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Topics - quarague

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DF Gameplay Questions / work details in 50xx versions

« on: September 02, 2023, 06:52:22 am »

I played a lot in 47xx and previous versions and in general used a policy that almost any task can only be done by the specific dwarfs I allowed for that task. This could be easily achieved by choosing in the options that dwarfs should only be allowed to do work that they are qualified for. When new immigrants arrived I assigned them whatever tasks I thought they should be doing.

In 50xx the standard option is that all dwarfs can do all tasks so for example the moment the masonry workshop is ready and has a task the miner will stop mining and do some masonry. I can manually create a new work detail for masonry and then set it to 'only selected dwarfs can do that' and only assign the mason. This does exactly what I want but I have to do this manually for every single task. I also have to type the name masonry for the work details because otherwise I will have 50 works details named work detail 1 to 50 and no easy way to see which is which.

There must be a better way to do this? I also assume that work details do not carry over from one fort to the next, so if I have to do this manually I would have to redo this for every fort?

I would also like to have a few tasks (for example hauling) that are 'everyone except the selected dwarfs can do that'. Is there a way to set that or do I have to assign all dwarfs that should be doing the task?

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / one heck of a marriage

« on: November 18, 2014, 02:09:55 pm »

I just had a bunch of migrants come to my fort, one of them is a competent marksdwarf so I checked his kill list:

must have been one heck of a marriage.

DF Gameplay Questions / siege getting stuck after leader gets caught

« on: August 27, 2014, 06:47:28 am »

So this is known as bug 1598, http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=1598 . If the leader of a squad of goblins is caught in a cage trap, the rest of his squad will just stand around there and wait. Are there any good walkarounds for this?
I had 7 goblins standing before my row of cage traps waiting. I tried stationing my military in sight of the goblins to entice them to run through the remaining traps but unfortunately it was the dwarfs that started running and they weren't trained and equipped well enough to defeat the goblins. Now there are 2 more goblins in cages and 3 dead but one of my two soldiers is dead and the other one is in a cage and I still have 2 goblins sitting around doing nothing.
Are there more long term walkarounds? If you use weapon traps instead of cage traps you avoid the issue but weapon traps are a lot more expensive to set up and you don't get life goblins for training either.

DF Adventure Mode Discussion / autowalk and interface.txt

« on: July 21, 2014, 08:19:57 am »

so when wandering about I occasionally get some sticky key issues. Walking around with the numpad keys I somehow trigger an autowalk, say north, meaning, the game thinks I am pressing the 8 key several times per second. Pressing 8 (or 2) again cycles through different speeds of autowalk, including the precious stop autowalk. The effect remains even when pressing say Esc, where it will then quickly cycle through the menu options.
I believe this is at least partially a feature that can be configured in the 'interface.txt' file but I don't really understand the code in this file. Is their a guide on what the various commands in this file do? I searched the forums and the wiki and didn't find anything.
I would like to turn this feature off or at least only trigger it in combination with some other key, like Alt+numpad or something like that. Thanks.

DF Adventure Mode Discussion / how to get a game going in 0.40xx

« on: July 18, 2014, 05:36:50 am »

I mostly play the fortress version but decided to give adventure more another try with all the new features. I remember in 0.34 versions, as an adventurer I would start in some town, talk to some people, they tell you about some nasty creature, tell you where it is, and off I went trying to slay it (or more likely die trying).
Now in 0.40 I started out in a huge fortress (as a dwarf). After wandering around for a while I found lots of dwarfs and humans hanging out in some storage room. When asking about their problems, I am told that several years ago some dwarf was abducted by a goblin. When asking again, same story but with a different dwarf and goblin. When asking for directions, I get referred to someone else or am told that the goblin is already dead. So no quest to be had? The quest Q contains information about every single event that ever happened in this world, so I can't really get any useful pointers from there either. I wandered around for about 1h real time in the fortress, found hundreds of bed rooms with human sized clothing, lots of workshops but no exit. The fortress also seems to be so big, that the automap feature forgets places I've been to already, so that a complete search for an exit moves from extremely tedious to practially impossible.
All I wanted was be told about some nasty werewolf/nightcreature/goblin hangout or whatever, go there and try to kill stuff.

DF Gameplay Questions / war dog training 'no creature'

« on: July 15, 2014, 02:16:55 pm »

Playing the newest version 0.40.03. I have a few tame dogs, build an animal training zone, gave a dwarf the animal training profession and then checked the dogs in the animal menu to be trained into war dogs.
The announcement is then spammed by 'Urist cancels train stray dog (tame) for war: no creature' x50. Urist and the dog are standing on the same spot inside the animal training zone.
I did successfully train war dogs in 0.40.01. Also, Urist has no clue about animal training but I don't think this should make a difference.
Any idea what might be causing this or is this a bug?

DF Gameplay Questions / FB in eternal fight

« on: June 28, 2012, 10:27:24 am »

so I have an FB visiting my caverns which is also populated by serpent people. Although the FB can breath fire it managed to kill only one of the serpent people, the other 6 are happily bashing away at it and have been doing so for about half a year. The serpent people are all sword masters or spear masters or whatever they use. The FB has two pages worth of fresh injuries, being cut open, dented, bruised, broken, what have you and about 10 pages worth of scars on every single part of its body. It is also bleeding all over the place.
Should I be worried? As long as I don't go into that cavern level nothing happens. But the serpent people are probably much stronger now than they were in the beginning. Does the FB learn from combat practice? Judging from the serpent people it is hard to kill but doesn't do any serious damage? There are fighting in the water so I can get there directly anyway. Any tips to circumvent that?

DF Modding / minimod on metal production

« on: June 28, 2012, 06:08:01 am »

This came about from thinking about ore distribution. In vanilla metal ores always occur in massive quanitities. If you set mineral frequencies to high you will have massive quantities of almost every ore, if you set it lower you still have ridiculous quantities of the ores you do have, you just have fewer different ores. What I wanted was an embark where you have a lot of different metal ores, but in small quantities and with a higher effort to get them.
I only changed to of the object files, first in the 'inorganic_stone_mineral.txt' I divided all the ore frequencies by 10. Ie for hematite change the line [METAL_ORE:IRON:100] to [METAL_ORE:IRON:10] and similar for all other minerals. Second, in the 'reaction_smelter.txt' I changed all alloy reactions from ores from say [PRODUCT:100:8:BAR:NO_SUBTYPE:METAL:BRASS] to
[PRODUCT:10:8:BAR:NO_SUBTYPE:METAL:BRASS] and I adjusted the returns for making coke from bitumous coal and lignite down to 3 coke and 2 coke respectivly.
Combine this with a mineral frequency of 'everywhere' in world generation (less if you are a masochist) and you get a version of df where finding a hematite vein and mining it out completly will give you maybe 10 bars of iron. So a single vein is enough to make a weapons and maybe helms for a squad of 6 dwarfs but not enough to immediately equip the entire squad with a full set of armor.
Note you can still cheat by making rock crafts out of say gold nuggets instead of smelting the gold ore first but you would have to actively set that up.
I didn't post the modded files because the changes are so simple but I can do so if there is interest.

DF Gameplay Questions / food questions

« on: June 27, 2012, 10:31:55 am »

I had a food crisis in my fort recently (due to bad planning on my part, should have brought more food at embark) but some delicious cat biscuits were served and the crisis was averted. A few things about eggs I was wondering about.
1) eggs cannot be eaten raw normally? but can by a starving dwarf hunting for vermin?
2) are eggs liquid or solid? Ie can I have an egg roast made of nothing but eggs?
3) if the only food available is a single stack of 14 turkey eggs, can I use it to make 7 turkey egg biscuits or do I need two stacks of ingredients to start cooking?
Thanks

DF Gameplay Questions / irrigating large areas

« on: June 19, 2012, 12:33:37 pm »

This is more an answer then a question, just wanted to share what I found out. So we want to build a large tree farm/ grazing area underground, say 30 by 30 which is the max zone size, deep enough that it requires irrigation. This is more tricky then irrigating a 3 by 3 farming area because water will evaporate and this might happen faster then the new water flows in.
First method: use an infinite water source on the same z-level and a diagonal pressure reduction. This is completely useless, you might irrigate a 10 by 10 area at best until the evaporation balances out with the flow
Second: skip the diagonal pressure reduction, maybe enlarge the channel to width 2 or 3, works better then method one but still won't fully cover a 30 by 30 area, having the water falling down does not help either
Third: use a water source that is below the area to be irrigated and a pump stack. Even if this water has to flow through a long channel after it leaves the pump stack it will still cover a very large area relatively quickly, it will also be only 1 or 2 z-levels deep on the entire area so after you turn the pump of it will evaporate quickly.
Thus summary: when irrigating large areas always pump the water up to the level where you want to irrigate.
This makes sense in DF water physics, but not in real life so it took me a few tries to figure it out :-)

DF Gameplay Questions / shallow and deep mineral distribution

« on: June 19, 2012, 12:04:19 pm »

does anyone know what z-levels count as shallow / deep on the embark screen? If I only have deep metals, how far do I have to dig?
I had a few embarks where metals are mainly a surface occurrence. In the current embark I had both shallow and deep metals (plural), the wagon started out at z147, although above ground is rather hilly, with top mountain at z149 and one corner going all the way down to z119. Some metals are visible from the outside and I found various different metals in the upper levels. At about z90 metals stop. I did various digging below that and looked into the caverns but there seem to be no metal whatsoever below about z90 (with the exception of some candy but I haven't found that yet).
Is this normal? What influences occurrence of metals at different depth? This way I have about 50 z levels of fun things to explore, then 100 z levels of nothing, and finally candy, magma and fun at the very bottom.

DF Gameplay Questions / depot accessibility

« on: June 10, 2012, 03:13:25 am »

If the traders come around they check whether they can access your depot with their wagons or not. In order to access it they need a three wide path all the way from the edge of the map to your depot, ramps are ok, stairs are not. If they can access it you get a cute animation of the wagons rolling into your depot, if not you get a warning message that they bipassed your inaccessible depot.
Question: why should I care?
Even if they can't access it, the traders will still come to my depot and trade just as well as if their wagons were there. I wondered about this for quite a while, is there any benefit to having an accessible depot?

DF Gameplay Questions / pathing error with bins?

« on: May 29, 2012, 10:09:44 am »

so I have a dwarf who is trying to pick up gems with a bin to put them in the appropriate stock pile. But he is running in circles in some corridor. The dwarf is holding the wooden bin, the job manager shows his task as pick up items. He seems to run something like a random walk confined to a 5 by 5 area of open space in front of the dining hall. There are gems in the dining hall, and also in various other areas but none in the small area he is circling. He was running for a while and was thirsty but did not interrupt his task. I forbade and dumped the bin, this caused him to cancel the job and run of doing what a dwarf does. But then another dwarf got the task of picking up gems and is now circling in the same area with a new bin.
Maybe there are two gems close by and he can't decide which one to pick up first?

DF Gameplay Questions / migrant overload

« on: May 16, 2012, 10:59:45 am »

so started a new fort in 3408, got through the first year and my first non hardcoded migrant wave arrives. The only metals I found so far are galena and sphalerite, so I don't really have a metal industry, I got one artifact, but it is a slate crown worth only 4800, total fortress value just below 70.000, exported wealth 6000. Seems to me that by any reasonable standards this should count as a poor to average number for one year. As usual no real military action yet, so nobody died so far.
The migrant wave I got was 27, so close to the max of 30 and more than my entire fortress population before.
The number of migrants you get is supposed to depend on how well your fortress is doing, which is a great idea, but it seems this is badly off balance. If you don't do anything stupid and provide enough food and basic infrastructure you are already at the max values. You only get smaller migrant waves if half your dwarfs die in the first year, which usually only happens if you want it to. The wealth dependence on migrant waves is completely irrelevant because practically any fort will be scored as maximum wealth no matter whether you make candy armor or just dig a few holes in the ground.
For me this has been an issue since I started playing, about 3404 I think.
I know migrants can have accidents on the way to the fort but I feel this is a very nice feature of the game that has been broken for several updates and only takes changing a few numbers to fix.

DF Gameplay Questions / animal management

« on: April 23, 2012, 04:16:00 pm »

I have a lot of cats running through my fortress and after I encountered a forgotten beast one of them has most of its body rotting and now it leaves a trail of miasma everywhere it goes. How can I get rid of this specific cat?
I can easily find this particular cat on the map or in the unit menu. If I go to the 'z' stocks, animals menu I can choose cats to be butchered but there is no way to pinpoint this particular one. Similarly if I try to pasture it somewhere out of the way I don't know how to find this particular cat.
Seems to be that this is a general issue. Each animal is an individual and you can look at and distinguish them on the map or in the unit menu by looking at them. But if you want to assign them to a pasture, train them to war animals or butcher them you can't differentiate between the different animals of the same gender and species (unless there are named).