Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Carbonated Dan]

Howdy, newcomer being inquisitive and nosy

installed last night, spent six odd hours in game

think I've grasped the basics of control, design and the crafting economy, though that cost of hundreds of lives

looking for some general advice and appraisal of this embarkation build

[weenog]

I'm no expert, but I know Animal Caretaker does nothing, and is a waste of points to purchase.

I consider Dimple Cup spawn a waste of points too.  Dying cloth does nothing useful, it merely increases value (not that dwarves can get happy thoughts from nice clothing), and there's nothing else you can really do with dimple cups.  Even if you wanted dimple cups later, they're quite easy to get.

[Carbonated Dan]

I thought Dimple Cups were food :s

and I had assumed that animal caretakers were necessary to keep livestock fed - if it wasn't my last fortress' lack of animal caretakers, what was causing my livestock to die of thirst and hunger?

[lordnincompoop]

I thought Dimple Cups were food :s

and I had assumed that animal caretakers were necessary to keep livestock fed - if it wasn't my last fortress' lack of animal caretakers, what was causing my livestock to die of thirst and hunger?

Your lack of a pasture. This is more of a bother than it's worth and is better solved by simply not taking along grazing animals such as cows. Examples of non-grazing animals include cats, dogs, pigs and chickens.

[Carbonated Dan]

oh, I ahd pastures

but looking at the wiki it seems I should have assigned animals to them?

do sheep need pasture?

[toomanysecrets]

My advice:

*Lose the sheep. Too expensive. You'll get plenty of animals with migrant waves.
*You're not bringing a pick or an axe. If you want to make your own, that's fine, I would bring tetrahedrite and bituminous coal instead of all those zinc and copper bars. Then you need a smelter and forge as soon as you embark to get that stuff going. Most noobs just buy picks and an axe at embark to save the headache.
*I say buy more skills and less stuff. The thread and cloth and leather you really don't need but having a proficeine (lv 5) mason and carpenter is really helpful.
* A proficient farmer is very nearly MANDATORY.  A skilled farmer gets more plants from farm plots and makes food production 10x more efficient.

And yes sheep need to graze. Make a pasture, after you've pressed 'n' to make it a pasture your press 'N' to add animals to it.

[quarague]

animal grazer can self feed if there are on a pasture with grass or cave moss. Assign a pasture zone and then assign the animals to it.
Grazers that are not in a pasture still get fed by dwarfs if one of the dwarfs assigned them as their pets (that is up to the dwarf, you can't make them adopt pets). Sheep are grazers, in general if animals eat grass in real life they need a pasture, if they eat anything else you don't need to feed them in dwarf fortress

[Firehawk45]

in general if animals eat grass in real life they need a pasture, if they eat anything else you don't need to feed them in dwarf fortress

"thinks about giant tigers and what they would eat"

I think its better the way its now

Many ppl just remove the [Grazer] Tag from all animals, as its broken at the moment. Rhinos and elephants are actually starving even with the whole map as a pasture.

[Carbonated Dan]

*Lose the sheep. Too expensive. You'll get plenty of animals with migrant waves.

done

*You're not bringing a pick or an axe. If you want to make your own, that's fine Most noobs just buy picks and an axe at embark to save the headache

yeah, but they're WAY too expensive and a wooden axe is good enough for chopping

I would bring tetrahedrite and bituminous coal instead of all those zinc and copper bars

tin and copper

can I not make charcoal from wood?

*I say buy more skills and less stuff. The thread and cloth and leather you really don't need but having a proficeine (lv 5) mason and carpenter is really helpful.

ok

A proficient farmer is very nearly MANDATORY.  A skilled farmer gets more plants from farm plots and makes food production 10x more efficient

grower? any other skills?

[toomanysecrets]

Yes you can use charcoal, but this will consume extraordinary numbers of trees. Up to you.

Yes, grower, not farmer, sorry. Personally I embark with a dedicated grower (lv 5, no other skills) and once some migrants show up I turn off all of his hauling and everything. That's just me; you could have farmers that also cook/brew/mill etc. Also, I don't embark with a cook, I like to focus on other things and when the first migrants show up, I make one of them a brewer/cook and start setting up stills/kitchens.  Brewing skills pretty slow, but cooking skills pretty fast especially making easy meals.

[Snaake]

Yea, bring copper and tin ores rather than bars. Preferably native copper or malachite if you can get it (and cassiterite for tin of course), since they're probably cheaper to embark with than tetrahedrite (which is 9 points, and all I've had available in the forts I've brought ore). With tetrahedrite, you're wasting silver if you smelt directly from ores, and using more coke/charcoal and jobs if smelting to bars, then to bronze.

You could do with less plump helmet spawn in my opinion, in addition to the less leather/cloth that's been mentioned before. I might keep a breeding pair of sheep, or maybe alpacas, depending on the embark site. 101 points is ok to spend on grazers if you want. A breeding pair or 2 of birds is enough too, they really breed at a crazy pace, if you let them. Dogs are easy enough to train that I now only take a pair of non-trained ones, saves some points.

[Carbonated Dan]

bring copper and tin ores rather than bars... but the bars are the same cost as the ores - do ores produce more than one bar?

[Carbonated Dan]

DELETED
and nothing of value was lost

[peccan]

With birds, you need a nest box for every female you want to lay eggs, or at least one box for two or so. These can be constructed after embark easily enough. No nest boxes, no eggs. Up to you how you want to keep your dorfs away from the breeding eggs though, but search around the forums or the Net and you'll find lots of info on poultry farming in DF.

[Snaake]

bring copper and tin ores rather than bars... but the bars are the same cost as the ores - do ores produce more than one bar?

Since the hauling update (34.08), 1 ore gives 4 bars (thus 1 copper ore + 1 tin ore = 8 bronze), and 1 stone similarly gives 4 blocks. Also, bituminous coal gives 9 coke (so a net gain of 8; this was added a bit later).