Bay 12 Games Forum

I like to carve subterranean tunnels for stuff like this. Typically they provide a shortcut straight through my defenses... but are at least slightly guarded and are designed to completely seal off, unlike the rest of my defenses.

I don't know what LIKES_FIGHTING does. If you're trying to make them less awesome, try taking away TRAPAVOID. If you want to make them MORE dangerous, make them constructs; take away all their vital organs so they're like bronze colossi.

RAM is a different sort of memory. Programs being run are stored in RAM while that happens, and it's very, very fast. If you don't have enough RAM, later versions of Windows (XP does it, so does Vista) and some other operating systems will use part of the hard drive space as a "virtual memory," which, while allowing you to run bigger programs, is much, much slower.

Example: On my old PC, I was able to run Battlefield 2 despite having HALF of the MINIMUM requirement. It just took about four times longer to load.

RAM comes in these sticks, they're not very big and they plug into their own slots.

You only need a few gigs of RAM because most programs don't take up all that much while running, and when not running, they're deleted from the RAM.

Gigahertz is a measure of your processor's speed. Basically the voltage in the processor is constantly flipping from low to high to low again, many times per second. How many times? One hertz is one complete cycle. One megahertz is one thousand. A gigahertz is one billion cycles per second.

As for checking your hardware stats, I don't know; I don't check often enough to remember how to do it easily.

It's impossible to do anything with SoF. They're too hot; supposedly dropping one into the ocean directly actually creates the same effect as a thermonuclear bin being dropped in: the ocean evaporates in a span of seconds.

You can also buy one of those little numpad thingies. It's basically a little pad with the entire numpad setup that plugs into a USB port, I use one for DF when I don't want to drag around a full keyboard.

That's the wussy way to deal with stone.

If you want a REAL stone-dealing-with method, go open the file for mineral matgloss raws and delete all the entries. It causes all stone layers to be replaced with a placeholder called "rock," which acts really weird but doesn't drop usable stone.

For sparring: Generally, your best bet is to give them the best armor you can produce (make sure they have a shield and at least leather, so they're at LEAST training the skills) and let them wrestle for a while. I usually don't let them even touch weapons until they're high-level wrestlers with good armor and shield user skills. Wrestling affects dodging, so it's important for defense. The fact that your Champions now have the stats to reduce other recruits to hamburger is a bad thing, admittedly.

I know that it's good to equip dwarves with crappy metals, like silver, for training. Especially if you're training bladed weapons. I've had squads bash each other with steel warhammers all the way up to Hammer Lord status, and I've had squads of axedwarves get halfway there before they suddenly stopped sparring due to a mysterious outbreak of the mysterious disease known as "big sharp metal bit in my spine-itis".

As has been stated, generally, when units are friendly by mistake on embark, they'll turn hostile as soon as their friends show up.


I once had a fort killed by orcs. I reclaimed, and the orcs were standing around Friendly... until the instant more orcs showed up, at which point they turned hostile and tried killing everything nearby, which included dwarves AND the orc invaders. Luckily there weren't many ex-friendlies inside the fort, so they got mobbed by nearby dwarves and taken down without a fuss.