Print

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

[TDSS02]

Hello everyone, I had a few questions that i cant seem to figure out.

1. I was wondering what everyone's strategy is for breeding livestock. How do you get them to stay in the same place/room? How exactly do you milk them if there locked in a room? Can anyone provide pictures for me to use of there setups as an example or point of reference. (I'm used to the graphic sets i have no clue how to read the ASCII characters so if you have any pictures that use graphic packs it would be appreciated)

2. I find waterfalls/Mist setups very fascinating. I was wondering if anyone can give me some pics/descriptions of your waterfall/mist setups and how they work. The wiki is kind of confusing on various topics and I think it would be amazing to mist my entire main corridor and/or the dinning room

Thanks everyone for reading my post and sorry about the stupid questions

[blue emu]

Hello everyone, I had a few questions that i cant seem to figure out.

1. I was wondering what everyone's strategy is for breeding livestock. How do you get them to stay in the same place/room? How exactly do you milk them if there locked in a room? Can anyone provide pictures for me to use of there setups as an example or point of reference. (I'm used to the graphic sets i have no clue how to read the ASCII characters so if you have any pictures that use graphic packs it would be appreciated)

Ropes. I create a barn, and attach the livestock in 1x2 stalls using ropes.

Here's a Rhesus Macaque farm:

[TDSS02]

Ok, so just use a ton of ropes lol, thanks. That setup looks sweet, so i'm guessing that whenever a new animal is born you just chain it up as needed? This may sound like a stupid question but do pets die of old age? if they do about how long does it take?

[blue emu]

They do, but it takes a long time. The above screen-shot is of a meat-ranch. I only keep two adult males (as studs) and as many females as possible. I slaughter the other males as they reach breeding age, and start slaughtering females when the population reaches 150 or so... there's a cap on how many animals you can have of any particular type, and no more pregnancies will occur if you are over the cap.

[Trekkin]

Is a ranch setup really necessary? I've heard of keeping animals in pits to reduce processor load from pathing, but ropes still let them path, so...

As for mist, if you design your fort vertically it's a simple matter to run a waterfall down the central staircase (I still use a 3x3 alternating up-down central staircase, so i just channel out the center tile, add grates, and pump water down, using a pump stack to pull it back up outside my fort proper. ) If not, you can put pumps in sequence on the floor above your dining room, and just have some kind of sump to pull the inevitable spillage away and back into the system. It's recommended that you put statues on the tiles where the pumps will actually be dumping/pulling up water to control muddying and stop pathing through variable-depth water too. Have the last pump drop the water into a channel below the dining room and pull it up on the other side.

[blue emu]

Is a ranch setup really necessary? I've heard of keeping animals in pits to reduce processor load from pathing, but ropes still let them path, so...

Ropes only let them path adjacent, so it seriously reduces the calc overhead. Pits are harder to harvest meat animals from... and "butcher-accessible but pet-safe" pits are harder to pack together at an efficient density than simple animal stalls.

[Trekkin]

Ropes only let them path adjacent, so it seriously reduces the calc overhead. Pits are harder to harvest meat animals from... and "butcher-accessible but pet-safe" pits are harder to pack together at an efficient density than simple animal stalls.

Ah. I tend to simply empty the pit, except for the one breeder animal I put in it, whenever i want a new influx of animal products, which nicely solves the pet access problem; they never need to put more than one animal back into the pits after they open the door and let the dogs/cows/monkeys out. It's basically a far smaller version of your stall setup with doors and an upper level.

[Psieye]

Key fact: reproduction in DF doesn't care about distance. You can have a cow 100 z-levels underground and a bull 20 z-levels up in the sky with 100 layers of rock between the two - they will reproduce.

[TDSS02]

Is a ranch setup really necessary? I've heard of keeping animals in pits to reduce processor load from pathing, but ropes still let them path, so...

As for mist, if you design your fort vertically it's a simple matter to run a waterfall down the central staircase (I still use a 3x3 alternating up-down central staircase, so i just channel out the center tile, add grates, and pump water down, using a pump stack to pull it back up outside my fort proper. ) If not, you can put pumps in sequence on the floor above your dining room, and just have some kind of sump to pull the inevitable spillage away and back into the system. It's recommended that you put statues on the tiles where the pumps will actually be dumping/pulling up water to control muddying and stop pathing through variable-depth water too. Have the last pump drop the water into a channel below the dining room and pull it up on the other side.

lol thats a amazing idea, you wouldn't happen to have a pic or map of your waterfall setup, that sounds awesome using the central staircase. Here's another question. Is there anyway to erase your fort from an embark location and reuse the site? I have some really good ideas and i screwed the site, it was a perfect stream/volcano site. It would be really easy to set something up there.

[TDSS02]

Ah. I tend to simply empty the pit, except for the one breeder animal I put in it, whenever i want a new influx of animal products, which nicely solves the pet access problem; they never need to put more than one animal back into the pits after they open the door and let the dogs/cows/monkeys out. It's basically a far smaller version of your stall setup with doors and an upper level.

I tried to put cows in a pit and it said something to the effect of "wrong building type" or something like that? How do you do it?

[Trekkin]

In inverse order:

1. You did designate the pit above the actual pit floor, right? The pit designation is for the hole you want them to chuck the animals through, not the area where you want them to end up.

2. You can reclaim then fill the tunnels with obsidian if you really want to erase all traces of the old fort, but it's probably easier to generate a new world looking for similar parameters. I've done the same thing to get a flat sand desert with limestone, granite, and gabbro dozens of times.

3. I'm afraid I'm not on the computer on which I normally play DF at the moment, but I'll try to draw it in code:

Code: [Select]

uju
jhj
ujualternates with

Code: [Select]

juj
uhu
juj
and then you sort your levels out off of that by the function you intend them to fill, so they traverse this staircase and associated mist flow as often as possible. I suppose visually it's as though they carved a quadruple helix of staircases and poured a waterfall down the middle of it. The rest of the machinery is just a tunnel off the channel at the bottom and a pump stack to get it back up to the top, although I've also used a large bridge set to repeatedy dwarven atom smash the water coming off of an infinite source. It's rather cleaner to implement, but then that's just me cursing the space used on pump stacks on every level the waterfall goes through.

[TDSS02]

Trekkin whats good about a Flat sand desert? any water? trees? how do you survive lol?

P.S. How do you get the water in the center of the staircase without having it flood your fort lol sorry just trying to understand the set up 

[Trekkin]

Well, there's sand, and I build my fortresses up from the magma sea so I pass through the water and tree-laden caverns on the way. It's also usefully processor-friendly to build on an utterly flat plain with no running water and a minimum of animal life; much like tundra but you're guaranteed sand and snow gets boring after a while IMHO.

And you pump it in via a horizontal tunnel one z-level above the staircase and pump it out via a similar tunnel one z-level below, although it can be helpful to your sanity to make the output tunnel wider. You just make it so that the water would be falling anyway, and wrap the staircases around it. Grates are supremely important to keep dwarves who happen to wander into the waterfall from following the water to a wet and messy death, though.

Incidentally, why apologize for asking questions in a forum called Gameplay Questions?

[Mason11987]

Is a ranch setup really necessary? I've heard of keeping animals in pits to reduce processor load from pathing, but ropes still let them path, so...

As for mist, if you design your fort vertically it's a simple matter to run a waterfall down the central staircase (I still use a 3x3 alternating up-down central staircase, so i just channel out the center tile, add grates, and pump water down, using a pump stack to pull it back up outside my fort proper. ) If not, you can put pumps in sequence on the floor above your dining room, and just have some kind of sump to pull the inevitable spillage away and back into the system. It's recommended that you put statues on the tiles where the pumps will actually be dumping/pulling up water to control muddying and stop pathing through variable-depth water too. Have the last pump drop the water into a channel below the dining room and pull it up on the other side.

lol thats a amazing idea, you wouldn't happen to have a pic or map of your waterfall setup, that sounds awesome using the central staircase. Here's another question. Is there anyway to erase your fort from an embark location and reuse the site? I have some really good ideas and i screwed the site, it was a perfect stream/volcano site. It would be really easy to set something up there.

If you abandon then do Start > YourSave > Legends you can export generation info, which will create a text file with the seeds used to make the world.  If you use those seeds as [e]advanced parameters in generate new world you can make the exact same world blank again.

[TDSS02]

Thank you sir very useful info