Bay 12 Games Forum

Unfortunately, two-weapon setups don't work. If you give them a melee weapon, they won't use their crossbow, no matter how far away the enemy is.

Many of these I suspect I'll have to discover myself through experimentation, but I thought I'd check whether anyone's already done it first.

• If you have two vampires in your fort, and one sees the other feeding, will he report it?
• I know dwarves can see through windows that vampires are feeding. Can they see through glass walls? What about glass floors/ceilings? What about seeing different z-levels through stairs/ramps/channels/grates/whatever?
• I notice that vampires grow paler as the time since their last feeding grows. Does this have any effects other than appearance?
• If a dwarf survives a feeding and is now pale from loss of blood, do I have to do anything to help him recover, or will he recover naturally?
• Feeding off of dwarves resets a vampire's alcohol counter, yes? Does this still work if the victim hasn't had a drink in a long time? How about if the victim isn't a dwarf at all?
• Is there any reliable way to knock animals/prisoners unconscious for vampires?
• Can an animal that's been killed by vampire feeding still be butchered as normal?
• Does bloody water (obtained from a contaminated well) sate a vampire's thirst at all? What about those barrels of blood caravans sometimes bring?
• Do vampires suffer any special penalties from cave adaptation (as a form of weakness to sunlight)?
• Elves are okay with cannibalism, right? Does that mean they're more accepting of vampires than dwarves are?
• In adventure mode, vampires don't gain physical attributes from exercise. Is this also the case for fortress mode?
• Can vampires cross running water?

So I just recently returned to DF after a long absence. I stopped playing just shortly before DF2012 was released, and I've been having some trouble adjusting to the new version. When I realized that it was possible to fine-tune which animals were trained, which were assigned to whom... I sort of fell in love with the new version. It took me a while to realize why all the children were unhappy. No clothes! The words "Dwarven modesty" are no longer a nonsense. Werecreatures are interesting. I was a bit disappointed to see that the large-gems-in-depot bug still hasn't been fixed.

Anyway, here's the reason I'm posting: I was reading about vampires on the wiki, and a thought occurred. Vampires don't need to sleep, right? So if you let dwarves choose their own bedrooms, a vampire should never claim one, making vampire identification easier. Or am I misunderstanding this? If this does work, it would have a major advantage over the methods listed on the wiki: those all require you to scrutinize each individual suspect dwarf, whereas this method allows you to go the other way around, easily getting a list of those dwarves who don't have a room.

I just reclaimed a fortress, and there's a bunch of wood/cloth everywhere.

I understand that I need to claim them, but is there a way to mass claim everything without individually clicking things to claim?

None of my dwarves are bringing the 4000 pieces of lumber from the top to the stockpiles...

Go into stocks menu, scroll to logs (it should be near the top of the third page), unforbid.

The first piece of coke/charcoal is pretty obvious - you're just taking some iron and some carbon and melting them, really.

The second use is more complicated though. The coke is mostly used because it reacts with various impurities in the pig iron, helping clear them out. At the same time, oxygen is injected into the furnace (formerly just air, hence the name "blast furnace"), reacting with the carbon to make good ol CO2. So in the end the steel has a lower carbon content, despite using more carbon in the process - something like 3-4% carbon for pig iron down to just 0.1-1% or so for steel.

If the carbon gets down to 0.1% something's gone wrong. That's too low for high-qual steel.

The technique you're talking about -- essentially, the Bessimer process -- is a modern one. The kind of steelmaking used in DF takes two bars, one with high carbon and one with low or no carbon, and combines them to get a result that's got the appropriate amount of carbon. This is similar to a technique that was used in China at one point.

All steel has a certain amount of carbon in it; that's what makes it steel. Having too much or too little is bad.

Caverns. There are axes available. I temporarily got one of them, (not the woodcutter) to cut trees, then he got webbed and it is back to no woodcutting.

There are no trees on the surface, and not many underground, so I need to chop down what I can as often as possible.

Try making some new axes anyway, that sometimes jogs them out of it. You might also try burrowing the woodcutters near the trees. This isn't so much a fix as a diagnostic tool; if there's some non-obvious reason they can't or don't want to get to the trees, this'll help determine why that might be.

You need to actually designate those trees for chopping.