Print

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

[itg]

How are you getting dwarves into the dusting room?

I just assign them to pull a lever. The beast is stuck in a 1x2 enclosure behind fortifications. I use bridges to block line of sight while I get the dwarves into position. Edit: It just occurred to me, I might have built the lever in the dust chamber right after uploading the save. Hope I didn't cause any confusion.

Interestingly, it's surprising nobody's thought to go the modding route for a reliable source of blindness. It's not hard to make an interaction with the tag that lets you enable it in arena mode, similar to how you spawn vamps/werecreatures/undead/necromancers/whatever, and make it blind creatures with laser precision. For bonus points, since you'd have to use a syndrome granted by interaction anyways, you could slap the syndrome onto a plant and give it [SYN_INGESTED] for fort/adv mode testing outside of arena.

But grats on the catch, dude.

That's a good idea, and I'd encourage you or anyone else to try it and post your results in this thread, especially for combat things that are more easily tested in arena mode than fortress mode. I don't have the modding skills, myself, and of course I've already got a source of blindness.

[itg]

Here's the results of another quick experiment:

Masonry

Subject:

Udil Lertethfath (again)

Relevant Skills

Legendary mason

Procedure

The subject (who had healed since his last experiment) was ordered to construct 100 piece of furniture: 20 statues, 20 thrones, 20 tables, 20 weapon stands, 20 armor racks. He was re-blinded then ordered to repeat the experiment.

Results

There was no point in counting quality levels this time. Every single piece of furniture Udil created while blind was created at minimum quality. He was slow, too, about the speed of a dabbling mason. Literally ANY dwarf with at least one functioning eye is a better mason than a legendary blind mason. I have to admit, this came as a surprise to me after the blind engraver (same dwarf, in fact) performed moderately well, producing plenty of masterpieces.

[Edmus]

Interesting results, posting to watch.

[itg]

Carpentry

Subject:

Aban Niraltulon

Relevant Skills:

Legendary Carpenter

Procedure:

In light of the masonry results, I did the blind test first, building 10 cages, 10 shields, 10 beds, 10 spiked balls, 10 minecarts, and 10 training axes.

Results:

The results were the same as in the masonry experiment. The blind carpenter builds all items at minimum quality and very slowly, probably at the slowest possible speed, though I'm not sure how to determine that conclusively. Even a legendary blind carpenter is the worst carpenter possible.




Hunting

Subjects:

Momuz Zulbannol, hunter
Urdim Mengegen, not hunter
Shorast Gikendatan, sort of hunter

Skills

Momuz:

Great Marksdwarf/Archer
Accomplished Ambusher
Novice Hammerdwarf
Adequate Fighter

Urdim:

No relevant skills

Shorast:

Adequate Marksdwarf/Archer
Adequate Ambusher
Novice Fighter
Novice Wrestler

Procedure:

Hunting kind of has to happen organically, so I blinded the subjects and followed them as they attempted to hunt, recording observations.

Results:

Hunt 1, Momuz: The hunter began sneaking in the direction of a dingo, but the dingo was accidentally killed by some nearby soldiers. He returned the kill as if he had killed it himself.

Hunt 2, Momuz: The soldiers killed another dingo and Momuz returned it, despite being nowhere nearby.

Hunt 3, Momuz: The hunter approached his quarry (an opossum), but as he got close he seemed to wander off in the wrong direction. It soon became clear that he was periodically divining the animal's location somehow (I'm betting on beardsense), then heading to that point without correcting for the animal's wandering. It's actually a pretty reliable method of finding the prey, if a little inefficient. Upon reaching the animal, the hunter would pause briefly, then the opossum would run away. I couldn't see any shot fired and there was nothing in the combat logs, but after a while the hunter ran out of ammo. On his way to get more ammo, the hunter stumbled into the opossum and bashed it to death with his crossbow. However, I checked his health soon after, and his blindness had worn off, so this unexpected display of competence probably doesn't count.

Hunt 4, Momuz, reblinded: He hunted a wombat this time. The hunt was identical except for the surprise bashing at the end. The wombat got away.

Hunt 5, Urdim: Hunted a dingo, using the same tracking process as Momuz. However, when he entered the dingo's square, the dingo stayed and fought. Urdim never dodged, blocked, or fought back, although there's the possibility he was firing his crossbow and missing as the last hunter seemed to do. He was able to counterstrike, though. Urdim regained his sight (Combat may trigger this, somehow. Too many dwarfs have suddenly regained their sight right after being attacked), ran for a few steps, then shot and killed the dingo. Then he promptly died in a drawbridge accident.

Hunt 6, Shorast: The hunt was identical to Urdim's.

Conclusion:

In short, blind hunters will eventually find their prey, but they are very, very bad at shooting it, regardless of combat/hunting skills. Their only hope of killing an animal seems to be to let it attack them and to try for a counterstrike. There is still the possibility that a hunter who is out of ammo will be able to bash his prey to death. More research is needed on that point.

[Foton]

Sorry for necroing, but I found recently that blind dwarves are excellent for recovering wounded. If they have some armor, then they can effectively haul wounded from battlefield before they got more injuries.

[Agent_Irons]

Oh I see, they don't know they're in danger so they don't run.
Hmm. Dwarfy.

[Lav]

Dwarfy.

Nothing's truly dwarfy until it's been weaponized to kill elves with magma.

[deepfreeze78]

Nothing's truly dwarfy until it's been weaponized to kill elves with magma.

Sigg'd