Bay 12 Games Forum

Temperature is a mild FPS drain, but Masterwork boosts FPS in a lot of other ways. Don't worry about it, turn temperature back on. To me, temperature is a crucial aspect, even of the base game, and dwarf fortress with temperature turned off is not dwarf fortress at all.

The plan is to get a 6700k/7700k (overclocked to some degree) + 16GB of RAM at 3000MHz + SSD (which I already have)
I've never used Linux and do enjoy Windows out of habit and simplicity though I'm interested in your game's performance and the impact swapping has.

Before the 64 bit rewrite, I would have told you swapping has zero impact, as the game could never grab enough RAM to make a modern system (4GB+) swap. Now? Slim chance. I don't think DF really knows what to do with large amounts of RAM. Memory speed is critical, though. It might not be using a ton of RAM, but the RAM it is using, it is using hard. The game basically spends its time cycling over 3D arrays.

I do not think you can change the graphics, changing them changes the raws, and LMP just copies over new raws that came with the graphics packs. But I'm not sure about that.

The settings in the latest Masterwork mac pack have every single option turned on. Meaning, for example, all the civilizations from Fortress Defense are turned on, every race that can be is set to "playable" and all options like harder farming, greedy nobles, and so on is turned on. That is why I recommend downloading the basic raws from the windows pack and replacing your raws with those. You are basically starting out in "nightmare mode" difficulty otherwise, and turning off a hundred or so options doesn't sound fun.

When you turn on more than one playable race at a time, you can select them from the civilization screen of the embark selector, depending on who survives worldgen. With so many hostile Fortress Defense races enabled, its a toss up who survives. Different races have different territory icons, so when you are going through the choices you can get some rough idea who is who. Otherwise try an embark with each civ, you can quit without saving by typing "die" into the terminal.

For a more difficult version of masterwork, I would recommend the default setting plus a few of the Fortress Defense races, like Pandashi or Tigermen. Maybe enable more difficult farming, which makes underground crops take twice as long. The Earth Strikes Back is enabled by default, leave it on for early fun, as stones come alive and attack your miners. You can make Tributes to the various stones, and have your miners sacrifice a large gem, or a specific special gem, and the living stones of that particular type will be friendly when that miner wakes them up. Adopt a cuddly diorite or granite!

Not sure about the black line bug, maybe try changing the display system, it's in the data folder, in init, in a file called, erm, either d_init.txt or init.txt, I think the latter one but I can't remember. Change it from TWBT to default or 2D.

first: http://dwarffortresswiki.org

The best way to use minecarts is quantum stockpiles. Make a feeder stockpile, a two tile track with a track stop set to dump at one end, onto a single tile quantum stockpile. Set a route that takes from the feeder, goes to the track stop, then returns. Everything from the feeder gets dumped onto a single tile. It's very good for FPS. Other than that, use them to transport things long distances, or as a weapon.

Magma smelting: the best way to do this really depends on your location. There are several ways to go about it, they break down to "bring the dwarves and ore to the magma" or "bring the magma to the dwarves and ore." It depends on how far down the magma is, and where it comes from (tube or sea.)

Military: At it's most basic, just get the best armor and weapons you can, put some dwarves in a squad, and let them train. See the military section on the wiki for more details.

New stuff: Each of these is a "location" and can encompass more than one room or meeting area. They all need constructed chests or bags in them, like the hospital does, for holding stuff that is used at that location. Create a dining room and assign it to a tavern location, designate any old area as a meeting are and assign it to a temple location, create a meeting room with bookcases, tables and chairs in it and call it a library.

Make musical instruments for use in the tavern or temple, make blank books or scrolls for the library, make goblets for your tavern. Musical instruments are procedurally generated, different for every civ. Parts can be crafted at a craftsdwarf workshop or smithy, then assembled at the craftsdwarf shop. To write books, you need to assign a scholar to your library, cook up ink from ash at the kitchen, grind up plants at a quern or mill, press them into sheets at a screw press, make scroll holders or quires and book bindings at the craftsdwarf workshop. Assign a scribe and he will copy books that have been written, either at your fortress or that you've bought from merchants.

That's the basics, but see the wiki for more details.

I have it unpacked but none of the commands you listed are working. Is there a way you could explain this to a 5 year old?

I know it looks complex, but it really isn't that bad. Unpack the folder to someplace convenient, like the desktop. Open up the folder. Double click on the lazy mac pack icon. Click "Play Dwarf Fprtress!" button at the bottom. This opens up a terminal window, which runs the dfhack program, which starts dwarf fortress and patches itself into the running copy, allowing DF to be scripted.

Now, with the terminal in the foreground, you can open up a new terminal window. Press command-N. Next, we are going to want to get the terminal into the right folder. It starts out in your home directory. You list what's in the directory with the ls command. You change directories with the cd command. Type 'ls' (without the quotes) and hit return now. You should see Desktop listed. Type 'cd Desktop' and hit return. Type 'ls' again (you know to hit return after now, right?) and locate the MDF version of the LMP now, it should be something like LMP-MDF-1.17. Type 'cd LMP-MDF-1.17' or whatever the version is. Type 'ls' again to see what's here, and then cd into df_osx v0.43.03.

Oops, theres a space there! You can 'escape' spaces using the backslash, so to cd into that directory you would need to type 'cd df_osx\ v0.43.03' but here is a quicker way, you can use the tab auto-completion feature of the bash shell (that is the name of the program, running in the terminal, which is interpreting and executing what you type.) Just type 'cd df' and hit tab, it will fill in the rest.

We are almost there!

type './mdf-config' now, and it will give you some brief instructions. At this point, you need to know which options you are trying to change. Play around a bit. Do you have any familiarity with the DF "raw" files? These are what the data files that modders change to add things. they are located in the "raw/objects" directory. You can peruse these text files to gain some familiarity.

Ahh, I was just going to say, "Macros" for mass bedrooming. If they are set up on any sort of grid, you can make a macro to do one and move to the next, then you just run the macro over and over again. Dwarves will claim designated but unclaimed rooms. They will not claim undesignated beds.

Well, thanks for updating urmane, but, erm, ALL options turned on by default?    Okay, well I shall have to give your mdf-config a try, some of the options are quite painful. Greedy nobles, for example, makes the expedition leader start issuing demands right away. So, uh, no way to see which way toggles are set, except looking through the raws? I mean, I guess they are all toggled on by default, so toggle once to turn off. Let me try that with nobles. Uhm, and just about every other toggle, most of them are things I would not want to play with.

Okay. That works, very cool! But WOW there are a lot of options to turn off. That is a lot of work. I think I will just grab a base version of the raws and replace the one with every single thing turned on, then use your wonderful config script to turn on just the few things I want different from the defaults.

And now I need a rar expander for mac. *sigh*

Edit: CRICKEY! Is the "objects.orig" directory the original, unmodified masterwork raws? Well, grr, wish I'd spotted that sooner, but still it was good to download the windoze masterwork and get those quickstart .png files and the .txt files for all the additions.
Edit 2: Oh, ah, nope that's just the regular DF raws...