Print

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

[recon1o6]

The first dwarven caravan came to my newest fort of arrowblade, and with it no less than 9 little bastards guzzling my booze and limited food along with their useless peasant father, an almost useless mother and an accomplished smith who unfortunately is friends with most of the family. The parents I can deal with, but its the younglings I'm unsure about.

I'm in the middle of a savage tundra and I'm still digging out the first few floors of the fort (had a light aquifer on 3rd floor down and another heavier one on 7th)

So I'm looking for suggestions for what to do with them, I can't kill off too many without making the smith go into depression, but if I let them stick around for long, then I'm going to be running on empty until summer or perhaps autumn.

[PatrikLundell]

Firstly, unskilled doesn't mean useless. There's always work to be done, and some dorf with poor skills nevertheless have great potential. In addition to that, they learn fairly quickly (a lot faster than real life humans...).

If you're afraid of running out of food and booze, increase your agricultural production as quickly as you can. Tundras have somewhat poor selections of boozable (and edible) plants, but you should still be able to collect some and build a surface plant farm (I build mine by channeling away one Z level over an area, build a roof over it, and use it as my courtyard/surface farming area/pasture).
By gathering surface plants and process them by a still you get seeds for your (surface) farm plots as well as booze (and variety) for your dorfs, and a savage surface isn't particularly bad (it can be if it's evil, but any evil can be scary).

According to my understanding of how Toady has implemented aquifers, there should never be both heavy and light aquifers directly under each other, as you'd either get light, heavy, or none (you can get the other kinds in a different part of the embark if it's "ruled" by a different world tile). It's possible to hack both light and heavy aquifers above each other, but I assume you haven't done that. Also, it's rare for DF to have multiple aquifers, although you can get one in sand/soil at level 2, have non aquifer clay at level 3, and then sandstone or conglomerate stone (there might be a small number of others) below that, though, but I don't think I've seen a naturally appearing rock aquifer underneath a non aquifer rock layer (although it can be hacked).

Just let the kids grow up. Create a burrow for them to keep them inside the fortress until they mature, and release them from the burrow at that time.

[anewaname]

9 kids is a lot. You could always force them to work using Dwarf Therapist's hack. Without that DT hack, you can slightly leverage their willingness to pick plants from the farms by turning off food hauling for many of the adult dwarfs. Or, maybe you will decide you do not need that smith.

At the junction of two significantly different biomes, one biome's aquifer might be several z's lower than the other biome's aquifer (I have seen this many times where ocean and land biomes meet, maybe it is only related to the ocean).

[Red Diamond]

Peasants are not useless, deactivate hauling on what you think of as your 'useful' dwarf, hauling is the main use of labour time in this game.  Children on the other hand are basically useless, but all you have to do is feed them, which on most biomes is not hard.  Are there any edible plants growing in your tundra?  If there are it will not be hard to keep said children fed.  The aquifer will provide a supply of fresh, non-frozen water. 

[Stench Guzman]

Food and booze consumption should never be a serious problem unless you are playing some kind of challenge game or are on a glacier with no livestock or something.

Children can harvest crops if your settings allow all dwarves to harvest.  My children seem content to sing and play near my butcher's shop.

[Red Diamond]

Food and booze consumption should never be a serious problem unless you are playing some kind of challenge game or are on a glacier with no livestock or something.

Children can harvest crops if your settings allow all dwarves to harvest.  My children seem content to sing and play near my butcher's shop.

I think he is playing some kind of challenge game.

[Thon]

I do family planning via messing with the ini files. Pop cap + X  Baby cap X/10  per year. By the time fort's 12 years old , when new ones are born, old ones start working. When started with the default cap, I had 50 children in fort for 12 years or so...