Bay 12 Games Forum

I like to start with a proficient carpenter, and there's normally plenty of wood, so I make redundant wooden shields and just let my soldiers pick the highest quality.  I assume higher quality shields improve block chance, though I've never seen any !!SCIENCE!! to confirm.

Quote from: Bognor on February 19, 2014, 07:41:13 pm

Given that chain mail covers the upper legs as well as the torso, and presumably everything in between, would chain mail + boots be sufficient to stop these negative thoughts?

Chainmail may protect the thighs, but they still occupy the Upper Body slot, so I'm pretty sure they'll still be upset about being pantsless in front of their friends and family. Same goes for robes, which technically cover the whole body, but are still considered Upper Body wear.

Great.  I now have a mental image of a dwarf in neck-to-knee chainmail that's crotchless and assless.

Well, with extremely high skill dwarves, it seems that candy has quite a decisive advantage, based on my preliminary arena tests.

5 grandmaster hammerdorfs vs 5 grandmaster hammerdorfs, both wielding silver warhammers, with side 1 wearing addy and side 2 wearing steel has had the addy dorfs beat the steel dorfs decisively for 2 trials. I'm planning to do a total of 15 trials of this, and reporting back.

If addy proves superior in repeats of this test, I would suggest it would be due to the hammers, not due to the high skills.  See Shinziril's research: "Blunt attacks seem to ignore armor of the level of iron or below, are somewhat blocked by steel armor, and are often (but not invariably) blocked by adamantine armor."

Another thing is that, all else being equal, a room that's fully enclosed by walls (accessible via stairs or ramps) will be worth much more than one that is not.  Each side of a room that has a "gap" in it, whether plugged by a door or not, reduces a room's value.  See this masterwork thread for details.

Once all other tasks are out of their way it then becomes a matter of the self-discipline attribute.  I guess dwarf therapist calls it Willpower.  Individual dwarfs seem to practice with a frequency proportional to their Willpower.

Self-discipline is a personality trait that leads to descriptors like "is self-disciplined" and "is occasionally given to procrastination".  Willpower is an attribute like Strength or Agility that would be mentioned in green writing in a Dwarf's profile if good or red writing if bad.  You can train Willpower just like other attributes.  The confusion may be because Self-discipline values between 76 and 90 are reported as "possesses great willpower", which I guess is because soul attributes were added to the game long after personality traits.

I noticed that they would go for unprepared food pretty often. I set the food to restricted and set high priority walking all the way to the prepared food. This hasn't stopped it completely but almost all dwarves now eat from the good food.

Priority doesn't work like that.  It never affects a dwarf's destination, only how he will get there.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Domestic_animal

Dogs.  They're not milkable or shearable but they breed fast, give absurd amounts of meat (possibly due to a bug related to their lack of hooves), help on defense, and don't need to graze.

Maybe add pigs if you want milk, and sheep if you want wool (pig tails are an easier source of thread). Turkeys are ideal for eggs, but blue peafowl are arguably better if you want bones and meat as well because they grow up quicker.

Unless somethings changed recently, goats and sheep both give milk, but only sheep give wool.

I can't find a link, but my memory is that there used to be a bug affecting mining specifically that prevented mining from training any attribute.  It seems to have been fixed by 0.31.12, though. (link)