Bay 12 Games Forum

The devlog mentioned that Toady's considering ways to handle carts that carry liquids, so I felt this would be a good time for the community to brainstorm on that. I couldn't find any other threads about this exact subject, aside from an Eternal Suggestion Voting entry that was extremely far-ranging in topic.

First thing that occurred to me: what if there was a type of rail / depot that caused carts to 'tip' over in a given direction, causing liquids to be dumped? Players could use these as an alternative to pumps to allows for both vertical and horizontal transport of liquids over long distances.

There could also be different varieties of carts, some of which do not carry liquids. Maybe a metal mesh cart, or a slatted cart, or whatever, that just allows fluids to flow right back out. This could be a useful way to coat items with liquid materials, in case there's ever a use for that. Perhaps there could be types of cart that can be switched from watertight to non-watertight when they pass over certain rails or depots.

I'd suggest that carts that fly off the tracks and crash into things should also spill their contents, but that's probably already planned. This should satisfy people that want more varieties of magma cannon.

It's impossible to efficiently handle miasma, while protecting stockpiles of crafting materials, without being able to differentiate refuse stockpiles by having one that holds rotting items, and another that holds non-rotting items.

Bones, shells, chitin, skulls, and other creature remains that do not rot don't appear to be options in the refuse stockpile in df_31_06. Apparently you can shut off turtles, fish, what-have-you but making a pile that excludes their bones and shells only isn't an option.

This means that refuse piles become filled with items that don't need to be disposed of.

Excuse me if this has been suggested before, but after a bit of searching I couldn't find a thread that dealt with this issue only, rather than a total overhaul of the stockpile system.

On my current fortress I just managed to isolate the 'elimination point' of the brook running through the map, in other words the point where the water was flowing off the map no longer has flowing water.

My FPS went from a stuttering 50 - 60 on this map to 70 - 78.. with a spike I just noticed of 81, which is 1 above the cap I set for FPS. This is despite massive drainage pools and the rest of the river still filling, so I've got tons of non-static water, but now that it isn't draining off the map my FPS has massively improved.

Of course while the pumps were going, the drainage area was filling, and water was flowing left and right as the river's pressure system was being drastically altered my FPS was horrible, but I'd say this was quite worth it.

I decided not to put this in the suggestion forum, because I could've avoided it by getting silk cloth from a caravan(not just any caravan, but probably one of the three). Yes, many maps have absolutely no inherent source of silk, but, caravans /do/ count for mitigating this. So the whole reason I'm posting is because I thought this might be a fun story.

"Zulban could take no more. He needed silk cloth! He had screamed himself hoarse since August, locked away in his mason shop, barely taking notice as heavy Chert doors were placed in the exit passage. The common folk hadn't locked them, perhaps they thought a caravan would come over the horizon bearing the crucially rare material and the Master Mason could be saved. They were wrong.

He tore from the chambers, running on all fours as he screamed, "I need silk cloth, I need silk cloth!" Making his way towards the Noble quarters he encountered the Weave Trader, Monom Unibzareth.

The merchant ran back around the northeast corner and made a loop back towards the central stairwell. "Send wardogs!" came the shout, but they were too late..

Zulban was now in a target rich environment, laborers scattered as he tore past the stairwell.. the only one standing in his way was the Woodcutter, Zuglar Keskalnish. He knew that fate now pressed him into service, and made his stand in the southern hallway.

He swung and swung at the mad, horrifically strong Master Mason. Dodging wild kicks and punches, the axeblade met flesh. Zulban's left foot flew past, into the clothworking sector with a smear of blood. Geysers of crimson soon coated the eastern wall of the south corridor as Zulban lost possession of his right arm, severed from the shoulder. He threw a punch with his left and came back with a bloody stump at the elbow.

Off-balance, he flew past Zuglar, the axe biting into his right leg and lopping it off at the hip. Zulban wriggled angrily on the floor, nashing his teeth as he screeched, "Come back here, this isn't over! I need silk cloth!" Zuglar continued to strike, the screams gurgling and dying out as the berzerk Master Mason was put out of his, and Fortress Hammerkey's misery."

[ January 07, 2008: Message edited by: Stromko ]

[ January 07, 2008: Message edited by: Stromko ]

I've been monitoring this problem with my new fort for a couple days now, not sure why it was happening. I'd drafted 12 dwarves and assigned them Unarmed with Plate armor. They grabbed armor as it became available, they wrestled and raised their skill, so far so good.

Then, I assigned all of them to Crossbows. They grabbed the x-bows in their right hands (they are not carrying shields), they grabbed the quivers, and they started grabbing wooden bolts to train. So far so good, right?

Well, most of them have empty quivers! This will be a problem when I send them out to fight and they have no ammo. I've tried setting them on duty and moving them around, I've tried unarming and re-arming the ammoless dwarves, but they still refuse to grab any bolts.

Interestingly, many of them are now Proficient Hammerdwarves as they are still training in melee combat while holding the crossbows. They are also practicing marksdwarfship whenever they get a chance. Really, it's a brilliant cross-training program if only I could make them pick up bolts so they'd be ready to fight when the time comes.

Today I noticed a pattern that shines some light on this. Four of my dwarves /are/ carrying bolts in their quivers. The difference? Those four dwarves have the TITLE of Marksdwarf, whereas all the others, none of whom have any bolts in their quivers, have the title of Wrestler. The Wrestlers will soon become Hammerdwarves at this rate, bashing at eachother in training with their crossbows, which I doubt will fix the problem. I might be able to shut off my barracks and force their marksdwarf skill to surpass their melee skills though.

Also, I noticed my marksdwarves have little to no hammerdwarf skill, while those that refuse to put anything in their quivers are becoming Proficient Hammerdwarves. So I don't think marksdwarves cross-training themselves whenever they don't have enough wooden/bone bolts to practice is deliberate, since it isn't firing off for 'titled' Marksdwarves.

[ November 17, 2007: Message edited by: Stromko ]

Adding to confirm that as soon as dwarves are titled Marksdwarves they /do/ grab metal bolts to fill their quivers. Since shutting down my barracks and ramping up training bolt production, I went from 4 marksdwarves to 6, and every single one has bolts in their quivers. Still pretty sure this is a bug because if I hadn't shut down my barracks they'd never have gained enough shooting skill to decide they needed bolts; ideally, they should prefer ranged combat and grab bolts as soon as I assign them crossbows.

[ November 17, 2007: Message edited by: Stromko ]

There were still some abberations that didn't hold true to my theory of when this bug does and does not occur. After leaving an unarmed squad of Wrestlers on-duty outside for a few seasons (forgot about them for a bit), and then telling them to get crossbows, several of them put bolts in their quiver immediately. One of them didn't, for no apparent reason, and that one also refused to ever train marksdwarveship either.

All in all it's not that bad of a glitch though, by shutting off the barracks and making tons and tons of wooden bolts I managed to get 90% of my would-be marksdwarves to become true, fully-functional marksdwarves. None of them went back to clubbing eachother with their xbows when I turned the barracks back on, and those that remained buggy I just went ahead and kept as melee combattants.

[ November 18, 2007: Message edited by: Stromko ]

I used to be able to use floodgates fine, but I notice that every time I deploy them now I'm unable to shut off the water. I can flip both switches back over until everybody starves but the water never recedes, and it's an infinite supply so it'll flood the whole map if I give it half a chance. Is this a known issue?

I don't presently have a save onhand where I used  floodgates, but it happens in every game I run so I could generate a save with said bug and see if I can try and host it somewhere if that helps.

Is there any chance there'll be a day/night cycle in dwarf fortress mode? It might add a lot of variety to the proceedings, and will be great once some kind of fire / light arc is complete.

It feels like in adventure mode I'm stumbling around in the dark more often than not, so perhaps it should be much shorter than adventure mode nights, maybe about 1/6th or 1/8th or less of the time, or infrequent so it isn't too much of a bother. Dwarves would probably have a preference to sleeping during night, making it more of a concern to truly have enough beds for everyone. There could perhaps be options for different Squads to sleep at different times.

Having this almost-universal sleep period might make it hard to get things done during the night, but you could still Draft dwarves to force them to react to invasions or what-have-you, with suitable consequences. Your fort's sleep being more synchronized would actually be very helpful in some ways as it would make it more predictable, instead of essentially random dwarves going off to sleep at any time.

I don't know how the pallete change (everything turning blue) works and how well that would translate to dwarf mode, and if it would be possible to have only Outside areas have this color change. That would be part of what helps make it an interesting and worthwhile change. Dwarves and kobolds and goblins might have nightvision, I don't know, but when there's less light you might expect slightly worse senses of observation anyway.

Having a sphere of light around each dwarf would also probably be intensely laggy, so perhaps it could just change sneak or LoS parameters to make skulking creatures more of a concern during the night. Creatures being worse at picking out targets at night would be good in both fortress and adventure modes, it would be a reasonable way to make melee fighters worthwhile.

I guess all the inherent complexity to make it 'work' might be why we aren't seeing night in DF already, but I haven't seen a thread with the words 'night' in the title over the last 30 days (yay search function) so hopefully this thread has a point.