Print

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

Single Giant library workroom. Takes a bit of set-up but once done is done.

90 (40%)

Specific Library sections. Books are in the library and the menu is managable.

111 (49.3%)

Generic library sections with free floating books. Messy, but flexible.

19 (8.4%)

Other: Describe (keep in mind the limits of modding)

5 (2.2%)

Total Members Voted: 224

[UristMcHuman]

Never though of that. I intend to save my starting beetles to breed, though, so I tend not to make war animals early on.

[Mephansteras]

Never though of that. I intend to save my starting beetles to breed, though, so I tend not to make war animals early on.

Swarms of war dogs and cave crabs work as well. And bringing along a hunter at embark to train them and take care of wild animals can also be effective.

Cage traps also work wonders, since you get a trainable beetle out of it.

[UristMcHuman]

Are the coloured crystal grasses underground plants?

[Mephansteras]

Are the coloured crystal grasses underground plants?

Yes.

[Mephansteras]

Still working on the crash bug. Might have it resolved now, but that'll take more testing.

In the meantime, I'm resurrecting a bunch of work that I had done on libraries. So that might go out with this release. Or maybe a follow-up one. But they should be pretty nifty. I've got parchment working, as well as the creation of glue to make ink. I'll probably have glue used to make books as well. There should be some interesting stuff going in.

Question for all of you: What do you consider the most important thing for the libraries to do? Right now I have 10 separate library sections, which cover broad areas. So you have a woodworking section, a metalworking section, a medical section, and so on. Would having a bunch of separate workshops be annoying? Or would you rather have one giant library that can take any of the research options (although that would restrict it to one dwarf at a time)

Also, my current thought is that writing manuscripts will train both the skill and Teaching, while reading will train the skill and Student. I'm torn on how detailed this should be. It would be simpler to have a few jobs for each, and have the training be across the board. So writing about medicine (or studying it) would train all of the medical skills. But it seems more in the spirit of dwarf fortress to have each skill have a separate action. That's a ton of workshop options for the scriptorium, though!

Granted, I'm not 100% sure that a given job can train more than one skill. That needs testing. If it can't, then I guess I'll have to do the one-job-per-skill route regardless.

[UristMcHuman]

Question for all of you: What do you consider the most important thing for the libraries to do? Right now I have 10 separate library sections, which cover broad areas. So you have a woodworking section, a metalworking section, a medical section, and so on. Would having a bunch of separate workshops be annoying? Or would you rather have one giant library that can take any of the research options (although that would restrict it to one dwarf at a time)

Make Book-shelf buildings that can have a library room dragged out from it. Place tables, chairs and additional book-shelves throughout the room. Have scribes write lots of books for both entertainment and education, and fill the shelves with the books. When dwarfs are bored, they can go read a fantastic story about an adventurer's great travels across the world. When a dwarf is losing certain skills or wants to learn a skill (like metal-working or carpentry), he/she can go read a book about (re)learning the skill and doing some types of work. If a kid wants to learn about what happened prior to his/her birth, arrival to the fort, or to just learn general history about the world, he/she can go read a book written by a historian if about the world or by a battle-hardened soldier if about wars.

I don't want the 'labor' "Study (skill)" or "Read Story" to take up a job on a useful dwarf. If he/she is reading, the item he/she is hauling should be the book and they should be sitting at a table in the library. When a job needs to be done, the dwarf would either re-shelf their book or put it on the table and go do their job. When they are done, the will go back to reading the book or studying.

[Mephansteras]

Sadly, what you're talking about there is beyond the scope of modding for DF. That would all take changes to the source code. So right now I'm limited to what the raws will let me do.

Namely, the ability to have custom jobs, workshops, and items.

My current design is thus:

Libraries are small sections with a cabinet (bookshelf), table, and chair. They require a selection of manuscripts on the subject area to be built. Probably 5. Once built you'll be able to have a dwarf Study in the library to gain skill in the subject area. The primary reason for doing this is to skill up rarely used skills (like medical skills) or skill up dwarves in areas that use up scarce materials. Keeping your Surgeon's skills from rusting would be nice without having to injure some dwarves, after all!

Ideally, I'd cap the level that you could skill up in. So you couldn't become, say, a Master Armorer by reading books. But that's not possible at the moment. You could, however, put skill level restrictions on the rooms so that your Master Armorer won't go use the library but your novice armorer would.

I may have to have the jobs use an input and give an output. I'm thinking of having the dwarves take paper of some sort in with them, with a very slight chance to have them create a Manuscript of their own based on what they read. Otherwise it would be assumed that they'd just use the paper/parchement up taking notes. But I'm still thinking about that.

[Fallen Flame]

Regarding libraries I think a good idea for the amount that what you should do is have different libraries for each group of related skills, and then each one can train the skills. For example you could have a geology library that could train: mining, masonry, engraving, stonecrafting. And then so on for each other type. This way you don't have one central one, and you don't need lots for each skill

[Saeldanya]

Heh... my first ever visiting titan was totally anihillated by... Vamari merchants. He caught an early crossbow bolt in his lung, then had trouble breathing for 25 combat report pages. The whole time he was tanked by one macefox who he only hit once... the fox broke his bones bit by bit, and when the titan was just lying there on the ground, the furry little thing started -wrestling- him. The only support he had were his buddies shooting bolts from further away.

That nameless fox deserves a legends entry, I swear.

[Mephansteras]

Another option for libraries is to make it so that they're generic, and the dwarves simply take the appropriate book with them from the stockpiles. Only problem with this is that you end up with a bunch of books/scrolls lying around in some stockpile instead of sitting on the shelves. But it's another way of handling it.


@Saeldanya: Yeah, Vamarian guards are pretty awesome. They're quick, which helps a lot. Oh, and if you check the legends after you abandon that fort I'm sure you'll find that Vamarii in there, with the titan's kill to his name.

[Fallen Flame]

Another option for libraries is to make it so that they're generic, and the dwarves simply take the appropriate book with them from the stockpiles. Only problem with this is that you end up with a bunch of books/scrolls lying around in some stockpile instead of sitting on the shelves. But it's another way of handling it.

I think it would be better to have it so any book can be used at any library, or else like you said you will end up with lots of books lying around, and it will be more of a hassle to make the ones you want.

[Mephansteras]

I'm not too fond of having 'generic' books, though. I'd at least like to have them category specific. So, you could use any Medical book to study Diagnosis or Bone setting or whatever, but you couldn't use it to study Mining or Herbalism. Generic books just seems...odd.

Did a quick test, looks like jobs can only use/train a single skill. That's unfortunate. Looks like the Scriptorium will have a giant list of jobs that can be done at it.

I think I'll stick up a poll with the options. There are three basic options, I think.

1) Large General Library. A single, large workshop that needs 1 manuscript of each of the various subject areas to be built. The advantage is that you've got a single place to do everything, you don't need a ton of books on each subject, and I can make it look pretty snazzy. Disadvantage is that you can only have one dwarf study in there at any given time, and you can't just make a library to deal with one or two subjects.

2) Smaller Specific Libraries. Small library sections that are used for a specific subject area. Agriculture, for instance, or Medicine. They would require a few manuscripts of the appropriate type to be built. This lets you have as many or few sections as you want for a given subject and you don't have to clutter up your fortress with books. Disadvantage is that you have to make a lot of them to cover all subject areas.

3) Generic libraries and stockpiled books. Small library sections that can be used to study any book. This makes the books you have on hand the only limiting factor in their use. Disadvantage: You have to have book stockpiles sitting around, so you have an odd disconnect of having a library without any real shelves. Probably just bins of books.

I kind of like 2, since I like the fact that I can build in a selection of books to the library sections. So you'd need to have, say, five manuscripts on medicine in order to start training doctors. It doesn't truly enforce the knowledge transfer logically, since they could all be on diagnosis but somehow train surgery, but it'd be closer. It also means that each library has a somewhat limited set of actions in the menu, making it easier to navigate. But 3 has some nice aspects as well. I just that stockpiles could be made more fine grained. Right now you can't quite restrict it so that ONLY books and no other tools end up in the stockpile.

[Fallen Flame]

How would it work having both option 1 and 2? that way if you want to just have one big library you can, but If you want something more specific you can just build the smaller ones?

[Mephansteras]

Hmm. Yeah, that's doable.

[Anathema]

Based on your description, 2 seems like the way to go, easy to use and it makes sense. If it was a big general library, I'd need woodcrafting and farming books when all I want to do is train doctors, and then it could only train one dwarf at a time - I'd need several sets of odd books to create enough general libraries to train an entire medical staff at once.

On the other hand having book stockpiles separate from the "library" is a bit.. unintuitive, and one thing the game doesn't need more of is extra items and stockpiles to keep track of. Having the item simply be a component in creating the workshop seems like a much 'cleaner' approach.