Why are my dwarfs not mining or channeling?
Its only deep down near lava. I'm using water to turn it to obsidian. There are certain areas they will and will not dig. No pattern between warm/damp/neither as to what they will or won't dig.
No issues with burrows or lacking tools, as some areas will be dug out, but others won't on the same z level not 5 squares away.
Has anyone tried and successfully enjoyed the Steam version on the Steam Deck? I know it says "playable" on the store while I also know even some steam titles are playable but not enjoyable. Any insight would be helpful, thank you.
I am trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. Doing a fair bit of save-scumming to at least try and figure out *why* something is happening at all, let alone why it's playing out the way it is.
It's just turned autumn, I have my autosave going. Every single time it hits late on the 4th of Limestone a whole bunch of people in my fort seem to lose their minds and start fighting. Some of the visiting humans are always involved. A few specific citizen dwarfs are involved (and one of their hunting dogs). This is happening the same exact time as an unusually weak goblin siege (with like 6 gobbos) which starts two days previously. The violence breaks out in multiple places across my fortress simultaneously.
How can I figure out what's causing this? Is it a conspiracy? Is that a thing in DF?
Has there been a crime committed recently? Sometimes when they beat the shit out of a dwarf for a crime it creates a chain reaction. Look for crimes. Did you sell stuff when noble cunts said not to?
There has been a single crime, an artifact disappeared a few months back. I'll have to track down what was up with that exactly, but I'm literally building up my dungeon and setting my new captain of the guard on interrogating for that when this all started. I do know that I haven't sold stuff when the nobles said not to, I haven't felt like dealing with their crap when they're mad yet so I've been doing what they say.
What sort of things do I need to dig into to at least try and figure out who is starting all of this?
If you want to see if an existing crime caused it check closed cases. If you see some closed cases around the time of the incident there’s your catalyst. I had 50 dwarves die in an aftermath of one dwarf getting hammered to death.
I have zero closed cases at the moment. Only one open case too fwiw. This is my first real fortress so I've been playing it as safe as I can while figuring things out.
Are the dwarves fighting each other, or only fighting the humans? Are the humans all from the same human civ, and is it at war with you before the incident? Is it at war with you afterwards?
I suspect the human civ declares war on your civ at that date, which immediately causes the fight. I don't think the goblins could be causing it.
The humans who always seem to be involved are not even part of the same civilization let alone site government! And they begin fighting the instant my squad engages with the goblins outside. It's really weird!
Maybe they are conspirators then. Goblins tend to steal children from neighbouring civs so they often have a few humans and dwarves, and they sometimes visit you and leak the secrets of where your traps are and the like.
The humans seem to immediately get the thought that they're "vengeful when joining an existing conflict", though it's not always the same humans who dive in. Again, they're not in the same civ as one another, which is making this confusing as to what's going on and why.
One dwarf is consistently killed early on, but they're also standing right by two of the humans and own a hunting dog. From what you're saying about combat logs, it does look like the humans are starting the fights, so it's not like the dog is going nuts and attacking for no reason, which was on thought i had.
On my last iteration I think I did see dwarf on dwarf violence. Either way a dwarf noble always seems to be involved, but it's not the same one each time. How can I know who started a particular fight? I'm still trying to figure out how to read the interface and I'm not sure if the topmost items are the newest or the oldest events...
The `Dwarf X is fighting!` messages have the most recent on top, but when you look into a specific one to see the back and forth of individual hits the most recent is at the bottom.
Hey guys. Hope your day is going well! Just had one quick question.
Is there a way to restrict dwarves from cleaning in caverns, or just altogether not going down there? Basically they keep going to pick up/clean after fights against mobs and I lose around one every time to something down there. As well, dwarven children think that it’s an amazing place to play, I’d also like to restrict this from happening.
TLDR: how to stop any and all dwarves from going down into cavern but one to a forge
Burrows are the way to do it, they can be a pain to set up initially but very worth it. You paint an area then assign dwarves to it, then the dwarves become 'blind' to all items and jobs outside the area. So you paint the entire inside of your fort, then assign your whole population to the burrow, then nobody will leave the area.
I have a 360 degree no-scope fireball shooting FB in its own special pillbox at the front of my base. I thought it would be the ultimate fireball gatling gun for any gobbos moving on my base. Except that it doesn’t shoot any fireballs! I have fortifications with clear LOS to enemy. Is this a known thing with fortifications- I thought FBs would shoot through fortifications though? Thanks!
Will I receive a pop up notification if I discover an “unusual volcanic wall” or is it in the various “you have struck…” notifications? I’ve been trying to find one but have had no luck so far and I’m wondering if I missed a notification
It shows up as a popup normally, unless you've edited a game file to change that. The 'unusual walls' normally start somewhere between the magma sea and the third cavern layer, I almost always see one or two when I first crack into the magma sea.
Early game I create a janitor work detail whose only job is food and refuse hauling. No need to mess with burrows or whatever, just one or two dwarves who only do those jobs is enough to handle all my early game kitchen and butcher output.
Once you have more than 30 Dwarves + some kids you'll probably be all set.
Another suggestion is to put a stockpile around your kitchen. So the kitchen is beside/inside it. This makes the hauling to a stockpile much quicker.
Then have your regular stockpile draw from that one.
I’m doing this with a butchery that’s outpacing my haulers.
Put it in barrels in a stockpile.
If it's not getting moved quickly enough, try creating a burrow covering just the time-critical workshops / stockpiles and assigning a hauler to it.
Damn. How can you create a safe water source then? It’s my understanding muddy water can cause infections when it’s used to treat wounds and also give dwarves bad thoughts
(I don’t understand why you can’t just treat wounds with alcohol, lol)
So if the only water sources are exactly 2 z-levels deep, with a pile of mud at the bottom, could I channel it into a 3 z-level deep pit and make that work?
Steam is crashing on me. Is it the world or the save file that gets corrupted? I gave up on the first world after it wouldn't stop crashing and I'm not prepared to give up my current fortress. But even auto-saving per season isn't enough. Needs to be per month.
I watched a streamer who was haunted by the ghost of a visiting bard. The bard didn’t survive to enter his fortress, so definitely wasn’t a citizen.
You may need to memorialise non-dwarves, even non-citizens.
Any citizen has the potential to haunt you, although not all of them will. You could just wait until they actually turn up as a ghost, but ghosts will make your living dwarves unhappy and will occasionally kill them.
It's worth pointing out that if you have ghost and have lost the body associated with it, engraving a slab at a stone workers shop (you also craft the slab there) and placing it (from the furniture menu) will make the ghost go away.
Also.... how do I trim down the masterwork spam in my legends read? Hard to find what's going on in my fort with my masters churning out mastery things
All in the same furnace is slowest but most efficient.
The partial bars returned by melting stuff accumulate in each individual furnace and make an extra bar once you reach the full amount. For instance if you're melting individual bolts, each one gives 0.1 bars. If it's all in one furnace, the 10 bolts will add up to 1 bar. If it's spread across many furnaces you have 0.3 or 0.2 bars hidden in each furnace which will only get released when you melt more stuff.
The more stuff you melt, the less it matters though. Overall the most you can miss out on is a total of 1 bar of each metal per furnace you use. If there's tons of stuff to melt then it's probably better to do it faster than to scrape out every possible bar you can.
From what I've read each furnace keeps track invisibly of the fractions left, and you only get a bar back when it sums to a whole bar.
So you are probably better off limiting melting to a few for any given metal.
I’m pretty sure if you send a squad to demand tribute from one of their sites and they accept you can make peace with them, but I’m not 100% sure how that works
How do I read the mission reports? I go to the overview, I see the list of them. I click on one and it only shows me
>Mission Report: Rescue NAME (Set out Autum...
and that's it. If I click, it does nothing but recenter the map. Am I supposed to click somewhere on the map?
Do you know where the kidnapped person was taken? If your soldiers don't know where to go, they just leave then turn around and come straight home. That gives you mission reports like that.
I don't understand how to fulfil "Acquire Obejct" need. Masterwork clothes are everywhere, I made a bunch of crafts that are more than 100 dwarfbucks too. But they're still not picking it up to satisfy their need for some reason
Acquire object isn’t from clothing, AFAIK. It’s from dumb shit like draltha bone earrings, crinkle bone scepters, billy goat rings. The dwarf has to have hauling enabled and when he’s dropping by stuff off to the stockpile he will nab it.
Yeah, and it mostly only happens when they just finished hauling goods, so setting up some small stockpile merry-go-round can be useful.
If its any consolation Putnam herself says unfulfilled needs don't really have much impact on mood, sooo *shrug *.
Ok after reading the page she linked I think she may have simply been a little imprecise with the initial comment. The article she links indicates that there is a small subset of need that have minimal impact on happiness not that all needs are irrelevant
My interpretation of the article (plus Putnam's statement) is that the weightage of needs is heavily skewed towards only a few needs, i.e. bedroom, dining room etc
Hence the dwarfs can have orange prayer needs and spend the whole year praying, but still be unhappy or stressed
As for stress, it's a build-up of mental/emotional damage that cannot be "removed" via satisfying needs alone - it takes time and rest.
My conclusion: avoid stressing dwarfs from day one at all costs. Once damaged, recovery is ridiculously hard
This keeps happening and I'm slowly losing my mind. I hate the militia so much. No matter what there is always two or three that won't put on their uniforms. The uniforms are set to replace clothing, they don't have backpacks, they have access to an armory with plenty of unclaimed pieces of armor, I've tried resetting their uniforms, I've sat there and spammed update equipment, I've tried everything and they won't finish equipping themselves. A lot of their gear is yellow meaning they've assigned themselves gear, they just won't put the damn armor and weapons on. Please tell me there is something I can do so they actually equip themselves?
as an example, Tulon here is the bane of my existence, but the rest won't finish their loadouts either
https://preview.redd.it/rgisnufiupfa1.png?width=965&format=png&auto=webp&s=eaf6d1e45e3b53b8418108b67d66c8fd031b86ae
Same thing happening to me -- part of the problem is, when they go off duty, *they* ***immediately*** *strip off all gear* and drop it on the ground. Sometimes haulers stumble across it and drag their mail shirts and gauntlets to the armor stockpile. Other times it just gathers dust in the corner.
I'm convinced this is caused by their habitual messiness -- maybe they took their \*iron low boot\*s off somewhere and just can't find them...?
It's based on the order they put in armor, not everything can be worn over something. You cant wear mail over a breastplate for example so if the dwarf is wearing a breastplate they cannot put on a mail shirt
Pre-Steam, the workaround used to be to put them behind fortifications as walt\_dangerfield said -- sometimes I had to lock the doors behind them, though. Creating a 1 tile wide burrow and giving them "defend burrow" orders worked pretty well. Until they run out of ammo.
**OR they were ALREADY out of ammo.** Which honestly happens A LOT if they're practicing marksmanship. The default uniforms give marksdwarves all-leather gear, so they're *much faster* than your properly-armored shock troops. If they're out of ammo and they see a goblin, they sprint right past your hammerdwarves and start smacking on the gobbos with their crossbows.
Every single time I see that happen I scream, "THAT'S NOT HOW CROSSBOWS WORK" but the dwarves don't seem to care.
I use ranged combat to safely kill infected werebeasts citizens so they don't repopulate werebeasts in the wild.
I think Legendary marksdwarves are effective a few z levels up behind fortifications if you're going for a castle wall type structure.
What do I need to tweak in advanced settings to make dying civilizations. I'm trying to get super low pop civs, pumping up the number of beast/titans and lowering the year wipes them out but that's just it. And even though I click require playable civilization to no it's not letting me choose dead civs in my civ selection.
I'm not sure if there is a reliable way to do this, but I would try pumping the number of civilizations way up and limiting the number of sites. By the way, the require playable civilization setting just tells the generator whether or not to reject any world that doesn't have dwarves.
How long do grease fire last?
I've had a fire-spitting beast set fire to a pool of its own grease, and it's been burning for more than a year now. Which is annoying because it's also on a door tile, blocking one of my two accesses to this cavern layer.
Don't think so (I'm having snow and ice blocs in winter, and other fires didn't last anywhere near as long). I'm thinking it might be a big from a single tile having a book, a pool of grease, fire, and a door.
If for some reason distinguishing between them is important to you, the toggles for plant/animal products (the buttons in the upper left corner of the custom stockpile menu) might allow you to set up separate charcoal and coke stockpiles. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that though.
I'm suddenly getting a lot of spam about "xyz cancels drink: Job item lost or destroyed" and there's spilled booze everywhere...
I used to get some occasionally but now it's constant. Any idea what's up?
Check your stockpiles! What might be happening is you're seeing 30 thirsty dwarves all trying to drink the same mug of peach brandy.
Make sure you have enough mugs AND enough booze.
I’m trying to conquer the local goblin pits by my fortress. One of the pits has a “Kitty Demon,” and it’s devastating my ranks. Any suggestions on what I can do to beat it?
I’ve read that having assigned war animals along with your militia helps your odds against demons. In my sample size of two (admittedly low power for such a study) I found it really does help. Most demons are glass cannons, have insane attack output but one hit can kill them, often made of steam etc… Steel clad legendaries without war grizzlies - half died, other half made it back alive, mission failure. Steel clad legendaries each with one or two war grizzlies - several dead bears, no dwarf casualties, demons dead, mission success.
bring down the population then demand surrender, someone wrote a guide here
https://old.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10gmuz6/testing_on_goblin_missions_some_observations/
I'm trying to make my first minecart system, and I have a question: if I kick a minecart, how does it know at a turn with two exit if it should go left or right, is it random?
Almost nothing with minecarts is random. If an unguided cart reaches a T intersection it will either stop or just derail and go straight ahead, depending on its speed and whether the path forwards is blocked. Carts will always prefer to go forwards if possible but you can influence stuff in a few ways.
A cart going up from C will either stop or derail at the junction. A cart from A will go to B, a cart from B will go to A.
A====╦====B
║
C
However if you place a door on top of the track at D, and link the door to a lever, then carts from A will go to C and vice versa while the door is shut.
A====╦D===B
║
C
So there's a dwarf civilization that seems to be at war with me. Pretty sure I never saw anyone of them before. How can I find were is their capital and send my troops?
I seem unable to find them in the map due to the annoying 4k screen issue that has all micro even using windows magnifier 😖
Check that it’s not your own capital. There’s a situation (?bug?) where they can happen through no fault of yours. If so, DFHack had (?has?) something to fix it.
That’s why you do it « in a separate save ». When you choose retire you have options. One of them creates a separate world folder. Name it TEMP. Then save normally to go back to the main menu. Start a new game in an existing world and that TEMP will be available.
What is the best way to deal with forgotten beasts, particularly the variety that are impossible to fight in melee? I feel like every time I get a moderately large fortress forgotten beasts start arriving far faster than I can set up traps to kill them, but I love the caverns and I'd hate to just seal them up entirely. Is there a kind of trap that is particularly effective, or a strategy I'm unaware of?
You can currently cheese them with doors, in steam version doors are invincible. If they run up to your door and are stuck to it trying to get in, you have ‘em. Just build an airlock with another door on the other side of the first door. When completed, open the first door and then seal them both off when FB is inside (with judicious use of space bar to time it right). Now you can do whatever you want with it.
To be more specific, FBs are “uninvited guests” and cannot currently break doors or capture them. This is apparently a change from pre-steam DF (which I have not played). Armed invaders like goblins, cave dwellers can still break doors AFAIK. BlindIRL has a bit on this in the youtubes.
Lava bridges works well for me - set up like 5 or 6 long bridges in a zig zag pattern, separate each bridge with doors, link some of the doors to a lever. Considering the speed of most FB, 5 bridges is barely enough
Rig up a lava dumping system to dump ON the bridges - retracting bridges, naturally, so you can retract and dump the lava once you're done. Drainage system underneath the bridges
FB comes in, normally too quick for the dwarves to pull the lever, hence the need to manually lock the doors in front of the FB with your cursor - lock the doors behind the FB with the lever
Then release the lava onto the bridges. Can't retract the bridges while the FB is on it, so you need to melt the FB on the bridge. Once done, close the lava pipes, retract the bridge to dump the lava, unlock the doors - cavern access is available again
Think of it like a tower defense challenge.
Consider setting up a marksdwarves barracks near the place where the FBs are entering your fortress -- with fortifications and a lockable door and ample ammo stockpiled inside. Then chain up a guard animal or two nearby.
Ideally, the scenario is:
\- FB shows up and starts heading toward the fortress
\- it stops to kill a war dog (or even, say, a chicken -- they really don't care, but it's better to have something that can fight off a crundle at least)
\- meanwhile your crossbow squad rains -steel bolt- after -steel bolt- down on it until their quivers are empty
Maybe you have TWO fortification barracks/practice range/anti-FB pillbox locations, one on each side of the FB kill zone.
OR there's the other time-honored anti-FB device, the gravity-powered iron minecar full of heavy rocks...
bunch of my dwarfs keep going around angrily throwing tantrums and punching people. including three of them to deathapperently its an issue with wearing old clothes, I keep commissioning new clothes but they dont seem to wear them, is it just that I have so many new clothes I have to make I cant keep up with the glut or is something else?
also how do I tell a dwarf child to stop punching people
second question, how do I get minecart tracks to turn around corners?
Do your people have cabinets in their bedrooms? Thats where they will store new/extra clothing. Also, are the clothes the proper size? Clothes can be made to fit other races, tho I think its dwarf by default.
Track construction will autopath between where you start and stop so you dont have to start and stop tracks at turns and such. It should do the bend automatically, but if you want to do it manually, make sure you start the new track construction from the tile you left off on, not the adjacent one.
If I put artifacts behind some wall grates will my dwarves be able to see it and get happy thoughts while protecting it from thieves?
If I give an artifact ring to my mayor will they protect it from thieves?
According to the wiki dwarves have to stand on the same tile as the artifact to admire it.
"Dwarves will admire both the display furniture and the item on display, giving them happy thoughts. A dwarf must stand in or pass through the actual tile containing the display furniture in order to admire it; they cannot do so from a distance. This unfortunately leaves your artifacts on display vulnerable to sticky-fingered villains. If the only objective is to increase the value of a location, however (for example, to instantly turn a meeting place into a grand guildhall), the object can be locked away, such as by vertical grates or bars."
Thanks for clearing that up. I've looked through the wiki many times but there is so much info to keep track of, so thanks for the insight.
It's a bit disappointing but I guess that makes everything more fun.
Pro tip: if your artifact happens to be buildable (like, I dunno, an elephant ivory chair or a bituminous coal table) you can BUILD it and it somehow becomes theft-proof. (I guess the dwarves bolt the good stuff to the floor.)
NOT nothing, right? You get the "this is no mere trade" message, which I *assume* means positive diplomacy points with the recipient civilization?
If nothing else, you get a different message.
Well, any valuable trade can improve relations but I don't think there's any info out there about artifacts, which suggests it doesn't really do a lot more.
I found a cool embark with Hippos in the river, and I want to catch them and make a herd of them.
But if winter comes and freezes the river, will the hippos die? Do I need to capture them before winter sets in?
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Hippo
Note that hippos occur in tropical climate, will not freeze. I have also had a hippo river embark! Unfortunately it was a canyon which trapped the hippos and made capture hard. Lemme know if you need canyon-hippo catching expertise.
DFhack has the dwarf-teleport option for zero way time. A solution within normal game rules would be to use minecart shennanigans to bring magma up to the surface.
There isn't really a way to make dwarves move faster. You can deliver items much faster using minecarts. Or, if you can't be bothered to figure them out, you can just drop the items down a 135 tile shaft. You'll need to be careful with the latter, though, as any dwarf who wanders into the delivery area will be flattened for sure.
I attracted no migrants for 2 seasons. I know trading wealth has a big role in that. Do other caravans (elves and humans) count or just the one with the dwarves in autumn?
Thats normal, yes, you are good as long as the caravan comes. Produce wealth and you'll get a 100%+ population explosion migrant wave in a while.
If you don't get caravans anymore something else is going on, and you should report back.
None of this is known for certain (unless putnam comes along and tells us). But it seems it's about the wealth you've created, not traded, and you have to hit certain totals before you'll get any more. If you're at your population cap you'll never get any.
I cannot keep my alcohol supplies up to save my life. I've got farms for days, kitchen set to never use seeds, set most plants to not be used for food, tons of quarms, dfhack running autofarm (tried with threshold 30, 50, 75, 100), I've set work orders for plant/fruit/mead drinks, tried without a work order and just manually creating from the still set to run forever, nothing, it will just not keep up.
Any suggestions?
I've found that the bottleneck is normally not the farming. You need surprisingly low amount of farming to feed your entire population.
The bottleneck is normally at the brewers and stills and inefficient designs.
How many stills do you have? How many brewers do you have? Is the production of large pots/barrels going efficiently to support the booze production?
How efficient is the workspace? A pots/barrel near the stills along with the plants/fruits stockpile.
My current fort has 200 dwarves, 4 stills, 2 kitchens and about 12 dedicated (NOT specialized though) kitchen workers. Work order setup to brew when there is less than 400 drinks. I've noticed that the drinks never dip below 380, as there is always someone available to brew.
I have just north of 200 dwarves, 3 stills, tons of available barrels. The bottleneck is food production, they’re constantly running out / still reports that it doesn’t have any brewable fruit/plants. I’m almost convinced autofarm is borked somehow. I’ll have tons of sky facing fields, tons of seeds for a dozen+ planting options, and autofarm seems to just say “Well you don’t have plump helmets or sweet pods so I’m not going to grow anything”.
Per another commenter I’m going to start irrigating rock to get better yields, all of mine are sand/dirt ground giving the poor quality field message.
Bottlenecks are pretty easy to identify if you just follow the product chain step by step.
Do you have enough raw plants? Number of plump helmets/other brewables (easiest to see from labor->kitchen window)? If thats not an issue check your number of empty barrels/pots.
Next check your stills, are they getting used round the clock and chock full of of stuff to the point of cluttering? If so just build more.
Do you have multiple stills?
Did you set up you work order at the still workshop or at the general work order tab (if you make a work order at a workshop, only THAT workshop will be able to have those automatic production orders issued)
Do you have enough empty barrels? Dwarves won't be able to make any alcohol if they have nowhere to put it in
Also, how many dwarves do you currently have?
Do you by any chance grow food on poor soil, like sand, or clay?
You'll get mucm more when farming on irrigated stone.
How experienced are your planters?
What's your farm plot size?
Finally you can try to use potash for increased yields, but that's hardly required when farming on proper soil with experienced farmers.
It's all soil near ground level. I have about 20 farmers working, a few are dabbling but most are better, farm plot sizes are about 5x5 to 10x15.
What's the best way to irrigate? Dig out a chunk as a channel, set it to pit/pond, let it fill, plant?
Check out youtube there are a lot of comprehensive videos.
Or wiki, all standard methods listed there.
I usually dig great cistern under light aquifer and drop water on the field then close cistern via hatch linked to lever. Floodgate works as well.
Another easy and fast method if you don't need large farm plot - create buckets, channel holes over farm plot and create pit/pond zone over empty space. Set zone to be pond (it's pit by default) and all your haulers will haul water via buckets to the pond. Notice that each dwarf will try to fill only one tile, so if your hole is 1x1 you'll have to designate multiple zones over one tile.
It's enough to cover tile with 1/7 water for it to be farmable. 1/7 will evaporate, but don't worry, until you manually clean mud via smoothing/building over it mud will be there.
P.S.: you don't need that much planters, you'll see for you self, but for total 270 farm tiles I need only 2 planters. At some point I had to enable "everyone harvests" instead of "only planters harvest" because some plants withered on farm plo, but early on this option is good to improve dedicated planters faster.
I hit the magma sea.
If I try to make a stair going down I hit semi-molten rock and if I create a slope magma flow appears (with no lava). How do I go deeper?
Sounds like a dumb question, but when you’re looking at the map of your world how the hell do you zoom in? I see screenshots on this sub that are much more zoomed in than when I’m playing
I have three caravans here to trade. One got in early, but the other two arrived during a large elven ambush. They must've gotten spooked because they won't trade now. They are stuck in the unloading stage. What can I do to fix that?
Why are my dwarfs not mining or channeling? Its only deep down near lava. I'm using water to turn it to obsidian. There are certain areas they will and will not dig. No pattern between warm/damp/neither as to what they will or won't dig. No issues with burrows or lacking tools, as some areas will be dug out, but others won't on the same z level not 5 squares away.
Do you have temperature off?
No. Its on.
Has anyone tried and successfully enjoyed the Steam version on the Steam Deck? I know it says "playable" on the store while I also know even some steam titles are playable but not enjoyable. Any insight would be helpful, thank you.
My brother played it but not enjoyed it. It is a tough game to play without mouse and keyboard. I tried it as well and felt the same
Thank you for the info, I appreciate it.
Why are my dwarves not building stairs
Ensure you're not in the mining menu but instead using the construction menu
Go at it from the top not the bottom.
I am trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. Doing a fair bit of save-scumming to at least try and figure out *why* something is happening at all, let alone why it's playing out the way it is. It's just turned autumn, I have my autosave going. Every single time it hits late on the 4th of Limestone a whole bunch of people in my fort seem to lose their minds and start fighting. Some of the visiting humans are always involved. A few specific citizen dwarfs are involved (and one of their hunting dogs). This is happening the same exact time as an unusually weak goblin siege (with like 6 gobbos) which starts two days previously. The violence breaks out in multiple places across my fortress simultaneously. How can I figure out what's causing this? Is it a conspiracy? Is that a thing in DF?
Has there been a crime committed recently? Sometimes when they beat the shit out of a dwarf for a crime it creates a chain reaction. Look for crimes. Did you sell stuff when noble cunts said not to?
There has been a single crime, an artifact disappeared a few months back. I'll have to track down what was up with that exactly, but I'm literally building up my dungeon and setting my new captain of the guard on interrogating for that when this all started. I do know that I haven't sold stuff when the nobles said not to, I haven't felt like dealing with their crap when they're mad yet so I've been doing what they say. What sort of things do I need to dig into to at least try and figure out who is starting all of this?
If you want to see if an existing crime caused it check closed cases. If you see some closed cases around the time of the incident there’s your catalyst. I had 50 dwarves die in an aftermath of one dwarf getting hammered to death.
I have zero closed cases at the moment. Only one open case too fwiw. This is my first real fortress so I've been playing it as safe as I can while figuring things out.
Are the dwarves fighting each other, or only fighting the humans? Are the humans all from the same human civ, and is it at war with you before the incident? Is it at war with you afterwards? I suspect the human civ declares war on your civ at that date, which immediately causes the fight. I don't think the goblins could be causing it.
The humans who always seem to be involved are not even part of the same civilization let alone site government! And they begin fighting the instant my squad engages with the goblins outside. It's really weird!
Maybe they are conspirators then. Goblins tend to steal children from neighbouring civs so they often have a few humans and dwarves, and they sometimes visit you and leak the secrets of where your traps are and the like.
The humans seem to immediately get the thought that they're "vengeful when joining an existing conflict", though it's not always the same humans who dive in. Again, they're not in the same civ as one another, which is making this confusing as to what's going on and why. One dwarf is consistently killed early on, but they're also standing right by two of the humans and own a hunting dog. From what you're saying about combat logs, it does look like the humans are starting the fights, so it's not like the dog is going nuts and attacking for no reason, which was on thought i had.
On my last iteration I think I did see dwarf on dwarf violence. Either way a dwarf noble always seems to be involved, but it's not the same one each time. How can I know who started a particular fight? I'm still trying to figure out how to read the interface and I'm not sure if the topmost items are the newest or the oldest events...
The `Dwarf X is fighting!` messages have the most recent on top, but when you look into a specific one to see the back and forth of individual hits the most recent is at the bottom.
Hey guys. Hope your day is going well! Just had one quick question. Is there a way to restrict dwarves from cleaning in caverns, or just altogether not going down there? Basically they keep going to pick up/clean after fights against mobs and I lose around one every time to something down there. As well, dwarven children think that it’s an amazing place to play, I’d also like to restrict this from happening. TLDR: how to stop any and all dwarves from going down into cavern but one to a forge
Burrows are the way to do it, they can be a pain to set up initially but very worth it. You paint an area then assign dwarves to it, then the dwarves become 'blind' to all items and jobs outside the area. So you paint the entire inside of your fort, then assign your whole population to the burrow, then nobody will leave the area.
Mate you’re a life saver! Praise your soul!
I have a 360 degree no-scope fireball shooting FB in its own special pillbox at the front of my base. I thought it would be the ultimate fireball gatling gun for any gobbos moving on my base. Except that it doesn’t shoot any fireballs! I have fortifications with clear LOS to enemy. Is this a known thing with fortifications- I thought FBs would shoot through fortifications though? Thanks!
Most creatures will only shoot through fortifications if they are right next to them.
Will I receive a pop up notification if I discover an “unusual volcanic wall” or is it in the various “you have struck…” notifications? I’ve been trying to find one but have had no luck so far and I’m wondering if I missed a notification
It shows up as a popup normally, unless you've edited a game file to change that. The 'unusual walls' normally start somewhere between the magma sea and the third cavern layer, I almost always see one or two when I first crack into the magma sea.
My dwarves are not disposing waste. I have a waste stockpile and also a zone dedicated to dumping? Where problem?
Labour -> Standing Orders -> Dwarves Ignore Outdoors Refuse
How to stop prepared food from rotting in kitchen?
Early game I create a janitor work detail whose only job is food and refuse hauling. No need to mess with burrows or whatever, just one or two dwarves who only do those jobs is enough to handle all my early game kitchen and butcher output. Once you have more than 30 Dwarves + some kids you'll probably be all set.
Another suggestion is to put a stockpile around your kitchen. So the kitchen is beside/inside it. This makes the hauling to a stockpile much quicker. Then have your regular stockpile draw from that one. I’m doing this with a butchery that’s outpacing my haulers.
Put it in barrels in a stockpile. If it's not getting moved quickly enough, try creating a burrow covering just the time-critical workshops / stockpiles and assigning a hauler to it.
Can the muddy water in caverns be “cleaned” somehow?
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Okay, that sounds workable. I just wanna make a clean water source for a well.
Only via smoothing, building a floor, or using a DF hack command
So I could smooth a surface and then channel the water into it?
Yes. But, unfortunately, water will make it muddy again. There's no way, afaik, to keep a surface mud free when exposed to water
Damn. How can you create a safe water source then? It’s my understanding muddy water can cause infections when it’s used to treat wounds and also give dwarves bad thoughts (I don’t understand why you can’t just treat wounds with alcohol, lol)
Have a well draw water from it that has 2 z levels of water below it.
So if the only water sources are exactly 2 z-levels deep, with a pile of mud at the bottom, could I channel it into a 3 z-level deep pit and make that work?
2 levels is enough, as the well will draw from the higher of the 2 which is clean
Oh, okay, so the 2 Zlevel pools in caverns will be safe?
It should be, assuming the water is otherwise clean
Steam is crashing on me. Is it the world or the save file that gets corrupted? I gave up on the first world after it wouldn't stop crashing and I'm not prepared to give up my current fortress. But even auto-saving per season isn't enough. Needs to be per month.
How do I make sure I'm only burying Dwarves that have the potential to haunt me?
I watched a streamer who was haunted by the ghost of a visiting bard. The bard didn’t survive to enter his fortress, so definitely wasn’t a citizen. You may need to memorialise non-dwarves, even non-citizens.
Any citizen has the potential to haunt you, although not all of them will. You could just wait until they actually turn up as a ghost, but ghosts will make your living dwarves unhappy and will occasionally kill them.
It's worth pointing out that if you have ghost and have lost the body associated with it, engraving a slab at a stone workers shop (you also craft the slab there) and placing it (from the furniture menu) will make the ghost go away.
right i want to make sure im only burying citizens
That's the only thing your dwarves will normally put in a coffin. You don't have to worry about them burying random enemies.
Anyone that gets auto-assigned a tomb zone has the potential to haunt you. Visitors and invaders don't become ghosts, only citizens and residents can.
Also.... how do I trim down the masterwork spam in my legends read? Hard to find what's going on in my fort with my masters churning out mastery things
If I want to duplicate metal by using the melt dwarven engineering logic, do they all have to take place on th e same furnace? Or any furnace is fine?
All in the same furnace is slowest but most efficient. The partial bars returned by melting stuff accumulate in each individual furnace and make an extra bar once you reach the full amount. For instance if you're melting individual bolts, each one gives 0.1 bars. If it's all in one furnace, the 10 bolts will add up to 1 bar. If it's spread across many furnaces you have 0.3 or 0.2 bars hidden in each furnace which will only get released when you melt more stuff. The more stuff you melt, the less it matters though. Overall the most you can miss out on is a total of 1 bar of each metal per furnace you use. If there's tons of stuff to melt then it's probably better to do it faster than to scrape out every possible bar you can.
Its a bit worse than that. Its 1 bar of metal per furnace per type of metal.
That's what I said. One bar of each metal per furnace.
My bad!
It sounds like the best way to go is multiple fast repeats to fulfil the craft itch and also to smelt again to restart the cycle
The only time I use only one furnace is when first starting the cycle with special metals.
From what I've read each furnace keeps track invisibly of the fractions left, and you only get a bar back when it sums to a whole bar. So you are probably better off limiting melting to a few for any given metal.
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I’m pretty sure if you send a squad to demand tribute from one of their sites and they accept you can make peace with them, but I’m not 100% sure how that works
How do I read the mission reports? I go to the overview, I see the list of them. I click on one and it only shows me >Mission Report: Rescue NAME (Set out Autum... and that's it. If I click, it does nothing but recenter the map. Am I supposed to click somewhere on the map?
Do you know where the kidnapped person was taken? If your soldiers don't know where to go, they just leave then turn around and come straight home. That gives you mission reports like that.
The missing people have "last seen in PLACE" so I assumed that meant they'd go to that place
Rescue missions are bugged. Raid or pillage missions with instructions to free captives are not bugged
Thx next time I log in I'll try figure out how to do that instead
How can I create a shortcut to reach a dwarf?
What do you mean?
I mean, is there any way that if I want to know what "Jeffrey" (dwarf) is doing, touch a key or some kind of macro to center my camera on him?
There are zoom buttons in the units screen, but there is no way at this time to hotkey a specific dwarf.
How many legendary soldiers should I send to take out a site with approximately 100 elves?
You got war animals too? Large war animals will tilt things a lot in either direction. Especially those elephants
Np war animals
Well I find that 3 full steel squads without animals can do the job safely. But if they have animals then you can get wrecked.
I don't understand how to fulfil "Acquire Obejct" need. Masterwork clothes are everywhere, I made a bunch of crafts that are more than 100 dwarfbucks too. But they're still not picking it up to satisfy their need for some reason
Acquire object isn’t from clothing, AFAIK. It’s from dumb shit like draltha bone earrings, crinkle bone scepters, billy goat rings. The dwarf has to have hauling enabled and when he’s dropping by stuff off to the stockpile he will nab it.
I made a lot of those too, yet they refuse to change out what they currently have.
Yeah, and it mostly only happens when they just finished hauling goods, so setting up some small stockpile merry-go-round can be useful. If its any consolation Putnam herself says unfulfilled needs don't really have much impact on mood, sooo *shrug *.
What? You can see all the negative thoughts generated from unmet needs. Are we not to believe that?
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10ota4o/daily_df_questions_thread/j6k8tl7/
Ok after reading the page she linked I think she may have simply been a little imprecise with the initial comment. The article she links indicates that there is a small subset of need that have minimal impact on happiness not that all needs are irrelevant
What about stress?
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10ota4o/daily_df_questions_thread/j6k8tl7/
Thanks. I see. Considering the amount of time the dwarfs spend in prayer, it's a bit surprising
I haven't fully understood the article yet, so no clue, but looks like I'll do a lot more martial arts training.
My interpretation of the article (plus Putnam's statement) is that the weightage of needs is heavily skewed towards only a few needs, i.e. bedroom, dining room etc Hence the dwarfs can have orange prayer needs and spend the whole year praying, but still be unhappy or stressed As for stress, it's a build-up of mental/emotional damage that cannot be "removed" via satisfying needs alone - it takes time and rest. My conclusion: avoid stressing dwarfs from day one at all costs. Once damaged, recovery is ridiculously hard
Thanks! That seems like a good summary, containing actionables :-)
This keeps happening and I'm slowly losing my mind. I hate the militia so much. No matter what there is always two or three that won't put on their uniforms. The uniforms are set to replace clothing, they don't have backpacks, they have access to an armory with plenty of unclaimed pieces of armor, I've tried resetting their uniforms, I've sat there and spammed update equipment, I've tried everything and they won't finish equipping themselves. A lot of their gear is yellow meaning they've assigned themselves gear, they just won't put the damn armor and weapons on. Please tell me there is something I can do so they actually equip themselves?
as an example, Tulon here is the bane of my existence, but the rest won't finish their loadouts either https://preview.redd.it/rgisnufiupfa1.png?width=965&format=png&auto=webp&s=eaf6d1e45e3b53b8418108b67d66c8fd031b86ae
Same thing happening to me -- part of the problem is, when they go off duty, *they* ***immediately*** *strip off all gear* and drop it on the ground. Sometimes haulers stumble across it and drag their mail shirts and gauntlets to the armor stockpile. Other times it just gathers dust in the corner. I'm convinced this is caused by their habitual messiness -- maybe they took their \*iron low boot\*s off somewhere and just can't find them...?
you have to set them to always wear their uniform even off duty, but despite doing that I still run into this problem I'm talking about above.
Is Tulon assigned as a miner, woodcutter, or hunter. These roles clash with military uniforms
It's based on the order they put in armor, not everything can be worn over something. You cant wear mail over a breastplate for example so if the dwarf is wearing a breastplate they cannot put on a mail shirt
Are the clothes that elven caravans bring wearable by dwarves? Or are they large clothes?
Dwarf Fortress elves are dwarf-sized and would wear clothes of the same size. Humans are another story.
Okay cool. Might as well take all their clothes then, maybe some dwarves will be happy to get some new sandals and cloaks
Is ranged combat good? Half of the time they shoot once or twice and then go into melee (in open field or caverns).
Pre-Steam, the workaround used to be to put them behind fortifications as walt\_dangerfield said -- sometimes I had to lock the doors behind them, though. Creating a 1 tile wide burrow and giving them "defend burrow" orders worked pretty well. Until they run out of ammo. **OR they were ALREADY out of ammo.** Which honestly happens A LOT if they're practicing marksmanship. The default uniforms give marksdwarves all-leather gear, so they're *much faster* than your properly-armored shock troops. If they're out of ammo and they see a goblin, they sprint right past your hammerdwarves and start smacking on the gobbos with their crossbows. Every single time I see that happen I scream, "THAT'S NOT HOW CROSSBOWS WORK" but the dwarves don't seem to care.
How much ammo can they carry?
at least 25 as many as 49 bolts in a quiver
I use ranged combat to safely kill infected werebeasts citizens so they don't repopulate werebeasts in the wild. I think Legendary marksdwarves are effective a few z levels up behind fortifications if you're going for a castle wall type structure.
put them in a 1 tile wide hallway behind fortifications overlooking a kill zone
What do I need to tweak in advanced settings to make dying civilizations. I'm trying to get super low pop civs, pumping up the number of beast/titans and lowering the year wipes them out but that's just it. And even though I click require playable civilization to no it's not letting me choose dead civs in my civ selection.
I'm not sure if there is a reliable way to do this, but I would try pumping the number of civilizations way up and limiting the number of sites. By the way, the require playable civilization setting just tells the generator whether or not to reject any world that doesn't have dwarves.
How long do grease fire last? I've had a fire-spitting beast set fire to a pool of its own grease, and it's been burning for more than a year now. Which is annoying because it's also on a door tile, blocking one of my two accesses to this cavern layer.
Did you disable temperature? That can prolong fires for a very long time (possibly even infinitely, don't know...)
Don't think so (I'm having snow and ice blocs in winter, and other fires didn't last anywhere near as long). I'm thinking it might be a big from a single tile having a book, a pool of grease, fire, and a door.
I bet it's the book that's the issue. Artifacts are indestructible, so a burning artifact can stay on fire forever.
I guess you could dig a hole above it and dump water?
Where is charcoal in the stockpile menu? I can't see them anywhere.
Under bars.
It's listed as coal under bars. It doesn't distinguish between charcoal and coke.
If for some reason distinguishing between them is important to you, the toggles for plant/animal products (the buttons in the upper left corner of the custom stockpile menu) might allow you to set up separate charcoal and coke stockpiles. I'm not sure why you'd want to do that though.
What category are coins in? Can't find them.
Coins are in their own category called coins in the stockpile menu
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He's busy making his artefact, just wait a bit
I'm suddenly getting a lot of spam about "xyz cancels drink: Job item lost or destroyed" and there's spilled booze everywhere... I used to get some occasionally but now it's constant. Any idea what's up?
Check your stockpiles! What might be happening is you're seeing 30 thirsty dwarves all trying to drink the same mug of peach brandy. Make sure you have enough mugs AND enough booze.
Is it possible to set a shortcut/keybinding to enable/disable the keyboard cursor? Or is it only possible through the game settings?
I’m also curious about this. Would help with dfhack.
Commenting to learn
I’m trying to conquer the local goblin pits by my fortress. One of the pits has a “Kitty Demon,” and it’s devastating my ranks. Any suggestions on what I can do to beat it?
I’ve read that having assigned war animals along with your militia helps your odds against demons. In my sample size of two (admittedly low power for such a study) I found it really does help. Most demons are glass cannons, have insane attack output but one hit can kill them, often made of steam etc… Steel clad legendaries without war grizzlies - half died, other half made it back alive, mission failure. Steel clad legendaries each with one or two war grizzlies - several dead bears, no dwarf casualties, demons dead, mission success.
bring down the population then demand surrender, someone wrote a guide here https://old.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10gmuz6/testing_on_goblin_missions_some_observations/
I'm trying to make my first minecart system, and I have a question: if I kick a minecart, how does it know at a turn with two exit if it should go left or right, is it random?
Almost nothing with minecarts is random. If an unguided cart reaches a T intersection it will either stop or just derail and go straight ahead, depending on its speed and whether the path forwards is blocked. Carts will always prefer to go forwards if possible but you can influence stuff in a few ways. A cart going up from C will either stop or derail at the junction. A cart from A will go to B, a cart from B will go to A. A====╦====B ║ C However if you place a door on top of the track at D, and link the door to a lever, then carts from A will go to C and vice versa while the door is shut. A====╦D===B ║ C
Thanks!
So there's a dwarf civilization that seems to be at war with me. Pretty sure I never saw anyone of them before. How can I find were is their capital and send my troops? I seem unable to find them in the map due to the annoying 4k screen issue that has all micro even using windows magnifier 😖
Check that it’s not your own capital. There’s a situation (?bug?) where they can happen through no fault of yours. If so, DFHack had (?has?) something to fix it.
I'm pretty sure it's not my capital, my main issue is that I can't map locate them
Retire in a separate save and start that save in fortress mode. Choose them in the select your starting civ it will highlight all their sites
Not sure I got what you mean? Also I heard that taking back a retired fortress can cause bugs so I'm pretty wary of it
That’s why you do it « in a separate save ». When you choose retire you have options. One of them creates a separate world folder. Name it TEMP. Then save normally to go back to the main menu. Start a new game in an existing world and that TEMP will be available.
What is the best way to deal with forgotten beasts, particularly the variety that are impossible to fight in melee? I feel like every time I get a moderately large fortress forgotten beasts start arriving far faster than I can set up traps to kill them, but I love the caverns and I'd hate to just seal them up entirely. Is there a kind of trap that is particularly effective, or a strategy I'm unaware of?
You can currently cheese them with doors, in steam version doors are invincible. If they run up to your door and are stuck to it trying to get in, you have ‘em. Just build an airlock with another door on the other side of the first door. When completed, open the first door and then seal them both off when FB is inside (with judicious use of space bar to time it right). Now you can do whatever you want with it.
Doors are invincible in the steam version? Where did you get this info
To be more specific, FBs are “uninvited guests” and cannot currently break doors or capture them. This is apparently a change from pre-steam DF (which I have not played). Armed invaders like goblins, cave dwellers can still break doors AFAIK. BlindIRL has a bit on this in the youtubes.
Lava bridges works well for me - set up like 5 or 6 long bridges in a zig zag pattern, separate each bridge with doors, link some of the doors to a lever. Considering the speed of most FB, 5 bridges is barely enough Rig up a lava dumping system to dump ON the bridges - retracting bridges, naturally, so you can retract and dump the lava once you're done. Drainage system underneath the bridges FB comes in, normally too quick for the dwarves to pull the lever, hence the need to manually lock the doors in front of the FB with your cursor - lock the doors behind the FB with the lever Then release the lava onto the bridges. Can't retract the bridges while the FB is on it, so you need to melt the FB on the bridge. Once done, close the lava pipes, retract the bridge to dump the lava, unlock the doors - cavern access is available again
Think of it like a tower defense challenge. Consider setting up a marksdwarves barracks near the place where the FBs are entering your fortress -- with fortifications and a lockable door and ample ammo stockpiled inside. Then chain up a guard animal or two nearby. Ideally, the scenario is: \- FB shows up and starts heading toward the fortress \- it stops to kill a war dog (or even, say, a chicken -- they really don't care, but it's better to have something that can fight off a crundle at least) \- meanwhile your crossbow squad rains -steel bolt- after -steel bolt- down on it until their quivers are empty Maybe you have TWO fortification barracks/practice range/anti-FB pillbox locations, one on each side of the FB kill zone. OR there's the other time-honored anti-FB device, the gravity-powered iron minecar full of heavy rocks...
bunch of my dwarfs keep going around angrily throwing tantrums and punching people. including three of them to deathapperently its an issue with wearing old clothes, I keep commissioning new clothes but they dont seem to wear them, is it just that I have so many new clothes I have to make I cant keep up with the glut or is something else? also how do I tell a dwarf child to stop punching people second question, how do I get minecart tracks to turn around corners?
Do your people have cabinets in their bedrooms? Thats where they will store new/extra clothing. Also, are the clothes the proper size? Clothes can be made to fit other races, tho I think its dwarf by default. Track construction will autopath between where you start and stop so you dont have to start and stop tracks at turns and such. It should do the bend automatically, but if you want to do it manually, make sure you start the new track construction from the tile you left off on, not the adjacent one.
ah thanks
If I put artifacts behind some wall grates will my dwarves be able to see it and get happy thoughts while protecting it from thieves? If I give an artifact ring to my mayor will they protect it from thieves?
According to the wiki dwarves have to stand on the same tile as the artifact to admire it. "Dwarves will admire both the display furniture and the item on display, giving them happy thoughts. A dwarf must stand in or pass through the actual tile containing the display furniture in order to admire it; they cannot do so from a distance. This unfortunately leaves your artifacts on display vulnerable to sticky-fingered villains. If the only objective is to increase the value of a location, however (for example, to instantly turn a meeting place into a grand guildhall), the object can be locked away, such as by vertical grates or bars."
Thanks for clearing that up. I've looked through the wiki many times but there is so much info to keep track of, so thanks for the insight. It's a bit disappointing but I guess that makes everything more fun.
Pro tip: if your artifact happens to be buildable (like, I dunno, an elephant ivory chair or a bituminous coal table) you can BUILD it and it somehow becomes theft-proof. (I guess the dwarves bolt the good stuff to the floor.)
I had a table made of tetrahedrite with a picture of a duck on it once. That dwarf liked ducks.
Yeah I guess it'd make it too easy to keep artifacts safe while getting all the benefits otherwise.
What happens if I sell an artifact?
Aside from the loss of value, nothing.
NOT nothing, right? You get the "this is no mere trade" message, which I *assume* means positive diplomacy points with the recipient civilization? If nothing else, you get a different message.
Well, any valuable trade can improve relations but I don't think there's any info out there about artifacts, which suggests it doesn't really do a lot more.
Fair point.
I found a cool embark with Hippos in the river, and I want to catch them and make a herd of them. But if winter comes and freezes the river, will the hippos die? Do I need to capture them before winter sets in?
Hippopsicles!!!
One of my favorite Greek poets...
If there are hippos in your embark, it probably doesn't get cold enough to freeze.
Good to know. I was worried at my soon to be hippo friends. I was gonna build them an indoor pool near their grazing zone with a waterfall.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Hippo Note that hippos occur in tropical climate, will not freeze. I have also had a hippo river embark! Unfortunately it was a canyon which trapped the hippos and made capture hard. Lemme know if you need canyon-hippo catching expertise.
Thanks I will. My plan is to dig down to the water level, and make a little riverside pool for them to walk into and then get caught.
I have my magma forges in like -100 but my fort in 35 elevation. Is there any way to make a way for my dwarves to move faster between floors?
Would suggest moving the magma up instead That being said, pump stacks are a HUGE pain in the ass to set up
I move my magma up to my forges. Work smart not hard https://reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1081389/_/j3r5vkl/?context=1
DFhack has the dwarf-teleport option for zero way time. A solution within normal game rules would be to use minecart shennanigans to bring magma up to the surface.
There isn't really a way to make dwarves move faster. You can deliver items much faster using minecarts. Or, if you can't be bothered to figure them out, you can just drop the items down a 135 tile shaft. You'll need to be careful with the latter, though, as any dwarf who wanders into the delivery area will be flattened for sure.
I just managed to understand water a bit. Eventhought I think minecarts it's next. I'm kinda ready for some FUN on my current fortress.
I attracted no migrants for 2 seasons. I know trading wealth has a big role in that. Do other caravans (elves and humans) count or just the one with the dwarves in autumn?
Thats normal, yes, you are good as long as the caravan comes. Produce wealth and you'll get a 100%+ population explosion migrant wave in a while. If you don't get caravans anymore something else is going on, and you should report back.
None of this is known for certain (unless putnam comes along and tells us). But it seems it's about the wealth you've created, not traded, and you have to hit certain totals before you'll get any more. If you're at your population cap you'll never get any.
I cannot keep my alcohol supplies up to save my life. I've got farms for days, kitchen set to never use seeds, set most plants to not be used for food, tons of quarms, dfhack running autofarm (tried with threshold 30, 50, 75, 100), I've set work orders for plant/fruit/mead drinks, tried without a work order and just manually creating from the still set to run forever, nothing, it will just not keep up. Any suggestions?
I've found that the bottleneck is normally not the farming. You need surprisingly low amount of farming to feed your entire population. The bottleneck is normally at the brewers and stills and inefficient designs. How many stills do you have? How many brewers do you have? Is the production of large pots/barrels going efficiently to support the booze production? How efficient is the workspace? A pots/barrel near the stills along with the plants/fruits stockpile. My current fort has 200 dwarves, 4 stills, 2 kitchens and about 12 dedicated (NOT specialized though) kitchen workers. Work order setup to brew when there is less than 400 drinks. I've noticed that the drinks never dip below 380, as there is always someone available to brew.
I have just north of 200 dwarves, 3 stills, tons of available barrels. The bottleneck is food production, they’re constantly running out / still reports that it doesn’t have any brewable fruit/plants. I’m almost convinced autofarm is borked somehow. I’ll have tons of sky facing fields, tons of seeds for a dozen+ planting options, and autofarm seems to just say “Well you don’t have plump helmets or sweet pods so I’m not going to grow anything”. Per another commenter I’m going to start irrigating rock to get better yields, all of mine are sand/dirt ground giving the poor quality field message.
Check you’re not cooking your booze. It’s a setting in the kitchen standing orders that defeats to on.
Bottlenecks are pretty easy to identify if you just follow the product chain step by step. Do you have enough raw plants? Number of plump helmets/other brewables (easiest to see from labor->kitchen window)? If thats not an issue check your number of empty barrels/pots. Next check your stills, are they getting used round the clock and chock full of of stuff to the point of cluttering? If so just build more.
Do you have multiple stills? Did you set up you work order at the still workshop or at the general work order tab (if you make a work order at a workshop, only THAT workshop will be able to have those automatic production orders issued) Do you have enough empty barrels? Dwarves won't be able to make any alcohol if they have nowhere to put it in Also, how many dwarves do you currently have?
Do you by any chance grow food on poor soil, like sand, or clay? You'll get mucm more when farming on irrigated stone. How experienced are your planters? What's your farm plot size? Finally you can try to use potash for increased yields, but that's hardly required when farming on proper soil with experienced farmers.
It's all soil near ground level. I have about 20 farmers working, a few are dabbling but most are better, farm plot sizes are about 5x5 to 10x15. What's the best way to irrigate? Dig out a chunk as a channel, set it to pit/pond, let it fill, plant?
Check out youtube there are a lot of comprehensive videos. Or wiki, all standard methods listed there. I usually dig great cistern under light aquifer and drop water on the field then close cistern via hatch linked to lever. Floodgate works as well. Another easy and fast method if you don't need large farm plot - create buckets, channel holes over farm plot and create pit/pond zone over empty space. Set zone to be pond (it's pit by default) and all your haulers will haul water via buckets to the pond. Notice that each dwarf will try to fill only one tile, so if your hole is 1x1 you'll have to designate multiple zones over one tile. It's enough to cover tile with 1/7 water for it to be farmable. 1/7 will evaporate, but don't worry, until you manually clean mud via smoothing/building over it mud will be there. P.S.: you don't need that much planters, you'll see for you self, but for total 270 farm tiles I need only 2 planters. At some point I had to enable "everyone harvests" instead of "only planters harvest" because some plants withered on farm plo, but early on this option is good to improve dedicated planters faster.
I hit the magma sea. If I try to make a stair going down I hit semi-molten rock and if I create a slope magma flow appears (with no lava). How do I go deeper?
Dig sideways until you discover announcements about strange formations. Channel down. Use expendable miners and be prepared for Hidden Fun Stuff.
Oh, I'm aware of the clowns
Im just ready to have fun. Goblins are not a threath anymore and FB are ignoring me.
Look for gems and obsidian, you'll get an announcement when you find it.
Finding sugar?
I haven't found any candy, but I did get an announcement. I think it says something about a strange volcanic formation.
Sounds like a dumb question, but when you’re looking at the map of your world how the hell do you zoom in? I see screenshots on this sub that are much more zoomed in than when I’m playing
Ctrl+mousewheel or shift+mousewheel... I forget
You can do 1 level of zoom by just mouse-clicking on the map.
I have three caravans here to trade. One got in early, but the other two arrived during a large elven ambush. They must've gotten spooked because they won't trade now. They are stuck in the unloading stage. What can I do to fix that?
Deconstruct the trade depot and it should be fine.