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quote:
Originally posted by randomjgj:
Just trying to think of ways to do melee training without all the training injuries.
Put them in iron chain at a minimum. Better still, full steel plate. Steel plate is tough as rock nuts.
But the lethality of sparring is a bit odd, yeah. 
Waterskins aren't worth it, for the reasons you noticed. Backpacks work well enough.
The smoothing/speeding issue has been long theorized but never proven. It would be great if detailed floors did speed dwarves, though. It makes sense and would make detailing do more than "look cool".
How to get them to always/usually carry a full quiver is not immediately obvious. That might take a fair amount of AI fine-tuning. However, Toady has item-stack-combining on his list of to-dos, so that will probably reduce the problem of dwarves carrying single arrows a little.
Bone and shell armor gives half the protection of iron. The only civilian dwarves that carry armor are hunters -- I think they'll wear up to chain, or at least leather. But they'll only wear it if you've got their Hunting labor turned on -- and then they'll insist on hunting.
See Armor on the wiki for more tips.
However, it might be possible to fix the setup you diagrammed: remove the doors and replace them with floodgates:
code:
WWWWWWWWWW.........RRR
.........D.........RRR
.........F.........RRR
.........F_________RRR
.........F.........RRR
WWWWWWWWWW.........RRR
Or even simpler, channels, which will not permit floodwaters to pass (though they will not stop seasonal river floodwaters):
code:
WWWWWWWWWW.........RRR
.........D.........RRR
........._.........RRR
.........F_________RRR
........._.........RRR
WWWWWWWWWW.........RRR
Mind you, I haven't tried these exact setups myself, but if I understand the behavior of gates and channels correctly, they should work okay.
Nobles are in truth easy to accommodate. If you give them reasonably-large rooms (12+ squares) and have a high-skill engraver, you'll overshoot their needs anyway. And if not, add in a killer statue or two. A handful of platinum statues will placate even the King.
Furnaces are admired, but not other workshops -- not because furnaces are made from blocks, but because furnaces have to be designed first. (But if you've seen an admired non-furnace workshop, let me know.)
Traps are admired too, so it looks like Mechanics has the same effect as architecture.
On the original subject of the thread, in my current fortress, I didn't get any dwarves in my first autumn, despite producing more food, open space, and overall value than any fortress I had previously run (each of which got 8-15 in the first autumn). I also bought out the dwarven caravan and even offered them a few hundred worth of additional goods, and they made it safely off the map.
Clearly there are some random factors at work as well. Has Toady simulated the caravan getting ambushed between your fort and the capital?
[ November 22, 2006: Message edited by: Maximus ]
But you can't currently view what the quality of buildings is, can you? So you can't know if it was well-crafted or not. I've heard dwarves can even admire workshops sometimes. I've personally seen them admire crappy stone-fall traps -- but that was after I got a legendary mechanic.
[ November 15, 2006: Message edited by: Maximus ]
Read through the wiki for answers to ALL sorts of questions, basic and advanced.
quote:
Originally posted by Mechanoid:
Often though if your farmer is poorly skilled, he will screw up on planting the seed and it will be destroyed (overly moist mud = seed rots before it can grow) Also, the ability of your farmer and wether or not fertilizer was used will effect how many plants will be taken from that tile of farm.
How sure are you about these things? I've been studying farmers for a while, not formal testing though. I don't remember ever seeing a seed get destroyed; sometimes they'll stop to drink, but the seed can be recovered in that case.
Does fertilizer increase the # of plants per stack, or does it speed their growth rate? Is the maximum 5 per stack even with fertilizer?
quote:
As for seeds, the only directly cookable plant is plump helmets, and they have their seeds destroyed when they're cooked. All other plants need to be processed before you can get their seeds, or even cooked, so you always get seeds back by cooking the other plants. Brewing plants will ALWAYS give you seeds.
I think you meant the only directly edible plant -- and more specifically, the only directly edible crop plant. Most outdoor shrubs can be eaten directly too, I believe. Also, are you sure that other plants leave behind seeds when cooked? Brewed/processed/milled, definitely, but cooked?
