Bay 12 Games Forum

How many dwarves does it take to change a light bulb?

Seven. One to unscrew it and six to clean up limbs of the first guy, who was standing on top of the light bulb when he unscrewed it.

I checked all the corpses and body parts through the stocks menu before posting, and I couldn't find anything suspicious. However, I seemed to have stopped the cancellations by using the stocks menu to mass forbid all corpses and body parts. Now I should be able to isolate the problem corpse/part by unforbidding things a little at a time.

The first thing I wanted to have cleared up was with regard to having your adventurers appear in Fortress Mode. My present (mis?)understanding states that it can provided your adventurer retires in one of your fortress civilization's holdings. If this is accurate I have two follow up questions in particular:

• Could they be an Elf or a Human instead of a Dwarf and still immigrate, or must the adventurer also be a dwarf?
• Is there a way to increase the likelihood of a retired adventurer's immigration? It seems to me that one must bank on gratuitous serendipity, and that getting one of your former skilled-and-well-equipped adventurers is something of a windfall.

Another thing I'm having trouble with in adventure mode is locating dwarves. The thing on the upper-left corner gives you directions, but I find that these directions are very misleading when it comes to getting you closer to Things That Are Underground. I think pausing to consider it has potentially yielded an answer, as I have entertained the possibility of simply following roads; surely following them would lead to the Mountainhome.

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think you can get an elf or human adventurer as an immigrant. I would imagine the only way to increase the likelihood of getting a dwarven adventurer as an immigrant is to decrease the likelihood of getting other dwarven immigrants, e.g. by generating a world where dwarves are extinct. Again, can't say for sure.

The reason you can't find dwarves in adventure mode is because dwarf sites don't exist in this version. Toady's adding them in the next release.

This one is about the game feeling slow after initial embark proceedings. Call it QUESTIONSET 2, but not to its face.
I am finding more and more that there is a rather large dearth of things for me to do over the course of the first year or two (ortenislandssuck). This is probably more of a question for the world cookbook thread, but I'm wondering if there are means by which one can secure more towers on the map? Also I have cave-display enabled, but I'm not exactly sure how to go about finding them so that I can try embarking near those too.

It sounds like you're wanting more attackers? You can encourage them to come sooner and in greater numbers by creating a lot of wealth. Trap components like glass serrated disks or wooden spiked balls are absurdly valuable for their resource cost, so building a bunch of those might be a good place to start. Also, you could open up the caverns sooner.

As for generating more towers, longer histories will give the necromancers more time to build them and take apprentices who will go on to found their own towers. Also, there is a worldgen setting for number of "secrets." More secrets ought to result in more necromancers.

Why do I military? The kids are calling it QUESTIONSET 3 these days
I suspect I am really undervaluing military dwarves, except for the crossbow kind. At the present I think of them mostly as only nominally more useful nobles with worse rooms, or, at best, a few less peons to manage. I suspect that strong military dwarves are the key to combating clowns, however, since my usual methods don't work against them. Am I putting to much faith in walls and bridges and traps? I use them nearly exclusively to repel things with at most a couple of squads of marksdwarves, whose main purpose is to rescue caravans/immigrants on occasion and to give me an excuse to build towers for them because I love to build towers.

Nearly my entire defense repertoire is traps; cave in traps, water traps, magma traps, pit traps, pits-wth-water-and-magma traps, collapse traps into pits that fill with water and/or magma, et al. Other than poor planning or against graduates of Clown school when is this going to fail me?

Traps and bridges are incredibly effective, to the point that many players choose not to use them in order to increase the challenge. Believe it or not, traps are by far the easiest way to face the clowns, too. That's not to say that a good military isn't worthwhile, though. Unlike traps, dwarves move, so you can respond to unexpected threats and guard workers outside the fort. A good military is usually a lot less hassle than the elaborate traps necessary to deal with FBs and titans. Plus, you'll really want a failsafe for when things get by your traps.

I don't feel this last one really needs it's own section:
Tips for dealing with a Giant Sperm Whale thrall?

Cage it.

Usually when dwarves suddenly bleed to death with an FB involved it's one of the many exsanguinating syndromes. Maybe the memorial is just wrong. It's conceivable that the iron spear is a sort of placeholder death cause. You're sure there was no combat log for this dwarf?

Full moons come once a month like you'd expect. An infected dwarf will transform the next full moon, so your guy must not have been infected. Maybe the bite didn't break the skin.

The most important thing is to get underground and wall yourself in ASAP. Your starting seven won't be able to fight demons and won't have time for fancy traps. Don't even try to let in migrants unless you're very comfortable doing so. Once you get settled, start working on your demon grinder. Spike traps on repeat work very well. You can use furniture as bait (ideally artifact quality). Wherever you put the spike traps, I would make sure the only entrance to your fortress is upward through a hatch, because building destroyers cannot target a forbidden hatch from below.

I once had a fort where I used a powered minecart route to bring sand from just below the surface to the glassworks about 100 z-levels down. I was pretty happy with it, but it would've been more efficient to bring the magma up to the surface and put the glassworks next to the sand. That's really the problem with minecarts right there. It's just too easy to build a really compact fortress that doesn't need or want long-range transportation. Really the only major practical use for minecarts is quantum stockpiling, and that's a quasi-exploity unintended use. And there's minecart shotguns, but that's a "dwarfy extra," if ever there was one.

My favorite animal by far is the noble wagon. You can build a trade depot from their bones and surround it with memorials to the brave wagons of yesteryear who gave their lives to bring your fortress prepared mosquito brains, capybara blood, and +large bronze breastplates+.