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Author Topic: Um... help?  (Read 3652 times)

NW_Kohaku

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #15 on: May 29, 2015, 10:09:42 pm »

The annoying thing is that I can never get a smelter or forge running. You don't seem to understand how nooby I am.

Well, what Loud Whispers said is how it runs, and generally speaking, you want to run mostly on magma and on-map ores if you can get it.

However, assuming the problem is the very basics of setting things up, to build a smelter, you need a stone (technically, a fireproof material, so anything not wood).  Stone blocks are nicer (carve at masonry shop), but just a stone is fine.  Try to embark with a few stones, because you'll need a few, no need to force your miner to go get some when (s)he's probably busy working the first soil stockpile, and they're dirt cheap. 

Remember, there's no penalty for building your first workshops outside, and when you deconstruct a workshop, you get all your materials back.  Feel free to set up your first workshops right next to the wagon before you even strike the earth. 

The smelter won't be able to do anything until you have fuel and ore or things to melt.  To make fuel, chop down some trees by (d)esignating (t)rees for chopping.  Then, make charcoal at a wood furnace (b->e->w).  You'll also want your metalsmith forge, which requires an anvil and a stone to build. 

After that, all you need are ores to actually make into metal.  The metals that are actually worth using are copper, tin (makes bronze with copper), and iron.  In ore form, these are tetrahedrite, malachite, native copper, cassiterite, hematite, limonite, and magnetite.

In general, if you want an easy run of things, I recommend setting your metals frequency to a really low number in your world generation screen, and then searching for flux and multiple surface metals.  When you embark, look around for limestone or chalk or dolomite on or near the surface, and if there's any hematite around.  Those are your easy money embarks, because you get tons of easy steel.  If you don't get any, abandon embark and try again.  I like to embark near rivers that have deep valleys (hit tab to see them when selecting an embark) because those tend to expose a lot of layers of stone for what ores they hold. (Plus rivers have interesting animals in them, and steep slopes provide interesting terrain to exploit. Just remove a ramp, and you have a wall!)

Early on, you should just manually order each item you need individually.  Remember, this game is about building up defenses as quickly as possible, so prioritize what you really need, and leave the rest for later.  This includes mining things.  Do not mine more ore than you need just because it's there.  You'll have all the time in the world for that later, focus on getting shelter, first. 

Depending on if there's anything hostile around your fort, you should probably be focusing on putting at least a door between you and anything nasty pretty quick.  (Or several doors.  Even door-destroying creatures take time to bash one down, so they can buy you time to get your dwarves ready for a fight.) Then put some cage traps outside the door, and make some wooden cages to fill them with.  Then put a war dog pasture on the inside of that door.  (Did I mention bring four dogs - two male, two female in case one of them is gay - with you, and immediately make a kennel to train them to war dogs?  And bring 4 turkeys while you're at it.  Nest boxes can be made from regular stone.  Pasture all animals, and pasture turkeys in one-tile pastures to stop them from running around.  Put excess turkeys and poults in cages.)
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FallacyofUrist

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #16 on: May 30, 2015, 06:51:50 am »

... so much for war dogs. Apparently maximum skilled dwarves cost points... I had to settle for cavies. And there's nothing hostile... well... I saw a giant moth... only one, thankfully. I've gotten into the habit of checking the unit list frequently.

So I've got shelter in my game, to say the least... just no stockpiles or bedrooms. Thankfully there's at least some workshops, including the forge I need. Not, however, including the furnace... and I can't seem to find ores other than gems.

I first played dwarf fortress at around three years ago. I played for all of ten minutes- then my mind went kaput. I started again about a year ago- then just fizzled. Now I'm trying again in earnest.
Thanks for the help.
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Reelya

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #17 on: May 30, 2015, 09:20:23 am »

... so much for war dogs.
You don't need to ship with wardogs. Dogs can be trained once you get there. Try 1 breeding pair of regular dogs and regular cats, and breed turkeys for meat and eggs. Take an excess of female turkeys and one male to speed this up. Tto breed more turkeys you have to lock them into a pen so dwarves won't steal the eggs for cooking, or turning off eggs on your food stockpile does the job too. Just make sure to keep your male breeding turkey(s) safe.

There are many ways to save embark points on items too, there are entire threads on embark tricks to save money:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=102276.15

You can bring raw materials for armor and tools much cheaper than bringing tools. This can be fiddly for metal tools, but could help you learn the forging system.

Bring 1 log and 1 stone instead of an axe, then make a carpenter's workshop with the stone, and have 1 training axe made from the wood. Then use that to chop down trees.

Also, bring a stack of plump helmets instead of booze and seeds. As soon as you embark make wooden barrels or stone pots, and brew all the plump helmets to wine. Presto: you get really cheap booze, and don't have to bring plump helmet seeds either.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2015, 09:24:49 am by Reelya »
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FallacyofUrist

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #18 on: May 30, 2015, 10:12:21 am »

Now that's brilliant. Pity I literally don't have any animals other than horses and cavies.

Those tricks are nice, I'll try them on my next embark.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #19 on: May 30, 2015, 11:21:36 am »

Now that's brilliant. Pity I literally don't have any animals other than horses and cavies.

Those tricks are nice, I'll try them on my next embark.

You don't need to take the things they give you at the start. 

Dwarven skills are cheap, relatively speaking, so I tend to take them.  A little herbalist in this new version can go a long way. 

Personally, I'd sell the axes and picks unless you expect to have to fight right at the start of the game (evil biome), and take along some copper nuggets, so you can forge your own when you get there, instead.  (Bring at least a half-dozen stone blocks, and a half-dozen copper nuggets.) You also can craft a wheelbarrow, stepladder, buckets, splints, and crutches all on the spot from cheap logs, rather than buying the expensive finished products.  (Once you have your axe, if you're embarking in a forest, you probably don't need the logs, either.) There's also no reason for bringing finished bags when you can bring cheaper thread, no reason to bring pig tail thread with sheep wool yarn is cheaper, or quivers when you don't have bolts or crossbows, and leather will be plentiful, later.  Get rid of all but one or two of each type of alcohol, which you bring with you for the free barrels, instead.  You'll be able to make infinite alcohol by the end of your first spring, (farms are priority #2, right after "get basic supplies squared away",) so there's no reason to worry about that.  Sell your plump helmets, as well, but keep all the seeds. 

Or basically, start off by selling back everything but the anvil, seeds, a couple alcohol,

If you need leather, you can just butcher one of your horses or yaks or whatever comes with the wagon.  They're random and almost never a breeding pair, anyway.  On the other hand, common animal leather purchased at embark is only 5, anyway.

Again, take 2 male, 2 female normal dogs, and train them there to become war dogs.  I only take 1 cat, since it's easy to import more, later.  Take 4 turkeys, half male, half female.  Keep in mind, in this version of the game, some animals are gay, so you should take some redundant animals to up your odds.  If you have excess points, you might also want to bring some sheep (ewe and ram), because they provide wool in a trickle, as well as milk, and can be butchered for leather, meat, fat, and bones.  Just bringing thread is slightly cheaper, but kick-starting larger butchering is useful in its own right.

Also, cavvies are guinea pigs. They're tiny, have no meat, and are utterly useless. 

Take with you any "garden plant" that produces seeds when eaten or brewed, like strawberries or blueberries. 

All of this generally applies to trading with caravans as a whole: buy raw materials, and sell finished goods.  If it's something you need, crank up the demand to paying 200% normal price for it, because you sell finished goods for 10 to 120 times the price of the raw material, and will be swimming in so much ☼ you'll be struggling to keep it down.  (No really, try to keep it down, it ups the power of attackers in sieges and megabeast raids.)

I'd suggest also bringing candlenut (or featherwood if you can) logs in a large quantity, and then using them to build some early buildings so that they can't be used up by your carpenter.  (Or just forbid them.) Candlenut wood is useful for making "padding" since its light weight makes it deal very little damage when dwarves fall upon it.  (Make barracks walls out of this!)

After all those cost-saving measures, I generally have several hundred points left to spend on random other things I might want, such as starting out with some raw ore. You can take a half-dozen hematite and flux with you for about 180, and have 6 steel bars very early in the game.  Or just bring some extra cassiterite with extra copper nuggets, and make some bronze, which is all you need early on.



For dwarf jobs, I suggest having one perma-miner who needs no other skill.  I'd give them a couple skill points to make early soil digging a little faster. 

I have a skilled farmer.  That skill is useful, yo. 

I have one skilled herbalist, so I can get more seeds (unless embarking on an all-glacier embark or something). Give both of those farmer dwarves one rank of skill in either weaponsmithing or armorsmithing for moods. 

I have one trained weapon- and armorsmith. 

I have one general crafter who I put a couple skill points into brewing (no quality, only speed) and several into masonry, so I can get quality chairs and tables early, and maybe also leatherworking.  This dwarf does a lot of random other jobs like wood burning, spinning, weaving, and leatherwork, as well.

I have one dwarf with a combination of marksdwarf, a little hammerdwarf, some armor user, discipline, and a bit of teacher.  This is my ranger. Make him a copper or bronze crossbow and some metal bolts early, along with leather armor.  This guy can also train animals and do other animal-related work.  This dwarf should have high physical stats plus spatial sense. 

Finally, my embark leader.  I usually give them carpentry (masterwork beds!) along with several social skills to ensure they become leader, and eventually mayor.  Look at your dwarves' personalities carefully, and select the best leader among them for this role.  (Use dwarf therapist! It works even at the embark screen.) You want a dwarf who has low (or not described) hate, envy, anger, depression, anxiety, and stress propensity, as well as low cruelty, closemindedness, self-consciousness, and straightforwardness.  You want high assertiveness, friendliness, politeness, cooperation, humor, altruism, and gregariousness.

Also, look at their preferences, especially their material preferences.  If they become mayor, they will start demanding things made from this stuff.  Make sure they like easy things like granite doors, and that whatever stone, metal, gem, and wood they like are all available for purchase from the mountainhomes. 

If you don't have good dwarves, abort and embark again until you do.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2015, 11:24:25 am by NW_Kohaku »
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SimRobert2001

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #20 on: May 31, 2015, 02:50:00 am »

Yeah, it's probably best if you just pass on it.  You'll just become hopelessly addicted like the rest of us and all other games will suddenly seem shallow and unfulfilling.  You'll spend several nights building a perfect fortress from some of the great youtube guides only to lose it to a failed engineering experiment.  You'll become frustrated and obsessed with next one... and the next one... and the next one...

Just because a lot of us are working on an 120z level golden cock and balls doesnt make us addicts.
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FallacyofUrist

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #21 on: May 31, 2015, 07:02:11 am »

...
...
Huh. Thanks for the advice. And ugh.
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Solarius Scorch

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #22 on: June 15, 2015, 05:39:47 am »

Just use some tutorials to help you get through the first stages. That's how I started anyway.

Ha. It interests me, it just feels slow compared to other options.

Slow? Look, I'm playing a multiplayer Civilization: Call to Power game with Forever Future mod installed that's been going on for several years already. (And running a late-cyberpunkish France multinational republic with half the population living in ocean floor cities, or sometimes in orbital habitats.) That's slow. Dwarf Fortress is reasonably fast in comparison, since you can build and lose a fort over a weekend.
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ldog

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #23 on: June 15, 2015, 09:05:41 am »

Turkey???
Goose!
1 year to maturity, almost as large.
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Max™

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #24 on: June 15, 2015, 09:16:55 am »

Really gotta suggest playing around with adventurer mode some if just for one thing.

Before you embark somewhere, roll up an adventurer and go look around some. The sites that look good from the embark screen can turn out pretty cool once you get there, but the kind of stuff you can find with a scout for your group? Lord the craziness.

Even if you don't get the combat and such well, the supplies you start with and remembering to head indoors before twilight if you have bogeymen enabled should let you find a few spots with enticing potential.

Don't make a fortress guard though, fortress underground sections can bug out and lose links to the surface, and they're a maze even with tons of practice roaming through them.

Just make a peasant in a hamlet and go look around, ask about monsters, maybe try to make it to another site intact and retire after finding a perfect embark spot, assuming you don't die in the process.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2015, 09:18:31 am by Max™ »
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Pearofclubs

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #25 on: June 17, 2015, 08:21:48 pm »

Having a goal for each fortress can help interest a lot, and reducing the size of the map helps it not get repetitive. Big maps are cool but I find I play more sloppy and get bored with a big embark well before I've exploited even a tiny fraction of it.
[/quote]

Agreed.

There is no end objective, there is no motivation in this game. A huge chunk of what keeps me playing is giving myself a project. My last big project was connecting two continents using a five world map tile bridge of microcline and marble (just cause that's what I had). I wanted to see if it affects whether neighbors on the embark screen, because there were goblins on one side and no goblins on the other. Some amusing implications would have arose if a goblin army used the bridge (did we at least charge a toll?).

The !!fun!! ended up coming because all but one single migrant wave was showing up on the wrong side of the ocean, where they would slowly dehydrate to death because they had no miners or woodcutters. So my bridge was being constructed by a total of 13 dorfs, three of whom were kids. It's still under construction, so no results yet :P So damn slow!

So yeah, think of something stupid to do with your fort, and make it happen. Along the way, learn the !!SCIENCE!! necessary to get the job done, and if a particular subject interests you, learn some more.
Just making a fortress can get boring.
Give yourself a job, and most importantly, have fun!
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Eldin00

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #26 on: June 23, 2015, 04:07:27 pm »

Turkey???
Goose!
1 year to maturity, almost as large.

Even with the faster growth, geese produce less than half as many eggs as turkeys. So with turkeys, by the end of two years you can have more meat, more eggs, more leather, and more bones than with geese. And since turkeys hens still begin laying at 1 year of age, you can get a full year of egglaying out of the newly hatched birds before they reach full size for butchering, or still butcher them at 1 year and let the fact that you get more than double the birds to butcher make up for the fact that 1 year old turkeys only produce about 75% the food/bones as of 1 year old geese.

Geese only come out ahead in the very short term. Peafowl are a good compromise, producing more eggs than geese while maturing in one year and being nearly as large.
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ldog

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #27 on: June 23, 2015, 05:07:09 pm »

Turkey???
Goose!
1 year to maturity, almost as large.

Even with the faster growth, geese produce less than half as many eggs as turkeys. So with turkeys, by the end of two years you can have more meat, more eggs, more leather, and more bones than with geese. And since turkeys hens still begin laying at 1 year of age, you can get a full year of egglaying out of the newly hatched birds before they reach full size for butchering, or still butcher them at 1 year and let the fact that you get more than double the birds to butcher make up for the fact that 1 year old turkeys only produce about 75% the food/bones as of 1 year old geese.

Geese only come out ahead in the very short term. Peafowl are a good compromise, producing more eggs than geese while maturing in one year and being nearly as large.

You and everyone else are overlooking 1 very important thing; the cap of 50 animals of a particular species.

You won't get anymore fertile eggs until the population comes down below the cap. Now that being said I have had "gooseplosions" where I've had 100 geese at a time but that is why I know for sure all eggs produced while I was waiting for them to mature were infertile. So over time for meat and leather goose beats turkey hands down. Yes, peafowl is also good, actually probably better than goose when you count the eggs. You'll probably have even larger "blue-peafowlsplosions" if you keep the room locked most of the time and forbid the fertile eggs (dfhack plugin indispensible). All others are not worth bothering with.

It depends on your priority, mine is usually leather, although since playing with the modest mod it's less of an issue (since the amount of hides you get are related to animal size, vanilla seems to be 1 per animal). Food is just never a problem.
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StagnantSoul

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #28 on: June 23, 2015, 08:16:37 pm »

There's a cap? I've had in excess of 200 turkeys, and they kept going. Never heard of a cap.
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ldog

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Re: Um... help?
« Reply #29 on: June 23, 2015, 09:48:57 pm »

There's a cap? I've had in excess of 200 turkeys, and they kept going. Never heard of a cap.

A softcap, It's supposed to be 50. It was only added a few versions ago (or maybe this version, it's been a while) IIRC.
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For example, if you wanted to check if a unit was eligible to be a politician or a car salesman, you'd first want to verify that there is no soul present...

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The more appropriate question becomes, are they awesome and dwarven enough.
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