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Messages - Haytrid

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46
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Will not allow creation of water zone
« on: March 25, 2012, 10:01:53 am »
I believe my save-game was bugged on this issue now.  After I went back to it the next day the problem reversed, I was able to designate drinking water in the very space I was unable to the day before and my existing designation above-ground on the river which had worked, then read 0 water source.  Go figure.

1.  So is there a "safe" way to do a miasma vent to the surface?  Just build fortifications around the vent maybe?  I've been building a series of doors to limit the spread of miasma underground which seems to be working alright so maybe I'm trying to make this more complicated than it needs to be.

3.  I always make my floodgate out of stone.  I don't see how you build a floodgate on the river side of the flood-gate though, won't the dwarves drown in the river trying to get to it?  I always build a flood-gate, link it to the lever, lower the gate, then dig out the last piece of dirt blocking the river.  Maybe I'm missing a basic best-practice here for draining the river.

There was a siege outside but they never attacked the flood-gate.  Sadly I lost that fortress, which was my best so far, when I opened the draw-bridge briefly to allow some migrants in.  I had every task on every dwarf disabled and nothing designated outside and yet every dwarf dropped what they were doing and ran outside to be slaughtered, I was pretty pissed off and don't understand why the retards ran outside the fortress at all.  Next time I'll try to make more of an air-lock type system to allow migrants in and keep the existing dwarves inside, I just wasn't sure if the migrants would path into the fortress if I had locked doors that were specifically preventing the inside dwarves from getting out.

I still have much to learn but my fortresses are getting better.

1. Last questions answered first.  A floor hatch can get hacked and destroyed.

2. My chutes are up/down stairs, with up and down on the ends, and all straight aways paved with stone block, if the water is going to be turned on/off, to prevent trees from growing and making dwarf killing clearups.  Drowning.

3. Did you say a siege is going on outside by the river?  And you opened the floodgate?  Or not?  Sounds to me like your floodgate got destroyed off its link, and now its sitting there blocking the flow.  The lever won't move it, so it won't produce water ingress.  A new link needs created to allow for the Pressure Plate to work.  Make sure you create a Fortification on the outside of the floodgate, to prevent enemies from reaching your floodgate.

PS.  3. happens alot if your floodgate is wood, and not stone.

47
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Will not allow creation of water zone
« on: March 24, 2012, 02:41:52 pm »
I haven't tried building a well yet, I just read the wiki on it and I'll give it a shot.  What is the best way to dig the 1x1 chute?  I was actually curious about that same question when it came to creating a miasma-free garbage dump under-ground with a chute to the surface.  Do you just make the chute a 2 way staircase or do you have to have a round-about way for the dwarf to exit from the bottom.  If you make a chute to the surface, can you just put a grate over it to keep enemies from pathing down the chute?

48
DF Gameplay Questions / Will not allow creation of water zone
« on: March 23, 2012, 11:23:14 pm »
This is something I've done in the past without difficulty.  I build a big pit next to the river, build a flood-gate linked to a switch, flood the pit. . . . boom, drinkable water underground.  I tried today several times and it comes up as being "0" water in the zone???  It's right there, I'm looking right at it, I do "K" and over over it, there is water in the square but it doesn't acknowledge it's there.  I tried building a new pit next to it, didn't work, tried draining and refilling, didn't work.  Creating outside zones over water. . .works no problem.  Problem is there is now a siege outside that I can't take on currently and I've been digging forever trying to find an underground water source with no luck and my dwarves are going to start dying of thirst.  Is this a bug I'm missing, it's just odd because I've never had a problem with it before.

49
We'll, dwarves already love mist so maybe gills are the next logical stage of evolution!  Sounds like an opportunity for some Darwinist **SCIENCE**.

...nor are you likely to ever be going into that cavern yourself unless you first a) create controllable floodgates at the entry and exit points, b) risk creating a massive cave in which exposes some new open map edges, or c) somehow manage to breed dwarves with gills.

Good luck with that last one.

50
I did a new embark and was just digging down to find my first rock layer still in the first year when I found, on about 6 z-levels down from embark, a massive cavern complex.  Not really feeling like dealing with them I just diverted a river into them.  The river just kept on flowing for about 45 minutes, the cavern never filled up.  The question is, is this a viable way to drown nasty cavern beasties?  Unfortunately I never got the chance to explore later and find out because by the third year a necromancer infiltrated my fortress and raised some kind of flesh beast which annihilated my entire fortress in no time, this was after two years of fending off flying fire and ice skulls, bad embark point I suppose.

51
I think using the older Ultima games for influence would generally be a good route.  I remember Ultima IV was massive, lot's to do, NPC's had lives and routines, there was an ultimate quest but it was still very sand-box'ish.

Specifically right now though for me, medical treatment and better inventory management.

52
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Pumps?
« on: March 16, 2012, 02:56:40 pm »
I need to get around to using pumps also.  I believe a big reason to use them is to pump fresh water for your dwarves to drink?  I've been forcing my dwarves to drink stagnant water though and they don't seem to care so I haven't bothered trying to find them a fresh water source yet.  I still have never found magma yet.  There are youtube videos out there though showing the use of pumps.

53
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Pop Cap doesn't work?
« on: March 16, 2012, 02:50:14 pm »
Ahhh, ok, I was thinking that they were making it back and reporting that I DID need migrants.  So if the occasional trade caravan just happens to accidentally die say due to drowning then all of their trade goods are belong to us?

54
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: New to DF, and I have a few questions.
« on: March 16, 2012, 01:36:53 pm »
So those nasty cave creatures I dig into sometimes that wipe out my entire fort, could I possibly rig an entire level to collapse on them and kill them by keeping just one supporting block next to a ramp or stairs?

Structures will only collapse if there isn't anything supporting them. You can mine out an entire level and it'll be fine as long as there's a single block holding it up.

55
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Pop Cap doesn't work?
« on: March 16, 2012, 01:31:17 pm »
So the goal here is to kill the caravan?  I was considering this until I read the post "Axe Lord Flipped Out!!" basically killing the caravan and suffering a loyalty cascade and I was curious if I just locked the caravan in the trade depot until they starved to death if that would be a more advantageous, if less humane, way of keeping them from reporting back.  Or possibly building the trade depot under a lake and drowning them, something along those lines.

56
Ahhh, I just realized that my inability to pick up items in containers I found was due to a bug in the version I was using.  I upgraded to the newest one and now I can loot to my hearts content although now that I am a human a lot of the items are showing up as giant sized.

57
I'm going to start searching the forums for answers to my questions but I'll post my first adventure experience and see if some of you want to throw out a couple quick answers and read about my untimely death at the hands of the human presser mummy.

I've been playing fortress mode for a while so I have the basics down so thought I'd try my hand at adventure mode.  I've interspersed a couple newbly questions that I just couldn't figure out regardless of how many keys I mashed.

Right off the bat I couldn't figure out how to start an adventure game in my existing world where my fortress was currently at, I thought I had read in the forums people exploring their own fortress but for the life of me I couldn't find an option to embark a new game in the existing world.  Not a huge deal, I created a new world and started an adventure mode.

Story wise I had a great time, I started out looking for a fight and to be killed and I found it quickly.  The local villagers were being terrorized by some shape-changing beast, they told me the location and name of the beast but not where the location was.  No matter how many times I spoke with the locals about surroundings they refused to disclose the actual location where this beast was???  No idea how I'm supposed to find that specific location so I just wandered around.  I started out by killing a couple coyotes in the woods to get the basics down.  No problem with the coyotes.  I then looted the remains, butchered the corpse, started a fire and tried to cook and eat some of the remains.  Took me a minute to realize I first had to remove it from my pack before I could interact with it but so far so good.  I didn't see any kind of cooking?  I settled for just heating it using advanced interaction and eating it, I ate the brain and liver and didn't get sick so I'm assuming that's just fine?

Now with the basics down, let's get killed.  I found and immediately raided a tomb, I had read previous horror stories of mummies on the forums so I thought that could be fun.  I walked through a room of peasant skeletons, up a stairs, dodged or deflected several traps, somehow picked a lock on a gold door (any way to melt that down and take it?) when I had no lock-picking skills as far as I knew but hey, I'll take a gimme.  I started looting bags and some misc. other pretty useless items and sure enough, a human presser mummy appeared and was nice enough to take the time to start a dialogue with me to let me know he was going to kill me first.  I tried to run back down the way I came but he had apparently animated the peasant skeletons in the room I had walked through to get there I think?  Or did he summon them from nowhere?  But they came up the stairs and blocked my way and within 4 hits sure enough, I died.  I wonder if I could have somehow destroyed or moved those remains outside before triggering the mummy if those were the ones he actually animated.  What a hoot though.

I immediately started a new character and went right to the tomb, the mummy and skeletons were gone and I looted my old hero (free stuff!).  I really wanted to loot the traps, they had high quality silver weapons but I could not figure out how to take them.  It said there was nothing to take even though I could inspect and see there was and trying to hit "u" to interact with the mechanism did nothing, so how can I disassemble those traps and loot the weapons???

I left the tomb and wanted to find a merchant to sell my wares too, this proved difficult, I went through my starting area and no merchants.  I saw a big walled city to the east and thought I'd try there.  I got there and to my amazement the entire city was abandoned!  It looks like everyone left in a hurry too because absolutely everything is still in the shops and rooms!  Cabinets, bags, and misc. stuff everywhere, did I just get really lucky here?  All of the items are Large size though, is that human-sized or larger than human?  I thought I'd give it a try but couldn't figure out how to take the items from the cabinet!  Once again I can't pick it up, I couldn't "u" interact with it and attempting to remove an item from a container only allows me to remove items from MY containers so how can I start looting all of this "stuff", I mean it's everywhere!

Finally on a technical note after about 20 minutes of playing I would take a step and the game would freeze up for about 30 seconds, then let me take another step and do it again.  I have to save/quit and come back in and then it does it again.  Computer resources are fine, cpu tooling around 40% and over 2gb memory free, DF is using about 600mb, everything seems fine there and I never had a problem in fortress mode like that even after playing for many hours.

All-in-all I had a great time, I really wish I could find a merchant to sell my "stuff" to and then I think I'm going to try going underground for a spell.

I'll summarize the questions from the wall of text:

1.  Adventure mode in existing fortress world?
2.  Interacting/looting traps, cabinets, and grates?
3.  Gold door?  Sounds like it will make me rich, how can I take it?
4.  No cooking?  Just heat coyote brains and eat?
5.  Mummy, was it animating skeletons in the burial I walked through or does it summon them from out of nowhere?
6.  Is large size human-size or larger than human size, whereas dwarf would be small size then?
7.  Adventure mode lagging out after about 20 minutes of play?

58
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Have never found metal. . . ever
« on: February 25, 2012, 09:42:46 am »
Wow, this has definitely been my problem.  I always embark on someplace that says it has metal only to find tons of both of those minerals.

One important thing to note is that the embark screen's "shallow/deep metal" may not actually be a metal at all. Anything that would give the message "you have struck _________" qualifies as "shallow/deep 'metal'". Many a player has embarked and found that the 'ore' they were expecting turned out to be microcline or cobaltite or something of absolutely no military value. This is why the advise is to always look for "metal(s)" and to bring the mineral scarcity setting very very low.

59
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Have never found metal. . . ever
« on: February 24, 2012, 06:46:40 pm »
OK, I always have stacks and stacks of charcoal on-hand because I always plan on melting metal objects since I can never find the metal ores.

I admit I don't check every item in the dump pile every time, I'm usually assuming that if I have the ore and have the charcoal something on the list will not be red finally.

Also, I can't imagine anything is too wonky with my game because I have reloaded it from scratch whenever a new version has come out and in fact just loaded the newest version and played through two more games to year 3 or so. . .same issue.

I have never used or assigned burrows, I actually had to look that up on the wiki to see what that was but I do constantly dump rocks and claim them regularly.

I spend hours exploring and looking for metal ores.  Usually when I dig down I will just clear out a 40 x 40 or 50 x 50 area every 10 to 20 levels down, I will revise my strategy to start digging longer tunnels in each direction instead to try to find a vein, I will also try a game NOT doing stone dumps.  Next game I will max out the mineral occurrence also.  It's seeming like I am just having supreme bad luck and it's crippling my military.

60
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Have never found metal. . . ever
« on: February 24, 2012, 05:55:09 pm »
I should have been more specific, I am looking for any of the ores listed in the smelter list and have never found a single ore I could smelt into metal.  It seems my mineral occurrence is usually medium by default?  At this point in time I probably should set it to everywhere.  I do take all the "rocks" and put them in the 1x1 "dump" as the tutorials say, but I have always reclaimed them and the smelter list is still always all red, nothing to smelt.

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