Bay 12 Games Forum

And my most recent ultimate fun was my first experience with were-badgers.   

One stopped by to give a friendly hello bite, so we killed it.  But then one of the warriors turned, on the next full moon.  He bit a few more before dying to a civilian beatdown.  The next full moon saw four were-badger citizens getting punched to death, but now the disease had exponentiated.  Next full moon saw everyone dying, thanks to a timely caravan visit.  The guards were having none of this fiddle-faddle, and put down all the survivors, were-badger tainted, or otherwise.

This clarifies things; My experience is clearly pretty common.

I do, of course, look for ores and flux on embark biomes.  But I think part of the problem was that I was accepting deep metals, and it seems that it's shallow metals that tend to carry iron and fuel.

In the past, I've assisted my metal 'industry' with caravan trade, buying anything that's iron or steel, buying all the wood.  Usually with lavish meal pots.  I do hope that in the future, food isn't made such an overpowered trading commodity.

But all that, again, runs contrary to many of the stories people tell of their own fortresses.  Perhaps that's written off as glossing over, or by non-default play.

Speaking of which, I've started a new fort, where I'm tunneling down to the magma sea early.  But knowing the frequency and danger of the caverns, I used DFHack to reveal all, so I could find a clear shaft down.  So my suspicion is that going to the magma sea early, using default play, isn't a reliable method.  It's a good way to bring in fun from the caverns early on.

So to doublecheck....  A persistent, independent metal industry is not easy to get started in default play, not unless you chop a lot of trees.  Those who manage it via magma forges are actually getting lucky, or aren't playing default?  If I'm wrong here, then something is still missing, because otherwise it doesn't seem to add up.

Another thought I'm having is that it could be worthwhile to dump all of my clothes from my stocks menu, minus the ropereed/pigtail items that I've been producing.  If I start early.  This allows me to know roughly what everyone is wearing, and keep better track of my stocks.  It also might make the fps slightly better since that's a drastic amount of items i'd be removing from the game over the longterm.  Perhaps it could also cut down the rate of un-touchable garbage.

Nice, thanks AndreaReina.

I experienced the naked-child-based tantrum spiral in my last fortress.  Frustrating, as the solution required either the creation of hundreds of items, or modding, or exploiting game mechanics.

I guess if the situation is un-fun enough, I'm amenable to a mod or exploit, but I'd rather try to 'win' the game as-is.  To work a solution according to the system-as-intended.

After scrolling 5 pages back, I found this thread on Clothes Management.  I may try the ideas there.  Though, I really have a distaste for quantum stockpiles. 

Boy, I come off as finicky, but I don't feel finicky...

My guess would be to ignore all the supplies everywhere.  Don't collect them.  Instead, hole up in the place you're dropped, and make just enough infra from scratch to support your soldiers' little outpost.   The only way your 7 will fight back the tide is through highly cautious, disciplined, no-risk play.

Or so I would theorize.

I do have way too many dwarves.  They hover at 40-70 idle at a time.   I haven't modded the game to set controls on the population... Especially the damn babies.

I'm seeing here that a difference in preference is a major factor.

I prefer to assign a few dwarves to their supply-making craft, and then never deal with them, or their craft, again if possible.  They would keep busy, as one of the persistently non-idle dwarves.  So for me, the idea of making a large surplus is against my intentions, as that would mean I'd have to start and stop them depending on surplus/needs.  Or continue growing their already-significant stockpile.

That would mean that for me, it's not about whether I can keep them fed and boozed...  As we can see, that's potentially very easy, and appears to have been a stumbling block for not a single person here, myself included.  Instead, for me it's about not over-feeding and over-boozing them(to a lesser extent).  The goal is a perpetual-motion machine, so that I can spend as much time as possible managing other things.  Primarily stuff like the military and it's infrastructure, happiness courting, and the metal industry.

Regarding the cooking of booze:  It's always been turned off, and near as I can tell the stills are running almost all the time.  The only significant stops in the works had been a lack of barrels and pots, due to my over-production of food.  I don't know how to account for the difference between my experience and Varnifane's.

Urist DaVincy posted a link to an analysis of the farming industry but....  Unfortunately I don't think I fully understood it.  I didn't get any takeaway conclusions from it.

Livestock other than sub-terranean egg-layers are right out.  Not bothering again.  Protecting them has, over the course of multiple fortresses, required a large setup-time.  Meanwhile they usually require a lot of maintenance without producing all that much.  I'm not bothering next time, even though I wish it was more necessary.

I've tried bees twice, because the idea of it sounds fun, but they function just like livestock, and don't yield much per time/effort.  Not bothering next time.

Fishing, like livestock, also requires a large initial setup of a protection racket.  Or more often, just a live-and-let-die acceptance of the risks of the dwarves who get caught outside during an ambush.  The yield is decent, but not very sustainable at larger scale.   I'm not going to bother next time.

My running theory now is that next fortress, I'd be better off growing far fewer foods, and dedicate most of the plant economy to booze.  Eggs, meanwhile, can efficiently catch up the kitchen without a need for management.  But the hole in this is that I'll want to find some other way to make up for the happiness loss from homogenized foods, while my production and stock-space for booze needs to be much higher since cooking the booze will also contribute to the kitchen's balance.
...Or perhaps my theory's all wrong.  We'll see.

That was extremely helpful Hans Lemurson, thank you! 

Finding food sources and setting them up hadn't been a problem, it was finding that balance.

My pop has gone up to about 250 now, and after securing my safe food space, I ended up with a massive over-abundance of crops, all kinds.  I switched to lavish meals, and eventually filled my huge stock with lavish meals.

Booze though, that's the bigger problem.  My stocks seem to go up and down severely, and I keep adding perma-brewing stills.  Bout to build my 5th.  The balance is elusive.

That aside, yeah, farming is too powerful.  Livestock is rendered moot when you can trade one pot of food for 2-9k, and buy all the meat fish and cheese you want from caravans.  And all their leather.  And wool.  Not that you need the wool with the plant-based textile industry. 

Well, anyhoo, thank you again.  By using the Plump Helmet as the basic metric to find equivalencies, that helped a lot.  I'll be using that.

Alright.  Wealth is the key then.

So next time around, I want to create as little as possible, and just make do without caravan trade.

Beyond that, does anyone have tips for keeping wealth down, and extending the early-game without modifying DF?