Make no mistake, this game is still riddled with bugs. However, the worst of the worst have been mostly weeded out, and the ones that remain can either be worked around or simply ignored. It's not pleasant by any means, but if you're persistent and resourceful you can find a workaround for most every bug you'll encounter, even if that workaround just hides the bug.
Some of the big issues:
- Military still has some large bugs. Kill orders don't function well at all, and the (s)quads screen in general is very clunky, unresponsive, and generally lacks functionality. Use it like a bludgeon and it works well enough, but if you need fine control don't expect it to perform. Equipment works well enough now for melee dwarves, although it is slow and may take a dwarf multiple activations to finally get his uniform right. With regards to training, in a 10 dwarf squad dwarves will progress so slowly it may be a bug, but in a 3 dwarf squad it actually moves along at a brisk pace -- most likely that is just a tuning issue. Militarily, though, marksdwarves have the lion's share of the remaining bugs. There are numerous bugs with regards to marksdwarves that still need to be hammered out. Most of these can be worked around, but just be warned that getting them to function in .31.12 is not for the faint of heart.
- Healthcare works well enough. Apply cast is broken almost completely; on rare occasions a dwarf will successfully apply a cast, but the vast majority of the time a bug involving drawing water from the well for his cast will stop him dead in his tracks. Workaround is to never supply gypsum plaster and instead make them use splints; these accomplish the same thing and work just fine. Surgery occasionally bugs out still, but this is rare. The one time I encountered it I locked the surgeon in the room with the patient and he finally completed surgery after almost 5 years of him starting it and then cancelling in the middle of it. One huge bug that remains, however, are crutches -- they're never used, so if a dwarf loses the ability to stand he never will again. The only workaround to that is magma. Infections also appear to be buggy, although what the bug is is unclear. It could just be that a fixed infection never takes it's tag away, leading to lots of left over infection tags on dwarves that go in and out of the hospital. Or maybe infection never kills dwarves. I don't know. Something is up for it, for sure.
- Cleaning is completely and utterly busted. The only cleaning job that functions at all any longer is the cleaning of smoothed or engraved floors. No other form of cleaning ever occurs. If a dwarf gets blood on his clothes or armor, it stays there until he wades into water and it washes off. Then another bug occurs that, when the water pushes the contaminant, it starts multiplying like mad. Next thing you know a single spatter of blood on a single dwarf has covered the walls and surface of an entire body of water. Even worse, if it's a well the blood will actually come up the well and out into the fort. It is quite disturbing, to say the least. Either way, the biggest issue with cleaning is that it's actually a large FPS drain. Keeping track of dozens of pages of contaminants per dwarf takes up a significant amount of memory and processing. The only solution I have found is nonstop use of dfcleanmap.exe, which comes from the DFHack library of tools, alongside a bath house that is permanently submerged in 3/7 to 4/7 water and designated as a meeting hall or statuary. This works fairly well in my experience. And when I say constant, I mean constant; the moment I see blood I use it lest the blood begin to multiply and contaminate more dwarves' clothing.
- Ownership is completely busted at the moment. Clothes that a dwarf arrives with are owned by the dwarf and no other dwarf may touch or move them, but once they become threadbare the dwarf will discard them on the floor -- yet the discarded raiments are still considered 'owned', so they cannot be moved. For the most part this is harmless although annoying, but occasionally one drops his threadbare clothes on a tile with a door in it that needs to be forbidden during sieges, acting as the proverbial 'monarch butterfly corpse', so to speak. The only workaround for that in particular is to notice it ahead of time, deconstruct the door, then reconstruct it in the same spot -- this will cause the hauler dwarf to move the clothes one tile away so they no longer prop the door open. As for working around the massive litter of clothes you end up with, well, your choices are to ignore it, use (d)-(b)-(h) to hide the clothes (they're still there, just you can't see them), or to apply magma. Another related issue with ownership involves dwarves claiming food and then not eating it. The claimed but uneaten food will then be placed somewhere, often in the dwarves' rooms but for some reason they love to put them on armor stands as well, and then the dwarf forgets about them. The food cannot be moved because it is owned, the owning dwarf won't eat the food, and eventually it rots away, producing miasma if outside. It is annoying, to say the least.
- Nobles are also very buggy at the moment. The appointment of a baron and his subsequent promotion to count and duke are very difficult, although possible, to achieve -- a workaround is possible, but you have to know what it is. Additionally many of the noble positions simply do not appear any more; of key note is the dungeon master, who is completely MIA. Inheritance of hereditary positions (Baron/Count/Duke and Monarch) is either uncertain or outright broken. Addtionally, if you do actually become the mountainhome and get the monarch to arrive, diplomats and liasons simply disappear; no more trade agreements can be made and no more meetings ever occur. You can't even tell the elves off when they ask you to stop cutting down trees, because they never ask. Collectively these issues add up to make the nobles system very unreliable and ultimately broken. It isn't a core, necessary feature of the game so it can be ignored, but it's still annoying. Also, for the DM, the workaround is to replace all [PET_EXOTIC] tags with just [PET]. Here is a mod that does just that, although you have to gen a new world for it to work:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59411.0- Beds. Dwarves will sleep anywhere. Even in the hospital. This leads to nonstop "slept without a proper room recently" thoughts. Tables work similarly, although less severe. Any table in the fort could be used, including the operating tables in the hospital. In my fort this lead to so many "complained about a lack of chairs" thoughts that I just said screw it and put chairs next to all of the operating tables. If they want to eat there, I say let them. I hope they get an infection and die. Or not, because infections (probably) don't work anyway.
There are many, many more bugs than this. These are just the major ones. No one bug renders the game unplayable, thankfully, but there are more bugs in this game than there are in my city. It's just a matter of how severe, and whether or not you can deal with them.
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Topic: 0.31.12, reasonably bug free? (Read 3646 times)