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[mrbobbyg]

Hello!

I'm back, and deeply hungry for some DF!

I haven't played in a year though, so while I'm past 40d, I have no idea what's going on.  All I remember from the past is hospitals kind of work, animals die because they can't eat, and 1 drop of forgotten beast blood can lead to funtimes for all.

Any tips on the new builds?

[Loud Whispers]

Plump helmets, rock pots, cage traps and steel. Then once you've regained your m4d sk1l5z, you go considerably down hill from there

[proxn_punkd]

Start with a male turkey and two females. Dig a room, build a door and nestboxes, pasture the turkeys inside. Lock the door whenever you want more turkeys than you know what to do with, otherwise enjoy more eggs than you know what to do with.

[SirFellfire]

i don't really know if this already happened back when you played, but migrants bring shitloads of tame animals with them so, with all due respect to proxn_punkd i say fuk male fowl bring only hens to get them yummy eggs, they'll have found a partner soon enough without you wasting points. This also allows you to bring more variety of egg laying animals so as to increase happy thoughts based on food preferences. By the way, magma is still the solution for everything.

[bombzero]

By the way, magma is still the solution for everything.

and the day that changes is the day Dwarf Fortress sucks.

[Railick Stonemane]

Returning player here as well, found suggestions so far to be helpful. Any other major changes since 40D that we should be aware of? Do all these egg laying animals breeding lead to extreme lag like one would expect? Also now that we've got turkeys do dwarves celebrate turkey day?

[proxn_punkd]

Birdsplosions are the new catsplosion, yes.

If you're used to 40d, new things of interest include caverns (which replace underground chasms and rivers), the Magma Sea (ensuring that every embark site has access to magma), and... let's just say Toady changed the distribution of shiny blue stuff and the Fun that goes with it.

It's also worth pointing out that any herbivorous livestock animals now need to graze on grass or fungus (underground) in a pasture, or they'll starve to death and leave your dwarves with no products. Some, like elephants and rhinos, literally can't eat fast enough to keep from starving to death anyway without modding.

[Railick Stonemane]

I could see where that might actually help control the animal population. Do you need to have live stock to survive or can go with just plant based diets? The only time I ever really gave my people meat is when I wanted to get rid of the animals running around slowing stuff down (And by then it was already too late lol) Where's Bob Barker when you need him?

[puke]

Plump helmets, rock pots, cage traps and steel. Then once you've regained your m4d sk1l5z, you go considerably down hill from there

What changed about plump helmets?  besides the 'men?

I was pretty surprised to learn about the rock pots when I came back to the game.  I knew that pottery and glazing had been added, but the fact that the things could be carved out of rock and used like barrels pretty much rocked my world.  Barrels are usually my #1 cause of wood consumption, so that changed things fairly majorly.

Doctoring is frustrating as you cant do any healing without a fully operational hospital.  You used to get by well enough with a bed and a bucket, but you need some major requirements -- cloth, thread, soap, skilled dwarfs...

You can milk MAMALS now.  its just undwarfish.  undwarfish and wrong.

statues are OF things.  thats pretty cool.  so are some other art objects.

and I think its all set to change again in late february, right?

[Loud Whispers]

I don't think anything's changing... More-so things added.

Lotsa lotsa eerie glowing bees.

[puke]

Oh right, beekeeping is also new from 40d.  as well as some extra evil biome things, like evil grasses and whatnot.

And the current levels of cave moss make underground farming / grazing far more viable than before when you had to hope for underground water.

[proxn_punkd]

Do you need to have live stock to survive or can go with just plant based diets?

You can have vegan dwarves, though as you noted it'd be kind of difficult with all the dwarves bringing their pets and letting 'em breed.

[Deon]

The most important part is that you can give your civillian dwarves weapons/army (add them to a military squad and make them permanent off-duty), also you can set up patrols.

Also you can order your dwarves to kill ANYTHING, including elven traders.

[Ieb]

Never ever order your soldiers to attack dwarven caravan guards/merchants though. It will lead to a loyalty cascade, attacking the guards makes your soldiers an enemy of your civ, but they remain in your civ so anyone attacking them becomes an enemy, and this goes on until there are only a handful of survivors left who may or may not be infected with the cascade, requiring isolation from the rest of the fort.

The blood spatter spread from early 2010 is gone, but you still should avoid puddles of blood when it comes to deadly blood FB's or titans.

There is now a mineral scarcity option in worldgen. Mess with it however you like. 1 is for encrusting your gold furniture with silver and jewels of all sorts.

Military control is now a bit better done, but requires some learning with the various parts, like you have to set the squad active after selecting what months they practice on in order for them to actually train or spar, rather than have individual exercise.

Hospitals work a lot better now actually than early DF2010. But your medical staff can still decide to go on fucking long breaks if they feel like it, so hire some useless peasants as Nurses to do healthcare as well.

Soapmaking by yourself is still broken when it comes to lye creation. Water in buckets ends up breaking the whole thing, so either have a burrow where all the buckets are kept, and never touched(save for the lyemaker) or import all your lye. Or soap. Someone said you can import soap directly, so yeah. Why should you bother? Soap is important in cleaning injured dorfs, lessens the chance of infection. Also, the previous bug with cleaning patients, with doctors standing next to the water source for infinity with a bucket in hand is fixed.

Create pastures big enough to hold your animal population, if they're grazers that is. In case you add more animals to the population, try and expand the pastures too. When they eat too much and start to run out of grass/moss to graze on, animals start to pack together where there's something to eat and attack each other.

Also, animals can attack dwarves in cramped meeting zones.

Eggsplosion isn't as bad as catsplosion. Eggs first need to hatch, which takes time and if you have a food stockpile which takes eggs, they're fetched far before they're ready to hatch by your dorfs.

I can't think of anything else that's changed for the new version during the past year.

[FearfulJesuit]

Really? I can't get my birds to breed- what am I doing wrong?