Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Jackboot on December 15, 2023, 12:19:30 pm

I had the thought that if all letters were persistent that they would become crazy clutter, so I think that they should be consumed upon use.

I don't think so. At least, not all letters should. Some people collect letters from the loved ones, why dwarves should be any different? [...]

You make good points! I change my mind then. I suppose it's no different than all the books we have laying around! Other than tattered clothes, dwarves don't keep a lot of things stored away in their rooms! Like I said in the beginning too, it would be fun to rifle through their chests and read their history of letters. Especially in old worlds, or after many generations - or even in adventure mode, going into old ruins to find historical correspondences?

It seems to be that some of the hardest to meet needs are socialization needs, because the right Dwarves need to be physically near one another. This can be impossible for Dwarves who have no/few family and friends.

Meeting these needs could be made far easier, even for isolated dwarves, by having a mail system similar to Prison Architect's.

https://prison-architect.fandom.com/wiki/Mail_Room

For friends and family outside the fort, the mail could arrive with the caravans to be delivered or picked up by Dwarves which satisfies their socialization need. Dwarves within the fort could write letters to one another, to be delivered to the rooms. Potentially it could even allow plotting with one another? Sparking romance? Pen pals could be communicating from across the continent, which as well as being beneficial for needs, would also be very endearing.

I searched "mail" and "letters" and found no results, so I don't think this has been suggested before.

I've had this bug quite a bit - it's more pronounced with military dwarves. It's gotten to the point that I just refuse to breach the caverns and if I do, to just seal them off completely. One way to fix it is to use dfhack to dump 7/7 water on them until they 'dodge' away and walk as normal.

Welcome to Anomshokmug, Agedcheeses! This fort is 10 years old, and encircles a volcano. The land brought the Mountainhomes unimagined wealth, as this embark carries with it silver, gold, copper, and aluminium! After years spent flooding the market with ridiculously expensive aluminium flasks, building a palace for the monarch that never arrived, and giving every decent rooms and pet crundles, I decided to go deeper.

I had already made cautious attempts in adamantium mining (mostly because out of the 4 spires I found 3 were completely submerged in the magma sea) and decked out my best military dwarves in the stuff with armour and weapons. The royal palace even got an adamantium blast door for a monarch who wanted to be very sure that he wouldn't be disturbed. (But apparently not even that was enough to please his Highness, who still hasn't shown up. Who's supposed to live in this palace, now? The crundles?)

But that wasn't enough. I had 98 dwarves, a thriving economy, and four full squads despite not ever having any invaders. I needed more.

So I sent down a lucky miner to breach one of the spires and unleash the demons - the miner actually stood there and tried to slug the first demon to pop up right in the face before the thing pushed him so hard his entire face exploded into gore. God bless that dwarf, he died like he lived: punching shit.

I decided to see how my Silver Guard would fare against them - 4 macelords, an axelord, and 5 grand master soldiers. They got sent down into the tight corridor to face the demons - heroically giving the single farmer still in the cavern time to get stuck in more webs and fall into a lake. They got slaughtered pretty fast - but managed to take out two of the demons, causing no more than a small hiccup. Undeterred but filled with rage at the resistance, the demons stormed through the rest of the tunnels and... Turned away from the stairs that lead to the containment area to apparently have a spa day in one of the magma lakes.
Now, I was a bit perplexed and irritated - my containment area had the staircase surrounded by fortifications with the entire Fort Guard stationed there with steel bolts - the Captain of the Guard even had an artifact adamantium crossbow with the same material for bolts! It would be a killing field if the stupid demons would stop taking a vacation for like 5 seconds. Every single demon was either in the lake or lounging around the cavern.

So I built a steel drawbridge behind the containment area that lead to the fort proper, then when that blast door was shut I opened the bridge to the containment area itself. The demons' all simultaneously sensed dwarf beards, and properly made their bee-lines towards the staircase. Once i thought they were close enough, I had the lever flipped again to get the blast door closed - allowing everyone to open fire from the safety of the fortifications.

Unfortunately one of the demons was closer than I thought, and popped up in the containment area just as the switch was flipped. What happened next I can barely find words for:

Every single marksdwarf bolted towards the demon and started to bash at him with their crossbows, standing over the bridge that was about to shut. The siege engineers left the siege engines to run towards the demon, abandoning their giant ballistas and going fisticuffs with the giant demon from Hell.

During the confusion and in the midst of extract, the drawbridge shut and instantly killed half the squad who was on the 3 tile bridge - including the Captain of the Guard and his adamantium artifact and full quiver of adamantium ammo. All the siege engineers also perished, and apparently the last surviving militiaman is only so because he got caught in one of our own cage traps that was meant for crundles.

it doesn't look like much, but this is the scene of one of the most embarrassing failures in my DF military history.

And these are the stupid idiots poor victims.

I was already dealing with the fact I had inadvertently made the palace look like a giant phallus, I didn't need this too!

After this incident, no one even wants to enter the room at all. There's about 12 dwarves standing in the hall staring into the area at the demons. I put the seige weapons too close, so I can't even shoot at them with those - all I have left are my Adamantium Guard - which were meant to protect the monarch - and the Copper Guard, who are just random idlers that I conscript to give more use to the tonnes and tonnes of copper weapons and armour I have laying around.

I'm debating on punishing the dwarves for their poor life choices by releasing the demons into the fort proper, but the sheer luck of having all these high value materials and previous plans to grow the fort are making me want to just wall up this travesty and build a memorial over it. Maybe that statue of burning crundles on top of a giant facepalm. It can be a megaproject.

I'm playing 40.10 and have been experencing a very annoying bug with the military. A handful of military dwarves end up stuck in a job while active, but don't move no matter what I do.


The jobs they are stuck trying to do are: Get provisions, individual combat drill, store item in bin, store owned item, and sleep.

Using DFhack to turn on 'fastdwarf 0 1' to let them teleport to their destination does bring a fix, but that carries with it the huge danger of a dwarf teleporting into an unrevealed area for a job then getting stuck there and spamming so many job cancellations that the game crawls to 4 or 1 fps as it deals with the sheer amount of cancellations.

I've observed that they will remain in this spot - tantruming rarely breaks them out of this spell, but otherwise I've had isolated cases of dwarves stuck in this situation simply starving to death. The only current cure that I've found is the teleportation allowance - cancelling their job doesn't work, kicking them out of the military doesn't work... Anyone else have this problem, and if so how have you fixed it?

Floor tiles are the fastest ways to eat up spare metal. If you had magma forges you could just use it to train up your metalsmiths, but for now either find dwarves that like Zinc and make them zinc /everything/ or just lay down zinc flooring everywhere it would look nice.

I really just just used Phoebus tileset and DFhack for periodic mass-deletions of all goods marked for dumping -- all the tattered clothes that pile up and start making my FPS slow down. I did try Therapist but it felt... Off. I really just grab whatever idle units are around if I need a particular job done, and have recently started using the vanilla manager to restrict the skill level allowed to work in particular workshops. With migrants I screen them with V and they call fall in three catagories: "Draft" for potential military units, hauler, and craftsman. Hauler usually make up the idlers in the later part of the fortresses life that I'm able to grab them and put them to work.

Warfare is now mainly psychological in nature.

Kind of realistic, when you think about it. Most battles in ancient times IRL were more about which sides routed first rather than who killed the most. Plus it'll be fun to figure out how to catapult out corpses at the enemies just before releasing the macedwarves on the horrified goblins...