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[taptap]

Kiddie pool: Since I burrowed some kids close to the pool for the farming experiment, xp gains increased significantly. I also started a meeting zone variant pool finally (watching closely creeped me out earlier and I waited until the got novice swimmers at least). The current setup with two pools gives the burrowed kids (farm + pool zone) >300 xp/month in swimming (at this rate they would reach legendary in 5 years, thanks jcnorris), which is already a rate that increases relevant attributes..

I watch climbing gains (rather uniform 1/5 of swimming gained by the kiddie pools) with fascination, given the improved rates for swimming (and assuming a steady rate) this would equal proficient climbing in 5 years. Not perfect, but nothing to sneeze at.

Berry farm: 30xp per harvesting action in say 10 years to 4 seasons means legendary (18k) would require 15 harvesting actions per kid and season.

[taptap]

Wild buzzards messed up my tracking of attribute gains due to unintentional military skill gains (adequate wrestler etc.). The kids burrowed close to the pools and farm gained 700-800 xp swimming last season (less than the first month but still sufficient for legendary swimming before adulthood) and hit novice in climbing. My berry farm is hampered by too much productivity and lack of variety, I have only strawberries and can't process them fast enough in the long run to keep going.

[taptap]

Thrown back by accidents. First one of the burrowed, farm kids injured himself falling down 9 tiles of stairs, I didn't understand in time that unburrowing is necessary for medical staff to care, so all five wounds on all legs and arms ended up infected. Fortunately all healed perfectly since. Then I noticed two dwarves had hand injuries (finger) one of them could still be pinpointed to one of the pools. I don't know how the impact with the pool wall happened, but it was the natural (sand) wall instead of the padded pool lined w/ tunnel tube wood (the lightest wood available here). Furthermore: climbing gains have increased lately (relatively to swimming). This is good for obvious reasons, but I suspect the climbing experiments are to blame for the injuries. Finally, I found a dead ten year old next to the pool. It looked almost vampiric, but I had no migration for 10 years and no previous incident. No normal report (I have no justice system). Making contact with the deceased (via relation screen of a sibling) revealed "vengeful when joining existing conflict" as last thought. I suspect a tame giant cave swallow that somehow made it to the area as the main culprit, but really I don't know.

[taptap]

Did some refitting at the aquifer pools, mainly added wooden lining for the second pool and filled up the reactor to a point where it works without water losses. The burrowed kids hit competent climbing and are very close to adept in swimming, experience ratio climbing - swimming now total 1:3, with recent gains closer to 1:2. Looks very promising for higher climbing skills as well, at some point swimming gains may be limited by all the climbing going on. Wait and see.

Is there any other climbing training scheme available in fortress mode to test this against? I had some complicated plans using swimming, but now it appears as if I don't need them at all.

[Max™]

I'm sure kids won't work a pump right?

You can clean kiddie pools with a pump, but it seems a waste if you aren't getting them to do it themselves.

[Mad Jackal]

Kiddie pools?

Do it the easy way.  Make a meeting area that they can never reach (until they can swim). Something like this:

You have a water source, and a water drain, connected by a 3 tile wide (or wider) hallway.  Water flows down the hallway out of the water source, and into the drain.  This could be a simple as water entering via a filtered brook/river tile and off the map through fortifications, but the water cannot be pressurized. If you use a river as the water source, use some diagonal flow pressure eliminators to normalize the pressure before letting it into the hallway.  Once water starts entering the drain, it cannot "back up" to allow the flow to reach 7/7, so the tiles near the drain will stay pretty close to 1/7, and it will graduate deeper toward the water source up the hallway, and the places where it is shallow and where it is deep will remain fairly constant after that.

Kid's barracks are situated above this water filled causeway on the 1/7 side. The meeting area is also above the causeway someplace in the 3/7 to 4/7 depth section.  Both rooms are in the Z level higher up, reachable by ramps that descend into the wall of the causeway.

Littlebeards decide that they want to go chill out in the meeting area for their burrow, so they leave the barracks/work areas, and enter the causeway. Pathing still operates because the water depth is not impassible. They enter the hall, and walk in the progressively deeper water. Poor swimmers are pushed back toward the shallow end by the slow flow of the water heading towards the drain. If they tire, the current pushes them into 2/7 water, where they can stand up before they drown.

The kids that make it to the meeting room will have sufficiently high swimming skill that they can navigate 4/7 water. Swimmer skill will continue to increase, because all pathing in and out of the meeting area requires it.

I am very intruigued by this as I  might be able to fit this into my dining room + hospital entrance waterfalls design.

I am just curious what calculations need to be made to know how long to make this causeway ?

I assume I can dig the ramps to the room after the fact once i see the spots for 3/7 -4/7 transition. so that isn't a killer. but the length to get 7 flowing down to 1 at a drain has me stumped.

Any help from any-one would be appreciated. -oh. i am in 34.11 still, I hope that doesn't ruin everything.

Also, cheers to the original poster, I am going to try to implement many of these as well. I try to play child heavy forts and have been trying to find automated and easy ways to secure them from snatchers. even if the dwarven parents don't care. I still do when one gets taken.

[Skullsploder]

I really want to make a combination of yours and Staalo's childcare operations. Yours I find is too soft on live combat training but Staalo's is too heavy on the danger room exploit and doesn't train climbing or grower

Perhaps one could have Staalo's cross pattern but with about 50 dogs packed in a 1*1 pasture in the center of the bridge. This way it should also be expanded to 8 rooms with a 3*3 Center:

dorms
dining
Food
booze
aquifer pool
farms
live combat arena
something else? Hospital maybe?

There should be a window in the most used room to a barracks where soldiers spar, for observer training.

By the way I really wish this thread and the original childcare thread were combined, the pool you have in particular seems useful to everyone, because it's the only way to train climber that I've heard of, and anyone testing any childcare should share results directly. Just imho.

[taptap]

climbing: maybe the wooden lining had the side effect of increasing climbing gains (you get higher xp on block walls than on natural ones, right?).

a failed swimming scheme: i experimented in my wave pool setup with a single 4 depth tile and plenty of 3 depth tiles between different areas and a statue in the water. the 4 depth tile produced a lot of cancellations once entered and then it stopped. no one ever tried to make a party again, even competent swimmers didn't bother to path through the water (3/7 for the main part with only a single tile 4/7) to booze and preferred drinking water despite the bad thought. very occasionally a dwarf (i believe on break) did path through the water. once i remove the single 4/7 tile everything starts going again, but there is no training effect anymore, so "mini-wave" wave pool doesn't work. proper waves may work, with even more cancellation spam, but I have to fix my plumbing to try that.

berry farm: too high productivity is a real obstacle. with strawberries producing an eatable plant and an eatable / brewable berry I am already drowning in all things strawberry even when set up for only two burrowed kids. maybe a cash crop (e.g. dyes) with only a single product would work better?

@skullsploder: people are able to read more than one thread, but it certainly feels like training for kids is almost accidental (apart from staalo) over there, the main interest being the "many innocent deaths". military skills are quite easy to train on adults (dodger, armor user a little less so) and if you are happy to use danger rooms even easier. but apart from ethics / roleplay style / exploits, staalo avoids mass casualties only by close personal supervision, if I understand him right. he stops the spikes when sth. happens. so whatever else it is, you probably won't ever want to include it into your fortress design best practices.

[Skullsploder]

Yeah the micromanagement is why I'd go for the dogs. Less attacks per second and less consistency means less skill gains but also zero chance of death or permanent injury, and without oversight too. I'll be building the combo in my fort soon.

Honestly the main childcare thread just needs everyone like you there to divert it away from the let's kill the kids mindset, as you say. Also I'm afraid this thread will get buried, along with all its useful info. I mean once a thread hits 37 pages it's there to stay.
The other thing is that it feels wrong to build on your progress in that thread when you reject it, which I'll have to do if I want to include any military training, however light, since you don't want that sort of thing in your thread (Read: the dogs).

[taptap]

The other thing is that it feels wrong to build on your progress in that thread when you reject it, which I'll have to do if I want to include any military training, however light, since you don't want that sort of thing in your thread (Read: the dogs).

I don't mind you posting results from here there. I posted in the other thread as well, although I share neither goals nor methods, but I can't stand the inevitable "Where is the magma?" answers. (For your own scheme you probably have to make your mind up, whether you actually want to train the kids or slowly murder them, unsupervised fighting training will more likely be the latter. Staalo's setup works because of supervision: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140588.msg5869333#msg5869333. At least you could bother to find sturdy/hard-to-hit yet impotent sparring opponents.)

[wierd]

Kiddie pools?

Do it the easy way.  Make a meeting area that they can never reach (until they can swim). Something like this:

You have a water source, and a water drain, connected by a 3 tile wide (or wider) hallway.  Water flows down the hallway out of the water source, and into the drain.  This could be a simple as water entering via a filtered brook/river tile and off the map through fortifications, but the water cannot be pressurized. If you use a river as the water source, use some diagonal flow pressure eliminators to normalize the pressure before letting it into the hallway.  Once water starts entering the drain, it cannot "back up" to allow the flow to reach 7/7, so the tiles near the drain will stay pretty close to 1/7, and it will graduate deeper toward the water source up the hallway, and the places where it is shallow and where it is deep will remain fairly constant after that.

Kid's barracks are situated above this water filled causeway on the 1/7 side. The meeting area is also above the causeway someplace in the 3/7 to 4/7 depth section.  Both rooms are in the Z level higher up, reachable by ramps that descend into the wall of the causeway.

Littlebeards decide that they want to go chill out in the meeting area for their burrow, so they leave the barracks/work areas, and enter the causeway. Pathing still operates because the water depth is not impassible. They enter the hall, and walk in the progressively deeper water. Poor swimmers are pushed back toward the shallow end by the slow flow of the water heading towards the drain. If they tire, the current pushes them into 2/7 water, where they can stand up before they drown.

The kids that make it to the meeting room will have sufficiently high swimming skill that they can navigate 4/7 water. Swimmer skill will continue to increase, because all pathing in and out of the meeting area requires it.

I am very intruigued by this as I  might be able to fit this into my dining room + hospital entrance waterfalls design.

I am just curious what calculations need to be made to know how long to make this causeway ?

I assume I can dig the ramps to the room after the fact once i see the spots for 3/7 -4/7 transition. so that isn't a killer. but the length to get 7 flowing down to 1 at a drain has me stumped.

Any help from any-one would be appreciated. -oh. i am in 34.11 still, I hope that doesn't ruin everything.

Also, cheers to the original poster, I am going to try to implement many of these as well. I try to play child heavy forts and have been trying to find automated and easy ways to secure them from snatchers. even if the dwarven parents don't care. I still do when one gets taken.

Since I have the day off today, I can pull an old copy of .34.11, an archival copy of DFHack to do testing with, and perform some flow experiment tests.

Give me a little bit.

[Mad Jackal]

Thank you wierd

[wierd]

Getting DFHack downloaded for that version was painful.  I had to dig up archived links, then use wget to force the download to complete successfully. Dont know why, but peterix's link for that version of DFHack always wanted to reset mid-download.  The wget operation retried 5 times!

Now I need to get a suitable stone layer embark to test with.

[taptap]

kiddie pools: climbing reached skilled, swimming expert. fairly sure now that both the changes to the pool (wooden lining) and increased experience in the skills affect the climbing : swimming ratio. in a newly burrowed kid the ratio was 1:3 almost from start (used to be 1:5), the experienced ones are at 1:2 or higher for recent gains. this works so well, i don't feel like experimenting a lot. i still have a few other plans, but i am too lazy to set up the plumbing.

34.11: i would totally let the kids chat away in a small burrow to see what happens. legendary conversationalist is my unattainable ambition in 40.19, i only reached expert in more than 45 years, but at least I managed to get a few marriages now.

[Sanctume]

climbing: maybe the wooden lining had the side effect of increasing climbing gains (you get higher xp on block walls than on natural ones, right?).

I have not read ahead of the threads, but responding to this re: climbable surface.

Smooth Walls - smoothed from natural stone/ore = impossible to climb.
Smooth Walls - Constructed from blocks are very hard to climb (not impossible).
Walls - untouched natural dirt, sand, clay, stone, ores, minerals climbable.
Walls - Constructed from logs, stones blocks are climbable.

Note also, Urist can jump z+1 wall.  I am unsure if Urist gains climbing skills from this.
So a pool without up ramp side exit, would be worth doing !science! if Urist gains climbing, and how if water levels in the pool affect Urists's behavior to climb/exit said pool.

From various readings, Urist can be enticed to exist the pool if an climbable exit is within 20 or 22 tiles?