Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm not really good at putting a whole build together, but some general points:

-Starting with a layer of soil means quick and easy excavation of initial stockpiles and living area, and also means there's no need to worry about stone cluttering it.
-Keep the anvil - it's cheap, and is one of few things that can't be made from scratch.
-Take at least one pick. Even if you intend to smith tools, that initial start on mining is a major boon.
-Drop at least one battle-axe. It's probably better to make your woodcutter an axedwarf than to try to find room for skills on two separate dwarves.

Probably won't be able to do too much actual tinkering to come up with more anytime soon - desktop computer seems to be dying(either memory or motherboard or both having Issues) and my laptop was marginal with 40d##, never mind 31.x.

had a chance to try it out. Had no trouble getting the sawmill built, although as a minor tweak the second stone required for construction is somewhat extraneous, as the game can use the same block used for the first part to fulfill the need (i suppose it works the same as smelting steel, the coal functions as both fuel and consumed as part of the reaction)

That's very curious, as this is no longer the case in 0.31. When I was making pig iron or steel at a non-magma smelter, there were two bars of coke brought to the smelter to do so.

Clarification: I'm not saying that what you say about the sawmill is wrong(I haven't had the chance to test this mod) - just that the smelter's use of coal has been changed to no longer allow one coke to stand for two things. (I'm not sure how this works for smelting billon with tetrahedrite - every time I've thought to check, I've also had other ores of copper and/or silver around, so didn't bother testing as the results wouldn't be reliable unless I knew the tetrahedrite was brought in first. In 40d, one unit of tetrahedrite ore would suffice for two bars of billon, as it counted as both "ore of copper" and "ore of silver"; I don't know if it's still that way in 0.31.)

I think casts are supposed to be for compound fractures - things that'd need a traction bench.

...also, by creating a 1x1 burrow... you could technically assign a noble to it and wall him/her in on this very 1x1 spot. Sounda kind of nice, he is still in there struggling while the other dwarfs are doing their business as usual... maybe his scratching and howling can be heard at night... who knows...

"For the love of GodArmok, MontresorUrist!"

You know why you had to irrigate in 2D? Same reason you have to irrigate on deeper layers in 40d, which I don't doubt will be maintained once this bug(yes, it's a bug, not a "feature) is fixed in 0.31 - because you're doing it on bare rock.

Spreading mud over rock makes some degree of sense to make it farmable. Spreading mud over soil? Not so much - the soil is probably far, far richer than the bit of mud you're slopping on top.

That farming is overbalanced is a separate issue. As with economy, cooking is currently a placeholder. Modding it to taste is well and good - but don't go and call a bug otherwise just for nostalgia's sake.

Eventually, DF may require actual irrigation(for any farm plot that doesn't e.g. get enough rain). That'll be another matter, especially since there will presumably be support for having dwarves do it as necessary. I look forward to that. Maybe it will require that all farming be done over damp soil(or damp muddied stone) or the yield will become tiny; that'll involve some extra planning to keep channels under the farm full of water, and presumably the farm plots will leach water over time. That's irrigation.

The current method is nothing more than slopping water over stone, once, to get a bit of mud on it - that's not "irrigation", not least because a single application of mud will keep a plot arable forever(well, unless it gets destroyed and the mud gets "cleaned" by the passing of seasons). Since the essential part is not the water, but the mud, having it be a required step for farming on otherwise arable soil makes no sense whatsoever, and is, in fact, a bug.

I know we're not supposed to log bugs against this version, but I'm just wondering:  Does anyone else see some of their dwarf skill levels not showing up in the grid?  Specifically, I have to identify my mechanic in my grid by finding the only guy with mechanic enabled, because his skill level isn't being represented (I run into this when I'm looking to turn off his hauling jobs so he'll pay attention to the orders for the damned mechanism so I can close my fort!)

I have the same problem - also, in fact, with the mechanic. I'm not sure if I've run into it with other skills, but that one in particular seems to be all too frequently missing from the grid.

I'm pretty sure the long delay here was because Toady wanted to cram in as many things that would break savegames as possible, and leave the incremental fixes and non-save-breaking stuff for afterward.

But it can't be nice to have thigns that were kind of worked on as big features to be seen as liabilities, it's true.

The things that are frustrating me are bugs; some of the other issues can be fixed with a little tuning, too.

This work-around doesn't, for me. Instead of remains I get chunks, which cause exactly the same sort of clutter...