Bay 12 Games Forum

TAB key during embark shows neighbors rather than minerals (beware if it says "no trade" next to the names, it's a spot no caravan can reach), during the game itself, civilizations only appear as the send their first caravans etc

I've had laggardly Goblins occasionally, one factor is probably how quickly you gain wealth.

A quantum stone stockpile will solve all your needs! 

Basicly, you designate a single tile somewhere in your fortress, preferably near your mason/craft workshop, a garbage dump. I think it's i-g for this. Then use d-b-d and mark all the stone you want removed. Your dwarves will gather all of that stone in the single tile where your garbage dump is. Then use d-b-D (i think) to reclaim the stones and make them usable for crafting etc.

d-b-D is to erase the dump flag on yet-to-be-dumped items, which cancels the dumping, and is useful if you have flagged a whole lot of dumping, but it overwhelms your haulers or a trade caravan comes in etc. Once items are dumped, they lose the dump flag but gain the forbid flag. d-b-c in the garbage zone to reclaim the items. BTW, your garbage dump can be inside an atom-smasher, unlike a stockpile.

I usually make any garbage dumps on the central stairs, so the stuff is central/easier to haul away later, and it removes the chance of a garbage dump many z-levels away being technically closer (plus easier to know where to find them to delete the zone)

I try never to leave old garbage dumps active because of said ridicuolous pathing.

I like that even better. Get a few waves of immigrants early in the game, get your fort up to 20'ish or so, then you need to "buy the contracts" of the rest once the Inn is built?

The contracts (and some immigrants) should include guys from any fortress you abandoned in that world. The trade aspect would make the trade depot / goods a little more useful too. And knowing a certain profession is going to show up would help with preparing the right buildings on time.

A couple of related ideas I just had is it would be good if you could have a screen for the liason telling him that you're not accepting any immigrants. And if you could send out trade caravans / emmigration of your own (maybe in the caravan arc?). Build wagons and take your best to resettle a new fortress. This would give more life to worldgens.

Whoa, that's alot of miners. Generally, I just use the two I start out with, then add more as they immigrate. Considering the sheer SPEED with which legendary miners mine, I actually never considered getting more than that before.

I guess it's all about what economic outcome you're after, he did say he has 76 masons after all, working on construction full-time. I've never considered running things like that before, but it's an interesting set-up.

Using a rope to restrain them outside the gate makes them a more reliable counter-measure.

So, the long skinny of it is, how do I get the variety back in my metal diet? I tied upping the mineral variety in the world gen, I tried other embarks, other worlds even, and I've got nothing. Please help, the lack of metal variety has thoroughly curbstomped my interest in DF. And that scares me.

You can make the whole world metal if you like. I have done it before - everything was gold, adamantine, and marble . This was in 31.18 and I had all the other metals too about the place.

I added the [SEDIMENTARY] etc tags to the definition of the metals - presto entire layers of the stuff (with other stuff as deposits). This was overkill though, I'd prefer to make the large deposits Metal, not the whole layer if I do it again. I cut and pasted the defs to the stone_layer file, I don't know if this is strictly necessary though.

Eg hematite has the tag "VEIN:100" try upping the value or changing VEIN to CLUSTER

The basic idea is look at the tags for something like orthoclase or mircocline, which you get a lot of, and copy/paste relevant tags into the things you want more of.

EDIT : Using DFProsector, on normal, I got 100,000 Microcline ad no Hematite. Then I regenned after I changed Hematite to "[ENVIRONMENT:ALL_STONE:CLUSTER:100]" copied from Microcline. The next map had 60000 each of Microcline, Orthoclase and Hematite. Presumably this figure could be tweaked down a bit (not to CLUSTER_SMALL, that's for rare gems only).

Setting Hematite to [ENVIRONMENT:ALL_STONE:CLUSTER:20] plus [ENVIRONMENT:ALL_STONE:VEIN:100] gave about 30000 Hematite to 65000 Microcline.

Actually just increasing the environments they appear in to ALL_STONE should give you a broader mix of metals.

Not if it's a lever. If it's a lever, then it can be repeated! A door could be locked on the invader (Steel door vs. slade titan?), then the cave-in would fire. Instant death to all HFS attacks!

You could use the Hatch-Pressure Plate combo to force invaders to be stuck somewhere. This is great because citizens can path straight in but invaders are blocked without you having to lock a door, or even if you are AFK. I had an FB come across one of these entrances and all he did was break the hatch, sealing himself outside on the other side of the channel.