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[assimilateur]

I recently got back into the game after a break of what feels like two years, and I'm trying to figure some stuff out that may have changed or that I've forgotten.

1. I'd like to get rid of nobles systemically. As in, no killing them off or anything, just to keep from having them appointed or elected in my forts. I'm fine with one of my starting seven being expedition leader for the foreseeable future. I avoid acquiring holdings (I understand I have to mount expeditions for that, and I just haven't even looked into that feature so far), which is supposedly how I'm going to keep from becoming a barony and the like. Correct me if I'm wrong here or if that's the way to go.

I took out the [ELECTED] tag from the mayor position and this apparently didn't work as expected: one guy just appointed himself mayor as if nothing happened. Should I get rid of the mayor position altogether, or will that mess up things during worldgen?

2. Is it finally possible to give my civilian dwarves uniforms that don't collide with equipment automatically assigned to miners, woodcutters, and hunters?

3. Any tricks or mods that enable me to force prepared meals to have two to four unique ingredients? Roasts made of minced dwarven sugar, minced dwarven sugar, minced dwarven sugar, and minced dwarven sugar were funny at first but got old fast.

4. Thread made out of hair doesn't seem to get stored in cloth stockpiles. Is there any way to correct this, or do I have to manage it via garbage dumps?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Magistrum]

1. Really hard to not get holdings. You will get some via economic link just by surviving. Your civilization will also send some settlers around your site from time to time(they will also send them more frequently once you get more holdings.) The only ways to stop that seems to be starting with a really low population civilization which is supposed to make them unable to found new sites, or embarking on some ridiculous inaccessible location so that they can't settle around you. No caravan though. I don't know enough about modding them out, never tried. You can remove their ability to mandate/demand though.


2.No, it is still a mess. But dwarves have some more sense of how to put shuffle their quivers now, so the combat/training bolts bug is gone and they use the appropriate kind of bolt for training and fighting, besides actually stocking up on both as ordered.

3. The kinda reliable way is messing with stockpile links so that the cook can only see one stack of each ingredient you want.

4. Different from wool, hair can't be spun into cloth, only into threads, so you gotta keep it in a yarn thread stockpile.

[HungThir]

if you keep your population below 50 you'll never get your own mayor, or become a barony or anything

if you set your population cap at (say) 49 and keep your population at 49, you won't get any arriving as migrants either (bc you won't get migrants)

you might still get nobles from other civs arriving as visitors/etc, but they won't be your nobles unless you grant them citizenship. (if you do grant citizenship to another civ's noble, i don't know what happens wrt their nobility status or demands/etc. has anyone tried?)

[Atarlost]

Can't you change the population thresholds?  Make all the non-appointed nobles only appear at some population you'll never reach without your computer self-immolating anyways and they may as well not exist.

[assimilateur]

Thanks for the input so far.

Ad. 1. Regarding population thresholds, the wiki says that that's been deprecated. I guess it can't hurt to try, but I'm reasonably sure I had the diplomat talk to my expedition leader about appointing some noble before I even had a pop of 50. Removing demands and mandates isn't that satisfactory a solution, but I guess it's better than nothing. I would strongly prefer not having them at all though.

Ad. 2 and 3. That sucks but isn't really surprising.

Ad. 4. The cloth stockpile accepts thread and cloth by default. I have two separate ones, one for cloth and the other for thread, and they don't accept hair thread at all. It gets left at the workshop that last processed it.

[HungThir]

i don't think hair thread can be used for anything except suturing, anyway? so there's no need for a stockpile for it, just make sure your hospital has enough* containers and it'll wind up in there instead

_{* i have no idea how many containers is "enough" for a hospital, i usually just build two or three}

[PatrikLundell]

No, the hospital takes a set amount of thread (there are parameters you can change for some items, but I don't know if thread is among those: I don't bother changing the settings from default), with the remainder being left in the workshop in which it was spun.
Every dozen or so years I haul useless thread off to the trade depot for disposal via the DF garbage disposal service (a.k.a. caravans).

The Mayor threshold likely remains at 50, but, as mentioned, other nobility depends on holdings. If you're playing a truly dead civ (as DF has buggily calculated it) you won't get any appointed nobility (or caravan, or monarch), but you can't do raiding either (due to a bug that causes them to never arrive or return), although you can still get spontaneous economic links. Also note that managing a Mayor is fairly easy, as you can appoint whoever you want after each (yearly) election, which I use to appoint someone who has no mandate preferences.

Cooking can be controlled via links, according to what I've heard. I'm using a rather complicated DFHack Lua script to do booze cooking, but that script is heavily tailored to my game play, and probably not that useful to others.

[assimilateur]

so there's no need for a stockpile for it

But there is, seeing as how micromanaging your hospital to take all your hair thread or otherwise getting it out of your workshops is inconvenient. That's exactly what stockpiles are for, even if the uses for a given item are very limited.

Little things like that, that seemingly never get fixed, make me look forward to DF coming to Steam. With a company working on the game, we should actually get someone to clean up these things while leaving Toady free to pursue his big picture development.

[PatrikLundell]

so there's no need for a stockpile for it

But there is, seeing as how micromanaging your hospital to take all your hair thread or otherwise getting it out of your workshops is inconvenient. That's exactly what stockpiles are for, even if the uses for a given item are very limited.

Little things like that, that seemingly never get fixed, make me look forward to DF coming to Steam. With a company working on the game, we should actually get someone to clean up these things while leaving Toady free to pursue his big picture development.

You seem to misunderstand things gravely. Toady and Threetoe will remain the only ones working on DF (apart from the graphics work that's been contracted out [and possibly some sound on top of that]). Kitfox will provide marketing and at least some testing, but will not get access to the source code. While the Premium release arc will deal with accessibility, it can't be a 5 year arc (I think there's an end date somewhere in the commercial agreement, possibly 2 years), which is probably what it would take to fix all the issues with the UI and the underlying functionality that causes UI confusion. The stockpile inconsistencies is sure to be a set of issues that's on the table, but that table can be expected to be very crowded.

[assimilateur]

Right, so that sounds worse than I thought.

To get back on topic: I modded my mayors to require a pop threshold I'm not gonna reach, and if the liaison offers to update my site to a county or some shit then I guess I can just keep fobbing him off.

Remind me: to get rid of caravans when I don't want to trade any more, I just have to kill them a couple of times after which they will refuse to send more? Or do I need to mod the game again (active seasons, I believe)?

[PatrikLundell]

Refusing to become a nobled site (or whatever the proper term would be) has the side effect of the trade liaison never presents you with the trade agreement list, so you can't request stuff (if you don't want caravans that isn't important, obviously).

I don't think destroying caravans will stop them from coming, but some civs may break off temporarily, and the more unprofitable caravans are the more they're shrunk (to some minimum size, I presume), with destruction being a 100% loss (stealing all their junk by deconstructing the trade depot when they've unloaded also results in a 100% loss but without the loss of lives). If there isn't any wagon path to the trade depot at the moment a caravan is announced wagons will bypass your site, and I think the rest of the caravan just stays at the embark border if there isn't any trade depot or all paths to it are blocked. They'll then leave when the time is up.
You can also allow caravans to go to your depot and then just ignore them, i.e. don't haul things to the depot or initiate trade. Again, they'll leave when their time is up.

Thus, I'd find it a waste of effort to attempt to get rid of caravans when you can just ignore them.

[anewaname]

You can avoid hair thread stockpile issues by not spinning it. Only have two stockpiles in the fort to accept "refuse/hair", one accepts non-alpaca/sheep/llama and feeds into an atom-smasher or magma dump, and the other accepts alpaca/sheep/llama and is linked to a workshop that triggers a "spin thread" job when there is enough hair available. You only need to trigger the "shear animal" jobs.

[Urist McUristUrist]

Correct me of I'm wrong, but IIRC the mayor is able to appoint other dorfs to his own position.

[Magistrum]

Yes, you can replace him anytime.

[assimilateur]

You can avoid hair thread stockpile issues by not spinning it. Only have two stockpiles in the fort to accept "refuse/hair", one accepts non-alpaca/sheep/llama and feeds into an atom-smasher or magma dump, and the other accepts alpaca/sheep/llama and is linked to a workshop that triggers a "spin thread" job when there is enough hair available. You only need to trigger the "shear animal" jobs.

Sounds like a neat solution, thanks.