Bay 12 Games Forum

That should be a feature.

Vegan fortes are easy. I didn't use butcher shops in between 34.11 all the way to 40.05.

Sure.

Terrifying Glacier No-dirt No-clay No-trade forts that also happen to be vegan are slightly more interesting.

One spin on the Glacier embark I've been trying to make work for a while is an 11x11 above-ground tower. The biggest problem I have with it so far are contaminants that I can't clean up, or evil rain taking out all of my above-ground workers or contaminating the entire tower.

What's the importance of discipline for 40.xx?

I generally embark with as little finished goods and as little skills as possible, for a few reasons. Namely:

* If the starting area is dangerous, I find it quicker to assemble a wooden wall (and if needed build a roof) than to dig, especially on Glaciers (my favorite embark!)
* Starting 7 will be too busy to do anything forever and never get to fight, be social, etc.
* Migrant waves seem to favor giving me whatever skills I don't have - so I get military and social skills a lot

So often my embarks have a ton of raw materials (coal, ores, animals, seeds) and a plethora of alcohol to keep them busy. RARELY I'll have a Marksdwarf and crank out a weapon for him in short order just to keep animals away... though on Evil Glaciers, he's... he's gonna die.

But now I see almost every build putting points in discipline. I'm presuming this is to avoid needless flight and job cancellations? Is my method of immediately putting up a wall missing something obvious? (besides that zombies can now scale those walls...)

Example embark I last took on 40.11 on a Glacier with a nearby Evil tile thrown in for good measure. I call it the "ICEHAULERSDELUXE", the goal of which is to minimize (or even eliminate) trading:

Iron Anvil
160 Alcohol (40 each)
7 Food (I slaughter my pack animals for more)
3-9 of each seed (9 plump helmet, 3-6 everything else)
50 Wood
30 Stone (magma safe, I turn into blocks usually, some into doors/hatches/mechanisms)
20-50 Bituminous Coal
3-15 Zinc, Iron, Tin, Copper Ores
1-3 Various mood materials (sand, glass, clay, anything my embark is unlikely to have)
2-6 Dogs
2-6 Cats
2-6 Pigs
2-6 Ducks, Turkeys
All remaining points go into 1-off or otherwise 1-use items I might have to have quickly, like a rope or cloth, lye or plaster, et cetera. I usually turn the Zinc into buckets for quick wells and prioritize getting my entrance sealed with cage and weapon traps, then irrigate stone.

I'm posting here before I submit a bug report since I'm not sure if this is a bug.

I recently started DF2014 on an evil glacier embark. Most everything is going well, and some new features (such as zombies climbing walls) have been great fun.

But, is there an extra dose of lethality to evil rains, now? Particularly "Fetid Goo", the kind that tracks and causes blistering. Formerly in DF2012 I was used to this being more annoyance than anything, and provided you got out of it before too long, your wounds would eventually heal.

Now, however, it seems even the slightest touch of Fetid Goo Rain will eventually be lethal. I sent someone up top to fetch a basket of cloth, and they were momentarily doused with it - not even from active rain, just from some tracked around. They immediately broke out in blisters, but I thought they'd heal and sent them back to work underground. Within a few minutes, multiple dwarves stopped working due to being too injured. A few minutes later, a half dozen were dead - all of whom were those sent to fetch items on the surface and had a VERY brief encounter with fetid goo.

This seems far more lethal than I'm used to. Is this normal? Note: I didn't have access to pools of water or soap, but I did have some active wells dipping into cavern water. Am I just misremembering how bad some evil rains were, and a single touch of fetid goo will eventually kill no matter what?

Ok, so it may be dependent on how deeply you dig. I'll try that again - it definitely does NOT work in this particular biome when breaching just the first cavern.

On Evil maps, I particularly like starving trapped elves to death, then sticking them in cages when they become undead and unleashing them on future elven caravans.

"Hey... I know that guy."

Also, not all evil biomes have undead.

Right. Which is why my question was, "Is there a way to tell?", not "Why aren't they there?"

this is in version 34.11. For a challenge I wanted to try an embark on a Terrifying Glacier, with the only resources listed as Ice and Deep Metals. Horrid survival even if you live and undead on top of that. I had a few things in mind when I went out to tackle this challenge that I could do to help me get by. I ran into a few problems. They were:

=== Problem 1: No grazing on stone ===
My steps to get underground stone grazing:
1) Breach the caverns
2) Build wells over cavern water
3) Mine out a 10x10 stone area and stick my grazing animals in there (in this case a horse and a water buffalo)
4) Channel out holes in a room above and throw water down in to create mud

Now, according to the wiki, this is sufficient for cave fungus to start growing - muddy stone is sufficient in particular. Well, I tossed water in over and over until I had most of the room covered in 1 deep water. I then stopped and let it evaporate, which did indeed leave mud behind - sufficient for me to build farms if I wanted. However, months rolled by and the mud always just stayed mud - in this case, 'muddy diorite'. Never once did any of the tiles grow cave fungus, trees, etc. So, naturally, my pack animals starved.

So, question: Is it actually the case that muddy stone should start growing cave fungus if you breach the caverns? If so, what was wrong in my technique? If stone grazing is simply impossible in 34.11, would building a floor from imported clay work?

=== Problem 2: No undead ===
The biome I selected is 'Terrifying'. It has no other biomes attached, it's entirely Terrifying. That said, I've now have had multiple dwarves die and even more animals die, along with some local wildlife (a yeti) die. They never revived as undead, which is precisely why I picked Terrifying in the first place. Now, I do have evil weather - I'm getting rotting mucus rain that causes blisters, but no undead. Now, the wiki indicates there's a chance a particular Evil biome will result in undeath, but it's not a guarantee. So, that being the case, is there any way to know in advance if a biome will create undead?