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[The Dog Delusion]

So I've got a decent fort going, and all seems to be going well - my dwarves are social and happy, I'm slowly building up fortress wealth, and the fortress itself marches ever onward toward mountain-home. Really, it's my favorite part of the game - the second and third acts, so to speak, where the true character of the fort, the terrain, and the dwarves becomes apparent. However, my dwarves also seem to be a bit...lazy. There's a lot of partying that goes on, and while I'm usually content to just let it go, it sucks when all 4 of my diggers are busy pickin' up chicks at the punch bowl instead of digging the moat I'm trying to complete before spring.

Currently, all the partying happens at the legendary dining room - I have no other "meeting" spots, and so I really just need a reliable way to end the party. In other forts, when I get the outdoor statue gardens going, it's easy to flip the "dwarves go outside/stay inside" to get them to reconsider when they should be doing, but right now, I'm not there yet, and I've grown rather weary of having to resort to the "outside" methods of ending parties - un-designating tables, turning off outside activity.

So I've been thinking of ways to end the party, probably with a lever of some sort, that's easily resettable and completely reliable. I was thinking at first that setting up a cage with an un-armed goblin would be good - I could just release him and then scare all the dwarves back to work, but then I'd have to re-load the cage, re-capture the goblin, etc. Alternately, I was thinking of some sort of flooding mechanism, but I don't even know how to begin  with that idea...

Does anyone here know of reliable ways to end a dwarven party?

[Retro]

You don't need a lever at all, actually. If you're okay with exploits, you can just free the room and then immediately re-create it. Alternatively, you could just use meeting area zones and disregard party rooms like statue gardens.

[spikedball]

Replace the ceiling of your meeting area with a set of retracting bridges. Fill the level above the bridges with gobbos wandering in a closed area with grates for floor. Pull the lever, enjoy.

[The Dog Delusion]

You don't need a lever at all, actually. If you're okay with exploits, you can just free the room and then immediately re-create it. Alternatively, you could just use meeting area zones and disregard party rooms like statue gardens.

Yeah, I've just been doing that, but I'm hoping to find a more dwarven, lever-based solution to this problem.

Replace the ceiling of your meeting area with a set of retracting bridges. Fill the level above the bridges with gobbos wandering in a closed area with grates for floor. Pull the lever, enjoy.

I'd considered something along these lines, but it would involve a lot more set-up than I'm willing to put in...I want something that more or less auto-resets, because there could well be half a dozen parties in the time it takes to re-capture all those goblins and throw them back into the party-pooper chamber.

[Argonnek]

If you used the gobbos-over-bridges method, you would only need to pull a lever to scare the dwarves, then pull it again to lower the bridges and hide the gobbos once more.

[Sensei]

Just put bridges on the floor. Remember, dwarves aren't harmed by 1-Z drops. Just stunned. You can simply drop them below your dining room, thus ending the party.

[Gergination]

Replace the ceiling of your meeting area with a set of retracting bridges. Fill the level above the bridges with gobbos wandering in a closed area with grates for floor. Pull the lever, enjoy.

I'd considered something along these lines, but it would involve a lot more set-up than I'm willing to put in...I want something that more or less auto-resets, because there could well be half a dozen parties in the time it takes to re-capture all those goblins and throw them back into the party-pooper chamber.

I think you misunderstand what he's getting at.  It would look like this

====
-----
++++

= - Gobbo's on top of floor grates
- - Retractable bridge
+ - Party room

So you pull the lever that retracts the bridge allowing the dwarves to see the gobbos.  They freak out and stop partying.

You could also just use vertical bars and floodgates in one of the walls of the dining room, but you might not want to ruin the look of it.

[IronyOwl]

A flooding system is easy to build, provided there's enough space around your dining hall for it. Just have a large cistern at or above your dining room level, with a pathway leading from one to the other. When the floodgates open, the water gushes out, flooding the room.

To empty the room, just make sure there's floor grates or similar leading to a lower cistern. Ideally, you then just use screw pumps to move the water from the lower chamber to the upper one, resetting everything. If you want to be especially automated, you can even install a pressure plate in the lower cistern so that the upper floodgates (or some of them) will close on their own once the lower cistern holds enough water.

If you can't be bothered with this, of course, you could always set up windmills to take water from a nearby river/aquifier and dump it in the upper cistern, provided there's room, while another series of windmill pumps empties the lower cistern.

If you want to go with the animals idea instead, just make sure some of the tiles in their chambers have cage traps. They'll be released, scare your dwarves, and wander around until they re-cage themselves, at which point you unseal the chamber and order the cages (preferably of some strange material, so you know which ones they are) rebuilt and hooked up to the lever again. Remember, transferring non-tame creatures between cages tends to result in it getting loose, so always build the cage they're in when possible.


Come to think of it, if you wanted to get REALLY dwarfy, you'd do the windmill thing but set it up so that the water fell from the ceiling right into grates in the floor, producing a waterfall in your dining room. A pull of a lever would magnify the water being pumped in and/or seal off the grates or the chamber the grates lead to, resulting in a flood until you pulled the lever again to undo it and return things to normal.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Just designate a meeting zone with (i) and don't have a dining room.  Sometimes dorfs will throw parties before the previous party has ended, its clearly broken. 

I only assign one if stuff starts dieing, although sometimes its too late then. 

[Lemunde]

Personally I've taken to just using meeting area zones.  It might be cheating a little but I think the whole party thing is broken anyways so I don't think it's a big deal.

[Grimlocke]

I like the idea of having a great and richly decorated dining room full of drinking, wenching and singing dwarves. Its one of the few things keeping my dwarves from ripping eachother apart too so I usualy have a good dining room set as meeting area.

I overlay it with a no-party meeting zone, so when I need my dwarves to do something usefull for a change I just free the dining room.

Though it would indeed be way more awesome to flood the dining room. And even a good way to sober them up! Im gonna do this on my next fortress. Shouldnt be too hard; some pumps, cisterns, levers and off you go. Just gotta make sure they can crawl out somehow.

[Aspgren]

The problem might not be the parties themselves, it might very well be the people throwing the parties.

In my experience CHILDREN love to throw parties. They have no work to worry about so they just go partying all over the place. You should imprison them until they're adults. I think there was a thread about this some time ago ...

[Sizik]

Just put bridges on the floor. Remember, dwarves aren't harmed by 1-Z drops. Just stunned. You can simply drop them below your dining room, thus ending the party.

What about just covering the floor with retracting bridges, which would just fling the dwarves around a little?

[Arrkhal]

Maybe a landmine hooked up to a lever.  High chance of death, high chance of injury, and being knocked out by a cave-in gives dwarves a very bad thought, greatly increasing the chances of a tantrum spiral.  Very dwarfy.

[Lightning4]

Magma is a reliable way of ending a party...