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[Reelyanoob]

A door makes a good emergency floodgate, just in case the wall doesn't get built in time.

[Manic Typist]

Yeah, I built a door before I even started that mining project.

As an aside, I'm amused and grateful that the suicidal dwarf only had passing acquitances in the fort. Not much risk of grief infecting the populace, and it's thematically appropriate. Everyone just watched him waste away at that table.... parties going on right around him.

Question:

A stray horse foal just out of nowhere starved to death. No big deal. Might have been someone's pet? No screen that I see indicates that. Its body gets take to a specially designated refuse stockpile right next to my butcher shop. I set an order at the butcher shop to "butcher a dead animal" but the order gets canceled every time due to the lack of a nearby unrotten corpse. What? It JUST died, it's winter, and it's right there!!!

[ledgekindred]

If the dead animal is someone's pet, it won't be butchered.  I also seem to recall that animals that die of starvation also won't be butchered, but I might be wrong about that.

To keep grazing animals alive now, you need to assign them a pasture with the "i" zones command.  Then assign animals to that pasture and they will graze.  You can even assign pets to the pasture, which is good for keeping all your animals in one place.  Note that if they are heavy grazers they will eat all your turf and have to be moved to a new pasture or risk starving again.

[Reelyanoob]

The tissues don't get properly "processed" with the right computer-ish tokens unless they are actually "butchered" at the workshop. Really annoying but not much you can do. It works different for wild animals (e.g. the auto-butchery design which drops breeding wild animals down a pit)

[b_boy_212]

I actually heard about this game repeatedly on a certain website

YOU BASTARD DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY LIVES YOU HAVE DESTROYED!!!!!! How could you do such a thing?

[Manic Typist]

Catastrophe!

I had my first birth, all well and good.

I decide to build an indoor farm that has been exposed to light so that I could grow all kinds of crops within the security of my fortress. So, I decide to give "channeling" a try and I begin channeling a large block of land out...over a prepared, empty room that I had dug out to be my future farm/grazing area.

I encountered my first collapse. The first one wasn't so bad, a dwarf knocked unconscious. Keep working, I said! The second one knocked another out....and killed my expedition leader.

Followed by another child birth.


How should I have done this? Should I have just "channeled" without digging the room out first?  I did a 1 tile experiment to confirm that it would work and didn't have a problem.... obviously this was insufficient.

[Number4]

I'd guess you channeled your supports away....

Imagine this:
Surface:               
XXXXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
and the 2nd lvl underground is your farm, completly dug out. Now your dwarf starts channeling:
CCCCC
CXXXC
CCCCC
a piece of surface is hanging in the air! Problem is: In DF, surface does not hang in the air. It crashes down, violently. First dig your channels, and only then dig out lvl 2. Otherwise, you'll get cave-ins (dwarf speak for: a piece of earth is crashing down!).

[Anathema]

How should I have done this? Should I have just "channeled" without digging the room out first?  I did a 1 tile experiment to confirm that it would work and didn't have a problem.... obviously this was insufficient.

Well, there are several ways to do this. You've guessed the easy/safe way: don't dig out the room first, instead channel over solid ground, and the solid ground one z-level below your channel command will become a new room full of ramps going up (which you can remove later). You can also approach it from the opposite direction and get the same effect; designate your future room to be a square of up ramps, which will clear the roof out from above them.

It is still possible to get cave-ins using the above methods, but only when something blocks the roof above your room (say, a tree), then that roof tile can't be removed and will collapse when you channel out everything connecting to it. Same problem if there's a workshop or a stockpile or something in the way on the surface, the floor under it won't get removed, so you have an isolated cave-in prone floor in the midst of your channeling. Just be sure to remove any such obstacles before channeling (and be aware new trees can grow while you're channeling, very annoying). Shrubs are ok, as are young trees (the ones that can't be chopped yet), they just get destroyed by the channeling.

You did it the hard way, which is much more cave-in prone; if you absolutely must channel over an already open space, designate a hole in the middle, wait for it to be channeled, then expand outward from there by only channeling squares adjacent to your hole. This obviously takes longer since you have to keep re-designating each row rather than doing it all at once.

[Starver]

My favourite way of chanelling out an area above an already dug underground is as follows (for a square 5x5 area... modify as necessary for bigger and rectangular areas).

Code: [Select]


1 Bare   2 Channel  3 Now do    4 Continue  5 Voila!
 Ground  a cross     remainder   to 5x5
                     of 3x3      square
                     square

.......  .......    .......     .......     .......
.......  ._..._.    . ... .     . ___ .     .     .
.......  .._._..    .. _ ..     ._   _.     .     .
.......  ..._...    .._ _..     ._   _.     .     .
.......  .._._..    .. _ ..     ._   _.     .     .
.......  ._..._.    . ... .     . ___ .     .     .
.......  .......    .......     .......     .......

Though probably the easiest way is to just do 'stripes':

Code: [Select]


1 Bare   2 Channel  3 Now the   4 Then the  5 Result!
 Ground  the middle  channels    next set
                     either     
                     side

.......  .......    .......     .......     .......
.......  .......    .......     ._____.     .     .
.......  .......    ._____.     .     .     .     .
.......  ._____.    .     .     .     .     .     .
.......  .......    ._____.     .     .     .     .
.......  .......    .......     ._____.     .     .
.......  .......    .......     .......     .......

You can micromanage the process, or leave it ages between reviewing it.  You can also short-cut the process by setting to channel any tile that is not the final one supporting any other so-far unchannelled tile.  Which means that in the second example you could set a block of 2x5 channels (because the tiles-to-be-dug in the other row of 1x5 are supported by the other side's not-yet-channelled tiles, IYSWIM), and in the first example you'll probably find they end up (with you designating more to be done, as and when it can be) progressively removing the left-hand triangle quicker than the right-hand one, but it's probably easier to see how that happens than for me to explain the process.

Even without a room below the surface to cause complications, I sometimes find it's handier to work in this way with channels at the top.  You can see where there are trees (which would cause problems if trying to "ramp" from below) and you can't even designate a channel on a tree tile (so are also proof from the basic mistake of trying to undermine one).

Plus, if I'm digging a long ditch at the surface (or anywhere else things grow), I'll tend to make a 1xN (or 2xN) designation of channels, then go over the exact same area once or twice more with other designations, once (certainly) to assign Tree-felling duties to any trees that happen to be there, the second perhaps to designate Plant-gathering for any harvestable natural plants.  These override the channelling designation (or, in the case of trees, just apply where the channel does not even get considered...), then your woodcutters and herbalists zoom in there and later on you can re-do the same rectangle over the same area for channelling operations to get your miners to pick out all the tiles that are still unchannelled but at least now do not have any significant plant or tree association.  Again, it's probably easier to see it happen than for me to explain properly.

[Reelyanoob]

Catastrophe!
[...]
How should I have done this? Should I have just "channeled" without digging the room out first?  I did a 1 tile experiment to confirm that it would work and didn't have a problem.... obviously this was insufficient.

Yeah you got it right, dig half a room normally, and channel the other half to create a combined farm.

If retrofitting above a dug out room, only channel single tile strips at a time, then nothing ever "breaks off"

[Manic Typist]

*Sigh, smacks head*

Another wave of migrants. 22 of them. I had a population of 54ish. What am I going to DO with all these people??

Also- they seem to have "covered" the hole over my hidden farm with wall segments and not floor pieces. What??? I can't even tell for sure if it's closed now. It just says "Wall" and "Open space."

[knaveofstaves]

So if you're on Lazy Newb you've got Runesmith, right?

Get the script in my sig, export your fort to XML, sort by Close combat dwarf, and throw all the names at the top into your military.

[Fredd]

Curse yourself for building walls, instead of doors. If the space says indoors/light its okay

[Fredd]

Good use for extra migrants is builder, or military. Assign builders mason job, just do not assign them a masons shop, unless you want them to produce blocks for the new flooring jobs they will be assigned too. Engraving a good job also for migrants. Increases fort wealth

[FrisianDude]

Since you're new, I'd like to remind you that you will become more sociopathic as you play. You should know this from reading tv-tropes tho...

TVtropes is more sociopathic than Dorftress. Tv-tropes just keeps producing more and more and more and more semi-interesting links to click aaaaaaaaah so many tabs. D: It's even worse than Cracked in that regard.

Luckily I came here from tvtropes, as most of the resident dwarven population I'd guess.

I'm here via an 'anyone try Dwarf Fortress' thread on the Taleworlds forum.