Bay 12 Games Forum

Since most of the children passed their Legendary Dodger grades without further incident, they're now continuing their education in live combat classes. This time I've kept a closer look at who's fighting and who's not, in hopes of seeing a pattern there. So far there isn't much to tell.

The two cowards with low Bravery scores never fight, despite all the Discipline training they've had. In addition to those there seems to be a changing group of borderline cases who sometimes charge headfirst into combat and other times just run around in panic. It looks like in beginning of each combat every student goes through a complicated decision whether to fight or flee, with multiple traits affecting the outcome. So far I've noticed that non-fighting dwarves tend to have at least one of following traits (names from Dwarf Therapist):

- low Bravery trait
- doesn't value Martial Prowess
- low Excitement Seeking trait

The fight/flee decision seems to be in force until the current threat has passed in one form or another. I have witnessed only one situation where a non-fighting student has started suddenly fighting and that involved a student getting enraged after getting a severe beating from a goblin invader. Few ticks later the goblin was very dead and the injured student went to get a new pair of trousers and a drink, in that order.

This is an important finding, and it makes sense. The dwarves who fit into those categories should be used as non-military dwarves (or drowned in magma, whichever). Everyone else who can also gain Discipline and be desensitized should be part of a militia starting at graduation from the daycare. Legendary grades should be achieved in all child-untrainable skills (e.g. Axedwarf) and then the student is done with postgraduate training and can move into the workforce with their weapon and a suit of armor.

Quote from: Iamblichos on July 09, 2015, 12:01:31 pm

Quote from: Larix on July 08, 2015, 08:20:00 pm

While filling up the magma plumbing, we opened a shaft down to the depth of the third cavern, where the annoying pterosaurid forgotten beast was lurking. Magma fell directly on its head, it turned into a ‼forgotten beast‼ and burned for two weeks until it expired. The body is still burning and smoking. At least we should be able to repossess the first well and the grinder now.

Ah, magma... is there ANYTHING it can't solve?

Heart burn. But that's it.

No no, it 'fixes' that too.

Magnum, if I recall correctly, most of the glitches mentioned in this post were fixed between July of last year and 40.24. You might have some weird glitches and/or odd things happening, but please don't resurrect posts this old. There is no correlation between this thread and your issues.

Ever since the .40 update, climbing has made things somewhat more difficult for those of us who like to dig straight holes from Point A on z-1 to Point B on z-50. Aqueducts and deadfalls of various kinds pretty much require these kinds of holes sooner or later, and nowadays dwarf miners won't just channel straight down like they used to. Instead, they dig down 2-3 levels and then cancel the job and climb out of the hole.

I've discovered a solution, which I posted in the Trivial findings thread. TheFlame52 mentioned that this was not really that trivial so I decided to make a thread about it (with some adaptations).

Multiple Solutions
All of them start with stairs. Dwarves will dig vertical stairs in place just fine, and this grants access to every point along the downward route as a side benefit.

Step 1: Dig A Vertical Staircase
Simple as that. In the slot where you'd dig the first channeled square before, instead designate a down stair, then designate up/down stairs below as far down as you need to go. On the last one, it's best to designate an up stair.

Step 2: Channel It Out
This is where it starts becoming optional.

Step 2a: From The Top
Find a good way to restrict only one miner to work on the staircase. Locked doors would help; burrow restrictions are ideal but a tad more messy. Designate channeling on the top downstair at priority 1; on the next level down at priority 2; then the rest at 3 or lower. The dwarf will dig the top few levels in order and then just keep going on downwards because he has nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. If you want to make absolutely certain he doesn't get himself stuck by channeling things in the wrong order, use the priority system to designate channeling seven squares at a time (priority 1-7, top to bottom). Designate the last tile (the upstair at the bottom) as stair-remove, let the dwarf out at the bottom end, and you've got an empty shaft just like mother used to make.

Step 2b: From The Bottom
In some cases you may not have/want access to the bottom layer. Things get annoying here, since you have to manually channel one square at a time from the bottom up. The upstair at the bottom level needs to be stair-remove-designated first; then channel each step up successively. The only reason this works is because dwarves can dig squares above and below them if they have proper access to each. It's a pain in the beard to get every single tile done this way, and the priority system doesn't work very well because dwarves might end up channeling out a square they're standing in, which leads to deadly falls. All the same, do it right and you'll have a lovely empty shaft.

Step 2c: Don't
A staircase will, in fact, carry liquid just as well as an empty shaft, and you also get the benefit of maintaining access. However, sometimes it can make a lot more sense to keep your dwarves out of the shaft; or maybe you're flinging captured invaders down the hole and you don't want any stairs in the way for them to grab hold of. In that case, use 2a or 2b above, as necessary. Otherwise, consider leaving the stairs there. You might thank me later.

Step 3: ??
(Open the floodgates.)

Step 4: Profit!!!
Enjoy your shaft and the lovely liquid/soon-to-be-corpses flowing through it.

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If you already knew all this, that's fine. Sorry for wasting your time. If you didn't, hey, great. Leave a comment saying it helped or something. Thanks for reading.

If nidilap isn't here to take his turn, we need to move on.

The other main issue is that water has to fall at least one full z-level before touching magma, or else it won't transform it. The water that flows over the edge of the already-obsidianized section is not going to cool the lava beneath it - it'll just make a lot of steam and be useless.

In one of my more recent forts, I have a platinum warhammer, a gold warhammer, a bismuth warhammer, and a silver warhammer. My current fort just got a platinum warhammer yesterday.

The gold one has an epic name, though. I'll go find it and post the name in a minute.

1. Did you save a screenshot/readout of his personality?
2. What was his stress level when his pet was killed and immediately afterwards?
3. What the Boatmurdered?!