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[Leonidas]

I thought I understood breakthroughs. I thought that you got breakthroughs rarely from scholars pondering, discussing, and reading in a library for many years. Then this happened:



This is a new fort that just got its first wave of migrants to push its population up to eleven. One of those migrants is a highly skilled doctor from another fort who spent lots of time as a scholar.

This fort is a 1x1 embark, which means lots of interaction with wildlife. A gray langur slipped into the fortress and bit a migrant on the foot. I had a hospital set up, with soap. But because this fort started in mid-autumn, I had no chance to grow pig tails and make cloth. So the doctor has tried several times to bandage the bitten foot, but there's no cloth. He doesn't get XP for the attempt, by the way. He's still a dabbling wound dresser.

So that's the setting in which I found this breakthrough message. It wasn't even an announcement; it just appeared in the combat log. I don't know what to make of it, but I thought I'd share it.

[PatrikLundell]

Interesting find. Nice that you shared it.

(Have you tried to gather surface plants that can be used for thread?)

[Immortal-D]

That is freaking hilarious.  *Causes a traumatic injury* "I've just had a eureka moment about major injuries"

[Leonidas]

Have you tried to gather surface plants that can be used for thread?

I did, with no luck. It worked out in the end, though.

This happened in a branch fort, not for long-term play, that I was using to collect data on light aquifers. So everything was shut down to focus the dwarves on construction---including the fields. Once I noticed the doctor complaining about a lack of cloth, then I let the farmer start growing pig tails. So the poor wounded dwarf had to lie in the hospital until the crops finished growing and could be made into cloth. It was hilarious.

Here's another little discovery from the same drama: You know how there's a labor to bring water to an injured dwarf? This dwarf was in the hospital so long that they had to bring him food.

[NordicNooob]

Dwarves will often times just say stuff after the end of combat and for some reason it'll show up in the logs. Like, I have a mist generator in my fort and pretty often I'll see a combat report, open it, and it's just adding a dwarf saying something about waterfalls to the combat log that ended two days ago.

That sounds like the most likely case if you made your medic a scholar. He beat the heck out of the falcon and then went back to his studies and promptly made a breakthrough.

[Leonidas]

Dwarves will often times just say stuff after the end of combat and for some reason it'll show up in the logs. Like, I have a mist generator in my fort and pretty often I'll see a combat report, open it, and it's just adding a dwarf saying something about waterfalls to the combat log that ended two days ago.

That sounds like the most likely case if you made your medic a scholar. He beat the heck out of the falcon and then went back to his studies and promptly made a breakthrough.

But he wasn't a scholar at the time. This is a new fort, with no library. He was a scholar in the library of the old retired fort.

[anewaname]

It would not be a surprise if this has been happening since libraries were introduced; Pondering and Discussing and doing the actual work, are probably all ways to increase knowledge, which leads to breakthroughs. And, you caught it happening in the combat log thought-capture! I searched my current and older gamelog.txt files but didn't see a breakthrough.

[Fleeting Frames]

The scholarly research speed thread few months ago showed retired fort scholars still continue researching. Maybe they got to the point of tipping over there....

But even then, this is still pretty surprising. Nice find.