Much agreed.
Hunting never seems to quite work out well for me, either.
There is such a thing. It’s called “gathering.” Picking the berries is easy at first, but get progressively harder as the dwarves have to travel further to get to the remaining bushes. It often yields stuff that can only be brewed or milled, not eaten raw like mushrooms.
Hunting works, but you have to have a butcher’s shop, and someone assigned to Butcher as a possible labor task. It tends to be much more hit and miss, though. It depends on the local wildlife, and it’s never a major source of food, though certainly enough to keep the initial 7 dwarves fed.
I seem to be able to get a steady amount of meat, enough to feed 100 dwarves or so, from just two hunters with a few dogs assigned, and of course crossbows. Watching your poor hunters chases down herds of elk with a wooden axe is less then efficient :)
Gryff
2824
Wait… if object to leaving food and offal lying about until it generates disgusting fumes and flies you are a neat freak?
Rightio, I am all set for the next time my wife moans about me leaving my socks on the floor…
I recall taking advantage of hunters much more in the earlier versions.
I suppose it depends on the types of map you select, but lately the animals have seemed much more sporadic, and the butchering process a bit more buggy. And even a small farm has such a massive output, that relying on anything else just seems wasteful. So I’ve been investing less in hunting, which certainly doesn’t help its efficacy.
And even a small farm has such a massive output, that relying on anything else just seems wasteful. So I’ve been investing less in hunting, which certainly doesn’t help its efficacy.
The small farm doesn’t produce the raw materials you will need for soap making/bone crafts/strange moods. I suppose you could go the route of slaughtering pets and other animals, but at the cost of happiness. Also, don’t forget the valuble marksdwarf training your hunters will get from all the crossbowerin’. Rallying up a squad of sniperdwarfs has saved me from many a goblin siege.
You should have married a dwarf girl!
salwon
2828
Actually, with the inability to get a shroom farm up and running immediately, I’ve been relying on a hunter/butcher in my initial expedition, which in turn causes me to get my leather industry up before I worry about metal, which means I wait until the first round of immagents to even worry about smithing, which means…
I never thought about it this way until just now, but it’s interesting how this one change has caused me to completely rethink the way I play. Okay, I take it back - I love one time flooding!
Marcin
2829
That seems to be a bit of a keyword there :P I have at most seen 2 deer and a fox on my map.
Indeed, aside packs of wolves (consisting of 4-5 wolves each) i’ve yet to see a herd of elk or deer or whatever; i do still recall with a sparkle in my eye the time when I saw 4 unicorns grazing peacefully near my new fortress entrance… until they roamed inside and butchered all but one of my dwarves.
Yeah, that is my primary problem. I feel as though I’m not getting quite the levels of fauna I had been before.
As for secondary goods, I’m usually overloaded with stone crafts by the time I’m ready to start producing anything - so I can more often than not trade for just about anything I need.
I tried a more northern embark to create a balancing challenge, but that just ends up making the startup disproportionately perilous.
It’d be much nicer if hunters also set to butchery would bring a kill back and perform the full service before heading out for another kill. That would ease up the process.
Yes, stone crafts are an unreasonably good source of income, but there’s still some point to stockpiling every kind of crafting material possible. That reason is Strange Moods. You want bone and shell around because those nutty dwarves get very upset if they can’t have it to make a Leather Earring of Doom.
Bones are easy to get in a pinch — slaughter something — but shell can’t be traded for, and in an older fortress the turtles are likely scarce if not entirely used up. You should never decorate with shell or make shell greaves, so a dwarf in a strange mood won’t have to be sacrificed if he wants shell.
Therlun
2834
You can trade for turtles (not turtle meat) which produce shell when you process them.
The new update is out, and I can’t even generate a world. So sad!
Ok, a medium world generated just fine.
I made a hammer human and got some quests to kill hags, cougars, pikemen, and more. I gathered a great deal of adventurers to come with me, and only a few were struck down along the way.
At one point, I got shot in the head with an arrow and didn’t know how to pull it out until I checked the key bindings. When I did pull it out, my head bled for a while and I giggled.
I got ambushed by goblins, and got smashed in the head with a morning star, which killed me right quick.
Checking the legends, it seems that most human groups had respect for me, some great, for my heroic acts.
Now, I’ve made a new human to go track down that fucking goblin.
This is just the kind of thing I was hoping for.
Squee
2837
Wow. Haven’t played DF since before the 2010 update and I figured I’d try out the new adventure mode to see if that would get me in the mood for starting a new fort. The new world generator is great, super fast and lets you customize it.
I’m really enjoying this game. I’ve even gotten past the interface (my complaints still stand, but I’m just used to it all now, I guess).
I’m starting to have a new problem, though. I’ve found that I really enjoy the game from embark until my first ambush (thieves and snatchers aren’t a problem, I’m talking about 5-10 goblin archers or something). I seem to never be adequately prepared… everything is going smoothly (if slowly) and suddenly an ambush comes and, within a few seconds, most of my dwarves are slaughtered.
I don’t know if I’ve maybe got the wrong mindset about the game… it just takes my motivation away when everything I’ve built up and all my plans are suddenly trashed, losing a bunch of legendary dwarves, all my nobles, my military, etc. I’ve only played through three forts now (in fairly easy embarks) so I’m sure I just need more practice.
This most recent embark, I was slaughtered after about 3 years, but I only had 68 dwarves (20 of which had just recently appeared, so I was scrambling to build housing for them). I had a 10-dwarf military squad that had been training 6 months of the year, and was making steel warhammers for them, but other than that, they had only a few pieces of leather armor (from trading) and no weapons, though they did have 2 war dogs each.
I just wanted to know how people deal with huge setbacks like this. Do I need to change my mindset somehow? Or am I just being too slow developing my military or something (it seems like growth of the fort really suffers if I prioritize military early-on, but maybe I need to do that)? I haven’t even gotten to caves or magma or anything really dangerous/Fun yet!
bkmiggs
2839
I usually build a large area in front of my fortress that is (hopefully) my designated battlefield. Using walls, bridges and trenches to (hopefully) cut off the possibility of attack from any direction except right in front and then using more walls, bridges and trenches to funnel the enemy over cage traps.
Lots and lots of cage traps.
It’s cheap but it works.
On embark, I spec up my woodcutter as future military leader. Good axe/armour skills, as well as leadership and what have you. Then I draft anyone with useless skills from the first two migrant waves until I have a squad of 10 that become perma-soldiers. I don’t bother rotating dwarves in and out of the military, they just stay there until they become legendary. BTW, a good tip is to get your soldiers to become legendary wrestlers before you give them a weapon. And once they skill up to legendary with one weapon, swap them to a new weapon class. This keeps them leveling up and boosting their attributes. (Of course make sure you only have a few dwarves training new weapons at once, otherwise when you get attacked they’ll all be holding bad weapons.) Goblin marksmen are quite annoying to deal with, once you have highly agile troops their hit ratio becomes nonexistent and it’s easy, but until then you’re generally better off walling up your front door.
Once I hit 100 dwarves I tend to stick about half of any new arrivals into the military.
