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[Paragon99]

I was just wondering how much oversight most players give their kingdom... does anyone have a system well enough defined that they can just leave the kingdom unattended for long periods of time? Currently, my games are paused 90% of the time but I'd like to get to a point where I could just let the dwarfs conduct their business unattended. I suppose there are still events that will auto pause (Is there a way to turn these off?) but even to be able to say, goto work or something and feel fairly confident you won't come back to a civ crumbled to dust would be cool.

[AwesomenessDog]

The goal is to make it so all mindless tasks (farming, producing coke and refining ores, etc.) are kept going using repeated tasks, while u can just order things you will not need continuously. Some events can have their pause effect removed with mods that only adjust specific effects in the coding, but they are generally there for a reason. Also if you don't get to see your dwarfs working, and the effects of said work, where is the fun?

[Melting Sky]

Aside for stock piling a mountain of food and booze and then completely locking down all entrances to the fortress and keeping the dwarves in some safe little prison type complex I don't think there would be anyway to just leave them running unattended for any long period of time without danger of  implosion. You would have crimes piling up that were going unpunished, you would have people dying of old age and becoming ghosts, clothes wearing out and dwarves going mad because of it. Eventually something would happen that would cause the fortress some serious harm. It would actually be kind of an interesting challenge to see who can have an unattended fort of over 100 dwarves for the longest period of time before collapse occurred.

You can automate a great deal of the more menial tasks in dwarf fortress but eventually even the safest and most limited of forts will need some sort of intervention from the player.

The more elaborate and awesome the fort, the harder it would be to leave it running on its own for any extended period of time. Without turtling up and walling the entire fortress off with all the entrances sealed, I think it would be next to impossible to leave a fortress unattended for hours. Eventually some particularly nasty threat would show up and the cascade of destruction would begin.

[Graknorke]

I think that the point where we get conditional manager orders is the time when automation becomes a lot more feasible. As it is your biggest threat is a repeated task cancelling because it's temporarily out of materials or something. Booze and barrel/bin production is the biggest deal here I think. Then that just leaves things like trading and expansion that can't be automated at all.

[Bwint]

Without turtling up and walling the entire fortress off with all the entrances sealed, I think it would be next to impossible to leave a fortress unattended for hours.

Depends on how low your framerate is. With a low enough framerate, you could keep your unattended fort going for days (both IRL and in-game  )

Military scheduling goes a long way toward automation. My goal for my current fort is to use patrol orders to eliminate the need for active military management (I'm thinking Marksdwarf burrows above the entrance to my depot access tunnel and patrol routes/defend burrows for my melee squads.) 10 steel-clad legends should be able to take care of most threats, and 4 squads should be sufficient to patrol the map effectively.

EDIT:

In my fortresses, ive been digging a large pit several layers deep. Over it is a 1 by 10 retracting bridge, a preasure pad, then another 1 by 10 retracting bridge.
Goblins run on, hit pad, bridges retract, and they all get to go swimming. Ive even devised a system using bridges and draining to retreave what they had on them, and i could even do so while more are being killed. My system is fully automate.
My only problem has been one goblin out of many who could cross the whole bridge before it retracted, that's why i now keep nasty creatures at the end in my fortress. Gotta love kingsnakes brutaly injecting poison into the hapless invaders while jaguirs rip them apart.

(From the Fortress defense thread.) Use magma instead of water, and you have an answer to just about everything.

Clothing management can be taken care of two ways: Put your civilian dwarves in a squad long enough for them to wear armor instead of clothes, OR make a farming complex that produces enough pig tails to keep a weaver/clothier busy indefinitely. Then you can use repeated "make clothing" orders to ensure a neverending supply of unworn clothing.

Some of the other issues might be solvable with DFHack scripting. I'm a little new to DFHack, but maybe you could write a script to bury deceased dwarves, punish criminals, and assign migrants to the military/burrows?

As for trading, a self-sufficient fort could just remove the trade depot.

It would actually be kind of an interesting challenge to see who can have an unattended fort of over 100 dwarves for the longest period of time before collapse occurred.

That challenge sounds awesome. I'm a bit new to the fora; If a thread for this challenge were started, should it be started in the Fortress board or a different board?

[GavJ]

Aside for stock piling a mountain of food and booze and then completely locking down all entrances to the fortress and keeping the dwarves in some safe little prison type complex I don't think there would be anyway to just leave them running unattended for any long period of time without danger of  implosion. You would have crimes piling up that were going unpunished, you would have people dying of old age and becoming ghosts, clothes wearing out and dwarves going mad because of it. Eventually something would happen that would cause the fortress some serious harm. It would actually be kind of an interesting challenge to see who can have an unattended fort of over 100 dwarves for the longest period of time before collapse occurred.

You can automate a great deal of the more menial tasks in dwarf fortress but eventually even the safest and most limited of forts will need some sort of intervention from the player.

The more elaborate and awesome the fort, the harder it would be to leave it running on its own for any extended period of time. Without turtling up and walling the entire fortress off with all the entrances sealed, I think it would be next to impossible to leave a fortress unattended for hours. Eventually some particularly nasty threat would show up and the cascade of destruction would begin.

I'm pretty sure the OP isn't referring to "long periods of time" as being like, 200 years or anything, such that old age coffin supply would actually be a serious concern. I don't think most of the rest of your concerns are necessarily problems, with the right kind of automation.

Crimes aren't that big of a deal if they go unpunished. There shouldn't be hardly any anyway. (Exception being vampires - you need to make sure you have none before lack of attendance)
Clothes can totally be automated. For example a timer based GCS webbing device, auto-looming, repeat clothes orders, and a clothing dump system that takes any unclaimed clothes (old or excess new!) and throws them into a pit to be atom smashed every few minutes to avoid lag but still keep the repeat orders going. As long as they linger in a stockpile somewhere for a bit before being dumped (minecart shenanigans work!), they will be claimed if needed.


"Not turtling up" changes things, but it's also a bit vaguely defined. For example, does it count as "turtling up" if I have a pressure plate activated door or trap system (perhaps an animal seeing things it is scared of and running to the back of a hall onto a plate = closed door)? Or what?

the devil will be in the details (details of the challenge specifics)

[slothen]

what you described can and has been done, but is most useful for megaproject construction where huge tasks can be designated all at once and the fortress is already experience very low FPS.

To assist there are fully automated, auto-reloading trap structures, or you can use automated axelord patrols.

[edgefigaro]

Older forts are generally more than competent to autorun for intermediate periods of time. I would regularly run forts semi afk and just look things over when a game autopause kicks in (migrants,FB,Titan,Ambush,Siege,Spring.)

[AwesomenessDog]

You would have crimes piling up that were going unpunished...

I've never had a problem with crime in some 20 year forts I haven't had any crimes whatsoever. In fact I have only ever had one crime and it was a guy who went berserk strangling a baby. Am I doing something right or wrong here?

[Thormgrim]

using things like autobutcher and workload management in DFHack, along with "Defend burrows" for a decent couple of militia squads and some autoreloading trap hallways in the outer areas, it's actually pretty straightforward to set up a self-running fortress.

usually i work in a mad dash to get to that point, let it run for a few hours with nopause enabled in dfhack and then get bored and abandon...

[GavJ]

You would have crimes piling up that were going unpunished...

I've never had a problem with crime in some 20 year forts I haven't had any crimes whatsoever. In fact I have only ever had one crime and it was a guy who went berserk strangling a baby. Am I doing something right or wrong here?

You're definitely doing something wrong. Only one strangled baby is WAY under quota.

And using DFHack seems pretty cheat-y for the thought experiment as proposed. I mean, if you're gonna use mods, you could just make them all [NO_EAT] [NO_DRINK] and leave them in a cave while the game runs for all eternity.  Yes, auto-butcher is far close to the less-moddy side of the spectrum. If it's just merely a practical question of fun vs. tedium, then absolutely I use scripts all the time.  But if you're looking at it from the perspective of "can it be done? And for how long" like a challenge, then I feel like you shouldn't use any non vanilla things at all, otherwise it sort of defeats the purpose of the whole question being asked in the first place. Anything can be done with scripts, yeah? Theoretically you could make a script that builds whole fortresses from scratch, etc.

[Swonnrr]

This is brainstorming about the main challenges
-Keeping the fort supplied
-Avoiding stockpiles overflow, especially of booze and worn items.

Biggest problems are food and clothing.

Best way i can find is:
-Set up farming on overkill.
-Food and booze production on repeat. If farming is sufficient, you won't have to restart the jobs.

-Actually you don't even need booze, a well is enough, although that could kill your efficiency. But to the circus efficiency.
Then it's just a problem of spamming plump helmets.

Clothing:
-either put everyone in an inactive squad and armor on replace clothing (lazy way)
-or same thing as food. Overflow  the production of cloth, and set make shirts, socks and pants on repeat.

On a note: There is some design of animal population control, with a repeater, a retractable bridge, a long fall and maybe spikes.

Then for overflow control, do the following:
Set up two stockpiles.
The first one gives to the second.
The second is linked to a minecart that throw it's content into a volcano every weeks.
That way, if the first pile is full, items will go in the first, be put in the minecart at the end of the week, and be eliminated via magma.

On deaths: You can build a thousand coffins, and wait for them to be needed.
The only threat would then to run out of workers, since newborns would not have any jobs assigned.

I think assigning a few jobs every hundred years is acceptable.

If you remove pause at events and don't open to the liaison, you will never be paused, never run out of food, clothes or dwarves, but never overflow either.
Of course any mathematician will tell you that it's only a matter of years before probabilites decide to have !!fun!! with you, but that would be like the DF equivalent of heat death of the universe.

[Melting Sky]

This guy is talking about leaving his fort running while he goes to work all day. We are talking multiple decades of in game time at a stretch.

[Swonnrr]

Well, if the fort can run for a hundred year, it can run for a couple, right?

Beside, it woudln't be Bay12 if we didn't come with ridiculously overkill solutions.
Last elephant problem i heard about was solved by annihilating all form of life on the surface of the planet.

[AwesomenessDog]

Well, if the fort can run for a hundred year, it can run for a couple, right?

Beside, it woudln't be Bay12 if we didn't come with ridiculously overkill solutions.
Last elephant problem i heard about was solved by annihilating all for of life on the surface of the planet.

We don't speak of that place anymore. They say her soul still haunts the place to this day...