Print

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

[DrCyano]

Howdy y'all!

I'm working on a fortress that is very, very long in the East-West dimension, and I'm noticing that my dwarves were getting thirsty in the time it takes to walk from the meeting hall to the construction site not even 25% of the way across the map.

I want to avoid the disaster of my previous fortress, which had a trapped entrance so long that a dwarf could not walk through it without stopping and turning around to get s drink, resulting in the entire population circling between the pond outside and the trap hall because they couldn't reach the mountain of booze in the fortress. Fun was had.

Anyway, to avoid this happening in my new fortress, I figure I need to somehow position food and drink at regular intervals. The problem is that just putting stockpiles along the way only results in empty barrels. I think the Dwarves are too lazy to fill the stockpiles while the ones near the kitchen still have space.

What are some techniques for keeping dwarves from dying of thirst (or catching sobriety-induced stupidity) when they have to walk long distances?

[Superdorf]

You'll want to set up each of those mini-stockpiles to "t"ake from the main stockpile. Dwarves will stow stuff in the big stockpile, then transfer from it to the smaller piles as necessary.

I have to ask tho... what on earth are you doing that your dwarves need to walk that far? O_o

[DrCyano]

I have to ask tho... what on earth are you doing that your dwarves need to walk that far? O_o

Building a bridge over the ocean to another island. Click here to read the full story

You'll want to set up each of those mini-stockpiles to "t"ake from the main stockpile. Dwarves will stow stuff in the big stockpile, then transfer from it to the smaller piles as necessary.

Do I have to chain 't'ake the stockpiles along? The farthest ones will be unreachable in a single trip once the project reaches roughly 50%?

Or how about making farms and stills along the way for local production?

[Superdorf]

Building a bridge over the ocean to another island. Click here to read the full story

Ahh, that makes more sense. Bridge forts are a right pain, they are.

Hmm. You'd need extra chained stockpiles... mid-bridge dining rooms,.. irrigated farm-platforms couldn't hurt either. Would be something like three forts in one by the time you were through-- might want to use burrows or something to keep civilians to their designated bridge-sections, to prevent unnecessary traffic across the map. Big. Complicated. Lots of micro-managing.

[Sarmatian123]

I have to ask tho... what on earth are you doing that your dwarves need to walk that far? O_o

Building a bridge over the ocean to another island. Click here to read the full story

You playing huge mining and construction on the largest embark map?
You didn't get the fault zone bug, which makes mining and construction impossible?
If you reload, then the bug will be cleared only from already mining or construction area.
The bug seems to glue Dwarf, to a wall or a floor, after they construct it.
This makes terrain, which suppose to be accessible, inaccessible.
I got this bug like after 5 years of my embark on largest map.
It always starts in my save, after caravan partially is going off the map.
As I tried few replays, once the bug happened  around 10 days after last member of caravan went off the map.
I think this is some caravan bug tbh.
It makes though mining and construction impossible without save/load every 1 minute. Impossible bug to play with.

[bloop_bleep]

What about... minecart tracks? Load at one end, send it down, dumping at a given rest point with each round trip? (Can't provide for every rest stop in one round trip since dumping track stops dump everything out.)

You can either have multiple minecarts going, one for each rest stop, each on its own minecart track, or a single one with mechanically controlled junctions at each rest stop.

[kaijyuu]

Yeah this seems ideal for minecarts. I'd suggest having separate burrows for different sets of the population, and have minecarts deliver goods as needed between them. Never have dwarves walk between them.

This actually sounds kinda fun so I might steal the idea for one of my own forts.

[DrCyano]

Yeah, I should use minecarts to deliver goods. I already installed minecart track to see if I could launch dwarves off the map when it's finished, but why await to use them 

I've not run into any bugs related to the size of the map. It's not actually a huge map. It's a 1x16 embark, same area as 4x4

[anewaname]

For booze, your dwarfs are likely to ignore the local booze stockpile to walk to where their favorite booze is. I am not sure how goblet selection is made, but that might be another potential reason that they might walk away from the local booze stockpile.

Consider a burrow system to keep a dozen dwarfs in a burrow that is placed in the current build site, then they should be limited to taking drinks from that burrow. Or, build a gateway and trap dwarfs on both sides of it, then open the gateway occasionally to allow dwarfs or items through.

Your minecart system could be in a 1-tile wide tunnel and that has statues on it, to allow the minecart to pass but not dwarfs.

[Sarmatian123]

In game of thrones tv show, there was this castle, which stood in the middle of this large river. The castle itself looked like a bridge.

So, why not move home into middle of the bridge and just bring raw stones in with wheelbarrows?
I have no clue how to create soil for above ground farming or how to provide shallow underground farming (like remote cave farming in a barrow?).
Obsidianizing in air layers and then mining out the obsidian suppose to create sometimes soil for farming.

[DrCyano]

I can just pump some seawater into a room to make a muddy floor.

Building large structures is realty tedious, however (just like all above-ground buildings), so a minimalist bunkhouse would be preferred.

For the minecart, I don't have the patience to separate it. I'll just designate the track as restricted so the Dwarves will generally avoid it. Any idea how to use rollers to make the minecart fly out and come back again without building a full loop of track? That would be a great help for my cave-adapted dwarves.

[bloop_bleep]

Lowered bridges can replace tracks in a pinch. That's a third of the material cost. However, not sure how well bridges work with rollers and track stops. You might need to sometimes put little 1-tile tracks between two bridges with a track stop or roller.

Plain rollers aren't gonna get your cart very far on ground without tracks or bridges.

[anewaname]

Any idea how to use rollers to make the minecart fly out and come back again without building a full loop of track?

I do not know how to set up a roller system. To use one track, I would use a highest friction track stop at both ends, and have the dwarfs 'push' the vehicle from each end.

[bloop_bleep]

Any idea how to use rollers to make the minecart fly out and come back again without building a full loop of track?

I do not know how to set up a roller system. To use one track, I would use a highest friction track stop at both ends, and have the dwarfs 'push' the vehicle from each end.

Ah, so sort of daisy-chain routes from each stockpile to the next?

Though at that point that's just more efficient carrying. Full automation is cooler. 

[PatrikLundell]

Like others have said, burrows separating populations and automated mine carts.

I'd use impulse ramps and have a track loop with stops at both ends (I assume you're building at the remote end and producing stuff at the near end, with nothing useful in between). It's possible to use rollers and a lot of power generation (and transmission), but that's a lot more work. If the remote end doesn't produce anything, I'd have the cart just dump the goods and return.

Note though, that that you can't move booze with mine carts, because that's bugged. The barrels get labeled as belonging to the stockpile you load the cart from, and morons will try to carry them back.
To make the situation worse, you can't produce anything on farm plots in the ocean biome, because it supports no crops. I can see two ways to work around that:
1. Build upward to reach the air biome (biome of world tile to the NW). If that biome isn't Ocean you'd be able to muddy floors there to build farm plots (you may have to be quick to place the plots, because of cleaning).
2. Build downwards to reach the ocean floor (you really need support pylons anyway ) and dig down to create underground farms. Requires pumping to get the water out (or magma to build with obsidian).

For booze supply, I'd consider groups of dorfs tasked solely with hauling booze between stockpiles along the way. Each hauler (group) would be burrowed in a section covering a supply stockpile and a delivery stockpile, so burrows would overlap at the stockpiles, and each stockpile would take from its supply and deliver to its delivery stockpile. This can be extended to cover all goods, in which case you don't need the mine carts (but carting magma IS dwarfy...).