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Author Topic: Dwarves preferring water?  (Read 422 times)

Amir Alawi

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Dwarves preferring water?
« on: December 15, 2006, 01:03:00 pm »

My dwarves are very rarely drinking alcohol.  Instead they are preferring to drink water from the rivers.  Is this normal?  It seems to me that a dwarf shouldn't be a real dwarf if he isn't stewing in alcohol and his own vomit/urine.

Only two of my dwarves have a specific preference for alcohol (both prefer wine) and it seems that the rest of the dwarves without a preference just want water.

[ December 15, 2006: Message edited by: Amir Alawi ]

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CogDissident

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Re: Dwarves preferring water?
« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2006, 02:00:00 pm »

Are you sure you have enough alcohol? You might want to build a well instead of letting them drink from the river, it gives them unhappy thoughts if they're stuck drinking from the river instead of a well.
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OldMiner

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Re: Dwarves preferring water?
« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2006, 08:26:00 pm »

quote:
Originally posted by Amir Alawi:
<STRONG>My dwarves are very rarely drinking alcohol.  Instead they are preferring to drink water from the rivers.</STRONG>

I have not seen this problem, but there is an unfortunate issue with alcohol in that you need essentially a barrel per every two dwarves to be fairly certain they'll drink.  When a dwarf wants to drink, he checks for a barrel of alcohol he can reach.  If he finds one, he flags it for his drinking, and no one else can do anything with that barrel until he finishes drinking it.  Similarly, if that barrel is tasked for being dragged to a stockpile, it can't be flagged for drinking at the time.

This isn't a question of how much alcohol you have, because if you're unlucky, a dwarf might grab a stack of 5 helmet spawn and brew them all at once, making a whole bunch of alcohol, but in a single barrel that will take forever to empty.  There is no way to request drink be evenly distributed between barrels nor to have a brewer add new drink to an existing barrel.

What's worse is that sometimes I've found dwarves randomly hauling around barrels of ale when they are doing other things like hunting.  I'm guessing this was because he didn't have  a waterskin available to keep water in or some such.  Perhaps it was a bug...  Dwarves do weird things sometimes, and I don't think anything of it.

Of course, it'd be neat if dwarves would actually fill their waterskins with dwarven vodka...  But perhaps that has to wait for dwarven juniper berries.  As it is, hunters just plain get surly after a while from sleeping in the dirt, drinking plain water (yech!) from the river or waterskin, and never admiring the local statue garden.

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Frugal

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Re: Dwarves preferring water?
« Reply #3 on: December 16, 2006, 06:59:00 pm »

Whenever I see a Hunter start to get Unhappy or tantrum, I disable their Hunting job so that they spend some time inside.  After they get happy again I send them back out.

I think once I finally move all my stuff over to the magma river, though, I'm gonna disable Hunting for everyone, and just use unassigned hunting dogs.  Sure, they'll die fairly often but since they aren't pets nobody will care.

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