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[Splint]

The axedwarves Baktun and Nosco have the honor of first weapon masters, and the entire militia has a very crude suit of armor and metal weapon. Notable among them being an iron whip used by Rio the jeweler, who's been cutting bought glass and jamming it into some stoneware crafts made from bought clay.

EDIT: Home caravan arrives and with it some serious upgrades for my first squad: Metal breastplates and bronze boots for all four members, and an iron mail shirt for Commander Squib to go under her own breastplate that she got last year, as well as a pair of steel greaves and high boots for her, thanks in no small part to some platinum ordered and the caravan wanting goblets this year. Some additional weapons have also been purchased as well as what may as well be "exotic" underground brews and fish; we have more fruit than we know what to do with kept in reserve for when booze runs low, and some of that reserve, specifically the bayberries, are being put into cooked food.

A single bit of coal has been sacrificed for the greater good, that is to say used to make a quern to mill finger millet flour and make some soap, as a small hospital by the river with a nice windowed view is planned as my next project, and after that, a mayoral residence and a nobleman's manorhouse.

[Chevaleresse]

"I also flooded an entire cavern layer with magma" he tosses in casually, because that's not really worth focusing on.

More gobs attacked, and I added a new member of the McLegendary clan. Nish McLegendary, long lost sister of Urist, Cog, and Dastot, her three brothers who arrived here after escaping the dwarven day care facility where they were all raised into megasupersoldiers (seriously weird ass glitch, had one migrant from 4 out of 8 waves with maxed skills and stupidly high stats) so while I may have lost the weirdness I had with Nish Shamelorbam wielding herself as a crossbow and training at a weapon rack made from her bones due to save corruption, the fort lives on, and the pile of goblins outside is up to 60+!

Well, the only effect it had was vaporizing the miner that I accidentally had tap the side of the magma tube. Certainly not enough to cause me to abandon.

[wierd]

Successfully breached the aquifer with the double-slit method, then cleaned up the secured aquifer layers' walls a bit so that they look all pretty.

This resulted in temporary localized flooding, but the areas that flooded I wanted to have flooded, as they were designated to be underground farming chambers.  Made an edge-of-map drain just in case.

I am now mining out 4 Z-levels for dwarven highrise apartments.  There will be a central courtyard that will be deep-channeled, then temporarily flooded to make the floor muddy.  When the cavern layer gets breached later, this space will grow pretty spore trees.  (Under the spore trees, I intend to construct statue gardens and zoos)

The ultimate intent is to have the legendary dining room suspended from the ceiling, above the courtyard. There is 1 stone layer above this "Top floor" that is not aquifer.  I intend to create some water plumbing up in that layer with floodgates and other water control valve structures, then upwards-tap (either staircase or up-channel) into the aquifer above to get running water. That water will then be poured on statues surrounded by grates in the legendary dining room below (which will create lots of mist in the dining hall). The grates simply rain down into the courtyard. Under the courtyard will be another layer of plumbing, leading to another edge-of-map drain after some multi-layer deep cisterns. This will permit me to have flowing water in the cisterns, ensuring freshness (No stagnant water issues) and free of mud (multi-z deep) status for hospital use. 

The dwarven bedrooms will have windows looking into this courtyard, so they will have a lovely view.

The falling/flowing water will destroy my already poor FPS (my sad laptop is mad at me. ), but the dwarves should like it. On the plus side, anyone walking into the courtyard will get a free bath, and it will be interesting to see how the water ends up flowing over the multi-tile spore trees on the way down.

When I eventually reach the magma sea, will dip up some magma with minecarts and bring it up to the first two soil levels, since they are made of sand. 

I have a very large variety of above-ground crops going right now, with a good selection of veggies. I intend to create a magnificent green-glass spire for above-ground trees and garden terraces. Right now, the crops are all on the ground inside a wooden perimeter wall.

I want to see just how many dwarves I actually *CAN* sustain in a fortress like this.

[Sloth-Man96]

I'm currently trying to keep a starving city of 145 dwarves happy while I desperately try to find food. So far, a carpenter has committed suicide, and a dwarven child drowned himself. I'm inexperienced in playing this so my "solutions" seem to only make things worse.

[Arx]

Step One: Mod in cannabalism.
Step Two: Butcher casualties.
Step Three:
Step Four: Profit!

Although I don't think you can make [ENTITY:] changes without a new world. Oh well.

[wierd]

I'm currently trying to keep a starving city of 145 dwarves happy while I desperately try to find food. So far, a carpenter has committed suicide, and a dwarven child drowned himself. I'm inexperienced in playing this so my "solutions" seem to only make things worse.

Sources of neigh-infinite food:

Turkeys/chickens
Surface crop farm plots

With chickens and or turkeys, you dont eat the birds themselves. Instead, you restrict cooking on everything EXCEPT their eggs, then make simple meals.  Dwarves will eat cooked eggs, and those birds lay a buttload of eggs.  The birds themselves require no material sustenence-- just a room, with nestboxes in them.  You will need to manage your population though; some of the nestbox rooms need lockable doors to keep dwarves out so eggs can hatch.

for surface crops, you want the dwarves to eat the raw crop, dont cook. Cooking destroys the seeds for that crop, because cooking does not produce seeds, where eating raw does.

For 170+ dwarves, you will need 3 10x10 farm plots, each with a different surface crop food, running year round. About 4 farmers will manage it perfectly.  I suggest foods that can also be brewed into booze, like strawberry, prickleberry, etc. With the new surface crops, this includes potatoes, carrots, raspberries (Fixed in .14) and pals.

In the meantime, you can bolster your food supply with a massive import of meat products. Produce lots of fodder for the merchant caravan, then request (on maximum priority) NOTHING but meat products. Every kind in the list.  The next caravan will come with about 300 to 400 units of meat. Sell the junk merchandise, buy the meat. That will buy you time.

[Col_Jessep]

A moderately easy way to get some quick food is to enable "plant gathering" on everybody (use Dwarf Therapist) and mark all surface plants near your fort for harvesting (d->p).
Then get some fisherdwarfs going if you have a river. Build one fishery for every two fisherdwarfs and enable fish cleaning labor on dwarf who are not fishers. (Fishers will keep fishing and your catch will be rotting away next to the river...)

[the1337doofus]

A hunter just stuffed his kill in his room..... nobody's taking it to the refuse pile, and it's not getting butchered. I fear the implications of this.

[Larix]

Rot won't happen if you have a food stockpile that allows "raw fish", but fisherdwarfs will waste their time hauling their catch to the stockpile. You still need to have most of the fish cleaned to make it edible.

After some fiddling with pumps and massive unsuspending of building designations, the river redirect succeeded. The water falls underground, crosses about a third of the embark on that level, comes back up and leaves in the ocean biome. As a nice bonus, that gave us fishable ocean critters in the river. It's a bit annoying that apparently, river floor autonomously spawns water - the river behind the drain receives no flowing water but is always between 2/7 and 5/7. I even walled off the main riverbed to no avail. The wall also means the water gets back up to the original level without additional effort. I hadn't fully anticipated that and had to do some fast channelling to save a miner from drowning.

The military is getting along nicely, too - two of the three-soldier squad are legendary after about half a year of sparring. The third is "skilled" - she spends very little time sparring because she lacks endurance (gets tired and aborts the session almost instantly) and gains extremely little in attributes (notably including endurance) because she doesn't spar enough.

[Kuikka]

Battle reports from Rivertrapped.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

More death in Rivertrapped. Werarmadillo that was trapped in human form transformed again when full moon rose, took countless amounts of hits from my crossbowmen stationed at the wall, dived into the moat bleeding heavily, and attacked my militiacaptain on the bridge. He was bitten in his arm, and hence as precaution he was walled inside a tunnel. He's getting thirsty, but not hungry and he hasn't transformed yet.

A minotaur called Inferno Blades attacked my city rwhen I was expecting militia captain to transform. I had placed a cage including a berserk outside my city in order to lure beasts of all kind closer to my crossbowmen. I pulled the lever, waited for epic fight between legendary warrior in full berserk mode and this infamous beast, and then my crossbowmen killed him instead of the minotaur. I decided to let the beast come and test my soldiers.

My militiasquad was fully glad in iron armors and had iron weapons, two soldiers were legendary ones and others experts, altough few were scarred and injured in previous battles (axe lord missed right arm). I had three squads of crossbowmen to support my melee infantry.

The minotaur charged at my soldiers, one spearman that went to challenge it was struck with horns to his head and his body was tossed into a moat by impact. Then the beast climbed over the wall before rest of the infantry catched him, chased my panicking crossbowmen on the battlements and collided against my axe lord and one crossbowman. All three fell from high wall, and axe lord lost his last operating arm. While the minotaur was stunned, a hammer lord crushed his skull with a copper war hammer.

[Splint]

If that axelord's arm is unusable even with medical treatment, you'll have to get rid of him, as he'll spam you with "Can't store my shit," "Can't wash all this blood off myself," or "Can't get my new socks: Too injured."
-

I have found I will need bags. Lots and lots of bags. "Well of course you need bags, for sand and seeds!" I hear you say, but the sand pear seeds. Deer god the sand pear seeds. They are everywhere, and they are inedible apparently, can't even be cooked. Thank the gods for sheep.

[Quartz_Mace]

Has the missing loved one glitch been fixed in the new version?

Also, when migrating saves to a new version, do I need to copy just the current game folder, just the region, or both?

[Larix]

It's been identified as sadness about relatives/acquaintances abducted by goblins some time in the distant past. It hasn't been fixed for 40.15, but with that knowledge, worlds without goblins or with very little goblin-dwarf contact should be less prone to the problem. To migrate saves, i think it's best to copy the complete region folders you wish to transfer - they come packed with the valid raw files and everything.

Own fort: since i have a very convenient and well-behaved river now, i fiddled with water logic again. The fluid-logic incrementers/counters i've seen posted were unholy messes that i didn't understand at all, so i gave it a try and directly succeeded in making a simple four-bit binary counter that takes three doors and one floodgate per bit (and lots of linkages). It generates switching-capable water depths by opening doors (i.e. increasing the area over which water has to spread) and uses the different reaction times of doors and floodgates for a deceptively simple toggle cell.

It's pretty simple actually. First of all, for the actual counting, we need a cell which toggles when receiving a signal cycle.

Code: [Select]

~~~
#X#
#+#
#^#
###
# - wall
~ - pressurised water source
X - Floodgate operated by the pressure plate
+ - Door operated by input
^ - pressure plate activating on 0-4 water: output, triggers the floodgate

In the "off" state, the plate is covered in 7/7 water, the floodgate is closed. When the cell receives a signal cycle (on-off, off must follow on very quickly), the door opens, lowering the water level on the plate to 3-4, turning the plate on and triggering an "open" signal to the floodgate. But because of the short signal cycle, the door closes again around the time the floodgate actually opens. I actually built it with two doors, one north and one south of the plate, which probably makes the operation a bit safer from erroneously drawing water before the signal door closes again. The floodgate stays open, 3 or 4 water remain on the plate. Using a raising bridge instead of the floodgate should make errors even less likely, going with a 0-4 off, 5-7 on plate instead.

The next signal cycle opens the door again, but this time, water will flow in through the open floodgate, covering the plate in seven water and turning it off. The floodgate closes ~200 steps later; this time, no misfire is possible - the floodgate stays shut, 7 water are on the plate which will turn on again on the next signal cycle.

To allow chaining up multiple such toggle cells, we need to generate a quick signal cycle, and to allow actually counting in binary steps, only every second toggle of the cell should trigger the cycle. So we'll build a type-specific "edge detector". The easiest one is the rising edge one, because that only takes two doors:

Code: [Select]

~~~
#+#A
#^#
#+#B
###
~ - pressurised water source
+A - door operated by the pressure plate
^ - pressure plate set to 0-4 water, output
+B - door operated by input (toggling cell)

Normally, 7/7 water are on the pressure plate, keeping it inactive and leaving the door shut.
On a "rising edge", i.e. when the toggle cell's pressure plate switches to "on", door B opens, lowers water on the plate to 3-4 and turns the plate on, which sends a signal to the next toggle cell and opens door A. Water rushes in, turns the pressure plate back off and ~100 steps later, the "off" signal of the cycle fires, shutting the doors in the linked toggle cell and in the edge detector itself. When the input toggle cell switches to "off", door B shuts, crushing the water in its tile but leaving the pressure plate under 7/7 water.

And that's it. I built four of these things all linked up and sent sixteen quick signal cycles. The hatch covers linked to the toggle plates showed that the count proceeded accurately from 0000 to 1111 (and it rolled around on the next signal). So there you have it - a reasonably fast and very simple fluid logic incrementer/counter. Minecarts make easier ring counters, but take more work to generate a binary output.

[Chevaleresse]

I just realized that this elven fort is going to be the most dwarfy thing ever. Here's why:

Elves have high natural stats and such, right? So, naturally, one would think they'd make a good military. This would be true if my best weapon material didn't happen to be what amounts to bloodthorn wood. Because of this, my defense system will have to consist entirely of advanced trap designs, including dodgeme traps (that are constructed above the grounds), atomsmashing corridors, bridgeapults, cave-in traps, and so on.

[Larix]

Revision: a water-logic binary counter takes much less space and machinery than shown above. All it takes per bit is one door and one bridge.

Code: [Select]

~~~
#B#
#D#
#^#
###

~ - pressurised water
B - raising bridge
D - Door
^- pressure plate reacting to 5-7 water

Both bridge and door are linked to the pressure plate itself, the door's also linked to the input signal. The pressure plate itself also activates the output - signal for the next toggle cell and potentially for the display.
Starting state: 7/7 water, door closed, bridge raised, pressure plate "on".
Toggling to "off":
1 - input turns "on": door opens, water lowers to 3-4, trigger condition for the plate no longer fulfilled
2 - after 100 steps, the plate turns off, closing the door and sending a "lower" signal to the bridge.
3 - after another 100 steps, the bridge lowers, water can't get through because the door's closed. "Off" state is reached.
4 - at some later point, the input will turn "off" again, sending another "close" signal to the door, which is ignored.

Toggling "on"
1 - input turns "on": door opens, temporarily lowering water depth even further, which does nothing, because it's below the trigger threshold anyway. Since the bridge is lowered, fresh water can reach the plate.
2 - water depth over the plate rises over the trigger threshold (reaches 7/7 when enough water is provided), plate turns "on", sending a redundant "open" signal to the door and a "raise" signal to the drawbridge. "On" state reached.
3 - 100 steps later, the bridge raises, cutting off water flow. Since the cell itself is full of water, height doesn't change.
4 - some time later, the input turns "off", closing the door. Once again, this doesn't change water depth over the plate.

So what this thing does is toggle state whenever the input changes state to "on". Exactly what you need for a toggle cell. I switched my four-bit counter to this design, and it works. It can be built on 5x2 tiles of floor and takes one door, one bridge, one pressure plate and three links per bit. Caveat: since it's the "on" signal that triggers toggles, a counter built from simple cells will count _down_. Adjust your logic accordingly if you don't want to fiddle with two-plate cells (one to regulate the cell itself and send the "true" output, an opposite-condition plate to manage the signal for the next cell).

Tested and proven.

PS: ah, found it - proposed old-school design for a one-bit counter: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30514.msg414841#msg414841
Yikes. Massive (five floodgates, four bridges, four pressure plates), slow, multiple drains and still needs an input that reliably switches off again within 200 steps, or it'll just oscillate. As a minor saving grace, it drains only while switching, not in a "saved" state.