Print

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

[blainemono]

Ok, I've actually managed to buld a somewhat self-sufficient fortress, sooo some questions

First, stone removal. What i did was designate a huge stone stockpile outside the fortress gates. it worked adequately for the first several rooms, but once I got aggressive with tunneling, the stockpile quickly filled up (did I mention it was huge?) and cleaning stopped. How do I do it more efficiently?

Second, field irrigation. I went with a reservoir and a floor hatch above the field. works great, but now I found that mud piles dry up after a while and I would like to skip this part about regularily checking fields and pulling levers. Is it possible to build an automated irrigation system? I've tried a waterwheel-powered pump that pumps water at the field and a drainage grate for excess fluid, but water still gets too high for farming. Any ideas?

Third, food/brew accounting. What happens for me now is farmers quickly fill up all the available barrels, leaving no containers for brewers. Now, ideally i would like to specify the amount of barrels filled with different kinds of food so that farmers only work fields when the food gets low, and the amount of booze barrels so that brewers automatically resupply them. I guess that's not how that works though. But how does that work?

Fourth, what to do with those baby snatches? I've made a small gathering area covering the entrance to the fortress, so some dorfs and some dogs always hang around there - yet goblins still snatch those babies like some kind of ugly pedophile ninjas. How do I stop them?

Thanks!

[Lormax]

For the first one, use garbage dumps.  Here's the link that explains how they work on the wiki.  http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Garbage_dump

For the 2nd, I don't think you need to constantly muddy the floor...once it's muddy it's muddy.  At least thats how it was in 40d

[blainemono]

For the 2nd, I don't think you need to constantly muddy the floor...once it's muddy it's muddy.

Mine dried out twice in two years. Maybe it had something to do with floor smoothing, but then again it shouldn't have

[Trekkin]

Smoothing floors unmuddies them. Bizarre, perhaps, but there you have it. So does building constructions on muddied rock. That said, if you want constant 1/7 water across a region, remember that you can set pressure plates to work on specific levels of liquid, and that they work like levers. having a pressure plate interrupting the action of a screw pump works, but then again 1/7 water is tricky because it doesn't move.

To remove stone quickly, catapults are always a wonderfully efficient solution, especially if you want siege operators for defense. If not, try zoning a dump and designating the items for dumping. They'll be forbidden so you'll have to reclaim them later to use them.

You can set the amount of barrels assigned to a particular stockpile and the contents of each stockpile in its menu, so yes it's possible to set the barrels used for each food type. However, the option to reserve barrels via /* on the main stockpile screen is a lot less headache-inducing.

As for thieves, tether one animal on either side of a three-tile hallway and the thieves will always bump into them. It's best not to use your best war animals for this so that if you forget come an ambush/siege it's not a problem. Incidentally, goblins aren't immune to traps, so it might be worthwhile having them try to sneak past several menacing spikes. When you see goblin corpses randomly popping into visibility at your fortress entrance you know it's working.

[Jelle]

Thanks for the using animals as scouts bit, gave me a good idea. Sudden ambushes will be a thing of the past!

[Sphalerite]

Mine dried out twice in two years. Maybe it had something to do with floor smoothing, but then again it shouldn't have

Smoothing is what did it.  Your dwarves will clean mud off smoothed floors, even if you built a farm on that floor.  Don't smooth floors you intend to turn into a farm, and the mud will last forever.

[Psieye]

Third, food/brew accounting. What happens for me now is farmers quickly fill up all the available barrels, leaving no containers for brewers. Now, ideally i would like to specify the amount of barrels filled with different kinds of food so that farmers only work fields when the food gets low, and the amount of booze barrels so that brewers automatically resupply them. I guess that's not how that works though. But how does that work?

Getting jobs auto-assigned under certain conditions is planned but won't be in for a good long time. You can reserve some barrels as "use only in jobs, not for filling spares" as described above. The alternate solution is to quickly use up the plants you've got stored up - mass brewing, mass threshing, mass cooking. Whatever you choose, get those plants out of those barrels and made into products. With cooking, make a food stockpile to only receive cooked meals and don't let barrels be used in there. Now you can sell those meals without throwing away barrels.

[ledgekindred]

Another good way of making sure you don't use up all your barrels is to make sure you are making fine or lavish meals.  They will use more raw materials than they produce than easy meals.   Start out with 30 barrels of raw food, make lavish meals out of them and you will wind up with 10 full barrels of lavish meals - which will make your dwarves happy and sell for crazy money - and 20 empty barrels.  Which you can fill with booze.  Once I hit about 100 barrels or so I usually seem to hit an equilibrium of how quickly my dwarves empty them versus how fast the cooks can fill them up.

I prefer cage traps for goblin snatchers.  Caged goblin prisoners can be subjected to all kinds of Fun.  Note that it's only the goblins - kobold thieves can avoid your traps even when discovered.  Although the animals will still scare kobolds into running away.

I second the catapult idea.  Build a couple of smallish stone stockpiles next to catapult and set it to Fire At Will.  The operator will pull from a continuously refilled stockpile and you will quickly build a Legendary Siege Operator.  I've got three of them so far, each with a little stockpile next to a catapult and Siege Operating as their only assigned job.  They fire those suckers off like machine guns.  Since Siege Operating is "generic," that means they are just as good at firing ballistas, which are arguably more devastating to incoming sieges.  But instead of using up valuable ballista bolts, you're using up extra stone for practice.  Then I have the actual ballistas pointed out through my fortifications, with a stockpile next to them that only holds ballista bolts, ready to go.