I've heard that putting floor grates near your well will prevent muck from accumulating. Does there have to be an open space under the grates? If not, will the well collapse when I channel all the eight squares around it?
Grates used to prevent the buildup of contamination, but they don't in the current version. Pools of blood, vomit, and forgotten beast poison will sit right on top of grates as if they were solid floor.
Perhaps you could briefly post about this problem in the
Future of the Fortress thread? Toady said that bug fixes are his priority right now, but isn't this about a very useful bug
workaround that suddenly stopped working as of .19 ?
Anyway, to prevent the bugged contaminant system from creating too much Fun or ruining their FPS, many players use the DFcleanmap tool from the
DFHack pack to remove them periodically.
If you don't like to cheat with a tool, however, the simplest in-game solution might be a Dwarven Atom Smasher:
Magmawiki >
DF2010:WellDwarves will use the well to wash themselves. This means that if dwarves are exposed to contaminants such as blood, it may accumulate around your well. Deadly contaminants from Forgotten Beasts can and will accumulate around your wells, too. Wells in highly trafficked areas can become death traps this way, quickly spreading the syndrome to your entire fort. One approach to decontamination is to build wells off the beaten path, in a nook limiting access to one tile, and placing a drawbridge atom smasher over that tile. Whenever a dwarf leaves a mess by a well, lock the access doors and smash that mess with a bridge. Another approach involves flooding the area around the well and draining the excess water off screen somehow. Removing the contaminants from the map is the only sure way to deal with them permanently and stop them from killing your FPS, and your dwarfs if they are deadly.
Alternatively, I suppose one could design a
magma system to destroy the contaminants around a well room periodically.
And, although I haven't tried it, I think a system that uses
fortifications on map edge to drain fluid away might be worth trying:
They say you can designate fortifications on edge tiles to drain fluid off the map. --TomiTapio 13:44, 15 July 2010 (UTC)
I've done the fortification trick. If you smooth the edge wall, you can carve fortifications in it and use it to drain an infinite amount of water/magma. 64.255.180.84 16:16, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
The idea is to periodically flush the well room to a drainage at the edge of the map. But that's
assuming the contaminates will not get stuck on a fortification like they do on grates in .19.
Where in inits is option for animal population cap? I can't find it. I believe the default is 50, but I'd like to set it to 20.
It's not in the inits. It appears to be a hard-coded limit in the code. You can't change it.
Tis a shame... I'm sure more than a few players would appreciate it if this was turned into an init.txt or d_init.txt option. For that matter, I assume this would be
extremely simple for Toady to code. (The game would just have to read a variable from init.txt instead of using a constant.) And it's not like doing this would be something that players could abuse or would ruin the atmosphere of the game. We can already control population caps for dwarves and children.
Now that I think about it, I might briefly mention this suggestion in the
Future of the Fortress thread...
Author
Topic: The DF2010 Little Questions Thread (Read 1145549 times)