Bay 12 Games Forum

Greetings from the hills.

I updated my dwarf fortress version to a newer one, and moved over my old save. It's not completely compatible, as I think this fortress was started at 40.11, and the version I currently have is 40.16 (Surprisingly stress hasn't been an issue in my fortress despite this version having a bad reputation for it). Transitions between versions have been rather smooth and I've been using the LazyNewbPack while playing.

Now however, the babies are proving a bit problematic. Not really because dwarves breed like rabbits, but because their mothers refuse to take them to the hospital despite quite a few of them having numerous body parts mangled beyond recognition (thanks to my McCheaterson style danger room on a popular hallway). Is this.. normal? I know dwarven ladies are prone to using the babies as shields and I've had it happen quite a few times myself, but I think I've always seen at least some of them in the hospital later on. My hospital is fully stacked and has free beds and traction beds too, so there's no reason not to take them there.

I spoke to mr. Google about the issue and it seems to be a known bug from somewhere earlier, but I wonder if anyone else has ran into it in recent times?

There is also another very annoying baby created problem. One of my miners recently spawned a little one. This now makes 6 kids for her (makes me want to geld her husband...) i.e. She currently has 4 babies of different ages and 2 children of different ages. I don't mind them breeding, future work force and cannon fodder is always nice, however the problem is that ever since the birth of the youngest one, she keeps spamming Cancel Job: Seeking Infant. At worst I had 24 pages of only this report and it annoyingly drowns every other announcement made by the game.

It doesn't really even make sense to me, she's already carrying a baby, a badly mangled one at that (see earlier baby problem). I don't know if she's looking for another baby that she's trying to carry at the same time, or... Never mind, I just checked, 3 out of 4 kids are in a grave with their upper body missing.  So I guess trying to find another baby isn't really the cause of it (Should I be worried about her having such a high infantile death percentage..?).

Any ideas what could be causing it and how I could stop the spamming? She does seem to do some work e.g. item hauling despite all the time spamming a cancellation message. Is concentrated baby/child camp somewhere in the depth of the fortress a viable idea (Build a big hall with food and entertainment and lock them all up in there)?

Ideas appreciated!

My animals aren't that weird or exotic, but I do have quite a handful of different ones in one fortress. I had the luck of buying a breeding pair of dingoes from those pesky hippies before I pissed them off for good. Then another stroke of luck I managed to capture a breeding pair of black bears and a breeding pair of kangaroos (and surprisingly some of my dwarfs actually like them and have adopted them as pets!), so now I have a rather nice varying zoo at my hands. My cage traps also lately caught some sea otters and ravens, but I'm not completely certain yet if I want to keep them.

I don't have too many quirks, just a tiny handful.. for example I feel really awkward embarking on a site without a river. I don't care if the river is under ground or above ground, if it freezes or dries completely out during my game, but in the beginning I just need a river or a brook on the site. ><

I'm also a sucker for symmetry. I tend to dig my levels to follow some sort of a symmetrical pattern. If I dig a hallway and a room on the other side, I need to mirror the size and position of the room on the other side.. that's why I hate running into damp stone and undiggable things.. it ruins my symmetry.

Related to the symmetry I tend to arrange my fortress in a specific manner. First level is the food and agriculture quarter, with stockpiles and workshops of specific type grouped up together, second level is typically two z-levels below, or when I get the first pure stone ground level, and it becomes the wood and stone factory, where all the furniture is produced, then I dig down two levels again, and create the crafts dwarf area, with gem cutters, crafts workshops, clothiers, etc., and then again two z-levels down to create the metal and forge and furnace level. On each level I branch out dwarven accommodation, creating individual rooms for my dwarves.

Last but not least, I always build the tiny dwarf houses the same way. It's a 2x3 room, with bed in the middle, chair and table at left or top, and a chest next to bed, and then a cabinet next to the chest, leaving one empty space in the middle of the room. The noble's rooms are bigger, but otherwise follow the same principle and arrangement of furniture, except the bed and chair+table change places, with the chair and table being in the middle of the room.

This was the first time I had seen a horse on a tree so I was really curious as to how it could've happened.. Cutting down the tree or building a ramp also are the easiest ways to handle the situation, however I was interested to see if there were any creative ways to go with it, since my embarkment site is very peaceful and there's not much "fun" going around.. so I might as well create some of my own. >.>

Standing on a sapling sounds like the most possible situation to cause this horse to get up there. I only noticed it when the "Animal inaccessible" spam started. x.x

I've had similar situations in an earlier fortress when the climbing skill was introduced. However, back then it was mostly due to my own noobishness: I didn't assign a meeting zone, so all the kids ran outside, started climbing trees, got stuck up in the trees.. then their bodies rained down on the unsuspecting dwarves below when the tree was felled or they otherwise somehow fell. It was.. pretty interesting to watch one dwarf have the corpse of his missing son fall ontop of him, make him injured and then go berserk and start a tantrum spiral that was the downfall of that fortress.

You select the material type then the thing you want to make on clothier workshops, so if you want a yarn bag, you select "yarn" then select "make yarn bag"

I don't normally use the manager because it takes forever for the lazy beard to accept the orders, and it makes issues really confusing...

I figured. The naming was just misleading.. it's funny to call the cloth "Wool cloth", yet if you want them to use the wool cloth you tell them to do "Yarn <craft>". x_x

A well trained manager makes things extremely smooth. :3 Mine is a legendary organizer, so she gets all my orders handled in a wiffy. When the population gets really high and things get hectic, I find it difficult *not* to use the manager. x.x

You order stuff madé from silk, wool or plant cloth. Your čase is you have wool, but order stuff Maxe from plants.

Is there a list of which item is made of which type of cloth somewhere outside or inside the game? The workshops don't really specify, you can only choose from cloth, yarn or silk.. or is this a case where yarn means wool cloth?

You have to tame creatures if you want to sell them or butcher them through the workshop (instead of sending in the military). Activate the animal training labour on a dwarf or two, and assign the animal for taming. The trainer should then bring a piece of food to the cage and tame the creature. Trained creatures can be released from the cage and behave like tame animals, but will forget their training over time, and if it isn't reinforced, they will eventually revert to a wild state.

You cannot tame animalmen, and you cannot normally use their corpses for food and other resources. Release them or kill them with your military, there's not much else to do with them. You can stuff multiple creatures into a single cage - build a cage, then 'a'ssign animals (and animal men) to it from the 'q'uery menu. Don't assign wild creatures already sitting in another built cage, there's some bug there; transferring creatures from a 'loose' cage sitting in a stockpile or so works without problems.

Build a central cage where you won't have to parade the critters past Human traders during transfer (the buffoons like to slaughter your catches on sight), and assign all the non-grazers to the cage.  Grazers are trickier because they require more attention.  Buld another cage near your farm so access to fresh greens is easy, build the grazer's cages near that cage and transfer them in.  Assign your two best trainers to them and turn off stone and item hauling so they have plenty of time to the grazers so they don't starve.  Next, assign "U"nassigned trainers to the non-grazers.
Once you have General Familiarity of the grazers and you get a few -trained- or better females, transfer them to a safe pasture.  If all goes well, you'll get some offspring(a male must be present on the map or caged for reproduction).
If you're brave, carve out a 4x4 room with a door, zone it "n" & "t" and transfer a couple of your better trained aggressive non-grazer females to the room and assign a devoted trainer to prevent them going wild.  Once again, if you're lucky you'll get offspring.
Assign your devoted trainers of the parents to your offspring, eventually they'll become tame and you'll be able to safely pen them with your other stock.

I've been trying to tame all sorts of animals, but the taming process seems to be broken in my game (There's no option to assign an animal for taming and queuing a taming/training task in Kennels just gives: "No tameable animal available" error), which really sucks, because I have a lot of dogs I could make use of. I don't know why it's not working though.

I'm also the only civilization in my embark site.. No humans, no elves, just dwarves trade with.

Guess it's time to make a marksdwarf training range and release the moosemen there to be living targets.