Main differences between 34.11 and 40.24
- Was mostly about the adventure update. But the following are notable:
* It's pretty stable but not perfect. I'm seeing perhaps a few more crashes in 40.24 over 34.11 - set your game (if you use the starter pack) to autosave seasonally.
* Big trees. You'll have a LOT more wood available, even if you embark in an area with "sparse" trees. Falling logs can punch through a floor as well so it's avisable if you can to put underground farms at surface-2 level not surface-1 level, and to leave surface-1 empty.
* Climbing invaders. A 1 high stockade is no longer sufficient to prevent invaders. My current stockade is between 4 and 6 high and invaders still managed to climb it. This doesn't happen often - with a 2-high stockade and no obvious tree-climbing routes over, you can expect maybe 2 or 3 invaders to get over the wall from a siege of 60. However, if you have no military, this can be devastating.
* Hospital bug where it takes all your supplies seems fixed.
* Site finder bug where it would never find flux stone is fixed.
* Bee-keeping is less buggy
* Archers can now find bolts in bins.
* Lots of new above ground plants and trees available.
* Herbalists are an effective way of feeding your fort.
* Collecting fruit from trees for brewing and cooking.
* Pit-dropping monsters from cages into pits is downright dangerous and should be avoided.
* Goblins are weaker. Undead are stronger. MUCH stronger.
* Your military will need time to train properly together as they now need discipline (or they can just run away from the enemy). Danger rooms no longer train fighting - just shield user, weaponskill, armour skill, and dodging. Lots of bugs still with armour equipping (just choose to replace and it'll be fine).
* Lye should not be placed in a stockpile that accepts barrels or your dwarves won't be able to find it.
* Clothesmaking / Dyeing conflict such that you'll get a lot of cancellation spam as soon as you start storing the cloth in bins. Solution 1: Cloth stockpile shouldn't accept bins; Solution 2: Manage all cloth-related jobs using the manager; Solution 3: Have a quite ridiculous amount of cloth around on hand;
* Happiness has changed to stress. Whilst this should mean that tantrum-spirals will be a thing of the past, dwarves that are susceptible to stress are extremely hard to keep happy. There's lots of things you can do about stress, none of them are easy.
* It's more laggy. There's many reasons behind this, but you should not try to play with 200 dwarves. If your computer struggles, choose a pocket world on world-gen (lots of external events can cause issues), a smallish size embark, restricted numbers of dwarves, small stockpiles, and try to keep your animal population small.