Bay 12 Games Forum

I just realized that underground forests are possible (I've heard of them, just never seen them in a game), which means underground forest fires should be possible. (If they aren't, just ignore this post.) Such a fire would produce smoke hundreds of times more quickly than a single wood furnace, and would quickly wipe out a fort under this scheme if ventilation is insufficient. I'm not sure what to do about that.

Maybe it's one reason to look for deep soil in an embark, rather than flooding an arbitrarily deep, mined-out stone layer, so that the planned UG forest would be higher than everything else. As long as smoke behaves like water in that it can't fill to a higher level than its source, dwarves deeper than the fire would be relatively safe.

The absolutely only way to do this is to path to the X,Y,Z cooridinates of the wall itself and stop 1 tile short.

But what if the dwarf decides to take stone from the wrong side of the wall?

To answer your questions:

Quote from: JasonMel on August 10, 2011, 02:27:36 pm

What about first calculating and comparing the builder's path to booze/bed/meeting room from both sides of the wall, and then, if that's inconclusive, just build on the side with the bigger enclosed area? Probably not perfect, but may guess correctly in the majority of cases.

what if the dwarf doesn't have a bed room? 

Just path to the nearest bed. If there are no beds, fall back to booze.

What if there's no booze? 

Fall back to enclosed area.

how do you find "bigger area"?

The number of pathable tiles the dwarf has access to. I don't know anything about programming pathfinding, but there must be a way.

Sorry!

I had been getting better results with Google searches of Bay 12 Forums, so I've been searching these forums from there, and I swear I did search there for this suggestion before posting it. Maybe I'll start using the Simple-Machines-based search as well when posting suggestions. I did think it was a little surprising that it hadn't been discussed before.

[As an aside, I like your propic! It's got *sauce*!]

For my next suggestion, I would like to propose that wood furnaces generate smoke, and all smoke carries risk of smoke inhalation which works much like miasma except that it causes death with prolonged exposure.

The smoke should attempt to rise to the highest point available, and should not dissipate until it reaches the outdoors, at which point it would become harmless, much like forest fire smoke. If no escape can be found, it should accumulate up to a maximum density and then begin to fill lower levels until all available space is filled. I suppose this means it should act partly like miasma and partly like an upside-down fluid with only 1/1 depth and no pressure. Since smoke is an undesirable waste product and not useful, I don't think players would mind or notice a more naive implementation than exists currently for fluids.

Thus players could either place wood furnaces indoors with a vent to the outdoors, or simply build the furnace aboveground. This would enhance gameplay by either creating the need for constant, open connection to the outdoors without creating a security hazard, or encouraging the player not to abandon the above world entirely.

There are certain things that can be done in Dwarf Fortress legally but which I find inelegant or unrealistic to the point of feeling like a cheat. Operating wood furnaces indoors with no ventilation is one of those.

Is there some reason operations at a smelter or forge, which burn charcoal for fuel, couldn't generate ash as a byproduct?

I've got bunches of thread and cloth available in my cloth stockpile, but none of it is usable. I've got a dwarf in a fey mood who can't use any of my stocks, and I can't make any rope or clothing. This is because every unit of thread and cloth has made its way through the hospital system and had pieces cut off for medical use. Unfortunately, non-medical dwarves turn up their noses at using scraps -- as they should, because a scrap may not be enough.

Currently, when a medical dwarf uses cloth for a bandage, he takes it from the hospital coffer, cuts off some of it, and then puts it back -- not into the coffer where he got it, but into a cloth stockpile outside the hospital. Meanwhile, someone else notices a free space in the hospital coffer and fills it with -- you guessed it -- pristine cloth from the same stockpile. Eventually, all cloth and all thread items will be suitable only for hospital use.

My suggestion to deal with this is threefold:

• put thread/cloth straight back into the container when done doctoring
  
• count thread/cloth in use by a doctor as part of hospital stocks
  
• display thread/cloth count when viewing an item of thread/cloth
  

Mangrove Swamp is the only biome from the biomes map I haven't found yet.

(At least, I assume it appears there since it's presumably an above-ground biome.)