Bay 12 Games Forum

So, do I have to forbid every single piece of wood in my stockpile in order to get the dorfs to use the wood blocks, or is there an easier way to forbid the rough wood?

Thanks.

The only things wooden blocks are used for are constructions and other things where you designate each unit of material to be used. Wood (and stone, and metal) blocks cannot be used for crafts, furniture, etc. the trade-off is that it's faster to use blocks for construction, and it gives the construction a higher value.

You can always just place a burrow over a zone...but if your dwarf was limited to a burrow that's a water collection zone, he wouldn't be able to do anything. Assigning doctors to a burrow containing only your hospital would be a good idea to keep them from wandering off though. But Zones and Burrows have two entirely distinct functions.

A fortress in the hills, or mountians, deserts, islands, volcanoes, deep underground, lush jungles, trading with dwarves, elves, humans, and trading blows with goblins and kobolds, Build with stone, wood, metal, and glass, structures to live in and items to trade, farm crops for food, or hunt for wild animals.

Don't forget to give them access to their supply stockpiles in addition to their output stockpiles.

Grower needs access to seeds and a place to put the plants
Thresher needs access to the plants and and a place to put the thread
Weaver needs access to the thread and a place to put the cloth
Clothier needs access to the cloth and a place to put the finished goods

Also keep in mind that while dwarves can live off of water, they prefer not to and it slows down their work. If you're dumping them food anyway, it's probably worth it to dump them alcohol as well. Or add a second grower to the equation who is in charge of supplying the other workers with food and drink.

Also, in Vanilla, if you trap and capture animals quickly enough, the game eventually hits a population cap and stops spawning that animal type, so after a few years of quickly replacing the traps with ruthless efficiency, you no longer have a use for them (except for defense against attacks, which is always low priority because you don't want your civilians to come up and replace the traps while goblins are being killed all around them.)

Again, a lot of this is playstyle decisions. You can certainly have a well made fortress using wood as your main building material and meat for your main food, it's just not the way many people play it.

I've already mentioned above, I probably dont need stones as much as you guys do because I use elephant soap for construction. I, however, do have alot of digging designation in advance and i see no problem with my miner going break on the job, fortress growth is always slower then digging process. Since when blacksmiths use more then 800 units of ore per year?

Keep in mind that in the current version, ores are much more common than they are going to be, it's not good to get in the habit of relying on a single miner chancing on ore veins and using that to fuel all your metalworking. A fortress might not use more than 800 units of metal in a given year, but at least some of that metal needs to be of a specific type (weapons grade, mandates if you care about them), and it will soon be hard to simply chance upon that much metal in the course of a year.

Chopping tree is very safe in the first year, which should net you over a thousand logs provided you are not on a desert. If you are one of those people who plan his fortress in advance, you also have a very large area secured with various means, usually enough to have 200-300 logs inside, which's plentiful for several years straight. Morever, chopping isnt a value-related job, new immigrants can do (and die trying) without anyone giving a damn. Weight is a huge factor for bins, barrels and cages because they get hauled around often and while -palm bin- are servicable, I'd rather my ☼«☼palm bin☼»☼ with masterwork star ruby decorations to boost hauler's happiness with minimal cost.

Valid points, however, keep in mind how much easier it is to enclose and protect an underground mine as opposed to an above ground tree preserve. Walling off the area is easy as pie, but what happens when some buzzards decide to harass your workers, or a dragon or giant eagle decides to make some Dwarf Roast for dinner? Underground trees are a bit more feasible, but they require large areas of space where you can't have any civilians going (otherwise the saplings get trampled and die), and you need to deal with blocking off the caverns you breached to allow them. Compare this to stone, with is always plentiful if you're digging through anything other than soil and can be used for many (though not all) of the things wood can be used for.

Put babies in the Military
And you get
*puts on glasses*
Infantry



YEEEEEEAAAAAAAH

This made me laugh so hard.