Bay 12 Games Forum

Do you have doors on all your rooms? Start locking them to isolate insane dwarves. Let them die in these rooms, and collect the bodies when possible--preferably before they start rising as ghosts. You can do the same to very unhappy dwarves, locking them in their rooms while they tantrum, but be sure to let them out before they starve.

Everyone who is still sane should start making coffins and slabs.

Make sure that you have a legendary dining room for them to eat in, but also remember that this is where they will congregate, and if they start tantruming will start killing each other. If you see this start to happen, lock them out.

Isolate any dwarves who do not have friends. They will be the survivors you will use to restart your fort. Get them food and booze and lock them away.

Remember that berserk dwarves can be caught in cage traps. Leave them in the cages; they will eventually die.

Closely monitor your hospital. This is where dwarves will be getting that last-straw "has witnessed death" thought. Just like your dining room, this may become a nexus for tantrums. I leave it up to you whether you will try to rescue injured dwarves (with the accompanying good thoughts for rescue and being given food), or simply close the hospital to stop the insanity from spreading. Either way has its merits. The worse it is, the more likely you'll want to triage it and just close the hospital.

Take non-soldiers off military duty. Close the fortress gates and ignore caravans and invasions. You don't have time for them.

Your dwarves will be accumulating crimes. If the crimes are punished, you may end up with dwarves on chains. Try to keep them alive if they're still sane. Watch out for dwarven justice if you don't have a proper jail; your lawbreakers may end up dead if you don't. If the crimes are not punished, you will have unhappy nobles, but they're usually the first to go nuts during a tantrum spiral, so you might as well just lock them away preemptively. You could lock away whoever is responsible for hammering dwarves, of course.

Keep pets alive and out of the way of tantruming dwarves. Pasturing them somewhere out of the way is a good idea, if you can spare the workforce to drag them there. If not, lock them in a convenient room.

Prioritize slabs for ghosts in order of annoyingness, berserker ghosts first.

Prioritize rotting corpses over fresh ones or skeletons. The miasma causes bad thoughts.

The brewery should be second only to the coffin makers and slab engravers. If you run out of booze, you might as well kiss your butt goodbye.

Cast obsidian monolith extending from just above the magma sea to the highest z-level I can cast at. With it being large enough to house my entire fort in and being completely smoothed. Those damn cavern lakes though...

Yes, I have come to hate those things with a passion! I'm trying to build the Parthenon and last I heard, the building wasn't supposed to be flooded even after it was finished, much less during construction. Drain the lake, build walls, oh, here's a couple more dorfs drowning... auhgh! At least it's not an aquifer.

Yes, it's actually a dining hall, and no, it isn't anything else. I wonder if maybe they are thinking in three dimensions, and reasoning that a destination ten z-levels down is closer than one that's fifteen steps away, even when it takes more steps to get there.

Hmm... so how good of an idea is it to give my crossbowdwarves a hammer for when they run out of bolts? It'd be better than the usual "whack the goblin with the crossbow" strategy. Assuming, that is, that they didn't just ignore their crossbows and rush into melee with the goblins still unperforated and much more lively than I'd like.

I forgot to schedule time off for newly-drafted soldiers... with predictable results.

Check those kills--animals, maybe? He could have been a hunter. I don't usually get dwarves with nearly a hundred kills and only one of them is notable.

So I've been working on my project to rebuild the Parthenon in DF. I had to get a stable fort up first, sitting on enough marble, which I now have; and I have the foundation on which the Parthenon sits. The trouble is that I can't find any good architectural drawings of the Parthenon itself. Everything seems to be touristy, or else a simple floor plan with just the horizontal dimensions of everything.

I initially decided to try rebuilding it in Google SketchUp, but I don't have enough information to do that right now. And then I realized that, ironically, multiple files in Microsoft Paint are better for the actual plans because it's got a grid that will give me the exact same perspective as inside DF.

So far, this is the best site I've found: http://www.greeklandscapes.com/greece/acropolis/parthenon-picture.html

I need vertical information, though.

And that's where you guys come in. Surely someone has better google-fu than me. Can you find me a comprehensive blueprint for the Parthenon?

I think it actually made sense, back then. No antibiotics. Cut yourself shaving and you could sign your own death sentence.