Bay 12 Games Forum

Don't use the Play Now option, especially if you're running out of barrels.  If you plan carefully, you can buy tiny of amounts of lots of different types of meat, and each type comes in its own barrel.  Result: plenty of food, and lots of free barrels!

Careful planning also allows you to match your dwarf skills to your biome and opening strategy.  If your site doesn't have many trees, then buy extra wood.  If you have dense vegetation, then maybe give somebody points in herbalism.

If you're just starting on farming, read up on quarry bushes.  They require some planning and processing, but in the end they produce huge quantities of food.

A bolt that misses its target will often hit some other enemy behind the target---if the enemies are coming straight at your marksdwarf.  Another problem with elevated marksdwarves is that they lose some of that followthrough effect.  If you fire mostly down on a goblin and miss, you hit the ground instead of the goblin behind him.

My advice is not to focus too much on design, because that puts you in a static frame of mind.  Inefficiency in DF usually comes from poor hauling management rather than poor design.  Most beginners divide their hauling in a dozen different directions and then wonder why nothing happens.  (At least, that's what I did.) 

Better to keep most of your hauling focused on a single task at a time.  First they're collecting wood, then they're dumping stone, then they're installing furniture, then they're moving food around through the fields, mill, thresher, and kitchen.  At any given moment you should know exactly where the bulk of your hauling is going, and you should be prepared to shut off that hauling stream and redirect it to some new project or emergency.

Workshops are much less important than stockpiles, because stockpiles consume so much hauling.  Every empty square in a stockpile is a potential demand on your hauling supply.  So when you see an empty stockpile square, make sure that either 1) the stockpile isn’t consuming any hauling because all of those items are either forbidden or in a stockpile, and you aren’t producing any more right now, or 2) you definitely want part of your hauling stream to be focused on that stockpile right now.  Slash unwanted stockpiles mercilessly, or they’ll eat you alive.

The key to DF efficiency is to stay fluid by manipulating your stockpiles to control your hauling stream.  Example: Suppose that you need a lot of doors and cabinets right now.  So put a stone stockpile by your mason’s shop.  That way you’ve got your hauling stream aimed at speeding up furniture production. 

A few minutes later, with the stockpile only half full, you realize that a recent battle has left various chunky goblin bits in your main hall, and they’ll soon start to stink.  Plus, maybe you want to collect their clothes to sell to the next caravan, and it looks like your mason has plenty of stone on hand for now.  So you delete that stone stockpile to free up your hauling supply.  Your number of idle workers shoots up to double digits.  Then you flag all the goblin parts and clothes to be dumped.  (You should put the bottom of your dump near your depot, for easy retrieval when the traders arrive.)  Your haulers drop the stones they’re carrying and head off to the scene of the carnage.

Then you notice that crops are withering in your fields.  And you really want those crops.  So you decide to split your hauling stream in two.  You decide to un-dump the goblin clothes for now, so that the dump command only applies to the actual goblin body parts that are likely to stink.  That should free up part of your hauling force to go harvest the crops.

So the question isn’t where you put your workshops.  The key question is: What’s eating up your hauling?  The usual answer is stockpiles, though careless dumping commands will also do it.

There’s nothing magic about design.  Just build the production chains.  Build a stockpile for pig tail seeds, and next to that a plot for growing pig tails.  Next to that a stockpile for pig tails.  Next to that a farmer’s workshop.  Next to that a stockpile for thread.  Next to that a loom.  Next to that a cloth stockpile.  Next to that a clothier’s workshop.  Next to that a workshop for cloth finished goods.  Your farming chain starts with a seed stockpile and ends up in the dining room.

Stockpiles for finished goods should always be right next to the workshop that produces those goods.  Some portion of your hauling will always go towards keeping active workshops from getting cluttered.  It’s like a tax on your hauling, an unavoidable 15-25% that’s going to disappear no matter what.  Good design just keeps that tax rate relatively low.

But no amount of good design will save you from the classic newbie mistakes of giant dump orders and giant stockpiles for raw materials, created and then forgotten.  If your fortress isn’t productive enough, it’s probably because you’re always short on hauling.  And if you’re short on hauling, it’s probably because you created some hauling-consuming orders and forgot about them.  So delete all your dump orders, and erase all your stockpiles.  Then create only the stockpiles and dump orders that you’re sure you really want right now, and your fortress will have no more efficiency problems.

In putting notes on levers, it's sometimes useful to describe the location in addition to the function.  "Main Drawbridge" may seem obvious in year one, but will be meaningless in year five as your defenses have grown.  But "Main Drawbridge 30 North 7 East Up 1z" is always precise.

Another way to go up and down is to put your right hand on the numpad with numlock off.  The outer number keys will move you up, down, left, right, etc., while Shift-5 will move you up one z-level and Ctrl-5 will move you down one z-level.  With a little practice you can move around the map in three dimensions very quickly.

My soldiers keep dropping their little lunchboxes and forgetting to pick them back up.  My dwarves don't appreciate the smell, but their iron-clad respect for property rights prevents them from cleaning up the mess.

Aside from forbidding soldiers from carrying food, is there a workaround?

I have some flaming HFS charcoal producing smoke that's killing my frame rate.  How long will it take the charcoal to burn itself out?  I'm trying to figure out if it's worth the time and effort to pipe some water out there to extinguish it.