Bay 12 Games Forum

Had my first FB composed of fire. It was fun seeing it burn the whole caverns, but then it was killed off by a swallow.

Now the interesting bit is, years later there is still an "Eliratholathoīs flames" at the spot where it died - in the water, no less. Apparently those "flames" are its corpse. They have a temperature of over 5200 Celsius (over 19000 Urist), way hotter than magma. They're also very light (<1 urists).

My questions:

1) Is it possible to haul these "flames" without setting a dwarf on fire?
2) Is there some application for them? Setting goblins on fire, powering a steam engine, anything?

What happens when the path of a minecart is blocked by a closed door, does it go through?

What if the door is forbidden? Could you use a forbidden door to close off a railway track to dwarves?

I really, really want to have a reason to do some beekeeping. It looks stylish and fun. The problem is that as far as I can see, the costs and benefits seem extremely bad.. am I overlooking something?

First note that it is essentially a different "farming": you invest materials and dwarf labors in return for food and booze.

Costs:
- is an outdoors activity, so requires to deal with cave adaptation (like outdoor farming); building a roofed-over light inside area is an optional workaround for both
- requires several special items to work (hive, press and jugs), where a farm just needs a plot. Is more work to set up.
- Once set up, the amount of dwarf labor to keep it going seems about the same. Farming needs sowing and harvesting, beekeeping needs splitting and harvesting colonies.
- there is a (soft and hard) limit to production, unlike farms. For practical purposes, the soft limit of 40 hives IS the hard limit, because hives above 40 yield very little increase in output. At the limit, you are producing about 12 Royal Jelly, 12 Honey and 12 wax each season.
- requires more space than farming: 40 tiles for the hives, but you also need some space in between for walking, for an output of 12 cooking ingredients and 5*12=60 booze. A farm can produce that much with about 2 tiles.

Benefits:
- Wax is garbage with low value, that can be used for nothing but crafts. Less useful than bones.
- Royal Gelee, according to what I read on the wiki: can be stored in finished good stockpiles, making it harder to access and keep track of. It is also a liquid, and dwarves will prefer to cook solid ingredients instead. If you do manage to get your dwarves to cook it, it is still one of the worst possible ingredients, because it has the lowest value and stack size.
- Honey can also be stored in finished good stockpiles, making it harder to access. It can be used for cooking but is another terrible ingredient for that purpose, for the same reasons. Turning it into 5 mead looks better, but mead has a terribly low value too.

tldr:
- harder than farming,
- yields inferior products
- hard cap on production that equals the output of two farming tiles

yikes Do the gods hate bees?

Hi all,

Relative noob here, having another go at this game after a hiatus of a few years.

Version I am playing is: 0.44.12 with lazy noob pack. DFHack enabled, and I sometimes run Dwarf Therapist. Using the default lazy noob pack tileset.

So far the game crashed while saving 1 time, and crashed twice while running. I googled around and heard a rumor that something called "twbt" might be related to random crashes if you use tilesets.

Specifically, I read somewhere that turning off a setting called "animations/twbt redraw_all 1" could help. The problem is that I have no idea where to find this setting. Any ideas?

Thanks!

My dwarves are running into a cavern that I breached, in order to clean some blood on the floor.. so far they have been lucky to avoid having themselves killed, but how to I prevent them from doing it again?
Are burrows the only option?

My expedition leader had an accident while cutting trees. Her right leg was badly injured.
Now she has been in the hospital for a long time, in a traction bench. Examining her health status says:

Status: In Traction, Ability to stand lost
Wounds: Right lower leg, bone: overlapping fracture (in traction), Smashed Open, has been sutured, Infection
Treatment: Diagnosis Required, Crutch Required

The patient history shows that she is being diagnosed many many times every day and cleaned with cat soap about once a day.

The hospital has crutches in stock, but they are not applied. Also, it's weird that Diagnosis Required stays active, in spite of being Diagnosed again and again every day. What could be causing this?

I dug a channel that connects an aquifer to a cavern below it (with a floor grate preventing wildlife from entering).

I reserved a part of this channel for powering water wheels, it looks like this:


xxxxxx
xxxxxx
......
......
xxxxxx
xxxxxx

x = supported floor
. = channel


The channel is filled with 7/7 water, flowing from right to left, ending into the drain down the caverns eventually.

In this channel I built a double waterwheel:


xxxxxx
xx|xxx
.===..
.===..
xx|xxx
xxxxxx


And yet it remains dead:

Inactive
Total Power: 0
Total Power needed: 22

Why does it not work?


Edit: I found out the problem. The game did not count it as "flowing" because the stream ended in a wide spreading flood of the caverns, instead of flowing off the edge of the map. If I end the channel in fortifications at the edge of the map, it works. However, I am a bit disappointed that this is how it works.. Flooding the caverns made more physical sense than fortifications at the map end, it is easier to figure out and is more fun, in a "screw the world" kind of way.

Question: how did the first dwarven civilization create their first anvil? Did it grow on a tree?