Bay 12 Games Forum

Are you sure that the magma is on 119? Magma and water are visible from the level above, so you may be putting the workshops above empty space.
Hit [k] and look at it to be sure, it should say "magma [7/7]".

This. Magma on its own is a LIGHT red 7. Magma viewed from the level above is a dark red 7. You should be able to see a dark red number while you're on the workshop floor, which represents magma immediately below the workshop. If you see a dot or anything else but the depth number, you're too high.

Go to d_init.txt and change [STORE_DIST_ITEM_DECREASE] to 15 or so and change [STORE_DIST_SEED_COMBINE] to 0. Dump and claim a bunch of empty bags right next to your still. Your dwarves SHOULD grab filled seed bags to get seeds only if there's not an empty bag available within 15 steps. You should end up with a lot more bags with just a couple seeds each.

If I'm feeling picky and want an embark just-so, I'll embark as normal and look around. If I don't like it I'll use "die" in DFHack and embark somewhere else.

I've recently started doing "thin" forts, e.g. something with minimum elevation set to 250 or so to move the magma layer up. I end up with embarks that have about 10 layers up top before the caverns, more than enough to do the fort proper. The surface layer is z-140 or so, and the magma layer ends up at 110-120, even with 3 cavern layers in between. 30 floors isn't hard at all to travel for regular hauling duties. Even on a 2x2 embark that's equivalent to less than half the map distance horizontally, and most dwarves will travel further than that to harvest trees.

Trimming out the fluff and bringing a bunch of bituminous coal on embark means that I'm good to go for extremely cheap. One bituminous coal is 3 points at embark, and gives 9 coke bars at a magma forge. One for making pig iron plus one coal for making 2 steel equates to 9 steel bars per coal, and no trees involved whatsoever. Makes glacier embarks a lot less of a pain. And the worldgen I have now for some reason ALWAYS gives me magnetite in the top layers, so iron is no problem. My last 3 forts have all had a dining hall inside a magnetite cluster. Instant happy dwarves. If I've got enough iron I sometimes make all the furniture out of it, just 'cuz.

Modify your raw/entity_default.txt file. In the [MOUNTAIN] (dwarves) section, find the ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER and ETHIC:EAT_SAPIENT_KILL lines to ACCEPTABLE. Gen a new world. You can now dispose of goblin/elf/kobold corpses in your dwarves' bellies. Bonus points for butchering an elven trader and making roasts out of him, then offering those roasts to the next elven trader.

I read "Artemis Missile", but my brain just says "19 extra scrap".

I never use missiles with the Kestrel A. It's such a well-rounded ship anyway that you won't need anything but lasers and one or two ancillary systems to back them up. If you find a second Burst Mk II, then you can coast on those for the rest of the game and just focus on defense. With two Burst Mk IIs and a drone system, you can beat the final boss easily. With just your starting laser and a teleporter/decent crew, you can board ships and farm extra scrap from everyone and have level 4 shields before sector 5. Same deal if you get an Ion Blast, just take out their shields and keep ions on their O2 system. Missiles are a perfectly viable way to go, but I usually can't afford to do missiles AND drones. Not on Normal, anyway.

The Kestrel is a great ship, and IMO the Red Tail is even better. They're like a blank canvas on which you can paint anything you like. The Engi A is awesome from the start, which makes up for the Engi B being so horrible. I LOVE the Fed cruiser. The artillery beam is stupid good once you upgrade it, and it's a guaranteed source of damage that you don't have to babysit. Get something to pop weapons systems or keep people from fleeing, and then just turtle up and wait. With artillery upgrades and a Defensive Drone II you can almost auto-win every battle.

The game IS a subset of the Roguelikes. It's expected for you to fail more often than not. The game is designed so that sometimes you're in a situation where you're going to die, and there's nothing you can do about it.

But it's not all about luck. Those screwed-over situations are by far the exception, and not the rule. A good player can take bad odds and make things stretch out much more efficiently than a bad player. Running out of oxygen, for example: did you know that when you're repairing a breach in a room with oxygen failing, you can open adjacent doors into oxygenated rooms and the air will rush into the vacuum, buying your repairman another second or two of air to seal the breach? Did you know that when you've got boarders and you're trying to remove the air from a room, you can turn off your own oxygen systems and make the room airless in half the time? The whole game is filled with little things like that, and I learn new ones every time I play, just like in Dwarf Fortress. I just watched a VerbalProcessing video of FTL, and I learned that you can have some weapons on auto-fire and some on manual at the same time by using the Ctrl key.

To those who think that the game is "unfair": of course it is, so deal with it. That's a staple of the genre. The thrill of a Roguelike(like) is to take a completely unfair scenario and overcome it anyway. If I want something with unlimited save/reloads that I don't even need to use because the game is so piss easy anyway, I'll go play Skyrim. Then I'll go cry in my bathroom because I just wasted a night playing Skyrim.

I think it might just be a proximity thing. Z-levels are treated as one "step" away from anything, no matter what their actual walking cost is. If the main food stockpile is directly above your farms, it could be that the dwarves think it's a "closer" pile, even though the actual walking distance is further than your intended plant stockpile. It's like if a mason needs to get a stone for a project, and he can choose either A, B, or C:
###############
     C
    #
    #
    #
    #      B
    #
   A# @<-- Mason
###############
The mason here will consider A to be the "closest" stone, even though it takes the most number of steps to get there. I think the same logic applies to stockpiles. One z-level is only one "step", regardless of the actual pathing, so a pile directly above your farms is considered 1 space away, regardless of your staircase setup.