2881

You’re right of course. When he’s coding 60,000 miles of dwarf blood vessles on a cardboard box in crayon outside of a Wal-Mart dumpster with a smile on his face, we’ll all consider him a pretty smart fellow and money be damned.

2882

That’s another argument entirely. Though that scenario strikes me as plausible.

2883

Maybe I’m dumb as a brick (possibility) but I fail to see how that has anything to do with him developing a saleable product; he never said or has shown any interest in “monetizing” DF, he merely saw that he could live out of the monthly donations and dedicate himself full time to the game instead of having a job and doing it in his free time; to compare it to Minecraft, Notch saw that Minecraft could have a buying audience and he himself has stated he never expected it to be such a hit and generate so much money.

Now, back on topic, could he be spending his time on cleaning up code, setting and following a logical development schedule instead of going on while tangential side development? Yes, he could, but he has shown time and time again he cares not for what the players want, it’s his project and he will develop it (or not) as he sees fit.

Unfortunately, might I add, because i’d love to see DF on par with Minecraft both on sales and accessibility. It’s a pretty good game but the arcane interface and stale gameplay (after some time) gets the better of me and I end up playing something else all the time.

2884

I’m in the camp where the awful interface just made me drop it. I guess no one has a right to press him to do anything since it’s his own “thing”, but I guess given how wonderful the underlying premise is, I just feel it’s such a missed opportunity.

2885

God help me, I was thinking about how much better Dwarf Fortress would be if there was a point to making all the various bling that’s possible in the game, and I started feeling the urge to create a huge stockpile of gold jewel-encrusted beer mugs. Just because I could. I downloaded 0.31.19. We’ll see what happens.

2886

Some various other changes I’ve noticed:

  • Still no 3x3 caravans, just the horses. Sigh.
  • Traders seem to carry far less now. I bumped up the priority of every wood at my first liason and that’s all the next one came with.
  • I embarked somewhere with humans dwarves and elves but only dwarves have come after two years.
  • No forgotten beasts have appeared despite plenty of space for them to do so.
  • Cave-ins are far more deatly. Falling one level will break a lot of bones, falling two is death.
  • Injuries heal significantly quicker but infection seems to invariably kill, at least without soap.
2887

And soap is still fucked.

But I haven’t had a problem with Forgotten Beasts.

2888

What’s wrong with sleep? And do you mean you’ve seen beasties? Perhaps I embarked in a Good, Calm location…

2889
  • Still no 3x3 caravans, just the horses. Sigh.
  • Traders seem to carry far less now. I bumped up the priority of every wood at my first liason and that’s all the next one came with.
  • I embarked somewhere with humans dwarves and elves but only dwarves have come after two years.

This makes me think you’ve embarked somewhere remote. The other civs are having trouble reaching you, and the ones that do suffer some casualties on the way. Are you near desert/glacier or savage mountain that the caravans might need to cross?

Pack animal caravans are normal for now and probably for two or three more updates but they carry quite a bit for me.

  • No forgotten beasts have appeared despite plenty of space for them to do so.

And do you mean you’ve seen beasties? Perhaps I embarked in a Good, Calm location…

Based on my limited experience, the biggest factors are total number of dwarves and overall fortress wealth. Check to see if your local production is getting close to or over 1M. If that looks good perhaps surroundings do matter…I usually end up in savage neutral areas.

  • Cave-ins are far more deatly. Falling one level will break a lot of bones, falling two is death.
  • Injuries heal significantly quicker but infection seems to invariably kill, at least without soap.

And soap is still fucked.

Yup, when dwarves try to bathe. I’ve found making soap and allowing the hospital to be stocked, then forbidding soap still stockpiled works. They don’t try to use hospital supplies for personal needs.

Casts are still a little wonked. Bone docs will retrieve gypsum but still get stuck at the water source. Forbidding the bucket they’re using seems to force them to move to the next step.

2890

Taking it you meant soap, it’s the ‘Urist cancels bathe self - area inaccessible’ spam. Dirty dwarves will go pick up a bar and then lose their shit, repeatedly.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen beasts. I’ve definitely seen a surface one - some big cyclops who kept twisting teeth out of my dwarves.

Wish I knew more interesting uses for beast corpses.

2891

Oooh, taxidermy in the next version!

2892

Well, that didn’t last long. I decided to embark on a glacier, since I’d never tried that before. I had a few false starts with carving out a chunk of ice for my farm water supply, but nothing serious, and for a while there it was looking like it would be easy.

Except that I wasn’t finding any ore. At all. Just granite and the like, no metal ores, no coal, no lignite. So I kept digging deeper. No caverns! Finally I got to the magma sea, and immediately spotted the walls of Hell. I sealed that up quickly, and figured I’d smelt some adamantine stuff with magma. Not really my first choice, jumping straight to that, but my only other economic resource was plain rock.

Then a goblin ambush showed up. Since this was still the first year, my defenses were pretty basic, just a few cage traps, and they got past those and started slaughtering my mostly unarmed and unarmored dwarves. At that point I decided I’d had enough of this fort.

As I understand it, hostile forces are keyed to things like your total fortress wealth, and what set off this attack before I could handle it was spotting the adamantine.

EDIT: Apparently this is a “feature” of 31.19. Metals went from overabundant (plenty of everything on every map) to utterly absent on most tiles, and very, very scarce on the few maps where they exist at all. Toady strikes again.

2893

Sounds like a good idea to me.

2894

It isn’t. Not without some major changes to trading. One of the core mechanics of Dwarf Fortress is making enough equipment to defend the fort. On most maps you can’t do that now, because there aren’t enough metals, and you can’t trade for enough either. On maps where metals do exist, there’s a pretty good chance they’re metals you can’t use for weapons or armor.

2895

Overabundance was great. It meant you could stop focusing a TON of your resources on looking for and switch to doing interesting things.

Perhaps one day the balance will be brought back to the Force.

2896

I wish there was more copper, tin, other non-iron metals. That way you can at least feel dwarfy with metal works without being overpowered and menacing with spikes of steel.

2897

It’s a little over-corrected now, but it’s not that hard to find good spots, especially if you use the improved site finder to look for sites with metal.

When you are embarking be sure to look closely at the geologic breakdown. A site with “Shallow Metal” has only one type of metal, but a site with “Shallow Metals” will have at least two, and there’s a good chance one will be iron. A site with both “Deep Metals” and “Shallow Metals” has a very good chance of having at least something usable.

2898

Unless rock-fall, flood, and cage traps have been massively nerfed since last I played, and unless goblins are equipped differently now, I disagree. In your example, where you found adamantium early, it may not be possible to repel the first invasion triggered by wealth…but if you’re able to adjust your script a bit it shouldn’t be a problem. Every fortress I’ve ever played has wound up with more iron lying around than I could possibly store, just because goblins leave so much behind.

2899

Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. If you insist on walling yourself in or building impenetrable trap defenses why not try a mod featuring trap-immune building-destroying orcs, just for fun.

2900

OK, I see what you’re saying. It didn’t occur to me that you can use the goblins as your source of metals. In my example fort, since I had no source of fuel on the map, I would still have needed to tunnel to the magma sea in order to melt goblin equipment. I’m less sure about your examples, since I’ve never found rock-fall traps to do much damage, and I’ve never been able to make a truly practical flood-trap. Cage traps work on anything, but since they’re one shot, you need a lot of them to stop even small goblin forces.

I’m not sure what you mean by “adjust your script.” Perhaps you’re suggesting learning to build extensive non-metallic traps early? Typically I’ve gone with a few cage traps immediately, then steel weapon traps, then a retracting bridge chasm trap to stop really big forces. So just skip the steel traps, and go straight for the retracting bridge over the deep pit?