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Messages - AdeleneDawner

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196
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Quarters
« on: April 05, 2011, 07:29:35 am »
You'd want enough bedrooms for all of your dwarves, plus a few extra for kids or migrants, but yeah - just setting them up is fine, you don't have to assign them all to the dwarves by hand.

197
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: dwarfs run across the map to drink
« on: April 05, 2011, 07:27:18 am »
Ah-ha. Pike, in this context, is a kind of fish. I bet what happened is that your dwarves went to the river to drink, got spooked by the fish, dodged into the river in their panic, and then couldn't get back out again.

Having your miners channel out the river banks ([d][h]) will make the river safer. Your dwarves will still get spooked and jump in, and they might get attacked by the fish, but they'll be able to climb out of the river and won't automatically drown. If you do have your miners do that, check where the fish are (go down a z-level and look for them) and start channeling on a different section of the river and move toward them. That way if your miners get spooked and jump in, they'll have a path back out. You may have to watch them to make sure they're always working near ramps that they've already dug, though.

198
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: The DF2010 Little Questions Thread
« on: April 05, 2011, 07:15:02 am »
Quote from: wuphonsreach on April 05, 2011, 04:54:56 am
Quote from: AdeleneDawner on April 05, 2011, 03:24:35 am
Quote from: wuphonsreach on April 05, 2011, 02:50:29 am
So, I'm at a magma pool, and my miner refuses to mine out the rough-hewn obsidian wall that stands between me and wonderful magma.

Do they need special picks to dig obsidian?

They don't need special picks, no. You do have to tell them twice to dig through warm stone, though - when they discover it's warm, they'll stop, un-designate it, and tell you about it, complete with bringing your camera to the area. If you designate it a second time they'll dig it with no problem.

Note that this generally results in losing the digging miner, though, and his pick. Magma moves faster than dwarves. If you want to access the magma without casualties, you can do so from the top, or I hear there's a trick with building a magma-safe (?) door where the miner is going to stand to mine into the magma, which will... usually... slam shut in time to block the magma so that the dwarf can leave safely. You can then hook the door up to a lever to open it from a distance. I haven't tried that particular trick, though, so I can't vouch for it.

I could dig all around it, but I never got the "tile is warm" warning at all in 31.25 when trying to dig the Obsidian side of a pool.  Makes me wonder if the sides of "pools" / "pipes" are immune to digging. 

The pool was open at the top, but I wasn't up to building a DWR to power a magma pump to fill the tunnels under my workshops.  Plus I had zero metal armor at all in that embark (no easy source of wood), so it was magma or nothing.

That's odd, then.

I could certainly see you not getting the warning, since the magma on the other side is already revealed and the dwarves expect the stone to be warm. But not being able to mine it at all? That's pretty weird, and possibly a bug.

What happens when you try to designate the square to be dug out? Does the designation mark go on the square? Does it just sit there forever without a dwarf coming by to dig it out? (Are your miners busy elsewhere?) Do you get a message about the job being cancelled, and then the designation goes away? If so, what does the message say?

Also, if you just want to move the magma down, you don't need a pump stack for that - can't use a pump stack for it, in fact. Dig a path for the magma to flow where you want it to, put a couple floodgates in so you can turn off the flow when you have enough magma where you want it, and let gravity do the work.

199
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: dwarfs run across the map to drink
« on: April 05, 2011, 06:52:09 am »
If they're that thirsty, keeping them inside will kill them pretty quickly anyway - they'll dehydrate to death. It seems to me like the priority should be to figure out why they're getting killed on the way to the river, and why they aren't drinking the booze you have.

Can you tell us more about the message you got when the dwarves died? If you press 'a' and scroll up it might still be in the log. Also, press 'r' and tell us what you see on the screen that comes up. There will probably be messages about dwarves fighting; are there also messages about animals - especially fish - fighting? Assuming there are messages on that screen about dwarves fighting, highlight the top one and press enter - what kind of messages does that give you?

As to the booze - press 'z' and look at the lower left section of that window. How many units of alcohol does it say you have? (You might have booze stockpiles full of empty barrels, if you don't have a furniture stockpile with enough space for them to be put away.) Try 'k'-ing over your booze stockpiles - are the barrels described as 'dwarven ale barrel' or something similar, or just 'tower cap barrel'? Are the names in {squiggly brackets}? If so, they're forbidden, and your dwarves aren't allowed to touch them - use [d][b ][c] to fix that. If that looks good, try 'q'-ing any doors that are between your dwarves and the stockpiles - are they locked? Have you actually seen dwarves go in and out? If you really want to be sure that there's access, set up a military squad and issue a move order for them to stand in the middle of the stockpile; if they can get there, civilians should be able to as well. Oh - if you're using burrows, are the barrels in the burrow? (I assume you're using some version of DF2010. If you're using an older version, can the dwarves get to the barrels without going outside?)

200
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Dwarf Fortress...What?
« on: April 05, 2011, 06:02:01 am »
Quote from: Dave1004 on April 05, 2011, 05:29:11 am
When I press "C" for Civilization, there's only one civilization there. The tab says:

This land has no important leaders

Is this significant?

That's significant, yes. It means that the civilization your dwarves are from was wiped out. In game terms, it means that you'll only get two waves of migrants, and then no more, ever - which may be a good thing, for your first fort, but it'll make it very hard to put together a military, so you should focus on building walls to keep yourself safe and traps to deal with the goblins without risking your precious dwarves. It might also mean that you won't get any dwarven caravans, which is not a good thing, or that you'll get dwarven caravans from a different dwarven civilization, which seems to mean that they'll come a little less frequently but otherwise isn't a big deal. You'll probably want to make a point of staying on the good side of the other civs' caravans, though.

(Oh, and the fact that there's only one civilization listed just means that the others haven't visited your fort yet, so you don't know anything about them. Each one will show up in the list the first time they send a caravan or diplomat or thief to visit your site.)

Quote from: Dave1004 on April 05, 2011, 05:29:11 am
Also, yes, I just got a bunch of refugees, on summer (New world :/), and boy do they suck. Five of them, a combination of lye makers, dyers, armorsmiths and....uhhh...whawazzat? Oya, a brewer.

Brewers are important. Thirsty dwarves are slow, unhappy dwarves. Armorsmiths are pretty good, too, if you have the right kinds of metal. (Even if you're not going to have a military, metal armor is a nice trade good.)


Quote from: Dave1004 on April 05, 2011, 05:29:11 am
Also, when will goblins start raiding? Sorry. I just want to know, if I have a deadline to build defenses....OH

You'll probably see your first goblin thieves after about an in-game year, and ambushes a few seasons to a year after that. They tend to come in with the caravans, and there's often a big siege in the winter. They also respond to your fortress's wealth - the more wealthy your fortress is the harder they'll try to capture it - so if you want to stick to just thieves for a while, don't go mass-producing masterwork stone crafts or anything.

Quote from: Dave1004 on April 05, 2011, 05:29:11 am
And I think I found a glitch. I was playing along on my new save, when I finally figured out how to make a Militia. So, I go make some training sticks, and go to equip them. In the "Weapons" menu although, there's a lot of weird weapons, Bowguns and Spears. I only started with two copper battle axes, so...These are the names:


Goblin Cap Spear
Blood Thorn Spear
Nether Cap Spear
Tunnul Tube Spear

Blood Thorn Blowgun
Goblin Cap Blowgun
Nether Cap Blowgun

I don't know how I got them, but I now have two speardwarves with...spears :D

This isn't a glitch, and it's not really a big deal. It's a bit of a spoiler, though, so I'll hide the explanation behind a spoiler tag:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)


201
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Dwarf Fortress...What?
« on: April 05, 2011, 04:40:28 am »
Quote from: Lytha on April 05, 2011, 04:34:12 am
Another excuse is that I had my meeting zone - a spot where I ask the dwarves to accumulate when they are idle, so that they can chat and be delighted about it was overlapping with the pasture. So, all the animals were attracted to the meeting zone and thus conflicts became more likely.

This will definitely do it. I accidentally overlapped my pasture and my meeting zone a couple forts back, and all the animals in the pasture tried to crowd onto the 10-or-so squares of meeting area that they were allowed into. I caught it pretty quickly, but it definitely would have caused fighting and might have even caused them to starve if I'd left it be.

202
DF Suggestions / Re: Show how much wind embark has
« on: April 05, 2011, 04:30:26 am »
How about "Dwarf fortress is a sandbox game, thus any way of playing it that one enjoys is fine; we're not in competition with each other, so 'cheating' is an irrelevant concept in this context."?

Really. It's not hurting anything but goblins and elves if I choose to use a danger room or a water reactor or speed:0 dwarves in my fort, or if I decide to use none of those and no traps or crossbows, either, so why should you care? Grousing about anything like that sounds suspiciously like "stop having fun, guys!" to me.

203
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: The DF2010 Little Questions Thread
« on: April 05, 2011, 03:24:35 am »
Quote from: wuphonsreach on April 05, 2011, 02:50:29 am
So, I'm at a magma pool, and my miner refuses to mine out the rough-hewn obsidian wall that stands between me and wonderful magma.

Do they need special picks to dig obsidian?

They don't need special picks, no. You do have to tell them twice to dig through warm stone, though - when they discover it's warm, they'll stop, un-designate it, and tell you about it, complete with bringing your camera to the area. If you designate it a second time they'll dig it with no problem.

Note that this generally results in losing the digging miner, though, and his pick. Magma moves faster than dwarves. If you want to access the magma without casualties, you can do so from the top, or I hear there's a trick with building a magma-safe (?) door where the miner is going to stand to mine into the magma, which will... usually... slam shut in time to block the magma so that the dwarf can leave safely. You can then hook the door up to a lever to open it from a distance. I haven't tried that particular trick, though, so I can't vouch for it.

204
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Shelf Life
« on: April 05, 2011, 02:56:57 am »
Prepared meals on stockpiles never go bad, barrels or no. I don't know if vermin change this, but having a cat or two running around does a good enough job of dealing with it if so - I've never seen a stockpiled prepared meal go bad.

Booze never goes bad, period, as far as I can tell.

205
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: The lack of metal variety, how do we solve it?
« on: April 05, 2011, 02:20:26 am »
An answer in a completely different direction:

I'm currently working on a mod to replace dwarves' use of 'human-themed' animals with creatures that are more cave-themed and dwarfy. One of those creatures is a 'cave coral' (actually, several species of cave coral, each with slightly different stats) that gives stone, including ores, once a season. I think this will be an interesting way of re-balancing the game to avoid these issues - you can embark anywhere, and so long as the traders can get to you and you can support a breeding population of coral, you'll *eventually* be able to have flux, coal, magnetite, whatever you like. (Well, not cotton candy, unless you mod my mod.)

I'm actually working on figuring out the details of how the cave corals should be set up right now (the basic mechanic is done), and I have a poll on the mod's thread about it, so if you're interested, go have a look and let me know how you think this should work.

206
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Dwarf Fortress...What?
« on: April 05, 2011, 01:58:37 am »
1) They're just indications that that's unexplored stone rather than some kind of pit. They don't relate to anything being hidden there.

2) Hit 'o' for orders, then under 'refuse' toggle 'collect refuse from outside' and 'ignore vermin corpses'. Dwarves ignore aboveground rubbish by default. The orders menu in general is a good thing to have a look at - some of the defaults aren't quite optimal for most play styles.

207
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Hi-ho, Hi-ho, Into the hole you go!
« on: April 05, 2011, 01:53:28 am »
Also, if you're going to use this on more than one goblin at a time, put a floor hatch over the hole. (Yes, this means that you can't do a 3x3 hole.) Otherwise, when dwarf 1 drops goblin 1, dwarf 2 will see goblin 1 in the hole, and even if dwarf 2 isn't freaking out about goblin 2 who he's hauling, he *will* freak out about goblin 1 (who's down in the hole, and can't get to him, but he doesn't know that - he just knows that he sees a goblin) and release goblin 2 (who isn't yet in the pit) to run away from goblin 1. With hatches, dwarf 2 won't see goblin 1 until goblin 2 is safely chucked.

208
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Hi-ho, Hi-ho, Into the hole you go!
« on: April 05, 2011, 01:41:41 am »
Correct.

Assuming you're doing 'pit/pond' and not 'pasture'.

Edit: The normal issues with dwarves getting scared of hostiles as soon as they let them out of the cage to try to lead them somewhere still apply, though. Build the cage at the edge of the pit to minimize this issue.

209
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Hi-ho, Hi-ho, Into the hole you go!
« on: April 05, 2011, 01:35:42 am »
You'd need the zone to cover at least one floor tile and at least one empty-space tile to be sure that dumping the goblin in would work. Having the zone cover the whole 5x5 would work fine; so would having it cover just one of the four sides (the zone would be 5x2 in that case), or just the floor space nearest the stairs/door/whatever and the empty space nearest that.

210
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Hi-ho, Hi-ho, Into the hole you go!
« on: April 05, 2011, 01:14:29 am »
If the zone is at the top of the hole, that's where they'll stand to dump things.

In fact, if the zone is next to the top of the hole, they'll still dump refuse in the hole, from the top. (This is something to watch out for when setting quantum ore stockpiles near volcanoes!) Dwarves really love throwing 'garbage' in pits. Don't know if they'd pit an animal or goblin properly in that case, though.

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