The Official Dwarf Fortress Thread

[TeckXKnight]

ive always been curious about swimming pools but ive never been brave enough to put my dwarves in water :P

Flood your barracks in 3-4 deep water and have your dorfs train in that. It will build their swimming passively while they train and can also be useful in preventing alcohol fires from spreading. They will have no risk of drowning at 3-4 deep water. This is in addition to boosting their stats from gaining skills.

Setup flood gates and triggers to release water into the room at depth 0-3 and once certain plates hit 4, have the water shut off. If a tile on the opposite end of the gate goes to 5 of above (where your dorfs can actually drown,) then have it release small amounts of water until the room is safe again. You will never get it to exactly 4 all over, which would be ideal, but 3-4 is pretty good.

[shotgunn902]

update on the fort im doing pretty well generally everyone is happy/content but...

[TeckXKnight]

You have two problems. First, get an accountant to take inventory on your stock so you can control what is doing what. Second, stop farming immediately. Pump out emergency barrels and assign an addition 25x25 stockpile only for alcohol and empty barrel containers. Set a brewer to have their only task be to produce alcohol. You may actually want 3-5 brewers on this task. They can convert 25 plants at a time into 125 units of alcohol allowing you to produce and store up to 78,000 units of alcohol. Mostly the space is necessary so that your barrels can flow rapidly and freely without being interrupted due to lack of space or items in motion.

Your problem right now is that you have a single stockpile for food and drink. Food is consuming all of your barrels and all of your space, so any attempt at brewing alcohol is blocked by the already massive queue. 7,000+ units of crops is plenty.

Edit: You can assign an accountant in the [n]obles menu. From there tell them to achieve the highest level of stock records.

[shotgunn902]

thank you sir sir

before reading this i did realize this problem and did pretty much all of the above.

and i actually do have a bookkeeper hes just awful apparently. also i didnt set him to highest accuracy which i will figure out.

thanks mate


overview

[Kaoru]

I just got as far as i have gotten so far. I actually made a decent working, efficient farm... planned my meeting room for expansion, so i could expand later, which i did... got a handle on forging and metalworking... had a decent running military, one squad of crossbowmen, one squad of swordsmen... i built a nice well... fortified my fortress better than ever before using walls and burrows... didnt have too much trouble with technical aspects of the game... everything basically worked how it was supposed to work, and i didnt have to bang my head into a wall repeatedly because dwarves werent doing what i was telling them to do, i basically figured all the little problems out...

IF i didnt happen to get attacked by a Jesus Pteradactal, as well as a goblin army right afterward... i would have been alright. actually, i was alright. the military killed the pter quickly enough, sustaining slightly more than minimal casualties (it hurt, but not something i couldnt come back from)... i fended off the goblin army, immediately after... it killed most of my military, so i was pretty much left with nothing but a few bowmen and a few swordsmen. which really sucked... because after all that, and all the dead bodies... my dwarves lost there fucking minds and decided that it wasnt worth surviving.

SO...in summation, ive learned a lesson.

it is not enough to sustain yourself. It is not enough to survive all engagements. It is not enough to have a well-oiled fortress, set up nicely... you have to survive all engagements, WITHOUT CASUALTIES. because casualties = insanity >= a dead fortress.

its funny, because this time i accidentally took the DF default embark. i even had one set up where i had a proficient armsmen and teacher to teach my military and get it going quickly... but yeah. it worked out well. i know how to control flood an area to farm. setting a well up and mechanisms was a real trip though. almost ended up flooding my fortress before i figured that one out in the nick of time.

in SUMMATION OF THE SUMMATION... i dont understand how losing is fun. its not. losing has not been fun up until now, but i held my judgement because i didnt lose because of anything i could even faintly imagine was fun. starving, dehydration, insanity, etc... this time, i lost from a goblin seige and a bigass pteradactal. while i realize that those are relatively mundane things compared to what you would find in a haunted or otherwise dangerous area, they are along the same lines. attacks of some sort. so yeah, losing is not fun. its just kind of frustrating. especially when you survive the attacks and end up with retarded dwarves attacking eachother. its unrealistic and aggravating.

[TeckXKnight]

If you provide luxuries for your dorfs they won't go insane. Having their own rooms, a bed to sleep in, enough food and alcohol, somewhere to eat off of and sit, a roof over their heads, a quiet place to sleep, and a proper burial for the dead can go a long way to stopping insanity. Higher quality items and food provide more happiness. An exceptional meal and bed can keep someone perky even after they've been starved for a week and witnessed the death of a loved one.

[Kaoru]

my carpenter was making masterpieces all the time. i cant speak to quality, because i havent really looked into it... but i would say 50-75% of the dwarves had their own personal rooms. i was making sure that my cook was almost constantly making lavish meals. they were all saying my meeting room was baws. plenty of food and alchohol. i was butchering constantly. ( butcher was around the corner so nobody would see it happening and get bad thoughts...) there was a dorm for the remaining dwarves without a room, which had some nice chests in it @.@... the bedrooms were off in the back of the fort, all on their own. in the kitchen, i had several booths set up and designated for eating. i had a graveyard set up before the big fights, which quickly became full. i had to build more caskets after the battle... but i put all the corpses in a pile outside in an area less traveled in the mean time.

i guess quality counts for alot... but then again, im pretty sure the quality of the items was pretty good. i had the same two carpenters from my first migrant wave and embark, so they were constantly making "masterpieces".

::edit::
i had an office, two training areas, a woodfurnace in my meeting room that dwarves were admiring... a hospital with a traction bench a couple beds and some tables with chairs...

::Edit - BY THE WAY::
now i know how the mines of moria came to be in the sad state that they were. Such a lovely, impressive masterwork, covered in dead bodies and skeletons. Bal didnt kill them. he only killed one. then they all lost their damn minds and killed eachother.

[TeckXKnight]

Check your dorfs individual thoughts to see how things are going. A lot of factors play into it besides just quality. Variety of materials, pets around, and specific things make dorfs fucking ecstatic too. Some dorfs love barrels and iron and if they have a masterwork iron barrel installed in their room then they are going to fucking jizz themselves every morning.

[Mateusz_Zboj]

Any ideas how to expand my local view area? I just set to 4x4 and terribly regret it now ;_;.

[TeckXKnight]

Any ideas how to expand my local view area? I just set to 4x4 and terribly regret it now ;_;.

Abandon fort and settle a new area. It is the only way.