Bay 12 Games Forum

Once I start attacking the creatures in the caverns, I'll want patrol routes down there, too - probably many of them. So a simple squad-based solution to this would be very welcome, at least to me.

In my experience, the patrol/burrow thing is the only reliable way to position them right other then leaving them only one tile to move to.
It would be nice to implement formations. So that your squads arrive in a useful fashion (as in you can order the strong ones in front, the marksdwarves in a row etc) and not in the total clusterf.. they often perform.

With precision unfortunate accidents you can shave your population down to the cap, without falling below it and inviting another migrant wave.

Urist McMagic recommends standing below a raised bridge in full privacy. There will be no screams. Just make sure you ordered that slab. And then *poof*, !!NINJA VANISH!!.

As a sidenote now that your mistery has been lifted: when in the military screen, press e-> P (thats SHIFT+p) and you can check each dwarfs individual equipment currently assigned to him including metal grade and quality. It'll make it easier for you to determine how many more suits of armor you'll need.

Okay now I'm confused.  No bad thoughts, no bad thoughts, upgrade from .09 to .1, play a bit, kid goes insane... bad thoughts RE: clothing.  It's not as if my clothing situation has changed much... I don't get it.  it being fixed for '.08 and '.09 and screwed up again for '.1 seems unlikely.

It may just be that as the baby becomes a child it picks up all its clothes. All the clothes wear off at the same time which results in a massive unhappiness spike if it hasnt picked anything new up. I had it happen a couple of times. They usually do not even recover faster enough from the bad thoughts and just stand somewhere, not getting any other good thoughts or food/booze. As soon as a kid goes stark clothing mad, I wall it in somewhere.

Also. make a scaffold frame around your obelisk by building extra floors/stairs you can deconstruct when done with the project. Helps a ton with any elaborate build.

Use retracting bridges instead of floors for a large scaffold. Needs less stone and creates a fairly large walkable area in only one job.
And for the lever & support quick deconstruction: check your scaffolding where it may be supported by the pyramid or whatever... nothing like awaiting your scaffolding to go down in a huge crash and then nothing happening as you pull the lever. =/

Do you have any idea on how big the base square should be? You have a very large area at your disposal.
Also: super bonus points if you could get your hands on a mummy somehow. Or zombie camels.

If framerate is more important than aesthetics, you can optimize your fort's layout to reduce the total distance a dwarf has to go to get somewhere. You might consider making personal dining rooms and quarters next to where they work so they aren't running all over the place every time they need to eat or sleep.

Good point. I am not quite so sure what effect burrows have on pathfinding (do they still always try pathing out of a burrow or just when a job orginated inside a burrow and its destination lies outside?), but that could help limiting the dwarves' eagerness to beardly go places noone has gone before. Everyone knows the phenomenon that dwarves go to the other end of the fortress to eat their plump helmet when there is a gigantic dining room a few steps away.
Making several burrows, say for farming, crafting and military, which overlap on a central food and clothing stockpile (so you do not need to set up several. I havent played .10 yet, but in earlier versions it was a pain to organize goods to be distributed equally over several stockpiles) as well as maybe a dining room and the living area could force dwarves to stay and path close to where they are.  Include a bunch of haulers that may go everywhere to cover inter-burrow hauling.

That is if you really want to go through the trouble of setting this all up properly. Dwarves will always find the one hole in your burrow system and bug you about it with job cancelation spam - and of course activating a civilian alert will cancel all current burrow assignments. All in all a lot of work, if someone is willing to do some science on it be my guest.

There's been some speculation that items on the map cause lag though, and butchery/killing tends to generate a lot of items. So it could actually make framerate worse in extreme circumstances, assuming items do cause lag.

Now that you elaborated this so well, I see why what I said doesnt make any sense. Although DF is... kind of dwarfy in regard what it is tracking, I doubt a mastermind like toady would build in such a FPS breaker as tracking dead things (other than in lists and legends which, I assume, take next to no processing time or memory).
Maybe it is because with time the fort grows, both in population and dug out space, and so does your number of animals (both living and slaughtered ones) and everyone gets lower FPS the longer the game goes. People probably connect the wrong ends together in that they assume butchering animals causes permanent lag because their FPS drain the more they butcher - butchering causes lag due to the number of items created, not because an animal has died. Much like the assumption a few versions back, when some believed items traded away would cause permanent lag, because of the lag when a trader enters the map.


If you have reached and uncovered the magma sea already, turning off temperature could help immensely. Again, I am not so sure about this as I am by no means proficient in the way how DF is programmed. But f.ex. magma pump stacks do not only cause so much lag because they move liquid over good distances, but because in the process the surrounding stone gets heated up and cooled down constantly forcing temperature calculations. Having large areas of magma in contact with stone in the sea could be to a lesser extent be the same. One way or the other, turning off weather and temperature always helps.

Layed eggs arent necessarily fertilized. If nothing hatches about a couple of months, take the eggs away and let them lay new ones.