Bay 12 Games Forum

How is he over 700 years old in year 219?

Once cave adaption kicks in, I noticed this pattern.

Urist notices that there is a spot of dirt somewhere outside, far away from the safety of the fort.
Urist decides this must be cleaned right now!
Urist walks out into the sun and feels sick. He leaves a trail of vomit, but he must really clean that faraway spot.
Ducim notices some dirty bit of vomit outside, left there by Urist. Ducim decides this must be cleaned immediately!
Ducim leaves the safety of the fort.
Ducim cancels clean: interrupted by goblin. Ducim runs away, leaving a trail of blood on the ground.
Tosid notices a dirty bit of blood on the ground outside of the fortress. Must clean now!
Meanwhile, Erush the miner opened a cavern and his sharp eyes spot a speck of crundle blood at the far other end of these strange caves. Must clean now!

The worst thing is, I know of no way to stop a dwarf once he decides on a cleaning job. Even disabling the labor does not cancel the current job. Help? Is there any way out of this nonsense, except for disabling the job forever on everyone?

Burrows will beat cleaning.

i plan on temporarily retiring a fortress so that i may have hand crafted adventurers in my fortress, are there any dangers about such an procedure that i should be aware of or some common mistake people make when attempting this? (the specific adventurers i plan to make are ones that are legendary in niche skills like cooking and perofming or just peasant adventurers with more valid skills, all of whom are charmeleon women and some normal peasant miner dwarves and lastly a few stronk but unskilled dwarves for hauling and only hauling)

I'm currently doing this, too. A few points in addition to what the others have said:
1. Pastures lose all assignments, so they'll have to be rebuilt.
2. Some of my stockpiles weren't working correctly, especially food. So I ended up rebuilding most of them.
3. Items in bins remain in their tile, but outside their bins. This made rebuilding those stockpiles more difficult.
4. If you're tempted to add an animal person, as I was, read this thread. You can still give them military training, but they move very slowly and their vision is weak.

Edit:
5. I seem to recall that my site's government was suddenly at peace with everyone, at least for a while.
6. All justice sentences are considered served, and all prisoners are released.
7. Lots of visitor weirdness. Next time I retire a fort, I'm driving out all visitors first to see if that helps.

My goal is to build a library with knowledge of all the topics. To speed things along, I want to steal books from other sites. There are five great libraries in my world, and two of them are within my civilization. So how do I get copies of those books into my library?

Here are the options I see:
1. Wait for the caravan to bring the books I want. This could take a long time.
2. Civil war. Considered immoral and buggy.
3. Retire the fortress and steal books as an adventurer. Would this start a civil war?
4. Retire the fortress. Start a fortress in the other dwarf civ. Steal the books. Unretire the original fortress. Steal the books.

Missions. People seem scared of the bugs, but I've done hundreds of them without any problem. It's a great way to steal livestock and artifacts.

No, DT does not show known topics. What do you want to do with it? Are you looking for a scholar with a specific knowledge? Or do you want to see an overview for a given dwarf? If it is just for researching about research, it may be better to use DFHack.

1. I'm getting visitors who want to join as scholars. If they know about topics that my scholars don't know about, then I definitely want them.
2. If I take those new scholars, then I want to watch that new knowledge spread to the other scholars through discussion and apprenticeship.
3. If my scholars have lots of topic knowledge that isn't represented in books, then I could put them into a no-book library that will make them write a little faster.
4. Suppose I'm considering getting books from outside, whether buying, stealing, or conquering. In making that decision, it would be nice to know whether the books I'm thinking of acquiring have knowledge of topics that my scholars lack.
5. When I acquire books with outside knowledge, then I want to watch that knowledge spread through my scholars as they read the new books and discuss those topics.
6. If I run a library-focused fortress for several years, then I want to watch my scholars become super-knowledgeable. And I want to see if the knowledge tracks their skills and interests. Will the doctors stick to medical topics, or will they branch out into math or philosophy? Will the legendary mechanic study engineering, or will he be drawn to history?

Patrik's librarian script is a crucial tool for those of us who want to collect all the topics. But it only addresses books, which are half the picture. I was hoping that DT could fill in the other half.

Edit: Just now I watched a watched a grand master chemist write about liquid-liquid extraction. It's the first book on that topic in my fortress. I assume that the other scholars will read it and advance their own knowledge, but right now there's no way for me to tell.

Writing is really rare.
It can take 20 fort years of pondering before a dwarf thinks it a good idea to write a book.
Or they just don't write at all.

I disagree. This trick with a lever is very effective in getting scholars to write. And it seems to help to get a lot of scholars together to discuss and trade knowledge. With 40 scholars I'm getting 20-30 books a year.

Edit: I should note that I had the benefit of a bug involving unretirement that dumped a lot of excellent scholars into my fortress. So your mileage may vary.

Generally though, reading books will teach topics that can broaden the amount of topics the scholar will work on next, but it doesn't do anything in terms of making the research go faster.

That's the part I'm confused about. What I get from this FotF thread is that the scholars pick topics, accumulate credits, and roll for breakthrough.

But is the topical knowledge actually associated with each scholar? The wiki says it is, but I'm skeptical. That would be a lot of extra data to hang on every dwarf in the fortress. And if each dwarf had topical knowledge, then Therapist should be able to show that data, and DFHack should be able to manipulate it.

If scholars needed to get topical knowledge from books, then a new ignorant scholar in a fortress with lots of books would need to spend months reading before starting research. That would be realistic, but it's not what I'm seeing. I never see my scholars read, though my anti-theft library setup might have some influence on that. And with the library lever trick, my scholars are cranking out books all the time.

My theory is that topical knowledge exists only in books. When a scholar selects a topic, he picks one that isn't represented in the available books---but he doesn't have to actually read all those books. Then he starts accumulating credits and rolling for breakthrough. The major effect of writing books or bringing in outside books is to prevent the scholars from picking the topics that they contain. It's simply the presence of the book that prevents the topic from being selected, not the scholar having read the book.

I assume that topic selection is based on all the books in the fortress. It could be made on a library basis, which would discourage setting up separate libraries. Or it could be made on a civilization-wide basis, though that seems unlikely.

This theory is testable. Toady said that the topics are arranged in tiers. If this theory is correct and a fortress were to lose all its books, then the scholars would have to shift from researching higher-tier topics to lower-tier topics. Is there any solid data on the topic tiers?