Bay 12 Games Forum

My favored way of avoiding an early death is to start in fortress mode, make a full set of masterpiece adamantine plate, put it in your trade depot, and abandon. Then start an adventurer and go claim your gear (it helps to pick a dwarf from the same civilization).

For illustration, this is an actual incident pulled from my log file (some irrelevant lines involving a frogman have been edited out). The character in question still had his skills at starting levels:

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<STRONG>
You've been spotted!
The dragon charges at You!
The dragon strikes at You but the shot is blocked!
The dragon collides with You!
You are knocked over and tumble backward!
The dragon strikes at You but the shot is blocked!
You counterstrike!
You bash The dragon in the upper body with your adamantine war hammer!
It collapses into a lump of gore!
The dragon is propelled away by the force of the blow!
The dragon slams into an obstacle and blows apart!
Limƒr Duthnurnekut, dragon has been struck down.
</STRONG>

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(And yes, creating a full set of masterpiece adamantine gear involves cheating. It's probably impossible to pull it off if you don't.)

I've definitely seen dwarves go for real food after being forced to eat vermin. I didn't let them have it, because I was starving them deliberately, but they would get the "Eat" job and start running toward it.

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Originally posted by Heliopios:
<STRONG>You've got a tiny, tiny list there.

You excluded Gold, platinum, coal (non conventional but still considered an ore in the game) and adamantine.</STRONG>

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I excluded the first three because, like you say, they aren't really ores, and by the time he reaches any of them he'll probably have ores all figured out anyhow. I excluded adamantine because it's a spoiler.

We all know that training up certain skills is a royal pain. So in my latest game, I decided to try to speed up the process with the simple strategy of bringing along a proficient engineer, a proficient weaponsmith, and a proficient armorsmith among my initial 7 dwarves.

Now for some reason, I keep having failed strange moods in this fortress. I seem to keep getting moody dwarves demanding particular gems, and I've so far been unable to locate a wide variety of gems. Lots and lots of aventurine, though. The first couple of times I remembered to post a squad nearby, so of course those dwarves merely went nuts.

The third strange mood, however, was my proficient armorsmith. Drat. As I scrambled to find the gem he wanted (probably turquoise, guessing from his preferences), I neglected to post a guard, so of course he went berserk. By the time an axedwarf caught up with him, he had managed to kill two other dwarves. Out of the 36 dwarves in my fortress, take a guess which two he struck down.

That's right, he just happened to kill my proficient weaponsmith and my proficient engineer (who was actually up to talented by this point in time). Well, so much for that strategy.

But it doesn't end there. I proceeded to dig out my main corridor between the chasm and the magma river. Completely by chance, I found a large vein of hematite crisscrossing back and forth across the entire length of the corridor, and then a coal pocket just a few tiles up. More salt for the wound, anyone? Usually I have to dig up half the mountain to find this stuff. At least my freshly recruited novice metalsmiths won't have far to walk...

Of course, this all comes right on the heels of my hermit game that ended with the message "Something has pulled a lever!" while I was busy cleaning out my caravan death trap. Blasted gremlins.

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Originally posted by GameHat:
<STRONG>I've considered that a stone might be across the river...

but having an area dedicated just to block storage, and having all blocks stored there should prevent this.

Which I have, and I still get the same cancelled building message.

I'm beginning to think this is a bug.</STRONG>

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It's not necessarily a stone needed for construction.  It could just be a stone that needs to be moved out of the way.

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Originally posted by Reynard:
<STRONG>I will do the alcohol quintuple food supply trick thing, though, 'cause directly cooking stuff doesn't give seeds back but brewing does, and I'm paranoid about running out of seeds.</STRONG>

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Only if you cook the plant in its raw form, which means that it really only applies to plump helmets, and at the rate plump helmets grow it's pretty difficult to accidentally run out of plump helmet spawn anyway.

Processing sweet pods to syrup and quarry bushes to quarry bush leaves saves the seeds, still gives you quintuple food output, and doesn't feel like an exploit.

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Originally posted by Reynard:
<STRONG>The main issue that comes to mind is that there's no way you'll get away with this on a hostile map. Eventually, the wandering creatures are going to kill the caravans and sour your relations. You'll get sieges instead of sustenance.</STRONG>

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As long as they're not consistently getting killed off, you'll probably be okay.  When a caravad does get killed off, just take the supplies on credit and pay them double the next year.

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Originally posted by herrbdog:
<STRONG>Bonus is bonuses, not boni, it is from Greek.</STRONG>

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No, bonus is from Latin.  However, it's an adjective in Latin, which is probably why we didn't inherit a Latin pluralization of it.