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[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

OVERSEER'S LOG of DOZEBOM ARDESFEB:

2nd Moonstone, 255

Breakfastpit is in need of a skilled overseer, someone to plan and organize the fortress's activities (including industry, construction, and the military). Not that the fort has been in poor hands recently - the defeat of Roomsounded in particular was one of the finest times in Breakfastpit's history. But we've been huddling in a pit for several years, barely scrabbling to make our own breakfasts (let alone those of the entire dwarven population). Understandable, given the threats outside until now, but...

We are largely miserable, in both senses of the term. Most of the population is under a great deal of stress, only managing to stave off insanity through copious alcohol consumption. We have only about seventy plots of farmland, clearly not enough to meet the prime purpose of this fortress. A miner is drowning in a cavern. Somebody's head (just their head) is sitting on top of a makeshift log palisade! We need to rebuild from the last few years of hardship, expand the farms, fix the myriad problems, refine our industrial processes, and MAKE MORE FOOD. And I'm just the person to lead this project.

Who am I? I'm Dozebom Ardesfeb, the mayor of Breakfastpit. I was elected to the position last year when the old mayor lost it. And I've just now managed to get even more power as part of the official transition from outpost to town which I organized with the outpost liaison. I am now the overseer of Breakfastpit, from now until next Moonstone. All the problem-makers, inefficiencies, and whatnot of Breakfastpit had better watch out.

3rd Moonstone, 255

I am a good persuader, if I do say so myself. And a good reader of intentions. Also funny, and good at calming people down. Also okay at wording things, great at poetry and speaking, skilled at teaching, and I've dabbled in some musical styles. Industrially, I'm proficient at engraving, great at training animals (which I suppose is synergistic with personal skills, if that wouldn't be too offensive! hah), and probably okay at dissecting things. Oh, and I'm adequate at hunting as well.

Where was I going? Oh, yes, I was padding my ego in preparation for admitting a lack of a skill. Yes. I am skilled at dealing with people and animals, and a good poet to boot, and also creative... Ahem. But I am very bad at analysis. I tried to calculate the necessary farm expansions yesterday, and I ended up with a full seven sheets of scrap parchment which I eventually threw into the magma. But that is no matter, for I know somebody who can analyze for me: Kogan. She's not very useful industrially or militarily; she's an adequate engraver and a novice fishery worker, but neither of those skills have been in demand and she hasn't done any skilled work for a season. She's old, flimsy, and low in willpower, so she hadn't been drafted like most fishery workers are. But that's perfect, because Kogan has many other skills. They're niche, but very useful to an overseer who lacks analytical skills. She's a quick learner, competent at scribing, extremely literate, a competent explainer, and (best of all) she is accomplished at logic and great at mathematics. This makes her a skilled... assistant? Perhaps that is too low or general a term. Somebody to research, collate, analyze, and present information. Somebody to see how effective different plans would be, based on asking knowledgeable dwarves and calculating with that information. Perhaps the term Analytical Assistant would be appropriate. Maybe...

Analysistant! Of course! I'm sure she'll appreciate the new job and its delightful title. On the other hand, from what I remember, she's not a very cooperative person. That doesn't matter. She won't really have to work with anybody, right? Just ask people question, do the analysis, and hand me the results. And I think she'd like having a real job for the first time in who knows how long.

4th Moonstone, 255

I went to Kogan and explained the job I wanted her to do. She seemed a bit... angry? Not quite angry. But she didn't seem happy about getting an official position that allowed her to do what she was best at, which I thought was strange. I tried to lighten the mood with a joke, and she just stared at me. I think this might have been a bad idea.

Nevertheless, this needs to be done. I can't do mathematics myself, and somebody needs to decide how much to expand the farms by. On a whim/hunch, I was frank with Kogan about the problem. I explained how her mathematical skills and powerful focus made her essential to the fortress's operations. And I reminded her how she was missing a solid project to use her skills on. I told her I didn't think she wanted to spend the rest of her life hauling. In the end, my persuasive skills won out and she agreed to the position.

Spoiler: Kogan Amostidash (click to show/hide)

She personally values self-control, values honesty and doesn't see cooperation as valuable.

She hates vows, obligations, promises and other binding elements that could restrict her life, though she is conflicted by this for more than one reason. She does not find most jokes humorous. She is sometimes cruel. She tends to assume the worst of two outcomes will be the one that comes to pass. She takes offered help and gifts without feeling particularly grateful. She lives a fast-paced life. She is slow to anger. She generally acts with a narrow focus on the current activity. She doesn't try to get things done perfectly. She isn't particularly curious about the world. She can handle stress. She is a friendly individual. She occasionally overindulges, and she is troubled by this because she values self-control. She enjoys the company of others. She isn't given to flights of fancy.

For her first project, I asked her to work on analyzing the goal of feeding our whole population, specifically estimating the requirements in terms of land, labor, etc.

[Bearskie]

Code: [Select]

Calculating predicted quota goals...
Optimizing food production formulas...
Assessing risk of internal factors...
Error: Analysistant.exe has crashed.
Good start Dozebom! Zan's army (the Exiled Ones) is going to return from pillaging the humans very soon. I advise you quickly send them away to their next destination, because they are all soldiers teetering on the brink of insanity. Dwarves won't get bad thoughts if they're on missions.They're better off conquering settlements than staying in Breakfastpit and throwing dangerous tantrums.

[pikachu17]

You could just send them away, if they are teetering on the brink of insanity. They will not come back unless you send a messenger to get them.
Assuming you update to 44.11

[auzewasright]

Reading through Breadbowl, here is an interesting challenge:

For the inevitable successor fort, we should do one where we have to make everything the liaison will pay more for. This screen:

[Bearskie]

^ You should read Atölasob, it's basically that idea.

You could just send them away, if they are teetering on the brink of insanity. They will not come back unless you send a messenger to get them.
Assuming you update to 44.11

They're a elite crack team of solders capable of infiltrating and razing towns to the ground. Why send them for retirement when you can conquer the world with them? Oh, and demand yearly cheese tributes of course.

[Carch]

^ You should read Atölasob, it's basically that idea.

You could just send them away, if they are teetering on the brink of insanity. They will not come back unless you send a messenger to get them.
Assuming you update to 44.11

They're a elite crack team of solders capable of infiltrating and razing towns to the ground. Why send them for retirement when you can conquer the world with them? Oh, and demand yearly cheese tributes of course.

'you know. I think this place is terrible for farming.'
'what do we have?'
'Insane murderdwarves?'
'can we use them to get others to do the farming for us?'
'that's not a bad idea....'

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

When the queen said "farm," you interpreted that in the gamer's sense?

I'll try to get another update up today or tomorrow.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Kogan

"...so could you please help me with this?" Dozebom asks. I sigh and acquiesce. He may be annoying, unfunny, and self-important, but he's right. This fortress needs to start meeting its quotas, and it's nowhere near doing so. And Dozebom certainly can't fix this on his own - it's obvious to both of us that he can't analyze to save his life.

"How long do you think it would take you to make an estimate of the farm space needed to provide our civilization with food and drink?" he asks me. I think for half a minute, then respond with "we'll need roughly one to two thousand square bots." He seems surprised at how quickly I could determine that, and somewhat skeptical, so I explain how I calculated my estimate. "I've read some about previous projects similar to this one. There's never been any project quite like Breakfastpit, or if there is I can't find any records about it, but I did find a report about a fortress that was agriculturally self-sufficient, and it required fifty square bots producing food and drink for about two hundred dwarves. Scaling that up to forty thousand and nine hundred dwarves, that's one thousand and two hundred square bots. But that's just a first estimate - I'll talk with the farmers to see if they have any rules of thumb for farm capacity, then give you the results tomorrow."

He seems impressed. Well, I can't say it's not satisfying to be appreciated. But I just wish he wouldn't congratulate me specifically on how good an "analysistant" I am. That's not a word, and it's not funny. Job titles shouldn't be funny anyway, but it's a simple portmanteau of the much more sensible full title "Analysis Assistant". Imagine if we called record keepers "recorpers"? And there's already a word for "Analysis Assistant" - it's Analyst!

Well. The job's open-ended and interesting, at least. What's not to love? Dozebom, but I won't have to interact too much with him, and he's hardly the most annoying dwarf in the world anyway. Only the second most annoying. That's my estimate.

It's preferable to hauling, I suppose.

[Sanctume]

Diggy - Undwarfed

Diggy diggy diggy, can't you see
Sanctume's picks just hypnotize me
And I just love his dwarfy ways
Guess that's why they dead, and he's alive (yaas?)

[Bearskie]

Is this the turning point when Breakfastpit starts producing breakfasts instead of pits??

The front page is out of date Sanctume, latest dorfing list can be found at the bottom of this post. Spoiler: Diggy's alive.

[Justin]

Could I be added to the list? And how I'd my dwarf doing?

[Bearskie]

^ Because who needs to do something as cheap as that when you can engineer an overcomplicated dwarf trick.

Spoiler: Justin (click to show/hide)

New migrant (from this update), fresh swordsdwarf trainee in bootcamp.

Here, you were dorfed.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

((I had to take a short break to write a college visit application essay. I'll put up a more substantial update (hopefully a season or so) in one or two days. To tide you over, here's more analysis:))

From the Notes of Kogan Amostidash:

I talked to some cooks and farmers, and learned that the average dwarf consumes 2 units of food and 5 units of drink per season. Since drink can be produced five times more efficiently than most plants (which I learned from a brewer), that means that we'll need to produce 3 units of food per season per dwarf, or 58788 units of unprocessed food each year.

The farmers don't have good statistics or rules of thumb for aboveground farming, but they do know that aboveground crops will be simple to grow year-round. (After struggling to grow plants in mud in the dark, winters do not pose a significant challenge.) I will assume that aboveground crops are roughly as productive as plump helmets. I was told that each farm plot can produce 60 plump helmets per year, which means that we need 979 farm plots. However, the 60 plump helmets is an optimistic estimate, since it requires either incredibly skilled farmers or constant fertilization. Legendary farmers, working full-time, can keep about a hundred farm plots planted and harvested. If we go the skilled-farmers route, we will need ten legendary farmers. If we don't, there are multiple effects that make the project much more difficult. Since less-skilled farmers do not produce as much food from a single plot, more plots will be required to produce the same amount of food. (Also, since they are slower planters, there are more inefficiencies, requiring slightly more farm space to overcome.) But since less-skilled farmers are also slower, they will not be able to keep as large an area planted and harvested, which means that we will need ten proficient farmers, times the ratio of extra farm space needed, divided by how much slower the less-skilled farmers are. I estimate that this would turn out to be 30-50 dwarves. But these dwarves would also need to be fed, which would require even more proficient farmers...

It is clear that we need a dozen legendary farmers, or else we can never achieve our goal. To this end, I propose that the number of farmers be increased to a dozen, and that the farmers have all their other obligations nullified. This will allow them to work full-time to grow and become more skilled. We will also need about 900 more plots, or 30 bots square, or a perimeter of 120 bots.

Dozebom Ardesfeb's Journal, 5th Moonstone, 255

Kogan gave me a report. It was... detailed. Very much so. I tried to follow the calculations... never mind. The takeaway is that we will need 30 square bots 30 bots square.

I was very surprised when I read that, and questioned Kogan. That's less space than a decent dining room! Then she informed me that she did not mean 30 areas, each of which are one bot by one bot. She meant a square where each side was 30 bots. That's much more reasonable. Still, such a large area doesn't sound like it can be effectively defended, and we can't afford to lose any farmers. I asked Kogan if she had any ideas about the matter of defending this large area, and she muttered something about optics and ran off.

6th Moonstone, 255

"Clear glass?" said Dozebom. "That will take much more wood and work to make. Why not just green glass?" "I'm not an expert on optics," said Kogan, "but from what I recall, the color of light that you see an object as being is what the object didn't absorb. This applies to both plants and glass." Dozebom motioned to keep explaining, and Kogan continued. "Plants require light to grow - at least aboveground plants do. They absorb the light through their green leaves, which means that they absorb everything but green light. Green glass does the same thing - it absorbs everything but green light. So the light that passes through the green glass will not contain what the plants need to grow, so they won't give much food. That's why we need clear glass, which won't absorb as much sunlight." "I see," said Dozebom. "I'll tell the woodcutters to begin clearcutting." "And we'll need fertilizer as well, at least in the beginning," said Kogan. "That will increase food production until the farmers are skilled enough to go without it." Dozebom marked down on a page: 'CUT ALL WOOD'.

[Fleeting Frames]

Daring.

With 10x10 plots, it might be worth it to have central tile staircase to a route/still below to collect all food from a plot. Initially, it might seem as if each one could have their own crop - but I'm doubtful, as trading away the food for the unbrewables won't produce any seeds.

Of course, I'm expecting something like undead giant sperm whale climbing on fort, killing all the farmers and then producing more food on butchering than all the farms combined.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Here's the issue with a monoculture - there's a seed cap of 200 and a collective cap of 3000. We'll need to plant 2500 seeds each season. We will need to do booze-cooking. That's the only way to produce seeds quickly enough. And we'll probably need to use as many brewable crops as we can, to avoid hitting the individual seed cap.

...hmm, booze-cooking makes it easier. Then it's only 5.6 plants required per dwarf per year, which means 458 tiles. But I think it might violate the spirit of this game. It's either booze-cooking, changing the init settings, or going for pastures over farms. But the issue with animals is that we need to slaughter probably at least hundreds, which means we'd need at least that much in breeders, which sounds like FPS hell. I'd rather go with init changes to allow more seeds.

You're right that giant sperm whales give ridiculous amounts of meat, but undead are rotting and that's unreliable anyway.

And in terms of the design, I was planning to hold the seeds in the middle of the 30x30 and the harvest would go to the edges, but it sounds like you're saying that farms can be overlaid on downstairs. I'll have to test that.