Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't see how it is more fun to discover HFS on accident. 

There is a fine line (OR a very thick line) between, "well now my fortress is finally set up, I'll dig up some of this stuff the miners found (bless them), ooops now everyone is dead, and I've abandoned, there goes three months work--fun"!  and "I've planned for this for 6 months, everyone is trained, spike hallway ready, cave-ins ready, let's let this fortress go out with a blaze of glory--FUN!"

 fun vs. FUN! It's not like giving away the ending, it's letting people know the option exists.  Also many people get into dwarf fortress after reading something like Boatmurdered.  Where they tap hell.  Or they just confused from all the clown talk and google "dwarf fortress clowns" and find out immediately. 

1.  How one loots only weapons (and not armor) from captured gobbos--my stocks screen midgame is a nightmare of 170+ iron spears, most of them lying around my fort, I have no clue which ones belong to the goblins in the cages.

2.  Why I keep finding various named blue weapons lying around forbidden, outside the barracks stockpiles while their owners are off duty--do dwarves forbid the weapons they name or chose--should I not unforbid them?  Is it a bug?

3. How do you set up a functional windmill-based power network--I tried the horseshoe wall with a gear in the middle but the game won't let me build without "solid ground", and if I just build windmills no amount of gears or axles between them seems to transfer power

4. How do people make marksmen work?

5. How do you catch Giant cave spiders--I went as far as to set their population equal to regular cave spiders and give them the travel-in-packs data of the naked mole dog and I still haven't seen one, even despite a massive cavern based lumber project, intended to lure one out.

It makes sense that it is an engraving as opposed to an object--consider when speaking about art in real life-- e.g. thieves stole a Picasso, a Michaelangelo was damaged by a maniac etc.

Age of one means there is one megabeast left, just as age of three means there are three, and age of legends means there are too many to count.

I lost epically today-- I was following the Lovecraft thread and tried to build an large, magma spewing Cthulhu (octopus-dragon) into a volcano, whereupon my dwarves would dwell in comfort.  Since my last fort was a humdrum 17 year fort guarded by 30 blue-equipped legends I had utterly forgotten that goblins do more than explode into bits upon encountering a member of my military.  I also discovered that sieges can come after your population has already dropped a whole bunch. 

First, to stop a raid, I blew open a magma chamber near my farms sealing half of my fortress away with magma.  Unfortunately the goblins were in the half with all the food.  And as I mentioned the farms were knee deep in magma. So I sent my entire population to beat the goblins to death.  We made it, losing something like 30 dwarves in the process.  Now I have 50.  Then the tantrum starts.  I now have 25.  A good portion of those are mad.  Then another siege comes!  Many, many crocodile riders. So I pull the levers--magma pours out of all of Cthulhus tentacles--three dwarves melt as do a bunch of goblins.  Magma is running off the mountains and into the real world.  Somehow the bastards make a beeline through it and kill everyone but a child, who runs around a while NOT pulling a lever which would seal off the volcano (children!).  When I tried to reclaim--still a dozen goblins and every square inch outside my fortress is covered in magma. After one f.p.s. death after another I consider this a win!

The food dropping/rotting thing is weird though--maybe its a case of being short on flasks and backpacks--they normally store their rations in those in my fort.

He isn't trapavoid, however he is the native resident of the map. In cases such as that megabeasts otherwise quite catchable, cannot be caught in traps.