Bay 12 Games Forum

I spent some time (with a little world gen tweaking) looking for a site for a good mega-project.  I was looking for a fairly flat map with shallow magma.  I now have a fresh embark ready to go.  It's a 4x4 red sand desert with scattered grass, completely flat except for a hill in the southwest corner.  A stream runs horizontally right through the center of the map.  Magma is about 30 levels below the surface, so easily brought up for FUN.  Metals are a little sparse though, so they should be used in the project sparingly.

Now that I have the site I was looking for, I'm suffering a dearth of inspiration.  What should I do?  The logical answer has something to do with glass, but what specifically?  A glass castle with a magma moat?  A glass tower with a stream running down from the top through each level and gardens everywhere (kind of a Hanging Gardens of Babylon in glass)?  A hollow block with water or magma trapped between two sheets of glass?  Something else???

Ok... maybe I have plenty of inspiration.  I'M PARALYZED WITH INDECISION!!  Help me pick a project!  Or suggest your own!
Also, the fortress is named Towercrush if that helps at all.

Might get un-buryable ghosts soon. You may or may not be able to slab them, depending on how the game feels.

Ah, that explains the mystery ghost.   

Ok, it doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought.  The liaison was already inside so he survived; I saw at least 4 other wagons turn around and leave; and I got a couple piles of free stuff.  I'll mark this one down as another victory for the dwarves of Ashquake!

I used to have similar problems as you.  I felt like my fortress would get overwhelmed with useless dwarves.  The first thing to realize is that having idlers is not a problem in and of itself, as others have mentioned.  I usually have anywhere from 10-20 dwarves idle at any given time.  Most of them have jobs assigned, but sometimes they just have nothing to do.  But when I get a new bunch of bedrooms dug out, those idlers can clear away the loose stone in no time at all.

Beyond that, here are three questions I ask myself when I feel like I have too many idle dwarves:

• Can I expand an existing industry?
• Can I start a new industry?
• Could I use more military dwarves?

I can almost always answer yes to at least one of those questions.  I've actually written myself a list of industries I'm not familiar with, so when I have idlers I check that list to see what I can experiment with.  In my current fort, I noticed I have honey bees.  So I set a dwarf as a beekeeper and started learning how to keep bees.  Sure he's idle most of the time, but now my fortress has one more interesting facet.

Also, I almost always keep it at one job per dwarf.  My starting seven have one job each, except that the carpenter is also a woodcutter.  But as soon as I get a dwarf with nothing better to do, I give him woodcutting and take it off the carpenter.  Again, he's idle a lot, but I know if I need trees cut in a hurry there's a good chance he'll be right out there to do it.

And as others have said, projects are a great way to keep people busy.  In one fort I built the Hanging Gardens of Dwarfylon, a tower with gardens on the walls and water pumped through the center that ran through streams all the way back down the tower.  Come up with something cool to build, 'cause isn't that the point of the game?