Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Squirrelloid]

Took a long break, came back to see what's changed.  Looks like I last played .34.11, but I'm missing features/mechanics older than that.

-Still can't butcher goblins for bones, really?  I miss my masterwork goblin totems with masterwork decorations

-Stacks of bones not getting turned into a big stack of bolts all at once, but being turned into bolts one at a time, leading to 5-bolt bone stack spam.  Once upon a time bones[10] used to become bone bolt[50]...  This is mostly just annoying.

-Embark: the view used to be tons more informative, with types of stone layers listed.  It would be nice if it would at least show if sedimentary rock is present.  You almost need DF Hack to see if a site has anything you're looking for, because the site selector information is pretty much useless.  (Guess I need to go find the current version one of these days)

-Metal presence is far more boring than it used to be.  There used to be more variety in metal deposits at a site because it was determined stone layer by stone layer, not just one or two metal types per biome.  (And it seems to be the same metal type across nearby biomes much of the time too.)

-A long long time ago, sites used to actually generate multi-z-level sheer cliff faces.  Now there's always slopes everywhere, even if you turn off periodic erosion.  Makes extreme cliff sites far less interesting.  (No wonder everyone seems to play flat sites these days).  The most interesting embarks I ever had were back in 0.28.40.  The only way I can get any real shear cliffs now is fps-killing waterfalls.

-Being able to send dwarfs inside without needing to designate a burrow.  I mean, I get that burrows are really powerful, but it's a pain to mark the entirety of a fortress that occupies over 50 z-levels of ground just to get the idiots to stop collecting wood during a siege.

Don't get me wrong, new features are cool.  But none of these things had to go away or change. xP

Is there a current fortress 3-D fortress visualization tool that works with .43.05? I know I used Visual Fortress at one point, a long time ago, and maybe Obsidian (?) at some other point.

Also: how do you get dwarves to get married these days? >.<

[StagnantSoul]

1: Now things have ethics and aren't just our thralls, it's kind of better, even if I do want to display goblin totems all over my walls.
2: Yeah that's annoying. Never knew it wasn't so.
3: Sure you weren't using DFHack for that?
4: It still is, just when you don't have high frequency a rock crystal gem cluster will override a tetrahydrite vein and so on.
5: It's mostly to stave off lag, sheer cliffs and such add up to a minor but noticeable FPS drop. They can still be found, you just need to look harder.
6: Just mark your main areas, or don't stretch the fortress over a needlessly large area and such. Do you really need more -silstone crown-'s during a siege anyway? Just mark one area for them to retreat to.

[PatrikLundell]

6. Setting up burrows for civilian alerts isn't much work. You designate one corner of the map at the level below ground, step down until you can't get further and go to the opposite corner and end the burrow there to get one for the surface. You may need to do some minor adjustments to remove the bottoms of pools and the like, and you may need to add a small bit of surface if your fortress has a surface component. It's the same with burrows for caverns: mark everything, remove the cavern levels, add back the parts that are inside the fortress.

7. You can wait for them to get married on their own, and that can happen. However, if you actually need them to marry and procreate (e.g. playing dead civs), you need to engage in pre nuptial suite burrowing arrangements of screened candidates.

[Bumber]

Is there a current fortress 3-D fortress visualization tool that works with .43.05? I know I used Visual Fortress at one point, a long time ago, and maybe Obsidian (?) at some other point.

Armok Vision

[MightyPaladin]

I miss being able to hunt with any weapon or no weapon if you were a bit addled.  Hunting big game with spears was a thing for a very long time IRL

[roqi]

I miss being able to hunt with any weapon or no weapon if you were a bit addled.  Hunting big game with spears was a thing for a very long time IRL

You can still do that, through making a squad, assigning them whatever weapons you choose, then sending them off to kill a particular target. I've enjoyed a fine boar hunt with spears recently. There was even a casualty!

[Shonai_Dweller]

I miss being able to hunt with any weapon or no weapon if you were a bit addled.  Hunting big game with spears was a thing for a very long time IRL

You can still do that, through making a squad, assigning them whatever weapons you choose, then sending them off to kill a particular target. I've enjoyed a fine boar hunt with spears recently. There was even a casualty!

Hunting by micromanaging military squads. Sounds awful. I like that dorfs hunt by themselves. Makes the fortress seem so much more alive.

[Squirrelloid]

Is the init.txt working right for population caps?  I've got Pop Cap set at 60, and Strict Pop Cap at 220, and my married dwarves stopped having babies when we hit 60.  I thought Pop Cap was supposed to control migrants, and Strict Pop Cap was supposed to control babies?

1: Now things have ethics and aren't just our thralls, it's kind of better, even if I do want to display goblin totems all over my walls.
3: Sure you weren't using DFHack for that?
4: It still is, just when you don't have high frequency a rock crystal gem cluster will override a tetrahydrite vein and so on.

1/
It would be nice if butchering for bones was a separate ethic than butchering for meat.  I don't want to turn my dwarves into sentient eaters just to get goblin bones.  (And butchering goblins for bones seems perfectly ethical from a dwarf perspective to me).

3/ Nope, not DF Hack.  Back then, you used DF Hack to find HFS, which was only one embark tile per large map tile square.  But it did show like the top 5 stone layers plus what all the soil layers were, and which layers had an aquifer, if present.

The wiki sadly doesn't have a picture of the 0.28 embark region-choice screen, and it apparently changed by 0.31.

4/ I don't think you understand how its changed.  Now you get one surface metal per biome and one deep metal per biome (if present), pretty much, and adjacent biomes seem to frequently have the same ones.  Before, each block of adjacent same-biome same-stone layers generated metals independently, so you could easily have *all* metal ores on one embark with decent variety of stone.  (And you could tell where the biomes met from changes in layer contents pretty easily back then too).

My current fortress has native gold and tetrahedrite only (of normal metals), despite having 3 biomes.  (With a little bit of bismuth).  That lack of diversity was almost unheard of in early 3-D versions.  (I also have abundant marble, granite, and gabbro.  I would have been pretty much guaranteed malachite, garnierite, and at least one of cassiterite or native silver in early 3-D versions with that stone distribution).

(Using default settings, so I haven't jacked up any frequencies, but my impression from post-change 0.34.11 was that frequencies just gave you more of the metal ores you had anyway, not more variety).

Note that this change was simultaneous with the site finding information change.

[StagnantSoul]

Is the init.txt working right for population caps?  I've got Pop Cap set at 60, and Strict Pop Cap at 220, and my married dwarves stopped having babies when we hit 60.  I thought Pop Cap was supposed to control migrants, and Strict Pop Cap was supposed to control babies?

1: Now things have ethics and aren't just our thralls, it's kind of better, even if I do want to display goblin totems all over my walls.
3: Sure you weren't using DFHack for that?
4: It still is, just when you don't have high frequency a rock crystal gem cluster will override a tetrahydrite vein and so on.

1/
It would be nice if butchering for bones was a separate ethic than butchering for meat.  I don't want to turn my dwarves into sentient eaters just to get goblin bones.  (And butchering goblins for bones seems perfectly ethical from a dwarf perspective to me).

3/ Nope, not DF Hack.  Back then, you used DF Hack to find HFS, which was only one embark tile per large map tile square.  But it did show like the top 5 stone layers plus what all the soil layers were, and which layers had an aquifer, if present.

4/ I don't think you understand how its changed.  Now you get one surface metal per biome and one deep metal per biome (if present), pretty much, and adjacent biomes seem to frequently have the same ones.  Before, each block of adjacent same-biome same-stone layers generated metals independently, so you could easily have *all* metal ores on one embark with decent variety of stone.  (And you could tell where the biomes met from changes in layer contents pretty easily back then too).

My current fortress has native gold and tetrahedrite only (of normal metals), despite having 3 biomes.  (With a little bit of bismuth).  That lack of diversity was almost unheard of in early 3-D versions.  (I also have abundant marble, granite, and gabbro.  I would have been pretty much guaranteed malachite, garnierite, and at least one of cassiterite or native silver in early 3-D versions with that stone distribution).

(Using default settings, so I haven't jacked up any frequencies, but my impression from post-change 0.34.11 was that frequencies just gave you more of the metal ores you had anyway, not more variety).

Note that this change was simultaneous with the site finding information change.

Frequency does give variety. Turn it up to frequent or everywhere and your civ will be tossing star rubies at you like it's dirt, and you'll find even native aluminum if you have the right biome. Turn it down to sparse and you'll get what you're describing.

[roqi]

I miss being able to hunt with any weapon or no weapon if you were a bit addled.  Hunting big game with spears was a thing for a very long time IRL

You can still do that, through making a squad, assigning them whatever weapons you choose, then sending them off to kill a particular target. I've enjoyed a fine boar hunt with spears recently. There was even a casualty!

Hunting by micromanaging military squads. Sounds awful. I like that dorfs hunt by themselves. Makes the fortress seem so much more alive.

I agree, though it's not that awful, really. Choosing targets is fun in itself. Should we hunt the fattest and meatiest hippo, or the skinny one that should be easier to kill?

[PatrikLundell]

As far as I know, the pop caps work as they should.

[roqi]

There's also that thing which controls what percentage of the population is allowed to be children/babies, so maybe that is blocking pregnancies in your fort?

[Valkyrie]

1: Now things have ethics and aren't just our thralls, it's kind of better, even if I do want to display goblin totems all over my walls.

1/
It would be nice if butchering for bones was a separate ethic than butchering for meat.  I don't want to turn my dwarves into sentient eaters just to get goblin bones.  (And butchering goblins for bones seems perfectly ethical from a dwarf perspective to me).

And the really annoying part is, that ethic doesn't work well in practice.  From what I can tell, when you have those ethics set (EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER, EAT_SAPIENT_KILL, MAKE_TROPHY_SAME_RACE, MAKE_TROPHY_SAPIENT set to ACCEPTABLE), you can still only butcher nameless generic sapients ("Goblin Lasher", etc), not anything with an actual name ("Song Nguslutuz, Goblin Swordsman", etc).  At least in my experience, virtually all hostiles that show up will be named critters nowadays - your only real hope of butcherables is /sometimes/ undead will show up as un-named generics, and sometimes those corpse-corpses will be butcherable.

6. Setting up burrows for civilian alerts isn't much work. You designate one corner of the map at the level below ground, step down until you can't get further and go to the opposite corner and end the burrow there to get one for the surface. You may need to do some minor adjustments to remove the bottoms of pools and the like, and you may need to add a small bit of surface if your fortress has a surface component. It's the same with burrows for caverns: mark everything, remove the cavern levels, add back the parts that are inside the fortress.

It's annoying and impressively time consuming when they cover a lot of z-levels (though admittedly you only have to do it once, if you're thorough), so you're trying to mark strips of hillside in tiers all over the map, and then again for each cave level.  And if you add some new outdoor superstructure or carve away some mineral patch, but forget to update the burrows, you can easily wind up with some very frustrating, befuddling 'misbehavior'. Ultimately, this is a key reason why I've favored mostly-flat embarks lately.  (my favorite is sharp-cliffed hill surrounded by flat plains, but that's hard to find)

That said, I still find it better than the old 'outdoors' system, but that might be more about using the old system when I was relatively new to DF, so everything seemed more complicated and prone to undesired behaviors.

For the specific original point about wood, the 'o'rders menu prohibition against wood gathering can be a useful stopgap.  It'll also break internal woodhauling between stockpiles, but that's often a worthwhile trade to keep your whole fort from suiciding in pursuit of that willow logs they mistook for a XXpig tail sockXX.

Also: how do you get dwarves to get married these days? >.<

Forced isolation together seems to be nearly required, now.  Dwarves have a lot more to occupy their downtime with, and they seem to skimp on a lot of the classic bonding time. Most successful modern marriage forts seem to involve long periods of zero labor for large chunks of the population, or locking prospective couples into tiny rooms to force them to see each other, with no possible activities beyond idling or interaction.

There's also that thing which controls what percentage of the population is allowed to be children/babies, so maybe that is blocking pregnancies in your fort?

That's BABY_CHILD_CAP, but it defaults to being very liberal: [BABY_CHILD_CAP:100:1000], limiting you to 100 babies+children, and limiting you to 1000% of your fort being babies+children.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Eat_sapient is acknowledged to be bugged right now. It's supposed to allow the eating of sapients and indeed did up until a short while ago. Seems that the reason is currently unknown so might take a while to fix (gotta work out what went wrong first).

[Squirrelloid]

Well, as long as people are answering questions here: are forgotten beast remains bugged?  I've got dwarfs storing their corpses in  my bones/shell/hoof only stockpile, and their bones in my corpse/vermin/disposable stockpile.  It's completely backwards.

Confirmed: game thinks my forgotten beast bones are a 'corpse', and its 'mangled trunk cartilage' is bones...

(And are teeth useable for anything?  Or beaks? Or feathers?)