Bay 12 Games Forum

Dabbling Novice Regular Competent Skilled Proficient
Talented Adept Expert Professional Accomplished
Great Master High-Master Grand-Master Legendary

In these blocks of five, it seems like it would be simple to learn them as "bad / good / great", as follows:

(1) Do Not Re-Claim Stones, Peasants as in, "keep your high-value gems {F}orbidden until you meet a worthy craftsman"

(2) Trade An Exceptional Product Away as in "well, at least I can sell it for a profit"

(3) Glorious Merchandise Helps Grow Legends as in "stuff worth keeping! FINALLY!"

If you think you can do better, go ahead and try. Good luck! 

Mine is a short story about the Trade Depot:

Dwarven Nobles Require Calming, So Peasants Trade.  Angry Elves Propose Arbitrary 'Green' Minimums... Ha! Get Lost.

Slugmen and snailmen make me wish Rock Salt was an economic stone... Go get my cooks to grab three twenty-pound bags from the kitchen!   Maybe carve some short swords out of it, load my catapults with baseball-sized salt rocks, and definitely build a nice flagstone courtyard out of it.  Now let's see those slugmen get anywhere near me!

The stone management problem has several solutions that have become standards:

1) Quantum stone piles.  When you tunnel out a room or a long shaft, designate all of the stone for dumping (d-b-d) in a 1x1 tile near a mason's shop.  Every game month or so, go back and unforbid the stone that gets placed there.  Pro: stone stacks infinitely high in a single tile.  Con: HUNDREDS of hauling jobs, and dwarves can't move stones that are tasked for hauling to place new furniture or constructions.

2) Atom-smashing.  Drawbridges vaporize piles of stone when they come down.  Use the technique from (1) or designated stone piles to stack stones under the bridge.  Lower the bridge.  Repeat.  Pro: stone is gone.  Cons: you can't use the stone later if you need it.

3) Use the stone!  Stone blocks are a great way to train up masons from the peasantry, and you can fit ten of them per bin in a Bar/Block pile.  This reduces the floor space of your stone storage by 90%.  Build a mason's workshop, designate it for low-level masons only (everything up to "Skilled" for example), and fill the job queue with Build Block-Repeat.  This keeps the shop from accepting task orders from the manager, so only your high-end masons fulfill your fortress needs.  If you want to generate trade goods, slip a single "Make crafts" or "Make mugs" order in the queue (on repeat) and 10% of the production will be used to make craft goods.  I like to do 8 blocks, 1 door, and 1 miscellaneous item (coffin, statue, coffer, or cabinet - depending on my needs).  Pros: levels up masonry, provides value to fortress, reduces floor space, increases value of constructions.  Cons: wastes large volumes of material on bins, takes lots of time.

Note that you can combine (1) and (3) so that your block factory sits next to a nearly-infinite pile of stone.  You can also mod the INIT files to forbid certain stones from being used as blocks - for example, in my latest fortress I'm using primarily obsidian for the blocks to triple the value of exterior constructions. 

Look at all that loose soil!  No dwarf would carve the main entrance to a mountain in dirt when there's perfectly serviceable rock commanding a view of the magma pipe and surrounding fields.  I'd dig a ramp over by the magma for your trade wagon, then dig out a 3-wide channel that the stone bunker can overlook.  Then either fortify the walls of the channel (and have archer hallways behind them) or build 3-thick walls on the surface overlooking the channel down its length with fortifications staring down on anyone dumb enough to venture in.  Make the channel long, and terminate it with a left or right turn around a fortified battery of 3 ballistae.  Deep in the mountain, set up an obsidian farm and a craftsdwarf's workshop and crank out obsidian swords.  Build them into traps and line the channel with Obsidian-bladed Cuisinarts.

You can build walled-in surface pockets for farming if you like, or stick to good dwarfy cave-farming.

If you're going to be doing casting, you'll need to pour the magma in from the top using a magma-safe pumping setup.  You can start pumping without magma-safe pumping materials, but it may be difficult to stop.  Of course, if you're doing casting you've got a water source, so maybe your plan is just to quench the whole thing.

Stupid question: when doing cast-in-place magma sculptures, should you add the magma first, or the water first?

Second stupid question: at what point does it make more sense* to cast an obsidian structure than to just build it out of obsidian blocks?  I think the answer is any structure thicker than two tiles and sufficiently large to justify the pumping... but it also makes sense when the structure is something like (e.g.) a giant obsidian statue of an ASCII Dwarf.  The Dwarf is laboring.



* Note that "making more sense" is not Dwarfy.

Aha, got it - I went in to reclaim, and now I'm doing a site survey.  My site is a 3x3 site on the west bank of the brook "The Outrageous Dent", with the south edge of my settlement at the same latitude as the brook's short eastward wobble.  Latitude is 18 squares north, 28 squares east of the extreme southwest corner of the Region map.  If you scroll along the bottom edge of the Region map until you reach Fidalebovo (elven settlement) and move due north, you'll be one square too far east.  Similarly, the source of the stream Scarreigns enters the mountains one (regional) square west of my site; that stream is a tributary of the stream Flier of Rancor which empties into The Last Swamp, an estuarial marsh of the Blueness of Clearing - my world's southwestern-most ocean.

Hopefully you can find the site.  I encourage you to grab a slightly-wider starting site to take advantage of that river... now that I know how to world-gen it from scratch, I may do the same. 

SEED!!!  Please!!!
I've been looking for a world where Elves send ambushes for a long while now!  I was told they didn't exist.   So I'd like to grab that seed for a Future fun Fortress.   If it's not too much trouble.

If you can show me a link that explains how to extract and share the seed of my current world/location, I'll be happy to paste it here.  The starting location is fantastic, and lacks only running water.  I have reason to believe that there are "additional features" -- aka HFS -- because I used the built-in site selector to find this starting loc.  I'll look for the link on my own as well.

Hadn't even considered guard animals, but I do have a curtain wall around most of my nearby surface area already.  Guess I ought to close it off and finish adding traps.