Hopefully, this will save someone out there a lot of time and frustration. Armok knows there is not enough information on the topic.
So, step-by-step instruction on how to establish a fortress populated exclusively by your adventurers. Playable in fortress mode. No migrants allowed. No randomly generated embark dwarves. All races from all civs are accepted, as long as they are either adventurers or their companions. Everyone will get full citizenship.
It's a place for the retirement of your heroes when they get too wounded to press on. A place where they can share stories with like-minded adventurers of old, forge weapons and armor for new adventurers, breed horses and other mounts, and finally a place where their story continues. So if you lose both arms, it doesn't have to end there.
You will need DFhack. This was tested in 0.47.04.
1. Set population cap to 1 before launching Dwarf Fortress. It's in the d_init.txt file or in your preferred launcher. This will disable migrants (you can always change it back if you feel like it).
2. If you don't want your adventurers to have kids, set strict population cap to 1 as well. You might have heard that adventurers are asexual anyway, but that's not the case.
Created adventurers are unable to develop relations (no lovers, no spouses, and even no friends), but companions that you
recruit along the way, will have friends, lovers, spouses, and kids.
3. Start a new adventurer or a group. I strongly suggest to start without a group and recruit people along the way - the created ones feel a bit "dry" in fortress mode, due to being unable to have relationships and friends.
4. Proceed to adventure as usual, kill stuff, gather loot, do your thing. When you are ready to build the foundation of your future fortress, check back with this guide.
5. Find a place and start building. Go wild, build more than you need, do it in advance, since it will be very difficult to build it in fortress mode with 4-6 cripples. DO NOT under any circumstances claim the site. Don't assign zones. Don't even name it to be on the safe side. Just build it, place furniture, maybe stash your loot, and move on.
6. Continue adventuring until ready for retirement.
7. Backup your save.
8. Retire your adventurers. I would suggest to retire them in whatever location you started, just to be on a safe side.
9. Now run fortress mode, and choose your pre-built camp as embark location. If you have several dwarven civs in your world, it doesn't matter which one you choose. You will be at war with their enemies, gain their knowledge on tamable animals and musical instruments, and receive their caravans and liaisons. Other than that, any adventurer can gain full citizenship with any dwarven civ.
10. Consider embarking dwarves as Pickaxe Delivery Service and don't bother customizing. You will expel them once your adventurers reach the site.
11. Retire the fortress immediately after embarking.
12. Unretire your adventurer and head straight to the fortress.
13. There yet? Good. Make sure you and your companions stand somewhere within the fortress boundaries on the travel screen. Not on the edge of these boundaries. Now retire adventurer.
14. For the next step you'll need a custom script for DFhack. You can't run an adventurer fortress in vanilla DF. Neither will "tweak makeown" comman get you anywhere if you want
playable adventurers with full citizenship, not just long-term residents loitering around. So go and grab the script named "make-citizen" here
https://github.com/Atkana/Dwarf-Fortress-Mods. All credits go to Atkana. This guide wouldn't be possible without this script.
15. Unretire fortress.
16. Run cursor over the adventurer, then over companions, applying the "make-citizen" command in DFhack for each one of them. This grants immidiate full citizenship to anyone, regardless of race. If you can't find your adventurers in citizens tab, check the "others" tab - they are probably there marked as "hostile". If they are not, you retired your adventurer band too close to the edge of the fortress (some companions might be left beyond the map).
17. Replace the expedition leader with your adventurer/companion, then expel the Pickaxe Delivery Service.
18. Unpause the game for a moment. If it crashed, this means you disregarded my advice and claimed the camped while building it in adventure mode. You might be able to play it still, but you'll have to keep the embark dwarves. I think the game crashes only when the site is populated exclusively by dwarves with ownership of another site? I can only guess. What I do know is it doesn't crash if you don't claim the site.
19. Now you have a fortress with nobody but your adventurers populating it! In the "civ and world info screen" it will be marked as "The Camp of Camp" and "no civilized population". Alas, that's what you get for playing in adventurer-built site. It won't change, but it's also purely cosmetic.
20. Go play your fortress!
21. You're back! Because it was unplayable due to the bugs. Don't panic, it means you did everything right. But DF is not supposed to be played like that, so we'll have to fix things before the fortress becomes playable and ready for future adventurers. Open DFHack console.
22. Run "cleanowned" command. If you gave your recruited companions artifact weapons/armor/items, they won't show up in display menu or military equipment screen, because your companions are the owners. This command fixes it for every item.
23. Run "cleanconst" to eliminate the lag. Depending on the scale of your pre-built camp, you might have thousands of logs in the stocks screen - logs that were used for walls, floors, ceilings. This command will fix it.
24. While you're there, you might want to use the "clean" command to get rid of contaminants too. I imagine you have a lot of blood splatter from those buzzards/keas/whatever that were pestering your adventurers during construction process.
25. Feel free to use "autodump" command liberally, to get rid of the corpses and maybe move around some items. Don't use it on the items inside the wagon, though. I've ran into some nasty bugs while doing so - just unload the wagon the normal way.
26. Back to the game. Use d-b-c to reclaim everything on the Z-1, Z+0, Z+1 layers. Otherwise, all the stuff will be forbidden by default.
27. If you try to play the game now, you will notice that a LOT of items are completely ignored by dwarves, no matter what you do. They won't touch them. They won't even take off that XXcopper mail shirtXX, despite not being assigned to a military squad. What's going on? If you open your stocks screen and browse the items in expanded mode, you will see that some of them are color-coded red. Don't ask me why but the game considers those items as trader's stock. That includes items that you took from your previous fortresses, looted along the way, and even crafted yourself during adventures. There is no easy way around it, so you can choose from the following:
- metal items can be melted. Yes, the dwarves won't haul them to stockpiles, these items don't show up in military equipment screen, but they can be melted.
- "autodump destroy" will atom-smash everything marked for dumping.
If you really want to keep AND USE those items (dealing with unmovable artifacts can be especially annoying - can't even mark them for dumping), you'll have to do the following:
- open item description screen
- run "gui/gm-editor"
- select "flags"
- change the "trader" flag from "true" to "false"
- do it for every single item that shows as red in your stocks screen. Yes, it's
that tedious.
That does it. Now you are finally good to go! A few noteworthy things that are kinda relevant to this guide:
- Remember, mounts count as workers during adventurer constructions;
- You might get some "phantom" wooden logs - they will show up in your stocks screen and material selection for wooden crafts, but they are not actually present on the map. Mark them for dumping in the stock screen and run "autodump destroy" in DFhack.
- Remember, you can recruit citizens during your adventures (ask them to join you for entertainment rather than going on adventures).
- If you plan on recruiting dwarves from your previous forts, it might be a good idea to unassign those dwarves from military duty first. You see, DF remembers their schedule. So when the time comes in your new fortress, such dwarves will change their civilian profession to something like "wrestler" despite not even being assigned to a military squad. A work-around for that is to make them militia commander - I think this overrides their previous duty/schedule. Worked for me.
- Bins are your friends! As far as securing adventurer's loot goes, storing stuff in bins is by far the safest method. NEVER put your stuff in chests, and try to avoid barrels for non-food items too. Pedestals only work for some items (they will keep that roc's skull, but you'll have to re-set it for display) but they won't keep artifacts. In fact, keep your artifacts in your backpack or give them to companions. If you don't, be prepared to lose them for good, forever.
- If you recruit non-historical figures (citizens), they won't have preferences in fortress mode (no favorite food, animals, metals, etc), just like your created adventurer. They will still be able to develop relationships and make friends, though. If you want them to have preferences, you'll have to recruit histfigs only. Your previous forts are the perfect places for that.
- Don't bother stocking up on food/booze during your adventures or embarking. Most of it will be gone after those retirement/unretirement cycles.
- Be prepared to lose some stuff as well. I've lost 240+ roc bones after starting the fortress because I kept them in the wrong container (chest with a "trader" flag). And just like that, they were gone.
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Topic: How to build a fortress by adventurers, for adventurers (Read 1850 times)