Bay 12 Games Forum

ONE goblin killing 1/4 of your dwarves? I'm assuming you have no military at all.

(l)egendary artifacts will give you a list of all artifacts created in your fortress. You can look through it, and see the description of the artifacts there.

I meant put on display for the dwarves, not display information to me about them....

The one real near-fort-destroying tantrum spiral I had occurred in a rather challenging situation where I started out in a Terrifying glacier biome with the only plus being a volcano.

Basically dwarves kept getting killed by blizzard men and wolves (mostly migrants though, luckily), and I was spending so much time on basic survival type stuff (like burying the corpses before murderous ghosts could appear, getting water, etc) that I wasn't getting decent dining halls or sleeping facilities. Burying corpses was particularly challenging since dwarves would run outside to retrieve a corpse and immediately get killed by something. As a result I had a few hauntings despite my best efforts.

Finally something kicked off a tantrum spiral and nothing would stop it (certainly not just giving people a few months off from work). In the middle of it some migrants arrived and after a while the 80 or so original dwarves had almost completely killed each other without doing much damage to the migrants, luckily. I was left with about 20 dwarves, most of whom didn't know any of the previous inhabitants.

Legendary dining halls seem to be really easy to create. All you seem to need is a 10 x 20 room with smoothed walls/floors and enough stone tables and seats for everyone.

I always build 4 beds immediately on embarking (if the area has no wood I bring at least 4 logs along, they're cheap) then make them into a dorm room even if the "room" is actually just a corner of a larger utility room. Even with beds in a crappy room they seem much happier than sleeping on the floor, though I have had some female dwarves get scandalized by shared sleeping arrangements.

My regular private bedrooms are only 1 x 4 and they seem pretty happy even with just a stone cabinet and chest. The fanciest I've really gotten is making the cabinets out of gold. I don't think they actually need even 3 x 3 worth of space, they just need one or two really expensive bits of furniture and smooth walls. Basically space seems to be worth much less than a small amount of fancy crap.

(I think my tantrum spiral occurred when I had 80 dwarves but they were all still sleeping in one big dorm area with no decent dining hall.)

I also try to create a walled-in above ground statue garden to help avoid cave adaptation, but it doesn't totally work because some dwarves just don't seem to like visiting statue gardens. Not sure how much happiness they really get from statues though.

Also, until the food requirements came along, I'd put all non-dog/cat animals in a cage at the entrance to the dining hall. Most of my dwarves were constantly "comforted by a wonderful creature in a cage recently".

Also if you're lucky enough to get any artifact furniture always build it in a high traffic area like the dining hall entrance so everyone will get happy thoughts. If not just build expensive doors, chairs, etc in the dining hall.

Also keeping all of them busy most of the time helps I think because they don't get as much of a chance to all become friends with each other. If everyone in the fortress is friends with everyone else then you're screwed.

Does anyone know if there is some way to display artifact non-furniture like artifact rings, loincloths, etc? I always hate it when they create a totally useless artifact that I can't display or use.

If they're spawning in your walls, there's a breach somewhere, probably some diagonal.  All goblins spawn at the map edge.

Goblins *seem* to spawn out of nowhere during ambushes, but I'm assuming that they have to just spawn invisibly at the edge of the map and invisibly move to the ambush site. I haven't had anything "spawn" inside any 10x10 walled in areas but maybe I've just been lucky. Then again I usually cover half the area with farm plots, then place a statue in the garden and make the whole thing into a statue garden so perhaps the fact that the whole thing is a "room" stops them from being able to teleport in?

It is worth noting though that dry moats won't stop arrows like walls will, and neither will being down in a pit. Perhaps next time I do this I'll dig out a big one z-level pit and put the wall around the edge on the level above....

I always build some sort of defensive fortress above ground made of stone blocks, so I never really have too much stone

Same here but I've tried clearing stone by just making a ton of stuff out of it and I can only get rid of about half of it. Also, I can't really control where they clear the stone from and it seems like they have an annoying tendency to get a bit from here and a bit from there leaving every room with some bits of stone in it, in the way of door placement or other things.

There pretty much has to be a way to say "move this stone here because it's going to block building something".

I only use quantum stockpiles for stone, though, I do draw stone from them for building stuff. I don't explicityly move stuff into them as a replacement for stockpiles, and if I build stuff above ground I create normal stone stockpiles nearby, so I don't feel like this is much of an explot. It's not like I'm using them to stack up metal bars, food, items, or ore for stockpile storage.

I'd be perfectly happy with some more reasonable way to dump stone such as a deep pit, but if you fill up a pit it should be more space efficient than stacking up stone in front of a shop or something.

I don't see how it can be considered an exploit. There's really no other way to clear a large room of stone other than using the d b d command.

If you go into a dwarf's inventory and view his weapon you'll see a list of "significant kills" for that weapon. I think weapons basically get experience points, though I'm not sure where I read that. For whatever reason I've never managed to get a named weapon and I've been through 10+ forts already.

If dwarves are naming weapons from danger room training then they must be getting experience for blocking with them or something....

I found siege engines to be pretty useless anyway. Seems like even a legendary siege op can barely shoot straight and even iron-tipped ballista arrowheads don't do that much damage compared to 10 serrated disc weapon traps.