Bay 12 Games Forum

With this mod, your pretty much unable to dig through stone.  If your real lucky, you might find some copper in a soil layer.  Last time I checked, you could still trade with the capital for the odd "iron bone armor".  But for the most part, your stuck with bone and wood weapons until the baddies drop something better.  I couldn't tell you about the tags in the raws though.

A child just grabbed a stack of 114 forgotten beast bones for his strange mood as his main ingredient, I'm hoping for a throne 

Edit: aw, a bracelet.  At least it references the founding of my fort along with my artifact gold mace.

Dang I hoped I would have one on my current embark, thats the reason I made it so large and killed my FPS.

Anyone wants to have some Fun, they could mod unicorns to rage the way badgers do.  I haven't seen one in awhile, but an elf siege can come with unicorn mounts. Lets just say that the elves are not the threat there, unless its unicorn mounted archers, its a good thing the ai isn't smart enough to stay in formation and skirmish with those.

Restricting civilians to a burrow with an alert just involves 1. making the burrow.  2. Hit (m)ilitary 3. Hit (a)lerts, then next to civ up top, push right a couple times and enter.  You will see (A) pop up next to the burrow, that means all civilians are assigned to that burrow now.

As far as military goes, unless you are using danger rooms, I strongly recommend multiple smaller squads.  I use 2 dwarves per squad and keep them training all year round.  Eventually the unhappy thought from being on patrol/drafted goes away once they are skilled enough, and until then, two dwarf squads will allow everyone to spar alot more often which is its own happy thought.  Since they are on duty 24/7, there isn't the happy thought from legendary dining rooms.  I usually let migrants chill out for a few months so they can eat a good meal and chill in the dining room before drafting them, those happy thoughts stay with them and balance out the unhappy thought from being drafted until they are decent enough soldiers to accept the lifestyle.  I do occassionally deactivate a squad when there is an unexpected unhappy thought, like losing a loved one.  But this involves less micromanaging in the end to deactivate a squad of two for a couple months and then roll them back on duty.

Oh and when using small squads, or really any squad for that matter, be sure to check their (s)chedule and make sure that you don't have more dwarves scheduled to train in a given month than are in the squad.  Again I recommend 2 dwarves per squad with 2 scheduled to train all year, but some people say that 3 or 4 with 2 or 3 works well too.

Edit: As far as iron armor goes, that'll suit your needs just fine for a long time, if your heart is set on steel, but you know it'll take awhile to make it, then what I do is make leather/bone or copper armor so that they can still learn the armor user skill during training.

Quote from: greycat on May 06, 2011, 05:47:38 pm

That's only true of booze, not food.  When a dwarf drinks, he grabs the whole barrel (or pot) and holds it in his haul pouch until he's done drinking, which takes a considerable amount of time.  But when a dwarf eats, he just takes one meal off the top of the stack, and hauls it to a chair, where he eats it.

Really now? I think I have seen this before. When my military dorfs are training and they get thirsty I see them bring a whole barrel up to the barracks, drink some then leave it there as they go back to training.

Whats the best animal to breed for meat? When I had yaks I think I had one offspring the whole year.

Military dwarves are a little dumb, if they are on duty and you have enough waterskins, they will just fill the waterskins and drink from there.  They don't like to let go of what they are carrying otherwise. 

My two cents, dogs are the best thing to breed for food.  They don't graze, breed in litters, don't adopt dwarves, and give decent returns on meat.  I tend to embark with 7 dogs, 1 male and 6 females.  I kill about two generations of male puppies, and am actually overproducing food in a fort of 200 just with dog meat.  Make sure your booze is not being cooked, thats just a waste of booze.  Pig tails aren't bad because they can't be cooked, only distilled, but I tend to just feed the dwarves meat anyways

Oh and at the craftsdwarf shop, constructing rock pots are just as good as barrels now.  There are other types of pots which are pretty pointless because they involve several more steps to make.  Oh and like someone else mentioned, be sure your cooking lavish meals, its just space efficient.  And also, you can set up a food stockpile that only accepts prepared meals, and then adjust the number of barrels allowed to 0, but now that rock pots are so easy to make, this is also not as big a deal.

Food is really easy once you get the hang of it, your next problem will be overproducing food to the extent that your dwarves can't keep up with the hauling jobs.

I've heard that this actually works pretty well now, I am trying the same thing with my couple of archers, but haven't had a chance to test it personally.

I usually count on cloth from the first caravan too, because I hate to have strange moods I can't satisfy.  Plus I like having an epic hospital, the dwarves can all sleep on the floor for all I care, but my hospital is pimp.