Bay 12 Games Forum

Yes, preach it. I was AWFUL with aquifers, and with some trepidation decided to embark on a space with a light aquifer in the new release since it looked otherwise good. Very easy to handle now! Plus now I could decide to use it for water or wells or whatever, rather than dig out to the river or some such. I am pleased to have another option like this!

Aaah, thanks, I never realized that! I just kinda assumed that it went up a whole number for each main version that got updated (with mostly bugfix patches or additions that were meant for the main release but delayed slightly) after it for a while. I was pretty sure I hadn't been "away" long enough to miss two entire versions!

Anyhow, thanks for the response, fingers crossed then.

Hey, so as I just mentioned elsewhere, I tend to binge a while, then stop playing a bit so I sometimes come back after a few versions or what have you. And something I've always wondered but not found (and not bothered to ask before) is just how good macros are at carrying over between versions. I do have a few macros for digging general layouts that I tend to use in my fortresses and such, and since I don't know if I could just copy them over without breaking things, I generally tend to just re-do them from scratch in a new release (although I think I have occasionally just carried them over in new smaller versions that just fix a few things).

Soooo... looking at my files, my last version on this PC before this was 44:12 (which surprises me honestly, although I do think I had a more recent one on my laptop). So now I'm wondering if there's any chance my macros would still be good - I don't know how much just simple things like digging get possibly broken/changed between large version changes. Is there any way to know without just copying them over and possibly breaking things? Is there not much chance of it anyhow? I just really have no idea if/how some simple things like digging macros might get changed around, and thought I'd float it by some of y'all that are better with the coding side of things (or just know from experience).

I haven't played in undead-supporting biomes yet, so that's not an issue for me.

Werecreature are the ones that are probably my biggest headache. Vampires are a problem when they appear, but you can pretty quickly isolate those out and jail them, and/or figure out some permanent solution to the problem, even if it's just throwing them in a room and locking the door.

But werecreatures not only can kill more of your civilians at once, but have the ability to spread their disease, causing more problems in the months (and months and months) to come. Haaate.

So yeah, if you caught the badgers wild, they had indeed been trained by one of your animal trainers. Animals in cages don't get removed from those cages for training or after, you have to manually remove them. One way to do it is to just assign the badgers to a pasture (then you can un-pasture them once they are pastured, if you like). Another way is to build the cages (b-j I believe, and use tab when you're building to expand the list and see specifically which cages have which creatures inside), build a lever, attach the cage(s) to a lever using your engineers (q I think on the lever and attach to each cage in turn), and then pull the lever. That might take some time though and is riskier if you want to make sure your animals don't revert to wild fully.

You don't need to pasture the badgers or release them in a training area - the trainers will go specifically to wherever the badgers are to train them. I think the training area might be used for war/hunting training? or maybe they'll bring the animals there if they're not pastured/in cages, I haven't really paid enough attention.

As for what else you can do with extra animals/sentient beings... I personally have a zoo in my forts, which is just a largish room dug out and a meeting zone overlaid onto it using (i). I then build cages in that room of all the exhibits - a male and female of every wild animal or sentient hostile I catch, and I generally treat goblin lashers, swordsmen, marksmen, etc etc as separate types and keep a male and female of each. Then for every extra sentient or animal I don't want to train, I'll build the cages in an arena I built (with a dining room over top of it and some spaces channeled out to view everything below), build the cages in whatever batches I think my military can handle, attach them all to one lever outside the arena, then when they're built and attached I station my military in the arena and release the hounds.. er... enemies, and let the slaughter commence.

If your military isn't very skilled/well equipped and the enemies ARE well-equipped you'll want to remove their armor and weapons first, the same way PatrikLundell described, pretty positive I've done it on the built cages before and it works. Also I wouldn't put the arena beneath your main dining room - it's fun to do that just for immersion or whatever you want to call it, but having uncaged hostiles will actually panic any dwarfs over top of the arena that can see down into the lower room, even when theyr'e on separate z-levels, and interrupt their attempts to eat.

Then once you do that, you might want to try to put in a floodgate in the temporarily-dry stretch, and attach it to a lever. That way you can shut off the flow at will.

Sorry, my reading comprehension is still iffy before about, oh, say noon.