Bay 12 Games Forum

I have the reverse problem.  My Hammerer is trapped in a cage and I want to keep him there.  *Forever*.  Dwarves seem to be a bit slow bringing him food and water (although they do sometimes), much slower than they would take food and water to an injured dwarf in a bed.

Any suggestions on how to keep him alive?

Huh, I have difficulty arranging any kind of full ten, as most of the things I like are in series.
With the exception of the first two, these aren't in any particular order.

1.  DF
2.  Elite

3.  City Life
4.  Alpha Centauri + Alien Crossfire (still better than any previous or subsequent version of Civ. IMO)
5.  UFO: Enemy Unknown (with options on TFTD, UFO: Afterlight and Silent Storm, but the original still wins in terms of being able to total city blocks)
6.  Vampire: Bloodlines (very replayable for a linear game)
7.  System Shock 2 (with options on the various Thiefs, Bioshock and Deus Ex; it looks very dated now in comparison to Bioshock, but... Shodan is unholy cool.)
8.  Lemmings (and Lemmings 2)
9.  Medieval: Total War (with options on the others)
10.  Daggerfall (procedural generation of dungeons and quests means it's > Morrowind, bugs or no; and Morrowind is of course > Oblivion as any fule kno; plus who couldn't love the sound of a million voices crying "Halt!"?  )

I'm pointedly not including EVE and WoW.  The day a MMORPG comes along that doesn't have a nonsensical setting and economy (looks at DF *ahem*) well setting anyway, it'll probably make the list.  See Sluggy. 

Huh.  I ordered up a bunch of steel trinkets, maximum priority... the traders brought four.  Okay... sent them to their own special store-room, jolly good, I'll save 'em up till I get a lot.
Huh.  By the time I checked on the store room, my kleptomaniac dwarves had pinched the lot.   

Ah.  I seem to have stumbled upon a ludicrously easy way of doing this.

You don't need a grand road made out of dragon soap or platinum blocks.
You just need one tiny rock bridge, and a handful of very valuable mechanisms.

Build a lever out of valuable mechanisms, connect the lever to the bridge using valuable mechanisms, and bingo... road value in spades.

I noticed it when I constructed a bridge as part of an experimental rubbish dumper device.  The bridge was connected to the trade depot, but only by stairs, certainly not by a three tile wide road, so it doesn't seem as if the bridge needs to be built anywhere in particular.  I connected the bridge to an artifact lever and used masterpiece mechanisms.
I noticed that my road value had shot up, so I built another tiny bridge to test, and again connected it to the artifact lever using even more valuable masterpiece mechanisms (encrusted with various gems, which everyone should have plenty of.)
Building the second bridge caused the road value to jump by nearly 10,000 dwarfbucks.  ^^

This seems a bit.. ah... unintended.    I'm quite peeved as I very definitely do not want the King and his Royal Guards - once they turn up I'll be forced to kill them somehow as the "criminal" list encompasses nearly every adult dwarf; noone has been punished for not making a trifle pewter toothpick for thirty years.     


(edit - or possibly not have to kill them, it depends whether Royal Guards do Dwarven Justice or not.  Fingers crossed!)

(edit again - tried with another small bridge connected to a non-artifact lever.  Lever value : 4530 dwarfbucks, mechanism value: 4110 in road, 7890 at lever; total road gain: 16440.  These don't add up so not sure what is going on, regardless, it's silly money.)

Would someone else mind trying this out to test it?  It may even be bugged somehow as the value gain seems disproportionate to the value invested.

I like to build artefact furniture where every dwarf can see it - usually in corridors, sculpture gardens or meeting halls or anywhere else highly populated.  That way every dwarf gets a chance to "admire a completely sublime Trap" or whatever, instead of just one dwarf who has it in their room.  Artefact mechanisms are great for this.

You could try setting an active water source zone, and toggling the "prefer zone drinking" on and off?  Might kick 'em into action.  I've found healthcare very good with these recent releases, haven't had anyone starve or die of thirst.

At present, a bunch of low quality rock coffins in individual niches.  Dwarf dies, dwarf goes into the coffin; pet dies, pet's rotten corpse is hurled down the chasm when it starts to stink and gets noticed.
The nobles can claim they need a fancy tomb as much as they like, but it won't make it true.