Bay 12 Games Forum

They have to have grasps or heads, but yeah, presumably a skull totem is no longer recognized as a head.

Is a head not a grasper? My adventurers seem to hold plenty of 'ammo' (lips, ears, fingers, that sort of thing) in their mouths.

Crutchwalkswimsneak across the warm ocean.

Don't even try it in a cold ocean. Man, I hate how DF models the oceans freezing over every night... so daft.

If you ask me, best use for an artifact mechanism is in a well. Every dwarf will use the well at some point, to clean themselves for example. Dwarves get very dirty.

Fort mode is unplayable without Dwarf Therapist anyway.

It would make sense that Toady would fix it so that vampire curses change eye colour. Most dwarves do tend to have the same skin and eye colour in a particular civilisation, but vampires are often portrayed as having weird eyes, like in Twilight.

It wouldn't be better if they turned up without 'unnecessary' skills, because those skills arenecessary for obscure or seldom used industries. The industries all have their place; you might for example only create soap occasionally, but when you do, having an already highly skilled lye maker or soap maker will greatly speed up the process, freeing up your dwarves for other tasks. You probably don't notice this, because you likely will have one master dwarf migrant for that industry, but when you set a dwarf with no skill to undertake these tasks it takes a painfully long time to get the job done. Not having enough soap when you need it (and you will need it), and not having anyone any good at making it could kill your fort within a year.

I don't know why I'm defending migrants. I really couldn't give a hoot.

It would be nice to be able to turn off migration waves, but the fact is that migrants actually add an important play dynamic. Migrant waves and sieges often coincide, forcing you to open your gates to prevent ghosts. If you could just wall yourself in and ignore sieges, a significant challenge to the game and an element of efficient fort design would be lost. I'd go as far as to say that figuring out a way to open your main gates while still retaining defensibility is the main element of fort design finesse.

Migrants are usually much more skilled than your starting seven, often have useful medical, social or military skills, and in cases where they don't have any skills that you need, are easily trained with ones that you do need. You always have too much stone, and not enough smoothed walls. It's always worth having a backup legendary dwarf for any skill. You can never have too many dwarves.

Migrants aren't useless; that's not what's irritating about them. What's irritating is that you have to let them in your fort, leaving you vulnerable, and if you don't you end up with ghosts. You also have to take them time to go through them and reassign their stupid labours, which is just a chore.

If memory serves, royal jelly is just an ingredient and it has to be cooked out of the jugs. If it's a problem, make more jugs. What, are you running out of stone? What else are your legendary stonecrafters so busy doing?