Bay 12 Games Forum

Just had the best embark I have seen. Small 3x3 area (home for the holidays, computer slower than mine) with native gold, platinum, tons of tetrahedrite, sphalerite, galena, and gems galore before I even dig anything. Oh, and marble everywhere. Plus- bamboo! Can't seem to cut it down (many Asian societies construct w bamboo, so you should be able to imo) but it's still cool. Natural spring canyon, so perfect for defense. Merry Christmas to me!

Bamboo currently is only for certain animals to eat, it's not really useful otherwise. hopefully it's made into something more useful in later versions - bamboo crafts, or furniture, would be nice.

Quote from: Jenniretta on December 23, 2011, 05:06:37 pm

It's all randomly generated, so if you get lucky you can get a FB made of ash that any stray kitten will rip in half, or you could get one made of metal spewing toxic gas and bleeding acid. Some can be damn near invincible, I've had a few that I needed to stage a cave-in to kill because none of my dwarves could get close to it and bolts just bounced off.

Ash devils,wraiths,shadows atacked my dwarfs. From 120 dwarfes were 0 left. I dont think it depends on body material.

not entirely, but its easier to break apart an ash beastie than one of steel, all else being equal.

3 wood furnaces, running full-time, powering a smelter that hasn't stopped since it was built, and a pair of forges pounding out silver and copper goods, 4 woodcutters working full time to keep up with the demand of the wood burners and the carpenters, life is looking pretty good. We found a gold vein in the first cavern layer, but we haven't started expanding down there due to a forgotten beast that luckily can't fly. The thing has a poisonous excretion so I don't want to really deal with it, the mess might kill everyone. I may skip cavern 1 and go deeper, leaving this forgotten beast to play with the troglodytes. A shame to leave gold behind, but I can dig up from below and mine out some of it without opening the cavern.

Still hoping to hit an iron ore in the depths of the mountain, I have more flux than I care to keep track of, a few good hematite veins and my military will be dressed in the finest steel this side of the mountain home.Since I have Silver, most of my military is training to use hammers (a few are getting trained with swords and axes gotten from the caravan so we have at least a few warriors who can sever limbs with ease)

Once the military has trained up a little more, I think I'll dig to the magma sea deep beneath the earth, so my wood cutters can come inside for more than a nap and a drink once in a while. Maybe we'll find some interesting ores on the way, no telling what secrets lay sealed within the earth.

... As an aside, I kind of want to re-read lord of the rings now, I'm getting that Moria feeling from this fortress, I feel like I'm going to accidentally unearth my demise lol

Just watched the last two -
in vid3 "He'll catch fish and clean them so that way they don't rot" - not quite, fish cleaning makes the fish edible and ready to be cooked, an un-cleaned fish in a barrel or stockpile won't rot, same as with a clean fish

♂ Is male
♀ Is female

As for the next video for setting up the basics, I think the best way would be to do things how you normally would and explain them as they come up, so when you dig your first stairway, explain how stairs work. When you make your first buildings explain those, same for stockpiles, trade, migrants, all the basics you can explain as they happen because they will come up fairly quickly usually.
Once you have a fortress set up and have explained the basics needed to keep the dwarves alive and such. then do like in-depth videos about specific things like a video dedicated to explaining more advanced aspects of farming[processing plants and the like], and one about textiles and dye, one about metal without magma, when you hit magma explain how that changes the metal industry, and so on.
If something interesting comes up before you were planning it, record it and explain it, so an early siege or something is a good excuse to explain sieges, same for forgotten beasts and the like.
Also, make sure you explain any plans you have for your fortress - if you build with defenses in mind, for example, explain why you're building that way and what your plans are.

Dwarves go "On break" every now and then, the longer you've had them going without booze the more breaks they'll take, some dwarves also seem prone to eat, drink, go on break, and sleep, all in a row, before getting back to work, so some dwarves will be away from their jobs for days.

I've never bothered with ramps, usually the area near my entrance gets floors of stone or stone blocks built over it, including the ponds, since most of the fighting takes place in the entryway (using the doors as a choke point so the goblins etc. don't flood in too quickly) I rarely if ever have military dodge into water/pits.

I would like to see goblin sieges bring more trap-avoid/building destroyer buddies, so a pair of wooden doors and a row of cage traps doesn't break the siege almost every time.

Can a goblin on a trap-avoid mount run over traps safely? I've never noticed either way but if that is the case trap-avoid mounts being more common would be pretty cool too'