Print

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

[RocheLimit]

Trying this out in my current fort, and had a few questions.

How do you keep all your children fully clothed?  Do you have to constantly monitor the children for worn clothing?  Or do you manage it so they all wear out at the same time and replace them at the same time?

In the process of making 500+ training spears, my carpenter has created dozens of masterwork pieces.  Would you recommend using these masterwork pieces, or make more spears using a fresh carpenter?

In using a guest lecturer, and separating the students from him when the bells rings, do any children end up caught in traps (detention)?  I can see it getting tiring having to mechanically let them out (write hall passes) one at a time.  Though thinking about this more after I posted, he would be difficult to re-catch...

Final question:  I haven't been lucky enough to catch a bronze colossus, but I did just catch a humanoid-shaped FB made out of bronze.  Do you think he would be a better lecturer than a colossus, or would he give out too many injuries/deaths (suspensions/expulsions)?  Though I imagine it would be more difficult to end his sessions.

Thanks!

[Sanctume]

In my current attempt, I create 3 carpenter's workshop. 
2 are set for my higher level carpenter, using Profile, set Min to higher than Dabling or Novice.

1 is set to lower carpenter skills, Profile, Max is Dabling or Novice, set to make 10x Training Spear on Repeat.
The reason I give 10x build is so that the Manager don't put other job in it.
I give everyone carpenter skill, but only those with low skills get to make training spears.

Prior to making a QSP, I sold a bunch of higher quality of training spears :p

[Staalo]

RocheLimit:

Clothes don't actually wear out that quickly. The students will use the opportunity to get new clothes when I let them out every few months to do changes and/or cleanup in the classroom. All I have to do is to keep enough new clothes in the stockpile.

I tend to do the same as Sanctume does: the workshops producing wooden training spears/R have the maximum skill set to Adequate in the workshop profile screen and the whole population has Carpenter skill enabled. In truth the spear quality doesn't matter that much; protective clothing blocks ordinary and masterwork spears with equal ease.

Dwarves don't usually trigger traps except when they are unconscious or have broken legs from all the hard studying. I used to end lectures in Questmountain with a retracting bridge that dropped everyone to a roomful of cage traps; only two students got caught during the whole time, both beaten unconscious by Fimshel the bronze colossus.

I'd suppose the invulnerable FB would be a very good training partner as well, as long as it doesn't have any extra disciplinary measures like deadly dust or fire. All hostile beings are fit for guest lecturing, the only difference is how long they last. I'm planning to use undead in Moonpalace, once I get that far; I just hope they won't kill all my students right away.

[Skullsploder]

Even tiny undead are terrifying opponents, and will kill dwarves with ease. I'm talking reanimated chickens' feet here. And they will eventually get pulped and become permanently useless.... but I guess acquiring new reanimable corpses is no great issue for any healthy fort.

Just be careful, because my experience with undead is eiher that you curbstomp them or a single undead goblin kills 15 fully armoured soldiers.

PS do your kids just obey the burrow restrictions? I remember that mine in the previous version completely ignored them. If they don't, then hoe do you get them all in the daycare?

[Staalo]

I'm not planning to use anything more substantial than reanimated hair, at least in the beginning. Even then I'm going to use the strictest emergency flush protocols I can. We'll see how it comes down; those other children in some parallel dimension managed quite well against a bronze colossus, so why not zombie bits and pieces?

Now that you mentioned it, the children are keeping surprisingly well in their burrows. I'm now using .40.24; I think they weren't this well-behaved in the last version.

[Sadrice]

In the process of making 500+ training spears, my carpenter has created dozens of masterwork pieces.  Would you recommend using these masterwork pieces, or make more spears using a fresh carpenter?

Custom stockpiles are your friend in this case.  Make a stockpile that accepts only low quality training spears next to your training room, and set it to take from the main weapon pile (or wherever your training spears are being kept).  Since the building material screen does not show quality, but does show distance, this makes it easy to pick out the right spears: any that are close by will be low quality.  Just be careful if designating multiple spears per trap that the distance doesn't jump up.  In that case, switch to a different, closer spear material.

This same method can be used for bringing the good spears to the depot (or wherever you want them), sorting out troglodyte and troll cages and placing them near your live training center, sorting out low quality weapons and armor for sale or remelting, sorting out high quality furniture for your luxury suites, and all sorts of other handy things.

[Skullsploder]

Remind me, do dwarves only gain observer when watching sparring? Or do individual drills work too?

Regardless, might I suggest having an 8 room version of your current setup, Staalo, and implement  the swimming trainer from the other childcare thread in one of the extras (trains climbing somehow), and in another you have a communal barracks for the whole fort, particularly marksdwarves. Adjacent to this you can have a single tile room built with fortifications or, better, bars around it. That tile contains a pressure plate which holds up a bridge which keeps back a minecart which upon launching double-shotguns an undead creature into the 1 tile room. The whole process can be fully automated - no player interaction. At the same time or slightly sooner, another undead is deposited by the same mechanism into the children's dining hall. The military will aggro, and go after it, but not before the kids experience some first hand combat. The military cleans up when they arrive and the kiddies can get back to recovering. All this is timed off the first undead's death by marksdwarf, which is a fairly long timer. Shorter substitutes are available, but  the first UD dying is a solid indicator that there are miltary units nearby to clean up.

In terms of full automation, you need to keep a stockpile stocked with undead in cages. Best way to do this would be to set up a minecart QSP set to take corpses and refuse and dump them down a hole. In view of the bottom of the hole sits a necromancer behind fortifications and glass windows (in case a building destroyer part gets chucked down). At right angles to the necro's little chamber is the trap corridor, filled with dozens of cage traps followed by a decent amount of weapon traps to get rid of excess undead.

Thus you have an undead producing factory feeding slowly into the daycare.

If you want less threatening undead you might want to have another necro sitting at the top of the chute 1z below the minecart itself and on the same side. This way he will see the stuff only once it gets thrown down and reanimate it as it falls past. If you make the fall 30z levels, the undead will explode on impact and give you nice small bits to work with. Alternatively, just drop cavies down the chute to be reanimated, or set the refuse pile to only take hair. Your choice.

I know you have no problem with micromanagement but if this factory works it would be an excelent step towards this being practical for everydwarf.

[Sanctume]

Remind me, do dwarves only gain observer when watching sparring? Or do individual drills work too?

Regardless, might I suggest having an 8 room version of your current setup, Staalo, and implement  the swimming trainer from the other childcare thread in one of the extras (trains climbing somehow), and in another you have a communal barracks for the whole fort, particularly marksdwarves. Adjacent to this you can have a single tile room built with fortifications or, better, bars around it. That tile contains a pressure plate which holds up a bridge which keeps back a minecart which upon launching double-shotguns an undead creature into the 1 tile room. The whole process can be fully automated - no player interaction. At the same time or slightly sooner, another undead is deposited by the same mechanism into the children's dining hall. The military will aggro, and go after it, but not before the kids experience some first hand combat. The military cleans up when they arrive and the kiddies can get back to recovering. All this is timed off the first undead's death by marksdwarf, which is a fairly long timer. Shorter substitutes are available, but  the first UD dying is a solid indicator that there are miltary units nearby to clean up.

In terms of full automation, you need to keep a stockpile stocked with undead in cages. Best way to do this would be to set up a minecart QSP set to take corpses and refuse and dump them down a hole. In view of the bottom of the hole sits a necromancer behind fortifications and glass windows (in case a building destroyer part gets chucked down). At right angles to the necro's little chamber is the trap corridor, filled with dozens of cage traps followed by a decent amount of weapon traps to get rid of excess undead.

Thus you have an undead producing factory feeding slowly into the daycare.

If you want less threatening undead you might want to have another necro sitting at the top of the chute 1z below the minecart itself and on the same side. This way he will see the stuff only once it gets thrown down and reanimate it as it falls past. If you make the fall 30z levels, the undead will explode on impact and give you nice small bits to work with. Alternatively, just drop cavies down the chute to be reanimated, or set the refuse pile to only take hair. Your choice.

I know you have no problem with micromanagement but if this factory works it would be an excelent step towards this being practical for everydwarf.

Nice.  I kinda like the dropping live animals from 30z to get exploded bits for the necro to animate. 

I was thinking for an evil biome, sheering sheep wool, disable auto loom, should yield re-animated sheep wool.
Set cage traps around the Farmer's Workshop next to a small stock pile. In time, you should have plenty of caged undead-sheep-wool that you can pit down to the day care.

[Max™]

In the process of making 500+ training spears, my carpenter has created dozens of masterwork pieces.  Would you recommend using these masterwork pieces, or make more spears using a fresh carpenter?

Custom stockpiles are your friend in this case.  Make a stockpile that accepts only low quality training spears next to your training room, and set it to take from the main weapon pile (or wherever your training spears are being kept).  Since the building material screen does not show quality, but does show distance, this makes it easy to pick out the right spears: any that are close by will be low quality.  Just be careful if designating multiple spears per trap that the distance doesn't jump up.  In that case, switch to a different, closer spear material.

>.>

Hit x.

[Sadrice]

Huh, I'm an idiot.  Over the years I have perfected the art of custom stockpiling for quality management, not realizing it's a built in feature.

[Max™]

I know that feel yo.

[Staalo]

After one month of hard studying in the Basic Training Room most of the students are now Competent at Dodge and Armor user. On average they have amassed 2200xp in each skill; this should mean that they will reach Legendary in only about eight months. Very efficient.
 
The first month also brought the school's first accident: three year old Udib Cobaltduty decided to discard his old shoe and was immediately rewarded with a mangled left foot. There was only a minimal interruption to lectures and Udib was quickly carried to school's small hospital facility. He'll be back training when he's rested a bit.

This all is of course old news but I was bit surprised about the training speed of this modified design. When all students have gotten their grades in Dodge and Armor user I can finally move on to the interesting part: arena combat with undead horrors.

[Max™]

So uh, it seems relevant here, and there is a bit of extra footwork (literally) involved, but should any of you happen across a fortress member who has a kidnapped relative at a fortress you can find, temp retire your fort and go find said fortress and every kid in the joint (well, the dorf kids >.>) and bring them back, once the related kid is reunited with your fort member they should be so happy that if you ask them to adopt the rest... they will.

Oh, as for the x: expand/contract bit, I only discovered what it did because I figured it was used to change the size of the weapon traps I was building, only to discover it let me select which ones I wanted to use.

[Pwned dwarf]

Idea for improvement, when wearing leather clothes you can also train armor user, so get those kids leather clothes instead of other clothes, leather clothes are also more protective than plant or silk (i think) and will help kids survive.

[Sanctume]

Staalo, I've been hit with a "gen a new world, embark on a new self-challenge" so this leads me to thinking about the Dwarven Child Care (DCC). 

My question is, what do you setup first in regards to child?
I am just trying to pin down a general to do list in preparation to starting the DCC.

In a new embark, I could maybe expect 1 to 4 kids in the first migrant wave, but I usually have not unfinished pre-requisites done by the end of the 1st year. 

Anyway, let me just start listing my "to do.

Basic Needs
1. Food
- A founding Herbalist can do this job solo, limitation: security from evil biomes.
- Evil biomes, embark with seeds and Grower instead. 
2. Shelter
- Aside from the beginning dig, Bedrooms or Dorms or just having beds.
- Evil biomes, a hatch is enough to prevent anything from entering the fort from below.
3. Clothing
- Initial clothing that comes with every migrant is enough to begin with, and not so much as a concern until after year 2.

Basic Support for all Fortress
1. Food
- Food Containers
- A thought out Stockpiles planning and distribution is well worth the time of setting up.
2. Shelter
- At least 1 coffer added when making individual bedrooms with worth doing along the way, but not a priority.
3. Clothing
- Highly dependent on where the source of the cloth will be.
- GCS silk farm would be nice.
- Growing Rope Reed and/or Pig Tails can handle the demands.
- Yarn from pastured wool-animals seems too much work (I don't use workflow plug-in). 
- Maybe after year 2 when a nice indoor pasture is growing moss from discovering a cavern.

- Worth investing on 3 turkey hens + 2 turkey gobblers, then saving fertilized egg, caging the poults after.
- I was able to get 10-14 fertilized egg per hen, but sometimes i get Not Fert batches.
- Poults take 2 game years to mature, and I need mature turkeys to slaughter and get turkey leather consistently.


Intermediate Needs for DCC
1. Water Source
- I try to get at least a cistern, with drainable option done before winter in cases the water source above would freeze.
- Aquifer in the embark make this a non-issue after successfully breaching the aquifer.

2. Danger Room Materials
- The amount of wood depends on how large of upright training spears (uts) will be cover.
- The amount of uts is less initially if only covering the 1-tile dodge path.

3. Hospital
- Minimalist: 1 bed, 1 traction bed (bed + rope), 1 table, 1 container, 1 bucket, 1 splint and 1 crutch.
- Minimalist: 1 soap (lye + rock nut embark), 5 thread, 3 cloth, 3-5 gypsum powder (embark)

I think these are all doable within 2 years, before year 3.