Bay 12 Games Forum

Areyar :

I don't know what you mean.  But I do know one thing: I have a consistently recurring problem with stockpiles.  They fill up with items before they fill up with bins or barrels, unless they're really big.  So if I designate, say, a relatively small finished goods stockpile, dwarves will fill it with goods before they put a bin in place.  Anyone else have that problem?  How do you solve it?

About pits: it appears that a 5-z drop isn't enough to necessarily kill things.  I have several goblins, severely wounded but trapped, at the bottom of my pit.  They don't seem to be planning to die off any time soon.  I keep reading about putting spikes in the bottom of pits, but I don't know how to build spikes.  Also channeled a shaft of water to the pit, but realized I don't have a way to drain it afterwards: so if I flood the pit, I'll never be able to get to the items at the bottom.

So, I thinking of restarting.  I've gotten much further on this go than I ever have before, but problems are beginning to make themselves felt.  In particular, I have no magma, and am very quickly running out of trees.  If I start over, I'm wondering: does anyone have any tips about how to set the world-generator parameters to make magma more common, and perhaps even available in areas that also have trees?

Finally, anyone have any mod recommendations for me?

First, thanks again for all the help and practical advice y'all have offered so far.  (By the way, Puck, you're tip on digging a pit turned out to be golden.  Muchos gracious, and huevos rancheros.)

Now I seem to have a new problem.  It started, I think, when I accidentally forgot to set the barrel limit on my seed stockpile to zero.  I hate it when I do that.  So suddenly I look over and there's a barrel with all my seed bags stuck in it.

So I remove the old stockpile and redesign a new one, careful to set the barrel limit to zero this time.  And my stupid dwarves respond by filling it with single seeds.  So I remove it, and start a new one again.  Only I forget to set the barrel limit to zero.  And so on.  In other words, I've had my dwarves shuffle my seeds around a few times.  Now I have a couple of seed barrels as well as a stockpile with seed bags.  I keep hoping that eventually some creative dorf will eventually even take the bags out of the barrels and put them on the stockpile, but that seems to be a bit above everyone's pay grade.

The problem was that if I hit Q-s and looked at a farm plot, towards the end of fall, several of my crops (Quarry bushes, Cave Wheat, and Pig Tails) were in red text.  And I noticed my crops weren't being planted, despite having much available seed of all types.  In the Stocks screen, all the seed was listed and available (nothing in red).  It's moved on into winter now, before I had time to post a question, but I'm worried about what will happen next spring.

Anybody out there have an explanation for this strange behavior?

By Jove!  I think I've got it!

And in return, please except this little macro I've made.  It's a modification of the "Decentralized Living" floorplan on the DFWiki.  The top left wing consists of six 3x3 rooms; the bottom left and right wings are modified for use as nobles quarters, with a large bedroom and adjacent office and dining space.  The top right wing is modified for use as a communal barracks, with room for about 20-30 dwarves.  The cursor starts from the center square, digs out the floor, and then returns to the center square.  There's a 3x3 central shaft left un-mined for use as a stairwell.

Here's the macro:

It's my first attempt, so I made a couple of mistakes I had to go back and clean up; for that reason the script has a couple of extra lines in it.

By the way, for lack of a better alternative, the macro works with alt-1. 

Thanks again, Rysith!

When I run AutoHotKey I see a small green H icon in my system tray.  There are options when I right-click on it, including "Edit this script" and "Reload this script".  But I can't edit or reload any script with those options as far as I can tell: I can only edit and reload the "example script" that came with the version of AHK I downloaded, which is supposed to launch my browser and direct it automatically to google when I hit a certain combination of keys (it doesn't seem to work, by the way).

The "quick start" how-to included with AHK seems to indicate I can create a separate .ahk file for each script, and AHK will locate and read them wherever they might be located on my computer.  If that's not how you do it, should I just copy and paste scripts one after the other in the AutoHotKey.ahk file?  I've pasted a "circular workspace" script there and for the first time almost got it to work (at the moment it doesn't seem to want to "dig": it wants to "remove designations".  So the cursor runs the pattern but leaves nothing marked.)

By the way, just so we aren't talking past each other: if I double-click on an .ahk file, windows responds by saying it doesn't recognize the file type.  AHK doesn't launch or appear in the system tray. 

Do I need to install AHK in some manner?  The version I downloaded, zipped, only had an AHK .exe file in it.

Hmmm....

Puck:

Let me know when you work out the kinks.



benoit.hudson:

Good advice.  I've designated some areas as fresh water sources.  I need to re-designate them. 

Unfortunately, the gars and pikes are infesting a few of the neighborhood ponds.  I had no idea they were so dangerous: imagine my surprise when one of them ate my woodchopper after he had wandered to close to the shore to chop down a tree.

Well, hello out there ya'll.  Zzzup?

Things are going fairly well at my fortress.  We're early into the winter of our second year.  Got ambushed by a squad of axe-goblins, they caught Zaneg Dodoklamush, Cilab Urvaddakas, and Alath Mengish out in the open and slew them, curse their green hides!  But then they (the goblins) took a stroll into my hallway of death and fell into the pits, which worked like a charm.  (Thanks again puck!)

I've also lost a couple of dwarves to pikes and long-nosed gar.  Anyone have any suggestions about how I might defend my dorfs against these fiendish fish?

Thanks for all the advice on how to dig big holes.  To bad I already had enough time to frikkin channel the thing out, square by frikkin square, before you all answered.

 

Anyway, puck, one last question about your bridge set-up (thanks for the suggestion, by the way.  I've got it almost completed.): do I need to link a lever to bridges to reset them, or do they re-extend by themselves after retracting?