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[Anathema]

I saw some precious stones along the bed of the brook.... learned the hard way that if the water is DIAGONAL from your hallway, it is NOT separated from it.

However water does flow more slowly through a diagonal opening, and it depressurizes (i.e. won't fill the destination to a higher z level than the diagonal opening itself). You would've been in much worse shape if you'd mined a rock directly adjacent to the water.

Several masterpieces have been produced, though of what I can never tell since you can't zoom to the item or even the act.

If you're curious, you can note the name of the dwarf from the masterpiece announcement, look him up in the units list (u) and see what he's up to. Masterpieces aren't really such a big deal though, it's just the highest out of the 'normal' quality possibilities (not including moods), when your dwarves get to 'legendary' skill you'll get spammed with masterpiece announcements quite frequently.

Another guy went into a fey mood and took over a glass furnace. He demanded raw green glass and cut stones. I had tons of the latter, and only one sand.... so I managed to find some sand tiles and designate them for collection. I checked on him later  using [v] and it no longer said he was "screaming" for ingredients. However, he still went insane and then became melancholy. I'm watching him stagger down the hall to the mess, and getting ready to sick my inept squad on him if necessary. Not sure what went wrong there.

You want to 'q' the workshop he's claimed. There it'll either say what he's asking for, or if he's collected everything he needs, it'll say he's working. When they go crazy they either get violent and try to kill folks, or just melancholy and kill themselves by thirst/starving, you were lucky (relatively speaking).

Dwarven caravan here. If only they had some more picks.... oh well. Guess I'll buy up cloth and leather then.

It should be noted that they will bring exactly what you tell the Liaison you want in the meeting, so it's crucial to have that meeting and choose carefully; the easiest way to make sure the meeting actually happens is to turn off all labors for your expedition leader. You could then ask for picks (i.e. set them to a high demand), or better yet ask for metal bars instead and make your own picks. Don't ask for raw stones/ores though, they're quite heavy, leaving less weight for the caravan to bring other things.

[Manic Typist]

Thank you Anathama, that was very helpful. Perhaps I'll see if I can reclaim that section by mining down a Z level and putting a hole underneath the first tile where the breach occurred?

Anyone want to offer me tips on animals? I've been trying to get some war and hunting animals trained.... but no luck. I have my kennels inside my pasture. I had a dog that said "ready to be trained." I give the train order at the kennel.... and it says it can't. I check later, and that dog is now someone's pet. I thought I assigned pets? I have a bunch of frogs in cages. Good for stew during the winter (Maybe?) but I can't figure out how to interact with the various small critters in the animal cages.

I'm definitely getting my feet under me and I feel like I have the basics....mostly down. Mostly. I really need to figure out 1) military, 2) increasing food production (i.e. better farming and controlled breeding so that I can have my livestock indoors when trouble shows up..... so far I haven't had anything more threatening than a few cabarayas), and getting my industry moving smoothly (i.e. product 1 is made so that it can be used as a reagent in process 2 which in turn.....etc).

Definitely going to buy some metal now that I have some charcoal made and see if I can fire a few things. This should be fun!

[Anathema]

Perhaps I'll see if I can reclaim that section by mining down a Z level and putting a hole underneath the first tile where the breach occurred?

You could do that, mine out a large drainage area, then build a ramp/stairway up into the flooded area just under the original breach. Then your flooded tunnels will empty out into the drainage area - problem is, the brook will drain there too, quickly filling up your drainage area and then re-flooding the tunnels. So you would need to quickly get masons into those freshly-drained tunnels and build walls blocking off the original breach/new hole, and make sure your drainage area is big enough to buy you enough time to do that.

[Darkmere]

The river will still fill that diagonal tile, so all that breaching under it would do is flood wherever it drained to. If your river freezes in winter, you could pump out the extra water and seal it then, otherwise it's an aquaduct permanently (barring cave-in plugs or obsidian plugs, but those are beyond the scope of the question).

The dog could have been a migrant's pet when they showed up, it happens sometimes.

What you need for tameable animals is, from the Z -> animals list, a stray (animal) listed as unavailable. They cannot be in cages or restraints. When you queue the train war animal (or hunting animal) task, the animal training dwarf should go find a stray and take it to the kennel for some training, and the critter emerges as a stray war animal, unavailable. The stray will follow the dwarf that trained it until you assign war animal through the [ v ] iew menu on a dwarf. Good choices for war animals are soldiers (esp ranged), woodcutters, or miners.

The on the z -> animals screen, you can highlight a stray and press enter to flag it as available, which frees it for adoption by a dwarf as a domestic pet. This is handy if you have, say, a breeding pair of critters that you don't want to accidentally butcher.

The exception to the pet rule is cats, they refuse to be assigned to anyone and will eventually adopt a dwarf on their own, making them immune to butchering. Get 'em while they're young, catsplosions are a terrible fortress disease, ruining FPS.

Speaking of, animal population control is usually done by a butcher. The z -> animals screen lists critters by age, so the kittens are at the bottom. Alternatively, you can [ v ] iew individual creatures and manually flag them as ready for slaughter. Butchering, fat rendering, and hide tanning jobs should be created automatically, if you have a butcher's shop, kitchen, and tanner's shop built and dwarfs with the associated labors enabled. Make sure there's a refuse stockpile for the spare bits like connective tissue and feathers etc., and a leather stockpile for the tanned hides.

Frogs and the like are considered vermin, and aren't big enough to be used for cooking or butchery. If you have a dwarf who likes that animal, moving the cage to their room or office would provide happy thoughts, otherwise you can link the cage to a lever and let the animal out, or put the cage somewhere public and stuff a bunch more animals in it for a zoo display.

Industry flow and efficiency is largely managed by specific stockpiles. These can get fairly complicated and are time-intensive to reorganize, so a bit of planning goes a long way in the early years. Continuing the example above for a meat industry/food...

I try to keep my food and booze production near the dining hall for efficiency's sake. Stills have a food stockpile set to only accept brewable material, to minimize travel time between barrels produced. Butcher's shops require a nearby refuse stockpile for extra chunks, and also to dump rotten bodies that weren't dealt with fast enough. (tip: miasma doesn't spread diagonally, but dwarves can walk diagonally, so leave a pillar in the front of your refuse pile so miasma doesn't leak out and make everyone unhappy) Once an animal is butchered, it yields a pile of prepared organs, meat, raw hides and fat. All of these except the hides are processed in a kitchen into prepared meals, and tallow, so a stockpile near the kitchens that accepts only organs and meat and whatever plants products you'd like to cook (quarry bush leaves, dwarven sugar, etc) helps out there. Also, the kitchen should have a nearby output stockpile that's close to the dining hall that only accepts prepared food. The raw hides should get taken to a nearby tannery, with adjacent leather stockpile for the output, that feeds a leatherworker's shop.

That sounds like a lot, and it is, the food industry's very robust. However, you don't have to fit all of that on the same Z-level, I usually use 3 or 4 floors for my food industry, with raw materials in the middle and outflow near the top and bottom.

Military is a complex and robust system. I'd get lost if I tried to retell all of it off the top of my head, but I do need to set one up in my new fort as soon as migrants come, so I'll do a mini-walkthrough of it later on when I have the game open to reference.

[Starver]

Oh, this is annoying. I keep getting announcements that "so and so" has canceled "collect sand" due to a need for a bag or somesuch. Except I've checked every workshop I can find/think of, and the standing orders, work orders, etc. Nothing I see indicates that people are being ordered to collect sand; and if you have canceled it why do I keep getting TOLD about it??

Don't know if you've sorted this one yet, but...  If you've accidentally added any number of "Collect Sand" jobs to the Job Manager, it'll pile them in the workshop job queues.  At some point a dwarf will try to accomplish this, find that they can't (perhaps after using some free bags, but definitely upon finding there are no more available), alert the problem and right then the jobs are probably cancelled from the workshop queues, so you won't find them.  But they're still unaccomplished and sitting in the Job Manager list, so shortly they'll be added again, lure another dwarf (or the same one, either way) to try to accomplish the task once more.  But by this time you've unpaused and aren't looking around any more, probably.

That's a guess.  Sometimes I accidentally set it to Job Manage a set of Iron Doors instead of Rock Doors, or similar, and find that once I've used up my sparse iron (should it be!) it'll do something similar.  But once you've actually gotten enough bags to deal with the recurring problem the Job Manager job will evaporate away as well, so leaves no sign of what went wrong once it stops pestering you.  Similarly, the number of times I've found I've gotten iron doors to place, that I never expected.

Would have blocked it off sooner (water was slowly coming down the hall, yet it was surprisingly intense to watch it go and hope the dwarf got there with a door in time!) but all of a sudden some tiles not connected to it and further ahead began to flood. Caught me off guard.

If there were rocks sitting in the corridor, they could well be n/7ths deep in water but it wouldn't show (either by the ~ and double-~ symbols under default setting or the blue 1..7 digits under the other way you can have water displayed).  But as soon as the water reaches a bit in your tunnel with nothing on the floor, it would show up.  Can be deceptive, that.  Examining the actual tiles (with 'k', or equivalent) should have shown you the water depth for any given instant of time.  And, yes, flowing liquids are kinda hypnotic...

(Or frustrating when you're trying to will them to reach further down an aqua(/magma)duct, or fill higher once they have reached the end with at least 2/7ths and are no longer prone to evaporation.  And the number of times I've tried to wait until a 'bubble' of 6/7ths magma has exited the end of the magmaduct through its drunkard's-walk progression back and forth along it, and then try to quickly get a dwarf to lever the floodgate closed before the random oscillations in the magma sea itself has re-inserted it, or even several others, into the narrow opening... Well, it's a purely aesthetic thing to do, but not funny when trying to arrange that, on a magmaduct that hits the top level of magma.)

[Manic Typist]

The river will still fill that diagonal tile, so all that breaching under it would do is flood wherever it drained to. If your river freezes in winter, you could pump out the extra water and seal it then, otherwise it's an aquaduct permanently (barring cave-in plugs or obsidian plugs, but those are beyond the scope of the question).

The brook does freeze in winter. So perhaps I'll reclaim these tunnels after all, but I might leave that until NEXT winter instead of now. Pretty busy carving out a tomb for the soon to be suicidal failed glassmaker. I also need to figure out walls before I do something like that...

Frogs and the like are considered vermin, and aren't big enough to be used for cooking or butchery. If you have a dwarf who likes that animal, moving the cage to their room or office would provide happy thoughts, otherwise you can link the cage to a lever and let the animal out, or put the cage somewhere public and stuff a bunch more animals in it for a zoo display.

...I have ten cages of rats and frogs. I guess I'll either zoo them, release them for the cages (once I actually get to the point where I'm building levers...)..... or perhaps build an emergency food cache deep down, and I can release them if my dwarves start to starve so they have vermin inside the fort that they can hunt. Vaguely amusing.

Also, the kitchen should have a nearby output stockpile that's close to the dining hall that only accepts prepared food.

How do I do this? I assume that I forbid everything and then hit [ u ] to light up the "Prepared food" option, which doesn't highlight "prepared toad eye" for instance but just accepts.... prepared meals? That aren't otherwise listed?

Thanks. I'm going to definitely try to institute these reforms once I have carved out the appropriate spaces. Fortunately I've already been PRETTY good about building certain things together (my kitchen is right below my butcher, and next to the dinning hall for instance).


Starver- I've since resolved it but I believe you hit the nail exactly on the dwarf. Good troubleshooting.


Edit: fixing the underlined texts (should have thought of that), and a thought:

If I end up having a dwarf in a fey mood, or any dwarf for that matter, DEMANDING something that I just do NOT have.... could I preemptively build a wall around him to contain the potential bloodbath?

[Naina]

Prepared food (as in kitchen-cooked meals) are listed under the food stockpile as u.  Waaay down at the bottom, not actually in the lists. Sand bags are listed the same way under furniture stockpile, of all things.

[Darkmere]

Phew, alright, I'll try and make this my last infodump post.

Walls are easy: [ b ] uild - [ C ] onstruction - [ w ] all, then select material. lots of options here, just keep in mind you can't build another construction on a constructed floor (but walls count as floors on Z +1, so you can stack them). If a dwarf is adamant about standing on the wrong side and sealing himself in during construction, you can order walls to be constructed in all the "bad" spots, and suspend construction of those with query. That forces the dwarf to stand in a spot where nothing is slated to be built.

Naina speaks wisdom, kitchen prepared meals which fall under the "prepared meals) u-option are listed as X roast/pie/biscuit/ etc. and are worth more (and more happiness) for dwarves. Prepared (organ) means the butchery has chopped it up well and it's ready to be eaten that way, but those prepared parts can still go into roasts and such, too.

Walling in moody dwarfs works fine. In fact, it's common to build each workshop in its own room and just lock the door (query, set to forbidden) when someone starts begging for turtle shells. They'll starve to death and you can bury them at your leisure later.

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Military_quickstart

puts it better than I ever could.

[Manic Typist]

*Sigh*

I nearly missed a trade due to swapping out traders.... and my original trader wanting to run off and manage orders instead of barter. New guy, it turns out, couldn't even see values for the goods being considered.

In the process of swapping back, I overzealously removed the expedition leader from his role of everything BUT broker (so, he was no longer expedition leader) so that I could catch the merchants before they left (they were packing up).

This is probably why the diplomat who had been stalking my leader in his bedroom (while he slept!) left unhappy/offended. Because there was, for a brief second, no leader, therefore no one for him to talk to?

[Anathema]

The liaison leaves unhappy whenever you change expedition leader while he's there. Really there's no need to change brokers or leaders around, just pick one guy for both and when trading time comes, turn off all his labors and set the depot to trader requested (r). Then you should have no problem getting him to trade at the depot, and the moment you're done trading and set the depot back to "no trader requested" (r again) he'll start liaising with the liaison. Don't turn his labors back on again until the meeting is complete - it takes several steps, when he finally says something about "our fortunes rise and fall together", you're done and the leader can go back to work.

[Manic Typist]

So, I've begun instituting many of these efficiency reforms. Hopefully I'm doing well.

All of a sudden, some guy I've never heard of is mandating the creation of certain things. What? Apparently I have a mayor now? Why didn't anyone tell me? Sheesh, was there even an election?

[Darkmere]

Yeah, expedition leader --> mayor happens at a very low pop/wealth. The others you'll get notified by the liaison. Welcome to nobles, and a whole universe of "accident" possibilities.

[knaveofstaves]

There used to be announcements of elections, I've also noticed that they no longer happen. I wonder if there's a setting in announcements.txt...

hrm, I don't see anything, but I could be missing it...

[nanomage]

So, I've begun instituting many of these efficiency reforms. Hopefully I'm doing well.

All of a sudden, some guy I've never heard of is mandating the creation of certain things. What? Apparently I have a mayor now? Why didn't anyone tell me? Sheesh, was there even an election?

in soviet fortress, mayor elects YOU!

[Manic Typist]

What's annoying is that the mayor is some 4th wave nobody I've never heard of, not my expedition leader.

The melancholy guy died of thirst in the dinning hall, so I hastily buried him. First casualty and I'm at... 53 dwarves remaining.

Got my first case of someone being "possessed."

Idiot dwarf trapped himself next to a frozen river by building the wall right behind him... I fortunately found him before spring. Now if I can get someone to reconstruct that wall before spring....