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[deodand]

I was going to put this in the Little Questions thread, but it got too long....sorry! 

Mini-rant:
Not to be sexist, but have you ever been in a relationship with a girl who is a bit ugly and you don't like her personality, not really, but she is willing to do things you like and she does everything you want? Except she is stubborn and difficult and crazy too and it is really hard to get her to understand what you want? Geez, DF is like that.

Sorry for mini-rant, some accumulated questions after another weekend of additive FUN.

Migrants:
I don't want them. Go away. Is there a way to stop useless eaters from simply showing up? Other than using lazy newb pack GUI to limit population, that is. I had to finally turn off invasions because I cannot get a metal economy working let alone soldiers to do anything but cry and hit each other with wooden swords, so Goblins just always kill me. But there is no way to turn off useless Cheesemakers from simply arriving and eating everything in sight. How do these vagrants even know where we live? How did they make it through the wilderness with their alpaca foals and guinea hens? Madness. This is madness.

Elves:
Is this a bug? They complain about my wooden objects, yet bring logs to trade with me. It doesn't even make sense. I just take everything they have, every time. It's not I hate elves really, but as the leader of a Dwarven fortress, if these idiots show up unguarded at my remote wilderness outpost with more loot than I can build in ten years, then chide me about chopping trees, well what do they think is going to happen? Windfall! But it makes stockpiles a mess.

Bones:
I have a refuse stockpile set to take only bones and things that are useful like that as someone explained to me how to do on the Little Questions thread, but it fills up fast and nobody will put a bin in there. I have ample bins. Apparently bins can only be made of wood, not stone?

Containers:
This is one of the most baffling parts of the game. They can only put small items in wooden bins? Why not stone coffers? We can make dozens of those. Yet they sit in the warehouse unused, while crap piles up incomprehensibly? Why why why? And seeds? Seeds most go in bags and then in barrels? What? How do I make bags? What? Bloody Astaroth, Azathoth, bloody bloody Crom!

Saved Games:
How is it possible to mess this up? How many years of PC games have we had? How is it possible to make an interface so utterly unfriendly you can't even tell what saved game you want, what is the most recent, last save, etc.? What am I supposed to do, take notes on paper? When I exit, it doesn't even tell me the file name. This is madness!

[Jelle]

Hey

Let's see if I can be of some kin of assistance.

Migrants:
Yes there's a way but I doubt it has any other effect then changing it in the lazy newb pack (I have never used it so can't be sure). To do it you'd have to go into your data folder init then d_init, there's a line for pop cap in there.

Elves:
Nono it's no bug, presumably the elves gather their wood in a nature friendly way, probably harvesting from fallen or dead trees.
If you want to set up a glass industry, or for some reason make lots of wooden furniture and crafts, there's no way around chopping trees and pissing them off, unless you get the wood through trade.

Bones:
A refuse stockpile's default setting do not allow bins, and there's no need as dwarves will not store bones in bins.

Containers:
Chests are furniture, wich aren't used to store stuff in stockpile. Chests can be set in a dwarfs room and he will store any non cloth items he own in there, but since there's no economy in this version they will never own any non cloth items. Nobles demand chests in their room anyway.
Bags can be made out of cloth or leather in respectively a clothmakers workshop of leather works.
If you don't quite know how to set up those industries it's not a bad idea to embark with some sand bags, dwarves can empty those bags so you get some cheap bags on embark.

Saved Games:
When you chose to save the game you save it over the save game you loaded from. If you load from seasonal saves things can get messy as the dates won't quite add up. I think you can name your saves  yourself by changing the file name, but I've never tried.

[Dutchling]

Stone pots = wooden barrel
When you load, ingnore the games with a season in its name. You should have one per fortress/adventure.

[Sutremaine]

Not to be sexist, but [....] Geez, DF is like that.

Guys can be like that too. Phrasing fail.

As for the useless migrants, I usually retrain them into something else. Making Pump Operator the new Peasant is an easy enough task, and with two high-levelled skills (in the case of those High Master Cheesemakers) the dwarf in question should get pretty good stats.

[Graebeard]

Migrants:  Yup, you want to change the population cap ("pop cap") in the d_init file.  That file, and the init file, are how you chance your settings in dwarf fortress.  I haven't used the lazy newb pack, but I think it just gives you a GUI to interact with these files instead of just editing them with a text editor.

Be patient once you change the population cap; it may take a few seasons to kick in.  Also, if you set it low from the beginning you'll still get the first two immigrant waves since they're hard coded.

Elves:  Yeah, people say stuff about them collecting fallen wood and all that.  I think they're just hypocritical judgmental cannibals.  Hypocritical judgmental cannibals that deserve an introduction to Armok's holy blood.

Bones:  Yup, you can't store bones in bins.  If you want to store more bones in your stockpiles you'll have to make them bigger.  It also helps to have them close to whatever shop is using them so they'll get processed faster.

Containers:  So you've got bins, which can be made of wood or metal.  Dwarves use these to increase the capacity of stockpiles.  You can fit one gem in one stockpile square without a bin.  If there's a bin there you can fit a lot of gems in that bin, effectively increasing the stockpile's capacity.  Barrels work the same way for food.  You can fit a lot of cat meat in one barrel.  Stone pots (made at a craftdwarf's shop) work the same as barrels, and can be a life saver when wood is dear.

Other containers, such as chests and cabinets, do not work with stockpiles like that.  They are furniture, like beds, chairs, and tables, that you need to (b)uild once you've crafted them.  Traditionally you build them in your dwarf's bedroom for their personal storage needs.  You should also build them in your hospital to hold thread, cloth, soap, etc... for your hospitaling needs.

Saved Games: The bad news is that in true Rogelike tradition, the default DF settings make permadeath a real possibility by overwriting the save you start with when you exit the game and not providing any backups of your game.  The good news is that you can change the settings to be less rage-inducing.

Open up our good friend that d_init file.  Set up autosaves and autobackups:

Code: [Select]

[AUTOSAVE:SEASONAL]
[AUTOBACKUP:YES]This will automatically save your game every season and make a backup of that save that won't be overwritten when you exit the game.  Let's say you flood your base with magma cause you pulled the wrong lever in the middle of summer.  You can go back and open up the summer autosave and restart from the beginning of the season.

Backups are named like this:  (opened save name)-(season)-(year).

Let's say the save you start with is "region1".  You'll end up with seasonal backups like "region 1-aut-1051", "region1-win-1051", "region1-spr-1052" and so on.

But what if you go back and reload from one of those backup saves?  Now the (opened save name) isn't "region1", it's "region1-spr-1052", so when you start getting new backup saves they'll look like ""region1-spr-1052-sum-1052", "region1-spr-1052-aut-1052" and so on.

It gets a bit confusing.  Fortunately, you can edit these names very easily.  In your DF folder go to \data\save.  See all those folders?  They're all your saved games, and the folder names are how you'll see them in DF.  I like to right click and rename mine to something a bit more intuitive periodically and clear out all the extra backups I know I'll never need.

[billybobfred]

Yeah, I always rename my saves after the fort I'm running in them. Much easier to remember that way.

And editing the d_init file is exactly the same as changing pop cap with the lazy newb pack. The lazy newb pack setting is literally just editing d_init for you.

[Skorpion]

Migrants:
Population cap. Look in the init files, under the data folder.

Elves:
No, it's not a bug. They're just hypocritical assholes. Drown them all.

Bones:
They don't go in bins, no. Just use them up, or use a bigger stockpile.

Containers:
Bins can't be made of stone. Ditto for barrels. Dig down, and use metals instead, if trees are scarce.

Saved Games:
Is it really that hard to remember?

[cancel.man]

Containers:
Bins can't be made of stone. Ditto for barrels.

Lies! Rock pot = barrel. Does the same thing as a barrel but made of rock.

[RAKninja]

Migrants:
I don't want them. Go away. Is there a way to stop useless eaters from simply showing up? Other than using lazy newb pack GUI to limit population, that is. I had to finally turn off invasions because I cannot get a metal economy working let alone soldiers to do anything but cry and hit each other with wooden swords, so Goblins just always kill me. But there is no way to turn off useless Cheesemakers from simply arriving and eating everything in sight. How do these vagrants even know where we live? How did they make it through the wilderness with their alpaca foals and guinea hens? Madness. This is madness.

how can you expect to defeat goblins if you do not have expendable dwarves for the military?  aside from traps of course.

you do not need wooden weapons for training, let them train with live weapons.  will save time of you switching uniforms, and them putting away wooden weapon for a metal one.

for many years, i threw every "useless" migrant i got into the military.  after a while, i started to get enough sieges a year to almost totally block all migrants and caravans that year.  at the time i had 5-6 squads of melee, and 2 squads of marksdwarves.  after these "goblin years" i had two near full squads of deadly melee dwarves, and a half squad of highly trained marksdwarves.

are you having food problems?  usually, food is the least of my worries, without trying, i managed to stockpile enough prepared meals to last several years.  booze is tougher, but if you have decent farmers, not that big a deal.

if you cannot get a metal industry set up fast enough, set up some no metal "shock troops".  then develop a different industry enough so that you can trade for what you need to kickstart your metal industry.  i went mainly with cloth (miscalculations led me to be nearly out of booze by year 3, i had to seize the entire elven caravan, so i had a lot of cloth) supplemented with rock and bone crafts (decorated) to buy the metal i needed.  decorating goblin clothes with well dyed, well weaved, masterful decorations is a huge value modifier (for cloth). 

[Alastar]

The actual questions seem to have been mostly answered, so:

if I had a girlfriend who's as clever, zany and unique as Dwarf Fortress with as much enthusiasm for gratuitious geekery... I don't think I'd be put off by a few personality quirks and looks I find endearing anyway (if not conventionally pretty).

[franti]

Bones:
I have a refuse stockpile set to take only bones and things that are useful like that as someone explained to me how to do on the Little Questions thread, but it fills up fast and nobody will put a bin in there. I have ample bins. Apparently bins can only be made of wood, not stone?

Mouse over the stockpile with "q", I think, and it will tell you how many barrels and bins are allowed. You can increase or decrease the value.
Stone coffers are too big to be placed in a bin.
Elves will go to war with you if you keep picking on them, and their archers are good shots. I'm not saying "dont kill elves", never, but keep your eyes open for ambushes if caravans stop showing up.

[Starver]

The actual questions seem to have been mostly answered, so:

if I had a girlfriend who's as clever, zany and unique as Dwarf Fortress with as much enthusiasm for gratuitious geekery... I don't think I'd be put off by a few personality quirks and looks I find endearing anyway (if not conventionally pretty).

If I had a girlfriend like DF, I don't know whether I'd be the one worrying more about her apparent sociopathic nature, or my friends for the way I was sooo into such a sociopathic girl.


As for Migrants, can be annoying and rewarding in equal measure.  You can always wall yourself up and let them suffer and accumulate (as much as the inevitable invasions and ambushes will allow).  Or, if you feel like it, set up their own parallel and yet expendable fort (...perhaps leave a pick in a walled up bunker for them to use if you're feeling like it...) while you get your original dwarves set down to keeping themselves self-sufficient.  See what goes wrong first... the potentially ever-increasing immigrant camp exposed to all invaders and monsters or your own little insular group.

One explanation about the Elves is that they tease the trees and plants into budding wooden instruments like fruit, to be picked.  But they apparently can't tell the difference between their own environmentally-friendly produce and your own items carved out of the remains of murdered trees if you try to pass them back to them, so maybe they are just plain mad.

Also, I think that if you don't have stockpiles of wood, but construct them into (useless or otherwise) blocks of wooden walls they don't actually count them...  And you can put off their ire a lot longer if you're not just horribly efficient at hoarding the logs in stockpiles and and have an awful lot of logs hanging around unused.


With Bones, you probably need loads of bone bolts, by the sound of it.  Get someone (best bonecrafter, or one of those useless migrants who will eventually become your best bonecrafter) to use them all up.  Or as many as you can, or as many as you think you can without finding yourself without them when someone decides that their moodcraft needs body parts or similar.  (Depends a lot on how, and how frequently, you are accumulating bones.)

To add to the information about Containers, seeds can sit in stockpiles alone, but typically at one seed per tile, so they can go into bags.  Bags can sit one-each in each stockpile tile, or go into barrels.  Barrels can sit 1-for-1 in a stockpile.  You've already heard about the rock equivalent.  (The most confusing thing about some items is that there are different names for different material items...  Chairs when wood, thrones when rock or metal, for example.  The ones that come to mind are Coffers=Chests.  Coffins=Sarcophagi.  Ropes=Chains.  Portals=Doors.  Cages=Aquaria.)  Bags, by the way are made in a clothesmaker's workshop from cloth.  The cloth is made from thread (silk, plant fibre or yarn) at a loom.  The thread is gathered (in the case of silk thread, also via the loom) or made from certain plants (in the case of the plant-fibre stuff, at a farmer's workshop) or spun from various wools (also at a farmer's workshop, usually after a shearer (also in a farmer's workshop) has sheared a suitable wool-bearing animal, like a sheep or alpaca).  It's a production chain that I can never get working self-sufficiently, I tend to just spam a (R)epeat job on some job, apply some random guys to the job (if I don't have a decent guy with the skill already) and when it runs out spam a (R)epeated job on the next stage, with either the same random guys or the extant professionals for that particular profession.  When an Expert Shearer doesn't have any animals to shear, he's usually given other things to do, of course.  Nothing like keeping them all busy. And it seems to work, at least as long as the rest of the fort does.

Ninjaed by franti about the barrels/bins settings, so that bit being snipped out of my reply.


The advice regarding Saved Games is much as I'd give.  Although I tend to: a) save a whole copy of the pre-embark save as (say) "region1#raw", just in case I want to go back and go at the same site slightly differently; b) make a "_region1" directory (that's the full name, prepending the default save with an underline... hey, it's a handy convention!) to put both the "#raw" and all older-than-one-year "region1_season_yearnumber" saves into.  For no reason other than having gone to the small (almost insignificant) trouble of making it save backups, I don't like just deleting data.  This way it can moulder away and even with two forts currently running, I'll only have a "region1" and four "region1_season_yearnumber" forts and ditto for "region2".  If I feel the need to permanently revert to a previous save (rare, as opposed to testing out different approaches to a problem which I'll probably Ctrl-Alt-Del abandon before the season ends anyway) I'll rename "region1" to "region1(abandonmentreason)", copy the appropriate seasonal save that I'm rewinding to and rename it to "region1" and continue in that vein.  But I do feel rather cheaty about doing that, so it's rare.

I've no idea if any of my more technical information means anything to many people who aren't already experienced players who do (or have done) similar (or their own equivalents), but I'm putting it out there.

[franti]

Also, a bit of misc advice that may or may not be helpful depending on how long you've played and how curious you are about "spoiler" tags.
Don't dig too deep without a good military. And even better doctors.

[RAKninja]

Also, a bit of misc advice that may or may not be helpful depending on how long you've played and how curious you are about "spoiler" tags.
Don't dig too deep without a good military. And even better doctors.

on that note, man am i lucky.  solid spire from at least cavern layer three to top of the magma sea.  scared to go deeper.

[franti]

Also, a bit of misc advice that may or may not be helpful depending on how long you've played and how curious you are about "spoiler" tags.
Don't dig too deep without a good military. And even better doctors.

on that note, man am i lucky.  solid spire from at least cavern layer three to top of the magma sea.  scared to go deeper.

I always had way more than my strand extractor could process, so I didn't need to go deep.