Bay 12 Games Forum

My pet peeve Bug #4430: Large gems not moved to stockpile, should really be named "Artifact gems cannot be moved". You actually have to mod them into something else to move them at all. That's the consequence of this bug that is most annoying.

Regarding choosing an adjacent job square, generally you will have to find a path at some point to complete the job. Why not generate a path to the actual job target and then remove the last step? That should be even less expensive than making a straight line distance calculation, and also it would be more effective.

There may be a million reasons why that won't work but it seems logical to me.

Never mind, I guess that's basically whats happening.

They keep track of the first valid square they walk through from the beginning of the job, and then use that when they have the material.  That stops it from taking the hit on doing extra pathing checks, but I don't think it would be easy to avoid many simultaneous jobs that have a potentially complicated configuration from walling people in.  Outside factors can still cause trouble.  That's virtually unavoidable.  In the two wall case, if one of the walls is finished while the other dwarf is still fishing for stone off in the dead-end AND the first square they walked in wasn't the good square but the other wall's square, then they will still make the mistake.  Doing the extra pathing calculation is not possible without killing the processor the way things are set up, but they'll also often make the correct decision in multi-wall cases (whereas they'd often be systematically failing them before).

I am concerned about colored stone. Just because I have a hundred times more granite than anyone could find a use for, doesn't mean that I have enough blue, green or purple stone for paving etc. I tend to use all of a particular available color, and I often don't have enough. Maybe it would be good to start with boulders and have someone crack them into 4 'stones' for jobs. That way if you want to use them you still have them, and if you don't there are less items to dump.

Even that is not ideal for things like rutile, which come in very small clusters. I could easily see someone mining out a cluster of 6 rutile and getting nothing because of the diceroll.

Lol, sorry for all that work just to place a volcano! I just didn't think of the possibility that people would want to place them exactly. I mean... it's obvious, but I didn't think of it. I may have been suffering from burnout since it was the next to last map to be handled. Sometimes I get sloppy near the end of a large project.

Another issue that may come up is that having no underlying noise in the volcanism values may have an undesireable effect on the world's geology. I'm not sure how volcanism effects that exactly, but having only zeros and a few 100s might create monotony in the layers. I haven't actually seen that however.

Hmm, I think that when the volcanism map is clean, before you generate any noise or what not, the map defaults to 0.5 on every tile.  You can then use the buggy paint functionality in PWDF to paint 1.0 on only the volcanos that you want. (save often) On maps smaller than 256x256, this may be easier said than done, since the map will be automatically shrunk to fit and there won't be a 1 to 1 relationship between PW map tiles and DF map tiles.

Let me know if that works.

Sometimes a big cause of hauling inefficiency is just have too many idle dwarves. Imagine having 50 stones in some distant, deep room and you want to move it to a stockpile in the fort. It would be best to have a couple of guys load up a minecart and send it home along the tracks, but you know it wouldn't work that way, especially if you have 50 or more idle dwarves. Most likely they would all like to pick up a stone, put it in the minecart and then walk all the way back to the dining room empty handed, for a gain of zero efficiency.

Solving this problem sounds technically difficult, so I want to ask:

Are there cases where a busy dwarf will be considered a better job recipient than an idle dwarf? How have you handled this so far?

EDIT: Now that I think about it, we can handle it ourselves by simply having few stone haulers. Heh, maybe this issue does not require complex problem solving.

You can issolate your mine cart loading station from the rest of the track with either a cliff, since mine carts will continue rolling on a track when they land (a roller or ramp on the land site may be necessary), or a pond, since mine carts can go under water.

I'd be no harder to get enemies to stand on the track than getting them to stand on a trap, though mine carts should work against trap-avoid creatures.

Since the cart can land and keep going, I could see something like in Indiana Jones where the boulder rolls down from above. Have your carts shoot out from one z level above the rear of the main entrance corridor. If its only one tile wide they might not even be able to dodge.

"Taking 10 years off your life" is also completely incorrect when used to reference certain drugs, unless you're referring to jail time.

All I meant by that is that time increases in value the less you have. I'm not one to talk about gambling with one's health, I already have strike one and strike three going against me. Had I gotten involved with strike two as well I'm sure I'd be dead by now. Just don't forget that people are fragile when you embark on some new bad habit.