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[assimilateur]

1. In most of my forts so far, I've tried to make my starting seven sort of themed. That is, I wanted them all to specialize in one industry (not literally one job, like masonry, but metalworking, making all of them smiths and furnace operators).

Now, in my earlier forts I'd make them all part of the food industry, but in my last fort it came to me that this was committing too much to it. I mean, the way I used to do it, it was possible to feed like 50 dwarfs with the labor of 3 of them (a grower, cook and brewer, respectively, while still doing secondary tasks like milling, threshing and butchering), and still have such a huge surplus that I got rid of selling it.

What do you think is a good industry, for whatever aesthetic or role-playing reasons you wanna give me, to make my starting seven do? And please don't say mining, because then they'd spend most of their time slacking off.

2. I can't test this out right now, as I'm going to start a new fort no sooner than next week, and I know this thing is gonna drive me nuts, so I ask you this: is it possible to suffocate anyone with smoke? I've read on the wiki that smoke supposedly causes internal injuries (which leads one to believe that this might eventually lead to death), but I've never seen it happen; could this be depending on concentration? I mean, it would be like that in real life, but I have no means of guessing how accurately this is implemented in the game.

[Doomshifter]

I always thought smoke just blocked sight and caused a bad thought. I think you're thinking of steam or boiling objects. Boiling clouds cause damage, I know this, but steam MIGHT damage too.

Also, I suggest a sort of hunter themed starting seven. As in, only food in is from hunting, only export out is from hunting. Bone-carvers, crossbowdwarves, butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, etc.

[assimilateur]

I always thought smoke just blocked sight and caused a bad thought. I think you're thinking of steam or boiling objects. Boiling clouds cause damage, I know this, but steam MIGHT damage too.

Regarding steam, I thought that got nerfed, so to speak. And boiling clouds would be, as I understand it, just a fancy way of saying hot steam, right?

But I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, just that I heard it was otherwise; I have never tested that sort of thing.

Also, I suggest a sort of hunter themed starting seven. As in, only food in is from hunting, only export out is from hunting. Bone-carvers, crossbowdwarves, butchers, tanners, leatherworkers, etc.

Not bad, but I'm skeptical about the sustainability of it. I mean, game is, according to common knowledge, going to be depopulated in a couple of years.

I was also meditating on two other industries or themes for my starting seven, namely those related to metal and to stone, but I'm not convinced by either. A metal industry is going to take some time to set up (and they'd obviously have to do some mining early on, before migrants came to specialize in it), and specializing in things like masonry, stone crafting and engraving is going to be boring, mildly speaking.

[Retro]

Boiling clouds, as opposed to steam, are thick red and instakill dwarves - found that out the hard way way when toying around with temperatures in the raws ( boiled away most dwarves' bedrooms >_>; )

As for a theme - give them all one form of crafting? ie. glass, stone, wood, metal... Santa's Little Dwarves? And by 'little' I mean 'belligerent and drunk,' of course.

[assimilateur]

How do you make those boiling clouds then? I take it pouring water on magma isn't enough?

I like your idea for a theme in that it is imaginative, so I take it into consideration. But I'm not convinced by the usefulness, because frankly, most crafting is a waste of time, or even worse, materials.

Right now I'm even thinking about going back to my "food industry" theme. It's good in that it is useful, but it's also liable to either throw too much manpower at the task (if I took 3 growers, instead of 1, and so on), or to leave too much free time (a dedicated thresher would only be working a couple of days a year).

[Doomshifter]

As for a theme - give them all one form of crafting? ie. glass, stone, wood, metal... Santa's Little Dwarves? And by 'little' I mean 'belligerent and drunk,' of course.

Become Santa Claus!

[Sutremaine]

Gem-working is something that I've always liked, and it combines rock and dwarven artistry perfectly. For pure gem-work you'd need only three jobs (miner, cutter, setter), but a glass industry for day-to-day work and jeweler training involves a lot of different jobs and a lot of hauling work. It's also very dwarvenly, as it benefits greatly from magma, extreme landscaping, and lots of interference from the will of Armok (eg. redundant furnaces in a lockable room with their order lists full of either suspended or repeated Collect Sand orders, and the main furnaces with perma-suspended Collect Sand orders and limited by dwarf or skill).

I like it a lot, but distributing skills can be a problem. Giving everybody the skills needed to produce tunnels, bags, glass, and cut gems quickly means that there either aren't enough bodies left to deal with the petty demands of the dwaven stomach, or they all muddle by in the brewery and the farm getting distracted from their real jobs until a handy immigrant comes by. One thing that seems to work for me is having a weaver putting out as much raw cloth as possible while all the other dwarves flail around getting everything else done. Rolls of cloth are quite valuble for the effort they take to make, and, unlike stonecrafts, are useful by themselves. Trade cloth for food and an anvil, wait for immigrants, set immigrants to work in the kitchens and fields, profit!

[assimilateur]

I like it. I'm thinking about making 3 of them miners, 2 of them glassworkers (possibly with potash making and wood burning as secondary skills) and each of the remaining ones a cutter and setter, respectively. That isn't entirely self-contained as it would need, as you said, weaving, but also farming, threshing and potentially leatherworking and butchering, but I don't see a problem with that. Those would be parts of other industries, and I wouldn't need bags to be produced continuously the same way I'd need glass.

[darkflagrance]

How do you make those boiling clouds then? I take it pouring water on magma isn't enough?

Don't have any ideas for the specializations...

But regarding the red gas clouds, they are are created when some normally solid material reaches its boiling point. This can be achieved by throwing zinc into magma in vanilla, or is more commonly seen via modding by changing the boiling point of a material. If you mod the boiling point of a material (usually stone) to 0 or some other ridiculously low value, the resulting red gas will freeze to death anything within it while it lasts (usually a dwarven week, I estimate? Not very long...) However, this gas can be harmless if the boiling point of said material is set to just below room temp, ~10,000 degrees.

[assimilateur]

So zinc will, instead of dissolving like everything else, keep on boiling in magma? I'm wondering how that's supposed to work (i.e. if that's in any way realistic, because it sure doesn't sound like it).

[Quietust]

No - when something boils, the object instantly disappears and is replaced with a cloud of the boiling substance which expands similarly to smoke, mist, and miasma.

Another substance which boils quite readily is booze, and since it creates a big red cloud, most people incorrectly assumed that the booze was "exploding".

[assimilateur]

You see, I was hoping to build a gas chamber where I could give my captives carbon monoxide poisoning, due to filling said chamber with smoke (obtained by throwing some coal into magma). But I guess boiling them in extremely hot steam (what you called boiling gases) is good too.

[Kavalion]

I went with a plantation sort of theme once.  Grow tons and tons of rope reeds, pig tails, and all the different dyes.  You can make cloth crafts, clothing, give everyone some nice cloth bags instead of rock coffers in their quarters, carpet entire rooms by constructing restraints if you feel like it... It makes some pretty insane wealth once it gets set up.  Then just grow some food on the side and you're set.  You can simply request tons and tons of steel armor and weapons from the merchants to defend yourself with.

[assimilateur]

I'm looking for a theme for just my starting seven, not my whole fort. Think of my starting seven as sort of a guild trying to monopolize an industry. So, in short, I'd still make my own steel goods, wouldn't need to buy them.

Your plantation idea (as applied to the pioneers and not the fort at large) is nice, but one detail I don't agree with is your carpeting idea. I don't think I could convince myself that the rope I covered the floors with was a carpet.

[bombcar]

I almost always either make all my dwarves unskilled (so that they can mine without making many stones for awhile), or I make each dwarf a single specialty.

I've been leaning more towards making them all different types of soldiers, though.