Bay 12 Games Forum

I'd like some sort of rubble system in the game just so it would make more sense. In reality, if you were to dig out an underground fortress, finding somewhere to put all the rubble would be your most major concern, and it's the reason why minecarts were invented. It might be a hassle, but Dwarf Fortress is a game about mitigating all those hassles. All games are about mitigating hassles.

Magma 2 z-levels below ice will melt it (so I hear) but it won't do anything special for water, other than keep it from freezing. You'll know it's warm, though. As far as I know, it won't even evaporate any faster.

What you *could* do is make a magma-powered steam room. Set up water and magma to combine in such a way that the resultant obsidian falls onto the magma flow and disappears, and let the steam rise up and fill a specially prepared area; preferably, rising from floor grates. You'd definitely want a way to turn this off, because if not you'd get a lot of cave-in messages.

With all these things following parabolic arcs now, I wonder if we can get real gravity for cave-ins and items dropped from bridges or deconstructed floors? The instant teleporting of some things to the ground seems out of date since we already know pretty much everything can fall realistically in the right situations.

It also seems like catapults could benefit from an overhaul. Shouldn't it be possible to set power, angle, and true bearing for a stone? Note, 'set' not 'get'. Or, to be frank, we could forgo catapults and just use minecarts.

I just want to know if we'll be able to craft elaborate minecart racing levels for playing in adventure mode. Pretty Temple of Doom, eh? Magma and all...

Dwarves getting smarter means dwarves getting stupider. Mark my words.

The thing about dwarf fortress is that you have to know how you're going to build your whole fortress before you leave the "Prepare for your journey carefully" screen.

It's fiendishly difficult to teach someone how to build a fort, because there's no 'right' way to build one. I had the joy of giving someone a woefully inadequate 30 minute intro to the game today, then told him I spent ten hours watching tutorials and reading the wiki before I even broke ground, and then a month playing almost constantly, before I learned how to play the game.

You have to fail several forts to work out how to create a sensible embark profile, which is where it all begins.

Once you've worked out a sensible embark profile, you'll probably be doing the following;

1. Dig out spot to keep food underground.
2. Dig out some underground soil to farm plump helmets and other subterranean snacks.
3. Set up a craftsdwarves workshop to make stone pots for booze, and food.
4. Set up a carpenter's shop to make beds.
5. Set up a mason's shop to make doors, tables, and chairs.
6. Hurriedly place the beds before they take their first nap.

Then, you basically expand however you want. You balance your efforts between building a place to house the incoming tide of migrants and establishing a defense for your fortress.

Stone traps outside.

It's like stepping on a rake, except the rake has an axe blade on the handle.

That, sir, is a stroke of military genius. Some day, I'll defeat an advancing army with this technique.

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