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[Leonidas]

I finally got my soldiers to pick up their socks lying around the barracks.  I just put a cabinet and a chest in every bedroom, with each dwarf having his own bedroom, and eventually they disappeared.  I think that Today intended us to give the dwarves lots of containers in which to store their wealth.

[Mr. Svinlesha]

Durin's Beard:

Yeah, my setup is somewhat similar, although not quite as complicated.  It seems to work so far, but then again, I haven't tried to make it through a siege yet.

I use my first level, usually a sediment level, as a massive farm/storage area, usually with barracks located in close proximity.  Then a few levels of workshops, followed by living space.

Organizationally, I also stop and go through every immigrant individually, modify their work order, and then give them a little star in front of their profession name so that I remember who I've modified.  Things still get really complicated after a year or so, though.

Right now I'm having a mysterious problem that I hope someone can help me with.  I'm having a terrible time getting one of my stockpiles to work correctly.  I'm trying to make a stockpile exclusively for prepared meals.  I've tried going into p-t and then selecting "food", blocking all food, and hitting u ("prepared meals").  For some reason this appears to work for some prepared meals, but not others.  For example, the stockpile attracted dwarven beer biscuits, but other foods (like dwarven wine biscuits) sit in the kitchen till they rot.  In addition, it seems to work fine sometimes, and not at all other times.  I'm sure I must be doing something wrong, but can't figure out what.

If I use q to look the kitchen, I see the letters "CLT" across from the name "Kitchen".  If I look at the contents of the kitchen with t, I see the letters "TSK" in blue across from some items stored there.  Anyone know what they mean?

Oh, and puck: what does LOS stand for?

Thanks, everybody, again, for taking out the time to help me figure this out.

[Puck]

Alright, acronym frenzy!

LOS= Line of sight
TSK= Task (that item is assigned to a certain task at hand)
CLT= Clutter (workshop is clogged up, slows production, look it up on the wiki under "clutter")

[Teeto_K]

Likely cause is that your dorves are simply too busy to haul away the massive amounts of food you're producing.

Other possibility is that there is rock blocking the stockpile.

Those would explain the inconsistency of failure and success. My levels of success with prepared meal only stockpiles have been high, except when I mess up and produce produce produce without making any time to haul the goods away.

"Clutter" is occuring merely because of the massive numbers of ingredients that get piled up in the cooking process. It seems to make cooking take a long time, like, longer than it should. Most other workshops get, at most, 4 ingredients involved in the production of a product. But the kitchen, could, hypothetically be building a 100 meal stack, all at once.

[eerr]

true clutter requires 1-2 pages of items inside the building

its very minor for a prepared meal of 4 if it changes anything at all

[Ademisk]

I got a couple:

1) Is there a reason that my dwarfs keep dumping water right on the floor in my booze stockpile? They don't even store it in barrels or anything, just walk in and splash it in a corner. Also, why is water stored on any stockpile to begin with?

2) What decides on who has kids, and when? There are only 11 kids in my fortress, 8 of which were birthed by my mayor. Maybe its related to her position and the fact that I ignore all of her demands for rooms and mandates. It seems her reproduction abilities are limited only by her ability to carry 2 babies at a time.

[Mr. Svinlesha]

puck: (or anyone else)

Yet another stupid question.  I'm trying out your bridge system, but this bit:

First you dig two holes, three tiles wide and as long as the maximum bridge length (10 squares?). The depth is up to you.

... has me a bit stumped.

How do you dig a pit?

[Alex Encandar]

1: Blinking = Legendary dwarf; This means that they do not pay rent, but they are excellent in at least 1 skill, usually multiple. Dwarves gain experience over time and as time goes on you will see more and more become legendary and blink.

2: Well, technically no there's no benefit to over doing it. As your fortress grows however, you will need to switch it back on to account for the new wealth, I just leave it on and have him as a farmer too so he can do something useful in his spare time.

3: Well, it's probably best to do multiple ideas when it comes to defense. My current fortress has a dry moat with a drawbridge as well as a locking mechanism made up of 3 floodgates to block any entrance in the main path. Their is another 1 square wide path with a steel door(not sure if material matters, I think it does though). This pathway is lined with fortifications allowing my marksdwarves to rain death down on them.

Moat: Prevents normal creatures, it doesn't protect against flying creatures or undead.

Lava Moat: Prevents undead, doesn't protect against flying.

Traps: Sissy way out, plus they can get jammed with bodies, causing your civilians to run out into the fight and try and clean them, which can lead to nasty results. I avoid them for the most part, crossbow weapon traps do not require cleaning but they do use ammo.

Army: Probably the most reliable defense, it can be moved quickly to plug holes you didn't notice, make sure you have them training ahead of time (dwarffortresswiki.net has a lot of info on all this btw) and with decent equipment. War dogs are useful too, you can assign them to your soldiers using the "work dogs" preference for each dwarf, or assign them to a chain near choke points and entrances, usually around corners so that they can't be shot at by ranged enemies. Also you can attach the chains to pressure plates to release the dogs when enemies get too close.

Fortifications: These allow your marksdwarves to shoot at enemies they can see through the fortifications. It's best to not allow enemies to pass directly next to the fortifications cause if they can, they can shoot you just as well as you can shoot them, I don't know the exact numbers but it's exponentially more difficult to shoot into them as they move further and further back, this can also be solved by putting them 1 z-level up from the main entrance level.

Creative defenses:
Caveins: Pressure plate linked to a support can cause a cavein on unsuspecting enemies
Flooding: Preasure plate linked to floodgates can drown non-undead creatures, and flying creatures assuming it's inside.
Gas Attack: If you set up a cavein trap, and block the actual rocks from hitting the enemies (make them fall near them) the gas/smoke will knock them out, this lets you easily capture them for later gladitorial arena bouts.

Allowing for enemies to technically move to the deepest parts of your fortress would probably solve a lot of the pathing problems with goblins you have. Drawbridge traps are too easy anyways >.<

4: Dig channel in the middle of a 3x3 square, build millstone in the channel 1 level below where the 3x3 square is. Once the millstone is built, build the windmill on the 3x3 square. That should do it.

5: Hard to figure out exactly what went wrong. Make sure you built the floodgate in the channel, not on top of it. Even if you had on top of it though, it should have still largely flowed into the channel. I would suggest making the channel wider than the floodgate, 3 squares or so wide would do it. This way, the channel should easily hold all the water, might want to make it 2-3 z-levels deep too, 5/7 and up and the creatures will probably just swim across.

6: Well eventually, the clothes will just rot away. If your fortress is happy enough, your dwarves will be quite happy nudists. Press o, r, and make sure dwarves are set to gather refuse as well.

Oh, make sure you have a refuse stockpile set up, a garbage dump zone would work too, if you make a dump, you would have to go through all the bad clothing and set them to "dump" by pressing d.

[Hague]

Just curious, I haven't tried this but I wonder if it would work. Perhaps make a series of 'knockout' traps based on single tiles collapsing in unison instead of entire floors. The idea hinges on building single floor tiles from a bridge that are supported by a pillar below. The bridge provides easy access from above to allow the floor to be rebuilt when sprung and levers are linked to the supports to cause a cave-in. The bridge doesn't provide support to the floor so it will collapse when the support is destroyed via lever or building destroyer. The dust generated by the collapse will knock-out anything caught in it.

Also, traps make excellent defenses against snatchers. For some reason they appear to be quite attacted to cage traps as I have caught many more snatchers than ambushers with my cage traps. You can place them randomly over your surface map to reveal ambushers and thieves. Ideally you'd need to form a wall of them around the entire map but that will require a lot of resources. Luckily you can get lots of cages from traders.

[juice]

Ideally you'd need to form a wall of them around the entire map but that will require a lot of resources. Luckily you can get lots of cages from traders.

Not quite. Although it would work excellently in revealing invaders as soon as they entered the map, it would create an endless amount of jobs to haul the cages from the far off sides of your map due to wildlife spawns that get stuck in them.

A better way of handling it is to use natural terrain, channels, rivers, and walls if needed to create a choke point where invaders would have to pass through in order to get near your fortress. Place a dog in this choke point, or a couple traps, and make sure the choke point is a good distance away from your fortress so you can have ample time to prepare before the ambush arrives at your doorstep.

[Mr. Svinlesha]

Alex:

Thanks in particular for your answer to 4.  I had missed the step involving building a channel before building the actual windmill.

But I'm still not convinced that blinking dwarves are legendary.  As I note previously, even my peasants blink on occasion, and my non-legendary-dorfs blink too.  Plus, they also stop blinking after a certain amount of time.

[Mr. Svinlesha]

So, anyway, a quick up date on where I'm at now:

It's spring of the second year of my fortress, Alathduthnur (which means something silly I can't remember).  I've dug out several levels.  The top of the fortress is a broad, open peat field, right under the surface, with farms, storage, a kitchen and a still.  Large open levels, 30 by 30, provide space for my workshops on the levels immediately below.  Woodburner and smelter are at work non-stop to make steel for armor and weapons (although I haven't finished my first shipment of steel yet, so my metalsmith is idling).  At, at the bottom of my fortress are two levels of living space, full of 3x3 rooms.

On the top level as well is a barracks and a gym for my 3 conscripts.  They've been in training all winter long.

I have a total of 15 dwarves.

I got lucky and accidentally deconstructed my trade depot in the middle of negotiations with the dwarven liaison last fall, so the caravan left all of its goods when it split.  So I have a lot of extra trade goods at the moment.

On the downside, the fortress is still basically open for the taking.  My engineers can't figure out how to build a pit, so I can't build the retractable bridge trap I was planning on using.  I've got nothing but a few stonefall traps at the entrance to my lair, so at the moment I'm basically waiting to be massacred.

I read about people catching demons, note the fact that I still can't even build a simple pit, and think: man, I have a long way to go in this game.

Finally, I'm wondering a bit about the future, once the dwarven economy sets in.  When this happens, many of my dwarves won't be able to afford 3x3 rooms.  Should I build a large barracks area for poor dwarves in the near future?

Can I use the various barrels of poison and venom and such in traps, or are they only trade goods?

[ByDurinsBeard]

What kind of blinking are you talking about exactly? Flashing in and out of existence or replaced by some other symbol?

By the by, regarding moats; fill them with water only for aesthetic purposes. A dry moat is completely impassable to all but flying creatures. Your defensive fortifications should be behind dry moats so no invaders will get to stand next to them. For example, for basic entrance defense in flat terrain, build a fortification around it, then dig a moat of three, four squares wide around it, and provide access across a single drawbridge. Your xbowdwarves, standing right next to fortifications, can shoot through easily, but invaders forced to stand multiple squares away cannot shoot through easily. This due to fortification structures having no sides, they simply provide cover depending on how far from structure the attacker is.

Pits etc are made by choosing to channel instead of digging. Channels can be dug from the level above (but not by standing on the square to be channeled) so you can easily create waterways without having a dwarf to descend into the channel. Remember that dwarves are naturally stupid (or constantly under influence) and may channel themselves into box if you designate large areas to channel at once. Only create 1 square wide designations at a time and wait until work is finished before designating more.

[Mr. Svinlesha]

ByDurinsBeard:

Regarding blinking:  When I open the u-menu and look at my list of dwarves, some names -- usually two or three -- will "blink", or flash on/off, on/off, on/off.  I've double-checked, and they definitely aren't legendary dwarves.


Regarding pits: well, a channel I can dig.  But how about a fifty-foot deep pit?  The only way I can figure is this:

1) at z-1, dig a channel of appropriate size.
2) dig an access stairwell downward one level.
3) dig out a passage on z-2 equal in size to the channel above it.
4) dig a new channel in the passage on z-2, same size.
5) dig an access stairwell downward one level.
6) go to 3).
7) continue till you've come to the bottom.
8 ) wall off the access stairwells.

Would that work, do you think? 

[ByDurinsBeard]

Blinking name in the u-list indicates legendary status. Have you checked their entire list of skills, scrolling with +/- keys? The skills are in somewhat random (learned?) order so legendary skills may be further down the list.

The only method I've figured to build multi-level inescapable pits is doing an access stairway. However, first thing I do is dig the stairs as far down as necessary, then lay out the bottom of the pit with up-stairs, then dig up/down stairs upwards level by level and finish off with down stairs. Next I order channeling of entire levels, starting at topmost layer. Channeling CAN be done from directly below too (and above I think, if there' stairs to stand on instead of open space). Because there's stairs everywhere the dwarves cannot box themselves in while channeling a layer. I keep going downwards until the pit has been formed. Finally, I channel out the top of my access stair, making the stairwell a dead end at top. If I happened to dig the stairs outside pit proper, I might floor over the tile too.

This is not aesthetically optimal as it leaves you with the access stairway remnant. I suppose one could come up with some system using pillars and levels to collapse the entire stairwell but I haven't bothered thinking anything up as I nearly never need pits for anything.