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[martinuzz]

No visible skill gain. Critical thinker is still adequate, other skills still dabbling.
It does make me happy though. My dwarves had failed to write a book in over two years. They like discussing way too much.

[Halnoth]

No visible skill gain. Critical thinker is still adequate, other skills still dabbling.
It does make me happy though. My dwarves had failed to write a book in over two years. They like discussing way too much.

Do you use dwarf therapist?

Dwarves gain about 10-30 xp in a topic skill each time they ponder/discuss/teach/learn + 10-30xp in speaking/student/teacher (except ponder since that is a solo activity).

I was just curious if you could pinpoint which exact skill the discovery was linked to. I have started tracking topics versus skill gain so that I can start finding links between subjects and also whether some scholar activities actually net multiple skill gains or not.

The practical gain here would be to ascertain which scholar skills you should combo at embark if you were so inclined.

[martinuzz]

Nope not using DT. Haven't used any 3d party tools in years really. I think the last time was in DF version 2010, I did use DFhack to clean the map from FPS killing muck.

On another note: I found out it's not possible to make a library out of a dwarf-owned dining room. Any chests placed in there will be reserved for the dwarf's personal belongings, and not used for storing writing materials.

Also, I put most of my legendary military dwarves on scholar duty.
Either observer is an academic skill too, or their name comes from having a high Teacher skill, but none to dabbling in all other academic skills.
I think the latter.

Their academic profession is called 'naturalist'.
It's not the tracking skill, even though they are all dabblers there, because my non-military hunter, who is better at tracking, but lacks the observer and teaching skills, is just a 'scholar'.

[Niddhoger]

Nope not using DT. Haven't used any 3d party tools in years really. I think the last time was in DF version 2010, I did use DFhack to clean the map from FPS killing muck.

On another note: I found out it's not possible to make a library out of a dwarf-owned dining room. Any chests placed in there will be reserved for the dwarf's personal belongings, and not used for storing writing materials.

Also, I put most of my legendary military dwarves on scholar duty.
Either observer is an academic skill too, or their name comes from having a high Teacher skill, but none to dabbling in all other academic skills.
I think the latter.

Their academic profession is called 'naturalist'.
It's not the tracking skill, even though they are all dabblers there, because my non-military hunter, who is better at tracking, but lacks the observer and teaching skills, is just a 'scholar'.

DT changes everything... Its good in the beginning to juggle multiple labors on multiple dwarves easily, then flip them off when not needed.  You can sort dwarves and assign them nicknames.  Say, you get a 30 strong migrant wave.  You sort by wave, and then flip to the military tab.  Sort by discipline (don't think its possible to have a weapon skill without this, other than miners), and then shift+click all the dwarves with prior military training.  Then give all of them the same nickname ("recruit" to all 11 of them at once) or add them piece by piece to existing squads.  Those two with swords get immediately added (via click interface) to your sword squad, the hunters get drafted to the marksmen squad, etc. 

You can also sort by "highest moodable skill" which it'll tell you normally, except this will also weed out the dwarves that have already mooded.  Thus, you can easily manage your peons to make sure the millers and cheesemakers are properly flagged for weapon/armorsmithing moods (and quickly turn the labor off on those that are ready).  You can even parse through their likes to make sure that a thresher that likes brass doesn't get to make a brass sword.  Speaking of the last one, you can flip through your useless peons with the "roles" category to weigh them for specific crafts.  Not only does it show you dwarves with high attributes in the matching skill, but it'll add extra weight for liking a relevant item/material (as well as adding weight to previous experience).  So if your weaponsmith takes a long nap in a deep cistern, you can quickly sift through your chaff to find that creative fish dissector with a thing for steel and axes.  Or if you want to expand into glass and find the guy that likes green glass for an early quality boost, or cabinets to fill out your bedroom furniture.  Its nothing you can't do in vanilla, but it makes sorting through your 100+ dwarves so much easier.

Back on task, according to the wiki most jobs give either 30 or 10 experience.  95% of jobs give the standard 30, while mass jobs (like stone detailing or firing at an archery target) give just 10.  However, attacking a living target gives a huge experience boost for weapon skills.  Due to the extreme length of time it takes scholars to finish their various tasks, they rarely get very far trying to train in-fortress.  I've seen cheesemakers with great intellects that valued knowledge spend years without breaking "dabbling" in their skills new scholarly skills.  They even gained masters, but the master didn't know much crap in the first place >.>  Skill gains from master/student relationships should have a higher modifier than just the base 30.  You are getting direct 1v1 instruction from someone you respect enough to call "master," you should be learning far more than at a normal rate researching on your own or just arguing with random Urists.  Even then, it'd still be slower growth.  I don't expect them to pop straight to legendary like a miner tearing through a sand bank for several months, but spending a week on the same job to only gain 10 exp is too much in the other direction. 

[Halnoth]

Also, I put most of my legendary military dwarves on scholar duty.
Either observer is an academic skill too, or their name comes from having a high Teacher skill, but none to dabbling in all other academic skills.
I think the latter.

Their academic profession is called 'naturalist'.
It's not the tracking skill, even though they are all dabblers there, because my non-military hunter, who is better at tracking, but lacks the observer and teaching skills, is just a 'scholar'.

In fort I've noticed that dwarves will not gain a scholar profession until they gain a level in it. I will go through my forts and see if I can prove observer as a scholar skill. I haven't been checking for it because I didn't think of it. I have found no correlation between the teacher skill and any academic profession title but I think I had a migrant peasant with a high teacher skill and nothing else a few forts back so I will check. Since I am looking at observer I will also look at other common military skills to see if I can find something.

Back on task, according to the wiki most jobs give either 30 or 10 experience.  95% of jobs give the standard 30, while mass jobs (like stone detailing or firing at an archery target) give just 10.  However, attacking a living target gives a huge experience boost for weapon skills.  Due to the extreme length of time it takes scholars to finish their various tasks, they rarely get very far trying to train in-fortress.  I've seen cheesemakers with great intellects that valued knowledge spend years without breaking "dabbling" in their skills new scholarly skills.  They even gained masters, but the master didn't know much crap in the first place >.>  Skill gains from master/student relationships should have a higher modifier than just the base 30.  You are getting direct 1v1 instruction from someone you respect enough to call "master," you should be learning far more than at a normal rate researching on your own or just arguing with random Urists.  Even then, it'd still be slower growth.  I don't expect them to pop straight to legendary like a miner tearing through a sand bank for several months, but spending a week on the same job to only gain 10 exp is too much in the other direction. 

Skill growth for scholarly activities appears to be split between skills. 1 discussion for example will give 10-30 in speaking and 10-30 in chemist (or w/e topic). Same for book writing which will give a (I think) standard 6 in wordsmith, 12 in writing, and 10 in a topic skill.

I do agree that skill growth is slow but I'm working on a way to train them faster. I think its all about the library set up. Previously in .02-.03 forts I saw skill growth all over. However, since starting .04 I have not seen dwarves discussing topics that they do not know about. My current fort has 12 scholars, all with medical skills except 1 that has tracking and mechanics. For the past 5 years the dwarves have only talked about these topics. In those 5 years nearly all of them have gained at least 1 skill level in each. My idea here is based on the idiom "you don't know what you don't know" so my next test will be as follows;

Embark with 3 scholar dwarves (the other 4 will build the fort so I don't contaminate my scholars with job skills), all will have a 3 in writing and 2 in teaching with the following skills
Dwarf 1: 5 Diagnose
Dwarf 2: 5 Geography
Dwarf 3: 5 Chemist

I will then set up 3 different libraries who have no scholar visiters and test what skills are gained when. I will have to be careful as to what skills any new scholars have that I add to the libraries so as not to contaminate my experiment. If I get different topic skills from migrants then I will open up new libraries.

Ideally I want at least 5 scholars per library to maximize the amount of activities undertaken. I hope unskilled dwarves don't mess it up, I may have to savescum a few times to preserve my data.

My hypothesis is that if we decrease the amount of potential topics then we will see an increase in skill growth in the remaining topics.

Now I did a similar test in .02 but like I said dwarves appear to not discuss unknown topics in .04.


 

[cochramd]

I'm planning to put my scholars through military school before they get to the library so that they all have good organizer, student and teacher skills. Has anyone noticed if discipline and observer, the other two mental military skills, help out scholars at all?

[Niddhoger]

I'm planning to put my scholars through military school before they get to the library so that they all have good organizer, student and teacher skills. Has anyone noticed if discipline and observer, the other two mental military skills, help out scholars at all?

No, but I did notice my military "scholars" deciding that book-learning was for nerds and return to a barracks to train.  I forgot to check if officially disbanding that squad/reforming it without those guys would work, but they had high weapon skills and I wanted them to just "stand by" in the library. 

However, the ones that -did- actually report to the library quickly formed master/apprentice relationships with my other scholars. 

Also, I put most of my legendary military dwarves on scholar duty.
Either observer is an academic skill too, or their name comes from having a high Teacher skill, but none to dabbling in all other academic skills.
I think the latter.

Their academic profession is called 'naturalist'.
It's not the tracking skill, even though they are all dabblers there, because my non-military hunter, who is better at tracking, but lacks the observer and teaching skills, is just a 'scholar'.

In fort I've noticed that dwarves will not gain a scholar profession until they gain a level in it. I will go through my forts and see if I can prove observer as a scholar skill. I haven't been checking for it because I didn't think of it. I have found no correlation between the teacher skill and any academic profession title but I think I had a migrant peasant with a high teacher skill and nothing else a few forts back so I will check. Since I am looking at observer I will also look at other common military skills to see if I can find something.

Back on task, according to the wiki most jobs give either 30 or 10 experience.  95% of jobs give the standard 30, while mass jobs (like stone detailing or firing at an archery target) give just 10.  However, attacking a living target gives a huge experience boost for weapon skills.  Due to the extreme length of time it takes scholars to finish their various tasks, they rarely get very far trying to train in-fortress.  I've seen cheesemakers with great intellects that valued knowledge spend years without breaking "dabbling" in their skills new scholarly skills.  They even gained masters, but the master didn't know much crap in the first place >.>  Skill gains from master/student relationships should have a higher modifier than just the base 30.  You are getting direct 1v1 instruction from someone you respect enough to call "master," you should be learning far more than at a normal rate researching on your own or just arguing with random Urists.  Even then, it'd still be slower growth.  I don't expect them to pop straight to legendary like a miner tearing through a sand bank for several months, but spending a week on the same job to only gain 10 exp is too much in the other direction. 

Skill growth for scholarly activities appears to be split between skills. 1 discussion for example will give 10-30 in speaking and 10-30 in chemist (or w/e topic). Same for book writing which will give a (I think) standard 6 in wordsmith, 12 in writing, and 10 in a topic skill.

I do agree that skill growth is slow but I'm working on a way to train them faster. I think its all about the library set up. Previously in .02-.03 forts I saw skill growth all over. However, since starting .04 I have not seen dwarves discussing topics that they do not know about. My current fort has 12 scholars, all with medical skills except 1 that has tracking and mechanics. For the past 5 years the dwarves have only talked about these topics. In those 5 years nearly all of them have gained at least 1 skill level in each. My idea here is based on the idiom "you don't know what you don't know" so my next test will be as follows;

Embark with 3 scholar dwarves (the other 4 will build the fort so I don't contaminate my scholars with job skills), all will have a 3 in writing and 2 in teaching with the following skills
Dwarf 1: 5 Diagnose
Dwarf 2: 5 Geography
Dwarf 3: 5 Chemist

I will then set up 3 different libraries who have no scholar visiters and test what skills are gained when. I will have to be careful as to what skills any new scholars have that I add to the libraries so as not to contaminate my experiment. If I get different topic skills from migrants then I will open up new libraries.

Ideally I want at least 5 scholars per library to maximize the amount of activities undertaken. I hope unskilled dwarves don't mess it up, I may have to savescum a few times to preserve my data.

My hypothesis is that if we decrease the amount of potential topics then we will see an increase in skill growth in the remaining topics.

Hmmm well brokers gain 30 experience in a battery of social skills per trade, randomly split between them.  Are those numbers from just one dwarf, or checked across several?

I was also thinking we needed to "bootstrap" a proper library to get it running.  My last library in 42.04 wouldn't write books either.  Out of the 12 or so I wound up with in 5 years, I think only two were written by fortress-"trained" scholars (yes, I had free tables and writing materials out the wazoo).  The rest were from the rare scholar that would grace my fort once in a blue moon.  One of those visiting scholars did write 5 books... wasn't a long term resident either.  I wish I had examined him closer, as I didn't notice this until long after he left.  However, I was thinking about bringing at least one dwarf that was 5 writer/5 teacher.  I wanted to see if he would "teach" writing to the other dwarves, and if that writing skill would prompt my dwarves to write more books.  Otherwise, it might be a catch 22- dwarves don't know how to write to know how to practice and improve their writing."

I was going to let the scholars do menial labor (hauler monkeys), or things like make the fluid engineer create mechanisms and set up the first levers/traps (since they are related skills).  I doubt things like "shearing" and "butchering" would contaminate knowledge skills either.  I was going to use the dwarven caravan as the start point of said library.  Not just to get work out of them, but so that I might buy a few books off the caravan to install in my library.  They'd have something to research from the start. 

[martinuzz]

I'm planning to put my scholars through military school before they get to the library so that they all have good organizer, student and teacher skills. Has anyone noticed if discipline and observer, the other two mental military skills, help out scholars at all?

No, but I did notice my military "scholars" deciding that book-learning was for nerds and return to a barracks to train.  I forgot to check if officially disbanding that squad/reforming it without those guys would work, but they had high weapon skills and I wanted them to just "stand by" in the library. 

However, the ones that -did- actually report to the library quickly formed master/apprentice relationships with my other scholars.

You don't need to disband the squad. Just put them off-duty, and (f)ree their barracks. This will make them all behave like civvies again, even the legendaries. I haven't seen any bad thoughts for it either in the new version. Seems military and civilian status are always swappable at will. Remake their barracks if you want them to train again.

If you really want to force them into the library, use civilian alerts to forbid access to the tavern, and resign the temple plus use a civilian alert to kick them out of there as well. Yes, legendary military that has been civilianized as described above will listen to civilian alerts again.

EDIT: (f)reeing you archery range helps too. Or just wait till they run out of practice bolts.

(While you're at it, don't forget to turn some or another crafting job on your miltary dwarves. That way they can get rid of their distraction thoughs in that area while they're in civvie mode)

[therahedwig]

I attempted to see if I could get my dwarves to write books about other books like the necromancers like doing, so I embarked with a bunch of critical thinkers, but it seems they started discussing maths instead.

[cochramd]

However, the ones that -did- actually report to the library quickly formed master/apprentice relationships with my other scholars.

Presumably that's due to their higher teacher and student skills, though maybe discipline contributes to that as well.

[Halnoth]

I attempted to see if I could get my dwarves to write books about other books like the necromancers like doing, so I embarked with a bunch of critical thinkers, but it seems they started discussing maths instead.

Thats because crit think is at the base of the knowledge tree that leads to math.

                 medical
crit think <
                 logic  - math

[cochramd]

Another question: if two dwarfs with a relationship (friends, family members, spouses, what have you) are scholars in the same library and have discussions there, does that count as them interacting for the purposes of happy thoughts? Also, precisely what is the Poet skill used for as a scholar?

[Niddhoger]

Another question: if two dwarfs with a relationship (friends, family members, spouses, what have you) are scholars in the same library and have discussions there, does that count as them interacting for the purposes of happy thoughts? Also, precisely what is the Poet skill used for as a scholar?

Poet skill is used for poetry... and poetry doesn't actually use the writing skill- it uses "wordsmith"

I've seen bards and the like carrying poetic books with them, but I'm not entirely sure how you would get them written.  Perhaps you have to embark with a poet or get a passing poet to use your library? I don't know how to force "poetry" when assigning a performer.  They could just as easily perform an instrument or dance instead.

[cochramd]

Well, I've got a poet, so I suppose I'll just keep her untrained in medicine and engineering and put her in my public library (my doctors and engineers will be in my private library) and see what happens. I will train her in Recordkeeper, though, because I need something to do with her in the meanwhile. I'll also need to find someone who has no engineering or doctor skills but is skilled in writing and wordsmithing to teach her, because she has skill in neither!

[Halnoth]

Well, I've got a poet, so I suppose I'll just keep her untrained in medicine and engineering and put her in my public library (my doctors and engineers will be in my private library) and see what happens. I will train her in Recordkeeper, though, because I need something to do with her in the meanwhile. I'll also need to find someone who has no engineering or doctor skills but is skilled in writing and wordsmithing to teach her, because she has skill in neither!

Record keeper is a scholarly skill (I don't know what it is related to though) so that might cause her to research other topics.

My hunch is that poetry is not a scholar skill. Alot of dwarves seem to have some skill in poet but don't write poetry frequently. I do occasionally get poetry books but I never see dwarves discussing it.