smooth anymore.  The only way I've found to smooth it back out is to construct a tile of new floor over the spot where it was growing.   Every time I open my designation menu there's an irregular patchwork of blinking green C tiles where I constructed single pieces of floor to fix floor that got destroyed by fungus.