Bay 12 Games Forum

Why does everyone hate aquifers?

Unlimited water and drainage are only benefits if you plan on using 'em.  Unlimited hazardous terrain and job cancellation are pains in the ass no matter what.  And a first year that goes poorly can break a fortress, there are no buffer zones and little margin of error.

I don't hate the things, but I do consider 'em a nuisance a lot of the time.  I can see why they'd bother some people more than they do me, though.

I've just started playing. I don't even know how channeling or the physics of this game work so I can't possibly get past any aquifers.

Try embarking in a location that covers multiple biomes, one but not all of which contains an aquifer.  You should have a safe easygoing spot to dig early on, but you can go looking for the groundwater after you've got some safeguards in place.

*facepalm*

The allusion to Tolkien's work was intentional.  I know about Moria, and the balrog (known as a "balor" in D&D parlance to avoid copyright infringement issues).  I suggested what Tolkien's dwarves actually did without mentioning him by name, to see if a certain someone would reject the behavior of his own dwarf model as undwarflike.

If a stockpile is giving to a workshop it seems to only take from that stockpile.  Are you sure everything you need is in the one stockpile giving to the shop?

Quote from: feralferret on May 31, 2012, 08:07:55 pm

How dwarves behave is totally dependant on how the author/developer/creator decides they behave.  Just because the dwarves in your head (or D&D, Tolkein, etc) act a certain way does not mean this is the global law for all dwarves everywhere in all fiction. Is this not just common sense? Are you trolling? 

In this game dwarves are totally amoral, chaotic, and prone to bouts of rage and insanity. Welcome to DF. Learn to like it. A dwarfy solution to overcrowding (by the standards of this game) would definitely involve horrific mass murder, probably with magma and dead kittens in there somewhere.

Also.. Deathgate - awesome series! Even some of those dwarves eventually go a little nuts and start tearing apart their machine. The one on Pyran is pretty damn murderous for a while.

At last normal answer to my question.
Now tell me what would be the solution for Tolkien's dwarves.

Dig deeper, ostensibly for more underground living space but actually for greed.  Pierce the circus tent, release clowns.  Die horribly and en masse.  Overpopulation problem solved.

should give more space for player's align (good, neutral, evil or mixed) on management style

implies that it does not currently give enough leeway in that regard.  You may not have used the word "inflexibility" but the sentiment was there.

The dwarves do think and behave like dwarves from a fantasy world.  You're just wrongly expecting cliches from some other fantasy worlds to apply to the fantasy worlds generated by Dwarf Fortress.

Imagine you go out naked while everyone else isn't and everyone -- everyone -- is pointing and laughing at your tiny pecker.  Women hum bars of Is This All There Is, men ask what kind of accident you got into or if your rabbi was drunk.  Folks wonder sotto voce if you just took an icy shower.  A cop smirks and tears up the parking ticket he was putting on your car, remarking you've got it bad enough already.  Even guys who know they're packing less than you are mock and deride you... they can hide what they've got, you can't, and mob behavior rules.

How well do you think your pride, dignity and morale are going to hold up?  How long can you stay that way and insist nothing is wrong, before you cross the line between stubborn denial and lost contact with reality?

It's not so much that kids become naked, as naked (and totally fine with that) babies become kids.  They start accumulating bad thoughts from that if they can't find clothes, you don't notice because kids never do anything interesting unless it's a one-year-old entering a strange mood and becoming a legendary stonecrafter, then they draw attention to themselves by going insane.