Bay 12 Games Forum

While I would not defend fisherdwarves, in defence of both fisherdwarves and herbalists, both can perform their jobs safely indoors. For herbalists it's a simply matter of digging out some soil layer, and piercing the caverns. Plants grow very quickly. For fisherdwarves, you just need an indoor pool. Fish spawn by spores or something, so they can be caught pretty much anywhere, assuming they exist in the biome.

I feel herbalists are underrated and farmers are overrated.

You can buy heaps of plants from traders (especially elves) and they're all nice juicy stacks of 5 (for big barrels of booze). And a herbalist can easily provide supplementary plants if booze supplies get low (even a small tree farm will provide heaps and heaps and heaps of plants for a herbalist to gather). With farming you get plants whether you need them or not, while herbalism works much better for "on demand" plant production.

This assumes the fortress is fed by butchery and buying stuff from the caravans, making plants only required for booze (and obviously herbalism doesn't work for mass production of cloth or dye).

So this increasingly is my style. Although I admit I can't resist growing whip vines and sun berries.

I disagree with not bringing at least one rope, and one bucket. Those let you get a well going quick, in case you run into a booze issue. The reasons are A) rope requires a few steps to produce which uses several materials. and B) Buckets will take wood, which might be more useful doing other things, like beds.

Wells are evil and useless. The only thing more evil and useless, is running into booze issues. If you don't make the booze supply the #1 priority in your fortress then you must be some kind of elf or a sober beardless dwarf stricken with melancholy (because even elves make booze). The reason why wells are evil and useless, is only one dwarf can draw water from a well at once, and if the water is more than 1z below the well, it takes quite a while - quite a bit longer than it takes for a dwarf to go down and up the stairs (since dwarves travel faster than water falls due to gravity it should be no surprise they also effortlessly out-run buckets being lowered on a rope). If the water is at the well level though (i.e. built directly on top of the water), what usually happens, is that one dwarf uses the well, and the other dwarves who want to use the well, just take water from "around" the well, (i.e. they're actually taking water directly from the water tile because the well is in use, and they don't bother waiting for the well to be free). And the thing is, that while a dwarf is *drinking*, he hogs the well for as long as he is drinking - which is quite a while, about 30 seconds. So the drinking time is in addition to the bucket lowering and raising time, for all that time, other dwarves can't use the well, and will either go thirsty or will just take water directly from the tile and will get the unhappy thought about the lack of a well.
Now yes it is true that a dwarf in a sober elf fortress gets an unhappy thought about the lack of a well, but this is only when they drink water from the well, and as I already said above, most the dwarves wont use the well if there is a lack of booze because drinking water from a well takes so long so all the other dwarves just stick their head down the well and lap it up and get the unhappy thought about the lack of a well anyway. And here's the point, for anything *other* than drinking water, that is, taking water to fill a pond zone, or for a hospital patient, dwarves *do not* get an unhappy thought about the lack of a well, they are perfectly happy to just scoop up a bucket of water from an open tile. But if you have a well, they use it, and it takes them longer to draw a bucket of water from the well, than to just scoop it up. Scooping water is instantaneous and infinite dwarves can do it at once. And to add insult to injury, wells don't have any water purification effect at all, at best, they might trick dwarves into taking water they would usually regard as unusable, but otherwise the bucket of water produced is just as stagnant, salty or muddy as the source tile. And that's why wells are evil and useless and Armok-damned.

Basically in practise you'll be happier if you just make an open water tile and bung a grate over it and define it as a water source zone. Nothing can fall in, nothing can crawl up out of it, dwarves can get buckets of water instantly and infinite dwarves can use/drink from it at once, and it's all faster than using a well.

If you use marksdwarves for reserve troops (i.e. not permanently training) then it makes a tonne of sense to give them mostly leather armour and leather or wooden shields. Why? Because when they aren't fighting, they have to haul and stuff. Putting them in full metal will slow them down quite a lot, and there's not much point in making them generally inefficient just for the sake of protecting them from attacks which they shouldn't be subjected to in the first place.
A dwarf who isn't trained in weapon skill, fighting and shield user, simply can't survive in a real battle. Your archers are not going to have those skills (well I guess unless you're cheap and danger room train them). If they are being attacked by melee invaders, they will die. So basically if the fight is easy, they'll just peg the enemy with a bolt and it'll run away or be crippled by pain. If it's a hard battle they're screwed whether they have armour or not because they have no defensive skills.

With that said, as a compromise, gauntlets, high boots and helmets don't weigh much, so you may as well give them those made of metal. A mail shirt is heavy, but, combined with the previous items, it gives full body coverage (a mail shirt covers the upper legs, and high boots cover the lower legs, and it's the same with the arms). Add leather armour and leather trousers, and they have full body metal coverage, without the significant weight of a breastplate, greaves/leggings and metal shield.

This is why real dwarves pump magma rather than letting it flow around under its own power.

If you want a head on collision between freight trains type crash course then try Fortress Defence mod. You'll get sieges within the first year (of very weak enemies, which even unarmed untrained dwarves can often take on) and will probably die by year 3, but it's great to practise military, necessity being the mother of invention and all.

I quite often do the 6 military 1 civilian embark. It's quite a lot of fun actually. Initially I have the military dwarves chop some trees, dig out some space, produce some furniture, and smelt, forge and create their own gear. Typically the civilian will be a herbalist or farmer, and will be doing his thing. Otherwise the civilian will be a weapon or armorsmith - that depends on what the preferences are like.
Typically there is no need to bring food. Just slaughter the pack animals and cook some seeds from brewing and/or do some booze cooking (since I incline more to herbalism than farming, seeds are expendable, but even if you farm, if you bought some plump helmets for brewing, you'll have plenty of spare seeds).
The 6 will be training within the first season, and the 7th will be pretty busy until the migrants arrive, usually doing things like finishing off the furniture, completing uniforms for the military dwarves, producing soap, farming, brewing, cooking etc.

I also do 4 military and 2 military embarks. With 4 military, you have enough civilians left over to pierce an aquifer if need be. With 2 military, once you're used to 6/4 military starts, you almost wont know what to do with all the spare hands. Even 2 military is enough to absolutely demolish vanilla ambushes and sieges. But if you're playing Fortress Defence mod you'll want 4, and if you're playing FD Challenge and/or Bonus, you'll want 6 - at least if you're planning to fight the sieges with pure military.

Dorms as well as making the beds freely available (which beds are anyway be default), also makes dwarves without a bed, sleep on the floor of the dorm. This way you want have dwarves sleeping in random places. Not that it really matters either way, but that's how it works.