Bay 12 Games Forum

When I had a fort where I tried starting with only a single skilled miner I got a couple of high skilled Miners in my next immigration. It's possible that the game weights the skills based on what you lack.

This may explain the high number of 'useless' migrants players report, because those are skills the player does not use or train, the game sees the 'lack' of this skill. It would also explain why you get a clump of similar skills together, as each is 'rolled' off the same data.  I got a couple of skilled Glassmakers together in my current fort, which was handy at the time as I was about to set up Glassworks.

This might be an area where the gameplay could be improved. e.g. if you are training up clothiers and weavers, you'd be more likely to get dyers, as this is a lacked skill but is complementary to the other two.

Did you have very low-skilled Brewers before that?

@Necro910 : Legendary Fisherdwarf, or such, for me = Combined Hauler/Mason/Mech/Architect/Woodcutter. No worse than a peasant.

This one is the way I learned it! you can do it with the current version, although you'll need to learn the military somewhere else because it is outdated in the tutorial, but the wiki page of the military is very useful. Just rememberer that your first 5 fortresses won't last a year and the next 5 won't last longer than 5 years because of you incredibly stupid you are without knowing it

Me too ! I downloaded DF several times over 12 month period thinking 'this time I will learn to play'. The best attempt all I managed was to chop down some trees. 'Now What' i thought and tried to build a bed etc, no luck!

Then when 31.18 was out I decided to give it another go, but this time looked for tutorials. I read "the complete and utter newby tutorials" (HTML version), and it was all go from there.

After the tutorial, I just use magmawiki a lot to look up specific things I need to know, eg stone types, production inputs and outputs etc.

Once I got a weaponsmith in a fey mood, and he made an adamantine spear 

You'd atom smash him if he made an adamanitum left shoe. I'm longing for the days when we get PAIRS of artifact gloves etc

My last fort, a mooder made a cobaltite bed. It went in the Baron's room. Non-wood beds etc are my favourite because you can't make them yourself. In my current fort a Miner got a mood, made a statue at the Mason's shop and became a Legendary Miner. most others are about 'Talented' right now.

Actually, I think it's safe to update to .18. .19 added yarn though, which could well result in impossible moods, so I think we won't be updating past that.

Someone else on the forums had a yarn mood on a legacy fort. Adding yarn tags to Silk fixed it

I channel out half a room from the surface into soil, and dig out the other half. Channelled soil always lets you put the full farm in. Put a ceiling over the top and i have all my crops in one field, aboveground and below ground side-by-side. My current set-up is 8 3x5 farms in an 11x11 with stairs in the middle and an 11x11 food stockpile below. It's compact and produces a lot of variety, but too be honest still produces too much, so I set it fallow every few years.

I also put my rubbish pile on the roof part, so it doesn't cover any tree areas / grass.

11111555666     1 - 4 = aboveground crops
11111555666     5 - 8 = belowground crops
11111555666
22222555666
22222555666
22222X77777
33344477777
33344477777
33344488888
33344488888
33344488888


Any tips?

Pick a spot with multiple biomes in the embark screen, just for more variety. Haunted or Terrifying are a MUST, to get good attack critters.

No trees or other plants. No Volcano. Embarking on a Glacier is advised.

No river unless it's in a Freezing biome so it's just ice then you have to work out how to thaw it.

For extra challenge, bring only a 3 rocks and a bar of copper, and some plump helmet seeds (or bring no food/drink and starve til you open up the caverns)

I built a small city over the waters of a haunted ocean, you want scary, try having undead fish and whales snatch your dwarves from the walkways and flop onto land, my dwarves didn't last too long before I realized what a bad idea that was.  (The plan was to use the walkways to knock invaders into the bottom of the undead infested sea for hilarity, but I didn't realize how easily it would turn against me)  I'm going to do that embark again, and find a way to make it work to my advantage

Ummm, just build the walkways one z-level higher?

The patch with the supposed 1000% increase in playability was a third-party hack released a few years after the game. Other than that, there was one or two first-party patches that did nothing but fix a few crashing-bugs. Check the Good Old Games MoO forums for more information, last time I visited there were requests that GoG replace the original executable with the third-party-patched version (and I think I saw one request to split MoO3 into it's own board so 1 and 2 could remain untainted by the association).

Nope, sorry the control changes I listed were in the official 1.25 patch, released not long after the game, but with no further support. I've never seen the fan-patch (or heard about it till this thread). I presume there were crashing bugs, but i ran the unpatched version on 3 different machines, It never crashed or maybe like once, but it had autosave each turn anyway. Getting the official patch made it a lot easier to play. I have no idea of the features in the unofficial version.

There's a partial list of features of the 1.25 patch, which doesn't even cover all the changes I mentioned. So it's definitely incorrect to say it was just bug-fixes.

http://www.shacknews.com/file/2667/master-of-orion-3-125-patch

Could anyone explain in detail how the repeatable version works? It mentions obsidian, is that really necessary? I also looked at the provided map, however it's been some time since I used the unmodified DF without custom tileset and can't really understand what I see there. So would anyone be so kind and provide a guide on what to do? That would be great.

The obsidian is cast on top to re-create the piston back to the original height. So you build an obsidian caster above the piston, and dig out the bottom of the cistern again each time to refill it with magma from the magma sea. This is integral to the "repeatability". It should be possible to automate the recasting with some clever timing or mechanisms. I don't know how much has been done on this. Maybe raising bridges on the side of the piston would be better than retracting ones for casting purposes?

The bit you dig out would be normal rock for many repetitions, but eventually the piston would be solid obsidian if you used it enough.

EDIT : real quick version of the theory for a very small example, how I would build one to pull magma up 2 levels.

dig a cistern say 5x5 next to the magma source, with a magma-safe floodgate. Link this up to a lever.
The piston should be shaped to fit the cistern, but leave a ring 1-around and start right above the magma, e.g 3x3, so you channel rings sized 5x5 from the top to bottom. Here's a side-view :-
###WWW### W = Water held up by retracting bridge.
##B S B## S = Support, B = Raising bridge
##~PPP~## ~ = channel
##~PPP~## P = Piston
mFMMMMMD  M = Magma, F = floodgate, D = Locked door, m = Magma sea

When the support is released, the piston falls 1-z-level and pushes all the Magma up 2-z-levels, it is held into the shape of the piston by the raising bridges (walls would work here, but would stick to the new part of piston).

Most magma would be pumped or flow out of the top chamber, to a top reservoir (by lowering a single 1x1 setion of raisable bridge, leaving 2-3 Magma per square, then the bridge is raised again, some water is dumped from above to cast to obsidian. Dwarves now must rebuild the support and link it to the lever, while the door down below is unlocked and the 3x3 area is dig out to refill with magma, maybe have a garbage dump just outside the door if I want to keep the stones.