Bay 12 Games Forum

You've already done the first two items on the list? Are you sure your existing gems aren't just forbidden or behind a locked door?

In that case, kill a tiger, obviously. 

Failing that, you might have to do some exploratory mining. You might first double-check the stocks screen under rough gems and cut gems to make sure that you already have an excess of both, and that they're not forbidden or set to be dumped. You could also look around the map, since you might have uncovered some gem clusters already somewhere.

Yes.

To me, there are a lot of ways of cheating. Building an indoor wood furnace, because dwarves should die of prolonged smoke inhalation. Using bridges as anything other than an elevated path. Perpetual motion machines. Throwing ammo. Using traps. Compared to the average player on these forums, I have a pretty broad notion of what constitutes cheating.

It should be possible to create an overhang of grating for marksdwarves to walk on and shoot through (of course protected by fortifications both from below and from the side), eliminating that blind spot. I tried this in 31.25 and it didn't work, but one of the recent updates is supposed to allow dwarves to see down through gratings.

SIDE VIEW

  D+
||+
||
||g

Where
D is dwarf, standing on an installed grating
+ is fortification
| is wall
g is goblin

I've set up civilian alerts before, and I could swear that it worked those times. This time, I don't know what it is, but when I set the alert active, complete with an active underground burrow, the civilians only drop their jobs ("Urist cancels job: Forbidden area.") but then merely stand there. Aren't they supposed to actively move their bodies into the civilian alert's designated burrow?

Only one alert has an active burrow, and that alert says "[CIV]" after it. At the top of the military screen, it indicates that the civilian alert is active. So I don't know what is going wrong. Am I doing something wrong, or is the game just bugged?

I've uploaded my save, too, if you want to take a look yourself.

I thought it would be a nice addition to the game if you could set doors to only allow passage for certain dwarves.

The problem I have with this is that the more different ways you have of specifying who can be where, the more confusing it can become when the user is trying to figure out why someone seems unable to go somewhere. That's one reason why I favor the forbidden burrow concept to keep people out of places -- all such rules would be found under burro<w>.

If a dwarf happens to create a foreign artifact, he should be able to manufacture that kind of equipment from then on.

That seems reasonable in theory. I think that the crafter should only get this benefit if they gained skill experience from it; i.e., possessions should not confer this knowledge. But I disagree that the whole civilization, or even the whole fort, should gain the same benefit. I have no answer for how the interface would allow this.

Some biome specifications could also be extended to underground plants. Maybe temperature has an effect on them as long as they are above x depth.

The think the underground biome is its own biome because it doesn't differ significantly between latitudes in real life. Not subject to weather, a cave is a cave is a cave; that's why you can grow the same underground stuff everywhere.

Soil type planting restrictions are an interesting idea, though, for both above- and below-ground plants.

Oftentimes, I need dwarves to do things related to fortress defense, such as firing siege weapons or pulling levers, that do not involve swinging actual weapons. Civilian squads would be very useful for this if they had exactly two properties:

• Expect its members to perform their jobs, if any, in the face of danger rather than running away. (Modulate this with personality if desired.)
• Make its members exempt from civilian alerts.

You could define a civilian squad on the <m>ilitary screen, but be unable to assign them equipment. Also, it would not appear on the <s>quads screen or the military schedule rotation, since they do not engage in combat like a normal squad would, and would therefore be unsuitable for "kill" orders, patrol routes, training and so forth.

I see no reason for more than one civilian squad to be creatable, as long as it accepts an essentially unbounded number of members.

But the player can direct the dwarves based on that player's knowledge, so player knowledge effectively is dwarven knowledge. That's why I don't think we should get into the habit of making distinctions between the two.

I agree, blood should dry and not be spreadable, and there should be a limit on the number of generations of smears a single spillage can generate, based on its type. I don't know how blood tracking works currently, or whether this includes all the types there are in the game, but just as an example,

• A pool should dry in a month or six, and be able to generate at most N spatterings, after which it should downgrade to a spattering itself.
• A spatter should dry in about a month, and should be able to generate M smears, after which it should downgrade to a smear.
• Smears should dry right away and be unspreadable.