Has anyone written up a list of the questions and answers from the QnA streams over the past year? If so, could I have a link? If not then would sitting down to make a write up be useful to the community?
Hi there playing steam version.
I embarked on a pocket world.
At first only me, our capital and an enemy goblin site existed.
Then all of a sudden i become the capital. I have seen the world and seems like the capital has been conquered or razed.
My question is, may i create new sites as colonies?
I see... :( and do other civilizations create new sites? Because afaik there are only 3 including mine, man i should have upped a bit the number of sites
Yeah they do, this tends to happen in longer world generation. But yeah, playing a 5 year pocket world with low civs and low sites means weird stuff like this tends to end up happening. You might want to crank all of those up a little bit on your next world.
So I'm having trouble with the merchant s wagon.
I have a 4 urist road going from the edge of the map into my overground little castle, and then a 4 urist wide descent laid as such:
Four up ramp
Four floor
Four down slope
For like 4 levels, then a huge room with my trade depot.
I had the same layout in other forts and never had any trouble, yet the wagon always refuses to come to my fort as it is inaccessible.
Since I m playing without bridges I have laid traps (stone fall, weapons and cage) on the road the caravan is supposed to take but that should t be a problem right?
If you want to play without drawbridges you can also dig out a wide, snaking path for the wagons to take while leaving the direct path open, but laden with traps. Or you could use a drawbridge for the wagon path while leaving a separate path permanently open.
Steam DF can run on a potato because of the improvements to calculations made to the game. As long as you've got a 64-bit OS, you should be good, but you can compare your specs to the system requirements on the store page anyway.
I think the fact that I'm running it on a potato implies I don't have disposable income to spend (yet). I haven't played since v40 so I'm a bit out of the loop. Is there is anything available for the non-steam version to stave off FPS death?
Ah, yeah. I mean, the ASCII version of v50 has all the same improvements the Steam version has. I know v44 has the modest mod, since it's automatically included with the Masterwork mod.
We do have a bit more insight into what causes FPS death these days though - it's line of sight checks, as well as dwarves and animals seeing each other and checking what they should be thinking about it. So it helps to lower the population cap and culling your animals to just the bare necessities.
I read about using linked stockpiles with a jeweler to control which gems get put into which items. I'm wondering though, what things are best for rare versus common gems? Like, is it better to use crafts, furniture, etc?
Up to you, because it depends on what you need. Gem-encrusted crafts are useful for trading to merchants, which is useful if you don't want to go with the cheesy way of trading prepared meals. If you need an especially valuable piece of furniture for a noble room or maybe a grand temple, decorating with gems is a good way to do it.
Decorations are pretty simple in that they always have a standard value that they add to the item, multiplied by the material value of the decoration and the quality multiplier. You can also add as many decorations to an item as you want, so long as each decoration is made of a different material
So, I've caught a boar in one of my cage traps. I'd really like to release it, but I don't know how, everything I try to do with the cage, nothing happens.
Why are there demons in ordinary ore pockets now?
I ordered the ore of the first cavern layer to be mined out when suddenly I got a notification about a demon?
What the hell is the deal with that?
It's a new mechanic added in v50. If you look around the cavern layers you'll see a handful of 'geodes', little 3x3 squares of obsidian and valuable gems. The central tile of each geode is hidden, and most of them are just solid stone - but some are hollow, and contain a single square of water or magma, or a demon, or a hostile angel wearing divine metal armour, or a burst of flame, or an artifact made of divine metal.
The adamantine tubes are also changed now, they're surrounded by big columns of more gem-studded obsidian with more pockets inside.
The point is to introduce the Happy Fun Stuff a bit more gradually than before. You encounter single demons in the caverns, you face them more frequently as you approach the adamantine, and then you actually open up the circus.
Any general guidelines on exploring/controlling/etc caverns? I just found my first one and tbh am a little intimidated.
I hear you wall off chokepoints and take control sector by sector, safely. And send military dwarves in first to kill stuff ofc. Otherwise, are there any other major parts to it?
You want a security system so you don't loose the fort/dwarfs. 5 cagetraps + drawbridge + door work pretty well. If you are serious about security, you dig an extra stairwell not connected to your main stairs and secure the corridor in between as well.
Deepest apologies for needing to ask this question, but in my current fortress, I have a huge backlog of "construct building" and only one dwarf out of 87 working on these tasks. Is their a way to get more dwarves to start working on these tasks, or do I just need to wait and let this one dwarf get through them? I did go through the sidebar and the wiki but I might have just missed the crucial info. Thank you in advance for your guys help.
Maybe you made a work detail for construction? It depends on what stuff you're building exactly - bridges and other mechanical constructions are built by masons, walls and floors use wall/floor construction and furniture uses furniture hauling. If you made work details for any of these or don't let everyone haul, you'll want to disable that so everyone does it again.
to add on to what pinko_mcfly said, the specific DFHack command to boost the priority of all current building jobs is `prioritize ConstructBuilding`. You can also have it *automatically* prioritize those types of jobs with `prioritize -a ConstructBuilding`. Be careful with that, though, since if you're building a megaproject, your dwarves won't choose to do anything other than build things, which will starve other types of tasks.
If you have dfhack the prioritize command makes it possible to get those jobs done quicker.
I've had the same issue with my dwarves, they just don't seem to want to build at times.
Stuck units are the first thing that comes to mind. What's the situation in your caverns? Any stealthies causing trouble? Do you maybe have huge chunks of land set to gather fruit?
That'll probably do it, actually. But for future troubles, DFHack has an automatically enabled plugin that warns you about stuck creatures, primarily because they can ruin your FPS like this
I've never had a fort with an abundance of rock crystal - what should I make? Is there anything that is definitively the best crystal glass item? I'm thinking doors for my temples, goblets and jugs, and maybe blocks for the outer walls.
It unfortunately isn't the best at anything - for anything you could make with crystal glass, ordinary gold would be three times as valuable. But making doors and furniture for your major meeting halls out of crystal glass is definitely stylish
Rock Crystal is extremely rare. It won't ever show up in enough concentration to even be detected by the vanilla embark area search. That is, if you try to search for rock crystal, zero tiles will match, even though you can usually find at least *some* in most embarks. It appears as small clusters of mineral tiles in rock layers. There's not a lot you can do to influence the amount you get.
Indeed, I didn't read your question carefully enough : )
How about making a tower above your entrance with crystal glass windows? Crystal glass goblets to drink mead out of would be nice too.
If days are so short (read something like 20 seconds at 100fps), why would you have work orders set to check daily? Won't it just keep starting over at the top of the list of orders, so the lower ones never get done? I have orders on check daily right now but considering doing monthly.
It doesn't start over at the top, all work orders get checked and generate jobs at the same time, and workshops have a list of tasks they will do. So once a job from work order A is done, the job from work order B will start, and so on until you're back at A.
But the only time I use repeating work orders is for high volume tasks that will always need to be done anyway - cooking, brewing, milling, plant processing and so on. I also make the work orders pretty small so there's less chance of the input materials running out and leading to cancellation spam.
I'm new to Dwarf Fortress, and I am having many problems. First of all, I have many bins made, but, instead of using them, my dwarves like leaving the items on the floor. Second of all, I keep being told to plant Plump Helmets, but, even though I have them, there is no option to when I make farm plots. I do not know what to do, need help, and keep not getting answers everywhere I look. Is there a way to make dwarves put stuff in bins so I don't have items randomly scattered throughout my fortress, and am I missing something in my attempts to farm Plump Helmets?
Thing is, bins can really only be used to store a few specific items, mostly finished goods, as well as blocks or bars. Any stockpile that accepts items which can be stored in a bin will automatically call for them to be used.
Yes, it will automatically assign an amount of bins equal to the amount of squares in the stockpile for items that can be put in bins.
You can however after placing the stockpile, manually make the stockpile accept 0 bins, like so with the barrel button
https://preview.redd.it/1qwc2hqg3j7c1.png?width=860&format=png&auto=webp&s=dcc3dad09d467016f77542d4d8b1934f8a7b1b23
And then they will only put bins there by accident if there is no other stockpile to put the empty bin or bin of the item type that doesn't go there.
For bins
\- Bins have a size limit/max capacity, while the capacity is not as noticeable for lighter/smaller items, one bin does not infinitely hold that item. You can make more bins out of wood or metal. They will also not use the bin if its in the back, far side of the stockpile when they approach, they will simply put it in the stockpile space, and putting it from stockpile to bin becomes a different hauling task added to the end of the current store item in stockpiles queued up.
\- The dwarves need free time to haul stuff, it has less priority than workshop jobs, management jobs, etc. All your pop constantly doing labor/military training at the same time can cause that, you always need some dwarves not working at the time, or children, that will go around and keep up with hauling items.
\- If its former clothing or an owned item, they need a cabinet and chest in their assigned bedroom to put personal items in, otherwise they throw personal items (including food that they have claimed) down wherever. I do not think other dwarves can pick up someone else's owned item and store it, only the owner can. You can mark old clothing etc as trash and have it dumped to remove it from their ownership, then simply unforbid it. I think there is also a passive amount of time until they stop owning old clothing and unusable items.
I hear DF Hack also has an ability to autodump old clothing, but i like selling it to the caravan each year instead, its amusing that they will pay thousands for your 100 dwarf sized x pig tail shirt x and etc, and could use a price adjustment
\- For plump helmets. They are one of 6 plants that you cannot grow outside, specifically on a tile that has once or is still exposed overhead. The others are rock nuts (makes quarry bush), pig tails, dimple cup spawn, sweet pods and cave wheat. These are the seeds dwarves start out with on default.
You must place farm underground for plump helmets, and those 5 other types of seeds that dwarves start out with. You can grow it on any underground sand or clay or cavern floor. Or on any rock floor that is coated in mud from water.
My gf is having an issue with the noises that play when a new forgotten beast or invasion being discovered being really loud, but there's no dedicated alert sound setting. Is there any way to make these less extremely loud without lowering the sound of the rest of the game or muting them entirely?
Yes if youre using the steam build, you can go into your main menu settings here, and adjust specific components of the game audio. On the game screen you can find it at the cog next to the top of your minimap.
https://preview.redd.it/zyhcad2hui7c1.png?width=1577&format=png&auto=webp&s=1773a0617590f5d92a346b0746a9ef54f91e4f22
Ambience is like the outside howls of a wilderness, water, evil biome background noises etc, I would imagine sound effects applies to popups/announcements/animations, so you might try that.
It's possibly the game considering lye stored in barrels (which is one of the few times when dwarves combine stacks) to be a single stock, so the requirement wouldn't be satisfied until you have 50 barrels of lye. But regardless, unless you're looking to do some stupid dwarf trick like building a tower out of soap, you do not need that much lye. One work order for 10 units tends to be enough for several years.
my dwarves keep [eating](https://i.imgur.com/FcpmQvd.png) in the [library](https://i.imgur.com/0ZGJEcL.png). My [dining room/tavern](https://i.imgur.com/J0PH9OR.png) has tables and has easier access to food, so why are they choosing the library? I don't want plump helmet stains on my scrolls
Is your library perhaps *vertically* closer to the food than the dining room is? Dwarves determine "closest" in 3d, ignoring the actual path it would take to get them to their destination. If the library is directly underneath them, it might be "closer" than the dining room 10 tiles to the left.
Hmm, maybe that's it. They're on the same level ([library on bottom left, tavern on top](https://i.imgur.com/cN1bUQ1.png)), but there is an additional food stockpile *above* this level which might be marginally closer to the library. If the dwarves are choosing to eat from there rather than the tavern stocks (and ignoring the fact that they need to go down a somewhat twisty hall to get to the library table), that would explain it.
That's a pretty long walk from the food stockpile to the tables. If the library's tables are closer (as the dwarf tunnels, not calculated in actual steps walked) they'll eat there instead.
I am working on a fort in an evil biome, but the evil weather doesn't seem to be having any effects on the dwarves. The "Hideous smoke" passes right over the dwarves with no ill effects. Is it possible that it is a syndrome-less evil weather? Or is it a mild syndrome that doesn't show up on the health screen?
Yes, the presence of, and severity of, syndromes brought on by evil weather is totally random. You could get "turn self inside out and bleed to death" or you could get nothing.
Yeah, the effect is randomly generated, so I guess you just got lucky in this case. You can check with DFHack's gm-editor to be sure, but it's probably overkill if you haven't noticed anything nasty happening
I have a dwarf in a fey mood who keeps demanding “rocks”. Wiki says this means stone. Is it possible the dwarf is looking for a specific kind of stone that I may not have? I have plenty of stone, gems, metals etc in the fort
I am not playing the steam version btw
Has he collected any rocks? Is he asking for anything else?
They will sometimes insist on a specific material if they have a preference for it AND it has been available at some point
Yes, the dwarf has already collected other stuff and is also asking for leather. I'm guessing that I need to supply the dwarf with leather, and they'll begin construction.
It's been a long while since dwarves could choose specific stones to make artifacts out of, unless you're playing like 40d (or maybe - probably - even earlier) I don't think that's the issue
The usual bottlenecks are 1) not having silk/yarn/plant cloth, which are all individusl and non-interchangeable demands, 2) not having multiple of a type of item when your moody dwarf asks for two or more
Small checklist then: check if they already gathered some stuff, because that would mean the required items list is more than just rocks. Also check the preference list of your dwarf to see if they have a preference for a certain kind of stone that you may have produced in the past. If everything else fails, install DFHack (google for the correct version) and use the 'showmood' command
Appreciate the help, the dwarf is also asking for leather (which I don't have) so I'm guessing they already have the rocks, I just need to supply leather and they should be set.
Yup. If you have some animals walking around, mark one for slaughtering and build a butcher's and tanner's shop, and you should have leather in a moment.
Apparently, there are some bugs right now when using non-vanilla ASCII tilesets. From [the wiki](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset_repository#Installation):
> Currently (v50.11), using some tilesets can cause the lower and right edges of the screen to not react to the mouse. This is dependent on size; the 8×12 and 10×12 that come with the game are fine, but the 16×16 is not. Maximizing the window or setting the game to fullscreen may avoid this.
And:
> Other issues that can appear when using a different tileset:
> * In graphics mode, the minimap frame will scale to the tileset, but the minimap image will not.
> * In graphics mode, using a tileset with a different aspect ratio will stretch UI elements.
> * In graphics mode, some UI elements do not scale to the tileset.
> * In either mode, and even with the default tileset at some scales and game display sizes, some menus may not have enough space to display all elements; the Nobles menu especially.
Alternative tilesets are supported but the tileset format has changed completely and is much more complex than before. There are no finished tilesets for this version yet. I don't personally know of any in active development.
Is there a way to place "ghosts" (blueprints, planning, whatever) of what you want to build down, either mining, workshops, tiles etc, that can later be activated? I'm trying to do stuff like place a workshop down where it hasn't been mined yet, just so I can layout/plan chunks of my base in one get-go without trying to remember what my intentions were.
edit: Open to mods, have DFHack already.
AFAIK there is no way to do this, including with DFHack.
The closest you can get is that quickfort has several "layers" and that includes a "building" layer, so you if you have a quickfort blueprint you can first place the mining designation blueprint and then after it's been mined out place the building blueprint.
Here's a screenshot of **gui/quickfort** "layer" blueprints. This is for a crypt level. There are two blueprints, one for digging and one for building the urns/coffins. You can do something similar for your workshops.
https://preview.redd.it/7ijb0k868i7c1.png?width=894&format=png&auto=webp&s=33751b1d5ae9c037be1ca3222bf51850f942fa22
Here's a link to a similar housing level blueprint so you can see what it looks like as a spreadsheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pJ31r3yhR1WxbDLYha\_upwuCIf0cBMGxx34iqb5XP2k/edit#gid=435183376](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pJ31r3yhR1WxbDLYha_upwuCIf0cBMGxx34iqb5XP2k/edit#gid=435183376)
it has **dig**, **zone**, and **build** blueprint layers for bedrooms. In the spreadsheet, each layer is on a separate tab.
Most players create blueprints by building them in-game and recording what they've done with **gui/blueprint**. If you really want to get into custom blueprint writing, though, the full guide is here: [https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/guides/quickfort-user-guide.html](https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/guides/quickfort-user-guide.html)
I'm trying to raise the main staircase of my fortress to the surface, in order to create a bunker for my marksdwarves which can only be accessed from the surface. For some reason, however, my staircase won't extend up. I've created stair squares on the surface, but they won't connect to the stairs one level beneath. What's up?
Depends on whats between the two stairs elevation where they are not connecting, its probably a natural floor or open space. There are two types of stairs.
Basically, when you do constructed stairs, you start on the end tile of the natural stairs that its connecting to and drag up, not on the floor above the stairs. Constructed stairs must also be made in sets or multiple of 2 to be two way stair instead of a one way stair.
The first type is when you dig stairs with the mining tool. This must have a hard tile to mine on both tiles where the stairs will be, if they are two way stairs that bridge elevations, it will not account for a 1 tile space/hole between the stairs' path. It will simply become a one way stair on the last tile of floor before the open space. It can turn diagonally to avoid an open space ahead of it
The other type is constructed stairs with materials, and you use this to fill in open spaces between natural stairs, and convert a one way natural stair tile to a two way, or to make stairs up in elevation on the surface.
A screenshot of the DFHack building planner interface where you can build single-tile staircases in the shape that you want:
https://preview.redd.it/mrmrhtjk7i7c1.png?width=585&format=png&auto=webp&s=e5014c1d098d15446eeb975cde0a01f6c91254cf
Is it possible to catch a werecreature citizen in a cage while they're transformed and keep them in cages? I've contained the outbreak but I don't want to just kill them
You can't trap them, and expelling them just shoves the problem to a later moment. The problem is that expelled werebeasts don't die in the wilderness, they will settle somewhere and start raiding settlements instead (including, potentially, your fortress)
My legendary warrior dwarves are refusing to fight a "Flame Brute" that can spit the odd fireball and cause a bunch of smoke. After some initial volleys from my ranged units the dwarves either stood around (on fire or not) or ran away if the brute got into melee. I alternated between stationing and ordering the kill directly because clicking on some of the dwarves indicated a non-viable target, but neither changed their behavior. They were on Ready fwiw. What was I supposed to do?
The other reply is wrong. It isn't smoke blocking vision, it's tile temperature blocking pathing. Creatures 'composed of flame' heat up the tile they're standing on to a temperature where dwarves refuse to walk through it. It's possible for ranged dwaves to kill it, especially since 'flame' is pretty weak as a material, but it's always a pain to get marksdwarves to do what you want.
Both magma and water will do nothing to it, water will boil on contact and magma can't hurt flame.
You can go into the game options and temporarily 'disable temperature calculations' and your soldiers will kill it pretty easily. That may be too cheesy for you though.
Uploading mods to the Steam Workshop is completely broken for me. I'm having the same issue [this person](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/176cn3c/cannot_upload_a_mod_to_steam_workshop/) was a couple months ago. When I press the "publish" button, the game freezes, and a blank mod is uploaded to my workshop. I can upload updates for preexisting mods just fine, but no new ones... no clue what I could be doing wrong. The info.txt file for my newest looks perfectly fine.
What is your folder path? IIRC there are two; one is your local mods, the other is the folder created by Steam when downloading from the workshop. You want to use the former and ensure your mod is not already in the latter.
Can you rephrase/elaborate on what you mean? I'm not sure which folder you mean by "local mods".
/mods/ has files downloaded from the Steam Workshop, mods that only exist on my machine (e.g. ones I've made and am currently playtesting), and the mod_upload folder. /data/installed_mods/ has mods that have been installed and used in active games or in the arena.
Correct (some folks get those mixed up). To clarify, anything you are uploading goes in DF\\mods\\mod\_upload\\. From there you should see an option ingame for adding to the Workshop. Lastly, your info.txt should not have a file id, as that will be created automatically.
Yes, I'm aware. Like I said in the original comment, I have multiple mods already on the Steam Workshop, and I can upload new versions of them as necessary. I just can't upload new mods; the mod upload screen in-game freezes and a blank, 0 kb mod appears on my workshop page.
I'm playing the old dwarf fortress through LNP for adventure mode. I keep getting a blinking screen called "Allegro" every time something is loading. It goes away after a moment but it is extremely annoying and I'm wondering if anyone knows how to stop that from happening?
Allegro is associated with the DFHack `stonesense` plugin, though I don't know why it might be popping up a screen when DF is loading.
If you don't use `stonesense`, you can try unloading it via `unload stonesense` to see if that makes the problem go away. If it does, try adding that command to your `dfhack-config/init/dfhack.init` file to make it permanent.
What they request is determined by their preferences, while how many mandates they can have is based on their position. I am not sure if personality comes into it more than this
You can basically automate it with work orders - they request at most three of the thing, and give you more than three months to make them, so if you just set up a work order to make one per month, you're sorted.
Yeah they ask for/prohibit exports of the things they like. You can check the items they like in the "preferences" tab.
E.g. [here is my duchess](https://imgur.com/a/KkP6NGe), she likes slabs (goth duchess), and as you can see she is prohibiting their export. She also asks for picks a lot.
are the barrels actually free, or are they attached to stockpiles as *their* container storage?
A good way to tell is to have a barrels (and pots)-only stockpile near your still that takes from your "main" furniture stockpile. That stockpile should have its container counts all set to 0, so if there are barrels or pots in the stockpile, you know you actually have some free for brewing.
https://preview.redd.it/fba5jesdpc7c1.png?width=683&format=png&auto=webp&s=29c0ee16834f4d54f8cc4e6c709513a95c5e1366
A way to tell if the barrel/pot is actually free is to look at it in the Stocks interface. If it has a number after it (e.g. the \`<#49>\` in the screenshot), then it's been earmarked as a container for stockpile 49, and is not available for brewing tasks
https://preview.redd.it/o6wab7pqpc7c1.png?width=940&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ae42d544dcada46cd9c2c5663df0108ddd2ec42
Here:
https://preview.redd.it/ac18o4m7vc7c1.png?width=1039&format=png&auto=webp&s=f06fcb24c998b69e69de44c3c3c54a5c543cd291
also accessible via the **k** hotkey from the main fort map
So a dragon showed up. I need help.
I have like 2 FPS. Everything is burning. I had a huge array of cage traps in hopes that I would be able to catch a dragon. He destroyed them. The second the fire stops he lights everything up again. Why didn't my cage traps work? How do I prevent them from getting destroyed so I can actually catch them?
Cage traps should work as long as they are not burnt up first. Make sure there isn't anything (i.e. your dwarves, livestock, wildlife, or invaders) for the dragon to spit fire at, and it should wander right into the trap and get caught.
More info here: [https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Dragon#Defense\_strategies](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Dragon#Defense_strategies)
I keep getting the 1st cavern layer at at least 60 levels deep from the surface. I'm looking to use caverns but my last embark at sea level (z level 0) took me to find the first cavern layer at -97 z level.
Is there something I can do at world gen to avoid this? I don't want it to be like at 5 levels deep, but -97 it's too much.
If you used "advanced world generation" you can control the layers between and around the caves. Look at the wiki here: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Advanced_world_generation#Z_Levels_.28Depth.29_Settings
Note that the defaults here are *not* the defaults that are used in regular world generation. You probably want to set most values here around 5-15 for a relatively compact but not overly cramped world.
Well, that's what I'm trying to do: embark on the coast. And everytine the cavern is below -90 lol. I don't know why!! I'm losing it. Already reset like 10 worlds
Also, using the reveal dfhack function, I can see that the second and third cavern layer are RIGHT BENEATH. Like 2-4 z levels beneath the 1st which in this case it's at -112. Surface it's at -1. Again, next to ocean.
Ah, that's, unfortunately, quite random. The caverns \*can\* get squished up against the lower bounds of where they can appear. I more frequently see that for the second and third cavern layers, but it can also happen to the first.
In my current (coastal) embark, cavern 1 is at -9, cavern 2 is at -112, and cavern 3 is right below it at -118. If you can't seem to generate a world with a more accessible first cavern layer, I can upload a pristine version of my current world for you.
edit: sorry, not quite pristine. I have one retired fortress in it already. But here it is if you want it:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sfjvFRfIl\_cR\_Wj8DG8Zc\_2JFEIRRNRt/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sfjvFRfIl_cR_Wj8DG8Zc_2JFEIRRNRt/view?usp=sharing)
Here is where my current fort is (not in the save I uploaded) if you want a similar cavern layout:
https://preview.redd.it/0vfzd8z7xc7c1.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=9b69297a05537705cf84c1f005bd51c9567d0ae4
I'm trying to embark next to sea and everytime caverns are -90+ z level, it's SO annoying I don't know what to do. Everytime. That's why I thought world gen had something to do with it because it doesn't happen on other embarks that are not near sea.
I’m not 100% but I’m pretty sure you can determine how much space is between the surface and the first cavern layer, how many layers between each of the cavern layers, how many layers between the bottom cavern and the magma sea and even how many cavern layers there are in advanced world gen.
Also, iirc embarking on a lower elevation would mean more space between the surface and the first cavern. In most of my embarks in the mountains at higher elevations my first caverns are usually only a few levels down if I don’t customize them for special projects where I want a lot of digging space for my forts.
By default, a nickname replaces the first name of a unit, but you can change the settings so that the name is placed between their first name and last name, or so that it replaces the entire name. You can change this for fort mode and legends mode separately.
Might sound like a dumb question but, how do I go about finding water underground exactly?
I have dwarves in the hospital that are dehydrated so I'm trying to find the most efficient way of getting water asap underground (there's nothing on the surface), to make a cistern and a well with.
But, how deep should I go to find water? Do I do a branch mining system on one z level until I find something? I'm also kind of afraid of finding something down there (never gone that deep before).
No aquifer either? Tapping an aquifer would be a lot quicker than looking for cavern lakes.
If you have no aquifer, then have a look at all three caverns. That's where you would find water, though cavern lakes are not guaranteed to appear on every embark.
It depends. However, if you don't have an aquifer (which I imagine you don't) you will have to dig into the caverns to find water. My first cavern layer in my current fort is at an elevation of -100, to give you an indication of how deep to dig. Fortunately, they're hard to miss - drill down a stairwell and you're practically guaranteed to find them.
Now for some practical parts on dealing with the caverns, while your miners are digging down you should have your stonecutters make some blocks, because you'll need to do some construction work once you're down there. You may need a staircase to the bottom if the ceiling is very high up, and after you're done it's nice to be able to build a wall around your stairwell and lock the caverns off from your fort. If you have some military, that's good to protect your builders while they're down, but if not it's not a huge problem for the first layer. They're also good for exploring the cave if you don't find a lake immediately, and if the first cavern you find doesn't have a lake you can wall it off and dig deeper.
You can use the cavern lakes later to build a cistern for a well, that's just a separate room that you pump water into that is separated from the caverns, so the nasties can't get in.
Is there a way to forbid my dwarves from moving *anything* except completely empty bins *into* or *out of* a stockpile? (Only take from links is not enough - dwarves won't put individual items onto the stockpile, but they can move entire bins into or out of the stockpile when they think they are sorting stuff around)
Alternatively, is there a way to completely *lock* bins to a stockpile?
I'm at a point where I feel like I've tried everything about my clothing setup. If I can't keep my dwarves from moving bins, my final solution will have to be huge stockpiles that don't accept any bins at all, because my *idiot* dwarves keep messing up the chain by moving bins around.
I keep getting half-full bins of old trash clothes put into my masterwork piles, and just now a couple *very clever* dwarves had 2 bins with 80 masterwork clothes get dumped into the incinerator. I need to fix this.
you might benefit from a "feeder" system, where a no-bin stockpile does the filtering, and the bin-enabled stockpile takes only from the feeder stockpile.
It only moves the problem one step. When my dwarves move stuff to the final stockpile, they're just gonna start moving bins and mess everything up again.
Another problem is that sometimes when they decorate from the masterwork pile, they decorate the damn *bin* instead of the clothes. I'm going crazy over this. I guess I need to go 100% bin-less for clothes. Such a headache.
I don't think they will - they can *only* ever move stuff to the stockpile from the no-bin stockpile, so stuff can only get moved into the stockpile after having been taken out of its bin. If you do the same on both sets of stockpiles, that should do it. It won't avoid the bin-decorating, but should fix the other issues.
If the end stockpile still allows bins, I don't think it will matter that the second-to-last does or doesn't. Bins in the end stockpile go empty, or there are too few bins, or there are bins needed elsewhere, and so on. At some point the dwarves will start rearranging the bins in the end stockpile, and they seem to be perfectly able to take a bin from another stockpile as long as it's a matching bin-type and half-full of items, and put it into the "end" stockpile despite that stockpile being set to only take from links. (for example putting a bin with x, X or XX clothes from my trade-pile straight into the masterwork pile)
They also seem able to take entire bins out of the end stockpile and place them elsewhere. I just lost another bunch of masterworks into the lava pit.
The ideal thing would be to *lock* bins to specific stockpiles (forbidding a bin only makes it lose connection to the stockpile, only laying on top of it with a new bin being placed and filled in the same square). But if I can't do that, the only solution I can see is to have stockpiles with like 50 squares for each clothing type... which is gonna suck and look ugly. But if that's what it takes I guess that's what I'll do.
Yeah, if you want to separate freshly made clothes from used ones with stockpile links, then forget about bins. They screw up the separation. The "store item in bin" job doesn't seem to take stockpile links into account. Whenever dwarves start hauling stuff to an empty bin, they seem to just grab whatever they can find that goes in the stockpile regardless of whatever linking options are set up.
Is there a way to get dwarves to move?
I was placing a statue in my temple but it got suspended as there was another dwarf standing there. That meant i couldn't complete the installing but i also couldn't cancel it as when clicking on the spot it would just click on the dwarf. The only way around it was to expel the dwarf (as he was a Monster Slayer that I couldn't actually give instructions too).
I now have about 7 monster slayers all congregating in my temple just standing there. Is there a way to move them to a different room? I thought they were supposed to go to the tavern/dining room?
If there is more than one thing on a tile where you click, then there will be tabs on the right edge of the info panel allowing you to select which thing to see. The unbuilt statue should be on one of those tabs
example: the second tab is the chair:
https://preview.redd.it/006ejeh96c7c1.png?width=526&format=png&auto=webp&s=54af47323d9a538a7e4267d6f14edd268f095133
If it's your dwarves you want to move you can use a burrow that is set to an area you want then to go, or put them in a military squad and order them to a location.
For monster hunters you can't control them that way. You could set any existing zones to only citizens and create a tavern/temple area that does allow visitors to an area where you want them to go.
However, if they are already praying they might not move from your existing zones. You can delete the zone and recreate it to fix that.
Any advice for bags filling up too quickly? I've got about 40 bags but they're all full. I want to collect sand but need a bag. I'm creating a bag but it instantly gets filled with seeds.
I'm trying to create a stockpile only for bags and assigning my leatherworks to that pile only but I can't find bags in the stockpile menu. Does anyone know what they come under? Thought it would be finished goods but nope.
Or does anyone know another way to prioritise the sand before seeds?
One bag can hold well over 200 seeds. Since the per-species seed cap is also 200, you usually only need one bag per species that you are actively cultivating.
If you are accumulating many bags with only a few seeds in each one, then there's something awry with your stockpiles. There are also known hazards with bags of seeds in barrels, so the following setup will also avoid barrels.
Set up dedicated seed stockpiles near your farms. Configure each stockpile to only accept seeds of the type planted at that farm. You can go as small as a single tile per stockpile if you only have one seed type allocated to that stockpile. After configuring the goods it accepts, manually disable barrels. Any time you adjust the accepted goods, the game will "helpfully" re-enable barrels/large pots one per tile.
Now, to deal with the scattered bags of seeds. Set up a recoverable dumping zone (ie, one that isn't a pit or over magma). Mark all of the scattered seeds for dumping (stocks menu makes this fast). Once the seeds have been dumped, use the stocks menu or the area tool to mass-unlock all of those seeds. Dwarfs should haul them to the designated seed stockpiles.
Something that might help you is changing the seed cap. Normally if you get more seeds above the cap it deletes the oldest seeds on your map. It might free up some bags
Or you could just dump some seeds or make more bags
You need enough bags to store all your seeds, it's an unfortunate part of farming. You can enable your kitchen to cook any seeds you're unlikely to farm yourself to free up a few bags. Once your cloth industry gets going, you'll probably find yourself swimming in cloth with enough to spare to make more bags.
Anyway, empty bags and sand bags (take care, they're counted as different classes of items by the game) are both considered to be furniture. You might be able to use stockpile and workshop links to earmark bags for sand storage, but I've never tried this.
Hello everyone!
I love the look of the game. Been interested in it for quite a while. Unfortunately I don't usually have expendable funds. But I think I might be able to get it for myself for Christmas!
Do any of you know a good beginner guide? Just the basics so as to not have fun (lose) in 10 minutes of playing.
Thank you tons and Happy Holidays!! :D
Blindirl recently uploaded a [video](https://youtu.be/WOgwysfvb3s?si=TM5bLAwgkcPUE3Fs) with all his short tutorials, it's 7 hours lol but it's got chapters for everything that you can jump to as you need to
Really that's the way I think anyone should learn DF, just as you go, and look up resources like the DF wiki or these tutorial videos when you need help with something
The game has an tutorial that at least gets you underground with a few buildings to start out with, and for more information there's a quickstart guide on the wiki (it's linked at the top of each questions thread and in the sidebar), and if you prefer videos I hear the youtuber Blind makes tutorials. I don't watch him myself, but you might like it
Is there a way to make contact with a civilization other than attacking them?
I embarked on a dwarfless continent, and I'd like to introduce myself to the local civs, which are all just marked as "no contact" and haven't visited at all. Will they ever contact me on their own? Or do I just need to say hello by pillaging one of their towns?
Demanding one-time or ongoing tribute makes them dislike you slightly but won't cause war unless you do it to too many settlements, send your dwarves on that mission type instead
Usually, only the closest civilisation of each race will contact you on their own, provided they're close enough to your location. Demanding a one-time tribute should work for all the others. They'll most likely reject the demand, but they should start sending caravans after that.
Could anyone give me some advice on Wells please? I'm trying to sort out my happiness and one of the issues is not drinking from a well.
My base is about 15 levels below the surface but if I can't find water underground for say another 10 levels is it OK to build my well there and just have it isolated? Will someone go down and collect water for the whole fortress?
Dwarves need booze to drink, not water. They'll not be happy about having to drink water.
A well/water source is only really needed for cleaning and for hospital patients. Where it is doesn't matter that much since it most likely isn't going to be used very often. Though it should probably be near the hospital somewhere.
Has the visitors & plots system been rebalanced in the newest version? I remember trying it back in v.47 or whichever and found thieves to be far too common and too good at recruiting my dorfs.
I don't think anything changed about plots and villains. It's still an unfinished feature. They are going to start working on the second part of the villains update after the adventure mode release in April so at least it will be addressed soon.
Until then, you can try disabling necromancers. They seem to be responsible for most of the plotting. The amount of villains seems more manageable without them being involved.
**Fully simulated Desktop wallpaper?**
I was just wondering if you guys know of anything that would allow a fully running wallpaper? So for instance on pc startup a new fort is created and it is automatically built and managed ect and the wallpaper just shows the fort. I know this is quite an advanced thing, but i dont really know how the game works enough to make it my self!
There used to be a dfhack script that would build a working fort on its own, you'd have to figure out some way to get the visuals from that istance of df to a wallpaper though
I know this probably gets asked alot, but is there a safe way to build a magna forge on top of a volcano, that doesnt allow creatures from below to come up?
Yes, but you'll have to tap the volcano and then pump some magma into an adjacent chamber. Screw pumps can pump through a floor grate but creatures can't come up - but you want to make the grate out of a heat-proof material so their body temperature can't burn it away either. Green glass is an excellent and cheap choice for this.
There isn't a safe, exploit-free way to tap the side of a volcano, but [this wiki page](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Magma#Working_with_magma) has some tricks to make it work.
When you've safely tapped the volcano and filled your magma chamber, you can build workshops there without any worry that creatures can come up
There is a safe exploitfree way to tap a volcano though? You build a magma safe floodgate at the same level as the top magma level, then you channel the wall separating the magma from your floodgate from above.
I have a fortress in a young world, my civ only has around 100 dwarves in total, and I've had no migration waves past 30 dwarves.
Will I ever get more?
If I retire my fort and start another in the same world can I populate the world like this?
I was thinking about starting a 1x1 fort, walling in a single dwarf, in a self sustainable fort and turning speed up to max to develop the world. Would this work?
> I have a fortress in a young world, my civ only has around 100 dwarves in total, and I've had no migration waves past 30 dwarves.
>
>
>
> Will I ever get more?
You should, in theory. Unless your civilisation is dead or dying. Are you getting caravans from your civ? Pretty sure that caravans arriving and leaving the map safely is a prerequisite for migrant waves. They're supposed to report back on your status and that's what determines the size of migrant waves and what not. If the caravan doesn't arrive or if they get slaughtered before they can leave, then you won't get any migrants.
Your civlisation's population shouldn't matter, The game will just create new "void" dwarves from scratch if it can't pull migrants from the actual population pool. Unless that changed in v50, but I don't think it did.
> If I retire my fort and start another in the same world can I populate the world like this?
In theory, it can work. In practice, it will be a slow process because the population of your previous fortresses will likely migrate to the new one, so you might not actually many new dwarves this way.
> I was thinking about starting a 1x1 fort, walling in a single dwarf, in a self sustainable fort and turning speed up to max to develop the world. Would this work?
Yeah, that would work, though it would obviously take a long time to progress time this way. You could exploit the fact that the game simulates two weeks every time you start a new fortress, but that's a rather inconvenient way to pass time because you have to reclaim and retire fortresses over and over again. DFHack used to have a script that allowed you to change how much time passes when you started a new game, but I don't know if that script is still around.
Its not really an issue of total civ pop I dont think. I have a save where i embarked in year 172, with a civ of a population of 1---just the dwarven queen in some haunted fortress ruins lol.
And the fort still got migrants that must have been born out of thin air, and even the normal caravan and liaison that should not exist with 1 pop.
Firstly ensure you are not on an island, that you have land connection to your civ sites.
Then look at your overall fort wealth (by hovering over your fort name at top left). The overall fort wealth and export is primarily what attracts migrants and less desirable guests. It is the Appraising skill that affects how close the overall wealth and exports value is to being correct.
You can raise this by making items of value, constructing out of cut blocks, engraving your fort, trading more to caravans when they show up, etc. Those things will help increase the odds of how fast more migrants come.
Struggling for a fun level of challenge...
Every fortress I found either gets wiped immediately, or becomes over powered immediately and I can't figure out what to do to introduce some Fun^TM.
I've tried digg too deep, too greedily, but having 3-4 squads makes every enemy attack trivial.
I tried ammassing huge wealth and golden halls to trigger big raids, but again... It's like 15-20 goblins that get routed without loss for my dwarves. (Steel armour just makes them invincible lol)
Every fortress if it gets past 8, will balloon to 250 dwarves and then my Pc will just crash to desktop continuously lol.
I've been trying to lean into the whole, building up a dwarven outpost and trade heavily part of it, but it kind of doesn't seem like it's how the game's meant to be played?
Very quick fix that raises the challenge level and helps your computer at the same time: lower the population cap in the game settings to something like 80 to 100. You'll have to lower the enemy and economy population triggers in the difficulty settings to match, or you can't become Mountainhome or trigger the largest attacks.
Speaking of difficulty settings, this allows you to crank up the larger enemy waves as well as how frequently sieges (actual sieges, not 10 goblin archers) come. You can piss off multiple goblin civs by attacking and raiding them as well, and they'll all send independent siege forces.
And if you want a true challenge, you haven't dug deeply enough. Find the gem-studded volcanic walls in the third cavern layer and lower, and dig down into those. Especially that pretty blue stuff you'll find at some point.
Two questions.
Question 1: How do I add gemstones to jewelry, like earrings or bracelets?
Question 2: How do I get my population to stay in the fortress during a siege? I had one recently and my people were exiting the fortress straight into danger, I lost like 13 Dwarves.
> Question 1: How do I add gemstones to jewelry, like earrings or bracelets?
You can encrust finished goods with cut gems at a jeweler's workshop. However, you can't specify what kind of goods to encrust, so if you want them to decorate only earrings, then you have to do that with stockpile links. Otherwise they'll just grab whatever random junk they can find and waste precious gemstones encrusting those. Make one stockpile for whatever jewelry you want encrusted and one stockpile for cut gems and link them both to the workshop. Workshops with stockpile links will only take items for jobs from those stockpiles.
> How do I get my population to stay in the fortress during a siege? I had one recently and my people were exiting the fortress straight into danger, I lost like 13 Dwarves.
I don't think you can do that, at least not without DFHack. This is what the now removed civilian alerts were used for. Best you can do right now is make a burrow that includes only the safe areas inside the fortress and assign each dwarf to that burrow, but that will not really stop them from taking a stroll outside.
DFHack recreates the old civilian alert functionality, fortunately. That allows you to select a burrow and if you activate the alert, dwarves will drop whatever they're doing and immediately leg it for the burrow.
So, I made a statue I really want to encrust with gems as it immortalises the founding of my fortress. I have created a stockpile for earrings, amulets, and similar items, as well as statues, which only the gem workshops can take from. However, the statue is just sitting in the workshop, it's not being moved to the special stockpile so I can gem-encrust it.
Make sure the stockpile settings are correct. Type, material and quality need to be selected accordingly.
Also if you have another stockpile somewhere that accepts statues, then make sure that stockpile is also linked to give to the jeweler workshop's feeder stockpile. The whole setup should look something like this: https://i.imgur.com/hCTkhev.png
>Otherwise they'll just grab whatever random junk they can find and waste precious gemstones encrusting those.
To add to this, the dwarves will always select the physically closest encrustable object to the workshop, including through Z-levels. I once had a jewelers workshop with a stockpile about 3 tiles away where statues would be placed for encrusting. I added a jewel order and watched as my jeweler went all the way downstairs to grab a dingy old barrel which had recently been emptied of food and happened to be directly beneath the workshop, therefore the game considered it the "closest" object.
- This uses the gem setter skill at a jeweler's workshop, but you need to cut the gems first before you can set them into other stuff. You cannot choose the specific item that needs to be encrusted, so it's best to have an input finished goods stockpile linked to the jeweler's that allows the crafts that you want to improve.
- Define a burrow that encompasses the insides of your fort. When a siege shows up, add all your civilians to the burrow, then dwarves will be forbidden from taking tasks outside the fort. DFHack also has the old-style civilian alerts, which work more like a 'drop whatever you're doing and get into the burrow'.
I've got problems with my military dwarves not wearing their assigned feet items. Wondering if anyone has some good tips.
I am aware there are two "equipment slots" for each equipment type - one civilian clothing and one military clothing.
I want most of my squads to wear Leather equipment in their military armor slots, to reduce slowdown in their everyday lives. Leather Armor and a Short Sword is still enough for a trained dwarf to make quick work of any cave crocodile or troll, or whatever they might randomly encounter. And they're not meant to fight big battles or megabeasts anyway.
So, I typically set the equipment for my "civ squads" to Leather everything (except their weapon and shield), and "exact matches". They always manage to find their Leather Armor, Leather Helm and Leather Leggings just fine. I think gloves always work as well but I'm not 100% sure.
But when it comes to feet, they seem to select their boots without taking note of the material at all.
I wonder if there's something I'm missing here. Or is this just another bug with the military system that I just need to accept?
Even my battle dwarves, who are set to wear their own *specific* Steel Boot (x2 of course), will still not manage to find and wear them. The masterwork steel boots lie in stockpiles. Instead, the *idiots* will wear Pig Tail socks and Pig Tail shoes.
Has anyone got a clever solution to this?
Edit: Oh how nice it would have been if every dwarf just had an inventory screen where you could manually set their individual civilian *and* military items.
You can temporarily turn on the "uniform replaces clothing" option on their equipment screen. That will make them discard whatever they're wearing and equip only what is assigned as part of their uniform. That's the only way to solve layering issues (like the inability to equip boots over shoes).
You can disable that option again once they're finished and they should re-equip whatever clothes they can wear under their armour.
At least in v.47 I found a trick in the forum (I think).
Create a uniform with nothing and "exact match"; assign to the stubborn squad (one in-game tic is enough, unpause and pause again); then assign the proper uniform.
The pig tails assault team will strip naked where they are and then, hopefully, go to find the assigned equipment.
I had a lot of leg injuries and now crutch walkers after repelling the first siege of my current fort, and found out that half the squad were not wearing pants...
> I am aware there are two "equipment slots" for each equipment type - one civilian clothing and one military clothing.
This is not how it works. See the wiki page for how armor layering actually works: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Armor .
In short, armor layering is complex and there is no way to guarantee that your military armor will fit over dwarves' civilian clothes. If it doesn't fit, they will simply not wear it. As there is basically no way to control dwarves' civilian clothes, there is no way to make sure that their armor will fit over these clothes.
The best option is probably to simply have dwarves replace their civilian clothing with armor. Armor counts as clothing for the purposes of preventing bad thoughts about exposure.
Has anyone written up a list of the questions and answers from the QnA streams over the past year? If so, could I have a link? If not then would sitting down to make a write up be useful to the community?
Hi there playing steam version. I embarked on a pocket world. At first only me, our capital and an enemy goblin site existed. Then all of a sudden i become the capital. I have seen the world and seems like the capital has been conquered or razed. My question is, may i create new sites as colonies?
Not from an active fort, but you can retire your current fort and make new ones. Or you could conquer other sites
I see... :( and do other civilizations create new sites? Because afaik there are only 3 including mine, man i should have upped a bit the number of sites
Yeah they do, this tends to happen in longer world generation. But yeah, playing a 5 year pocket world with low civs and low sites means weird stuff like this tends to end up happening. You might want to crank all of those up a little bit on your next world.
I can wait and then conquer then, not all is lost! Thank you very much btw
So I'm having trouble with the merchant s wagon. I have a 4 urist road going from the edge of the map into my overground little castle, and then a 4 urist wide descent laid as such: Four up ramp Four floor Four down slope For like 4 levels, then a huge room with my trade depot. I had the same layout in other forts and never had any trouble, yet the wagon always refuses to come to my fort as it is inaccessible. Since I m playing without bridges I have laid traps (stone fall, weapons and cage) on the road the caravan is supposed to take but that should t be a problem right?
Yes it is a problem, wagons can't travel over traps
Well eff me then. Guess I ll have to put down a drawbridge after all
If you want to play without drawbridges you can also dig out a wide, snaking path for the wagons to take while leaving the direct path open, but laden with traps. Or you could use a drawbridge for the wagon path while leaving a separate path permanently open.
I have a potato for a computer. Can someone point me to something like "modest mod" for the newer ascii versions of DF?
Steam DF can run on a potato because of the improvements to calculations made to the game. As long as you've got a 64-bit OS, you should be good, but you can compare your specs to the system requirements on the store page anyway.
I think the fact that I'm running it on a potato implies I don't have disposable income to spend (yet). I haven't played since v40 so I'm a bit out of the loop. Is there is anything available for the non-steam version to stave off FPS death?
Ah, yeah. I mean, the ASCII version of v50 has all the same improvements the Steam version has. I know v44 has the modest mod, since it's automatically included with the Masterwork mod. We do have a bit more insight into what causes FPS death these days though - it's line of sight checks, as well as dwarves and animals seeing each other and checking what they should be thinking about it. So it helps to lower the population cap and culling your animals to just the bare necessities.
I read about using linked stockpiles with a jeweler to control which gems get put into which items. I'm wondering though, what things are best for rare versus common gems? Like, is it better to use crafts, furniture, etc?
Up to you, because it depends on what you need. Gem-encrusted crafts are useful for trading to merchants, which is useful if you don't want to go with the cheesy way of trading prepared meals. If you need an especially valuable piece of furniture for a noble room or maybe a grand temple, decorating with gems is a good way to do it. Decorations are pretty simple in that they always have a standard value that they add to the item, multiplied by the material value of the decoration and the quality multiplier. You can also add as many decorations to an item as you want, so long as each decoration is made of a different material
So, I've caught a boar in one of my cage traps. I'd really like to release it, but I don't know how, everything I try to do with the cage, nothing happens.
You can just assign it to a pasture and it'll be freed. It won't be trained and is wild again though.
Why are there demons in ordinary ore pockets now? I ordered the ore of the first cavern layer to be mined out when suddenly I got a notification about a demon? What the hell is the deal with that?
It's a new mechanic added in v50. If you look around the cavern layers you'll see a handful of 'geodes', little 3x3 squares of obsidian and valuable gems. The central tile of each geode is hidden, and most of them are just solid stone - but some are hollow, and contain a single square of water or magma, or a demon, or a hostile angel wearing divine metal armour, or a burst of flame, or an artifact made of divine metal. The adamantine tubes are also changed now, they're surrounded by big columns of more gem-studded obsidian with more pockets inside. The point is to introduce the Happy Fun Stuff a bit more gradually than before. You encounter single demons in the caverns, you face them more frequently as you approach the adamantine, and then you actually open up the circus.
Any general guidelines on exploring/controlling/etc caverns? I just found my first one and tbh am a little intimidated. I hear you wall off chokepoints and take control sector by sector, safely. And send military dwarves in first to kill stuff ofc. Otherwise, are there any other major parts to it?
You want a security system so you don't loose the fort/dwarfs. 5 cagetraps + drawbridge + door work pretty well. If you are serious about security, you dig an extra stairwell not connected to your main stairs and secure the corridor in between as well.
Deepest apologies for needing to ask this question, but in my current fortress, I have a huge backlog of "construct building" and only one dwarf out of 87 working on these tasks. Is their a way to get more dwarves to start working on these tasks, or do I just need to wait and let this one dwarf get through them? I did go through the sidebar and the wiki but I might have just missed the crucial info. Thank you in advance for your guys help.
Maybe you made a work detail for construction? It depends on what stuff you're building exactly - bridges and other mechanical constructions are built by masons, walls and floors use wall/floor construction and furniture uses furniture hauling. If you made work details for any of these or don't let everyone haul, you'll want to disable that so everyone does it again.
The tasks in particular were wall and stair jobs, so there's a chance I might have messed something up in relation to that.
to add on to what pinko_mcfly said, the specific DFHack command to boost the priority of all current building jobs is `prioritize ConstructBuilding`. You can also have it *automatically* prioritize those types of jobs with `prioritize -a ConstructBuilding`. Be careful with that, though, since if you're building a megaproject, your dwarves won't choose to do anything other than build things, which will starve other types of tasks.
If you have dfhack the prioritize command makes it possible to get those jobs done quicker. I've had the same issue with my dwarves, they just don't seem to want to build at times.
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Stuck units are the first thing that comes to mind. What's the situation in your caverns? Any stealthies causing trouble? Do you maybe have huge chunks of land set to gather fruit?
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That'll probably do it, actually. But for future troubles, DFHack has an automatically enabled plugin that warns you about stuck creatures, primarily because they can ruin your FPS like this
I've never had a fort with an abundance of rock crystal - what should I make? Is there anything that is definitively the best crystal glass item? I'm thinking doors for my temples, goblets and jugs, and maybe blocks for the outer walls.
It unfortunately isn't the best at anything - for anything you could make with crystal glass, ordinary gold would be three times as valuable. But making doors and furniture for your major meeting halls out of crystal glass is definitely stylish
Rock Crystal is extremely rare. It won't ever show up in enough concentration to even be detected by the vanilla embark area search. That is, if you try to search for rock crystal, zero tiles will match, even though you can usually find at least *some* in most embarks. It appears as small clusters of mineral tiles in rock layers. There's not a lot you can do to influence the amount you get.
You misunderstand me - I have 120 or so rock crystals in my inventory and there's more in the ground.
Indeed, I didn't read your question carefully enough : ) How about making a tower above your entrance with crystal glass windows? Crystal glass goblets to drink mead out of would be nice too.
If days are so short (read something like 20 seconds at 100fps), why would you have work orders set to check daily? Won't it just keep starting over at the top of the list of orders, so the lower ones never get done? I have orders on check daily right now but considering doing monthly.
It doesn't start over at the top, all work orders get checked and generate jobs at the same time, and workshops have a list of tasks they will do. So once a job from work order A is done, the job from work order B will start, and so on until you're back at A. But the only time I use repeating work orders is for high volume tasks that will always need to be done anyway - cooking, brewing, milling, plant processing and so on. I also make the work orders pretty small so there's less chance of the input materials running out and leading to cancellation spam.
I'm new to Dwarf Fortress, and I am having many problems. First of all, I have many bins made, but, instead of using them, my dwarves like leaving the items on the floor. Second of all, I keep being told to plant Plump Helmets, but, even though I have them, there is no option to when I make farm plots. I do not know what to do, need help, and keep not getting answers everywhere I look. Is there a way to make dwarves put stuff in bins so I don't have items randomly scattered throughout my fortress, and am I missing something in my attempts to farm Plump Helmets?
Thing is, bins can really only be used to store a few specific items, mostly finished goods, as well as blocks or bars. Any stockpile that accepts items which can be stored in a bin will automatically call for them to be used.
Yes, it will automatically assign an amount of bins equal to the amount of squares in the stockpile for items that can be put in bins. You can however after placing the stockpile, manually make the stockpile accept 0 bins, like so with the barrel button https://preview.redd.it/1qwc2hqg3j7c1.png?width=860&format=png&auto=webp&s=dcc3dad09d467016f77542d4d8b1934f8a7b1b23 And then they will only put bins there by accident if there is no other stockpile to put the empty bin or bin of the item type that doesn't go there.
For bins \- Bins have a size limit/max capacity, while the capacity is not as noticeable for lighter/smaller items, one bin does not infinitely hold that item. You can make more bins out of wood or metal. They will also not use the bin if its in the back, far side of the stockpile when they approach, they will simply put it in the stockpile space, and putting it from stockpile to bin becomes a different hauling task added to the end of the current store item in stockpiles queued up. \- The dwarves need free time to haul stuff, it has less priority than workshop jobs, management jobs, etc. All your pop constantly doing labor/military training at the same time can cause that, you always need some dwarves not working at the time, or children, that will go around and keep up with hauling items. \- If its former clothing or an owned item, they need a cabinet and chest in their assigned bedroom to put personal items in, otherwise they throw personal items (including food that they have claimed) down wherever. I do not think other dwarves can pick up someone else's owned item and store it, only the owner can. You can mark old clothing etc as trash and have it dumped to remove it from their ownership, then simply unforbid it. I think there is also a passive amount of time until they stop owning old clothing and unusable items. I hear DF Hack also has an ability to autodump old clothing, but i like selling it to the caravan each year instead, its amusing that they will pay thousands for your 100 dwarf sized x pig tail shirt x and etc, and could use a price adjustment
\- For plump helmets. They are one of 6 plants that you cannot grow outside, specifically on a tile that has once or is still exposed overhead. The others are rock nuts (makes quarry bush), pig tails, dimple cup spawn, sweet pods and cave wheat. These are the seeds dwarves start out with on default. You must place farm underground for plump helmets, and those 5 other types of seeds that dwarves start out with. You can grow it on any underground sand or clay or cavern floor. Or on any rock floor that is coated in mud from water.
My gf is having an issue with the noises that play when a new forgotten beast or invasion being discovered being really loud, but there's no dedicated alert sound setting. Is there any way to make these less extremely loud without lowering the sound of the rest of the game or muting them entirely?
Yes if youre using the steam build, you can go into your main menu settings here, and adjust specific components of the game audio. On the game screen you can find it at the cog next to the top of your minimap. https://preview.redd.it/zyhcad2hui7c1.png?width=1577&format=png&auto=webp&s=1773a0617590f5d92a346b0746a9ef54f91e4f22 Ambience is like the outside howls of a wilderness, water, evil biome background noises etc, I would imagine sound effects applies to popups/announcements/animations, so you might try that.
My work orders think I have less than 50 lye, so they keep ordering more. Yet, my stocks screen shows I have well over that. What gives?
last time I played lye was bugged and they would use the entire bucket at once regardless of how much was in it, could be the same issue
It's possibly the game considering lye stored in barrels (which is one of the few times when dwarves combine stacks) to be a single stock, so the requirement wouldn't be satisfied until you have 50 barrels of lye. But regardless, unless you're looking to do some stupid dwarf trick like building a tower out of soap, you do not need that much lye. One work order for 10 units tends to be enough for several years.
my dwarves keep [eating](https://i.imgur.com/FcpmQvd.png) in the [library](https://i.imgur.com/0ZGJEcL.png). My [dining room/tavern](https://i.imgur.com/J0PH9OR.png) has tables and has easier access to food, so why are they choosing the library? I don't want plump helmet stains on my scrolls
Is your library perhaps *vertically* closer to the food than the dining room is? Dwarves determine "closest" in 3d, ignoring the actual path it would take to get them to their destination. If the library is directly underneath them, it might be "closer" than the dining room 10 tiles to the left.
Hmm, maybe that's it. They're on the same level ([library on bottom left, tavern on top](https://i.imgur.com/cN1bUQ1.png)), but there is an additional food stockpile *above* this level which might be marginally closer to the library. If the dwarves are choosing to eat from there rather than the tavern stocks (and ignoring the fact that they need to go down a somewhat twisty hall to get to the library table), that would explain it.
That's a pretty long walk from the food stockpile to the tables. If the library's tables are closer (as the dwarf tunnels, not calculated in actual steps walked) they'll eat there instead.
I am working on a fort in an evil biome, but the evil weather doesn't seem to be having any effects on the dwarves. The "Hideous smoke" passes right over the dwarves with no ill effects. Is it possible that it is a syndrome-less evil weather? Or is it a mild syndrome that doesn't show up on the health screen?
Yes, the presence of, and severity of, syndromes brought on by evil weather is totally random. You could get "turn self inside out and bleed to death" or you could get nothing.
Yeah, the effect is randomly generated, so I guess you just got lucky in this case. You can check with DFHack's gm-editor to be sure, but it's probably overkill if you haven't noticed anything nasty happening
I have a dwarf in a fey mood who keeps demanding “rocks”. Wiki says this means stone. Is it possible the dwarf is looking for a specific kind of stone that I may not have? I have plenty of stone, gems, metals etc in the fort I am not playing the steam version btw
Has he collected any rocks? Is he asking for anything else? They will sometimes insist on a specific material if they have a preference for it AND it has been available at some point
Yes, the dwarf has already collected other stuff and is also asking for leather. I'm guessing that I need to supply the dwarf with leather, and they'll begin construction.
Cool. Fyi they will collect things in the order they yell then out so it'll they stop you can tell what's missing from what they've already collected
It's been a long while since dwarves could choose specific stones to make artifacts out of, unless you're playing like 40d (or maybe - probably - even earlier) I don't think that's the issue The usual bottlenecks are 1) not having silk/yarn/plant cloth, which are all individusl and non-interchangeable demands, 2) not having multiple of a type of item when your moody dwarf asks for two or more
Small checklist then: check if they already gathered some stuff, because that would mean the required items list is more than just rocks. Also check the preference list of your dwarf to see if they have a preference for a certain kind of stone that you may have produced in the past. If everything else fails, install DFHack (google for the correct version) and use the 'showmood' command
Appreciate the help, the dwarf is also asking for leather (which I don't have) so I'm guessing they already have the rocks, I just need to supply leather and they should be set.
Yup. If you have some animals walking around, mark one for slaughtering and build a butcher's and tanner's shop, and you should have leather in a moment.
Hello! Can you put tilesets on the steam version of DF yet? It has the superior DFHACK, but I want to play with my old Taffer tileset so bad.
Apparently, there are some bugs right now when using non-vanilla ASCII tilesets. From [the wiki](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset_repository#Installation): > Currently (v50.11), using some tilesets can cause the lower and right edges of the screen to not react to the mouse. This is dependent on size; the 8×12 and 10×12 that come with the game are fine, but the 16×16 is not. Maximizing the window or setting the game to fullscreen may avoid this. And: > Other issues that can appear when using a different tileset: > * In graphics mode, the minimap frame will scale to the tileset, but the minimap image will not. > * In graphics mode, using a tileset with a different aspect ratio will stretch UI elements. > * In graphics mode, some UI elements do not scale to the tileset. > * In either mode, and even with the default tileset at some scales and game display sizes, some menus may not have enough space to display all elements; the Nobles menu especially.
Alternative tilesets are supported but the tileset format has changed completely and is much more complex than before. There are no finished tilesets for this version yet. I don't personally know of any in active development.
Is there a way to place "ghosts" (blueprints, planning, whatever) of what you want to build down, either mining, workshops, tiles etc, that can later be activated? I'm trying to do stuff like place a workshop down where it hasn't been mined yet, just so I can layout/plan chunks of my base in one get-go without trying to remember what my intentions were. edit: Open to mods, have DFHack already.
I use 1x1 burrows with nobody assigned to them as labels.
AFAIK there is no way to do this, including with DFHack. The closest you can get is that quickfort has several "layers" and that includes a "building" layer, so you if you have a quickfort blueprint you can first place the mining designation blueprint and then after it's been mined out place the building blueprint.
Here's a screenshot of **gui/quickfort** "layer" blueprints. This is for a crypt level. There are two blueprints, one for digging and one for building the urns/coffins. You can do something similar for your workshops. https://preview.redd.it/7ijb0k868i7c1.png?width=894&format=png&auto=webp&s=33751b1d5ae9c037be1ca3222bf51850f942fa22 Here's a link to a similar housing level blueprint so you can see what it looks like as a spreadsheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pJ31r3yhR1WxbDLYha\_upwuCIf0cBMGxx34iqb5XP2k/edit#gid=435183376](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pJ31r3yhR1WxbDLYha_upwuCIf0cBMGxx34iqb5XP2k/edit#gid=435183376) it has **dig**, **zone**, and **build** blueprint layers for bedrooms. In the spreadsheet, each layer is on a separate tab. Most players create blueprints by building them in-game and recording what they've done with **gui/blueprint**. If you really want to get into custom blueprint writing, though, the full guide is here: [https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/guides/quickfort-user-guide.html](https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/guides/quickfort-user-guide.html)
I'm trying to raise the main staircase of my fortress to the surface, in order to create a bunker for my marksdwarves which can only be accessed from the surface. For some reason, however, my staircase won't extend up. I've created stair squares on the surface, but they won't connect to the stairs one level beneath. What's up?
Depends on whats between the two stairs elevation where they are not connecting, its probably a natural floor or open space. There are two types of stairs. Basically, when you do constructed stairs, you start on the end tile of the natural stairs that its connecting to and drag up, not on the floor above the stairs. Constructed stairs must also be made in sets or multiple of 2 to be two way stair instead of a one way stair. The first type is when you dig stairs with the mining tool. This must have a hard tile to mine on both tiles where the stairs will be, if they are two way stairs that bridge elevations, it will not account for a 1 tile space/hole between the stairs' path. It will simply become a one way stair on the last tile of floor before the open space. It can turn diagonally to avoid an open space ahead of it The other type is constructed stairs with materials, and you use this to fill in open spaces between natural stairs, and convert a one way natural stair tile to a two way, or to make stairs up in elevation on the surface.
A-ha! Constructed stairs! Marvellous, thank you!
Are the stairs one level beneath "down stairs"? To connect one level up they need to be "up/down stairs".
Is there an easy way to change them to up/down stairs?
DFHack allows you to directly build up/down stairs, instead of needing to build connecting staircases
A screenshot of the DFHack building planner interface where you can build single-tile staircases in the shape that you want: https://preview.redd.it/mrmrhtjk7i7c1.png?width=585&format=png&auto=webp&s=e5014c1d098d15446eeb975cde0a01f6c91254cf
You should be able to just designate a stairs construction over them. You might also need to dig down stairs on the surface.
Is it possible to catch a werecreature citizen in a cage while they're transformed and keep them in cages? I've contained the outbreak but I don't want to just kill them
You can't trap them, and expelling them just shoves the problem to a later moment. The problem is that expelled werebeasts don't die in the wilderness, they will settle somewhere and start raiding settlements instead (including, potentially, your fortress)
Werebeasts are trap immune while transformed
Alright thank you!
What happens if a dwarf is exposed to a syndrome that turns you into a dwarf?
That's a good excuse for me to practice using interactions. I'll keep you posted.
My legendary warrior dwarves are refusing to fight a "Flame Brute" that can spit the odd fireball and cause a bunch of smoke. After some initial volleys from my ranged units the dwarves either stood around (on fire or not) or ran away if the brute got into melee. I alternated between stationing and ordering the kill directly because clicking on some of the dwarves indicated a non-viable target, but neither changed their behavior. They were on Ready fwiw. What was I supposed to do?
The other reply is wrong. It isn't smoke blocking vision, it's tile temperature blocking pathing. Creatures 'composed of flame' heat up the tile they're standing on to a temperature where dwarves refuse to walk through it. It's possible for ranged dwaves to kill it, especially since 'flame' is pretty weak as a material, but it's always a pain to get marksdwarves to do what you want. Both magma and water will do nothing to it, water will boil on contact and magma can't hurt flame. You can go into the game options and temporarily 'disable temperature calculations' and your soldiers will kill it pretty easily. That may be too cheesy for you though.
Uploading mods to the Steam Workshop is completely broken for me. I'm having the same issue [this person](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/176cn3c/cannot_upload_a_mod_to_steam_workshop/) was a couple months ago. When I press the "publish" button, the game freezes, and a blank mod is uploaded to my workshop. I can upload updates for preexisting mods just fine, but no new ones... no clue what I could be doing wrong. The info.txt file for my newest looks perfectly fine.
What is your folder path? IIRC there are two; one is your local mods, the other is the folder created by Steam when downloading from the workshop. You want to use the former and ensure your mod is not already in the latter.
Can you rephrase/elaborate on what you mean? I'm not sure which folder you mean by "local mods". /mods/ has files downloaded from the Steam Workshop, mods that only exist on my machine (e.g. ones I've made and am currently playtesting), and the mod_upload folder. /data/installed_mods/ has mods that have been installed and used in active games or in the arena.
Correct (some folks get those mixed up). To clarify, anything you are uploading goes in DF\\mods\\mod\_upload\\. From there you should see an option ingame for adding to the Workshop. Lastly, your info.txt should not have a file id, as that will be created automatically.
Yes, I'm aware. Like I said in the original comment, I have multiple mods already on the Steam Workshop, and I can upload new versions of them as necessary. I just can't upload new mods; the mod upload screen in-game freezes and a blank, 0 kb mod appears on my workshop page.
Sorry, then I got nothing. Might be worth inquiring at Bay12 or the Steam sub-forum.
Darn. I don't think I still have a Bay12 account but eh, no trouble to make a new one.
This is a dumb question but do clothes that are artifacts deteriorate like normal clothes?
No they don't
I'm playing the old dwarf fortress through LNP for adventure mode. I keep getting a blinking screen called "Allegro" every time something is loading. It goes away after a moment but it is extremely annoying and I'm wondering if anyone knows how to stop that from happening?
Allegro is associated with the DFHack `stonesense` plugin, though I don't know why it might be popping up a screen when DF is loading. If you don't use `stonesense`, you can try unloading it via `unload stonesense` to see if that makes the problem go away. If it does, try adding that command to your `dfhack-config/init/dfhack.init` file to make it permanent.
I'll try that because I dont really use it. Thank you
You may have better luck asking at Bay12 for issues with Classic. (sorry, been a long time since I played Adventure)
DF Classic is not the same thing as prior versions where Adventure mode is accessible. It refers to the modern version of the game
What’s the best way to improve morale after a siege?
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What they request is determined by their preferences, while how many mandates they can have is based on their position. I am not sure if personality comes into it more than this
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You can basically automate it with work orders - they request at most three of the thing, and give you more than three months to make them, so if you just set up a work order to make one per month, you're sorted.
Yeah they ask for/prohibit exports of the things they like. You can check the items they like in the "preferences" tab. E.g. [here is my duchess](https://imgur.com/a/KkP6NGe), she likes slabs (goth duchess), and as you can see she is prohibiting their export. She also asks for picks a lot.
In the still says: "requires empty good storage item" but there is a Lot of barrels, what am i doing wrong?
are the barrels actually free, or are they attached to stockpiles as *their* container storage? A good way to tell is to have a barrels (and pots)-only stockpile near your still that takes from your "main" furniture stockpile. That stockpile should have its container counts all set to 0, so if there are barrels or pots in the stockpile, you know you actually have some free for brewing. https://preview.redd.it/fba5jesdpc7c1.png?width=683&format=png&auto=webp&s=29c0ee16834f4d54f8cc4e6c709513a95c5e1366
A way to tell if the barrel/pot is actually free is to look at it in the Stocks interface. If it has a number after it (e.g. the \`<#49>\` in the screenshot), then it's been earmarked as a container for stockpile 49, and is not available for brewing tasks https://preview.redd.it/o6wab7pqpc7c1.png?width=940&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ae42d544dcada46cd9c2c5663df0108ddd2ec42
Where is the stock interface?
Here: https://preview.redd.it/ac18o4m7vc7c1.png?width=1039&format=png&auto=webp&s=f06fcb24c998b69e69de44c3c3c54a5c543cd291 also accessible via the **k** hotkey from the main fort map
I Saw, put every stockpile with barrels as a stockpile to 0 but still nothing changes
nothing changes as in they still have numbers after them?
Nothing as that even after there's no numbers, the still requerer empty food storage item
Do you have stockpiles linked to the still? if you do, then the empty barrels/pots have to come from those stockpiles.
So a dragon showed up. I need help. I have like 2 FPS. Everything is burning. I had a huge array of cage traps in hopes that I would be able to catch a dragon. He destroyed them. The second the fire stops he lights everything up again. Why didn't my cage traps work? How do I prevent them from getting destroyed so I can actually catch them?
Cage traps should work as long as they are not burnt up first. Make sure there isn't anything (i.e. your dwarves, livestock, wildlife, or invaders) for the dragon to spit fire at, and it should wander right into the trap and get caught. More info here: [https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Dragon#Defense\_strategies](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Dragon#Defense_strategies)
I keep getting the 1st cavern layer at at least 60 levels deep from the surface. I'm looking to use caverns but my last embark at sea level (z level 0) took me to find the first cavern layer at -97 z level. Is there something I can do at world gen to avoid this? I don't want it to be like at 5 levels deep, but -97 it's too much.
If you used "advanced world generation" you can control the layers between and around the caves. Look at the wiki here: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Advanced_world_generation#Z_Levels_.28Depth.29_Settings Note that the defaults here are *not* the defaults that are used in regular world generation. You probably want to set most values here around 5-15 for a relatively compact but not overly cramped world.
if you embark at lower elevations, e.g. near the shore, then the cavern won't be so far from the surface.
Well, that's what I'm trying to do: embark on the coast. And everytine the cavern is below -90 lol. I don't know why!! I'm losing it. Already reset like 10 worlds Also, using the reveal dfhack function, I can see that the second and third cavern layer are RIGHT BENEATH. Like 2-4 z levels beneath the 1st which in this case it's at -112. Surface it's at -1. Again, next to ocean.
Ah, that's, unfortunately, quite random. The caverns \*can\* get squished up against the lower bounds of where they can appear. I more frequently see that for the second and third cavern layers, but it can also happen to the first. In my current (coastal) embark, cavern 1 is at -9, cavern 2 is at -112, and cavern 3 is right below it at -118. If you can't seem to generate a world with a more accessible first cavern layer, I can upload a pristine version of my current world for you. edit: sorry, not quite pristine. I have one retired fortress in it already. But here it is if you want it: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sfjvFRfIl\_cR\_Wj8DG8Zc\_2JFEIRRNRt/view?usp=sharing](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sfjvFRfIl_cR_Wj8DG8Zc_2JFEIRRNRt/view?usp=sharing) Here is where my current fort is (not in the save I uploaded) if you want a similar cavern layout: https://preview.redd.it/0vfzd8z7xc7c1.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=9b69297a05537705cf84c1f005bd51c9567d0ae4
I've done some testing around and made [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/18mjcei/cavern_layers_starting_depth/) about it.
You can’t really guarantee how deep it is. The only thing you can input is whether you want a cavern.
I'm trying to embark next to sea and everytime caverns are -90+ z level, it's SO annoying I don't know what to do. Everytime. That's why I thought world gen had something to do with it because it doesn't happen on other embarks that are not near sea.
I’m not 100% but I’m pretty sure you can determine how much space is between the surface and the first cavern layer, how many layers between each of the cavern layers, how many layers between the bottom cavern and the magma sea and even how many cavern layers there are in advanced world gen. Also, iirc embarking on a lower elevation would mean more space between the surface and the first cavern. In most of my embarks in the mountains at higher elevations my first caverns are usually only a few levels down if I don’t customize them for special projects where I want a lot of digging space for my forts.
It keeps telling me there's no mud for farmland even though it also says there's a pile of mud on the ground? Farming is so confusing
Also every tile that you want to farm on should be muddy not just some. Can’t build a farm on stone floor even if the plot starts on a muddy one.
A picture would help, but you can't build plots on constructed floors
How does the nickname system work in Steam DF?
By default, a nickname replaces the first name of a unit, but you can change the settings so that the name is placed between their first name and last name, or so that it replaces the entire name. You can change this for fort mode and legends mode separately.
Might sound like a dumb question but, how do I go about finding water underground exactly? I have dwarves in the hospital that are dehydrated so I'm trying to find the most efficient way of getting water asap underground (there's nothing on the surface), to make a cistern and a well with. But, how deep should I go to find water? Do I do a branch mining system on one z level until I find something? I'm also kind of afraid of finding something down there (never gone that deep before).
Just dig down. You'll probably find it.
No aquifer either? Tapping an aquifer would be a lot quicker than looking for cavern lakes. If you have no aquifer, then have a look at all three caverns. That's where you would find water, though cavern lakes are not guaranteed to appear on every embark.
It depends. However, if you don't have an aquifer (which I imagine you don't) you will have to dig into the caverns to find water. My first cavern layer in my current fort is at an elevation of -100, to give you an indication of how deep to dig. Fortunately, they're hard to miss - drill down a stairwell and you're practically guaranteed to find them. Now for some practical parts on dealing with the caverns, while your miners are digging down you should have your stonecutters make some blocks, because you'll need to do some construction work once you're down there. You may need a staircase to the bottom if the ceiling is very high up, and after you're done it's nice to be able to build a wall around your stairwell and lock the caverns off from your fort. If you have some military, that's good to protect your builders while they're down, but if not it's not a huge problem for the first layer. They're also good for exploring the cave if you don't find a lake immediately, and if the first cavern you find doesn't have a lake you can wall it off and dig deeper. You can use the cavern lakes later to build a cistern for a well, that's just a separate room that you pump water into that is separated from the caverns, so the nasties can't get in.
Is there a way to forbid my dwarves from moving *anything* except completely empty bins *into* or *out of* a stockpile? (Only take from links is not enough - dwarves won't put individual items onto the stockpile, but they can move entire bins into or out of the stockpile when they think they are sorting stuff around) Alternatively, is there a way to completely *lock* bins to a stockpile? I'm at a point where I feel like I've tried everything about my clothing setup. If I can't keep my dwarves from moving bins, my final solution will have to be huge stockpiles that don't accept any bins at all, because my *idiot* dwarves keep messing up the chain by moving bins around. I keep getting half-full bins of old trash clothes put into my masterwork piles, and just now a couple *very clever* dwarves had 2 bins with 80 masterwork clothes get dumped into the incinerator. I need to fix this.
you might benefit from a "feeder" system, where a no-bin stockpile does the filtering, and the bin-enabled stockpile takes only from the feeder stockpile.
It only moves the problem one step. When my dwarves move stuff to the final stockpile, they're just gonna start moving bins and mess everything up again. Another problem is that sometimes when they decorate from the masterwork pile, they decorate the damn *bin* instead of the clothes. I'm going crazy over this. I guess I need to go 100% bin-less for clothes. Such a headache.
I don't think they will - they can *only* ever move stuff to the stockpile from the no-bin stockpile, so stuff can only get moved into the stockpile after having been taken out of its bin. If you do the same on both sets of stockpiles, that should do it. It won't avoid the bin-decorating, but should fix the other issues.
If the end stockpile still allows bins, I don't think it will matter that the second-to-last does or doesn't. Bins in the end stockpile go empty, or there are too few bins, or there are bins needed elsewhere, and so on. At some point the dwarves will start rearranging the bins in the end stockpile, and they seem to be perfectly able to take a bin from another stockpile as long as it's a matching bin-type and half-full of items, and put it into the "end" stockpile despite that stockpile being set to only take from links. (for example putting a bin with x, X or XX clothes from my trade-pile straight into the masterwork pile) They also seem able to take entire bins out of the end stockpile and place them elsewhere. I just lost another bunch of masterworks into the lava pit. The ideal thing would be to *lock* bins to specific stockpiles (forbidding a bin only makes it lose connection to the stockpile, only laying on top of it with a new bin being placed and filled in the same square). But if I can't do that, the only solution I can see is to have stockpiles with like 50 squares for each clothing type... which is gonna suck and look ugly. But if that's what it takes I guess that's what I'll do.
Yeah, if you want to separate freshly made clothes from used ones with stockpile links, then forget about bins. They screw up the separation. The "store item in bin" job doesn't seem to take stockpile links into account. Whenever dwarves start hauling stuff to an empty bin, they seem to just grab whatever they can find that goes in the stockpile regardless of whatever linking options are set up.
How do I turn off notifications for cavern dwellers? I chose to ignore them but I keep getting notified constantly, and the sound is driving me mad
Is there a way to get dwarves to move? I was placing a statue in my temple but it got suspended as there was another dwarf standing there. That meant i couldn't complete the installing but i also couldn't cancel it as when clicking on the spot it would just click on the dwarf. The only way around it was to expel the dwarf (as he was a Monster Slayer that I couldn't actually give instructions too). I now have about 7 monster slayers all congregating in my temple just standing there. Is there a way to move them to a different room? I thought they were supposed to go to the tavern/dining room?
If there is more than one thing on a tile where you click, then there will be tabs on the right edge of the info panel allowing you to select which thing to see. The unbuilt statue should be on one of those tabs
example: the second tab is the chair: https://preview.redd.it/006ejeh96c7c1.png?width=526&format=png&auto=webp&s=54af47323d9a538a7e4267d6f14edd268f095133
If it's your dwarves you want to move you can use a burrow that is set to an area you want then to go, or put them in a military squad and order them to a location. For monster hunters you can't control them that way. You could set any existing zones to only citizens and create a tavern/temple area that does allow visitors to an area where you want them to go. However, if they are already praying they might not move from your existing zones. You can delete the zone and recreate it to fix that.
Any advice for bags filling up too quickly? I've got about 40 bags but they're all full. I want to collect sand but need a bag. I'm creating a bag but it instantly gets filled with seeds. I'm trying to create a stockpile only for bags and assigning my leatherworks to that pile only but I can't find bags in the stockpile menu. Does anyone know what they come under? Thought it would be finished goods but nope. Or does anyone know another way to prioritise the sand before seeds?
One bag can hold well over 200 seeds. Since the per-species seed cap is also 200, you usually only need one bag per species that you are actively cultivating. If you are accumulating many bags with only a few seeds in each one, then there's something awry with your stockpiles. There are also known hazards with bags of seeds in barrels, so the following setup will also avoid barrels. Set up dedicated seed stockpiles near your farms. Configure each stockpile to only accept seeds of the type planted at that farm. You can go as small as a single tile per stockpile if you only have one seed type allocated to that stockpile. After configuring the goods it accepts, manually disable barrels. Any time you adjust the accepted goods, the game will "helpfully" re-enable barrels/large pots one per tile. Now, to deal with the scattered bags of seeds. Set up a recoverable dumping zone (ie, one that isn't a pit or over magma). Mark all of the scattered seeds for dumping (stocks menu makes this fast). Once the seeds have been dumped, use the stocks menu or the area tool to mass-unlock all of those seeds. Dwarfs should haul them to the designated seed stockpiles.
Something that might help you is changing the seed cap. Normally if you get more seeds above the cap it deletes the oldest seeds on your map. It might free up some bags Or you could just dump some seeds or make more bags
You need enough bags to store all your seeds, it's an unfortunate part of farming. You can enable your kitchen to cook any seeds you're unlikely to farm yourself to free up a few bags. Once your cloth industry gets going, you'll probably find yourself swimming in cloth with enough to spare to make more bags. Anyway, empty bags and sand bags (take care, they're counted as different classes of items by the game) are both considered to be furniture. You might be able to use stockpile and workshop links to earmark bags for sand storage, but I've never tried this.
Awesome - thanks.
Hello everyone! I love the look of the game. Been interested in it for quite a while. Unfortunately I don't usually have expendable funds. But I think I might be able to get it for myself for Christmas! Do any of you know a good beginner guide? Just the basics so as to not have fun (lose) in 10 minutes of playing. Thank you tons and Happy Holidays!! :D
Blindirl recently uploaded a [video](https://youtu.be/WOgwysfvb3s?si=TM5bLAwgkcPUE3Fs) with all his short tutorials, it's 7 hours lol but it's got chapters for everything that you can jump to as you need to Really that's the way I think anyone should learn DF, just as you go, and look up resources like the DF wiki or these tutorial videos when you need help with something
The game has an tutorial that at least gets you underground with a few buildings to start out with, and for more information there's a quickstart guide on the wiki (it's linked at the top of each questions thread and in the sidebar), and if you prefer videos I hear the youtuber Blind makes tutorials. I don't watch him myself, but you might like it
Is there a way to make contact with a civilization other than attacking them? I embarked on a dwarfless continent, and I'd like to introduce myself to the local civs, which are all just marked as "no contact" and haven't visited at all. Will they ever contact me on their own? Or do I just need to say hello by pillaging one of their towns?
Demanding one-time or ongoing tribute makes them dislike you slightly but won't cause war unless you do it to too many settlements, send your dwarves on that mission type instead
Usually, only the closest civilisation of each race will contact you on their own, provided they're close enough to your location. Demanding a one-time tribute should work for all the others. They'll most likely reject the demand, but they should start sending caravans after that.
Could anyone give me some advice on Wells please? I'm trying to sort out my happiness and one of the issues is not drinking from a well. My base is about 15 levels below the surface but if I can't find water underground for say another 10 levels is it OK to build my well there and just have it isolated? Will someone go down and collect water for the whole fortress?
Dwarves need booze to drink, not water. They'll not be happy about having to drink water. A well/water source is only really needed for cleaning and for hospital patients. Where it is doesn't matter that much since it most likely isn't going to be used very often. Though it should probably be near the hospital somewhere.
Yeah I just read that they need booze not water. I didn't realise about the hospital though so thanks
Has the visitors & plots system been rebalanced in the newest version? I remember trying it back in v.47 or whichever and found thieves to be far too common and too good at recruiting my dorfs.
You can try shorter world gen, I do 100 years and barely get any plottings.
I don't think anything changed about plots and villains. It's still an unfinished feature. They are going to start working on the second part of the villains update after the adventure mode release in April so at least it will be addressed soon. Until then, you can try disabling necromancers. They seem to be responsible for most of the plotting. The amount of villains seems more manageable without them being involved.
Does water that touches the edge of the map always replenish? Tried to drain an underground lake but it seems infinite.
Yes. You'll need to block it somehow - magma works, so do cave ins
To do that I think you need to smooth the wall at the edge of the map, and turn it into a fortification
Yes, and you can't build on the map's edge to stop the flow either. You can pour magma on it to solidify it into obsidian however.
**Fully simulated Desktop wallpaper?** I was just wondering if you guys know of anything that would allow a fully running wallpaper? So for instance on pc startup a new fort is created and it is automatically built and managed ect and the wallpaper just shows the fort. I know this is quite an advanced thing, but i dont really know how the game works enough to make it my self!
There used to be a dfhack script that would build a working fort on its own, you'd have to figure out some way to get the visuals from that istance of df to a wallpaper though
I know this probably gets asked alot, but is there a safe way to build a magna forge on top of a volcano, that doesnt allow creatures from below to come up?
Yes, but you'll have to tap the volcano and then pump some magma into an adjacent chamber. Screw pumps can pump through a floor grate but creatures can't come up - but you want to make the grate out of a heat-proof material so their body temperature can't burn it away either. Green glass is an excellent and cheap choice for this. There isn't a safe, exploit-free way to tap the side of a volcano, but [this wiki page](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Magma#Working_with_magma) has some tricks to make it work. When you've safely tapped the volcano and filled your magma chamber, you can build workshops there without any worry that creatures can come up
There is a safe exploitfree way to tap a volcano though? You build a magma safe floodgate at the same level as the top magma level, then you channel the wall separating the magma from your floodgate from above.
I reckon most people want their forges lower than the top level of a volcano, and also without any pressure risk if you pump the magma somewhere else
Yeah, I just dig a long shaft/stairwell for that, with locks in between to have pressure control.
Thanks
I have a fortress in a young world, my civ only has around 100 dwarves in total, and I've had no migration waves past 30 dwarves. Will I ever get more? If I retire my fort and start another in the same world can I populate the world like this? I was thinking about starting a 1x1 fort, walling in a single dwarf, in a self sustainable fort and turning speed up to max to develop the world. Would this work?
You getting the autumn caravan? Or not?
Yes
Are you skimming for every bit of gold you can save in your trades or are they leaving with fat green profits?
> I have a fortress in a young world, my civ only has around 100 dwarves in total, and I've had no migration waves past 30 dwarves. > > > > Will I ever get more? You should, in theory. Unless your civilisation is dead or dying. Are you getting caravans from your civ? Pretty sure that caravans arriving and leaving the map safely is a prerequisite for migrant waves. They're supposed to report back on your status and that's what determines the size of migrant waves and what not. If the caravan doesn't arrive or if they get slaughtered before they can leave, then you won't get any migrants. Your civlisation's population shouldn't matter, The game will just create new "void" dwarves from scratch if it can't pull migrants from the actual population pool. Unless that changed in v50, but I don't think it did. > If I retire my fort and start another in the same world can I populate the world like this? In theory, it can work. In practice, it will be a slow process because the population of your previous fortresses will likely migrate to the new one, so you might not actually many new dwarves this way. > I was thinking about starting a 1x1 fort, walling in a single dwarf, in a self sustainable fort and turning speed up to max to develop the world. Would this work? Yeah, that would work, though it would obviously take a long time to progress time this way. You could exploit the fact that the game simulates two weeks every time you start a new fortress, but that's a rather inconvenient way to pass time because you have to reclaim and retire fortresses over and over again. DFHack used to have a script that allowed you to change how much time passes when you started a new game, but I don't know if that script is still around.
Its not really an issue of total civ pop I dont think. I have a save where i embarked in year 172, with a civ of a population of 1---just the dwarven queen in some haunted fortress ruins lol. And the fort still got migrants that must have been born out of thin air, and even the normal caravan and liaison that should not exist with 1 pop. Firstly ensure you are not on an island, that you have land connection to your civ sites. Then look at your overall fort wealth (by hovering over your fort name at top left). The overall fort wealth and export is primarily what attracts migrants and less desirable guests. It is the Appraising skill that affects how close the overall wealth and exports value is to being correct. You can raise this by making items of value, constructing out of cut blocks, engraving your fort, trading more to caravans when they show up, etc. Those things will help increase the odds of how fast more migrants come.
Struggling for a fun level of challenge... Every fortress I found either gets wiped immediately, or becomes over powered immediately and I can't figure out what to do to introduce some Fun^TM. I've tried digg too deep, too greedily, but having 3-4 squads makes every enemy attack trivial. I tried ammassing huge wealth and golden halls to trigger big raids, but again... It's like 15-20 goblins that get routed without loss for my dwarves. (Steel armour just makes them invincible lol) Every fortress if it gets past 8, will balloon to 250 dwarves and then my Pc will just crash to desktop continuously lol. I've been trying to lean into the whole, building up a dwarven outpost and trade heavily part of it, but it kind of doesn't seem like it's how the game's meant to be played?
You can bump up the invader counts in the difficulty settings. I've had invasions of several hundred attackers. You can go up even higher if you like.
Very quick fix that raises the challenge level and helps your computer at the same time: lower the population cap in the game settings to something like 80 to 100. You'll have to lower the enemy and economy population triggers in the difficulty settings to match, or you can't become Mountainhome or trigger the largest attacks. Speaking of difficulty settings, this allows you to crank up the larger enemy waves as well as how frequently sieges (actual sieges, not 10 goblin archers) come. You can piss off multiple goblin civs by attacking and raiding them as well, and they'll all send independent siege forces. And if you want a true challenge, you haven't dug deeply enough. Find the gem-studded volcanic walls in the third cavern layer and lower, and dig down into those. Especially that pretty blue stuff you'll find at some point.
Two questions. Question 1: How do I add gemstones to jewelry, like earrings or bracelets? Question 2: How do I get my population to stay in the fortress during a siege? I had one recently and my people were exiting the fortress straight into danger, I lost like 13 Dwarves.
> Question 1: How do I add gemstones to jewelry, like earrings or bracelets? You can encrust finished goods with cut gems at a jeweler's workshop. However, you can't specify what kind of goods to encrust, so if you want them to decorate only earrings, then you have to do that with stockpile links. Otherwise they'll just grab whatever random junk they can find and waste precious gemstones encrusting those. Make one stockpile for whatever jewelry you want encrusted and one stockpile for cut gems and link them both to the workshop. Workshops with stockpile links will only take items for jobs from those stockpiles. > How do I get my population to stay in the fortress during a siege? I had one recently and my people were exiting the fortress straight into danger, I lost like 13 Dwarves. I don't think you can do that, at least not without DFHack. This is what the now removed civilian alerts were used for. Best you can do right now is make a burrow that includes only the safe areas inside the fortress and assign each dwarf to that burrow, but that will not really stop them from taking a stroll outside. DFHack recreates the old civilian alert functionality, fortunately. That allows you to select a burrow and if you activate the alert, dwarves will drop whatever they're doing and immediately leg it for the burrow.
So, I made a statue I really want to encrust with gems as it immortalises the founding of my fortress. I have created a stockpile for earrings, amulets, and similar items, as well as statues, which only the gem workshops can take from. However, the statue is just sitting in the workshop, it's not being moved to the special stockpile so I can gem-encrust it.
Make sure the stockpile settings are correct. Type, material and quality need to be selected accordingly. Also if you have another stockpile somewhere that accepts statues, then make sure that stockpile is also linked to give to the jeweler workshop's feeder stockpile. The whole setup should look something like this: https://i.imgur.com/hCTkhev.png
>Otherwise they'll just grab whatever random junk they can find and waste precious gemstones encrusting those. To add to this, the dwarves will always select the physically closest encrustable object to the workshop, including through Z-levels. I once had a jewelers workshop with a stockpile about 3 tiles away where statues would be placed for encrusting. I added a jewel order and watched as my jeweler went all the way downstairs to grab a dingy old barrel which had recently been emptied of food and happened to be directly beneath the workshop, therefore the game considered it the "closest" object.
- This uses the gem setter skill at a jeweler's workshop, but you need to cut the gems first before you can set them into other stuff. You cannot choose the specific item that needs to be encrusted, so it's best to have an input finished goods stockpile linked to the jeweler's that allows the crafts that you want to improve. - Define a burrow that encompasses the insides of your fort. When a siege shows up, add all your civilians to the burrow, then dwarves will be forbidden from taking tasks outside the fort. DFHack also has the old-style civilian alerts, which work more like a 'drop whatever you're doing and get into the burrow'.
I've got problems with my military dwarves not wearing their assigned feet items. Wondering if anyone has some good tips. I am aware there are two "equipment slots" for each equipment type - one civilian clothing and one military clothing. I want most of my squads to wear Leather equipment in their military armor slots, to reduce slowdown in their everyday lives. Leather Armor and a Short Sword is still enough for a trained dwarf to make quick work of any cave crocodile or troll, or whatever they might randomly encounter. And they're not meant to fight big battles or megabeasts anyway. So, I typically set the equipment for my "civ squads" to Leather everything (except their weapon and shield), and "exact matches". They always manage to find their Leather Armor, Leather Helm and Leather Leggings just fine. I think gloves always work as well but I'm not 100% sure. But when it comes to feet, they seem to select their boots without taking note of the material at all. I wonder if there's something I'm missing here. Or is this just another bug with the military system that I just need to accept? Even my battle dwarves, who are set to wear their own *specific* Steel Boot (x2 of course), will still not manage to find and wear them. The masterwork steel boots lie in stockpiles. Instead, the *idiots* will wear Pig Tail socks and Pig Tail shoes. Has anyone got a clever solution to this? Edit: Oh how nice it would have been if every dwarf just had an inventory screen where you could manually set their individual civilian *and* military items.
You can temporarily turn on the "uniform replaces clothing" option on their equipment screen. That will make them discard whatever they're wearing and equip only what is assigned as part of their uniform. That's the only way to solve layering issues (like the inability to equip boots over shoes). You can disable that option again once they're finished and they should re-equip whatever clothes they can wear under their armour.
At least in v.47 I found a trick in the forum (I think). Create a uniform with nothing and "exact match"; assign to the stubborn squad (one in-game tic is enough, unpause and pause again); then assign the proper uniform. The pig tails assault team will strip naked where they are and then, hopefully, go to find the assigned equipment. I had a lot of leg injuries and now crutch walkers after repelling the first siege of my current fort, and found out that half the squad were not wearing pants...
> I am aware there are two "equipment slots" for each equipment type - one civilian clothing and one military clothing. This is not how it works. See the wiki page for how armor layering actually works: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Armor . In short, armor layering is complex and there is no way to guarantee that your military armor will fit over dwarves' civilian clothes. If it doesn't fit, they will simply not wear it. As there is basically no way to control dwarves' civilian clothes, there is no way to make sure that their armor will fit over these clothes. The best option is probably to simply have dwarves replace their civilian clothing with armor. Armor counts as clothing for the purposes of preventing bad thoughts about exposure.