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[Socran]

I'm not sure exactly how long I've been gone, but I remember the last big change that occured just as I left was the implimentation of Burrows - which means that even if literally nothing else has changed, it's different enough now that I'd need to relearn a lot to be able to function. But I'm sure other things HAVE changed, and in addition to needing to know what I'll need to learn/relearn, I'm also curious exactly what new features are in the game. My only other options are to run into the game blind, look through ages and ages of very specific patch notes when just looking for highlights, or read through a list that also includes everything about the game I already know.

So...  What's been happening?  I heard, shortly after I left, something about large amounts of "spooky stuff" being implimented, like dwarves becoming weregoats and a bugged vampire history generator that had him driven out of his own tower by his zombie minions (the way he's supposed to be driven out of town by the citizens).

[Togre]

I think you've been gone longer than I've played.  I'll try to give you some things I think will be new.  This is in no way a complete list.

1) Undead.  If you are in a evil/reanimating biom, corpses, body parts, skin, hair, etc. will come to life, even in your fort.  If you are near a necro's tower you may get invasions from necro's who can raise to life the same (I think they use line of sight, but I'm not sure).  Undead are moderately tough on their own.  The real danger is numbers, their ability to appear in the midst of your civilians (butcher shop) and the likelihood that they will rise again after you clobber them.

2)Vampires.  These guys come to your fort disguised as dwarfs in your migrant waves.  They don't need food or drink, are incredibly strong and heal quickly.  They can be a boon (great warriors, immortal walled in bookkeeper) or a bane.  They like to drink the blood of sleeping dwarfs and often kill them doing so.  You don't know if you have a vampire or who it is, until you get a witness (or use some of the mentioned techniques to find clues in his behavior or description).   They can cause fortresses to fall through tantrum spirals if they kill popular people.

3) Wheelbarrows.  You can assign up to 3 wheelbarrows to each stockpile.  They make hauling heavy objects quicker.  However they limit the number of hauling tasks per stockpile.  I set most piles to 0.  I think there have been some other major hauling changes.  Bins are carried to pick up items and store them.

Those are a completely incomplete list of things that have changed in my recollection.

If I were you, I might track down the change log of the major versions updates and read them.  Or just pretend your beginning again walk through a tutorial or something.

Welcome back and enjoy!

[Veylon]

Stockpiles can be linked to one another so that things are taken from one to the other. So that, say, there's a pile for metal bars and a smaller, more specific one for gold bars that takes as needed from the first.

Minecarts! Have been added. You can build/engrave tracks for them to run on so that items can be gathered from one stockpiled, pushed/guided/ridden hurtling through your fortress and dump their stuff off at certain points (violently) or stopped and manually unloaded. Creatures in the way are injured or killed. They can also fill up with water or magma when submerged. There is also includes machinery to speed up the minecarts. Given the stockpile updates and wheelbarrows, they're more FUN than useful.

[JAFANZ]

Minecarts are very useful if you like Quantum Stockpiles without micromanagement (design advice is on the wiki).

[Andrakon]

I take it you have been gone for over 2 years. Welcome back! XD

Evil biomes have a chance to have horrible weather. You can get strange clouds that have random syndromes and anything that gets caught in them can get very ill, or turned into some sort of husk, much much worse than regular undead. You can also have strange rain with random syndromes but are usually much more benign, for instance rotten mucus that covers the map. Anything that gets rained on could be knocked out, get horrible blisters, have excruciating pain, or all of these and more. Also sometimes you can find an area where it rains elf blood!

Clothing has finally been implemented properly, mostly, and you have to cloth your dwarves or they have very bad thoughts about being naked. The clothes wear out over time and will eventually rot clear off if you don't have replacements in time. I think clothing may have been in the game properly long ago but it was disabled or something for a long time.

If you embark in an area where it says there is a tower as a neighbor you can get necromancers to invade. Sometimes they just send their undead army after you though. Usually the necromancer is hidden and sneaky so you may not see them even if they do come on the map. However I find yearly invasions of 60-80 zombies to be quite fun. They currently work on a hitpoint system so they are not too hard to take care of. However if you are in a region that automatically raises corpses and you have a zombie invasion then you can easily be overwhelmed. Undead are raised weekly in these areas. When towers and undead invasions first came out I embarked between 3 of them. I yearly had invasions of over 120 undead and the necromancers would keep raising all the corpses even as I was killing them. And all the heads and arms and hands kept coming back to life too. I ended up succumbing to FPS death due to over a thousand undead bodyparts crawling around on the surface. Things have been made easier to deal with since then though.

There have also been large advances in dwarven !!Science!! I don't know what was around when you last played but I recommend looking up pump stacks, lava pistons, and ways to move lava with minecarts. I also do not know if pressure plates are a newer thing or not. But there are new ways to make timers and signal clocks with minecarts. And someone even made a calendar with a were-creature that tells you what month it is when the full moon comes.

There were a huge number of new creatures added about a year ago. So enjoy the variety! And there have been large changes in animal training. You can catch wild animals and train them, eventually making their offspring into fully tame domestic creatures.

If your trade depot has wagon access you can get wagons to come with the trade caravans. These allow for extra weight to be carried so you can sell them a ton of gold statues or elephants and they won't easily hit their max carrying capacity. They will also bring a lot more stuff to trade with you. And if you have been gone a REALLY long time, the dwarven economy is disabled, and the king is attracted to your fort through your forts wealth, how much you have traded, and how much you have given to the mountain home through tribute. They used to come when you first find "candy".

A lot of the old bugs were squashed, we now have all new bugs! *trollface*

[Bihlbo]

Socran, it's been almost 4 years since you've posted on the forums, if that helps you pin down how long it's been.

[Socran]

So I looked into it, and it seems I last played shortly before or shortly after DF2010 was released. (I may have started a fort shortly after its release, but I know I've never made a burrow... Nor do I know how. Gonna have to look that up soon.) Then, apparently, I peeked in on the patch notes shortly before DF2012. I thought I played a lot more recently, and saw the notes much sooner after I stopped, but in retrospect that makes sense. Major updates in this game take a loooong time, so Toady wouldn't have had night creatures so far along right after the burrow update.  Still, three friggin' years...

Minecarts sound fun... And the stockpile thing should come in handy, as I'm still having trouble getting the empty barrels out of my main pile and into my brewer's pile. Even relearning the things I already knew seems to be taking just as long as it did the first time.

So do vampires only show up in evil biomes, or can that happen anywhere? And what about werethings? I never did understand how they were planned to work. Although I suppose I can just look them up at this point...

Socran, it's been almost 4 years since you've posted on the forums, if that helps you pin down how long it's been.

Well, I was never the most active forum member anyway. I actually never mastered the game to the point where I could discuss !!SCIENCE!! with people and know what I was talking about.  And without zany fun stuff, what is there to discuss?

...Oh, right!  So, have there been any changes to the physics that could interfere with my dream project? I planned to one day embark on top of a human village, dig out a large cavern underneath them, and use the materials to build a narrow tower leading up to an artificial sky fortress.  Then, upon its completion, I would destroy the tower, causing the fortress to plummet onto the unsuspecting humans below, causing the caverns underneath to collapse and leave nothing but a massive crater.

Sieg Zeon! http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/colony_drop.png

[EvilBob22]

One correction to an earlier post most evil biomes have reanimating dead, but not all.

Quantum stockpiling with minecarts is incredibly easy once you get one working.  As far as the hauling updates go, you can ignore that stuff while you re-learn the game.  Although assign three wheelbarrows to any stone stockpiles (make wheelbarrows in carpenter shops or forges) to help with the hauling.

Burrows primarily replace the inside vs. outside civilian restrictions (and work much better).  You can define exactly what tiles are safe, and send the civilians there when a siege comes.  They can also be used to define where the military goes (although guarding a specific spot is easier for a one-time thing).  And individual dwarves can be assigned to a burrow and they won't leave it unless absolutely necessary -- use with care, a master armorer set to stay in the forge won't build anything if the metal bars are outside of the burrow.

Vampires can show up anywhere, not just evil biomes.  And since they don't sleep, eat, or drink, they socialize more, becoming more popular, and often ending up as your mayor.

Werethings normally have a camp near your fortress (not in your embark, "near" on the world map).  They show up at the edge of the map in were form, but in my experience, they almost always have changed back to human (or elf, or dwarf, or whatever) before even getting close to any of your dwarves.  If you see one, send out the military, you might get him before he escapes.  (However, the forumite "Loud Whispers" has a long running fort with several werecivets in his military.)

I hate to burst your bubble, but it no longer lets you embark on top of existing settlements -- although I think there is a way around that with dfhack...

Channeling now automatically adds an up ramp in the lower level (unless the lower level is empty already).  It actually makes things much easier.  Also, rivers/lakes/ponds/etc have ramps at their sides, falling into one is no longer a death sentence.

Military has also undergone massive changes since you last played too, there is too much for one post, check out the wiki for that.

Every embark now has magma, there is a magma sea deep in the earth.  There are also three cavern layers that have special mushrooms trees, and new underground creatures, mostly hostile.  Each cavern is a little more dangerous than the one before, but they aren't TOO bad.  They do open you up to Forgotten Beasts though: procedurally generated semi-megabeasts that range from "an unarmed child can kill it" to "a legendary military is likely to lose to it".

I'm sure I missed something, but that is all I have for now.  Enjoy!

[Socran]

I hate to burst your bubble, but it no longer lets you embark on top of existing settlements -- although I think there is a way around that with dfhack...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOnHrjCx2bU

Well, I was never gonna be able to pull it off anyway. My most advanced dwarven engineering construct was a Dwarven Atom Smasher.  By which I mean, I built a bridge and connected a lever to it.

When I pulled the lever, it opened the goblin cages.

i are not siuntist


I seem to have already tunneled into the new cavern layer in my latest fortress, though.  While trying to make the bedrooms, at that.  I haven't established a military yet, but all of those gem-encrusted walls are so tempting...

[Cuddles]

I hate to burst your bubble, but it no longer lets you embark on top of existing settlements -- although I think there is a way around that with dfhack...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOnHrjCx2bU

Well, I was never gonna be able to pull it off anyway. My most advanced dwarven engineering construct was a Dwarven Atom Smasher.  By which I mean, I built a bridge and connected a lever to it.

When I pulled the lever, it opened the goblin cages.

i are not siuntist


I seem to have already tunneled into the new cavern layer in my latest fortress, though.  While trying to make the bedrooms, at that.  I haven't established a military yet, but all of those gem-encrusted walls are so tempting...

I find that business with bedroom creation leading to cavern discovery happens a lot to me.
Don't fall for the trap. Going for significant abstract wealth (gems, crafts, etc.) before a good military is a great way to lose a fort to a tantrum spiral after the gobbo siege hits.

[Socran]

I find that business with bedroom creation leading to cavern discovery happens a lot to me.
Don't fall for the trap. Going for significant abstract wealth (gems, crafts, etc.) before a good military is a great way to lose a fort to a tantrum spiral after the gobbo siege hits.

Goblins?  Ha! The jokes on them when they invade my fortress only to find that it's been demolished by this cave troll.

...Or at least it will be, once he realizes that he's capable of destroying doors, and stops just sitting there on the other side of the only thing seperating my fortress from the cavern of death. There's not even room to build a wall.

[Socran]

Goblins?  Ha! The jokes on them when they invade my fortress only to find that it's been demolished by this cave troll.

...Or at least it will be, once he realizes that he's capable of destroying doors, and stops just sitting there on the other side of the only thing seperating my fortress from the cavern of death. There's not even room to build a wall.

Urist McDwarf cancels store item in stockpile: interrupted by Forgotten Beast.

Ahh!  Ahhhhhh!  I still haven't figured out how to get my militia working!  The only thing standing between my fortress and certain death is a troll who's blocking the hallway and hasn't figured out that he can break down this--

Urist McDwarf cancels drink: interrupted by Troll.

I DON'T LIKE THIS UPDATE.

Urist McDwarf has been struck down.

Quick! Seal away the lower levels!  Salvage what we can!  Oh Armok he made it into the bedrooms!  He...  Where did he go?

Spothreb's lower body snow

Did he ****ing MELT!?

[A_S00]

Forgotten Beasts made of squishy things like snow aren't terribly durable.  Like, die to baby-punches not durable.

[Socran]

Yeah, it seems the troll did most of the damage in that incident. But now that it's gone, I can wall up that hallway and get back to normal dwarven life.

Urist McDwarf Jr. cancels drink: interrupted by Forgotten Beast.

Oh, for the love of...  Everybody stop panicking! It's just a giant tick sitting around at the bottom of that cave we just finished sealing off.

5 dwarves have died from poison vapors.

What.  Oh god...  Is this because of that Up/Down staircase hanging above the cavern? Is he seriously shooting gas at my dwarves from five Z-levels down, through a staircase?  And... are they shooting back?  Haha, they killed it!  Take that, giant tick!

Well, it was a rough time, but I've fluked my way to victory against two forgotten beasts, and I hadn't even set up my military yet. I think this group is destined for greatness.

An ambush! Curse them!

[Cuddles]

Most forgotten beasts and titans aren't that scary.
Unless they are made of metal or something equally difficult to destroy AND have a syndrome or something, they can be taken out reasonably quickly.