Bay 12 Games Forum

So in my original post I left out a bunch of rules that I'd been playing with so long that I didn't even think of them as rules.

Nobles:

• Always make a good-faith effort to fulfill noble demands and mandates.
• No unfortunate accidents.
• Never replace an elected mayor.
• Always try to get the highest possible level of nobility as soon as possible. Once I've got a duke, go for monarch.

Merchants:

• No stealing, either through bugs or force.
• Always trade something whenever merchants come. If they have nothing I need, offer them something.
• Exceptions to the above: If I want war, I can kill merchants or insult them, but I still can't use their stuff if I gained it through force.

Military:

• No danger rooms.
• No ultra-layered armor; all melee dwarves have a uniform of eight items: helm, chain shirt, breastplate, gauntlets, greaves, boots, shield, weapon.

Rooms:

• Everybody gets a bedroom.
• Bedrooms are stone, not dirt.
• Each bedroom should contain at least one cabinet and at least one chest.
• Once I've worked out the basic running of the fort, all bedrooms should be smoothed; however, no commoner gets engravings, and nobles only get engravings if I'm having trouble getting their room quality high enough (I think smoothed stone looks better than engraved).

Misc:

• Always try to meet strange mood demands.
• When farming aboveground crops, they should always have some genuine light. Just temporarily removing the ceiling and then immediately covering it up again doesn't cut it.

DF sieges are fairly realistic, in that they think they're going to wait there until you're worn down or you/they are dead.

No, they'll leave eventually.

So I was wondering about minor restrictions people like to put on themselves. Not full-on challenges, but minor rules that just make one aspect of the game a bit more interesting. Things like never using artifacts to enhance room value or making all your tables out of one particular color of stone or, I dunno, only assigning certain jobs to dwarves with a "k" in their names. There are a few such rules that are followed by large sections of the playerbase, like not using danger rooms, but do you have any of your own? Personally, I never make pots, instead restricting myself to wooden barrels.

I've always thought that the disdain for smoothly running forts is because people jump to the conclusion that a well-run fort must lack ambition. If your only goal in fort design was to make it run smoothly, that would be trivially easy. You could never enter a cavern, never dig out any candy, never use magma, never piss off a trader, never do a megaproject... so when someone hears that a fort's working properly, that's the image that springs to mind. When a fort does all those things and still functions well, that's different from what most people think of.

Also, disaster makes for a much better story.

Dude but this is like the twenty-first century

Yeah, but... if you actually make the board out of chalk that would defeat the whole point. It has to be a dark material so chalk writing will show up on it. If you make chalk-colored letters on a chalk-colored background it'll be unreadable.

Make sure your solid cookable items are not stored in barrels. The system prioritizes cooking solid foods in barrels first, other foods in barrels second then any other food outside of barrels. The problem is that the system also cooks all solid items together FIRST, so the dwarves never get to use the syrup (since cooked meals require at least 1 solid item). So if all your solid stuff is not in barrels your dwarves will take a solid item to start the meal, but use whatever is in barrels to top it off eg. Dwarven Syrup.

That's... actually much better than the system I was using (which involved traffic designations and separate stockpiles to make it look like all the solid food was really far away from the kitchen). Thanks.

You could just run it in a window rather than full-screen.