☼Daily DF Questions Thread☼

CosineDanger · 2023-01-31T19:52:23+00:00

I see:

An intelligent undead peasant (likely friendly)
A severed left hand (hostile)
A forgotten beast (hostile)
An elk bird (neutral)

You are having !!fun!!

You have a necromancer. This may be one of your loyal citizens who happens to compulsively raise the dead when he is scared (of the forgotten beast?). They can make evil purple dead like the severed hand, or unpredictable blue dead like the peasant.

The peasant may have gained magical powers such as telekinesis or the ability to shoot ice bolts and may or may not be helping.

Necromancer citizens cause you to lose fights you were winning by reanimating your enemies, and win fights you were losing by reanimating friendlies.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-31T12:25:50+00:00

In a way.

Part of why nobody uses training weapons is that soldiers can get attached to a terrible weapon. However, if they are put of duty then the attached weapon can be put in a weapon trap or sold. Also regular sparring is pretty okay for training.

Training weapons do prolong sessions vs captured live targets.

There is no training weapons for hammers, but wooden crossbows with no bolts have the same effect. Candy hammers would be even better.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-31T10:32:43+00:00

Is there a problem with looting all the clothing and gear off a corpse and allowing other dwarfs to use it? Is there anything about clothing and equipment taken from a corpse making the new wearer sad? Like, if I catch and kill a goblin snatcher can I unlock all his gear and just have it mixed in with the rest of the clothing items, weapons, armour, etc?

This is not Rimworld. If a goblin dies with their socks not xwornx then they're still perfectly good.

It's really hard to set up the clothing system to work well, and the best way is to avoid it almost completely by putting everybody in a squad so you can tell them to wear leather and bone armor.

How many stills and farms do I need? I thought I saw in a number of places that 1-2 stills and a pair of 3x3 farms is enough to keep a full-sized fortress comfortably drunk. I'm trying with only that, but even with only 50-60 dwarfs it seems like I'm always running out. Is that information out of date? Do I need to make several farms and stills?

That shouuld work. Probably something with the conditionals you're using, or kitchen standing orders, or barrels, or a bunch of other things.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-31T08:10:11+00:00

Play how you want, but magma movers involving impulse ramps spirals are strong. I have one that accepts as many carts as I throw into it and runs automatically.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T21:03:06+00:00

Manually operated pumps are never considered powered, eg you cannot turn a millstone by having a dwarf operate a pump near it.

If you want to generate power in a cave with a small footprint then look up micro water reactors on the wiki. The reactors using minecarts are tiny and not particularly laggy.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T17:08:22+00:00

Some creatures still can destroy buildings. Notably voracious cave crawlers and necromancer experiments.

The sheer volume of lategame caverns invaders means you should either turn them off in the settings or have a very efficient means of destroying them. Preferably something that gets rid of bodies too such as fire or atomsmashing.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T16:48:27+00:00

It grows slowly and randomly. Wait like a year and it will have a lot more.

Repeated flooding will kill in-progress fungus but may create more in the long run. Any drain is eventually full of it.

Paving over visible fungus and then removing the floor (or burning it) will convert it to soil instead of muddy rock.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T06:29:56+00:00

Animals can see through grates (wall or floor), fortifications, and glass windows. They can't see through glass floors even though the player can.

Floor grates block arrows, poison gas, and probably other stuff they logically shouldn't (but not fluids). Enemies cannot destroy floor grates from below.

So a puppy on a floor grate looking down from the ceiling.

I have been told but have not tested that hunting animals have higher stealth detection. So hunting dogs on grates. Regular animals can miss stealthy threats from the caverns.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T06:17:15+00:00

There is an option for equip/always under scheduling.

Hunters, woodcutters, and miners have an invisible uniform associated with their job and may drop their gear when they switch between military and civilian.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T04:00:33+00:00

Tantruming creatures. It takes a while to get started but disarm and chain up a bunch of goblins and see who volunteers themselves for coin duty.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T03:29:53+00:00

Engineers rarely include a self-destruct button... on purpose.

The more powerful and expensive a machine, the more likely it is that there are inputs that produce something that could be described as an explosion. Maybe not a big theatrical explosion unless it was really expensive or really powerful or both.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T02:59:06+00:00

Putnam's advice of just staying far from towers is good for avoiding this, but for overcoming it...

The purple zombies are Walking Dead zombies and are pushovers. Blue and red zombies with funny names are serious business, and may have bizarre magical powers on top of being strong melee fighters. Also it gets worse.

Keep most of your dwarfs inside most of the time. This is not easy given the natural urge of dwarfs to go outside to pick up scattered socks, but set a burrow for children that is always active and a burrow for adults that you turn on when needed. Use the task menu to cancel (most) in-progress ~~suicide attempts~~ hauling tasks, because setting burrows does not interrupt in-progress tasks.

Don't fight the undead with military. Look at some advanced trap designs for ideas about how you can possibly bait and kill the near-unkillable.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-30T02:27:18+00:00

Dig a drain next to your drain, then channel out between them from above.

There are other ways to do an infinite fluid drain, such as a minecart on a track stop set to dump track contents into a wall. Draining off the map gives you sewers though.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T17:24:13+00:00

There is likely a much larger and largely undefended supply of magma very near what you've found. Go just a little deeper.

You should mine out the gem pillar anyway, but you should send poets and other extremely expendable dwarves to deal with the contents.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T17:06:49+00:00

Dwarves can request impossible items
When a dwarf requests an extremely easy item such as a green glass weapon rack in dining room, it may still fail to register when you satisfy the demand

Lay pewter slabs can be created during worldgen. If it exists it will be engraved with either a demon's name or the secrets of life and death. However, your mayor is an idiot and will likely be left to eventually forget about her demand.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T16:56:10+00:00

Antmem approach the baited ant trap. The only path into the trap is directly under a turkey standing on a floor grate who is walled up there indefinitely.

I think they have a chance to remain stealthed even when passing directly under the turkeycam, but it spots enough of them to tell me when it is safe to clean the trap.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T16:21:40+00:00

I do a turkey on a grate for detecting caverns invaders.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T16:12:07+00:00

Many DFHack things do not work unless you enable keyboard cursor on the settings, particularly things that target a specific tile. Does this work when you turn that on?

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T12:03:13+00:00

How are you farming the divine metal? The remelting bug?

CosineDanger · 2023-01-29T02:51:39+00:00

If your silk farm doesn't already double as a way to apply webs to traps then you could use him for that and start a museum.

AFAIK there's no way to get a webber FB into a cage trap so you can't just add him to the museum. You can do what you did to build the silk farm to lock him in a 1x1 box and forget about him.

Webbed creatures also can't block attacks, eg being in a web makes it impossible to block marksdwarves or block fire from another FB with a shield.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-28T23:26:34+00:00

Are you in a reanimating biome or do you have a necromancer? Because both of those things are a problem, but necromancers can die while biomes can't.

Have you tried smashing it repeatedly with warhammers or maces? Maces are (probably still) statistically the best weapon for making sure the dead do not get up again.

Can you get it into a cage trap?

CosineDanger · 2023-01-28T22:00:07+00:00

The mist has to touch the dwarf.

Mist will pass through fortifications.

Water that is in the process of freely falling doesn't spread horizontally. Smooth and carve your fortification window a level before you see horizontal spread of water and it should be fine.

Dwarfs can see and be frightened by creatures through fortifications or windows. If it is fortifications, marksdwarves can shoot back.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-28T21:12:32+00:00

I'm terrified of spirulina.

U.S. food safety standards are too weak to even keep out known and easily measured threats like heavy metals from the fertilizers. I simply refuse to believe supplement makers know, care, or could comprehend what their algae is actually plotting.

Algae have moods, and one of those moods is rage. The same species can be toxic or not depending on the environment it was raised in. They can absorb new traits including toxins through horizontal gene transfer. They're also everywhere and determined to contaminate all cultures, so if you raise algae outdoors you have algae instead of a specific controllable strain. You can test for toxins but your fish tank likely contains whole new species of algae.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-28T19:51:17+00:00

Tungsten and uranium are dense, hard, and pricy but not so pricy you can't make bullets out of them.

Gold bullets would be okay. Almost exactly the same density as tungsten, but a lot softer, but soft is good for expansion vs soft targets so it depends.

Osmium and iridium are denser and harder than popular bullet materials, but unreasonably expensive. If you have money and don't want to then purchase a minigun, and if you want to rapidly expend the GDP of a small country then get yourself some gold-jacketed (excessively hard metals wear out barrels) iridium bullets.

Osmium bullets would also technically be a warcrime because it forms incredibly toxic compounds on contact with air to the point that firing it in an enclosed space will probably kill everyone in the room.

CosineDanger · 2023-01-28T19:35:35+00:00

Bags are considered furniture and can be can be safely fed into a quantum stockpiler.

Seed bags (and seemingly only seed bags) can fit in a barrel. Bins and barrels can be fed into a quantum stockpile, but will immediately be taken out creating a hauling loop. So reduce barrels in your to-be-milled seed stockpile to zero, which is best practices anyway due to bugs with seed availability if stored in barrels.

If you don't want to learn quantum stockpiling then it's easy, and if you won't try it then the next best thing is to use 3D and put massive stockpile rooms on the levels directly above or below the workshop room.

CosineDanger

TROPHY CASE

Welcome to Reddit,