Bay 12 Games Forum

How is your jobs list?  It seems whenever dwarves aren't getting something done that I consider crucial it's because they have too much else to do.  If it's several pages long then the burial might be too far down the list.  Come to think of it, check the list to see if the burial is even on it at all.

Yeah, the jobs list is a good place to check when something is not being done. Once the game assigns the dwarf to a burial receptacle, the dwarfs usually go to get the corpse unless they are all busy.

Did their sites just suck, or were they attacked strongly?

Make a world, read the history :p 

In one world I was looking at, the parent dwarf civ consisted of two camps.. one with 2 dwarfs and the other with 40 dwarfs. I could only picture they were refugees fleeing from something they unleashed in the Mountainhome or they were the military that left their fort undefended while they went to attack another site.

I usually don't worry much about what the parent civ can provide since you run out of that quick enough. It is more "do they exist or not?"

So many of my early embarks had, "A kea has stolen a wheelbarrow!"

Check each square of the problem plot for "Inside Dark Subterranean". If there is a tree overhanging your plot, the tree trunk that extends out from the central trunk may be overhanging your plot and that will stop the light as well. I've the same sort of "pit with a ceiling" that you do and have cavemoss growing next to outdoor plants because of the overhanging trees. The thing I am considering is that you may need to rebuild the plot or cut down a tree, because if the plot was built while 100% "Inside Dark Subterranean" then it may act funny after being partially exposed to light (and reject both seed types). But mountainous biome is another possibility and you may need to rebuild it elsewhere.

Check your stone stockpile and make sure it is set to allow 3 wheelbarrows and that you have 3 free wheelbarrows. Wheelbarrows will move stone 5 or 10 times faster than a dwarf and 3 is usually enough to support a legendary mason.

Usually I end up with one small stockpile with three wheelbarrows near the mason/mechanic/crafter shops. It is set to accept from links only and to 't'ake from two or three larger stockpiles, usually about 10 z down. Those larger stockpiles each have 3 wheelbarrows. So, when all three shops are going fulltime, the little stockpile is only sending wheelbarrows down to the larger stockpiles. It also triggers a steady stream of 3 hauling jobs per stockpile instead of using all your dwarfs at once, because a stockpile with wheelbarrows will limit the jobs it creates to the number of wheelbarrows 'owned' by it.

I had to set some ptrace configuration manually:

sudo your-favorite-editor /etc/sysctl.d/10-ptrace.conf

change:

kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 1

to:

kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 0

this will be active after restarting the system.

There is a better way!! Change into the DwarfTherapist directory and "sudo setcap cap_sys_ptrace=ep DwarfTherapist". This will disable ptrace access for DT only.

The difference is that "kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 0" will allow all software in your session to access memory space allocated to other apps, meaning that some hacked internet browser site/script can exploit some security flaw in another running app on your machine, and allow long-term infection. It would not matter if you were playing DF or not, the risk exists while ptrace is disabled. A purpose of ptrace protection is to prevent malicious software from being able to inject malware code into other running software.

By only allowing ptrace access to DwarfTherapist, you are minimizing the risk. You can go through the DT source code and see what it is capable of.

Though I'm not sure launching just the DT with sudo is worse than giving all apps ability to access each other memory (guessing, if that disables DT sudo), that's pretty nice set of instructions, especially to have in one place - didn't know or still not remember about changing ptrace_scope, myself.

Running DT with sudo is *much* safer than disabling all ptrace protection, for the reasons above.

I'm still pretty new, so this may not be the best plan of action.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

After that there's no real rule to what I do, it heavily depends on what I want done first. Usually it's shops but sometimes other things take priority.

This *is* the best rule.

The embark I've just started on, I have everything I need and all the skills I want. I bought up all the "free" barrels and bags. However, no magnetite, hematite or limonite, no lignite or bituminous. No iron goods available, though there is steel, both bars and armor/weapons. The only flux is marble, the only magma-safe is quartzite, the only ores sphalerite, galena and tetrahedrite. (Maybe it's a sign I'm not supposed to run for the magma this time.) How would you spend the remaining 700+ points?

My 3x3 embarks always have flux in one of the biomes, so when the ore options on embark are limited, I plan on trade/invader/mining to obtain iron and copper and ignore the expensive steel bars. I take about 10 tetrahedrite to get some early silver for weapons to sell in the first year and then spend a lot on sphalerite, bismuthinite, and cassiterite, most of which sits idle until I get to the magma. Copper always shows up from invaders, traders, or mining, so the sphalerite is for brass mugs/tradegoods, the bismuthinite is a stone-substitute to make blocks in case I need to make a d-slit to get through the aquifer to get to more stone and the remainder is for bismuth bronze, and the cassiterite is for the bronze alloys (because if there is an iron shortage then bronze will be useful for armor). I still race for the magma for the cheap smelting costs. You could also buy 50 turkeys and butcher 40 of them in the first few months, for a large pile of meat and leather. This takes a lot of dwarf labor but if the surface is evil/untamed and there is an aquifer, it will keep some dwarfs busy while you are trying to get through the aquifer to get to stone.