Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jasonwill2]

hey guys i like playing DF. Recently I  broke my collar bone and since I have no job and DF is all i can really play with mostly one hand, it is what most of my time for the next 6 weeks will consist of. I got a fairly good grip on the game, but often after 3-4 years of a fortress at a quarter million wealth it would get hard by an invasion or suffer some managment disaster inside and slowly wither and I would just forget it because it was too much to fix it.

i have a vid of my fortress then some questions. in raw wealth its my richest ever, ive reclaimed it after a bad incident and have had it this time for about 5ish years. i did suffer that 3/4 year mark where it usually crumbles, and regained my footing this time. this fortress and the way ive run it has been very good and it seems to be able to bounce back unlike many of my other fortresses. ive had slightly bigger fortresses before, but this is my best so far in how well it runs and esp how well equiped and trained my milita is (many fortresses only had copper equipment for example and not that well trained). I have this on a custom world and I suspect my higher than normal embark points is part of why; I could take better gear to start. Anyway, here is a vid of my fortress so that you guys can best help me. i do a 2x2 size to cut down lag; a year in the game used to take 6 hours on teh default size of a fort before i put it down to the smallest

the first 3 mins is enough to see everything, view in fullscreen to be able to see good =p trust me its only slightly fuzzy in full screen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqjKW-RhyfI

any advice or help? I recently lost over half my Militia in a bad attack and had to downsize from 3 squads to two. I also lost my axelord and spearlord, but now i have a swordlord. My hospitals are the most effective ever too.

you might of seen where some cave ins happened when i messed up making my moat, and i went overkill with floor patching it up in an old storage space. my two way bridge system isnt working well i tried to get it so that there was one master stwitch and two independent ones so that i could set both to close/open at the same time from the master one or alternate for a airlock style safety feature for when my Militia went out to fight an invasion so that no bad guys got in when i sent my dudes out. my militia is well equiped with mostly iron armor, if not a piece of bronze here or there; I should have iron for all.

also i cant get my dwarves to grow anythign really good, or figure out how to get them to feed/water prisioners or animals that arnt pets. one criminal died of thirst so i put water in the prison. also i cant figure out how to brew.

normally getting food is a problem, so i just buy massive amounts when carvans come (esp from home) but last fall they didnt come because the time before i pissed them off with too many bad offers apparently, but we made by with no starvations. also how do I get my dwarves to cook/eat seeds? i set 3 or so kitchens up incase it was needed that they were cooked as meals to be sure, but idk.

can anyone help me? oh and also enemy corpses and somtimes loot isnt touched at all even when i unforbid it or mark it for refuse. why is this?

[Tiruin]

Some tips as for some reason, the video is not loading for me (must be my connection).

In digging, miners prioritize direction over survival. West>East>South>North>SW>SE>NW>NE, cave-ins will happen if you have uneven terrain and you aren't watching. They also happen if you turn a long pillar of dirt into a ramp (miner hits bottom part) instead of channeling it from above.

To avoid criminals, make your dwarves happy. This involves a communal dining hall, it will rise to legendary status if enough chairs/tables are put into it (like a dozen maybe?). A starting dormitory would suffice if you lack bedspace. A walled off perimeter with a single bridge opening outwards will keep any invader out, if the lever is pulled at the right time. Or wall off your fort for a time, begin training soldiers in groups of 2 or 3 for maximum sparring as you design your fortress without invaders hitting on you.

On food and farming (underground is easier), a 4x4 plot would serve well for about 30 dwarves with cooked meals to spare for trade. But you could do multiple plots and give certain dwarves full time farming and food hauling jobs, that would be your trade goods as this might end up in a foodsplosion (production>consumation, this is good.)

Since you have epic embark points, try investing in steel armor sets with weapons to match, set two or three of your beginning seven or the migrants as soldiers and give them full military time, this takes care of any invaders in time if you set up a standing barracks early.

For food orders, z > kitchen will show you a screen for edible food, you can then set what should or should not be made into cooked food/brewed. Raw edible food like plump helmet spawn will be automatically eaten unless it was marked as a forbidden item.

For feeding/giving water, that is low priority to dwarves, if you want someone doing that then give them no labor but the default ones in healthcare. It would take time but they will see it done. That, or put a stockpile of food and drink in their jail which fixes itself (I'm assuming you're using chains for justice)

You must set stockpiles to store food, drink and seeds for easier consumption/storage, plus, it makes the place more "clean" and organized. Food Hauling takes care of moving the said items.

On enemy loot, they need stockpiles to be placed in. The bodies of any dead go in the 'refuse' pile or could be Dumped into a Garbage zone, loot as in armor/weapons go in their respective stockpiles too. You may want to give some dwarves purely hauling labors to make it faster as there must be a lot of things to haul.


Also, you may want to make storage space in one of the z-layers for miscellaneous stuff (like cloth and leather for one), size is up to you.


Forgive me if some or most of what I've put down is off-topic, couldn't see what your fort is in trouble with  .

[Diicc Tater]

also i cant figure out how to brew.

normally getting food is a problem, so i just buy massive amounts when carvans come (esp from home) but last fall they didnt come because the time before i pissed them off with too many bad offers apparently, but we made by with no starvations. also how do I get my dwarves to cook/eat seeds? i set 3 or so kitchens up incase it was needed that they were cooked as meals to be sure, but idk.

can anyone help me? oh and also enemy corpses and somtimes loot isnt touched at all even when i unforbid it or mark it for refuse. why is this?

Brewing is pretty easy. Build the stil(l) workshop. Have your craftsdarf make stone pots as they can be used as food and drink containers.
If you set seeds to be cooked however, you will take away from what you need to plant. Brewing will "save" the seeds.
Also, you will notice that when you look at the prepared meals you can find roasts of the drink type.
Make sure you have some dwarf with the Brewing skill active.

Good luck with the collar bone.... be glad you don't have my run-of-the-mill bonesetter dwarf... you'd be an arm poorer.

[jasonwill2]

In digging, miners prioritize direction over survival. West>East>South>North>SW>SE>NW>NE, cave-ins will happen if you have uneven terrain and you aren't watching. They also happen if you turn a long pillar of dirt into a ramp (miner hits bottom part) instead of channeling it from above.

i noticed that in the past and tried to mark it so that they shaved off the sides in rows, but got lazy and gave up. I kind of left part of the pit intact in the first layer down (its two deep to meet where the water is going, soz the video wont load!) but it was mostly dug out to the second layer of depth so I have left it that way. It just more makes me feel stupid now.

A starting dormitory would suffice if you lack bedspace.

have a dorm and am now working on some indivdual rooms with a bed, table, chair and cabinet for each room. some 90 dwarfs right now, after a few attacks where some of my guys were cuaght outside I went down from above 100. its a shame i lost at least two legendary engravers.

Or wall off your fort for a time, begin training soldiers in groups of 2 or 3 for maximum sparring as you design your fortress without invaders hitting on you.

only 2 or 3 new recruits at a time? or squads? As well after the loss of many good men It was painful, But I still have my wrestler that gained a title (in his name) has 9 some kills and recently got a sword lord. Overall I think my squads might improve; I just hope the two new wrestlers and 3 new recruits can be brought up to speed. At .5 mill wealth and 19 out of 80-90 dwarves warriors I do not know if it will be enough; I might have two or three potential warriors around, though I think I layed one off after losing their leg. The two others I think just escaped my notice when migrating. all year around training seems to be good for them.

For food orders, z > kitchen will show you a screen for edible food, you can then set what should or should not be made into cooked food/brewed. Raw edible food like plump helmet spawn will be automatically eaten unless it was marked as a forbidden item.

For feeding/giving water, that is low priority to dwarves, if you want someone doing that then give them no labor but the default ones in healthcare. It would take time but they will see it done. That, or put a stockpile of food and drink in their jail which fixes itself (I'm assuming you're using chains for justice)

did both of those, put a small channel within reach of the chains. I guess then only my two or three dedicated doctors would be feeding o.0 good thing ive only ever had one prisioner

On enemy loot, they need stockpiles to be placed in. The bodies of any dead go in the 'refuse' pile or could be Dumped into a Garbage zone, loot as in armor/weapons go in their respective stockpiles too. You may want to give some dwarves purely hauling labors to make it faster as there must be a lot of things to haul.

Even when they have no job ATM and I have a refuse pile they will not dump the bodies, it's quite annoying. I can't figure it out. Also as such I have food piles.

But is a 'garbage' zone different from a refuse stockpile?

edit: wait, its going to be in the zoning screen i bet... lol so enemy bodies go in garbage zones and not refuse?

Brewing is pretty easy. Build the stil(l) workshop. Have your craftsdarf make stone pots so as they can be used as food and drink containers.
If you set seeds to be eaten and cooked however, you will take away from what you need to plant. Brewing will "save" the seeds.
Also, you will notice that when you look at the prepared meals you can find roasts of the drink type.
Make sure you have some dwarf with the Brewing skill active.

pots? aha! though i thought they would of used all those mugs i made for water. also as well I have THOUSANDS of seeds, like 2,700 some odd seeds as you will see when i went to the 'z' screen.



edit:

Also i tried to set my bridges in an airlock like fashion so that my militia can go out side with no chance of baddies getting in. worked good for one invasion I tried it in.

but I tried to set it up with both bridges having their own switch and then a master switch. With the master one it was made so that depending on how the other two were pulled, it could alternate between the north open, the south closed, vice versa, or both open and closed at the same time.

didnt work, apparently only 1 switch can be set to the one bridge at a time, a bridge cant have two switches but a switch can have two bridges... from what I remember

Good luck with the collar bone.... be glad you don't have my run-of-the-mill bonesetter dwarf... you'd be an arm poorer.

lol the doc told me I need no surgery =D just a sling. if only dwarves were so lucky. my bicycle i was riding was totaled, the part around the front wheel bent almost 90 degrees backwards, bringing the wheel with it. I ran into a ditch off a road on a hill at like 25 MPH I would guess and when I hit the end I flew off the bike like 8 feet and flipped.

I'm glad I'm no dwarf.

[Diicc Tater]

But is a 'garbage' zone different from a refuse stockpile?

Garbage zone, set by the 'i' menu is ..well.. a zone.
Refuse you collect in (p)iles, just as you do with food, furniture and such things.

[jasonwill2]

ah, well that explains the bodies then.

so any tips on my militia in the video? it occurred to me to set their uniform specifically to iron, but training wise im not sure what to do. whats this danger room I keep hearing about? get training weapons and set it on some kind of loop? how do I do that (set it on the loop)? And if I do that do i set it in their barracks or lock them in a room and do it? i fear with my 500,000 wealth that I might not survive the next attack if I want to drive off the attackers so that the caravan can come in, we need to buy that food! also our wood supply so close to the desert is reliant on people coming and selling us logs.

Logs, beer and food is our import while stone crafts is our main export.

[i2amroy]

Also i tried to set my bridges in an airlock like fashion so that my militia can go out side with no chance of baddies getting in. worked good for one invasion I tried it in.

but I tried to set it up with both bridges having their own switch and then a master switch. With the master one it was made so that depending on how the other two were pulled, it could alternate between the north open, the south closed, vice versa, or both open and closed at the same time.

didnt work, apparently only 1 switch can be set to the one bridge at a time, a bridge cant have two switches but a switch can have two bridges... from what I remember

Did you actually set up an alternator for your bridges to toggle like that? Many newcomers to the game don't realize this, but almost all lever components (bridges, doors, floodgates, etc.) do not toggle when a lever is pulled, but instead have a set "on" and "off" state. As such when you pull a lever it sends a "on" command to the bridge and then the bridge raises. Then when the lever is pulled again it sends a "off" signal and the bridge lowers. As such if you have two levers connected to the same bridge then when you pull the first one it sends a "on" signal and the bridge raises. Then when you pull the second lever it sends another "on" command and the bridge does nothing since it is already raised.

There are currently two different ways to get around this. The first and more complicated way is to build an alternator, something that is a little too complicated for me to get in here, but that you could probably find on the wiki somewhere. The other method takes advantage of the fact that bridges have a 100 tick delay before acting in which they won't recognize any further commands given. In the second method simply que two levers pulls each time instead of one and the bridges will toggle. This is because if a bridge is down it will receive the "on" command and then while it is waiting to raise it will receive a "off" command that it will ignore because it is technically still down. In the case of a bridge that is up then it will receive an "on" command since it is still up, but then will immediately receive a "off" command so it will go down. As a result the easiest way to set two bridges to toggle is to simply pull the lever two times immediately after each other each time you want the bridges to switch.

[jasonwill2]

^
|
uh... lots of similar words are confusing me.

edit: did anyone watch the video? or is it unwatchable I believe I put it as unlisted so that only with that link you can view it.

[Garath]

for food, bring some chickens or turkeys. 6 cost each and if you take 4 or so you'll have too many eggs, more than you ever want. Its good as a "solid" piece in cooking and will do as food in the beginning. Make sure that you have a nest behind a door seperately if you want to hatch chicks and to put them into cages immediately. They are pretty good as meat source too, mostly because they hatch in groups of  to 10. At embark, prefer a chicken over food to take, because butchering that chicken gives more food than you could buy for the cost of a chicken (or turkey or other bird, but i prefer chicken: mature faster, plenty of eggs, slightly (a lot of) less meat)

Work on traps, especially serrated discs. my current fort will have 2 entances. a pretty much trapped 3 wide corridor for cart carravans, wont use it for some time. A 1 wide heavily trapped entrance.... it lets caravans through but cuts up goblins. and cyclopses. and minotaurs, and a lot of other things. I only use gates at the start, before i set the traps, actually later i use the gates to stop fisherdwarf from going out. You need quite a few traps, since they're not the fastest to reset. However, if you see they hit a trap and then close the gate at the end, they'll wander back.... through the traps. Only fire creatures may melt your walls/bridges. You'd only need some marksdwarfs in case all the traps get stuck

i did watch the video btw

to retrieve the dwarf in the water, channel a few places around the pool (make sure it doesnt empty out in your tunnels). that will also allow any idiots who jump in while fleeing to get out, possibly

[i2amroy]

uh... lots of similar words are confusing me.

Basically I'm saying that the reason that your master switch bridge idea doesn't work is because bridges don't just toggle when you pull a lever. Instead they are either turned 'on' (raised) or 'off' (down). When you pull a lever it sends either a 'on' or 'off' signal and bridges switch to that signal. So in your case you pull one lever and make the south bridge turn 'on' (raised). Then when you pull the master switch it doesn't tell the bridges to toggle, it instead sends a 'on' signal. At this signal the north bridge (which is still 'off') turns 'on' (raises). Meanwhile the south bridge (which is already 'on') simply stays 'on' (raised), meaning you end up with two raised bridges.

There are a couple of ways to get around this, some more complex then others. The easiest way is that every time you pull the master switch pull it twice instead of once. This will cause the bridges to actually toggle for the reasons described in my first post.

[khearn]

I watched the video, but didn't get a whole lot from it. It's hard to tell what you're trying to show at any given point. Some voice-over narration  like "this is my front gate - I can't get the bridges to do what I want", "This is my food storage", etc. would help a lot.

One thing I did see was a riot of engraved floors that made it hard to tell what was what on one level. You can make all of those engravings look like '+'s by designating "Toggle Engravings" (d-v). It makes it much easier to see things.

[Kon]

also i cant get my dwarves to ... feed/water prisoners ... . one criminal died of thirst so i put water in the prison. ...

There appears to be a bug with feeding and watering prisoners. Mainly because of that, but also because the wrong dwarves were always getting punished, I stopped assigning a Sheriff or Captain of the Guard.

[jasonwill2]

@ two posts up, good to know about the toggling. Sorry about the video I had assumed that showing it would be enough to get teh jist of how it ran, I did go to a couple of screens too in there sorry again.

Work on traps, especially serrated discs. my current fort will have 2 entances. a pretty much trapped 3 wide corridor for cart carravans, wont use it for some time. A 1 wide heavily trapped entrance.... it lets caravans through but cuts up goblins. and cyclopses. and minotaurs, and a lot of other things. I only use gates at the start, before i set the traps, actually later i use the gates to stop fisherdwarf from going out. You need quite a few traps, since they're not the fastest to reset. However, if you see they hit a trap and then close the gate at the end, they'll wander back.... through the traps. Only fire creatures may melt your walls/bridges. You'd only need some marksdwarfs in case all the traps get stuck

hehe... good idea.

=-=-

well guys, we made it through until the food shipment. Some food went bad but when the next year came by all our meat get in without rotting and now I have a ton of food and got a hang on getting some small farms to work at a decent rate, though I dont think I have enough pots for brewing.

I noticed most my militia was using low grade metal so I have set making all full iron sets and almost have 20. Also my wealth is over 800K now. One bad siege came and I had a grouping issue and lost about 13ish or so of 26 men and downgraded again to two militias. I was working on expanding teh moat and making a gate house where the bridge was and moving one bridge up. though the way it was made was diesgned so that wagons could get in, but this made bolts and arrows easy to shoot in down one long line of site =(

but I gathered my 13 uninjured soliders decked out in full iron with breastplates and all that and had them in my building outside the main fort, and let in teh goblins into teh courtyard area.

It was great, I had a hammerlord and 2-3 sword lords backed by really skilled warriors (im not sure if one of the sword lords was injured) and they drove off easily 40 goblins, though I think it may of been 50. The hammerlord and sword lords cut through them like butter and their upgraded armor stood firm.  Some axemen with "adept" and similar levels of skill helped too, also I recently got a new axelord. Unfortunately I now vulnerable to the next attack, but my small team of 13 men might be able to hold stuff off. My second best miltia was good at killing forgotten beasts taht came out of the caverns below where I get all my wood (im on the edge of a desert), but now I guess I will have to get some recruits to back up my more skilled guys for cavern defense (meaning that they will be down low 3 or so levels and wont be able to help on seiges as much).

so ya, I got 16-18 out of 26 alive after that attack. Shame some of men got knocked off the bridge or got lured out and mauled, but hopefully the 3-5 soldiers will get out of teh hospital soon.

I'll try the serrated trap idea, or close of my new bridge tower between the bridges with doors so that arrows can get through; will it hurt if wagons can't get in? I might need to move my trade depot outside then.

Luckily though if we are attacked again I have enough food to last us at least 12 months. down to 97 dwarves again =(




Oh! do fish ever live in aquifers? some are the on a couple edges of my map, also what does it mean to 'dig too deep'? I've never seen anything down low but caverns and lava (but on this custom map I removed lava lakes below) with (mostly) easily killed forgotten beasts; as long as you have ONE decent/average squad they can storm them and kill them by surrounding it.

I hit the bottom of the map once on one fort on this world and found nothing lol

edit: almost forgot, having trouble getting my marksmen to use bolts, I set specifically for each squad to use 60 bronze bolts for training and combat, but they never seem to use them. would of helped, all those crossbolt goblins is what slighted a good chunk of my less trained militia.

[Tiruin]

^ Ever heard of the Lord of the Rings? Dwarves dug too deep there and found...something bad. But in DF, that just gives more spice and fun to the game, go ahead and dig deeper and deeper, reach the heart of the world, you'll find it beating out real blood!

About your trade depot, if you have a bridge in the way of your main entrance (or only entrance) just raise it when not needed and then lower it when caravans arrive, they will know. Send out an escort force just incase there are ambushers about, but mostly they will not need that, ambushers are slow...

For the aquifers, I've somehow seen vermin fish teleport to those that are dug out, never got one though from any fisherdwarf so I guess that you cannot fish from dug out aquifers. (Fish that live in a certain terrain or move in one can teleport to other terrain tiles, like those salmon in one murky pool? Yeah, they went to the next one 3 z-levels below and two screens away.)

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

My sympathies for your injury, Jason.

I've broken my sternum before, and it was no fun at all.  Lots of Fun, though.

Here's wishing you a quick recovery!