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[Lielac]

Some nice things in there - the hauling upgrades sound GREAT, for instance.

I did remember something about burrows, read the wiki on that, and it sounds nice.

Clothes - has the issue with owned items being immobile and cluttering up the universe been fixed?  Because that's what breaks clothes (and owning items in general) for me now: somebody owns an item, so I can't get rid of it in any sane fashion, but they won't come and take it to their room.  Item management once dwarves own something is a pain in 40d.

Enemies: I like playing a fort that gets no migrants and raising children to populate the place... but somewhere along the way over the years, something breaks the siege/ambush mechanic and nobody ever comes again (well, traders still do).  Anybody know if that bug is still around?

Doctor stuff: the early releases with this stuff sounded nightmarish, with all kinds of bugs and kinks.  Is that working reasonably now?  And will dwarves bath themselves now, or do you still have to make dwarf baths at the entrances to deal with contaminants?

Unkillable forgotten beasts have sounded really annoying all along, but I supposed putting up with a rare one of those wouldn't be too bad...

1. Hauling upgrades are SWEET. Except when a hauler drags off the barrel with all the seeds to pick up one seed somewhere else, and then you get spammed with cancel messages until he puts it back in the stockpile. I just don't allow barrels in my seed stockpile for that.

2. SO USEFUL.

3. I don't think so... DFHack does a lot of useful things, including a thing called cleanowned that confiscates and dumps dropped food, scattered items, worn clothes...

4. VerdantSF has a fort that's lasted nearly 100 years in the latest version, and I think he still gets invaders. Also I think it's always been possible to drive the goblins extinct, even before the "migrants-and-invaders-and-such are pulled from historical figures" update, which might be why you don't get any more invaders after a while.

5. They wash contaminants off themselves, but I think baths are still useful. At least they always wear shoes now so they don't get FB stuff in between their toes.

6. Bah. There's no such thing as unkillable when you drop a floor on someone's head. I can kill any building destroyer with an artifact table lure and a lever-linked support for a floor over the square the building destroyer has to stand to stare at the table.

[deoxy]

3. I don't think so... DFHack does a lot of useful things, including a thing called cleanowned that confiscates and dumps dropped food, scattered items, worn clothes...

Third-party hack the rescue.  Not saying that's a bad thing, necessarily, just annoying.  Having a third party hack is better than not.... like 40d doesn't.  So yay.

4. VerdantSF has a fort that's lasted nearly 100 years in the latest version, and I think he still gets invaders. Also I think it's always been possible to drive the goblins extinct, even before the "migrants-and-invaders-and-such are pulled from historical figures" update, which might be why you don't get any more invaders after a while.

No, this was a known bug in 40d - happens when you save at the wrong moment, when an invader is doing something that doesn't save right or something.  Basically, the current siege/ambush never ends, even though all the units have left.  It can happen even when the enemy units are still hidden, so.... yeah, it's annoying.

6. Bah. There's no such thing as unkillable when you drop a floor on someone's head. I can kill any building destroyer with an artifact table lure and a lever-linked support for a floor over the square the building destroyer has to stand to stare at the table.

Well, since you can use constructed stuff to do it, that's not TOO bad, but it doesn't really change my point.

On the whole, it's sounding pretty good, really... I'm tempted to upgrade.

[Sutremaine]

They like to drag important (and heavy, in the case of weapon bins,) stuff away from stockpiles in order to fetch a single item. You have to mess with stockpile links to work around it.

At least you have stockpile links...

Burrows are a thing too. They're like the 'dwarves stay inside' order, except you can specify where 'inside' is, how many 'insides' there are, and how many of them can have jobs taken within them. You can also assign dwarves to burrows, although this behaviour is overridden by the civilian alert that lets you limit everybody to a burrow or burrows.

Healthcare and the military have gotten a makeover too. Healthcare exists now -- if a miner breaks all their arms and legs in a cave-in, you can patch them up and send them on their way instead of waiting for the RNG to maybe decide that this season, one of those red injuries will become yellow. Healthcare will use water, soap, thread, cloth, crutches, and splints / bags of plaster. The first two of these are the most important. Make your wells more than one level of water deep, and make sure there's soap available. Soap cuts down on infections, and may help even outside the hospital (iirc, there's a 'cleanliness' value somewhere, and this is linked to infections). Protip: enable all the healthcare jobs on everybody, even if you do have dedicated nurses. Medical skill is like threshing or butchery skill -- it affects only the speed of the job. If your Chief Medical Dwaf has Novice or better Diagnostician skill, you get extra info in the Health screen.

The military is more complex, but also more flexible. Dwarves won't injure each other sparring unless they try wrestling moves on each other, so go ahead and give them adamantine battleaxes right from the start. Don't bother with the adamantine hammers though -- materials don't have damage and defence values any more, and adamantine's balsa-wood lightness makes it about as effective a hammer as actual balsa wood. Dwarves who reach Elite status can be taken out of the military and returned to civilian jobs, although there's an annoying bug that means their labour list gets cleared whenever they switch to being Elite soldiers.

As for the unkillable underground beasties, nothing can survive having a chunk of floor caved in on its head. For most of them though, that would be overkill. Manually-operated spikes or marksdwarves are enough for most FBs, but since FBs are big and can take a lot of punishment you need to control their movements. Even though you should assume that all FB syndromes are of the projectile Ebola variety, some of them are not so bad.

[foop]

Clothes have been mentioned, but I don't think anybody's touched on the absolute requirement for clothing.

No more happy naked dwarves.  Nakedness leads to lots of unhappy thoughts and tantrum spirals.   You have to get your clothing industry up and running before the clothes your dwarves arrived with wear away.

As a side-effect, this leads to lots of clothing churn and the necessity to deal with second-hand clothing.

[EvilBob22]

One thing I've noticed being ignored here is that "upgrade" does not mean the same thing for DF as most other applications.  DF is not installed, it is just unzipped into a folder somewhere.  So having two different versions of DF is as easy as unzipping one version to one folder and the other version to a different folder.  Then you can try the most recent version, but still have the 40d version available and untouched.

[deoxy]

One thing I've noticed being ignored here is that "upgrade" does not mean the same thing for DF as most other applications.  DF is not installed, it is just unzipped into a folder somewhere.  So having two different versions of DF is as easy as unzipping one version to one folder and the other version to a different folder.  Then you can try the most recent version, but still have the 40d version available and untouched.

When I I say "upgrade", I'm referring to my own knowledge and habits of commands, etc.  "Mental version change", if you prefer.

But here's another question: do liaisons COME WITH THE BLOODY CARAVAN now instead of showing up wherever to get killed crossing the map alone?  In an entirely unrelated question, do fortress liaisons get replaced now if they die?

[Knick]

The most annoying change that I have found is that of the military.  It is much more difficult to train up a powerful military, and the squad system is much more complex. 

[Sutremaine]

Fortress liaisons will get replaced if they die, which is quite likely. Guess why.

But at least they have a pair of guards now.

[Button]

Not only do fortress liaisons get replaced when they die, the liaisons are replaced every year regardless. If your mayor is near-mortally wounded or your liaison gets trapped somewhere and they don't make it off the map, you will still get a new fortress liaison.

Couple things I've seen nobody mention: nobles and animal training work completely differently from how they used to.

I'm not 100% sure which version was 40d, but the kennel is now mostly useless and animal trainers can tame most anything even at 0 skill. Skill affects how long it takes and how long the training "sticks." Even a semi-wild creature won't attack your trainer or anything else in the fort, with the exception of severely overcrowded beasties and also grazing animals, which have a bug where they all try to graze on the same tile and start fighting each other. (Only grazing animals need to eat.) Also, a few of the big grazers - elephants, rhinos, dralthas, giant moose, what have you - can't graze fast enough to survive and will die of starvation if you let them out of their cages. And elk bird hens will die of starvation while nesting, if they don't have owners to feed them.

Nobility is now limited to a few functional roles, plus the leader of your fort - the baron, who can get promoted to a count and then to a duke when your wealth is high enough - and the king. Both of these are optional. You can assign all of the nobles except the king; reassign all the nobles except the king and the baron/count/duke; and give other jobs to all nobles except the king. If you invite the king (by sending 5000 dorfbucks tribute to the mountainhome), you won't get any more caravans.