Bay 12 Games Forum

Yes, a bit confusing, but "The pointy toof what they bite you wif" sounds even sillier.

Eggs, plump helmets, quarry bush leaves and pig tallow make an excellent omelet. I would totally eat that omelet. I make omelets with mushrooms, spinach and bacon and they are super delicious!

Actually, cutting flour with shortening, oats, sugar and cinnamon, spreading it on fruit, and baking it is pretty good. That's basically roasted minced flour, with a few additions.

A few thoughts on hospital stocking:
1.) don't build a chest in a hospital when you have any idle dwarves. Do it when they are all busy. That way, thirty dwarves won't all think "The hospital needs thread, I'll go stock it" at the same time.
2.) Don't build more than one chest at a time. Let one chest fill, use 't' to see what all is really in it, and build more when your dwarves are busy, if necessary.
3.) You can dump items from your hospital. Use the 't' key to select items to dump. Do this when they stock candy threads.

I've never really had a problem with hospitals, they seem to work just fine for me, but maybe I've just gotten lucky.

Forge a bunch of picks. Give one to each immigrant and make them carve out their own quarters.

Why is having one animal per pasture not ideal? Each animal requires a certain number of tiles of grass to graze, depending on the animal. You could make a pasture twice this size and put two animals in it. But why? What does that gain you? Why not just make one pasture of the appropriate size (which can be found on the wiki) for each animal? It uses the same amount of space as making one big pasture.

When a dwarf claims a workshop for a mood, you should check on him to see what he needs and what he has. Use the q key over the workshop and you will get a series of clues, depending on the type of mood. The order your dwarf lists the clues in is the same order he will collect the materials. Use the t key to see what he has already brought to the workshop. Now you can tell exactly where on the list your dwarf is. If he says "stone, cut gems, bone, tanned hide" and you look in the workshop and see a stone and a cut gem, then you know that bones are the next thing he needs to gather. Be aware, the clues are listed for about four seconds each. If you see a clue listed for eight seconds (for instance) then your dwarf needs TWO of those.

You can't get the clowns with traps, but they are building destroyers so you could always engineer some cave-ins for them.  Have some areas where they have to path through supported by only a single pillar, they'll smash the pillar which will drop the ceiling on their heads.

This has not worked since very many versions ago. Toady changed it so building destroyers won't destroy supports. You can still collapse it manually, though. And nothing is immune to upright weapons traps operated by a lever. Also, nothing can destroy anything (like a locked hatch) on the z-level above it. Make sure you have a lockable hatch, send a disposable miner in to hack out some candy, if you hit the circus, lock the hatch. This will still hurt your FPS, though, what with dozens or hundreds of clowns trying to path to your fort.

Not sure I understand the idea that changing mineral scarcity is cheating, but embarking a bazzilion times to find what you are looking for isn't cheating. Either take what the game gives you, namely, scarce iron, or take what you want. But you posted here frustrated that you couldn't find iron. Okay, if that's what the game gives you, and taking something the game fails to give you is cheating, then embarking a bazillion times, or any other technique for gaining more iron is also cheating. I mean, you either crave the challenge that comes from scarce minerals, OR you want plentiful iron. You can not logically desire both at the same time.

But this is not only a sandbox game, it is a beta (at best, I'd call it a feature incomplete alpha version.) Meaning, it has not been playtested and modified for balance. Meaning, for all we know mineral scarcity might be seriously out of whack at it's default setting. In any case, the whole concept of "cheating" doesn't really apply to a single player sandbox alpha release game.