Bay 12 Games Forum

That's interesting - I'm on a map with magma and at one point, for no reason I could discern (and believe me I looked!), got an absolute frakload (several dozen) of "a masterwork has been lost" messages.  There are several fire snakes around (including a couple of caged ones) and I think (looking at the skills of the 2 dwarfs affected) whatever was being destroyed may well have been wooden...

If someone had attacked a wagon carrying animal cages, it might have been left behind, and subsequently collected by your dwarfs and brought inside.

You can use the mules as guard animals chained up at your fortress entrance to detect kobolds, and be confident they won't breed, which as far as I know other animals would when chained.  They are likewise safe pets.

Enemies have got to be within the usual LOS range of a Guard dwarf before the Guard will attack them.  I don't know about whether they respect the no dwarves outside - they certainly respect it when no enemies are around, but I suspect that (like active military dwarfs) they will pursue enemies outside even if the no dwarfs outside is on.

I would suggest that you tell your military dwarfs to wear no armour and then construct your new armour from a particular material - let's say Giant Toad leather for an example - so that you end up with (eg) 10 * Giant Toad Leather Helms.  Then go into the stocks menu and forbid every helm made from a different material so that only the Giant Toad Leather Helms are unforbidden.  As you're forbidding by type of material, you don't need to manually forbid each Helm.  Then tell your dwarfs to wear armour again and they should pick up those particular helms.
I believe that this should work.

Things become harder for (particularly) iron armour, as a) the goblins inconveniently smother you in it and b) some dwarfs have a horrible habit of filling their room with 26 narrow iron helms, which appear in the stocks but can't be moved, dumped, etc.

(edit)
Incidentally, I always have my bookkeeper set to maximum precision, and suspect most people do the same - it'd be very interesting to survey this.

I'll not go by definition, but by playing style:  playing adventure mode requires you to do very much the same sort of things as playing a Roguelike would.  I never bothered with the original Rogue but IME adventure mode plays very similarly to playing Angband without magic.
Same movement, similar combat, same display, same sort of inventory management, similar (by which I mean, of course, massively better in many different ways) environment to adventure in.

Fortress mode, on the other hand, plays like... uh, well, fortress mode.  More complicated than DK or Evil Genius, more freeform than any Civ any other game I can think of, more combat oriented than Sim-whatever, more gruesome (in its own special way) than any FPS, and with an unhealthy dose of anal micromanagement required on a regular basis and a user interface from the fourth circle of hell.   


(we could add another one to the list of Roguelike traits: moddability)

I thought this was going to be a thread about "which foods is it best to feed your dwarfs on, and which foods should be avoided."  Personally I like to order in food from Giant creatures (especially GCS and Giant Toads) on the grounds that a) the more expensive the food, the happier it probably makes the dwarf and b) I like the idea that my dwarfs are commissioning the death of GCS.
I suspect a *gutter cruor biscuit* should probably be avoided, too.

IRL I'm a veggie, although more from a distrust of meat processing than from a desire not to slaughter hapless animals.  I don't think it's possible to live without causing harm to some creatures somewhere, but I also don't believe in wasting time agonising over guilt for something trivial like theoretically denying the right of a bunny rabbit to graze in the garden  .

As for DF, I personally try to cause the poor dwarfs the minimum harm practical (although as the Terminator once remarked after seeing a couple of dwarfs running around:  "It is in their nature to destroy one another"); I have no qualms about exterminating goblins and wildlife, but I won't (usually) kill dwarfs for kicks, and I won't murder traders either. 

I'd quite like to see the "thoughts" of dead dwarfs updated when they die, so that instead of reading "he has sustained major injuries recently" it might read something like "was killed by suchandsuch and is communing with insertworshippedeityhere in heaven" or "is in hell awaiting the arrival of stilllivingdemonworshippedbythedwarf" and things like that.  It would give more "closure" to the death than having them just listed as if they were still alive.

The single tile blind corner version above could be loosely considered an exploit, as it takes advantage of units being able to squeeze between the blocks diagonally.  It wouldn't work on anything larger than a single tile width corridor.  (No condemnation intended!  It's just a bit flange-y )