Bay 12 Games Forum

When you say stuck, do you mean that you can't do anything? Or can you still do some things, like maybe move the cursor around, but nothing other than that? If it's the former then there's nothing to do but wait and hope DF snaps out of it, but if it's the latter there may be some options.

Oh, hey, here's one from the wayback machine.

The day I upgraded my computer from an ancient Celeron D to the AMD 1090T Six core. I also went from 1GB RAM to 8. (Apparently, the biggest impact on my speed was the extreme cache upgrade.) Also, my FPS on my carefully selected, excessive item culled, no moving water or magma, anti-fps drain 2x2 map went from ~16 to over 200,000. The siege that hit me right after I loaded the save lasted less than a second, and I lost 190 dorfs. My reaction?

O_O OMFGWAT?

Then I remembered that I had the FPS uncapped.

*facepalm*

I wish this would happen to me. I've got a fort of 50 dwarves, and I'm lucky if my FPS gets above 40, despite 4GB RAM. Of course, I'm in the middle of a megaproject, which might affect things somewhat...

Which brings me to my facepalm. I'm working with very limited stone resources, and trying to build a huge stone disk on top of a pillar overlooking a volcano. There's a pump stack set up in the middle of this pillar. I spend about a year in game, and about 10 hours out of game setting everything up when I realise that granite is not in fact magma safe.

For the most efficient forts, don't use stairs. Use ramp corridors

Well, for the most efficient forts, restrict all dwarves to one z-level. This is difficult in practice however.

I usually have my fort divided into a couple of sections. There's the bedrooms/diningroom/foodstorage area, which has the dining room right next to a food and drink stockpile with a brewer and cook right next to it to one side and large swathes of bedrooms on the other, along with a hospital/well and any barracks I need. There is the farm area, which has farms, a farmer's workshop and as many animals as I can fit in it. I usually need to keep more animals down in the caverns to prevent starving, and put another workshop down there for shearing purposes. Right outside the entrance I have a butcher/tanner and refuse stockpile and right inside I have a trade depot along with a bunch of craft/gem cutter workshops and a craft/clothing storage area. I usually put my other workshops between there and the bedrooms, unless there's a big z-level distance between the two for some reason. And finally I have a magma forge area, hopefully close to the rest of the fort but down in the caverns if necessary. If it is down there, then I have some food/bedrooms for the smiths set up as well.

I try to keep all my hallways 2 tiles wide, unless they're in a high traffic area in which case I make them  3 tiles wide. I don't leave unnecessary walls up, and I make my bedrooms 3x3 for normal citizens and 5x5 for nobles.




In my most recent fort I'm trying to build a set of large mid-air disks on which to house my dwarves, supplied with magma and water via pump-filled columns. Most of this isn't built yet, and none of the water/magma stuff will be set up until the end due to trouble in placing windmills. I intend divided it into four areas to make the best use of the water/magma. There are three smaller disks with one central one in the middle connecting them together.

One disk has all my farm workers and food preparers, with a few bedrooms for them, a few areas covered in grass for livestock if possible and a few covered in mud for farming. There will probably be a couple layered disks here with workers for that layer housed on one side of the disk. On top will be a bunch of windmills to power the pump stack for water when I need it.

The next disk has all of the workshops related to fortress-specific items, like furniture, mechanisms, that sort of thing. There isn't anything special about it, it just is there to not take up space on the central disk.

The last smaller disk has all the crafts and clothing makers on it, as well as a trade depot and the mayor's residence. It is the only disk with a direct connection to the ground, which is a spiral ramp which is designed to let caravans up. There will be a bunch of traps set up to stop intruders, along with some war-trained animals to stop any kobolds who get past the traps.

The central disk is the big one. There will be a mini-aquifer system to take extra water from the farm area, which will be piped over to fill in a small reservoir with a couple of wells around it and a fountain/mist generator in the center. There will be a small statue garden/courtyard area around the fountain, and a few dining areas around the courtyard. Some closed in, some open air for exposure to the waterfall. There will be a bunch of warehouses, a barracks which will house mostly marksdwarves, and a hospital near the wells. There will be bridges connecting it to the other disks, which will all be detachable in case of an emergency. There will be some apartment blocks, some nicer houses, and a small palace for the non-mayor nobles. Down underneath this disk is the forge area, with some magma piped up to it, along with a nice big mamga reservoir. There will be an emergency hatch to dump all the magma, as well as a pump to pull the magma up to the surface and spit it out through the fountain in case of emergencies.


My only regret about this is that the site I chose freezes up in the winter, which makes my fountain somewhat impermanent and dangerous. But the rest of the site's design is so awesome that I couldn't not go with it: there is a row of hills right under where I want to put the disks, which is a nice place to base the pillars I want to set them on, there's an aquifer for me to pull water from, and a volcano in the middle of one of the hills on which to build the central disk. Lots of mica, Plenty of soil, and right at the meeting point of three deserts and a savannah, so I've got plenty of sand and wood.

I'm hoping that by restricting workers to their disks, apart from some haulers to carry food and stuff around, I can avoid excessive fps trouble like I've had in past forts. Acquiring raw materials will be difficult though.

I wasn't sure whether or not to put this in with creative projects, and decided not to since I'm still a ways away from actually trying to build this.

I've got an idea in my head to design a laser cutter, with the major distinction between it and most others being that rather than using an X-Y table to direct the laser it would instead embed the laser in a sphere which would rotate in two directions and raise/lower itself. The main reasons for this are to make it more compact and to make some operations (rotations and scaling) much easier, from a computational standpoint.

The basic idea here is a laser in a hampsterball. It's sitting on a ring filled with ball bearings to keep it from falling, and there are a pair of motors which spin it around the vertical axis and which change the angle the laser points to the vertical axis, and one which slides the whole assembly up and down a pole. So far the problems I've thought of which might come up mostly involve the motors slipping, or the wires from the laser tangling up or something like that, but when I described this to someone they said that there would be problems with keeping the laser collimated at different incident angles. I've looked into this a little, and haven't been able to find anything relating how well collimated a laser is to its incident angle, but I'm not especially familiar with lasers and it's possible I misinterpreted what I read. Does anyone have a comment on this, or any other aspect of my design which they think would be problematic?

I always have to laugh at most kanji tats, because either people have no clue what they're getting (and conversely the artist is either not fluent or is a smartass), or it's really simple basic stuff over and over ("strength", "love", "happiness").

I've seen some pretty good ones.

変, presumably meant to be 恋, on right upper arm.

A surprising number of 馬鹿, on various body parts. Who knows what these guys were thinking?


I don't like the idea of tattoos myself, but I have to second Kilroy here. It doesn't have to be too complex, so long as it gets the idea across, but that would be the most awesome tattoo ever.

I think you're still missing my point, but let's stop here before it gets out of hand.

Nothing is boring if taught by the right teacher. Everything is boring if taught by the wrong teacher. However, even boring things are interesting to the right student. I would recommend taking everything you can and then dropping what turns out to be poorly taught if you need to, and if your school allows you to, mostly since this will be the closest to a real science class you've taken so far and so you probably don't really know what classes you are or aren't interested in. Then again, I'm a maniac who got through all the science in my school by 11th grade.

On the subject of Math's relationship to Physics, as a Physics/Math double major I feel qualified to say that the more math you know the easier time you have, but also that you will need to do little beyond memorization/computation at the highschool level. Being superawesome at math, while recommended, is not necessary.

Heh. My HS did try to implement uniforms one year; about a third of the student population crossdressed and wore underwear on the outside of their clothes, as there weren't rules against that. After about a month of a good portion of the student body in near-constant detention, the administration gave it up.

I find this to be the most amusing thing, though I also find it to be almost too amusing to actually be true.