Bay 12 Games Forum

Tell me what you people think of this build
**Low priority for hunting and farming in this build.
**All skills Proficient unless stated otherwise

2 Mining   *Optional* (5 Left)
- Look for: Focus (< Not actually sure if this one helps)
- Avoid: Quick to tire

1 Mechanic  Butcher(Novice), *Optional* (4 left)

1 Cook  Mason

1 Brewer  Carpenter

1 Negotiator  Judge of Intent (Novice), Appraisal (Novice) , *Optional* (3 Left)
- Avoid: Unassertive, Lacks confidence

1 Military skill of choice  *Optional* (5 Left, complimentary military skill advised: fighting,archery,dodging etc)
- Look for: Strong, Agile, Tough, Naturally Happy, Focus, Kinesthetic Sense, Spatial Sense, Willpower
- Avoid: Friendly, Naturally Depressed, Trusting
- Gender is by choice, but keep in mind the babies (unless you adjusted birth rates)

Alternative to above 1 Stonecrafting, Glassmaking or Armorsmithing, Weaponsmithing
- Look for: Strong Urges, Excellence (< not actually sure if this one helps)
- Avoid: Friendly


Enable masonry, carpentry, mechanics, architecture on every dwarf. Use the Workshop profile menu to limit workshop usage to the higher skilled dwarves.
That way, the experienced artisans will make the high quality mechanics and furniture, and everyone can help build constructions.

Noble Positions:

Expedition Leader: Obvious

Militia Commander: Military skills dwarf or leave unassigned until migrant wave or pick anyone if you plan on drafting everyone into a squad and have no military skills dwarf

Sheriff: leave vacant

Manager: Same as Expedition Leader

Chief Medical Dwarf: Leave Unassigned until migrant wave, or same as Expedition Leader

Broker: Same as Expedition Leader

Bookkeeper: Same as Expedition Leader


Justifications:

Mining is mining. Avoid quick to tire and look for focus so they mine longer without getting distracted. Miners constantly mine in most forts, so pick any other skills you feel are necessary. Perhaps 2 levels of swimming, to avoid drowning while channeling.

Mechanic/Butcher: Mechanics will take a large amount of time, at least at first, to craft many mechanisms. Butchery usually doesn't, an animal will explode into meat in an instant, even with novice butchery.

Cook/Mason: Dwarves don't need much to eat, after cooking a few dozen meals at the start of the game, the dwarf is free to craft stone furniture.

Brewing/Carpentry: Dwarves drink more than they eat, and you'll probably need wooden furniture less than stone ones, so more brewing, less...carpent..ing

Social Skills: Negotiator will actually make the caravans accept less for their goods, you only need a single skill level of the other 2 skills to see prices and trader mood. I didn't add "Look for: Friendly" because, making friends is nice and all and dwarves get happiness they get from befriends, but tantrum spirals are not nice and all. If the dwarf is unassertive or lacks confidence, they won't gain exp in the social skills.

Military: This is for if you want a guard early on. (which I do) Useful for more dangerous embarks. Will also help train new militia members. Recommended traits all help in battle.

Craftsdwarf: Makes lots of crafts for trade and wealth, or helps make weapons and armor for your military. Not much to say here. Strong urges trait so they will feel the need to craft an artifact more easily and a legendary stonecrafter/glassmaker/armorer/weaponsmith is always good to have. Why no friendly craftsman? For wen you fail to provide raw materials during a mood and they die of rage/sadness.

Consider the following for the optional skills:
Herbalist (won't need it much after farming is set in place)
Woodcutting
Fisherman/Fish Cleaner
Animal trainer (a less work-intensive skill)
Grower


Items to bring:
1 male kitten (same job as adult cats, not able to breed until adult, can't give birth, this fella is almost certain to get adopted.)
2 copper picks
1 wooden training axe
36 barrels of every booze type (the odd number over multiples of 5 get you an extra container with only (1) content)
51 bags of sand (in case you don't make any trade goods, you can trade the bags, and your glassmaker will have some materials to work with. Also, free bags.)
26 Plump helmets. (Brew them into wine, cook some of the seeds, plant the rest)
26 Rock Nuts ( Boil'em, mash'em, stick'em in a stew. More free bags)

There should be ~300 points left for anything else. Consider getting anvils or bronze equipment for your military dwarf.


Why I did not include the text file for embark profiles:
Dwarves will have different traits
Civilization may have different wares
I am lazy

Good Luck

Have to purge apartments of large amounts of claimed clothing. I built a nice system for flooding the apartments with magma then purging it over a safe zone by the nearby volcano.

Problem is this will take months at the lava's current speed. Is there any way to mod the lava to as fast (or faster than) water flowing.

Ok, everyone knows civilian clothing is a little broken currently. Dwarves won't replace tattered clothing but will instead claim and hoard new clothing in their rooms.

Drafting civilians into squads and assigning them uniforms to replace worn out clothing solves one part of the problem.

Now what do I do about the massive amount of claimed clothing littered around the apartments? They can't be dumped and I'm not sure I can cleanse it with !!fire!! without causing casualties.

When reclaiming a fort there's massive scatter of items from the previous fortress, is there any way to avoid this, either by having every that's not constructed disappear or stay in place?

MASSIVE tantrum spiral killed my fort and the architecture took way too much work for me to give up. There will be possibly thousands of items scattered across the map that I will dread to reclaim.

Mainly looking for a mod solution, but a simple in-game will work too.

edit: Uh...there are corpses everywhere...so their items are lying the ground too...which will probably get scattered on reclaim.

I read on the wiki many people hunt with the military and I've outsourced all my hunting to my military marksdwarves since they kill more efficiently than my hunters, however their kills refuse to get butchered.


For example I've had them kill several chimps and orangutans and their bodies are just laying outside, slowly rotting since my butcher won't go get em.

-Butchering labor is turned on
-The butcher(s) have "no job"
-Gather refuse from outside is turned on
-There is open, walk-able space to the corpses
-The bodies aren't mutilated
-I've forbid/unforbid the corpses several times
-Butcher's workshop materials aren't forbidden
-When i manually set the workshop to butcher an animal it gives me the "needs butcher-able corpse" error

Only military kills don't seem to get butchered since when my hunter (with the ambusher labor turned on) kills something, the corpse gets butchered posthaste.

On a possibly related note, goblins I've killed from ambushes are getting butchered readily, and the butcher has been churning out goblin meat and prepared goblin organs, skulls, goblin fat (which gets made into goblin soap) etc. I thought sentient creatures couldn't be butchered?

Nothing beats washing the blood of your enemies off with soap made from said enemy.

After reading up on the forums and wiki i believe I understand what a danger room is and how you go about building one but I'm not sure I know how to put it into practice. And I have a LOT of questions.


So a danger room is a room filled with upright spear traps, that are in the activated position, so basically a big spikey floor to put your recruits in harms way?

Is the trap put directly on the ground, or does it require you to channel a tile to act as pit?

Is the goal to get your dwarfs to step on the trap, poking them? or to get them to dodge out of the way? or both?

Does the trap have to be activated when a dwarf stands on it or will it work as long as the trap is in the activated mode and a dwarf walks over it? I see mention of using repeater mechanisms so does that mean the traps have to be constantly activating/deactivating? or permanently in activated mode (saving mechanisms)

Should the entire floor be filled with traps or should you leave safe tiles and arrange the traps and safe tiles in a checkerboard pattern?
A checkerboard pattern would allow the dwarves to technically avoid all the traps though, so should you make the traps unavoidable to walk into?
On the other hand, would the dwarves have enough self-preservation to walk around the traps or will they walk onto the trap tiles?

To get your squad to use the danger room, do you station them inside the room or can you set the room as a barracks and have them train there?

How many wooden practice spears is a good number to avoid killing/crippling inexperienced dwarves?

Base quality wooden spears and base quality mechanisms would be best for the traps correct? But if the trap only needs to be in the activated mode, no mechanisms are necessary?

I'm currently on an island and im trying to get freshwater using a screw-pump.

I was fairly certain that my reservoir was entirely artificial but after filling it and creating a zone through an open space to check the salinity, the water was still salty. The walls of the reservoir on all levels were constructed and all floors were constructed as well. I have questions on what I did wrong.

Did I test the water correctly? In a room above the reservoir, I channeled out a tile where my well will go and created a zone including the open space and adjacent tiles. The fishing option lit up so I'm assuming the game recognizes there is reachable water underneath the open space, but the water source option stayed gray.

If a floor is muddied with saltwater, will it turn fresh water salty? (Parts of my reservoir were muddied from a pumping accident and I waited for all the water to evaporate)

I read on the wiki that water automatically turns salty if it passes a saltwater aquifer layer. The reservoir was built through 5 z-levels and I only mined out dacite and rhyolite, but would those count as aquifer layers since other tiles on the same z-level might be aquifers?
 
I modded the region raws to remove all aquifers, but does that affect the above question?

I'm currently trying to build an archer tower on the beach in front of my fort but for some reason, the game doesn't have stones as a building material option above ground, only wood and vice-versa.

In other words, on "outside" tiles, i can only choose wood as building materials and on "inside" tiles i can only choose stone as building materials. Also, my carpenter is trying to make beds, but the game gives me messages that I don't any logs (but i do).

I keep all my stone in a 1 tile dump (underground) and the logs are more or less scattered with a dozen or so tiles of my fort entrance (on the surface). None of the stone is forbidden and i didn't mark them all economic, none of the logs are forbidden. There's hundreds of stones in the dump and several dozen logs on the surface.

I tried restarting DF but I keep having this problem, it seems spontaneous since I built a wave breaker (walls) on the beach with stone just a few minutes earlier.
I use version 0.31.16