Bay 12 Games Forum

Explodes into gore seems to be about equivalent in terms of damage to a fist fight where a guy gets punched in the face and a few teeth and gobs of blood go flying. Messy and unpleasant, but the description 'explodes into gore' exaggerates ever so slightly.

I use that analogy particularly because pulping regularly happens in fist fights between similar sized creatures, not say, getting clobbered by a bronze colossus or kicked by an elephant.

If this is .40 try the following:

On the bottom level, construct a ramp next to a constructed wall. Construct another ramp on top of that wall. Dwarves can now use the ramps to get in/out.
Now first order the z-1 ramp to be deconstructed, then a few moments later order the z-2 ramp and wall to be deconstructed. Once each dwarf has finished deconstructing his construction, he should climb out of the pit.

Probably not possible in pre .40 (without sacrificing dwarf lives) as anything which lets a dwarf traverse up z-levels is a construction and will provide support to the plug.

This has certainly added much to the game. A pause-worthy announcement indeed!

I have noted that live hamsters/rats will chew their way free of wooden cages as well as wooden animal traps. BUT, you can use wooden animal traps if you have built a metal cage. If you are quick enough you can re-assign live hamsters/rats from their wooden animal trap into the metal cage, and the dwarves will often succeed in relocating the vermin before it chews free. As dwarves will quickly and repeatedly re-capture escaped vermin the timing is not as hard as it sounds.

I filled a wooden cage with some creepy crawlers and added a hamster, the hamster chewed free from the cage and escaped, but the creepy crawlers wouldn't follow it out the hole it had made. This leads me to suspect that by "chewing" Toady actually means a form of quantum tunneling, and the message should read "The live hamster has quantum tunneled out of confinement". Otherwise, I would appreciate if cagemates would escape too, thus the message would read something like: "The live hamster has chewed out of  confinement, freeing a live creepy crawler, a wild elephant, and 57 goblin prisoners".

For the record, I have a fortress with an extensive above-ground farming operation, definitely far away from water, and I have fisher berries there.  I can't grow bloated tubers or muckroot, though, because according to the Crops page they need a specific biome -- in spite of buying them frequently from traders for alcohol purposes.

The reason you can't grow them is because they don't have seeds. In .34 I modded in seeds (I think I called them seed tubers and muck root fragments), and could grow them just fine in fields. I haven't bothered in .40 because we can grow potatoes and turnips and stuff anyway.

Dead babies without tragedy training leads to swordmaster tantrums.

Trust me, you need to stick to males until dwarves become less awful parents.

Not hardly. Dwarfettes get so much more happiness out of having a baby than they suffer from losing it, that it still turns into a net happiness gain and can make your female dwarf warriors even hardier than the males. Also, tragedy training? That's exactly what having their tykes murdered in battle is. The difference is that female dwarves are better able to handle the tragedy because of all the happiness of giving birth, and they produce their own tragedy-training victims, and even carry them into battle to be slaughtered.
Dwarves are extremely practical.

Possible implication: I think that civilians will be able to still do all jobs except ofcourse mining, woodcutting and hunting when dual wielding shields. It might very well be the very best possible defensive gear option for civvies, if you can manage to spare them a few months training session time to get some shield proficiency.

The way skill proficiency works it doesn't really matter. A dwarf with dabbling skill in shield user, against an enemy with dabbling attack skill, might block 60% of the time. If you crank it up to adequate, he might block 68% of the time.
Where skill is helpful is really helpful is in "opposed skill checks", lets say a grand master lasher goblin attacks a dabbling shield dwarf, now the dwarf will only block say, 10% of the time. Now the same grand master lasher goblin, attacks a grand master shield dwarf. Now the dwarf might block 70% of the time. I can't remember what thread the graph appeared in (one on bolt/crossbow science), but that's basically how it works. For equal skill level around 60% block, with improving block depending on the degree of out-skilling, and IIRC, more shield skill is better than more weapon skill (i.e. shield skill isn't totally cancelled out by skilled attacker).

Because of this just putting a few levels into shield user does practically nothing as the base blocking rate is already pretty high against the enemies dwarves are likely to encounter. Giving them a shield is an awesome upgrade in their survivability, teaching them how to use it is a much lesser upgrade.

Turning pumps on is tricky with levers, because gear assemblies work quite differently to any other device. If you're okay with the pump stack running all the time, the best way is to block the flow of magma with a door/hatch/floodgate/bridge.

Here is what you can do:

Doors and floodgates operate in opposing phase to raising bridges, link both to the same lever and when a floodgate allows passage, a raising bridge will block it, and vice-verca. This is very helpful, as you can for example use raising bridges which seal an area, and a floodgate which opens allowing magma to pour in. Instead of a floodgate, you can also use a retracting bridge or hatch, which in retracting/opening, will allow magma to flow in.  You can also use retracting bridges to seal an area by extending and blocking vertical passage, and raising bridges to let magma in by lowering and permitting horizontal passage. Retracting bridges (and hatches) have the advantage that they will never squash anything and can never be blocked from closing which makes them the best solution when you want to include/exclude dwarves from an area without risking squashing them. Doors and floodgates also wont ever squash anything, but WILL be blocked from closing by any obstruction, which makes them a bad solution if you need them to say, stop magma spilling into your fortress (although putting a floodgate/raising bridge behind a fortification is a decent solution to stop anything obstructing it).

Doors and hatches have no delay while floodgates and bridges have the same delay, so if you want things to happen simultaneously use doors and hatches together, or floodgates and bridges together.

Finally there are two ways of triggering things - with a lever, and a pressure plate. A pressure plate sends an 'on' signal, then a little later (after not being depressed for long enough) automatically sends a 'off' signal. Say you have a big pile of magma sitting on a retracting bridge linked to a pressure plate, having a dwarf stand on that pressure plate will dump the magma, and then the bridge will close automatically allowing it to refill with magma.
To trigger pressure plates on demand, put a pressure plate in front of a lever at the end of a 1 wide corridor, and order the level be pulled, the lever does nothing, it just lures the dwarf into triggering the pressure plate. I have used this kind of setup for things like obsidian casting, allowing a 'one click' dumping of water and magma with automatic resetting.

The demise of an evil puppy-assassin: