Bay 12 Games Forum

What, and not even a mention of the Wii nunchaku?

The big thing to check first is what's causing the cancellations. A lot of things you'll see get canceled (if you have a lot of notifications set anyhow) because of dwarves getting hungry or thirsty or sleepy and going off to take care of those needs.Things like "item no longer available" (I don't think that's the right message, but it's something along those lines) proooobably aren't a huge deal, since they can happen from various causes, and I don't usually seem to notice them causing a big problem.

Generally though if you get things like they can't find a route, or area inaccessible or something, then you might need to go look and make sure you didn't break a necessary route. You also need to watch out for job cancellations that won't automatically be re-queued - usually orders you queue up in the workshops are a big one (unless you have them set through the manager screen). If say you don't have any food for a cook to make prepared meals with, it'll cancel out any "create food" orders in the kitchen and you'll have to requeue.

Pretty much any job that uses items in a barrel, bag, or other container are a huge pain. Seeds, food stored in barrels, stuff you've got stored in bins... they're all annoying, because one dwarf will go grab the container to gather up new items to put in it, and that makes the items unavailable to any other dwarf. -_- Things like seeds being planted will requeue themselves, but like I said, other things like cooking you'll need to reset manually.

Yay, glad you got it fixed!

And looking at the pick... it looks like on the lower level, there's an empty space blocking off access to the up ramps. Those two little dots just north of your stairs, too small to be normal terrain - those are empty ground, so you dug a channel or something caved in, or something. So your dwarves couldn't get to the ramps. If you decide you want to still use them, construct a floor over them or something.

How long did you play each time? In the first year of your fort, you'll get two hard-coded migrant waves and then the dwarf caravan in late Fall. (Not sure if that always comes even if you're not near an active dwarf civ.)

After that, you should continue to get migrant waves (as long as you're not at cap) as long as you have an active dwarf civilization with a leader close enough, and elf caravans should start showing up in late Spring while human ones show up in late Summer (with or without a diplomat).

When you're selecting the location for your Fort on the world map, press the Tab key to toggle between info about the location. In the section where normally it lists what the site has (Aquifier, clay, metals, etc.), instead it'll show other information for each Tab press, and one of the screens shows which of the main civilizations are close enough to interact with your fortress. (Dwarves, elves, humans, and goblins, not sure if any others can show up there.) I try to remember to check that out each time, although that won't help you in a game you've already started. (Unless you mess around doing things like backing up the save file, abandoning your fort, then going to reclaim/rebuild in the same spot, then going back to the backup save.)

You've absolutely sure the hens aren't laying? The dwarves can be pretty quick to run and grab the eggs sometimes to stock them once they're laid.

Also, on the discussion that developed from this...

My own two cents is that I've long wanted to see some sort of priority system that we could set. It wouldn't have to be 100% dwarves will definitely do that, I mean, they don't anyhow even with the current coded priorities. I don't see how it would detract from anything, more than the fact that there are priorities associated with jobs currently does.

Heck, it could even give a use for one of the other currently useless nobles. Let the expedition leader/mayor/whatever be able to change priorities of jobs in your fort, they don't take effect until the noble actually sits down and does it, sorta like the manager currently. And perhaps you could only have a certain number of priorities set, depending on the nobles level in some skill(s).

Or at the very least, I hope they change the priorities in some things, like taking care of wounded and feeding/watering prisoners/the sick.

Obviously they're annoyed that they're not considered as dangerous as they used to be, so they've added a new trick to their repertoire.