The Gamer's Quarter

[Laco]

Please continue! Although I found the interface pretty impossible (like everyone else), I find your updates really interesting. Roguelikes and turn-based games in general can make for really good storytelling.

[player 2]

No, scratch, dont' stop. It's really interesting to read what you write. DF is kind of intimidating for me to pickup myself, but it's fascinating to hear other people play.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[dessgeega]

keep posting!
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[a_plus]

please please do keep posting! I'd be adding more of my own stuff were I around the computer long enough to play it. I think i played for about 6 hours in a row the first night I got it.

and like i said, it's not TOO intimidating, once you just jump in. I'd say not to read any of the (skimpy) manual and just play it, with the wiki open in your browser. Things just kind of fall into place after a while.

The military/defense type stuff is something i haven't really gotten into yet, since I've so far only played in very calm widlernesses.

also, that alternate tileset! Any clue where I can get that?

[dark steve]

I'm also sincerely enjoying experiencing the game vicariously, as I can't get my hands on it personally.

There's a seriously great article in this thread, I bet.

[a_plus]

and would you believe that this game is an alpha? it's more complete than many professionally released games!

[Scratchmonkey]

[Scratchmonkey]

One thing that I've noticed among the various DF communities is a split between players in how they view immigration and how they handle it.

For those who wish, there's a Wiki page on immigration that's pretty good. I'll give a short explanation for those of you too lazy to follow links.

First, I should give some background on how immigration functions in the game. The game starts out with 7 dwarves (nyuck nyuck nyuck) who start building up your fort. Additional dwarves arrive mainly in the spring, although there is a chance a smaller group will show up before winter. There's always a metalsmith immigrant that shows up prior to winter in your first year. The number of immigrants that shows up is related to your fortress's total Created Wealth, which is visible in the [z] status screen. This information is conducted by the dwarven caravan.

Immigrants pose a problem for two reasons:

1) Survival. At the beginning of the game, your biggest enemy is starvation. Having enough food for all your dwarves becomes even more dangerous when a horde of new tenants show up on your map, especially if they show up just before winter.

2) Expansion. New immigrants require rooms and other infrastructure, meaning that you have to take time away from whatever projects you might be working on at the time to try and create the needed infrastructure for the new dwarves.

The split is whether you kill immigrants or not.

The difference between the two camps seems to be loosely based on those who like to invest some sort of narrative into the game vs. those who play the game "to win" or to maximize their mastery of the internal systems. The most extreme examples of each can be seen in the posters on the DF message boards, where there is one player who feels that immigration forces the game to play at a faster pace than they would like, so the response is to off immigrants and where there is another player who constantly attacks those who kill their immigrants by making passive-aggressive comments about dwarven death camps and sending immigrants "to the showers".

There's also a further difference of opinion among the killing camp in terms of nobles vs. regular dwarves. Many players off the "useless" nobles under the theory that they're more trouble than they're worth, especially since the beneficial aspects of these nobles haven't even been implemented yet. At least one player kills all nobles that come to the fortress under the role-playing conceit of running a dwarven collectivist society.

As for how the immigrants are killed, there are a bunch of different methods. The most common is drowning, simply because it's easy to set up a drowning room and the method works really quickly. The disadvantage is that the gear from the drowned dwarves is usually washed away, along with their corpses. Starvation is another common tactic, with the advantage that you can implement it with a single room with a locked door and you can recover the gear afterwards. The disadvantage being that it takes a long time. There's also caving the the cavern in on top of dwarves, which is unreliable and burning them up in magma, which I imagine is quite satisfying and even quicker than drowning.

The most "humane" method of offing unwanted immigrants is making them hunters. Because of various issues with the hunting code, most hunters are unlikely to survive for any length of time, meaning that it's a fairly ideal choice, seeing as how the dwarf will probably die and even if they don't, they're providing the fortress with "free" food and hides for tanning. Confession: I have resorted to this tactic in the past when I have gotten overwhelmed by several large groups of immigrants. Shortly afterward, I decided to go back and changed the hunters back to their original jobs, which leaves me with one Peasant who constantly passes out when doing anything thanks to a spinal injury incurred when attempting to hunt a deer.

I don't really feel like there's the need for killing off immigrants, at least if you know what you're doing -- it's fairly easy to have a sustainable food supply if you get farms going in your first year and past that, the only reason for killing dwarves is feeling like you don't want to deal with them, which, concentration-camp allusions aside, does seem to be taking the easy way out.

[a_plus]

oho

[Scratchmonkey]

Good find.

Ralum/"Silverynails" experienced a near-catastrophe today. While gamely trying to set up my steam defenses, a magma man broke through my floodgate as I was trying to link it to a lever, the problem being that I had not yet built the door/channel combo that I always build as flood control (as I still needed to place another floodgate and figured it could wait). So the lava coursed through the halls of my fortress that lay between the chasm and the magma river.

Thankfully regular doors stop lava, so I was able to contain the flow to my mining stockpile and my mining corridors, with the loss of 10 assorted dwarves and random domestic animals. At first I was thinking that my whole fortress would have to be abandoned, what with a major part of it flooded with magma. Oddly enough, the way that magma floods work is that you have a "wave" that moves along the passages and nothing behind it, meaning that after it was done, I had lava in the most extreme north of the area between the chasm and the magma and the vast majority of the fort in that area was now clear. The magma didn't even destroy my mining stockpile or my masonry workshops (the magma smelter and forge were blocked off by a separate set of doors, although that didn't stop a fire man from coming out of the magma river and destroying my forge while the flood was going on).

I've now managed to reclaim the areas where there is no longer magma and am currently contemplating the possibility of draining the magma that is still there into the chasm. I think I can do this, so long as I can retract one of my bridges across the chasm, open the doors to where that bridge was and hopefully, the magma will all flow into the chasm. I'll have to risk attacks from the chasm denizens, I think it will be well worth it not to have a major part of the mountain made impassable by magma (although I guess I could bridge over it/dig around it).

The bright side of all of this is that my lava flooding corridor is now full of hot bubby magma and my steam defense is ready to go, although I now realize that the switch to control the steam defense is right next to where the magma will first reach the water, meaning that there's a very good chance that the poor sod who pulls the lever will be instantly flash-fried for his troubles.

[a_plus]

ok, i'm pretty excited about the new version of this that should be out in a day or two. It's going to include specific pile types, which means things will run a lot smoother and faster! making steel, for one, includes lots of specific ores and stuff, and if i can just have a pile of limestone close to my magma smelter, that'll keep my dwarves from running halfway across the mountain to get anything.

[Redeye]

This thread is vicariously thrilling.

I really must try to get into this game.

..."dwarven death camps and sending immigrants "to the showers".


Maybe I can metagame this as a variant of Dungeon Keeper.

Make a "nested" Tomb Of Horrors with my Demented Dwarves living in hidden sections,
pulling levers behind the scenes.

Step into my parlor.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[Scratchmonkey]

[Redeye]

[dark steve]

So wait, you came in with the fallout kids, right
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[Scratchmonkey]

I think anytime the caravan is wiped out while it's visiting you, it's held against you, regardless of whether it was you, goblins or rampaging elephants that destroyed the caravan.

I don't think that counts for the dwarven caravan, which comes from "your" civilization. I don't think that you can ever have the dwarves besiege you, although that might change later when Toady adds competing kingdoms, trade routes, etc.

[Redeye]

[Scratchmonkey]

Okey, last I posted, Ducimshoveth looked like this: Ducimshoveth, Winter 1055.

So, now it looks like this: Ducimshoveth, Summer 1057

Warning: it's pretty darn big because I didn't really shrink it down and I provided some half-assed documentation to try and explain what the major features of the fort are.

I still haven't gotten besiged yet, although I've caught 8 goblins and killed a bunch more in the row of traps that sit at the entrance to the fort (the captured goblins are currently being caged for the pleasure of my dwarves in the zoo and their equipment is currently being traded to the humans at my trade depot, largely for more booze). I'm hoping that I'll be able to lock all the dwarves inside and just steam away. I still haven't gotten a chance to pull the Lever of Doom yet and I'm getting kind of itchy about it.

In terms of fort planning, the biggest additions are, going from west to east:

Conversion of my old dining hall into a barracks, now loaded with weapon and armor racks (and covered with the blood of my sparring military dwarves). The intention was that in times of siege, having a barracks close to the entrance to the fort would make it easier for my military to repel invaders. The problem with this is that you don't really want your military to get involved with sieges. It's far easier to shut the door/fire siege engines/steam them to death/build a murder corridor, etc. So I'm likely going to move the barracks again.

I've also put in a ton more bedrooms for the dwarves and I'm currently contemplating of clearing out the "original" dorms near the front of the mountain and just building new ones deeper inside. The dorms are all being filled with stone coffers in anticipation of whenever a bookkeeper shows up (I've already made some coins, having heard that a single stack of coins is enough to make the bookkeeper decide to show up).

I've also added some tombs just to the left of the chasm, which were accidentally blocked off by a spur of the chasm, making the structure a little unorthodox. I had a feeling that some of the dwarves may not have appreciated my open outside graveyard, so I build a bunch of coffins and set them up. I'm still not entirely sure how they work -- most of them have been claimed by one dwarf or another; I'm just not sure whether the dwarves in question are still alive or not. If they are, I'm going to have to build a lot more coffins (as I have 155 dwarves).

The big new addition between the chasm and the magma is the huge mining stockpile that I've hollowed out. I still haven't moved my original stockpile inside and I'm already running out of space, which is why I have a bunch of mason's workshops working on reducing rock to blocks, which take up less space and can be used in more kinds of construction. I've also set up a magma smelter and a magma forge, which I'm using to create various metal items (created thus far: coins, giant serrated disks (suitable for use in traps) and a platinum statue). My main problems with the magma workshops in the past has been attacks from the magma monsters, so to this end I've placed an archery range and a secondary barracks so that when the monsters do show up, I'll at least have some nearby dwarves to deal with the problem. When I get rid of the front barracks, I'll probably just build this one up, as I'll need it when I eventually decide to cross the magma.

If anybody has any questions about the fort, lemme know, I'll be happy to answer.

[Scratchmonkey]

Another Dwarf Fortress image post, as not a lot has happened with my personal forts, aside from finally getting rid of the front barracks and some minor digging/upgrades for bedrooms (and the reason I haven't gotten sieged yet is that there was a bug preventing sieges from happening).

First, I'll post some more outside defense strategies, since that seems to be a fairly common topic of conversation among DF players, mainly because since all forts have to have entrances, it's a universal problem and it's also something that people like to have work stylistically as well as functionally. There's just something about carving out an entrance into an under-mountain fort that demands something beyond practicality, which is why one of my forts has the entrance lined with statues.

http://img204.imageshack.us/my.php?image=tatastdefenceii1.jpg

Firstly, a very large and long defence corridor, notable for the gigantic amount of space involved and that the defences proper don't even really start until the other side of the underground river, barring the barracks that are south of the entrance (and are inaccessible from it), the guard dogs at the very beginning of the entrance and the lever-linked supports holding up the entrance, which is not something that you see a lot.

The numbers represent what the 3 levers on the right side of the image are linked to. The first two levers are linked to different bridges, allowing the player to route invaders in front of the ballistae emplacements on the other side of the river and possibly trap them in the entrance hall entirely. The third lever is linked to the supports in the entrance hall, meaning that if it's thrown, that entire hall should be filled with falling rock. Obviously this is something that requires a great amount of cleanup time, since you would have to re-mine the area, build new supports and link them all up to the lever each time you used it; however, it gets serious style points.

http://img0633.paintedover.com/uploads/0633/ocdfortcolorcoded.gif

This is version 1 of one guy's self-described "OCD entrance". Basically, there's a winding corridor that is first lined with ballistae, then by fortified rooms that could be filled with dwarves armed with crossbows and a final "battle-room" where the martialed military dwarves would meet the invaders before entering into the fort proper. There are two basic issues with this, the first being that since civilians man siege engines (rather than military dwarves), they have a habit of panicking when confronted with enemies close-up, making the proximity of the ballistae to the entrance corridor problematic. The other was discovered when he test-fired one of the ballistae and broke the leg of a dwarf re-loading the ballista directly across from it.

http://img0633.paintedover.com/uploads/0633/damnthegemwalls.gif

This is the second iteration of this defence, allowing more room between the ballistae and the potential invaders as well as aligning them so that they aren't firing directly at each other. I still don't know if it's going to be very effective since I've never used ballistae at close quarters. It looks cool though.

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/images/3/36/Df_steam2.gif

This is a picture of a very advanced steam defense in action. There are several things of note in this design, in particular the placement of statues around the magma aqueducts, so that dwarves don't wanter into them, as well as the craziest lever room that I've ever seen. In fact, I count 57 different levers in this screenshot and I fully believe that they all have independent functions (although some may be subsets of the others). It's also set up to perpetually generate steam with no issues with water channels being dried up by flooding magma because this works by flooding water into magma channels instead. I've seen the guy's explanation of how to set it up (it's in the wiki under Steam Defence) and it makes my head spin.

Moving away from defense systems, some people have put a lot of thought into producing aesthetically pleasing room designs, this being one of the more extreme:

http://img0633.paintedover.com/uploads/0633/holyshitnobles.gif

Done by the same guy who did the OCD defences, this is a mock-up of a system for housing the various nobles who show up to live in the fort. The rooms around the outside are bedrooms and the inside is a giant communal dining area. The issue with this is that generally nobles dislike sharing rooms and many of them require rooms beyond a bedroom, such as offices. These rooms would either have to be designated elsewhere or overlap with the bedroom. Since overlapping and sharing reduces room value and nobles have requirements as to how valuable their rooms are, you can often get stuck in the position of having to provide the nobles with valuable (and hard-to-produce) items like metal or glass furniture in order to give them the room values that they desire.

http://spartapathfinders.com/misc/chasm.gif

Finally, we have one of the most efficient fort designs in a while, obviously made by somebody who's spent a great deal of time with the game and knows how to plan ahead. My forts are far more "organic". They waste space and don't have enough in certain areas. There are sprawling complexes and wasteful choke points. Here, there's a solid 6-wide corridor (as wide as you can get without the ceiling collapsing) running down the center of the fort, all the bedrooms are the same size and are situated in well-organized blocks, there's a single large farm room with multiple plots, a single large food storeroom, an inside refuse pile (doored off to reduce miasma), a small coffin plot, mining corridors, a future magma tunnel/aqueduct, basically everything that my forts are not. Another aspect worth pointing out is that this fort is operating without any (or any visible in this shot) mining stockpiles, meaning that rock and ore is left to sit where it's been hewed out of the earth. The advantage to this is that it eliminates a lot of hauling and actually makes it easier to build on an area with stone/ore sitting on it because of the way tasking works in DF. With the recent advent of specific stockpiles (i.e. only limestone here, only iron here, etc.), not having a single main stockpile is highly recommended for increasing efficiency.

I almost look forward to when mine eventually fail so that I can build something with the future of the fort in mind. My forts are the first two forts that I ever attempted, meaning that they've got so many mistakes that it's often very frustrating working around my previous design decisions; although I also find it challenging in an engaging way, enough so that I don't have the heart to start over.

[Scratchmonkey]

So it turns out that in recent versions of the game, there were bugs that prevented sieges from occuring, specifically goblin sieges (apparently the goblins would not siege unless they could find beak dogs to ride and the engine actually generates beak dogs procedurally, which is crazy). This was fixed in the latest version of the game, meaning that when I upgraded and started playing with my peaceful fort of Ducimshoveth, it took roughly half-a-season for the goblins to show up.

They dawdled near the side of the map killing some deer before beginning their approach of the fortress proper, crossing directly over the frozen outside river and keeping to the north of my channels, thus bypassing any direct fire from the ballistae, who were quickly shut down once it became apparent that they were only going to be wasting their ammo. After all, although goblins would eventually come in front of them, by that point they would be so close as to spook the firing crews, who would also then be vunerable to goblin arrows and bolts fired through the fortifications.

Instead, all dwarves were gradually shut deeper into the fortress, the bridge across the moat was retracted and the order was given to open the floodgate that held back the magma. I was somewhat worried about this because the floodgate in question is constructed out of stone and I know that stone floodgates that border the magma river are incinerated after a single use and that you need to make the floodgate out of steel to prevent this from occuring. If this were the case here, the magma, once loosed into the outside channels, could not be shut off and the channels, now coursing with liquid rock, would set up a permanent wall of steam as they emptied into the outside river, creating difficulties in trading, to say the least.

Nevertheless, the order was given, the lever was pulled and the magma poured forth, creating a billowing cloud of steam that soon split into two as it headed down the separate channels, leaving a horde of screaming and dying goblins in its wake. Eventually the magma reached the outside river, cutting off any chance of retreat across the main bridge. Exhilirated from the carnage of it all, I ordered the magma floodgate closed and rejoiced when the floodgate was unscathed, shutting off the magma flow and allowing me to re-fill my moat with more conventional liquid.

The Aftermath:

http://www.pongism.org/Ducimshoveth1057w.png

The channels are currently empty of water because the water-lava reaction got rid of both and I haven't re-opened my water floodgates because as you may notice near the bottom-right of the picture, the House Fer (farmers) noble has wandered down my water tunnel and as tempting as drowning him is, I'd prefer to keep my number of intentional murders at 0 (after un-forbidding some doors, he came back out and I re-flooded).

The main mass of goblins died fairly quickly, as you can tell from the clump just north from the front gates. There are some that made it past the trade depot before succumbing to the clouds of steam and there are two others farther to the left:

There's a live(!) goblin just to the south of the south channel. The brown background indicates that he/she has been injured in some way. I only noticed this goblin after taking the screenshot and in the time that had expired in-game since, the goblin had limped off-map.

The corpse directly next to the outside river was a goblin who survived the initial steaming with only a dark-red (completely useless, although still there) wound to his right leg. He attempted to flee afterwards, periodically passing out as he limped west, unthinkingly heading straight into giant steam clouds being generated at the outside river from the channels being filled with lava. I sent a quick burst of water after him, sending a wave of steam down each channel and chasing him down from behind. Struggling, he barely managed to outrun the steam wave, only to perish when attempting to cross through the clouds still hanging over the river.

The two dwarves coming in from the south were hanging out in front of the fort when the siege began and ignored the order to go inside when it was given. When the goblins showed up and showered them with bolts, they raced off south, although only after the peasant (the light blue backed by brown) was badly wounded in the foot. I had actually thought that they were dead and it was a nice surprise to see that I'd only lost two dwarves in the attack, one of which is visible just south of the south main gate bridge, along with a handful of dogs and one pet mule, which is causing one of my farmers to mope around in a extended state of grief. These, in comparison to the 15 goblins who perished in the attack, are acceptable losses.

[Redeye]

Marvelous, keep it coming.
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I felt sheer anarchic joy when I ran over my first pedestrian.

[Scratchmonkey]

In terms of more mundane matters, I've been turning my attention to a couple different areas of production, each focused around making my dwarves happier.

First of these is booze production. Dwarves love booze and prefer to drink it over water. Booze is also stored in barrels, which can also be used for food production. A common problem in DF has been your dwarves packing all your barrels full with the fall harvest, meaning that the brewdwarves abandon their jobs, not having any barrels to put their product into. Combine this with the fact that barrels are most easily made out of wood, the scarcest resource in the game, and you have a recipe for a lot of sober (and thus unhappy) dwarves.

There are two ways around this. Most recently Toady (the main developer of DF) added specific stockpile options, allowing you to control what the dwarves can place in each individual stockpile. This is very handy because now you can separate ores and rocks, as well as other things, like the stockpile right above my ballistae, which is set to hold only siege engine components and ammo (and the rest of my furniture stockpiles are set not to take these items). Part of this is an option available from the stock[p]ile screen, where you can reserve a certain amount of barrels for booze production.

Additionally, barrels don't have to be made out of wood. You can also make them out of 3 bars of metal. While any metal will do, it's advised to use the readly-available and non-valuable metals like tin, brass and bronze. So now I have a dedicated magma smelter and magma forge doing nothing more than churning out tin bars and forging them into tin barrels. These kegs are now slowly rolling into my stockpiles, where they are picked up and utilized by my brewdwarves.

Remember, a drunk dwarf is a happy (and efficient) dwarf.

The second issue regarding happiness is that of clothes. Clothes wear out and dwarves are upset when they're wearing tattered rags, for some reason. I haven't been able to solve this problem as adeptly as I have the booze issue, mainly because I haven't found a cheap and easy method of cloth production. I think I may have to build a mill and start weaving some of the pig tail plants that I grow into pig tail cloth that then can be woven into clothes at the appropriate workshop. I was hoping that my cave spider silk production would meet clothing demands; it appears that this is not very reliable.

So, to do:

- increase clothing production
- figure out how to get weapons out of my forge and into the hands of my military
- mint more coins so that the bookkeeper shows up
- build slums before the bookkeeper shows up so that when the Dwarven Economy starts, my haulers will have somewhere to live
- build more magma smelters and forges, start mass production of metal and glass items

[Bulkor]

Registering just to gush about this game with Scratchmonkey.

I recently got the bookkeeper. This means that dwarves are now charged rent for their rooms (calculated based on size, quality of furniture, presence of valuable minerals or gems in the walls,and so on) and receive money for the work they do. Dwarves get mad if there isn't enough work to do, and they get really mad if they can't make rent and get evicted.

To that end, you need to set up cheap slum apartments and try to keep everyone employed, which means inventing busy work periodically and giving people with unnecessary specialties (like jewelers and so on) supplementary jobs to make ends meet.

The guild representatives also start making requests of the governing official once the economy forms, either to adjust wages in their favor or to mandate a certain number of jobs for their laborers.

So, a few weeks after the bookkeeper arrived, a dwarf who was injured in a siege got evicted because he was bedridden and couldn't work. He later went insane from the stress and hauled himself off the bed on a bad foot to crawl around the fortress babbling. His farmer guild rep had managed to get a 50% wage increase just in time for winter, when it did nobody any good except a handful of brewers, cooks and plant-processors. (that's still more work than most of the other guilds got, but not nearly enough to keep all 30+ of them busy)

The upsides to being a capitalist fortress are the ability to see how much of anything you have in stock, and the ability to order specific items thrown into the chasm or melted down in the forge. Unfortunately, both of these features are kind of clunky and don't work as well as I'd like, but the hassle of keeping your dwarves from going homeless (and subsequently throwing tantrums and getting thrown in jail) is interesting enough that it's sort of its own reward.

I think you can also buy things with coins instead of just goods from caravans once you have the bookkeeper, but since the last human caravan got massacred by goblins, (as seems pretty much inevitable) I'm not sure if they're going to come back as a caravan or a siege next time.

[Scratchmonkey]

So, last time, I laid out some bullet points for future development, I'll go through those one-by-one.

- increase clothing production

Still trying to figure out this one. I do have a ton more cloth/plant fiber thanks to more judicious use of planting and trading what spoils of war the elves will accept in exchange for rope reed cloth. I have a couple clothesmaker's workshops churning out trousers and shirts, I'm hoping currently that these will be enough in terms of keeping dwarves from getting unhappy about the lack of non-threadbare clothing.

- figure out how to get weapons out of my forge and into the hands of my military

This may just be an issue of time. I have a ton of hauling tasks taking place right now (more on this later) and because of this many items that need hauling to stockpiles are just sitting around on the ground for large amounts of time. I also need to concentrate on building better warehouse space next time, as currently it is far from optimized.

- mint more coins so that the bookkeeper shows up

I've minted a stack of copper coins and a stack of gold coins. No bookkeeper yet.

- build slums before the bookkeeper shows up so that when the Dwarven Economy starts, my haulers will have somewhere to live

I have about 20 2-space rough stone slum apartments dug out, they're waiting for beds right now. I figure anybody extra can sleep in the barracks, where I do have a small number of open beds.

- build more magma smelters and forges, start mass production of metal and glass items

I have built more smelters and forges and production of tin barrels and copper cages has begun, with the former hopefully ending my problems with having a constant supply of alcohol available and the latter serving to help me outfit my jail with a proper number of restraints/cages and to retire the cloth restraints that I'd been using for this purpose thus far. Glass is taking an altogether too long to get going, mainly because if I want to produce clear glass (one of my nobles is demanding a clear glass window in his bedroom), I need to do the following:

- make ash in the ashery out of wood
- make lye in the ashery out of ash
- make potash in the ashery out of barrels of lye
- bake pearlash in the kiln out of potash
- collect some sand
- make clear glass in the glass furnace out of pearlash and sand

Awesome.

Also currently the front of my fortress is awash in vomit. This is because I'm moving my stone stockpiles inside the mountain, which means that I have a constant stream of haulers going in and out dragging along giant boulders. Apparently a lot of my haulers have spent so much time inside the the mountain without ever leaving that they now have sun-sickness, meaning that when they're exposed to natural light, they start feeling weak and puking all over the place.

[Scratchmonkey]

I just got the second siege of Ducimshoveth, or at least the first wave of it. In this latest version of DF, the "don't go outside" option actually works tremendously well, so before the gobbos had even crossed the first outside bridge, every dwarf was safely locked inside the fort with the drawbridge entrance retracted.

Faced with a lifted bridge and no other mode of entry, the gobbos decided to hang around on the main road and do what goblins do, eat their own snot, play goblin-dice, stare at the hypnotically lapping channels of water that line both sides of the road, hang on, what's that hissing sound?

This time the steam defences made a clean sweep, with the perma-steam at the bridge over the outside river catching all of the stragglers that weren't steamed on the first burst. Although many DF players use a more complex steam system that relies on perpetual floods to generate an unending cloud of steam, I'm happy enough with my system, with which I can generate bursts of steam travelling from the front of the fort to the outside river with the pull of a lever.

Now to sit back and see if there's a second wave and if there is, whether they'll have brought trolls.

[Scratchmonkey]

There was, in fact, a second wave, and what I thought were trolls were evil men, humans who led the goblins into battle. They were milling around south of the fort, unwilling to venture near the entrance since with the drawbridge now raised, there was no obvious route into the fort.

Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking clearly and hit the wrong sequence of levers, eventually resulting in my stupidly allowing my dwarves to go outside, which caused the goblins to come roaring up the entrance. With 9 or so dwarves outside and none of them important, I locked my doors and watched helplessly as the goblins came across the lowered bridge and carved up the dwarves hapless enough to be caught outside. The problem was that my lever that withdrew the bridge and triggered the steam defences was too close to the front of the fort, since it could be "seen" by the goblins, meaning that my dwarves were too scared to go pull it. Thankfully with no trolls, the goblins couldn't get further into my fort, leaving us at an impasse. Eventually I mined a tunnel from below the lever that allowed a farmer to get close enough to pull it, leading to the destruction of the second wave.

After, I had a number of duties that needed to be tended to. Firstly, I needed to make a second lever to control the magma floodgate and the drawbridge that was placed out of sight of outside marauders. Secondly, I had hit upon a reliable method of producing clothing.

You can grow a number of staple crops in Dwarf Fortress. The ones I have access to are:

Plump Helmets: can be eaten raw, can be cooked at a Kitchen, can be brewed into Dwarven Wine
Cave Wheat: can be ground into cookable Dwarven Flour at a Mill for a 1:1 ration, can be brewed into Dwarven Beer
Sweet Pods: can be squished into cookable Dwarven Syrup at a Farmer's Workshop for a 5:1 ratio, can be brewed into Dwarven Rum
Pig Tails: can be processed at a Farmer's Workshop to make Pig Tail Thread for a ratio of 1:1, can be brewed into Dwarven Ale

There are also Quarry Bushes, which I have not found any seeds for as of yet. (They can be collected from bushes that grow naturally around and inside the fort. It is possible that they were not generated on my map, which would be too bad because they are another plant that can be processed at a Farmer's Workshop for a 5:1 ratio.)

Early on, it's best to rely on Plump Helmets, since you can grow them in any season except winter, they can be brewed into Dwarven Wine for a net gain in seeds and since they can be eaten raw, you don't have to rely on making kitchens or having cooks. After you get rolling, Sweet Pods become very attractive because if you process them into a barrel at a Farmer's Workshop, you get 5 units of Dwarven Syrup for every Pod. The best part about that is that each unit of Syrup, while not edible by itself, can be used as an ingredient for making a meal. Once most of your food is meals being generated by cooks, the extra return for Sweet Pods means that you should be using it as your main food staple, complemented with Plump Helmets for the seasons where Sweet Pods won't grow and with whatever meat and fish you get from caravans/hunters/fisherdwarves.

You also want to have some crops that can be brewed, which is generally what I do with some of the Sweet Pods and also with Cave Wheat. Pig Tails, on the other hand, don't get brewed at all, because since you can grow them very quickly and they generate one unit of Pig Tail Thread per plant, which can be woven at a Loom into Pig Tail Cloth and then fashioned into clothing at a Clothesmaker's Workshop. (This is not entirely idle pedantry, it's intended as an object lesson as to the level of detail in DF.)

With Pig Tails being used entirely for thread production and two Farmer's Workshops devoted entirely to creating this thread, I have managed to clothe a fort of nearly 200 dwarves in less than 2 years. It helps a lot if your fort is heavy on farmers like mine, since they naturally have their jobs set to work on every step of the processes listed above.

Only a couple seasons after the siege noted above, a third siege showed up, this time with nearly 40 goblins. Leaving the drawbridge up until the last second, I let the goblins pierce themselves on the collection of weapon traps around the entrance and then let loose the magma, followed by a burst of water that generated two running steam explosions that combined wiped out all except 2 goblins, for the cost of 4 stray dogs that did not get inside in time. Now if only the bookkeeper would show up, so that I could melt down all of their iron eqiupment that they've left behind, nicely cleaned.

[Scratchmonkey]

Bill Harris has part 1 of a 2 part interview with DF creator Tarn Adams up:

http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2007/01/dwarf-fortress-interview.html

[dark steve]

(still following this thread with interest)
_________________

[Redeye]

[Scratchmonkey]

Well, those sieges are coming pretty regularly, about 1 every 2 seasons or so. With my steam up and running, actually defending my fort isn't much of a deal; however, the cleanup afterwards is pretty ridiculous, in that I have to deal with 2-3 dozen goblin corpses, plus all the equipment that they leave behind.

Thankfully, I did eventually get the bookkeeper, which means I can designate the leftover equipment to be melted or thrown into the chasm; with around 4 sieges worth of piled-up equipment, this winds up being a monumental task, even for a fort of 200+ dwarves. It's bad enough that I have harvests rotting in the fields because I'm spread so thin with hauling duties. The chasming also causes occasional invasions of batmen blowgunners, which are dealt with in almost comical fashion by the traps lining the chasm entrance, not to mention the giant roving packs of dogs.

The coming of capitalism (through the person of the bookkeeper) is also shaking up the fort quite a bit, in that now that dwarves are paid for the work they do, there are plenty of dwarves who can no longer afford the apparently quite opulent quarters that I've built for them. Instead, they're reduced to sleeping in the free beds in the barracks, where they'll try and sleep through the sound of steel on steel and screams of pain. I've also dug a fair amount of small rough-stone slum dwellings that hopefully even the poorest dwarves will be able to afford. For those who are rolling in it, I've also built a series of shops that are selling a variety of different items, each taken from the previously community-property storerooms. Oh, it is a fickle invisible hand.

I've posted it before in this thread, it's worth posting again:

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/images/3/36/Df_steam2.gif

This is probably the most efficient fort that I've ever seen. It's designed around a 6-tile bore (the maximum width you can have without needing to build supports to prevent cave-ins) that runs from the front of the mountain all the way to the magma river. It's flanked by two other 6-tile areas to the north and south, used for farming, storage and workshops, with even the ore and stone storage neatly split into the various types. The only area that really stands out as being anything other than brutally efficient is the large oval dining room.

There are a couple rooms/constructions that are worth a closer look:

Firstly, this fort is in the DF wiki because of the steam defenses. How they work is that the fort has two perma-filled magma channels that run all the way from the magma river to the western edge of the map. The main entrance to the fort has a floodgate that's linked to the inside river. By flipping a switch, the inside river floods out through the entrance, moving out towards the edge of the map and also running into the magma channels on the side. This generates clouds of steam that never dissapate until that central floodgate is closed. You can see the steam being generated in the above screenshot, although the floodgate has been closed and the defense will soon be reset. I would like to have a defense built along these lines for my next fortress, although the efficiency of this fort is such that I feel like doing so would be a waste of time considering that somebody has already done something along those lines and done it so well.

There's also the switch room, down and to the right from the central floodgate. Earlier I had surmised that the builder actually had functions for all of these switches. In retrospect, this seems incredibly unlikely. Instead, it is probable that the builder used the function of assigning a particular dwarf to a particular object to make a room full of switches, each one assigned to a single dwarf. This would allow the player to make any dwarf they wanted move toward this room. This would have been incredibly useful when the "everybody go inside" command was non-functional and would still be useful in that sometimes dwarves just ignore the command and wander outside anyway (I lost a legendary mason because of this during the last siege).

I'm still trying to work out how I'll deal with the endgame SPOILARZ. I have half of something set up right now; I've just realized that there's a possibility of losing containment and as such, am going to have to revisit my strategy, with the end result possibly involving some serious overuse of steel.

[Redeye]

[Scratchmonkey]

[Harveyjames]

You boys and your Dwarf Fortress.

[Redeye]

[Scratchmonkey]

Today I found out, as per a post by the developer in the forums, that DF is beerware.

[Fred]

[Redeye]

[Malons]

I'm interested in this game, but I'm totally lost as soon as I load it. So I was wondering if someone could point me in the direction of a good "Where to start guide" or something similar. Thanks.

[Scratchmonkey]

[Scratchmonkey]

Another crazy example of the attention to detail that you get in DF:

If you have diplomats/trade negotiators from a civilization enter into your fort and walk over squares with traps on them, if you are then subsequently invaded by that civilization, their warriors will not be affected by those traps because they've been told about them by the diplomat.

In code terms, this is probably something pretty easy like putting a [-ELF] flag on the trap in question so that it won't trigger when an elf walks over it (since all elves would be from the same local civilization), it's still fairly boggling in terms of the amount of thought that's gone into the game design.

[Hyfrydle]

I have just started playing this amazing game the first session ended with me staring at the screen wondering what on earth. The best advice I can give is to pause the game and do one thing at a time. I tend to start with the first dwarf and work through each one before I unpause then keep an eye on the first one and this way you can concentrate on one thing at a time.

The thing you need to work out very early on is farming as without this the food supply dwindles very quickly. Also read the Wiki it's packed with info which really starts to make sense after a few games.

Also I have noticed that the images of the fortresses posted on this thread are zoomed out and show the whole thing I was wondering how this was done.

If we all play the game and help each other out we should be able to start getting somewhere and make people more aware of this incredible game.

[Scratchmonkey]

[Scratchmonkey]

Part Two of the DF interview is up, featuring user-submitted questions, including four from yours truly.

[Malons]

I read through one of those, and they look to prove incredible helpful. Thanks a lot, I'll start in on the game either later tonight or this weekend if I don't get together with my friends.

[Malons]

Argh, for some reason I can't seem to figure how to move items. Like all the stuff I got when I started the game. What command do I use to move all that stuff inside. It's almost my first winter and I want all of my food and such inside.

[Scratchmonkey]

Depends on what "stuff" it is. If it's food or seeds, you need to make a food stockpile inside. You do this by hitting [p], then selecting [f] for food and then designating an area for the stockpile. If you've already created one outside, the easiest way to move it is to create the new stockpile and then un-designate the old one. This will cause the dwarves to move the stuff. There's also a way to move between stockpiles; however, just getting rid of the outside one would be more efficient.

Other items have, appropriately enough, other stockpiles. So beds and doors (and tables and chairs, etc.) go in a furniture stockpile. So doing the same for each kind of item should get your dwarves to move them inside.

If you're talking about workshops, you "move" those by building new ones and destroying the old ones. You can do this to your wagons to turn them into wood. You can do this by [q]ing over a workshop/building and then hitting [x] to remove said building. The dwarves, if they have the appropriate skills, will eventually wander over and take it apart.

[Malons]

I'm intelligent, I didn't even think about stockpiles, since I assumed that I could just command a dwarf to bring individual items inside one at a time or whatever. Bleh.

Alright, thanks for that help.

[Hyfrydle]

I continued my fortress last night. and started thinking about defense and worked out how the military system works. I now have the farming well in hand with plenty of food and drink for everyone also started on an indoor forest. Lost one fisherdwrf when the cave river flooded but I had three so it wasn't a major problem.

Also last night three nobles decided to join me I got a Manager, Sheriff and a House Ber which I believe is somrthing to do with farming. Started on there quarters but for some reason they keep requesting furniture even when I put it in there rooms any ideas???

Only been attacked by small groups of Kobolds which didn't cause me a major headache. Now that I know how to take a screen dump of the fortress I will aim to post some pics.

Thats all for now will keep updating as I play.

[Scratchmonkey]

In terms of furniture for the nobles, it doesn't register until you assign the room to them. For example, to define a study, you need to have a throne/seat built in that room. Then you select that throne with [q] and select the "make a room" option, define how big it is, etc. Then you need to assign it to the appropriate dwarf. Then the furniture that they want needs to be placed within the boundaries of that room for them to recognize that it's there. Remember that it takes time for dwarves to haul and place furniture, so you might be looking at the designated spot for it rather than the furntiture itself (the designated spot should be a negative tile of the actual item).

I've started a new fort at work. It's going pretty well except that my mechanic was assaulted by a giant mole and had his upper torso mangled (red) in the attack, meaning that he's probably out of commission for years to come.

[Redeye]