Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Finndibaenn on July 05, 2012, 02:19:54 pm

i've made the depot area floodable (i usually embark on aquifer maps) and flood the merchants and especially mules if they go zerk.

You should have a sign with a disclaimer at your entrance. Something like "Traders are subject to execution at a moment's notice."

"As your trading partners, our utmost priority is to protect you from goblin sieges. We apologize for any inconvenience caused."

Do dwarves get stuck trying to drink from barrels in minecarts?
Not sure if this is a bug that needs reporting or if it was related to my nonfuctional design of the route.

I've had a thirsty dwarf stand on top of a minecart with "drink" as job for about a season...

I'd say that definitely sounds like a bug. There's one reported, in fact, about dwarves eating from minecarts getting stuck. You should maybe go add a note that it also affects drinking, maybe upload a save. For a solution: "Forbidding cart contents or moving it solves this until next hungry one."

I never prospect, so can't compare. Do you have metals everywhere though, or what? (my world is sparse metals).

Sadly the embark is pretty flat, I prefer digging into hillsides to just making stairs down from the surface.

I've got the site scouted out for my next fort. Also sand, volcano, and a river (brook I think, but still). IIRC no shallow metal though, only deep metals (extra challenge!). The really fun part is that it does have some haunted mountains (completely flat area though), comprising a 1x2 area in the NW corner of the embark.

I was thinking of casting the aboveground part of my fort from obsidian. Maybe eventually cast a huge block of obsidian underground, to house my entire fort!

Quote from: weenog on July 08, 2012, 12:46:40 am

Even the double-slit method can and will flop on its ass if you don't carefully micromanage the order of wall building.

Quote from: Two Slits Method in practice

You wanted a wall there? Sorry, that's a diagonal, you can't do that.  You deconstructed the wall that was in your way?  Now there's too much water coming and your pump operator can't keep up.

U MAD?

I've developed a variation on twin-slit which is far less micro-management intensive, you can do it blindfolded with a mild case of metal retardation. It's optimized for speed and sheer laziness, and there is basically two aspects which make it much faster and lazier:
1) QM's second method (for layers with aquifer below) is optimised to require no de-construction at all and far less construction.
2) To deal with the bottom layer, a cavern drain is installed as priority, since it's much much easier to work with aquifers with a drain below.

So far the only documentation is my video on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXQH9dliFZE

In the video, it only takes a little more than 5 minutes to get through the 2-layer aquifer. That's like, uh, 1/3rd of a season. I haven't timed QM's original method, but I know it's not nearly that fast.

It's possible to go through 1 layer aquifers in a couple of minutes on most maps. On cold maps, less than a minute. It's really all about knowing the techniques, then aquifers are a total pushover.

Did you rewrite the double-slit article on the wiki, or was it someone else? It's definitely changed since the last time I read it. Which was when I started a fort just to test doing it, the job cancellations were crazy. I think it was a 2-level aquifer, I was using the system the double-slit method now recommends for the last level only, don't know why I wasn't draining to lower levels at all... must have been because the wiki either didn't recommend that back then (this was May or June this year), or I didn't understand that bit.

Anyway, the article now mentions the option of draining once you get a 1x1 safe area at the bottom. However, it (and you) only mention draining to caverns). Wouldn't it be easier and safer just to dig a few z down, then to the map edge, carve fortifications, and drain through those? Or is there some sort of limit to off-map outflow, and the caverns are necessary because they usually have plenty of areas open to the map edge (as opposed to a 1-wide corridor to the map edge)?

Decided to try the "bring ore and fuel instead of finished products" embark strategy to see how well I'd do with it.

Embarked in a decent spot, looked around, assigned a few missing labors, then unpaused so they could get to work.

Only to have an alligator leap out, maul a llama's head (still wounded a year later), try to rip of the left foot of one of the two Farmers, and killed one of my two female dogs before I was able to punch it to death with six dwarves (and two dogs chewing on it).  All on the 1st of Granite.

A normal embark, I would have had four weapons to use on it.  Instead, I have to resort to an unarmed mob to try and bring it down.  I've no idea how I managed to get away with so few injuries.

Sure, blame it on the lack of weapons. I remember a guy complaining that he had an alligator kill multiple embarks/reclaims worth of dwarves (and he bought 2-4 armed ones each time, I think).

...
- Track stop which does the pickup from the stockpile at the top of the chute is linked to a lever at the bottom.  (There's also a track stop which does the dumping, but it's not useful to stop that one from operating.)  The default state for a track stop hooked to the lever is to be operating?

- Items fall down the chute, land on a hatch 1Z above the bottom, also hooked to the lever.  Default state for the hatch is closed.

So, throw lever and the mine cart up above should stop being filled or departing.  Hatch opens up and dumps items into lower stockpile, wait a beat or three, then throw the lever again and things to back to working.  Your dwarves now have a far lower chance of being killed by falling items?

I could even see this setup with a pressure plate and another minecart on a track to act as a timing mechanism.  The other minecart track would be set to depart always every 14 days, as it goes around the track it would go across pressure plates and trigger the hatch?  You'd just need a dwarf to guide it every 14 days.

The stop where the loading happens wouldn't be useful to link to a lever (that's what I'm reading from your post?). The loading of the cart is dependent on the hauling stop's settings, not whether or not there even is a track stop at the location, never mind whether the track stop is "on" (the exception to the aforementioned being if there is a dumping track stop at the loading stop; this is only useful for quantum dumping). Either way, some schemes to avoid stuff from your chutes falling on your dwarves' heads have already been suggested: the best I've seen had pressure plates that the hauling dwarves at the bottom triggered so that the hatch only opened when they weren't inside the room at the bottom of the chute (at least if there was only one dwarf burrowed to do the hauling for the chute).

How does a kea manage to carry off a wheelbarrow, anyway?   

It could grip it by the... handle?

It's more a question of weight ratios, anyway.