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[Fleeting Frames]

Clear cut the jungle?

Unless you prevent tree regrowth, it's going to grow back several times as thick :v

I imagine elves once cutting trees and harvesting the forest, and then being bitch-slapped by the deity (like this, from another player: "cutting the tree down killed everybody" - imagine if this is your forest retreat and you are the solitary elf left on the ground holding the axe and seeing everyone you've ever known dead and destroyed).

Thereafter they avoid it completely. But dwarves don't believe in that god, so to save dwarves from their own doom they demand they don't bunker buster their own fortress.

[Salmeuk]

As to your lost designations, macros are useful. I tend to designate a number of bedroom layers in succession using the same macro.

I also invest some time into recording macros that designate 10 z-level chunks of ramps and stairwells, since:

1. Those sorts of structures are needed in almost every fortress.
2. I don't mind if every stairwell or ramp tunnel looks the same in every fortress I play.
3. Manually designating these things is exceptionally boring.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Regarding point 2, I must say that despite using the same basic structures in many of my forts, unique factors present in each embark like the presence of high value stone, the shape of the caverns, or a pressing need for a particular type of room can greatly flavor the final layout.

[YetAnotherLurker]

I just wish there were an easy way to fix the stupid surface holes collapsing trees leave at ground level, even if they don't manage to collapse anything else on the way down. I've been fiddling with DFHack a bit to try and set up a script to automate mass repairs to the surface, but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how the tiletype structure is arranged. Ideally, the script would check all tiles starting from the Z-level of the lowest tile that's Outside-Light-Aboveground, and for each tile it finds that's a Soil Wall or a Root Wall with entirely empty space above it (rather than a floor, ramp or something else), and plant a soil floor on top.

[Weizen1988]

Clear cut the jungle?

Unless you prevent tree regrowth, it's going to grow back several times as thick :v

I imagine elves once cutting trees and harvesting the forest, and then being bitch-slapped by the deity (like this, from another player: "cutting the tree down killed everybody" - imagine if this is your forest retreat and you are the solitary elf left on the ground holding the axe and seeing everyone you've ever known dead and destroyed).

Thereafter they avoid it completely. But dwarves don't believe in that god, so to save dwarves from their own doom they demand they don't bunker buster their own fortress.

Id be satisfied if every tree wasnt like 5 z levels tall, I assume younger trees start shorter, makes building anything take forever, need to designate like 40 trees because they will prevent me placing walls above the first level, if not and trees just sprout fully grown like minecraft or something, thats it for that plan. Maybe just build in firebreaks, pave chunks to stop the fire, or dig moats, ive got a bunch of murky pools and it rains year round, which far as I can tell means infinite water, so long as I dont breach my fortress, I can build areas that fires cant cross.

I just wish there were an easy way to fix the stupid surface holes collapsing trees leave at ground level, even if they don't manage to collapse anything else on the way down. I've been fiddling with DFHack a bit to try and set up a script to automate mass repairs to the surface, but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how the tiletype structure is arranged. Ideally, the script would check all tiles starting from the Z-level of the lowest tile that's Outside-Light-Aboveground, and for each tile it finds that's a Soil Wall or a Root Wall with entirely empty space above it (rather than a floor, ramp or something else), and plant a soil floor on top.

The trees leaving holes thing bugs me as well, and yeah tiletypes is a bitch, ive yet to figure it out, I did have to use it to dig a hole once, a miner got about halfway through done with a job digging a channel down to my butcher shop as a vent, then fell asleep, woke up, and rather than finish, climbed out of the hole and wandered off, 3 years passed and no one completed the damn hole, so i tiletyped it, and now its finished but doesnt work, that final tile is marked as underground still, and stops it from ever reaching the shop. If I ever find a thread actually explaining how tiletypes works, i may fix that, it bugs me a lot having that be useless, I could have used that space for something else instead if that was going to happen.

[Weizen1988]

As to your lost designations, macros are useful. I tend to designate a number of bedroom layers in succession using the same macro.

I also invest some time into recording macros that designate 10 z-level chunks of ramps and stairwells, since:

1. Those sorts of structures are needed in almost every fortress.
2. I don't mind if every stairwell or ramp tunnel looks the same in every fortress I play.
3. Manually designating these things is exceptionally boring.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Regarding point 2, I must say that despite using the same basic structures in many of my forts, unique factors present in each embark like the presence of high value stone, the shape of the caverns, or a pressing need for a particular type of room can greatly flavor the final layout.

Yeah, im still learning the game, had no idea how macros worked, so ive been designating everything by hand, nervous automating things if it could just autodig a staircase straight into a cavern or something, I guess I could use reveal and check, but that feels cheaty.

[YetAnotherLurker]

The trees leaving holes thing bugs me as well, and yeah tiletypes is a bitch, ive yet to figure it out, I did have to use it to dig a hole once, a miner got about halfway through done with a job digging a channel down to my butcher shop as a vent, then fell asleep, woke up, and rather than finish, climbed out of the hole and wandered off, 3 years passed and no one completed the damn hole, so i tiletyped it, and now its finished but doesnt work, that final tile is marked as underground still, and stops it from ever reaching the shop. If I ever find a thread actually explaining how tiletypes works, i may fix that, it bugs me a lot having that be useless, I could have used that space for something else instead if that was going to happen

I think to fix it using tiletypes you also need to set it as light/aboveground/outside, or something. Honestly haven't tried using anything except the basic material/shape brushes so far. I think what you want is to set the tile at the bottom of your shaft using tiletypes, "paint L 1", "paint ST 1", and "paint SV 1".

[Weizen1988]

The trees leaving holes thing bugs me as well, and yeah tiletypes is a bitch, ive yet to figure it out, I did have to use it to dig a hole once, a miner got about halfway through done with a job digging a channel down to my butcher shop as a vent, then fell asleep, woke up, and rather than finish, climbed out of the hole and wandered off, 3 years passed and no one completed the damn hole, so i tiletyped it, and now its finished but doesnt work, that final tile is marked as underground still, and stops it from ever reaching the shop. If I ever find a thread actually explaining how tiletypes works, i may fix that, it bugs me a lot having that be useless, I could have used that space for something else instead if that was going to happen

I think to fix it using tiletypes you also need to set it as light/aboveground/outside, or something. Honestly haven't tried using anything except the basic material/shape brushes so far. I think what you want is to set the tile at the bottom of your shaft using tiletypes, "paint L 1", "paint ST 1", and "paint SV 1".

Ah, thank you, ill give that a shot, really i just wish that miner had finished his job instead of going to sleep at the bottom of the hole, then waking up and climbing out the hole, while no dwarf seems able to climb down the hole to finish the job.

[Melting Sky]

Yeah, an unlucky tree collapse over a central area in a fort can make one hell of a mess. Real world tree falls are surprisingly damaging as well. Have you ever seen what a big red wood fall looks like? Seriously we are talking about the sort of damage that would take out half a block of housing it if happened in the middle of a town. I got stuck in the northern mountains of California for hours after a big one came down across the highway in a storm. I was there until 4 am as they scrambled to cut a path through the debri field for the cars to get through. They brought in massive machinery and it still took forever. The damage that thing did was impressive. I do agree with you that it's a bit silly how cave ins in this game work where they can literally collapse domino style all the way from the surface down to the magma sea if there aren't any solid unmined out floors to stop it.

[Fleeting Frames]

Hm. As far as on-embark canopies go, you can decrease available sky levels in advanced worldgen to minimum. (Though this doesn't help that much if your embark isn't flat.)

Then I think you can use infinitesky command post-embarking, though I'm not certain the canopies won't grow with sky.

Anyway, 5z is what trees normally pop with after growing up from sapling, yeah. You can get taller than that - wiki suggests especially with highwoods on older worlds, but if you have no ceiling above the trees it's what you should expect.

For digging vents, you can dig stairs first, then smooth as necessary to prevent climbers from grabbing hold of the wall, then channel down the stairs from top to bottom one by one and exit on bottom.

[Thisfox]

Yeah, an unlucky tree collapse over a central area in a fort can make one hell of a mess. Real world tree falls are surprisingly damaging as well. Have you ever seen what a big red wood fall looks like? Seriously we are talking about the sort of damage that would take out half a block of housing it if happened in the middle of a town. I got stuck in the northern mountains of California for hours after a big one came down across the highway in a storm. I was there until 4 am as they scrambled to cut a path through the debri field for the cars to get through. They brought in massive machinery and it still took forever. The damage that thing did was impressive.

Yeah, I felt that it was very realistic as well, having seen what a tree can do to a house, a shed, or even an underground raintank during a cyclone. Large trees can do incredible damage to aboveground and underground structures in real life.

[Weizen1988]

Yeah, an unlucky tree collapse over a central area in a fort can make one hell of a mess. Real world tree falls are surprisingly damaging as well. Have you ever seen what a big red wood fall looks like? Seriously we are talking about the sort of damage that would take out half a block of housing it if happened in the middle of a town. I got stuck in the northern mountains of California for hours after a big one came down across the highway in a storm. I was there until 4 am as they scrambled to cut a path through the debri field for the cars to get through. They brought in massive machinery and it still took forever. The damage that thing did was impressive.

Yeah, I felt that it was very realistic as well, having seen what a tree can do to a house, a shed, or even an underground raintank during a cyclone. Large trees can do incredible damage to aboveground and underground structures in real life.

Yeah, i grew up more or less in the place that poster was talking about, out in the forests in northern california, gold mining town, trees can mess up a lot of stuff, biggest ive seen were about a meter and a half across, so not huge but pretty big, they dont spear straight downward through meters of solid stone, or puncture straight to the bottom of the gold mines around, they smash up a bunch of surface down a short ways. Anyway, doesnt matter, i rebuilt best I could, ran up top with pumps and dwarves and threw water at the fire to stop it getting worse, like to think it probably helped keep the fire back some.

[mikekchar]

But to be fair, you can't build large underground rooms with no support in real life either.  It will collapse without the tree ;-)  Sometimes I think we just have to accept that DF has it's own physics.

[Weizen1988]

But to be fair, you can't build large underground rooms with no support in real life either.  It will collapse without the tree ;-)  Sometimes I think we just have to accept that DF has it's own physics.

But the walls or supports only protect that exact square as far as I know, but yes, dwarf fortress physics is similar to but distinct from ours, clearly. Survive and adapt.

[muldrake]

So, my surface forest caught on fire, and amid the spam of "something collapsed on the surface" suddenly like half of my fort was knocked out, i go to look, something smashed a hole straight down several floors, through solid basalt, and now my fort is full of smoke. Ive seen chopped down trees leave a single space hole in the ground, but im not chopping anything, and that doesnt explain why its a several floor deep hole. If my whole surface operating as a giant cave in piston trap thing?

Edit: its also completely destroyed several stockpiles, and a farm, this is stupid. I could see it messing up the top level, but not like 3-4 floors down through solid stone, its a tree, not a bomb.

You should relax.

Bizarre effects from fire are one of the few truly unpredictable things left in this game, and losing is fun.

[Lozzymandias]

Once lost a fort to a forest fire... not the fire itself, but tree collapses punched a tonne of holes in the ground, took out the floor but not the soil below... creatures pathing into these holes with no place to stand underneath caused crashes (as far as I could tell) and an army of lesser spotted game bugs took the fort over.