Bay 12 Games Forum

What's the difference, exactly, between a squad being on duty versus standing down?  I know that standing down dwarves will spar, while on duty won't.  And I know that patrolling dwarves will complain about long patrols.  But do they get grumpy from just being on duty, without patrolling?  

I know that I can turn them back into civilians, but I want to keep my ultra-mighty-legendary-miner-turned-swordsdwarf from having to unequip and re-equip every time I want him to rest and regain some happiness.

1) When exactly does mud dry up and need to be re-flooded?  I know that there's an event at the beginning of winter, but is there anything at the end of winter?  I ask because one year I built fields before spring, and the farmers wouldn't use them.

2) Is there any benefit to flooding a room longer, either for a field or an underground forest?  It seems like there should be.

1) I just had my first case of my main river bridge being destroyed in a tantrum.  What a mess!  And it seems that this isn't uncommon.  So I built a one-width safety bridge downstream.  So now I'm thinking: Why not make the entire bridge out of one-width strips?  That way, a tantruming dwarf can destroy a single strip, and yet barely slow the traffic.  Has anybody tried this and had it work?

2) I just dug the river channels for my first animal-trapping operation, and all the miners survived.  But it seems awfully risky, and of course outdoor channels are so terribly permanent.  So now I'm thinking: Couldn't you do the same thing with bridges?  I mean, a raised drawbridge is basically a wall against anything but fluid, right?  So why not build them on dry land specifically to use them as walls?

And assuming that other people have already figured this out:

3) If you build these bridge-walls, is there any way to look at them without putting the bridge back down?

4) Can monsters knock down bridge walls?  If so, does the time to knock it down depend on the size and composition of the bridge?

5) Do bridge walls block archer fire?

I've taken a zero-tolerance policy with the seasonal flood.  So I've got it all walled in, but I still have a couple of bridges.  And I think there's still a little risk with those bridges.  I know that one flood recently cost me a dwarf, a cat, and a foal, and I assume that they were either on the bridge or right at the end of the bridge.

How do you guys minimize the flooding risk?  I've been thinking of building a wide second bridge---a sort of flood apron---just downstream from my real bridge, to catch  anybody who gets caught up with the tide.  Does that sound like it'll work?  With enough patience, I suppose that you could completely cover the river with bridges, and then nobody could drown, right?

I bought some food from a caravan, and it just sat there on the ground until it rotted.  Now I've bought some plants from the elves, and they're just sitting there, wilting.  I've turned off all other types of hauling, and I have lots of peasants, but I suspect that they're spending all their time picking up plump helmet seeds off the dining room floors.  How do I save my purchases?

When I run DF in fortress mode, it loads and runs just fine for anywhere from twenty seconds to two minutes.  Then it crashes in a way that corrupts the GUI.  The screen looks something like a checkerboard, cut into squares and with a colored bar at the bottom of each square.  It's as if the pixel map for each square has some random noise added at the bottom.  A similar set of squares forms around the cursor.  For about thirty seconds after the lockup the cursor continues to move and the sound continues to play.  Then the whole system locks and the screen goes black.  A few times the system has rebooted, but usually it just freezes on black.  The only way out is to push the reboot button.

And here's a weird part: The first reboot doesn't fix it.  After the first reboot the screen stays black, though the computer mostly sounds like it's booting up normally.  I have to push the reboot button a second time before the screen will show something.

My graphics card is an nVidia 6800.  The problem appeared under an older set of drivers, so I installed to the latest set, released just a few days ago.  The problem is still there.  I completely uninstalled all grahpics drivers and reinstalled the latest nVidia drivers, and it didn't help.

I downloaded Kobold Quest and got the same problem after maybe three minutes.  The problem appears whether the game is running or paused, and whether it is fullscreen or windowed.  It also happens with the sound on or off, and the sound card drivers are up to date.

Another weird twist: At one point I couldn't get any signal to the monitor at all, no matter how many times I booted.  So I turned it off from the button on the case and switched the monitor cable to the other output port on my graphics card.  It seems to have helped, in that I can now clear up the problem with only two reboots.

Before this, I had been having a different but similar problem with Laser Squad Nemesis, where the whole screen would just go black off and on every few seconds at random.  That's the only other game where I've had this problem.  The only thing I can think of that changed before this started happening was that I switched from a CRT monitor to a flatscreen, and consequently my desktop is at a much higher resolution than before.

Any ideas?

My miners are doing a lot of exploring, now that there's so much more mountain out there to mine.  And when they hit a vein of ore, it has become a chore to watch them continuously as they follow it to each end.

So I propose a Prospect command: You designate a single square of ore, gems, or economic stone.  The miner then mines that square.  He then checks all the squares adjacent to that mined square.  If any of those adjacent squares contain the target ore/gem/stone.  Then he designates those---on his own---for prospecting.  

That simple algorithm should carry the miner to the end of the seam.  And if you enter the seam in the middle then you prospect both sides, and eventually the miners will follow it to both ends.

This would reduce a lot of tedium for me, and I assume for many other players.  It wouldn't replace the current mine command, because there are lots of situations where you wouldn't want the miner to follow the ore.  But in the current version my miners are spending less than 20% of their time carving grand halls for living, working, and defense.  All the rest of my digging is exploration, and then tediously following out each vein square by square.