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[Wumpi]

Year 8 and things are fairly stable. Most workshops are indoors, food is taken care of, housing for everyone, textile industries keeping everyone in fresh clothes.
I even sent out one of my dwarves to chop up some tall dwarves for their exotic animals, and now have a set of crappy wooden armor, a war grizzly, and a war gorilla.
Thinking of letting a wave of migrants in to get some better potential breeders. I have a feeling once I let one arrive, it will be like 60 dwarves.

Edit: It was 2 male dwarves. A furnace operator and a weaver.
edit 2: Second Migrant wave:

So a new arrival had his confiscated during cleanup, and I miscounted how many new pairs to make. He was naked while I let the season run and went on a rampage.


RIP in peace, Sak. RIP in peace, Ton.


I covered them in clay.

[Mimodo]

I'm already obsessively planning my little dwarven commune in excel.

Hmmm... I might try using excel to plan things, that sounds so much easier than grid paper :p

Year 8 and things are fairly stable. Most workshops are indoors, food is taken care of, housing for everyone, textile industries keeping everyone in fresh clothes.

Clothes is my only problem right now. I've got a solid leather industry going, but I just seem to suck at making sure everyone is well clothed. I never have enough to make it all at once, and keep losing track of it. I'll get there eventually.

I've almost managed to finish my outer wall now, so then it'll be onto making some clay huts for a future baby-making migrant wave. Then I'll upgrade the inner wall I think, and maybe even switch out my military dwarf and let another train

[Max™]

>.>

Assign a civilian uniform with a minimum of:
leather armor
leather leggings
leather high boot
leather high boot

Make sure you have enough for your dorfs, set it to replace clothing at least once to make sure they get the boots on right, then you can put it to over clothing and they should wear various other bits of clothing with the armor so they never end up naked.

Make sure to remove the supplies and unschedule all training so they don't end up turning into legendary wrestlers if that isn't what you're after, and they'll happily dorf around in their little leathery squad like a bunch of disturbingly hairy S&M fetishists... sorry about that last part.

[Mimodo]

Make sure to remove the supplies and unschedule all training so they don't end up turning into legendary wrestlers if that isn't what you're after, and they'll happily dorf around in their little leathery squad like a bunch of disturbingly hairy S&M fetishists... sorry about that last part.

Not something I want to picture, but what you do in your spare time is no business of mine. I tried that earlier but for some reason bits of armour weren't available when I tried to assign specific ones

[Insanegame27]

Add a moat.
Moats ALWAYS work...
except when they don't

[Mimodo]

Add a moat.
Moats ALWAYS work...
except when they don't

How likely am I to be able to fill it with water from murky pools? The idea has crossed my mind

[Max™]

Make sure to remove the supplies and unschedule all training so they don't end up turning into legendary wrestlers if that isn't what you're after, and they'll happily dorf around in their little leathery squad like a bunch of disturbingly hairy S&M fetishists... sorry about that last part.

Not something I want to picture, but what you do in your spare time is no business of mine. I tried that earlier but for some reason bits of armour weren't available when I tried to assign specific ones

See if you can locate them and set up a garbage dump by your armor stockpile, then designate them to be dumped and unforbid them, should show up to be available.

They won't need specific armor as long as you've got 4 leather armor bodies, 4 leggings, and 8 boots.

[Mimodo]

All it takes is for me to not be so lazy and actually bother setting something up, and all of a sudden, they're not complaining about their clothes rotting :p


Was a very productive day today. Managed to get my entire outer wall finished, a dorm for 8 breeding dwarves, which will hopefully bring about at least one couple in the next few years. I've got some proper pens for the animals now too. There's been a changing of the guard, and my regular military is taking a break to allow some new blood to train up some skills with the crossbow.

Thinking I might try to make myself a clean water source using the murky pools scattered around. Still got plenty of space for more buildings too, so other things to add I'm open to suggestions. If not, I'll just keep working on the walls

[wuphonsreach]

Alternately, if you have a surplus of leather, just make:

tunic
trousers
shoes

I believe that is the minimum required.  I usually make mittens, cloaks and hoods as well.

And you can export the old x/X/XX clothing to the caravan in the fall (if allowed).

[Tacomagic]

Add a moat.
Moats ALWAYS work...
except when they don't

How likely am I to be able to fill it with water from murky pools? The idea has crossed my mind

It's possible, but might take a while and a lot of bucket...ing from your dwarves.  If you're in a place rainy enough for the pools to refill, it's very possible to fill a moat.

Your best bet would be to do the fill in stages, that way you minimize evaporation.  I had built something I called a "magma collector" for one of my forts, but I think it would work here, too.  It would need to be operated manually, but that wouldn't be a big deal.

Basically, set up a single tile surrounded by walls and make it a pond zone for filling.  It will fill rapidly up to 7/7 with minimal evaporation loss (especially with several pond zones stacked over it).  Now, have a pump that dumps that single 7/7 tile into a room that is 3x1 and however deep you want.  Every time the 7/7 tile is full, kick on the pump and it'll losslessly empty that tile into the 3x1x? reservior, which itself will eventually be filled.  You'll have minimal evaporation loss.

This is where you'll have to be inventive.  In my design, I had a bridge on the lowest level of the collector that dumped the liquid out to wherever I needed it.  If you've actually got a little stone laying around for 3 mechanisms, you can do the same thing, otherwise you'll need to figure out how to get the water out of the 3x1x? safely.

EDIT: Alternatively, you could do it in more stages.  1x1x1 pumping to 3x1x1 pumping to 3x3x1.  Once you've filled the 3x3x1, it can be pumped into any enclosure 54 squares in size or smaller.

ADDITIONAL EDIT:  Another way you can approach this is to count up all your murky pool tiles and see how much water they hold.  You could pump directly from the pools either to your moat, or to a centralized collection cistern.  As long as the collection point is correctly sized, you should be able to fill it.  You'll have a lot more evaporation loss, but it would probably be faster than going with the bucket brigade.  If you've got all the time in the world and the murky pools refill, then having a centralized cistern that the ponds pump to would be a good way to go.

ADDITIONAL ADDITIONAL EDIT:  Just thought of a way to build the collector so you could have an arbitrarily tall 3x1 stack and still be able to empty it without using mechanisms.  At the very bottom of the stack, offset the tiles so that they form a 3 tile diagonal, with one of the reservoir tiles under the 3x1 stack, one under the wall, and one out in the open that you can pump from.  You'll lose the speedy flow advantage you get from a pressurized 3x1 stack, but it should function with minimal evaporation loss.

[Wumpi]

It rains 8 months of the year in Wishcities. I was going to suggest a filling a tall water tower like 2x2 or 3x3, and using that to fill the moat, but it's basically the same as what max suggested.

I'm curious, have you had any attacks to need walls? I'm at 90k wealth, and the only attack I've had was a kobold in year 2.

[Mimodo]

It rains 8 months of the year in Wishcities. I was going to suggest a filling a tall water tower like 2x2 or 3x3, and using that to fill the moat, but it's basically the same as what max suggested.

I'm curious, have you had any attacks to need walls? I'm at 90k wealth, and the only attack I've had was a kobold in year 2.

I've only had a couple of attacks. Early stages kobolds, which ended when I finally killed the bastard, and I had a necromancer come visit, with two armed goblins. I was prepared for a necromancer (knowing I'd embarked close enough), so I didn't have anything raise up against me, but just the two goblins (one undead, and the other nondead) managed to permanently put one guy on crutches and another with a wound that's never fully healed. I definitely feel safer knowing that I've got walls to retreat behind though, just in case something decides I'm worth attacking.


The moat sounds like way too much dwarf labour for what I'm capable of at the moment. Perhaps once the first generation of kids grows up. In the mean time I'll just upgrade the walls, and make a small cistern of clean water. I'll be sure to have a play around with that method though, thanks for the tips.

On the topic of kids growing up, how long should I expect to wait for my breeding stock to become lovers before I throw them out and get new ones to take a shot?

[Wumpi]

I'm not too sure. I've had numerous pairs from 377-391, and none of them married even though they've all idled for the past half a decade or so. If I have to let 40 migrants in just to get a breeding pair, it kind of beats the purpose of the whole project. Not to mention you need at least 2 breeding couples at the same time to produce offspring within the 10 year age requirements.
I think I'm going to consider my attempt a failure at this point. 18 dwarves total, 2 killed.

Spoiler: 'Wishcities' (click to show/hide)

Farthest building to the left was the new tavern/social area. Directly right of it was the industry district, with various workshops and a small office tower.
North is the covered bridge, and housing for the migrants.
Farthest right is the hospital, which became necessary after Bear's attacks. Bear is a dwarf.
Farthest south is the jailhouse, with 2 cells. Bear spent almost 3 years there after brutally slaying 2 dwarves, injuring atleast 3 others, and fracturing the sheriffs spine. Clearly, someone should have made him a pair of pants.
Very bottom of the image shoes the tombstones of Bear's victims. My favorite part about this experiment was burying dwarves the old fashioned way, then memorializing them.

For future attempts, I would suggest a few things.
1: Mod the marriage rates to be nearly 100%, as mentioned in the other thread. As long as dwarves match in terms of sexuality, they should marry. Many of my couples were "Dreams of starting a family" type dwarves, and still do not marry.
2: Mod out all fliers. a single eagle is enough to drop my FPS from 250 capped to about 160. A gaggle of ravens is enough to drop me from 250 capped to about 90. I ended up using dfhack to kill fliers to keep them from bombing my FPS every 2 minutes.
3: Mod out "critter" type animals, like fluffy wamblers, rats, etc. Every season 2-3 would escape from the traders and become part of my fort. They can't be killed or adopted or anything, and clutter the heck out of the animals screen. I'm not sure if they contribute to the animal cap or not, but my dogs and sheep stopped breeding after a while, despite having rather low numbers.

I don't think it's possible to get a sustainable population from 4 or even 7 dwarves. It has to be a perfect storm of random variables to get at least 4 dwarves who are straight, interested in marriage, opposite sexes, and within 10 years apart. And then you need to repeat the process with their children, with the added problem of having to wait 13 years for them to mature into adults to find out.

[Tacomagic]

but my dogs and sheep stopped breeding after a while, despite having rather low numbers.

Were you killing off some of these animals and/or killing off a large percentile of the males?  If so, likely you were bit by the animal sterility bug.  It's a good idea to take a verified breeding pair and lock them away somewhere so they won't be slaughtered.  Males are a lot harder to test so keeping a large number of them around is typically beneficial. Alternately, employ the fix so you don't have to worry about your meat industry collapsing because you slaughter the wrong male.

[Thisfox]

Farthest right is the hospital, which became necessary after Bear's attacks. Bear is a dwarf.
Farthest south is the jailhouse, with 2 cells. Bear spent almost 3 years there after brutally slaying 2 dwarves, injuring at least 3 others, and fracturing the sheriffs spine. Clearly, someone should have made him a pair of pants.
Very bottom of the image shoes the tombstones of Bear's victims. My favourite part about this experiment was burying dwarves the old fashioned way, then memorialising them.

...I love this. So much story.