Bay 12 Games Forum

I would like to see more of this thread incl. architectural solutions and more about skill (conversationalist)/attribute (empathy) gain. I made a 11-month experiment in my fortress, simulating the fortress being taken over by "Mebzuth's Science of Happy" cult winding down all other activity, focus on the meeting area and finally retreat into a smallish bunker - meeting area size 12 with 24 dwarves (with locked lead doors) and small adjacent stockpiles and dormitory. I creeped out (deconstructing the depot and let the traders linger around outside in the evil rain wasn't the best idea) for now and broke off the experiment. But Mebzuth's Science of Happy has scored a great success (no marriages yet, but more talking than ever, but still <50xp per month, a few new relations, long estranged couples feeling tenderness again) and has taken hold as the official religion.

Too much stuff on the same chart. This leads to omissions or only half documented industries. (Oil, screwpress, potash, pearlash, pottery, glass industry, querns ...)

At the same time you can lose a hilarious amount of metal by just melting stuff you made - in a way the exploit is a fix to that.

@jessep: How long does it take you to dig through an aquifer that you can even trade while doing so?

Does the bucket brigade fill a pond only to 6 when filling from the level directly above? Why?

I'm having difficulties with aquifer draining again.  Whoopee.

When I'm pumping the water out, now I can't seem to get both stair tiles drained.  The pump only drains out the orthogonally adjacent tile, not the one above/below that one.  Thus, when I stop to turn the pump around, everything fills right back up with water.  Additionally, before you begin pumping, do you channel out both tiles on the side, or only one?

At this rate I'm going to need to make a "help me not fuck up aquifers" livestream or something...

It is not entirely clear what you refer to. If you remember the principles: you can drain through stairs, you can take water only if the floor is completely open, keep a path for your miner/mason ... You should be able to figure it out or ask a bit more specific.

Quote from: neblime on March 27, 2014, 06:35:52 am

my two cents is retractable bridges are way way easier to setup than all this minecarting chicanery.

Yes. And much more deadly. After two dwarves fatally landed on their heads within the first month of operation, I started looking for an alternate way to teach swimming. This post by Ravendarksky was quite informative, particularly that dwarves gain swimming skill while simply riding in a minecart through water. My design has now trained 30+ dwarves to legendary +5 swimmer with only one accident (the outpost liaison decided to rendezvous with my minecart-riding mayor on the tracks).

Both Ravendarksky and you deserve a masterwork statue for science and contributions to dwarven education. This is seriously great!

I have had no problem with dwarves pathing through a 3/7 water-filled decontamination trench. (v34.11) A single tile's width of ramp across a hallway is sufficient. So in your case, for a 5 wide hallway, dig a 1x5 trench of ramps across it, fill to 3/7 of water, and you're done.

The problem with systems of this type is that contaminants tend to accumulate in the water, affecting any barefoot creatures or animals that path through it.

I don't have a good solution to this problem in general. You can set it up to atom-smash the water by putting a raising bridge over the ramps, then fill the trench with magma to clean out the contaminants, then atom-smash the magma, then refill with water, but that's moderately complicated and hard to safely automate.

Cleaning jobs have a higher priority in current versions. In a compact fortress trenches are cleaned rapidly, trenches far away from the main area, however, are still mostly ignored.

People are all crazy about 3/7 water, I don't know why. It is even in the wiki. In my current fort (40.14) dwarves did NOT path through 3/7 water when I filled the decontamination trench to exactly 3/7. They even preferred drinking unclean water from the trench to going through the trench to the booze stockpile.

Computing: It could also be 5 doors, when all are opened goblin will move on pressure plate to trigger flushing (or the doors/hatches are simply in the way of the water, when all five are open water flows). Making the counter / reset is the complicated part not the AND.

Edit: Can't reproduce the not pathing through 3/7, but it did indeed happen. Best forget it.