Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Tacomagic on October 30, 2014, 08:14:19 am

Seems more than fair.

On another note, it might be a good idea to mod in outsider dwarves as an aventurer option if you haven't already.

Wut?  Did that need to be modded in?  :|  I know I have them, but cant remember if that normal.  My worlds are a touch modded

Only the human outsiders are in the vanilla game.  Modding in other racial outsiders is pretty common though. It's all of 1 token to add to the race's entity definition:  [INDIV_CONTROLLABLE]

Low civilization settings are set but often entire landmass is filled up with cities.

Civilization settings are just for the number of possible civilizations there can be, not how many cities they can each have.  Site limit controlls how many cities each civilization can have.  It's an advanced setting.  You can reduce this with standard generation by using smaller maps.  I wouldn't worry about this too much for your first game though.

Most recently last few times I end up in some area with no mountain just gray ground snow no river,
That wasn't what I saw on the map.

Mountains are a bit of a misnomer on the map screen.  Mountains only indicate high, rocky terrain, but not necesarrily peaks.  High plateus will show up exactly the same as mountains.    For actual montainous terrain you have to look at the cliffs indicator.  To do this, on the embark site selection screen press tab 4 times.  The local area will change to a bunch of numbers.  This indicates how tortuous the terrain is.  High numbers means more elevation variation.

Also, it is likely that your river is frozen and buried under the snow.  You can search for it by going down one level (shift + .)

If you can post a picture of your embark site selection screen, I might be able to provide additional insight.

I can't zoom or move out any way to see if the lake has been hidden.

There really isn't any zooming per se in dwarf fortress. Your embark is bounded by your initial selection.  If it's small enough and your screen resolution is large enough, it's possible your entire embark is on the screen.  If I recall, the default embark size used by the newbie pack is 2x2.

Otherwise arrow keys and the side carrot keys should allow you to move around your embark.

Then I try to set up trying to move stuff off the cart with shortcut keys, which is often right in front of me.

Can you be smidge more specific here?  How are you trying to have them moved?

I can't control plot size, I end up with weird shape ones

Are you talking about farm plots here, or stockpiles?

and when I try to set permissions for specific object or pasture areas for animals about here something just doesn't happen that I got no clue why this happen.

I am not sure what you're trying to say here. 

Pastures work like this: Press i, move the cursor to where you want a corner, press enter to select your first corner, move the cursor to where you want the diagonal corner to be, hit enter again, then press 'n' to designate it as a pasture, then press N (shift + n) to bring up the animal selection menu to assign animals to the pasture.  Once the animals are assigned to the pasture, the dwarves will move those animals to the pasture when they have a free moment to do so.

I try to dig a room last time I just kept hitting rock or worse yet I clear out entire space but all the rocks, clay are missing or I can't pick them up and put them in pile somewhere

Not everything leave a rock behind, and clay/dirt is never left behind.  For your first fort, it's probably just better to ignore rock hauling and let your masons pick the rocks up off the ground whenever they are needed.

If you insist on stockpiling rock, you need to first designate a rock stockpile.  Press 'p' to bring up the stockpile menu, 'r' to select rocks, position your cursor where you want the first corner of the stockpile to be, press 'enter', move the cursor to the diagonal corner of where you want the stockpile to be, press enter again.

Chop a bunch of trees maybe they will be cut, maybe not but either way I can't pick up the logs or get the dwarves to do it.

Again, this requires a wood stockpile, but is not necesarry.  Your dwarves will happily pick up logs for any work they need to do with them.  Best skip worrying about stockpiling the logs until later.

Set up a workshop with whatever I brought with me, takes my goods but doesn't seem to build or if I get farm or fishing plot open something else goes wrong.

Some workshops require architect (building designer) labor enabled.   Make sure you have at least one dwarf with this labor enabled.  Further, most workshops require the labor associated with that shop to be built.  Make sure you have fish cleaning enabled on at least one dwarf before trying to build a fishing workshop.

Fishing workshop poofs like its not there even when I set the area as fishing area and water source.

There are two different things needed for fishing, and it sounds like you're confusing the two of them.  The first is a fishing activity zone. This is the area you set up with the menu that opens with the 'i' key.  That's not the shop, though.  You have to build the shop using the build menu under 'b' and then the workshop menu 'w' within that menu.  Fishing workship is then the 'h' key.

And there is more, like my picks are enabled in one version of the game and the other version of game it doesn't seem like it is.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.  Do you mean sometimes your embark doesn't have any picks or that sometimes mining isn't enabled on your dwarves by default?

And if I select or unselect job task in Dwarf Therapist I run into problems too there.
Its like setting the task or something only partially happens that I don't entirely know how to explain,

Make sure to commit your changes when using dwarf therapist.  It does not track your changes in real time.  Even us old salts still forget to commit stuff and wonder why nothing is getting done.

Also of note:  Currently (40.13 & 40.14, fixed in pending 40.15) refuse hauling is messed up so it incorrectly interpret inside/outside.

You need to set 'o'rders to allow outside refuse hauling and vermin collection.  Otherwise dwarves will ignore all indoor remains.

Of note with eggs:

•The first clutch laid by a female will usually be infertile.  Make sure that the first batch of eggs is always collected for food.

•The first clutch laid after a successfull hatch will always be infertile.  Make sure that at least 1 batch of eggs is collected between hatches.

•Eggs take about 6 months to hatch (200,000 ticks).  If they go any longer than that, they are infertile.  Sometimes eggs just are infertile, so more than 1 batch will need testing.

•All animals have a roughly 25% chance of being sterile.  Sterile females will lay eggs, but they never hatch.  Fertile females cannot lay fertile eggs if the only male on the map when the eggs are laid is sterile.

•Eggs can be fertilized by any fertile male present on the map, even if there is no direct access.

Hmm. The peafowl are ignoring the nest boxes; I wonder why?

Do you have multiple nesting sites?  Currently fowl of all kinds do not respect boundaries set by pastures when claiming nests, so they'll happily claim nests that they can't actually get to.  They can even claim nest boxes behind forbidden doors.

The only way it seems that you can force which nest they claim is to restrict them to a single tile room with a pasture over a nest box.  And even then, sometimes they'll claim a random box somewhere else.

Yeah, you pay more for stuff you request, than for stuff you didn't request. Not necessarily double, but more. Depends on how much you request it, I think.

What do you do to manufacture beds? They all take wood. And do you hunt with metal bolts? That must get expensive as well. I use wood for a myriad of small tasks.

When embarking in a biome with no trees, typically I only use wood for beds, easy minecarts early-on, pump components if theres's an aquifer, charcoal for steel, and waterwheels.  Otherwise, I tend to rush the magma sea and build all the stuff I'd normally use wood for out of junk metal.  Like gold or copper.

That said, the first 2 or 3 years I set all the wood to highest need, which brings in roughly 80 logs the next year.  Coupled with whatever meager wood I can scavenge from the caverns, and it's enough to get a dormatory up early on, and bedrooms up in the second year.

So far as the bolts for hunters, I don't usually use hunters because of how inconsistent they are.  If I need meat, I either create a meat industry out of domestics or trapped wildlife, or just send my military out to practice on whatever looks tasty.

Interesting. Perhaps I could use some tree farms next time to see how efficient they are.
I always buy logs from caravans and use magma forge to smelt things.

Same here.  One or two years telling the liaison that I'll pay double for logs is enough to set my fort up for 10 years worth of needs.  Unless I go crazy with the steel production.

I think he means the trees are growing back/i] slower.

I've noticed it too. In 40.13, I had to designate rOads constantly to stomp out trees in my pastures for fear of three or four springing up on a season. Now in 40.14, I'm in the third year and my immediate embark area is still clean of trees even though I now want some harvestables around.

I'm seeing this too.  Underground pastures are growing far, far fewer trees than they used to.

For the most part I'm kinda fine with slower tree growth.  But it might be scaled back just a little bit too much in 40.14.