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[urmane]

Ah, ya know what, I've been hanging on Pause too long - the manager jobs get validated, I'm just not letting it run long enough.  I'm gettin' kinda panicky now to make sure I don't miss anything :-)

I think I'll spend some time reducing and consolidating stone piles.

Does anvil material make a difference?  The wiki doesn't say.  I've just found a ton of marble, and if I understand correctly I have to make both iron and pig iron bars to make steel - to keep the pipeline going continuously that means two (three?) forges, yes?  I'm wondering if I should just make two more iron anvils and make the forge to make steel, or use the current single forge to make three steel anvils for new forges.

[misko27]

I'm unaware of any difference between anvil types, I think those are just the possible materials.

Smelters take care of alloys, not forgers. As it is, 3 should be fine. 1 for iron, 1 for pig iron, and 1 for steel.

[urmane]

Five smelters, then, based on my current situation:
- one for turning bituminous coal into coke
- one for hematite->iron
- one for magnetite->iron
- one for pig iron
- one for steel

And just keep one forge.  I think that works ...

[AndreaReina]

Ooh, you've got both hematite and magnetite? Nice!

4 smelters is enough, just have one smelter have both "smelt hematite" and "smelt magnetite" on repeat, it will alternate between the two of them. Otherwise you'll be drowning in iron bars, the pig iron and steel smelters won't keep up. A second forge will be useful for those times when you need to make a full suite of armor plus weapons for a squad or two.

[Starver]

If you want to clear an area of mined stones (of no other intrinsic value[1]) or rat corpses[2] that the miners are leaving, then there's always setting them to be dumped to a Quantum Stockpile

I strongly recommend against dumping stones.  They are extremely heavy, and your dwarves will not use wheelbarrows when dumping them.  Leave the stones alone, except to make small stockpiles by the workshops that use them, and use wheelbarrows in those stockpiles.

You are, of course, somewhat right, and I forget that most of this is servicing my own OCD about clearing areas.  But I find it important (at least for my peace of mind) to definitely prioritise[1] a clear out what will become an aquaduct or magmaduct, of mined stones I either want (because they're ores) or that might jam up floodgate mechanisms if left to be pushed around by the fluid.

Also my head still hasn't caught up to all the recent changes to the hauling (and mining drop-rate), so I'm probably stuck in a mental rut.  The fact that I almost always have plenty of haulers helps smooth over such a dichotomy, though.


[1] And, regardless of regular stone-hauling, or indeed any other hauling task for any other material, dump-hauling is the way I deal with any "get this moved now!!! job, whether it be the above-mentioned stones in the magmaduct or battle items scattered outside, in the hiatus between two separate invasions.

[urmane]

Hm, I apparently still have a fundamental misunderstanding about food and drink, and I'm not sure if it's scale, or process, or just timing.

I got another wave of immigrants, now up to 55, and immediately I ran out of food and drink.  I've had four guys alternating between gathering plants outside (designated) and planting seeds.  I now have between 300 and 400 tiles dedicated to farming, but 200 are brand new, tho.  Seeds are at 227, Drink is back up to 35 (guessing from plants gathered from outside), meat/fish/plant are zero.  Farms are about evenly split btw all-year plump helmets and sweetpod/sweetpod/cavewheat/plumphelmet (I did verify, I had forgotten one earlier, now I double-check :-)

I've had at least one fisher and one hunter (who's now out of ammo) for most of the game, but I guess they're not very good :-)  No meat or fish.  I've had a huge area (say, 40x40) in my heavily forested area designated for plant gathering for ages - they're about halfway through it.  The kitchen has nothing set to cook, everything on brew (despite 19 items, they're all seeds or booze, and just a few pods/grass/herbs/vines).  Does the kitchen do anything if I don't prepare meals?  I've never had enough items outside seeds/booze to dedicate 2/3/4 to cooking a meal.

It appears that there are several "harvests" in a season, after which booze jumps up, but they're still drinking too fast - that explains the wild variations in count.  My reading is that I need way, way more farming, and that I'm missing something with hunt/fish.  I wonder about planting outside, too?

Workshops - Is it one dwarf per workshop?  I don't remember seeing that, but might explain the long queues.

Fun!  I've just mined down into the middle of a cavern.  I was going to put an up/down stair on the cavern floor and fortify walls around it, but I cannot seem to designate stairs (it's only one level down).  I have instead put down an alternate stair into the last mine room, and wonder if I can destroy the stair that drops into the cavern, replacing it with a hatch?

While that's going on, steel axes are done and steel mail shirts are on the way, but I haven't read up on military yet - is there any automatic defense if that Giant Bat flies up, or do I explicitly need to tag/arm/assign weapons/armor to dwarves?

Wheeeee!!!

[Starver]

I got another wave of immigrants, now up to 55, and immediately I ran out of food and drink.

Doesn't sound wrongly misbalanced, everything you put.  Do you have military guys drawing food rations?  They tend to bite claim something, bite on it and then go claim something else.  I set the military to carry drink (need flask/waterskin) but no food.  Let them eat from the regular dining areas (every now and then) but carry their drink around with them.  Or that might not be your issue (or how others deal with it).

I've had at least one fisher and one hunter (who's now out of ammo) for most of the game, but I guess they're not very good :-)

I don't use hunters/fishers, these days.  Get a breeding pair of any fortress animals, wait a short time, and you've got more.  Check the attributes of any spare adults you have of a species and set to butcher them.  Make sure you can haul the stuff out of the Butcher's shop quick enough that a) The bits that rot don't rot; b) The bits that don't rot don't clutter it up and slow down the next butchering job.  Let the kitchen cook any meat items you get from this (I disabled booze cookng, seed cooking and plant cooking, to preserve booze, seeds and seeds-in-potentia; I probably also disable milk-cooking and set it to being made into cheese, which I will let be cooked).  Prepared meals are better than the sum of their parts, generally.

As to what a kitchen does when it's not preparing meals?  Rendering fat, isn't it?  If you have fat (which you don't, if you're not (successfully) hunting or butchering as above) then you can make it into tallow.  Which has uses.  Anything else kitchens do isn't coming to mind, without the game (or a window on the Wiki) open in front of me.

Obviously you need the spare food items (consider also grinding cave wheat/etc?) to go for prepared food.  Doing a two-item snack thingummy, whatever it's called again, is good to build up the Cooking skill for minimum ingredients (last time I checked), but once you've got a decent skill then you get better value/more meals per action/more satisfying meals overall if you go for the 4-item roast thingummy.  When you've got spare food items to cook with.


Your farming looks sufficient (I've seen recent calculations that a small amount of farms (possibly a couple of 2x2s but certainly less than a single 3x3 for each crop-type) is capable of supporting a 200-dwarf fortress, but I can't remember the precise details), and probably just needs tuning somehow, in a way I can't bring to mind.  You see my forum username there, to the left and up a bit?  Well, there's a reason I chose that.  I took a long time to work out farming (and food in particular).  What really helped me was a fully-aquifered map with all but one non-soil ground square warning as wet, and so I spent some time dedicating myself to a soil-based fort and a lot of farming.  Since then I've (barring oversights, or rushing to the magma and forgetting farms until I was already near starving) generally been Ok.  As to what I learnt?  Darn hard to describe, to be honest.  Practice?

Workshops - Is it one dwarf per workshop?  I don't remember seeing that, but might explain the long queues.

Yes.  One at a time, with current Workshops (possible future room-designation-type workshops might differ, and allow multiple 'workstations').  It's at most one dwarf per workshop, in fact.  You can also have long queueueueueues when a workshop isn't currently being worked in.  (Dwarf may be on way there, or off to get something to eat, and no other dwarf is stepping in to work on the job he's not currently doing.  Or just everyone's off sleeping/eating/drinking/whatever.)  Again, hard to describe what I'd do, to get things done faster (save for making more workshops and dedicating more dwarves to the job-specific allocation in the hope that they'll jump in there and keep things going), but it'll be a matter of fine-tuning of some kind.  And practice, again.

Fun!  I've just mined down into the middle of a cavern.  I was going to put an up/down stair on the cavern floor and fortify walls around it, but I cannot seem to designate stairs (it's only one level down).  I have instead put down an alternate stair into the last mine room, and wonder if I can destroy the stair that drops into the cavern, replacing it with a hatch?

If you've dug into the ceiling of a cavern then (as long as you have an orthogonal spot for a dwarf to stand), you can Construct an up-stair over the final up/down stair, and it will be a pure-up stair and flier-sealed.  Unless a dwarf is actually falling down the stairs (which I've heard happens, perhaps in combat on a stairwell?  ..but I've never seen it happen myself), there's no problem having an 'open-bottomed stairwell' for normal purposes, but sealing it to prevent flying cavern inhabitants from randomly wandering in is always useful.

(Or you can put a hatch in there over this 'loose' up/down, locked or otherwise, and I believe it'll still operate as an Up.)

Now you see the cavern, you can work out where to side-step and send stairs further down.  I'd advise doing so in the middle of a wall, not at the edge of one, so that you don't have a walkable breach into (and, more importantly, out of) the cavern just yet.  But that's just how I work and you could breach the cavern and then work on isolating an area if you want.


Regarding military defence against the Giant Bat, it's generally a matter of using the Squad menu to designate an attack (either by cursor on a tile/area, or a specific creature) and see how it goes.  Darnit, another thing I know how to do when the game's in front of me, but can't describe.  Fat lot of good I am, ain't I?


(OTOH, unless you have a walkable path, flying beasts will not (in my experience) deliberately path through fly-only paths into your fortress...  But as they randomly wander (and fly) around they do seem to find such entryways anyway.  I'm not sure how much is Drunkard's Walk chance and how much is a little devious bias to...)

[greycat]

I got another wave of immigrants, now up to 55, and immediately I ran out of food and drink.  I've had four guys alternating between gathering plants outside (designated) and planting seeds.  I now have between 300 and 400 tiles dedicated to farming, but 200 are brand new, tho.

That's an insanely huge farm.  Way too big.  You should have more like 50 tiles.

Drink is back up to 35

That is a booze emergency.  You are dying of thirst here, or you're drinking water.  Getting more booze is your #1 priority unless you are actually being attacked.

Make sure plants are set not to be cooked, in the kitchen menu.  No plants should be cooked, ever -- it destroys the seeds, and in the case of brewable plants, it contributes to your booze emergency.

Make sure all your booze is also set not to be cooked.

Farms are about evenly split btw all-year plump helmets and sweetpod/sweetpod/cavewheat/plumphelmet

That's OK, but you're going to need pig tails unless you import ungodly amounts of leather, or you armor all your civilians.

Does the kitchen do anything if I don't prepare meals?

It will render fat from butchered/slaughtered animals into tallow.

It appears that there are several "harvests" in a season, after which booze jumps up, but they're still drinking too fast - that explains the wild variations in count.

You have negative booze.  Every single drop of booze is in a barrel that someone is drinking from.  The next dwarf can't drink until the current dwarf sets down the barrel.  You're in a booze deficit.  Every drop you produce helps alleviate that, but you have a long way to go to get back into the black.

My reading is that I need way, way more farming, and that I'm missing something with hunt/fish.

You don't need more tiles of farmland.  You might need more farmers, or more brewers, or more barrels, or a more efficient workflow among stockpiles and workshops.

I wonder about planting outside, too?

Once you have some above-ground seeds, sure.  Diversifying crops is great, and above-ground plants give you a lot of new brewables.

Workshops - Is it one dwarf per workshop?  I don't remember seeing that, but might explain the long queues.

Only one dwarf can work in a workshop at a time.  Multiple haulers can take stuff out of a workshop though.

Another note on herbalists (gather plants) -- above-ground gathering is really inefficient (though it may be necessary to bootstrap your farming in many cases).  Most above-ground shrubs yield nothing regardless of your herbalists' skill.

On the other hand, underground shrubs don't have that problem.  They almost always produce plants when gathered.  So, having a bunch of underground soil tiles (or muddied stone) and then piercing and resealing a cavern to produce spores, can give you a continual source of "free" plants to be gathered in addition to your farms.

[urmane]

Ah, I may have discovered the issue - nothing actually getting planted.

I turned on planting for almost everyone (~45), and I see they visit every tile which then changes shape, but they do it very, very slowly.  I'm also guessing that when that "needs plump helmet" cancel comes up, that tile doesn't get planted - I've let it churn for almost two seasons without pause, and they've got maybe 30 tiles planted.  (OTOH, my armed squad fought off a weretapir, whatever that is :-)  )

The others I have hunting and fishing - now that I have a butcher and a fishery, meat/fish/plant are slowly rising, drinks at almost 80 ... but that's the whole crew working this full time.

I'm at the point where I'm considering starting over to build the fortress more efficiently.  Is this a common feeling for DFers?  ;-)

[Starver]

Yup, a common feeling.  Well, at least in this quarter, it is...

(Must.  Make.  It.  More.  Perfect.)
((Is.  That.  Akin.  To.  A.  Split.  Infinitive?))

[xeniorn]

Try not to restart, rather to modify your current fort as to achieve greater efficiency. During the lifetime of your fortress you'll run into several such obstacles, and while they can be solved by simply restarting and avoiding that next time, the true DF spirit is that you try to claw your way to success until the bitter end, or at least the sign of an inevitable end soon to happen, but too slowly for you to wait. That way you'll probably immerse yourself more into the game and enjoy it more, rather than it becoming "work" and constant strive to achieve a "perfect, clean game". It soon backfires and slams you into a wall with boredom.

[AndreaReina]

Does your grower have any other labors enabled? I have a single grower with no other labors turned on (3x15 field), that's enough for my fort of 90. A skilled grower increases efficiency, as does fertilizing the fields with potash.

[urmane]

Well, that was close.  Thank you to everyone that responded!!

I was down to zero, with waves of "Job cancelled: looking for vermin to eat".  I'm now up to 64 meat, 33 fish, 292 plant, 213 drink for 68 beards, and a wave of 28(!) immigrants just arrived (dwarf therapist running on linux, it's a lifesaver).  I do have some farm plots outside for the non-UG seeds, and will look at how to do a sun-roof-contained plot.  Silly me, I've just now found the barrels setting on the seed stockpiles :-)

The cavern appears to be sealed off, and the military is training up.  Steel weapons and armor all around, 6 soldiers so far, will expand to 11-ish for my new pop of 96.  New granite drawbridge is in place.  Actually got bedrooms assigned (accidentally read "free" in the tutorial and thought it meant hit 'f'ree, but that's not right).  Virtually all the workshops created, although placement sucks - great experience for next time :-)

Off to read up and tune stockpiles, and read up on military, prepare for inevitable attack, and how to exploit that cavern.  I'll put further questions in a new thread.

[wuphonsreach]

If you want to be efficient with stones, create a few quantum-minecart stockpiles near your major stairways.

Same effect in the end as stone dumping (everything in a single tile of space) but since you can assign wheelbarrows to the input stockpiles, it's a lot more efficient on the transport side.

Ideally, you place those stone stockpiles in a way that they can later be hooked up to the minecart track network for distribution to their final destinations.