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[Pyro627]

I agree, bones are your best bet. Since you've got an infinite number of monkeys, you can just kill a fraction of them and get an infinite number of monkey bones, whilst still having an infinite number of monkeys left to do the work.

[Draco18s]

I agree, bones are your best bet. Since you've got an infinite number of monkeys, you can just kill a fraction of them and get an infinite number of monkey bones, whilst still having an infinite number of monkeys left to do the work.

(Aren't the cardinalities of infinity fun?  You can write off a whole half of infinity and still have infinity.  Of course, if you raise 2 to the power of infinity, you get a new, bigger, infinity)

[Starver]

I assume these monkeys are also your workers, by this point.  It's a good job that as well as killing half of the monkeys, you can assign half of those that are left to process the bones.  Of course, to get them all done straight away you should start by taking half of those that remain to build the infinite amount of workshops and for that you may need to assign half of the remaining remainder to get the materials you need (with half of the further remaining remainder of those that remain to create the picks or axes for those).

Assuming the recently updated A_**^* pathing algorithm can handle all the resulting kerfuffle elegantly enough, you should have accomplished all that within just a few game-ticks, and now you just need to work out what to do now that you have more monkeys than typewriters.  (I'd suggest tell each monkey still assigned to a typewriter to get move up to the typewriter that is given the number four times that of the current one, while the other, still live, groups work themselves out into the gaps in their own time.  There are other ways of doing it, but this might give the least impact on your frames-per-femtosecond rate.

[FearfulJesuit]

I agree, bones are your best bet. Since you've got an infinite number of monkeys, you can just kill a fraction of them and get an infinite number of monkey bones, whilst still having an infinite number of monkeys left to do the work.

(Aren't the cardinalities of infinity fun?  You can write off a whole half of infinity and still have infinity.  Of course, if you raise 2 to the power of infinity, you get a new, bigger, infinity)

Actually, we'll never know for sure.

[SquatchHammer]

Well today I got my Dwarven civilization's space program up and running and had an elven Civ attack me on one of the worlds I was trying to settle for my next save. Well when I was losing all hope and ships I ordered one to fire upon the sun. Well the sound byte glitched and now all my dwarves are yelling "Kill the sun!!!" over and over again.

[cam]

Usually I set the MAGIC value during worldgen to LOW, because I'm a big fan of Conan and prefer that kind of world. As expected, though, fortress mode gets kind of easy, and it's not too long before I've conquered whatever continent I've embarked on.

So I set it to HIGH. Wizard time!

I didn't notice much of a change at first. There were a couple more options to train up in, but they all had dwarven names for things, and since no one during worldgen had come up with a dwarven-human translation guide, I was stuck guessing at most of the skills. It wasn't until I had actually embarked that I realized that I had managed to get one of my starting seven as a full-fledged mage.

Great, right? Except he won't do anything. He counts as a noble, and thus had a whole list of demands for his own room, workshop, apprentice, etc, and won't do a lick of work.

I've seen other people post about how useful mages are, but this guy's worthless.

Well, OK, not totally worthless. A necromancer attempted to siege me in my tenth year, and this guy walked right out of his workshop, walked up to the undead, and turned every zombie to ash. No fire, electricity, or anything. Just ash. The necromancer was so intimidated, he fled right off the map.

But *most* of the time, the mage just sits in his workshop with the task "Doing Research." Every once in a while he'll make a demand for a rare book or scroll. While I'm tempted to just let him go insane, his trick with the necromancer eventually convinces me to go ahead and fund an adventuring party to find what he wants.

Supposedly, mages are supposed to go with those adventuring parties, right? Not so for Mr High-and-Mighty here. I'll assign him using the (A)dventuring screen, but he'll just deny the request and return to his books.

Basically, I've got a grade-A wizard sitting in an ivory tower (well, he requested ivory, but I didn't have enough elephants, so I made it marble instead) who makes my main fortress nigh-untouchable, but doesn't do a bit of good over the entire kingdom. He's not even training the apprentices (he's got three now); he just makes them sweep the floors.

I suppose I could treat him as any other noble, and set up deathtraps (or just exile him, though, again, I don't want my empire to literally crumble to ash). But I started this fortress as high-fantasy, dammit; if I kill him, I might as well have played one of my other worlds.

Any thoughts on how to make this wizard actually useful?

Usually what I do in that situation is check to see if the wizard has either "hothead", "arrogant", or "prideful" personality traits. If he does, you might be able to get an enemy civilization to challenge his power. Usually a diplomatic boast (magic) is enough but an official statement (magic>science) or (ourmagic>othermagic) might be necessary. Assuming that's down he should volunteer to become a soldier or general. However, if you don't grant him a position he might raise any levies he has (assuming he has land and you're still in the feudal system) or call for soldiers to join him and go onto conquest himself. While this is usually a good thing, assuming he is as powerful as you say, but he might decide to make his own kingdom apart from yours.

About the apprentices, If he respects authority you might be able to force him to teach the apprentices. If not then your probably out of luck unless he has written some books your apprentices can read.

[Mel_Vixen]

I remember my last sorcerer it was a vampire who got turned after he started his apprentice-ship. A rare instance sure but with over 500 years of Knowledge and experience under his belt. I got some blood magic with him but also (which actually makes me wonder) some minor druidic and shamanic rituals as well as some spells from the the water sub-sphere ICE.

He was able to grow swords (saber-type) from the oak trees in my fort and was expert in climbing by calling on a gecko-spirit, both not realy usefull for me. Frosting over people and keeping my stocks on freezer temperature on the other hand was quite nice.


Anyway i had the same problem with non-teaching. I had a study and tried some stuff mentioned here but nothing did help. The thing is if your mage "strongly values tradition" and is/was in a guild (druids count as such) your apprentices have often to fulfil some uniform requirements. Staffs and some blue robes did it for me and soon i had 3 dorfs studying.

[Pyro627]

Well today I got my Dwarven civilization's space program up and running and had an elven Civ attack me on one of the worlds I was trying to settle for my next save. Well when I was losing all hope and ships I ordered one to fire upon the sun. Well the sound byte glitched and now all my dwarves are yelling "Kill the sun!!!" over and over again.

You tried to kill the sun? You do understand just how impossible that is with normal weapons, right? You need some crazy specialized equipment to just stop that kind of fusion. I mean, you could in theory halt it by shooting a truly insane amount of iron projectiles into the star, but that's just not practical.

Just atom-smash the damn thing, I say.

Also, sound bytes? I hate those mods. They're always just a generic voice synth with some shitty tuning to try and make it sound like whatever the author thinks dwarves sound like. I bet you're using one of those crazy 3D visualizers, too.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Well today I got my Dwarven civilization's space program up and running and had an elven Civ attack me on one of the worlds I was trying to settle for my next save. Well when I was losing all hope and ships I ordered one to fire upon the sun. Well the sound byte glitched and now all my dwarves are yelling "Kill the sun!!!" over and over again.

You tried to kill the sun? You do understand just how impossible that is with normal weapons, right? You need some crazy specialized equipment to just stop that kind of fusion. I mean, you could in theory halt it by shooting a truly insane amount of iron projectiles into the star, but that's just not practical.

Just atom-smash the damn thing, I say.

Also, sound bytes? I hate those mods. They're always just a generic voice synth with some shitty tuning to try and make it sound like whatever the author thinks dwarves sound like. I bet you're using one of those crazy 3D visualizers, too.

Actually, I bet his missiles are powered by waterwheels, so they probably would have enclosed the sun with a shell of obsidian.

[Fniff]

Also, sound bytes? I hate those mods. They're always just a generic voice synth with some shitty tuning to try and make it sound like whatever the author thinks dwarves sound like. I bet you're using one of those crazy 3D visualizers, too.

Hey, not all of them are terrible. Zwei's Vocal Mod is awesome, since Zwei is a professional virtual girlfriend programmer, but no-one knows about it.

[misko27]

Also, sound bytes? I hate those mods. They're always just a generic voice synth with some shitty tuning to try and make it sound like whatever the author thinks dwarves sound like. I bet you're using one of those crazy 3D visualizers, too.

Hey, not all of them are terrible. Zwei's Vocal Mod is awesome, since Zwei is a professional virtual girlfriend programmer, but no-one knows about it.

Still, isn't a way to handle DF Vanilla. I like they keep it a little garbled, keeps it to the mind of the listener. All you hear is "Chirp, Chirp chirp!"

[Draco18s]

Actually, I bet his missiles are powered by waterwheels, so they probably would have enclosed the sun with a shell of obsidian.

*Cough*
http://what-if.xkcd.com/14/

[My Name is Immaterial]

Actually, I bet his missiles are powered by waterwheels, so they probably would have enclosed the sun with a shell of obsidian.

*Cough*
http://what-if.xkcd.com/14/

Damn it, Science!

[Starver]

But that was written 38 years ago...  Unless you've not been to any school (including Kindergarten) in the intervening times, and avoided all the headcasts and stayed Unplugged so you don't get the NeuroNewsNetwork feeds, you should by now be fully aware that that old "particle/wave-particle/wave-particle-other science" is completely discredited, as was string theory and brane theory and cosmowobble-theory and then the (short-lived, but much-hyped) WYSIWYG conjecture.  Under both of the current mainstream universe-views[1], it is now conceivably possible to effectively obsidianise the Sun.  (Also, I think, to meringuise it.)

Although I'm not sure if Scamps (if still head physicist in the Dwarf Fortress project, I've really not been keeping track) has yet abandoned the rough physical models brought into the game about five years ago, and updated things to reflect the new real-world paradigms, yet.  There was all that fuss over fixing that "good bug" regarding helium's superfluid behaviour showing at one Kelvin degree higher than it should have done, after all, which then lost us a lot of the fanbase who had that cryofetish thing going on.  Talk about giving us the cold shoulder!


[1] I favour the Adrian-Chung-Chung-Blazkowicz-Smedley-May interpretation over the Hislop-Johnson-Merton one, but mainly because I feel President Boris is pushing his own agenda (and showing his age a bit) and the other two should stick to their TV career (the N3 broadcast the other day was amazing...  and I've got tickets to see s116e05 of the show being recorded on location at the BBC's newly rebuilt studios at Plinius Crater.  I can't wait!)

[Doodooist]

I was playng in Evil Fortress mode when one of my slave dwarfs got posessed, stole my necromancer's robe, claimed the kitchen and created a "Dog Shearer" lizardman leather backpack decorated with pegasus wings. (Yes, I built my Evil Fortress in Good Biome)

I was too busy with monkey outbreak in upper levels of my tower and completely forgot about that backpack. But a year later a squad of adventurers raided me and got a lot of loot, and message about stolen artifact reminded me.

I left my Fortress to itself and ran a little investigation. As always, most of the loot were in nearest village, and my backpack was there too. But shopkeeper didn't want to sell it back to me. He put my backpack on, he said that it's his clothes, and he said that he doesn't exchange bodywear for money.  I tried to kill him, but shopkeeper just flew away! It was the backpack of levitation!

Oh man I so want it now! I'l research it, I'l create a mass production of its copies, I'l equip my legions of doom with it, I'l conquer the world!

My necromancer is obviously not a good stealth-man, so stealing it is not an option, but I'l ask around, maybe thieves guild will help me out.