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[Garun]

Hey guys... So I've been playing for about 3 days now after reading up on getting started and the basics... I knew I'd run into a situation that stumped me eventually, so here it is along with a few random questions I need help with.



So I have my entryway here with an outdoor area walled off to allow for outdoor crops. The last caravan came through, and I bought a ton of plump helmet seeds and other random seeds from them... and while I don't think that's related, it seems like ever since I did that my farmers have just stopped caring about the crops. I forgot to screenshot it, but a few seasons before this one, they let the entire field of plump helmets die and rot, they all ended up in the refuse pile. I seem to have more than enough food in storage, but I'm pretty sure they won't stop tending crops because of that. In the screenshot here you can see that they're just leaving crops sitting all over the fields. Not sure what I did wrong to cause all the farmers to stop caring. I am using Dwarf Therapist, I can see that they have the proper labor enabled, and they're not all in a party... just puzzling.

Secondly, Why is it that idlers don't do even the low priority jobs like hauling those goblin corpses or cleaning? Is it because that's considered out of my fortress, so they ignore it?

Next, HOW DO YOU STOP THEM HAVING SO MANY BABIES?!??! I'm at 84 dwarves and 15 of those are babies! That's already almost 1/4. I have a ton of idlers at times, is that why?! They just sit around and bang all day... I'm asking because I don't want to have some crazy dwarf charge into battle carrying a baby, and I've already gotten one stolen by a child snatcher. Want to avoid that.

Lastly, if I forbid rock nut seeds in the stocks menu, they should just continue to build up until I have plenty, right? I want to use them to make soap, but they keep getting used and I hadn't thought of trying this until now.

Any advice is appreciated. I feel like I'm doing pretty well for my first fort, but I still keep finding things that puzzle me.

[Telgin]

Are your plant stockpiles full?  That will prevent harvesting of more plump helmets and leading to them withering.  Nothing else will directly cause them to be ignored that I'm aware of.

Your screenshot is broken, but are the goblin bodies outside?  By default, corpses outside your fort won't be touched, I believe.  Check the orders menu ('o' key) and set refuse to be gathered from outside.  You may have to manually dump the bodies still, I don't recall.

To limit babies, you can set a child cap in your init file.  It won't stop current pregnancies or reduce the number of existing kids, but will keep more from being conceived once you lower the number.  You're actually fairly lucky, some people have like 30+ kids at that population!

Forbidding rock nut seeds will prevent anything from happening related to them, including stockpiling them.  That will definitely prevent them from being used up in food, but you can also disable cooking them from kitchen menu.  That should at least keep them around long enough for you to press some oil from them.

[Garun]

Sorry, I should have just put the normal link. Here's the screenshot: http://imgur.com/n9EHxsw

[Garath]

My own reply would be exactly the same as Telgins, so just do as he says 

[Garun]

My own reply would be exactly the same as Telgins, so just do as he says 

lol... uhhhh... well it's very odd that you bothered to write this, but thank you, I have listened to his advice.

Telgin: My plant stockpiles are definitely not full. If by plant stockpile you mean my general food stockpile. Here's a current screenshot of it: http://i.imgur.com/ZNwJoSF.jpg
As an update, they are back to using the farm like normal, but now, as you can see here, they've taken all the plump helmet spawn and thrown it all over the stockpile. I have tons of empty barrels one floor down in my furniture storage, as well as stone pots and things, but they don't seem concerned with that. No idea...

Thanks for the reminder about the orders menu, I set them to gather refuse from outside and they cleaned up those bodies. I also edited my d_init.txt and set children caps. I just set it to something I felt was more reasonable. It was set to 100 before. Still trying to figure out a suitable solution for saving rock nuts. But until then I have resorted to crafting lye to make soap with.

[Garath]

well, sometimes someone is completely convinced he is right in an answer but then finds out he is wrong (and sometimes that someone is me), so it pays to have a second opinion

dwarfs take some time to get barrels and all the thing sorted out. It might have been the spawn issue, since the spawns are treated somewhat differently. You'll need bags for the plump helmet spawns. Only 2 bags to hold the maximum of 200, but if you have no free bags (the others are full with rock nut leaves, whatever they were called again?) they'll be stored on the stockpile, keeping it completely full and forcing your farmers to leave the grown crops to rot on your fields. After they were rotting away, they can take the seeds again, the stockpile will clean up, etc, until the next time it overflows with the spawns. That might not be what happened, but it's a good guess I think.

An important first step is to have enough bags, another important step is to seperate stockpiles. Having one seed stockpile, one for harvested plants, one for prepared meals and one for cookable/edible meat and fish, one for tallow (for soap instead of the oil, you always need lye anyway) and so on and so on. It helps overproduction or poor management to stop the rest of your works. Similarly, giving cloth and such their own stockpile just makes it easier to keep an overview of the running of your fort without having to scrutinize every stockpile closely or spending a lot of time in the stocks screen

for seed stockpiles: you need 2 bags and the space for it per crop you plan on growing, don't use barrels for it, that is more efficient

[Tinyheavyistiny]

You need to make sure that you have enough space and barrels to store all the food and seeds, also make sure that the stockpile is designated a lot of barrels

I don't know what to do with the idlers besides double check that they can access the stuff they need to access and have all the proper labors activated. In terms of babies you could just get the Lazy Newb Pack and use that since it allows you to limit the number of babies and dwarves you can have in your fortress.

[Xinael]

Lazy Newb Pack isn't special in allowing you to set the baby numbers - it's an option in d_init.txt, which controls a bunch of things. The "baby cap" is set by default to 1000% of your population or 100, whichever is the lower, so the cap is 70 when you start then 100 when you have 10 or more dwarves. This is absurdly high. Try setting it to 5% and 10 or something.

With regard to your seed and plump helmet problems, this is almost certainly a stockpiling issue. You ideally want at least two food stockpiles - one that accepts barrels and all food but seeds, and one that accepts only seeds, with 0 barrels set. You'll see all your seed bags in the second stockpile and can see what's going on with them - I'd imagine some dwarf has run off with the plump helmet spawn bag and is filling it up very slowly.

[Garath]

the LNP isn't required for changing pop_cap, child_cap, aquifers and various other settings and parameters, it just makes it a bit easier for the lazy newbie 

[Garun]

Well I guess it's good that I'm not a lazy newbie then, I didn't need the LNP. Edited my d_init.txt and set limits on the babies.

As for the farming issue, I'm still not 100% sure what caused it, but I tried what you guys suggested and split my giant general food stockpile into 3, one for plants/seeds only, one for drinks only, and one for everything else. Things worked themselves out, seeds got where they were supposed to and my farms started running again.

For a pretty anticlimactic ending... I ended up trying to experiment with a screw pump for the first time and pump water from a running river into a pool in my hospital zone to make it closer and easier to access for the doctors and all other dwarves (I noticed once I got a lot of soap that they'd often want to bathe themselves). I built the pump on the edge of the river and put a water wheel next to it. Tried to dig a channel from the pump output all the way inside the fort to the pool I made... have to be more careful next time because I flooded the hell out of my fort and had to abandon it. Kinda sad, I had 157 dwarves, a solid military forming, and food/drink production was going smoothly. Lesson learned: make sure I'm careful with moving water next time.

Actually I have a question about it... what's the easiest way to move water horizontally? I read on the wiki about screw pumps, but it seems that their primary use is to raise liquids from lower Z levels. What if I wanna pump water from the left side of a map to my fort on the right side?

[Garath]

heh, funny, that's how I destroyed my first fort that survived the first few years too

The lesson is to make sure there's a gear assembly somewhere, hooked up to a lever, so you can turn the pump off. And make sure the lever is somewhere safe from flooding. Anyway, the best way to get water that far is a channel. Just dig through the last tile, preferably by channeling, or make sure there are some exits from the chanel for the last miner. Also don't forget to make some ways to close the whole thing, just in case you want to alter it and need it to be empty

[Garun]

Yeah, I feel ignant for forgetting I could hook it up to a lever.

I have a new problem... I want to build wheelbarrows to help haul all the loose stone in my fort, but wheelbarrows are NOWHERE to be found on any build menu. The Wiki lists them as being built from a Carpenter or a Metalsmith, both of which do not have an option for building them. I looked into my item_tool.txt raw and found that the entries for both minecart and wheelbarrow were missing. I found a somewhat similar issue that listed the tileset as the culprit for missing items, although this does't make sense to me...

Would anyone know what I should do? I guess I could just add the entries back into the raw, right? I'm using this tileset: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7373

[Trif]

Um, that's pretty weird. I just checked the graphic set and the raw entries are in the download, right at the bottom of item_tool.txt . You could add the entries, but I'd recommend downloading it again in case more stuff went missing for some reason.
Your saves are in /data/save/ , you can copy them over. You might have to generate a new world to make the tools appear, though.

[Garun]

No, you're right... they're at the bottom... I don't know how I missed it earlier. So that just means that I still can't build them in my workshops. Very confusing.

I downloaded a vanilla 0.34.11, embarked, and sure enough there is a wheelbarrow in my starting tools. I also built a Carpenter shop and both items can be built from the list.

So what the hell? Somehow the tileset has caused this.

[Trif]

Hmm, maybe they're just not displayed in the list? If you scroll to the point where they're supposed to be, can you select them even if they're not visible?