Dwarf Fortress

[NeonSamurai]

Hmm? does digging just into sand or soil not work any more? That is what I use to do early game for the first winter. I am hoping that the farm fields now need to be flooded semi regularly to keep working. The flood once and work forever principle I never much cared for.

Why don't you just make a short term farm and bucket brigade it until your main waterworks is running?

That or 2 pump, a intermediate cistern, and dwarf power (or windmills as it sounds above ground)

I just hope he did something about the 2 things that drive me the most nuts in the old version, ****ing mud, and ****ing tower caps growing under my water floodgates and blocking them off.

The game always picking the one dwarf early on for a mood where I don't have a workshop for, and then demands all kinds of stuff I do not have and can't easily get is my other major source of irritation.

I have almost gotten use to their mindless stupidity and utter inefficiency though


Anyhow, I assume we need to generate new worlds for the new version right? Not going to like that one bit, took me forever to find good sites on the map I usually play with. But my sources of "fun" usually involve carefully designing and building an impregnable fortress that can survive forever while locked down, has every possible feature and comfort, and can easily deal with any invasion force.

For example my current 40d fort has a massive 3 story entryway fort (like ~30x50 tiles) that floods by back pressured pumps to drown all invaders, and if they can swim. I have 4 max quality ballistas in a offset row behind fortifications covering the 4 tile wide passage to perforate those who won't drown. Plus archers can occupy the walls in the flood area to pick off swimmers. my "secret" entrance is designed to look like a lake that drains, it is also similarly guarded.

[NeonSamurai]

Yay if you didn't notice yet, you can FINALLY edit what pauses the game via announcements.txt

No more game pausing every damn time the stupid dwarves have stupid kids or whatever

[Lionclaw]

Yes it's nice it doesn't pause for every small event.

"Miners have struck microcline." Yes, thank you for letting me know we've struck useless rock.

Construction material nonetheless.

- - -

I dug a too big room for farming so bucket brigading would take too much time. I have to make smaller rooms to make things easier. The farm plots were on soil.

And while I was building the aqueduct the mason said "No Job".. There was plenty to do since the aqueduct was about 50% finished.

[Safe-Keeper]

Loving it so far, biggest problem for me right now is the Military interface, which is very powerful and thus highly complicated. The burrows/alert level systems will be good to have, though. I like the squad schedule thing, too. You can set squad-wide orders for every month, so that squads take it in turns to train, rest, patrol burrows, guard set points, etc. Thus, if you have three squads, you can make it so that every month one of them is practising, one is patrolling, and one is off-duty. You can also decide if they're to wear their uniforms while inactive.

Originally Posted by NeonSamurai

Hmm? does digging just into sand or soil not work any more? That is what I use to do early game for the first winter. I am hoping that the farm fields now need to be flooded semi regularly to keep working. The flood once and work forever principle I never much cared for.

No, just digging out dry soil isn't enough, you have to actually flood the area. I get an "invalid building" error when I try to designate the would-be crops as a Pond to irrigate it this way, don't know if it's a bug or not. What I ended up doing was digging into a nearby pond on the same level so that it flooded the room (and a small reservoir I built to collect the water). I then closed the gap with a floodgate, which I hooked up to a lever so that I can re-flood the room again if I need water for the crops or reservoir.

Don't know if you need to irrigate the tiles more than once. You apparently don't, though, since it's now more than a year since I irrigated my crops. Either way, I'm in a swamp area, so you'd think the soil would be wet enough from the get-go.

A plus point is that water no longer ruin constructed floors. I accidentally spilled water into a hallway, and the floor stayed "Rough shale block floor". No more do you have to remove and build new floors if water gets onto it and discolours it forever.

Overall, I like that farming takes more skill. It was such an overpowered way to get food in the earlier versions. Think I had something like 1500+ plants in the play-along tutorial fortress that made it to over 100 dwarves.

****ing tower caps growing under my water floodgates and blocking them off.

Okay, I'm sorry, but... . That is all.

The game always picking the one dwarf early on for a mood where I don't have a workshop for, and then demands all kinds of stuff I do not have and can't easily get is my other major source of irritation.

Have played for a year now, and no moods yet. It's more than possible that they've been made for more uncommon, as they apparently were in Dig Deeper/Dwarfier.

Anyhow, I assume we need to generate new worlds for the new version right? Not going to like that one bit, took me forever to find good sites on the map I usually play with. But my sources of "fun" usually involve carefully designing and building an impregnable fortress that can survive forever while locked down, has every possible feature and comfort, and can easily deal with any invasion force.

You probably have to gen a new world, yes. On the plus side, you seem to be able to dig down as deep as you want to now -- no longer are you limited to 20 z-levels or so. Of course, digging deep runs the risk of running into Hidden Fun Stuff, which is apparently far more prevalent now than in the last version.

Originally Posted by NeonSamurai

Yay if you didn't notice yet, you can FINALLY edit what pauses the game via announcements.txt

Is that how you do it. Wonderful. Apparently, you can also set how many embark points you start with (in the worldgen setup).

Oh, and has anyone tried to dig a channel yet? The miner automatically leaves ramps along the side of whatever you dig out. Enlarge the pit and the downward ramps that no longer touch the sides go away. BIG thumbs-up!

[NeonSamurai]

Hmm so you don't have to do the ramps thing any more? As that was about the only safe and quick way of digging down with out the dorfs either trapping themselves. I wonder how cave-in happy they still are..

As for the old ****ing tower-caps under the floodgates problem, my solution was to stop using them and use 1 tile long raising bridges instead. It works very well and they can't grow under bridges as they are always there (plants start growing when the door/gate is "up" as the structure disappears and allows growth. It would be nice if smoothed tiles did not generate mud.

Anyhow the bad thing about 1 tile long bridges is you can't tell if they are up or down visualy, unless there is water running over them. and they are built in the down position, which means you are more likely to have an accident and flood if you are not very careful and forget to link a bridge to a lever. But this is better then having a tree grow in a critical spot and block off water flow (even though the stupid tree is blocking off a 16x16x10 cistern which has enough pressure to blast the tree to kingdom come). Good thing though about being built down is no more stupid dwarves trapping themselves and starving to death before I realize they did this yet again (and ya I know the solution, not always possible though).

If you have to irrigate for all crops now though (maybe surface crops still work without irrigation), what on earth do you do if you want a desert fort now. I have read though that it may be a bug and not intended.

As for ponds, don't forget that you need to designate the pond over a hole 1 z level above. Temp farms I make are usually 4x4 or 8x8 and have an opening at the top 1x1 or 2x2 with separate ponds designated on each pit square (this way they bucket faster, each pond can only have 1 bucket task at a time, so 4 ponds with 1 opening and 1 strip of land is best for a 2x2 pit).


Anyhow I have to say for the moment that I will be sticking to 40d, game is not very stable for me, it crashes when trying to do a search for a start point, runs very slowly, and for some reason my worlds are being generated with a ton of aquifers (my maps are coming out with about a 95% aquifer rate on any land that has soil).

[Safe-Keeper]

Hmm so you don't have to do the ramps thing any more? As that was about the only safe and quick way of digging down with out the dorfs either trapping themselves. I wonder how cave-in happy they still are..

When you channeled out a tile in the old version, it left an empty tile on the z-level below the dwarf. Now it produces a tile with an up ramp in it, so all you have to do to dig into the ground is to channel. No need for building and tearing down staircases or whatnot any more.

If you have to irrigate for all crops now though (maybe surface crops still work without irrigation), what on earth do you do if you want a desert fort now. I have read though that it may be a bug and not intended.

Surface ones seem to be as they were.

Oh, and has anyone else tried out the military yet? I'm finding the new UI hard as heck to understand. Thank goodness for the DF wiki.

[NeonSamurai]

I thought about this more and I don't like it leaving a ramp.

The whole purpose of channeling was to make a pit (ie a channel), if i wanted to leave ramps and dig into the earth that way i would dig using ramps (if you don't know this, this is the quickest way to dig in 40d as you don't need to line out channels one at a time in an enclosed space).

Now If i can get rid of the ramps with out having to go down into the channel then it is not a big deal, otherwise it just totally kills a main defense which is pit moats.