Bay 12 Games Forum

So I made a new game in 31.19, to see what this lack of metals was like. I embark at a site with flux and deep metals, and find out it's all marble and gold. Well, the place will at least look pretty awesome once I start decorating with gold and marble, but it presents problems for making actual useful objects.

Suddenly, one of the dorfs gets possessed. A Weaponsmith, even. I quickly build a wood burner, smelter and forge (parent civ gave me a steel anvil) and smelt some gold for him. I'm thinking 'what kind of awesome, gold artifact weapon will I get'? A sword would be cool. Maybe an axe. Warhammer should hit like a ton of bricks. What does the possessed (so not even legendary after the item is built) bastard give me? Tathurmorul, "Scribepaged", a gold crossbow. Has an image of a clownfish.

Sure, it's nice, but I was hoping for something more dorfy for my first artifact, you know? Well, at least considering I have no metal, all my defence will have to be marksdwarves. Should be a nice weapon for my militia commander.

Something odd just happened.

I decided to make a militarized fort, and get every dwarf into squads. Kept them inactive, but wanted them to wear armor at least, for added safety.

The ones I selected for jobs such as mining and woodcutting were given appropriate weapons, axes and picks, in the equip menu.

The problem happened when my miner refused to mine. He had the pick in hand, and the mining job active, but he idled despite there being mining to do. I switched him on and off, made him drop the pick and pick it up again, etc.

Finally I discharged him, and he got to work. Is this normal, or a bug?

çi also have manager and bookeeper complaining about lack of offices. Despit hacving assigned one to them. Haven't tried to discharge them yet.

Right, on the post above I've hammered down what all is necessary.

Wagon -> 3 logs
3 logs -> Carpenter Workshop, 2 wooden axes
wooden axes -> Chop trees for infinite wood

hematite -> wood burner
wood burner -> charcoal, 3 ash
2 ash -> wood burner, smelter
ash + anvil -> forge
deconstruct wood burner -> hematite

smelter + hematite -> iron
forge + iron -> pick
pick -> infinite everything

Thanks for the replies. The 'ash is fireproof' is exactly the kind of knowledge I was looking for. As said, anything you don't bring because you can buy it later counts as something you need.

Sucks that I need an anvil, as they can only be forged from another anvil.

To make matters worse, I just started an embark to test a fort bringing the barest minimum: 7 untrained peasants, 1 hematite ore, and 77 dogs to train into wardogs (not as food, just spent the embark points and need to keep the dwarves alive). I got stuck when I couldn't build a wood burner (you'd think a wooden woodburner would work even better!). Going to have to wait for the caravan anyway.

I'd restart, but I checked stocks and found there's an adamantine long sword hidden somewhere, which means there's fun lurking under the surface, and now I don't want to leave this embark. First time I find one.

IIRC, dwarves equip weapons based on their prices, so they forgo cheap iron for expensive steel.

Masterwork silver is best for blunt weapons, but it is less expensive than others so dwarves will drop it in favor of other materials.

You can either give dwarves explicit orders to wield specific item, or you can decorate hell out of your silver hammers/maces to make them more valuable than steel.

A simpler method may be just not making weapons you don't want your dwarves to use, and melting any that come your way. Unless you're using steel because you don't have enough silver to outfit all your hammerdwarves.

So after a few mishaps with irrigation (sometimes too much water, sometimes not enough) I decided to install a floodgate in the murky pool that would put mud on my fields. I then noticed that the murky pool was one square away from a river, and figured "Hey! I can make a bigger room if I install another floodgate in the river!" Surprisingly, despite this being one of my first forts (I tend to abandon after a couple of years when I'm dissatisfied with the layout, rather than anything going terribly wrong. Still learning the ropes, so I figure they don't count), I didn't mess up that too badly. I had the forethought to put a door in the entrance to the rest of the fort, forbade the door and made sure it was pet proof. And I made sure there were no dwarfs in the room.

So I had the future farming area nice and wet. Only I let in a little more water than I meant to, and had 3/4 water in about four 11x11 rooms. Oops. I just had to wait for it to drain, right? No big deal. I closed both floodgates and everything was fine.

Then a few seasons pass, and the water doesn't seem to be draining. I'm a little concerned, but I the caravan came and I wasn't worried for food or booze. Winter comes, and the murky pool freezes over. I suddenly have the great idea to drain the pool, by carrying out the ice, and opening the floodgate so my farm would drain into the murky pool, freeze, and I'd carry it out.

So I start channeling the ice from above (after I notice that mining it from below didn't work and I didn't want to open the floodgate). Immediately my miners get to work and I receive the message "Urist McLegendaryMiner has been encased in ice!"

What?!

I still don't know how that happened. The rest of the dwarfs kept on mining the ice happily. All the water was ice. I don't know how he managed to freeze himself in ice, since the wiki said that happened if they were in water as it froze. Die and learn, I guess. The fortress was really coming together, too. Save for the farm.

I started another one shortly after. Such a pointless death.

And as for your dwarfs not showing up... I really have no idea.
The only explanation I have is: you forgot to update your savegame properly,
or you downloaded the upgrade pack instead of the full package, and put it in the wrong place.
Try starting with a fresh install of the complete package, and let me know if it still looks funny.

The save file was generated in a clean DF 31.18, no mods or anything. I then downloaded the full IH install (still 31.18 when I got it), placed it in a different folder so nothing was overwritten or changed. And finally copied over the region directory into the save folder of the IH install.

I didn't see that the Readme included any other directions, or found anything in the thread or download page that would indicate I had to do things differently. If I missed something obvious, I apologize.

The file I downloaded was Ironhand 0.494.rar, weighing 7970KB.

So I just started my metallurgy industry, and wanted to make some bronze. The smelter has the options of using either bars or ore for the alloy. I was curious, what is the difference between the two options? Is it the same, is one more efficient than the other?