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[Ziusudra]

Furniture - Type - Sand Bag

[muldrake]

The more you know,,,

On a different note - I can't seem to find sand in stockpile settings. There's sandstone but no sand... Any hints?

This kind of question is a gameplay questions thing, but probably zones are in the "save the noobs" category too because they're not exactly transparent.

You use "i" to create a zone, on top of some sand (if you have it on your map).  Specify it as a sand zone.  Then in a glass furnace (or magma glass furnace) (or job manager) you specify a "collect sand" job and if you have bags available, someone will go collect sand.  Or you can just buy it from a caravan.  This is also how you collect clay but you need to specify a "collect clay" job and that's specified from a kiln (or magma kiln).

[ror6ax]

No I meant stockpile. As in I want a stockpile to collect my sand in.
I know how to make a clay one because it's an item on (one of the) lists. Sand isn't. I'm asking here because with no sand stockpile I can't produce glass items and I really want to make glassmaking fortress.

[PatrikLundell]

Sand bags are, as Ziusundra said, stored in the furniture stockpile. However, I always remove sand bags from the stockpile and let the buggers pick up the bags from the sand collection zone (or trade depot, as the case may be). "Sand bag" is what a bag filled with sand is called as a stockpile object, as there is no "sand" object: sand requires a container (which has to be a bag: a coffer won't do).

Note, though, that this is a gameplay question (or a fortress one). This thread is not a thread for newbies to ask questions in, but a thread for informing Threetoe and Toady of issues newbies are likely to run into.

[Fleeting Frames]

If not covered by tutorial zones maybe could use a rename I guess? (but maybe that's partly me being non-native English writer) - as it is, I can entirely see putting it, much like burrows, off for learning later. "Work zones" is obvious, but inaccurate on account of most important zones being leisure ones. "Work and relaxation zones" is unwieldy and too long to fit in current UI. There's probably something more snappy possible.

[Starver]

Probably the best place to respond to the DF forum repost of the Steam forum announcement, though I'm still a bit behind on the reading of this thread, so I've created a new tab to 'bookmark' where had got to. Apols if I repeat anything newer than what I've read.

Embark choices-screen(s) look good. Minor suggestions to continue the improvement:

• The greyed-out placeholding 'search' ellipsis could be made to say "<filter the list>", still greyed/halftoned. I know the magnifying glass is a big clue (whether or not it's a button to click for searching or the list updates as changing text in there updates without requiring anythjng more than keyboard focus) but I needed the example search pic to be sure.
• A similar search over the animals...
• I was thinking that, ideally, a search for "cow" would give (male+female)(adult+calf) 'cattle', because of the [CREATURE][NAME] match expanding to all [CASTE]s within.
• It would also include all female [CASTE] types also with "Cow", e.g. elephant
• Could actual tag-matches be used? Either rely on 'obvious' searches or give the power to those that know what they're looking for. "Milk"/"Milkable" as a word in Animals restricting to those so given to that quality tag. Or "Grazer". Or "!Grazer" for non-Grazers (auto-alias "non-<foo>" to "!<foo>")?
• ...similarly narrowing to items_(weapon|armor|etc) with "Weapon" or whichever is searched for (in non-Animals) for duly specified weapons-grade materials and/or [ITEM_WEAPON], ideally both. I was going to suggest "Magmasafe", but that isn't directly tagged, you'd have to make it a search-alias for a per-item lookup/check of melting point being above whatever value it is again, or whatever internal flag is already involved in the... alloys list? I forget where, but somewhere under the Z-screens.
• I could see use for this in the Dwarves tab, too, though it won't be the Have/Buyable setup. A psychological-nature search (highlight matches, rather than filter out non-match? And/or sorting choices - see below) might be useful, though risks being cluttering, in working out your starting assignment of skills and the rest.
• I assume space-delimited words would be treated as "must match all words", can't think of a reason to have "at least one of these words", but might be a useful if you get wider searchability than straight pattern matching
• Default-off 'button'/other control to filter "only things I can currently afford"? Auto-reevaluated as +ing and -ing choices, of course.
• Collapse (-), and then re-expand (+) icons on group-headings in all menus (e.g. Seeds in LHS of Item stocking screen). Group-headings should also apply to RHS (available) once you work that one out too.
• You say you're looking at the ordering. Groupings would thus depend on that. Choice of ordering (majortype/subtype of match, values, alphabetical, etc), which I'd expect to be icon-selectable from among the choices. (So instantaneous order would dictate the top-level collapsable-Grouping, and items within may fall back to the previously major-sort. Two clicks and Alphabetical order under Numeric value(/cost) Group headers. One more click and Breed/Item-Class as groups, items within being Numeric.  Click, click, click, and a list suitable for all preferences is available.
• Talking of clicking. No obvious sign of Hotkey control, like Underlined items or Otherwise Highlighted text. Whether you keep/reestablish cursoring around the lists (e.g. left, right switches between Your and Available lists of Items, up/down navigates that side with Shifted ones jumping ?5? Items, shifted Left-Right or Tab (with/without shift?) sends across the Dwarves/Items/Animals tags, PageUp/Down rapid page-of-scrollbar, +/- on Group header expands/contracts but on item alters levels..?  There's a few decisions needed there, plus how to indicate the responsiveness to such control without recluttering the interface) I'd feel awkward without F/G/e or revised equivalents as allowed.
• A very minor aesthetic: The "5 Cavy Pup" lines don't work for me, in amongst the unchosen options as drawn there. The label obviously is revised from "<Name> <GenderSymbol>" to "<Number> <Name> <GenderSymbol>", when <Number> != 0. If you're doing that, also change <Name> to <PluralName> when gt 1? But, actually, I think it'd look better with the number in an 'invisibly separated column' (like the Cost is, left-aligned in an invisibly-separate right-docked column in that part of the table field) perhaps assume a space capable of a possible three-digit size (so as not to jiggle the whole Name parts around... 3 digits should be more than enough to make default minimum preparation for) which gets a (right-aligned) unit count if non-zero. And you don't need to switch to the plural forms for that, either.

Hmmm, way too much tapping. All very simple in my head (including the ways I'd code the changes, where applicable, depending on compositor code and structs in use) but expanded out a lot when putting finger-to-keyboard. And not everything is Noob-useful (it panders in some ways to stick-in-the-mudnesses like me, who'd probably valiantly survive without some features), though some of it is.

Still, hope it helps.

[DrudeFiegler]

Hi all. I may be late to the show, but here is some of the points that disturbed me when I started playing. I precise that, but for a few minor exceptions, I have long solved all these riddles to my satisfaction.

• I can't destroy items.
• Military schedule and alerts, as a lot of people already pointed out.
• Multiple ways to look at things and dwarfs, as a lot of people already pointed out.
• Most orders lost me. It's seemed (and still seems) often redundant with labors. Why is there an option for dwarfs to harvest or not? To take stone ? Isn't that the Farmer and Hauler labors?
• Lots and lots of labors, and sometimes the difference between them is not quite clear (like Wood burner and Furnace Operator). I quickly shifted to Dwarf Therapists, so it's now a non-issue.
• To this day, I've never used the menus for Points/routes/notes, Hauling, and Movies. I don't really know what they are used for. If they are somewhat important to the game, the game should tell me.
• That it's the furniture which makes the room. A bed allows us to define a chamber, a chair an office, a table a dining room. Whereas for locations and zones, you start by designating the area, and then you put furniture in it. It doesn't help that the value of the room (like a Magnificent Chamber) is a function of the other furniture in it ><". Maybe they could repack "Living areas" in a "Workshops" way: you order to build a chamber/office/dining room, you select the place and area, and DF asks you for a bed/chair/table ?
• Some labors and workshops need specific tools (axe for cutting tree, pickaxe for digger, anvil for forge), but most don't. Why?
• That's your dwarfs move up/down as quickly as they move left/right. So, you should totally dig down/up a lot, and not expand on the same level.
• Items take place unless they don't. A coffer in a hospital can gobble up everything a lot? A Dump zone can gobble up everything?
• "Repeat" orders are not "Always orders". They are "Repeat until I can't do it". So, every few hours of gameplay, I've to go round, and ask again to cut all my rough emeralds/topazes, make all the cheese I can, shear all my animals, and so on.
• Workshop orders are often too precise for our own good. I like "Construct rock Blocks" and "Make craft from bones". I know what will be used, and what I'll obtain in a general but sufficient way. Whereas I need to order the cutting of all rough gems and smelting of all ores one type by type. Orders like "Cut all rough gems", "Smelt all ores (or all you-choose-the-kind-of-ore)" and "Do something (cut, thread, press, etc) for all elements of a stockpile." would be very useful.
• Stockpiles are difficult to use, even after a lot of play. It's not often clear where some objects are, and the lack of uniformization does not help: prepared food is not a food? finished goods are way too general, where is the sand ? When i look into an item, it should display which types of stockpile can stored them.
• Also I can't "save" several custom stockpiles, for easy used. Categories are "by nature" (it's a seed, it's a furniture) whereas I often needed the option to sort by use: is it magma-safe ? Can I press it or brew it or transform it into paste ? And lists should be alphabetized, for Amok's sake.
• You can't import things from one fort to another. All the stockpiles configuration I devised for my industries. The schedules and uniforms I tailored to what I think is a decent army. All that is lost when I start a new fort, and I need to manually configure it again. I don't think it's very fun.

On a side note, I'm really not sure about tutorials. I didn't have them in DF nor in Minecraft, and it was great nonetheless. Not knowing what will happen was 90% of the fun during my first plays. And for most complex things, going to the wiki was kind of mandatory. I've made quite a few tutorials myself, and as @somebody-in-the-last-35-pages said, it's a lot of work that you need to constantly update... A job best left to fans on Youtube
That being said, I'm really in favour of a system of advancements, like in Minecraft PC. It could help a lot of new players discover the game, encouraging them to test new things without being to directive.

Cheers all!

Note: Edited for clarification

[PatrikLundell]

@DrudeFiegler:
- Look: There is basically the option of interacting with things through a single operation that then goes into sub menus to get at the commands, or several operations that go to the appropriate sub menu directly. It's one of the things that's going to be looked at as part of the UI overhaul, though.
- Everyone harvest, unless you disable that, but only farmers plant (and they continue to harvest when others are blocked). The other top level orders similarly are fortress wide, rather than tied to jobs. A common one is Collect Refuse from Outdoors. This is disabled by default, and will cause animals killed outside the fortress and outside of the fairly short butchery shop range to not be processed, unless it was killed by a hunter that then brings the kill home (they can get interrupted, in which case the kill is left to rot).
- Furniture: The logic is in a rather slow process of being shifted from furniture defined locations to zone defined ones (hospital/tavern/library/temple/guild hall). It will probably take many years before that's complete, though.
- Logically, you need an axe to cut down a tree (a saw would do, but that's not dwarfy), and similarly a pickaxe is needed to mine and a crossbow for hunting (bows are for elves). You need an anvil to make a smithy, but all workshops implicitly provide the tools needed for working in them. It's a matter of which level of detail DF should go into (a fisherdwarf could, for instance, require a rod for fishing). The requirements for tools will probably be increased for the new zone based workshops, and it's possible tool availability in them might restrict what they can do.
- Containers have a limited capacity, but it's fairly large. The default hospital requirements fit in a single coffer, I believe.
- You do get a message when repeat orders are cancelled, but I agree it's annoying that the order gets deleted. Some would point you to the Manager, but I don't use it (and the Manager can't handle shearing in a reasonable manner, which is one of the many reasons I don't use it).
- You typically don't have that many kinds or ore, although gems might be an issue. Note, however, that you should save some raw gems for strange moods. I certainly wouldn't complain about a more generic "melt ore" order, but you may want to use the specific ones at time to ensure you get the metals you want and save the "junk" ones for later, and you may also want to ensure alloys are produced in an efficient manner.
- Stockpiles are messy, and, fortunately, it's one of the things that's on the table for the UI overhaul. If it makes the cut won't be known until it either did or didn't, though. Sand is "sand bags" at the end of one of the stockpiles (furniture I think, but it might be tools. I always disable sand bags, as it results in a needless additional hauling step [during which the bags are tasked for hauling, but not available for usage by the workshop operator, and so those repeat orders can get cancelled because sand bag hauling is a low priority job]).
- DF is, in practice, heavily wiki dependent, to, e.g. find out which kinds or rocks are magma safe, and to find if a soil or stone type is aquifer bearing.
- Exporting/Importing is a bit tricky, because all fortresses don't have the same resources (it's not uncommon to find that your civ can't make high boots, but only low ones, for instance), and that's before modding is taken into consideration. Still, it would be convenient if you could export/import templates.

[Starver]

On ores, the direct making of alloy bars from them sometimes is better than making the basic bars and then making the alloy from those bars. A "smelt all ores" job could remove that possibility without other types of micromanagement filling in.

Personally, I like setting up a <foo>-smelter (one per <foo> that I'm interested in), and there are now ways to automate this to gobble up the target raw material. Though I rarely even consider it, myself.


(The whole pathway system in this field of play is perhaps a little opaque for new players. With some background in ferrous metallurgy, and an appreciation of other ores - I quite like stibnite, IRL - I yet still sometimes have to double-check that I'm doing the right thing to make best use of the 'exotic' metals, and at least *I* know how to check what the game expects and allows to be possible...)

[Bumber]

• I can't destroy things.

What things? Items? Throwing them into the magma sea would be the most obvious way. You can sell pretty much everything that doesn't rot away. Drawbridges are the easiest, less intuitive way.

[muldrake]

On ores, the direct making of alloy bars from them sometimes is better than making the basic bars and then making the alloy from those bars. A "smelt all ores" job could remove that possibility without other types of micromanagement filling in.

Bronze is the most obvious of these and the most likely you'll be making early.  1 cassiterite + 1 copper ore of any kind = 8 bronze.  And the cost is only 1 charcoal/refined coal.  Doing the same from bars would take two steps and much more coal, as well as much more time.

It would be nice if some of the preconfigured embarks would include things like cassiterite/tetrahedrite/coke since it wouldn't necessarily occur to noobs to bring these relatively cheap components to start a bronze industry immediately.

[FantasticDorf]

It would be nice if some of the preconfigured embarks would include things like cassiterite/tetrahedrite/coke since it wouldn't necessarily occur to noobs to bring these relatively cheap components to start a bronze industry immediately.

There are no pre-confgured embark profiles by default in DF, those are written in by the player themselves or saved to template.

A big cheatsheet of meta-embark strategies might be a good workshop item to help new players.

[voliol]

It would be nice if some of the preconfigured embarks would include things like cassiterite/tetrahedrite/coke since it wouldn't necessarily occur to noobs to bring these relatively cheap components to start a bronze industry immediately.

There are no pre-confgured embark profiles by default in DF, those are written in by the player themselves or saved to template.

A big cheatsheet of meta-embark strategies might be a good workshop item to help new players.

Doesn't mean there couldn't be. The "embark now!" basically is one already.

[Starver]

A big cheat-sheet of (pre-embark/on-embark) strategies covers so much ground. I had the following sitting waiting to send, not sure if it needed saying (the way I said it, at least). It actually illustrates this a little, so maybe it serves this purpose if not its original one. (With minor tense changes, rushed, so maybe errors of meaning introduced.)

• I can't destroy things.

What things? Items? Throwing them into the magma sea would be the most obvious way. You can sell pretty much everything that doesn't rot away. Drawbridges are the easiest, less intuitive way.

I read that (and the rest) as "an issue a new player doesn't know how to deal with". Though whether it is destruction that is definitely wanted or perhaps to (d)esignate (b)uildings/items to be (h)idden would do, to let things be unhidden later when the clutter can be moved on from where it is littering.

But how does a new user know about hiding, (magma)dumping and otherwise dealing with things in all the various ways?


Though that assumes an average new player even knows that it's a need. Very early on, does the anaesthetic nature of clutter mean so much more than just trying to make sure you're not making more tangible errors? At what point does reaching magma/SMR for dumping get to be practical? Is it an official 'target' to at least learn how to make an atom-smasher (deliberately!), and for what scope of use?

Outliers might rush there early. And other outliers might never.  Do we simplify some players' game starts while adding complications to others'..?  Where's the balance.

[DrudeFiegler]

I read that (and the rest) as "an issue a new player doesn't know how to deal with".

That's the way I intended it, yeah and I will edit first post to be clearer. But for a few minor exceptions, I have long solved all these riddles to my satisfaction. Thanks to all people who where kind enough to answer back, I'll gladly offer them a cat and a beer next time they show up in my Fortress

- Everyone harvest, unless you disable that, but only farmers plant (and they continue to harvest when others are blocked). The other top level orders similarly are fortress wide, rather than tied to jobs. A common one is Collect Refuse from Outdoors. This is disabled by default, and will cause animals killed outside the fortress and outside of the fairly short butchery shop range to not be processed, unless it was killed by a hunter that then brings the kill home (they can get interrupted, in which case the kill is left to rot).

This distinction in the two farmers tasks don't make many sense gamewise to me. If it's a farm job, it should be a task for a Farmer. The option "Collect Refuse from Outdoors" is not worth the hassle it creates, imho. "Designate -> Collect Refuse" or something should be enough. That's about the gist of my problem with "Set Orders" : i understand their role, but I thing it'd easier for everybody if that were put into regular jobs.

- Logically, you need an axe to cut down a tree (a saw would do, but that's not dwarfy), and similarly a pickaxe is needed to mine and a crossbow for hunting (bows are for elves). You need an anvil to make a smithy, but all workshops implicitly provide the tools needed for working in them. It's a matter of which level of detail DF should go into (a fisherdwarf could, for instance, require a rod for fishing). The requirements for tools will probably be increased for the new zone based workshops, and it's possible tool availability in them might restrict what they can do.

I'm not against details, but the incoherence between the level of details in jobs/workshops was an obstacle during my first games. Maybe three jobs out of 100 need a tool... and the game don't tell you which one. Same with the workshops.

- Sand is "sand bags" at the end of one of the stockpiles (furniture I think, but it might be tools. I always disable sand bags, as it results in a needless additional hauling step [during which the bags are tasked for hauling, but not available for usage by the workshop operator, and so those repeat orders can get cancelled because sand bag hauling is a low priority job]).

That is exactly the problem I was talking about. When i look into an item, it should display which types of stockpile can stored them.

On ores, the direct making of alloy bars from them sometimes is better than making the basic bars and then making the alloy from those bars. A "smelt all ores" job could remove that possibility without other types of micromanagement filling in.

- You typically don't have that many kinds or ore, although gems might be an issue. Note, however, that you should save some raw gems for strange moods. I certainly wouldn't complain about a more generic "melt ore" order, but you may want to use the specific ones at time to ensure you get the metals you want and save the "junk" ones for later, and you may also want to ensure alloys are produced in an efficient manner.

I know. Still, I have often hundreds of cheap ore (i play on "easy" location), and enough magma-smelters, so bulk smelting everything is not a problem, it's the sane solution. But I agree, it's less tedious that managing the cutting of gems.