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[martinuzz]

How did that carp get through the wall grates into my well reservoir?

[Splint]

How did that carp get through the wall grates into my well reservoir?

Swam through, probably, if the water's deep enough.

[Urist McWaffles]

So we had a werecreature attack a month ago and I had caught it in cage as it transformed back into it's dwarven form. My plan was to use it to thin out my visitor population a bit.

Well as usual things didn't go as planned...

After I had set up the cage, linked it to a lever and sealed off all entry/exit, I waited patiently. And then on the 25th of Granite:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

They did manage to kill the weregoat but not before it had wounded one of them. This is what I was after though a death or two or more would have been welcome.

And so I waited again...

23rd of Slate:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This time upon transformation the infected dwarf did not attack anyone unlike the originally infected dwarf who had been killed earlier. There was even that damn rooster that had given away the location of an artifact to a visitor years earlier trapped in there but it did not attack that either. Strangeness.

So now I'm still stuck with the 14 visitors/freeloaders and now on top of that, one is infected with weregoatism. Niiiiice.

Plan B may involve liberal application of magma. 

[martinuzz]

I don't get what triggers dwarves to write books and what doesn't.

Sometimes I can put them in a library for a year, and they'll only discuss and ponder.

Now, I put every dwarf in my fort (well okay, there's only 19 of them)  on scholar duty, and 6 of them all started writing an autobiographical adventure, and a seventh is writing about biography. While my library only has 3 tables.

EDIT: it's just funny. It's like they are all in the same class and the teacher gave them an assignment to all write an essay about "writing a biography of oneself, particularily as it concerns a military campaign or adventure". Have six books with the same topic now.

[Larix]

Spoiler: Dwarven engineering (click to show/hide)

Minecart percussion traps don't need a full z-level of drop: the half-z of a cart falling from the middle to the bottom of a tile is enough, which allows making a thumper from a simple hatch cover -

when a hatch cover over open space opens under a cart, the cart starts to fall, and it always falls from the exact middle of the tile, which also means "halfway up" the tile. Only when the cart tries to fall down to the next level down will it check if there's floor (a re-closed hatch, in our case) and "land" on it. I guess checking for floor and checking for a vertical collision both happen on the same game turn, but in the logically wrong order - collision check first. So by "flickering" a hatch in such a way that it closes at most seven steps after opening we can build a high-frequency thumper.

That was the theory, so i went and built the thing and indeed: regulated 104-step minecart cycle with 13 pressure plates all linked to the same hatch -> hatch goes through 13 open/close cycles per round, all opens eight steps apart, all closes four steps after the last open. Getting the drop cart on the hatch is a luck-based mission, you have to throw the cart onto the hatch and hope it hits the hatch in the correct half of its duty cycle; worked for me on the first try. The testing puppy registered cart collisions, so the actual percussion part clearly works (dead in two hits).

There you have it: a percussion trap with a frequency of one hit per eight steps. Designs with a full-level drop before hitting the floor have a minimum drop time of eleven steps, not counting the time needed to launch the cart again. Hatches must be over open space to "throw" the cart, thus this design is vulnerable to building destroyers.

Building and linking the "driving" circuit is a fair bit of work and it will eat your FPS for lunch while active (down from 55 to 16 for me).

I also tried a re-design of my old "counting" (basically an on-signal-detector) circuit to reduce its area footprint. Space savings are fairly small in the finished result, but it is smaller and it's tested to work:

Code: [Select]

above:
  ╔══╗          ╔══╗
0╔▼▼0╗        0╔˘▼0▲
╚╚╔╝╗╗        ▲╚#╝╗▲
╚0▼▼╝0        ▲0▼˘╝0
╚══╝          ╚══╝

below:

   0╣═0           0▲▲0
0═╠╣╝╔╠╣═0     0▲▲▲^^▲▲▲0
   0═╠0           0▲▲0

˘ = hatch covers linked to the same input
# = medium-friction track stop (required)
^ = track-sensing pressure plate (output, switches between them whenever the circuit "triggers")

Everytime the input switches from off to on, the cart will switch the partial circuit it occupies. The given design can be used as a binary counter.

Re: libraries

I think writing is much easier if there's a given "developped" topic dwarfs can write about - something they've read about or something they were taught by a teaching scholar. Otherwise, they have to think the topic through until they make a breakthrough, which tends to take upwards of five years (and if anything messes up the writing job, all that effort fizzles and you get no book after all). In a world with no outside libraries and thus no import-able books and scholar visitors, getting anything written is a fool's errand. It's hard to get a dozen worthwhile books out of ten scholars in ten years if they have to study everything up from zero.

In my current (0.43.05) fort, we have a massive outside supply of books and ridiculous numbers of scholars; we can't keep up with the production of writing materials and the artefact list is up to 128 original pieces of literature in under ten years (well over a hundred copies of imported books are also present).

[martinuzz]

For two years in a row now, the Elf caravan stopped coming. They don't arrive and then flee the map, no they just don't come anymore.
Could this mean the Elves were eradicated on the world map?

[Jazz Cat]

Check Legends mode.

[StagnantSoul]

Finally, a fortress made for me! Got cherries, plums, and no stupid fruits like durians for my wood, lots of them too, meaning I can clear away all of the top layer and be fine using the lower area in the northeast for picking, we have a lava tube on the surface that the map said nothing about, and even though we are without iron and coal, we have a ton of tetrahydrite and cassiterite right in the first layers. We even have fire clay, so I can set up a kickass pottery really easily. Bronze fortress and tons of peach cider, hell yeah. Now, let's hope this place doesn't come crashing down... Thinking of designing the fortress based around the volcano we were randomly given, partially in ground partially above.

[LexJackle]

The artefact missions seem to be bugged, at least in forts with the visitor bug. In my fort, no mission to send artefacts retrieval missions just results in the dwarfs disappearing off the map and then reappearing with an empty mission log. I've also experienced more crashes and premature fps deaths in this version than other versions. My nearly two year fort has gone to 6fps, with just 50 dwarfs and 84 visitors. It has a narrow river, but no active pump stacks or caverns revealed. It also has maybe ~15 animals. There is no way that it should have fps death this early. Even with my computer completely minimised (with all programs including therapist) cut off and df on highest priority, I only get 8 fps ffs. Its been about 5 forts now that have died really early thanks to fps death.

So I'm creating a large island with a 1000 year history in the hope of getting a fort without problems. However I'm probably going to soon give up on DF for another few months if my next world/ fort doesn't work out. I've lost too many hours to crashes and about 5 forts to FPS death when they should be at 50+ at least (if not a solid 100).

Edit: New fort, season one and already I have 11 elf visitors. I haven't even built a single workshop yet.

[martinuzz]

Yay, the top half of my map north of the river is now tree-spawn free. Stripmined it all down to bedrock, save for a 3x3 edge around it.
The battle for preserving FPS continues.

I do get occasional 'something has collapsed on the surface' messages though. I think that's phantom trees trying to grow into maturity in mid air.


EDIT: hmmmmm. On topic of my lack of elven caravans.... I just noticed that on the civilization screen, their exports and offerings are listed as terror and vengeance.
I guess I can expect elves once I turn on invasions.

No idea how I pissed them off though, I didn't trade them any meats, nor do I even have a baron yet (only 19 dwarves, nr 20 should be born soon), so they hadn't made any tree cutting restriction demands yet either.

Yeah.. 19 dwarves. I have my pop soft cap at 20, and I have 4 breeding pairs of dwarves, plus two lovers amongst the starting seven for a potential 5th breeder.
Should be a good generations fort. I did mod dwarves to grow up at age 5 instead of 12, or generation forts really take forever to establish.

[StagnantSoul]

Accursed kea... Not only did they take the original anvil, they also took the second one we bought and the first artifact of the site after we finally got the third off the humans...

[LexJackle]

Yay, the top half of my map north of the river is now tree-spawn free. Stripmined it all down to bedrock, save for a 3x3 edge around it.
The battle for preserving FPS continues.

I do get occasional 'something has collapsed on the surface' messages though. I think that's phantom trees trying to grow into maturity in mid air.

Its annoying. FPS death is sadly incurable. When my fortress decides to go down to 7fps, its sadly dead.

I've just had my fortress experience FPS death on the second season. I've got about 30 visitors, 10 dwarfs and 4 animals. 7fps. In this fortress, 7 of those men are out artefact hunting, leaving 3 dwarfs to man the fort. It shouldn't be experiencing this kind of fps death. But this fort is just an attempt for me to see if I can get any artefact through raiding other than blooming books. I haven't yet been able to get a successful raid on anything that hasn't just recovered books. Even towers seem to get me endless books, but no slabs.

[martinuzz]

Its annoying. FPS death is sadly incurable. When my fortress decides to go down to 7fps, its sadly dead.

I've just had my fortress experience FPS death on the second season. I've got about 30 visitors, 10 dwarfs and 4 animals. 7fps. In this fortress, 7 of those men are out artefact hunting, leaving 3 dwarfs to man the fort. It shouldn't be experiencing this kind of fps death. But this fort is just an attempt for me to see if I can get any artefact through raiding other than blooming books. I haven't yet been able to get a successful raid on anything that hasn't just recovered books. Even towers seem to get me endless books, but no slabs.

Can't complain in this fort. After two atom smashings, I am down to 3 spies, and since I have no tavern set to accept all visitors, there's no big influx of bugged visitors.
Add quantum stockpiles, and the anti-tree stripmine, and I'm in year 6 now without losing a single point of FPS. It's still at my starting 72FPS (36GFPS), even when 100 dwarven traders and their mules arrive in autumn.

Must be said though, I haven't breached the caverns yet.

[LexJackle]

Lucky. I'm getting the endless visitor bug, without any taverns. I might need to build a tavern just so I can get set it to no visitors and get rid of my 30 odd visitors. On the plus side, if I do somehow get an artefact and annoy someone, I have a nice standing army I need to kill.

[spazyak]

Lucky. I'm getting the endless visitor bug, without any taverns. I might need to build a tavern just so I can get set it to no visitors and get rid of my 30 odd visitors. On the plus side, if I do somehow get an artefact and annoy someone, I have a nice standing army I need to kill.

Why not just use the tavernto harvest visitite and make a drowninzg chamber?