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[Garth]

Quick question, trying to get a glass industry going for the first time, but I need a bag for my glassmaker to collect sand with. I've got bags laying around, but they aren't in stockpiles. What stockpile will my dwarves store it in if I create it? Because currently any time I tell my dude to collect sand it just says he needs a storage container.

[KingBacon]

Use a furniture stockpile, Garth. Sand bags are under that.

[Larix]

Ah well, my attempt at using power for another type of logic was a bit of a bust. Y'see, there are _three_ power acceptors, and logic making use of pumps or rollers is well-known and versatile, but what of the third option?

I'm of course speaking of the millstone. Now obviously, providing or cutting power to the millstone doesn't directly do anything. The only thing is that if you've ordered 'mill plant' jobs via manager, they'll be queued to a millstone only if the stone has power and are automatically cleared if the millstone loses power. So connecting a millstone to the grid... well, orders a miller to come to the millstone and try to mill. You're setting dwarfs in motion by applying mechanical power, that's only a tiny step removed from motorised transport!

It still achieves little of value - you can place a pressure plate near the millstone and use your miller as a power-to-signal converter, but the response times are orders of magnitude slower than the alternatives and you'll get intermittent signals with ridiculously long periods. Water and minecarts react quickly, can 'hold' a signal and i've yet to see water in the inlet of an active pump decide not to pass the pump and attend a party at well instead. The sweet-pod-to-signal converter has the sole advantage of producing dwarven sugar on top of the signal; and of course, since it directly uses _dwarfs_ to convert power to signals, it certainly is very, very dwarfy. (Hmm, i think i'll add it to my user page anyway. "Alternative Power-to-Signal Converter" or somesuch.)

You can of course build some sort of circuit with the millstone as "pathing goal" and build a ton of creature logic gates around it to use your miller for computation, but you could simply use a quern instead, saving a few mechanisms and any considerations of power generation or -transport. Any logic operation beyond "come and mill" can't really be run from power alone; all pathing has a bit of latency, so dwarfs will run on for several steps after a millstone lost power and cleared all jobs. For any serious logic processing, you'd need direct movement-restricting machinery like opening/closing doors and hatches, i.e. plain old creature logic that works just as well if not better with unpowered workshops.

[Robsoie]

Disaster just happened.

To ready my fort against the season of goblin sieges, i had made my dwarves busy building a big wall surrounding the surface access, the trade depot  and the big hole that was left from the collapse we forced to pierce the aquifer.

Unfortunately i had taken too much time before ordering this, and so the wall wasn't completed in time, a vile force of darkness arrived.

I drafted as much as i could because there was no way my axedwarves , while competent, would survive what was coming without help.
But still an army of dwarves that know nothing about fighting to support my actual trained main military is not really much against an army of very well equipped (they had a lot of silver weapon, i guess those were very rich goblins)
And after a brave resistance in which the goblins one-hit-killed nearly everybody (i was extremely disapointed in my good axedwarves performance), the conclusion, while surprisingly favouring my side in the end (as 3 goblins were left alive and retreated), was really horrible

We had 159 dwarves in that fortress but after

a bloodbath on the surface


a carnage with blood and gore covering the whole workshop and stockpile level


We're down to 58 dwarves, and more than half tantruming like crazy and far from enough coffin for that heavy loss of a hundred of dwarves


We lost the captain of the guard, the manager and the broker, the mayor managed to escape the onslaught and ordered for 3 backpacks to be made .
The chief medic lost wife and children to the goblin invasion, i doubt the poor guy will be able to stitch together the wounded survivors.
Our bookkeeper lost a friend and is in a bad mood.
We lost some important and talent workers in that, i wonder if i'll be able to get back the situation in control or if the fortress is lost (as the tantruming is probably not going to stop) , hopefull i'll get talented migrants soon enough to help instead of the usual low skilled ones

[Mr Space Cat]

We lost the captain of the guard, the manager and the broker, the mayor managed to escape the onslaught and ordered for 3 backpacks to be made .

"We've lost more than two thirds of our population! Quick, make some backpacks, Urist! Three should be enough to cram all of the bodies in if we try hard enough!"

[Axe27]

Just had a goblin siege. They showed up right after I had disbanded a squad so they would go eat in my legendary room and stop being miserable. This time, instead of sending my squads to fight the goblins, I let the goblins come to me, banking on the power of my traps and crossbowmen to stop them. Unfortunately, as it turns out, stuffing twenty+ trolls, and a squad of axeman down a tunnel caused all of my traps to be used (every cage trap fired, 4x4 = 16 caged trolls/goblins including an elite axegoblin). MY two squads of melee troops, my fully equipped and completely noobish macemen and my partially equipped but very experienced axeman then fought in the entrance with the attackers. Body parts flying everywhere. I think my dwarves came out ahead (not sure because of the amount of dead and gore.)

 I then sent my dwarves outside to engage the squad of hammergoblins that hadn't joined the fight yet, and in the ensuing onslaught, I watched my armless captain of the guard kick a troll so hard in the head his teeth exploded everywhere and his head went sailing off like a football. The hammergoblins rushed to join the fray (as my military was duking it out with the trolls), but broke very quickly, losing quite a few in the battle.

Of 90-something dwarves that started out the siege, 12 didn't make it all the way through. Two dwarves The Axedwarves took the worst of it, as they weren't fully armored in the fighting. I watched one dwarf run out clothed in nothing but an Iron helmet and a gauntlet, but brandishing an axe. 3 of them were killed, two are injured. Of the mace dwarves, two didn't make it out of a squad of ten. None of the marksdwarves were killed. It was funny seeing the macedwarves wrestling the trolls with their maces instead of hitting them with it.

Lessons of the siege: moar traps. A quick look at the units tab reveals I have more a ton of trolls and only two goblins. Not entirely sure how I'm going to deal with that, but I think a drowning may be in order.

[Robsoie]

we got the best mayor there is

The situation escaled quite a bit since the carnage, it's not much tantrum we're facing but half of the survivors are going berserk one after another.

So that another onslaught, but this time it's not the goblins massacring the poor innocent fortress citizen, but insane dwarves, childs and adults, turning on their former friends and trying to murder everything inside the fort corridors or on the surface.

In reply to this concerning situation the mayor decided to throw a tantrum and destroy the chair of his office.
And so now he's requesting a new chair to solve the situation !

I got the last remaining capable miner to dig a new big room to stockpile all the new corpses while waiting that someone may build more coffin, but too bad he went berserk in the middle of the work and started to see the other dwarves as rocks he needed to break with his pickaxe.

And of course, none giving food or water to the wounded, there are death by starvation and dehydratation that add to the situation.

All the while miasma clouds are making the atmosphere rather unpleasant.

So from the 58 survivors of the Goblin invasion, we're now down to ... 28 but at least it seems the berserker wave got under control.

I start to think that fortress will not go very well

edit : more deaths happened and  looks like the mayor got it too, his mandate just ended, he went back at being a farmer and ... he went berserk

But he didn't went berserk like that : he punched to death a poor farmer in the hospital, ran after a wounded child and strangled him to death and killed a tresher that was trying to help

I had to draft the 6 remaining adults into a squad and send them to kill that ex mayor

And very funny the one that just got elected mayor was who managed to put an end to the ex mayor turned murderer.

17 dwarves still alive , lost 41 to the post-war tantrum spiral !
And probably not finished

edit 2 :

an ambush ! curse them !

Just what we needed

[orodoth]

Preparations for fun. I embarked on a site with 7 z-levels full of magnetite, and 20 z-levels below that is the motherload of all marble. My military has only 2 dwarves in full iron clad gear, 1 with sword, the other 2 with maces. I've survived 3 all out assaults from langurs of all things, and successfully traded with dwarves and elves, no humans yet.

Things are going entirely too smooth...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[KingBacon]

Disaster just happened.

We're down to 58 dwarves, and more than half tantruming like crazy and far from enough coffin for that heavy loss of a hundred of dwarves

Migrants do not like coming after such violent occurrences. Lost about 60 dorfs from a massive draft to stem an undead hoard. Been 4 years and migrant waves have been smaller than 10.

[orodoth]

Disaster just happened.

We're down to 58 dwarves, and more than half tantruming like crazy and far from enough coffin for that heavy loss of a hundred of dwarves

Migrants do not like coming after such violent occurrences. Lost about 60 dorfs from a massive draft to stem an undead hoard. Been 4 years and migrant waves have been smaller than 10.

note to self: let genocide happen to reduce migrant waves

[Cheedows]

Robsoie, think of it as a purge of the weak minded dwarves. The ones who make it in the end will be mentally strong and great for future disasters. Otherwise just take military dwarves who stopped caring about life and lock them away until the worst is over  .

[Robsoie]

It's more a purge of anything dwarfy i must say considering what is happening
i'm not sure if the candidate migrant see that :


He would be that much willing to come in

[Cheedows]

"I think we truly made the right decision to migrate here."

"Yeah, look this place rocks!"

"Let's go to the mead hall, they must have some high quality booze!"

And when they entered, they saw 4 children rocking back and forth slowly waiting for the bitter end.

[Garth]

EDIT: Nevermind


EDIT 2: Well now I've got bags in stockpiles and zones designated for sand, but my glassworker still won't gather sand, saying I don't have a sand-bearing item. What am I doing wrong?

[Eric Blank]

That message would suggest that he doesn't have any bags of sand to use to make glass. You should double check that you've given the order to collect sand, but there is also an issue with letting dwarves move sand to stockpiles similar to that which faces cheese production: if there is a dwarf moving the pre-gathered sand/milk to a stockpile when the glassmaker/cheesemaker wants to perform there job and there aren't any bags of sand/barrels of milk in the stockpile already, the glassmaker/cheesemaker will tell you to fuck off because he can't make anything without the reagents, which your haulers are busy carting around. Usually in the least efficient manner possible

My solution is simply to refuse to allow sand to be stockpiled: the glassmakers will fill their bag and then drop it on the ground where they were gathering the sand, leaving it there until they need to use it. Milk on the other hand is a bit of a bugger because it might start to rot if it's left sitting in the workshop before getting processed into cheese, and I usually just produce a load of milk before beginning cheese production.