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[WCG]

I checked the bug reports and didn't see these, and indeed they might not be bugs at all. Frankly, I wasn't sure if I should be posting under 'Suggestions' or 'Bugs.'

1) In my new fortress, the bedrooms are set up so the dwarves will usually use a constructed ('inside,' but 'light') passage, to help with cave adaptation. This route is set as 'high traffic,' but there's an underground passage just beneath it which is set to 'low traffic.'

But during an ambush, when I instructed all dwarves to stay inside, I was inundated with announcement spam that such-and-such dwarf "cancels sleep - Forbidden Area." They all seemed to pile up at the start of this 'light inside' passage. Why wouldn't they automatically take the 'low traffic' route in a case like this? When I switched the high and low traffic designations, the message spam stopped instantly (so there really WAS a valid underground route available). After that, the dwarves had no trouble getting to their bedrooms (and back again).

2) I was trying to channel out one-square overhangs (one isolated square at a time, so my miners didn't kill each other) on the outside of my fortress - just to clean it up a little, and to give the marksdwarves a clear shot - but this took MUCH longer than I expected. The problem was with their pets. As soon as an unskilled miner started to channel that square, their pet would move to it. This caused them to stop (and then to travel clear across the map to some other mining operation, rather than pick another one close by).

Between the long travel times (the dwarves would only work briefly at the other side of the map before returning to this area) and the constant - no, the inevitable - pet disruptions, I didn't think this would ever be completed. Luckily, my legendary miner took on the job, and he was quick enough that his pets didn't have time to move to block his work. (Note, however, that even he moved from job to job clear across the map, rather than pick another channeling assignment just two steps away.)

3) One of my first immigrants was a male dwarf with two children. When the first child was goblin-snatched, he seemed to have no idea anything had happened. Then, about a year later, his remaining child was goblin-snatched. Again, he didn't even get a bad thought about this. It's not that his wonderful 3x3 hovel - with a single low-quality bed, and not even a door on the room - is overcoming the sad fact that both kids have been snatched. It's that he doesn't get a sad thought about it, or even seem to notice at all.

(After a search, I did see a similar posting as this from months ago, but I thought I'd add it here anyway.)

4) This is just kind of funny, and probably a feature, not a bug. But I had a cat tied to a rope, and I didn't think to un-assign the cat before removing the restraint 'building.' Unfortunately, this left me with the rope still tied to the free-roaming cat.

I couldn't use the rope for anything else (I wanted to rebuild the restraint elsewhere). And caging the cat didn't do any good. The rope just stayed in its inventory. But eventually, I thought to tie the cat to a different rope, and this one dropped off.

Actually, the more I think of it, I'd say this is just a feature. It was kind of funny (luckily, I wasn't in a hurry for the rope), and it's certainly not a big deal, anyway.

Great game! And 40a works fine for me (despite the yellow X trail). But apparently I'm two versions behind, just since yesterday!



Bill

[numerobis]

(1) dwarves don't think they shouldn't path through, they just get there and decide it's a bad idea.  That's why you used to get dozens of dwarves at the entrance of your fort all trying to run out and get socks and then trying (and often failing) to run back inside before getting killed.  Hopefully the whole "stay inside" setup gets fixed in a snazzy way sometime.

(2) if there's a job in the adjacent square, miners will take it.  Otherwise, they'll use some technique that roughly corresponds to "take the farthest possible job so you have a long way to walk before you actually need to work again."  Not exactly, but it often seems that way.

(4) is on the bugs list.  It is kind of pleasingly silly.

[Gnomechomsky]

About #2 specifically...I believe when digging, miners will choose adjacent jobs when possible.  However, when making channels (and possibly other stuff), they don't have this behavior, and I think they just work on the leftmost, then topmost designated square.  This behavior becomes quite pathological when you designate something like this:

Code: [Select]

____________________  <-- row of channels
          .
          .
          .
(lots of vertical space)
          .
          .
          .
____________________   <-- row of channels

I think regular digging is an exception to the rule that "the job chooses the dwarf".

[mithra]

About #2 specifically...I believe when digging, miners will choose adjacent jobs when possible.

I don't see that in my games.  Instead, the miners run all over the place, digging out one square here, one there, three here, two there, with many, many steps in-between, even though a diggable block is right there next to the block just dug. I really wish something would be done about how miners select the next block to dig

[numerobis]

I see my miner dig the top channel as far as he can until for some reason he has to stop; then he switches, as you say, to the left-most (which will be on the other side).  With one miner, this is OK because he's probably going a long ways to get a drink anyway.  With two or more miners, the typical reason he has to stop is that the other miner will have claimed dibs on the next job on the top, and that happens at almost every single tile.

Two mining jobs are adjacent if the tiles to be mined are next to each other (no matter how far it is to get access); they aren't adjacent just because the miner wouldn't have to move to get to the next one.

All this appears to hold for smoothing and engraving too.

[IcyLemon]

The ropes tied to cats is still present in 40c, just designate it for dumping and someone should come and wrestle the rope off the cat, then you can just reclaim it.

[WCG]

The ropes tied to cats is still present in 40c, just designate it for dumping and someone should come and wrestle the rope off the cat, then you can just reclaim it.

I remember trying that,... but I don't remember why it didn't work. I think it was just that I couldn't designate the rope for dumping from the cat's inventory. And it's a real pain to find the right object from the Stocks screen, because every time you zoom to one - to see if that's the correct item - you lose the screen and you have to tediously go through the whole procedure again (and again).

At any rate, assigning the cats to a different restraint worked fine. When they were tied up to that one, they were untied from the previous rope.

Bill

[Deon]

To designate the rope from the inventory, open it's description and press D there. Sometimes interface may seem a bit unintuitive.

[Stromko]

1) Best solution I can think of is to place some doors in the 'outside' part of the upper hall, if it's a wide hallway you may need to place some walls in the middle so that all the doors can be adjacent to a wall (of course). Your dwarves and pets will stay out of that Outside zone when you tell them to stay inside, therefore, nothing will be opening the doors and you can lock them. When they can't path through that area at all, they HAVE to take the alternate passage; they won't even try to take the blocked passage and won't hit the Outside area then, because it no longer counts as between them and the destination.

2) Until Toady does another pass over mining AI, the only real solution  can think of is to only mine one area of the map at once so there's no far-off mining jobs to choose from. It's really a choice between micromanagement and efficiency, either you're telling them to mine out one area at a time so they have no choice but to mine efficiently, or you're just designating huge swathes or scattered pockets and they they take much longer than they need to because of needless backtracking.

[WCG]

1) Best solution I can think of is to place some doors in the 'outside' part of the upper hall, if it's a wide hallway you may need to place some walls in the middle so that all the doors can be adjacent to a wall (of course). Your dwarves and pets will stay out of that Outside zone when you tell them to stay inside, therefore, nothing will be opening the doors and you can lock them. When they can't path through that area at all, they HAVE to take the alternate passage; they won't even try to take the blocked passage and won't hit the Outside area then, because it no longer counts as between them and the destination.

That's a great idea. Thanks!

But oddly enough, I didn't have this message spam the last time I locked down the fortress. Nothing is different, not in that area, anyway. And I'm still using 40a - inadvertently (which is an embarrassing story in itself).

Then again, we weren't locked down long, and maybe I just didn't have huge numbers of dwarves who felt sleepy at that particular time. That's unusual, though, since usually attackers make EVERYONE sleepy, all of a sudden - including all my military dwarves!



Bill

[numerobis]

My fix is to have all meeting places in the light; that way, when my dwarves party like it's 199 -- which is most of their lives -- they also soak in the sun (filtered through several stories of construction, typically, I admit).