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[Vodrilus]

For some reason high boots are now foreign. Beats me, why.

[eggrock]

After surfing comp.lang.perl.misc for a few years, I'm leery of asking questions at all without exhausing every other resource--such a fun community they have.   

This forum is so cohesive, tolerant and on topic--yet without heavy handed moderation--that it's almost scary. I keep expecting to find myself locked in a room with a very warm floodgate and a few piles of wood the only decor. And a kitten. Always a kitten. *shudder*

This is a nice fun place and I don't (yet) consider any of those questions stupid. DF is such a broad and deep topic that it's easy to miss what others may consider a triviality.

My stupid unasked question for negative XP is, how are cobblestones made? One of my homepages is the DF wiki and I can find out easily but it's not important for now. I haven't answered anyone's questions.

1000 xp for all the good folks here!

[Rexfelum]

A fairly common problem I see is people saying that their creature always shows up as "Nothing" and they can't figure out why. Of course it's just because they never defied a caste name, so it's a very easy problem to solve.

And how much Exp do you get from answering it??!

"What do I do with all these socks lying around my fortress?"  100 Exp

Sell them.

I wasn't clear: I meant socks and such that are owned by dwarves and that they are refusing to pick up.  The solution, according to most people, is magma.

Dwarf fortress has a learning cliff that you fall off of as apposed to climb up, on the way down you tend to smack into things you needed to know

Oh, just stop the quote there.  I like that one.  (WHACK!  "Ooh, glad I know where that blunt object is!")

I probably asked 50% of those.....and have probably since answered about 50% too....am i back at 0 Exp?

Depends on how far you go with the metaphor.  In most RPG's, you get experience primarily through killing monsters.  If "killing monster" equates to "dealing with someone's question," then asking a question just gives another person the opportunity to kill a monster.  Now, who "gives out" the monsters?  Well . . . the DM (or GM, etc.).  Does the DM lose experience from losing monsters?  Not really.

Therefore, I propose that you are actually in positive Exp.

"I use my prisonners to train my military in an arena".

Yes, this is exactly what I don't like.  If someone asked a more fundamental question than this, answering on such a global scale (complete with vocab terms like "arena") doesn't help.  Thankfully, people are often more specific.

And for dropping the creatures in a pit without them escaping, I finally found a post saying that the solution is to build the animal stockpile just next to the pit so that the creature doesn't have time to escape.

Careful: the stockpile helps, sure, but installing the cage itself next to the pit gives the creature the minimum time.  Or, well, installing the cage inside the pit gives zero time.

"Why can't I make high boots?"  50 Exp

About that..........could someone tell me why I am unable to make High Boots? Please?

During world generation, your civilization gains access to several items and technologies.  From one game to the next, or one civilization to the next inside the same world, "the dwarves" may be able to make high boots, and/or sell turtles on embark, and/or tons of other things.  Why are high boots special?  And why don't things like pikes show up, despite pikedwarves immigrating to your fortress?  I don't know.

--Rexfelum

Edited P.S.: Or, well, this thread seems to mention an underground-civilization-related bug as eliminating high boots.  Hmm.  Still doesn't explain where those pikedwarves learned the ways of the pike.

[Shoku]

Only 850. I don't go to a lot of threads where I expect somebody answered the question right away.

We're essentially willing to answer questions instead of turning people away like you would see with most other things because we can rule out the otherwise high probability that the person asking hasn't tried. Just trying to play this after you have seen the graphics shows that you're willing to look past the surface details. Even having enough understanding of the menus in order to dig around and encounter most problems indicates a person having not just spend more than five seconds looking at something but probably taking more than five minutes.
There is very little "ugh, this is so obvious right in the manual" in much the same way that most of us would not tell someone that the dictionary is a good place to go to find out the first letter of a word.

We know that we're not just enabling people to be lazy.

[Rexfelum]

Only 850. I don't go to a lot of threads where I expect somebody answered the question right away.

850?  Is that (gasp) total questions answered, or 850 using my silly experience points list?

If the latter, then hurry!  Just 150 Exp more and you can trade them in for a new health box!

--Rexfelum

[Nobak]

And don't forget that everytime you answer a question for one noob, there's other noobs lurking and learning.


I got the answer to many of my questions through the wiki, and a few through the search tool, but many others were through casually reading threads before I ran into the situation.

[Astramancer]

that the dictionary is a good place to go to find out the first letter of a word.

Slightly off topic, but... THIS THIS THIS!  It always bugged me as a kid when I asked my parents how to spell a word and they told me to go look it up in a dictionary.  I was always like: But  the dictionary is arranged alphabetically and I won't know where to look if I can't spell it!

/rant

You should probably include a few 'helpful hints' that are given out time and time again because people don't even know to ask (and not just new people, either).

For example: d-b-d aka mass dump.  You know, so you don't have to designate each stone for dumping by hand, or have to go into the zstocks menu and designate all stones of a certain type to be dumped?  Yeah,  that d-b-d.

Also: Reserved barrels.  In the stocks menu, you can reserve barrels so that they will be kept empty instead of being used for general storage.  This way it's very, very difficult to run out of barrel for emergency booze production.

[gtmattz]

For some reason high boots are now foreign. Beats me, why.

It is completely dependent on your civilization during worldgen, sometimes dwarven civs do not get high boots, sometimes they do.

[Halnoth]

The reason people ask so many questions (myself included) is that the wiki often has wrong, misleading, or too much information (meaning they answer rediculously complex questions but do nothing for the simple stuff) and everyone here remembers and is probably still suffering from this lack of information.

I personally try to find the information first, however since this game is so complex often you are stuck looking through countless threads for a simple answer and only getting complex, meaningless (to you), and convoluted answers.

For example, I am creating a reproduction of a fantasy castle and the walls are going to be 8 z levels high. Since I will be building this sucker with invasions on I wanted to know if such a wall would be functional. I could not for the life of me find a conclusive equation that represents how far a creature can shoot. However, since I have been asking quite alot of questions lately I thought I should test this one. What I found was up to 8 z levels (the max you can test in arena to my knowledge) the archers could still fire out 20 tiles horizontally on the lowest level. Essentially they can shoot anything on the gorund floor 20 tiles away from the top of the tower. This goes against what I had read here and on the wiki which states there is a penalty, which there is not.

This type of problem is frequent and can only be made worse if you are new and can't even grasp the fundamentals. Even the most experienced DF player will come to a spot where they must either ask a question or invest in !!SCIENCE!!

[Dreggon]

Probably "Why don't my dwarves collect stuff from outside when I try to dump it?"

It's in the O > Refuse menu.

[WrathNail]

Why do we do it? A kind of teacher mentality I guess. If you succeed at something, you want to pass on that knowledge to as many people as you can.

I've yet to see a STFU NOOB around here, so the concentration of people with the afore mentioned mindset must be unusually high on these forums.

[Halnoth]

Why do we do it? A kind of teacher mentality I guess. If you succeed at something, you want to pass on that knowledge to as many people as you can.

I've yet to see a STFU NOOB around here, so the concentration of people with the afore mentioned mindset must be unusually high on these forums.

I think you sort of have to have that mindset to want to even try to pierce the complexity that is DF.

[Lytha]

I've explained how to farm in DF 31.x a couple of times, o-r-o another couple of times, and some other repetitions of the same issue.

I do it because I take breaks from the forum often, so it doesn't get tedious. Also, I like these questions. It's a bit like playing a doctor: "I've symtom X, Y and Z and I am feeling so ill" - "You have illness A. Take this, and it'll be all good." Especially in cases like o-r-o.

[Rastaan]

I usually don't bother answering questions, because the guy who posted a minute ago has done it better already.

[Tsarwash]

This forum is excellent. A few weeks ago I asked how to find out how to strip prisoners of their armour and weapons when they are caged. The wiki does not tell you how to do this, and it is not at all obvious. The question was answered in two minutes. I am quite happy answering questions and asking them. It's easy to forget things.

I was wondering if it might be a good idea to create a huge text document with most of the FAQs on. Then people can use the search function to look for keywords, which shall direct them towards the correct question and answer. As it stands, it can be difficult to find answers on both the Wiki and the forum. My question above would be a good example , as otherwise people are going to continue to ask the same question.