Bay 12 Games Forum

Non-sentient creatures can be butchered after they are dry skeletons, to yield usable bones. Unseemingly as it may be, minotaurs, humans, goblins and other primates or the like are considerer sentient. Therefore they cannot be butchered after death. Before death, the only answer to such woes is High Tower of Butchering.

As for miasma, I just keep the underground boneyard covered with a hatch. Dwarves throw the cadavers on the heap, when they are done one of them pulls the lever, and all the remains fall down to the stockpile. Foul stench can reach too far to bother with half measures and my dwarves have delicate noses.

I may be being thick here, but was the category "small rock" present in the stocks screen before the new release? I was just trying out the resized windows (which are great) and I noticed it at the bottom of the screen. I have 0 of them, whatever they are, so my guess is that they weren't in previous versions (it's a save from .09)

"Small rock" category is old, it was surely present in v.31.xx.

Quote from: Nerfer2 on May 19, 2012, 07:16:31 pm

Is Ironhand still updating?

He has a girlfriend now. He's lost to us. 

Be hopeful. Girlfriends aren't for life.

Cave dragons don't breed unless you modify the raws - and I'm not sure you will be able to breed the units you already had before the change.

Captured mounts remain hostile. They can be used for training (to get experience for animal trainers), for butchery (preferably after dropping from a really high tower), for slaughter (once they have reverted to wild state), so they are quite useful, but I don't believe that multiplication is one of their uses.

My vampire king had no requests so far (3 years or so), maybe your queen will be as much accommodating. Now, mayor is another thing…

What was point of material changes in .34.08? I'm rather disappointed with some of them. There are even some outright wrong changes, for example cedar is based on a tree which is not cedar at all, not even a conifer - and it still grows in coniferous forests in DF. It's like basing a wolf on Tasmanian wolf.

I suppose the only change which matters in game terms is solid density of materials. Unfortunately, DF simulation is rather weak in this area - real life Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris, one of the most important pines of the Old World) for instance, as timber, have density usually in range 400-550 kg/cubic metre, but can be less or more. Siberian larch (Larix sibirica) can weight 590 kg/m³, just as the larch in raws, sure, but it also can weight 450 kg/m³, and freshly after cutting it is 850 kg/m³. Back to cedars: Canadian Western Red Cedar weighs even 550 kg/m³ as fresh logs, but its timber is only 330-460 kg/m³. So some logs weight more like fresh ones, and some more like heavily dried or seasoned.

Similarly stones have different densities, but since they are more resistant to water penetrations the changes are proportionally smaller. Gabbro can weight 2700-3300 kg/m³ for example, the DF version weights 2920, close to average values.

Since there are such many natural variations, I don't see a point in changing values to some arbitrary ones, when DF cannot emulate such variations. I suppose it may be added in future, like there are variations in size of dwarves, but for now such changes are premature. At least when it comes to such variable materials as timber. I admit I don't like the changes for two reasons: one is hauling update, which makes it matter, but the other is... less than scientific reliability.

So I channeled the brook into a pool and the area around close to the channel became stagnant but the rest of the brook stayed fresh. I also noticed that areas adjacent to some pools were stagnant too but not all of them. So it seems that stagnant water only spread so much, and adjacent pools still contaminate water, but not always.

This is exactly as it was before. Sharing a wall with stagnant area is a problem, and tiles close to pool may be counted as contaminated if you channel from it for example. If you dig under river at z-level -3  (which is at z-level -1), and you came under contaminated area, then your further digging will make the water two z-levels above you (and to the sides) contaminated, even though no water is involved in your works and you are digging in area which was never dug, never wet. Which means that no actual water nor real connection is needed for contamination.

Contamination don't spread further over time if you don't mine and don't make experiments with water. At least that is my experience with longer living fortresses. I always mark the point to which contamination is spread (usually upstream), and when I check it years later it remains the same. But it is hard to leave river and its surrounding area undisturbed, so unless you resist such temptation the contamination will spread.

From the point you are causing trouble, the water  is contaminated to a certain point (in my cases 10-16 tiles). The contamination spreads in chunks, so it is possible to dig some tiles and not spread it, and then dig one tile further and spread a large chunk, eventually making even river source "stagnant".

There is still another similar bug, with honeybees. Normally in v.34 dwarves go to collect colonies and return immediately with bees (in comparison in v.31 they were doing something on colony tile and often getting stuck). However, occasionally they try to go to the site previously occupied by a colony, but now empty, and then they get stuck. I don't know if this is related, but maybe the nature of these two bugs is the same, and Toady could fix both of them.