You could cover the floor of your cistern with constructed up/down stairs - that might be enough to get them to an area they can then escape through to?
Hmm perhaps this is new fun you are speaking of though I did make a fort two months ago or so and didn’t have any related water fun. You sure there isn’t a carp or rogue salmon in there? Anyways you should be able to floor off all but one tile and stick the well on that.
He probably has done that - it still is somewhat easy for dwarfs to dodge down a well. If a dwarf goes crazy near a well dwarfs will dodge away and… well… whoops!
Hope all is going well with the sales, Calistas.
I think I will archive away the release copy of the book along with the supporting DF version and capture a set in time to be able to use for years. DF has a certain charm to it that I plan to re-visit every few years for a long time to come.
I never did get really far in the couple forts I did try, but I am really looking forward to trying again a few more times with the book as a guide.
Well, I dug an underground cistern and only dug out a single channel tile from the floor above on which I placed the well.
And no dwarves were going crazy in any way, that stuff only started after a couple of folks had already drowned.
I don’t really get why this was changed, wells used to be a perfectly safe water source, but now they’re most hazardous and a very good course of action would probably be not to build one at all - the frequency of accidents is way, WAY too high.
Has someone possibly modded something in like muscle-powered water pumps?
rezaf
Raife fired me a funny shot of the book in action, which when I posted it to reddit got some meme and whatnot. Bit of a laugh
Oddly enough, I started a new fortress and didn’t have a single dwarf fall into the well in it, at least I haven’t noticed. The meeting room has exactly the same layout, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, it’s been a pretty fun ride, I survived a couple of minor goblin sieges and then a big one where the gobs actually attacked - I lost about 2 dwarves in that battle.
Shortly thereafter, in very quick succession, five forgotten beasts arrived and wreaked havoc - I only lost half a dozen dwarves or something, but it was annoying.
Whatever, I now have a pretty solid fortress protected by traps, siegeweapons and drawbridges, I’m confident it should survive another goblin assault even better than the last.
Thing is, my military is utter crap. I lost a couple of “veterans” in the war, and man, military training sucks arse. Essentally, in years, the dwarves earn like a hundred XP. Isn’t there ANY way, except semi-cheating with a danger room or somesuch, to get a halfway decent military?
I’m armed to the teeth in iron, but it’s all rookies. I made a mace-squad a year ago from “older” immigrants, and after a year of training, they’re still all “rusty”. That’s pretty crap.
I mean, like I wrote, I managed to survive a major siege and several forgotten beasts with this setup, but why oh why don’t these dudes ever gain some expertise?
rezaf
Are you using active or passive training? At different times in the last few releases there have been problems with getting training classes scheduled and get dwarves to attend them. Unless you are paying close attention to squad settings and what they are up to they can go for a long time without actually training.
On the other hand if you give them off time the more motivated members of the squad will train on their own, and that can often lead to faster results.
For fast training you also need at least a few dwarves with solid skills to hold the classes, so that can also be an issue.
I haven’t played the last release yet though, so I might be missing some changes to the training system that are causing your problem.
I thought that issue had long been fixed?
I remember in some version I played years ago, “active” training didn’t work at all, you had to play around with the settings so the dwarves would do individual combat drills - is that still the case?
Cause I consulted the wiki and it said you’d best reduce the minimum training (I set it to five) and it should work. I didn’t mix weapon types, btw.
I get the organizing/waiting for lesson stuff, and I’ve often actually see the dwarves train (as in standing around in the training room and attending instead of waiting for status), but of course there’s still a lot of downtime.
Duking it out with the goblins and forgotten beasts didn’t improve anyones combat skill either, though.
I don’t mind slow progress, but at this glacial pace, every single dwarf in the fort would be legendary without these dudes ever leaving their initial skill levels.
About needing someone good to train the others … where should I get such dwarf? If training doesn’t make him good and actually beating a FB doesn’t make him good, what is he supposed to do?
Right now I’m at least very tempted to try making a danger room to at least see how it goes, and if that fails, I think I’m done with DF again.
There’s just so many systems that work bad or very bad, the years go by and I see little to no improvement.
I’ll just depict toady standing around in the coding workshop he claimed babbling about needing something to finish up this artifact, but I fail to understand what he needs, so I just wall him in in case he decides to go berserk at some point. ;)
rezaf
No, you don’t need to reduce the minimum training thingumy. Yes, it will give dwarves breaks, but it doesn’t really help much. If you want to give a squad a break, give them a break when they start to seem unhappy by inactivating them.
Instead, I would recommend dissolving all squads and creating squads of 2 dwarves. They will then tend to spend their time sparing, rather than running lessons (unless you put a dwarf with superior skills in with a rookie - so try and keep dwarves roughly matched in skill. Dwarf Therapist can help a lot, especially the splintz (? I forget?) version which I think has had some military tasking capabilities added. (Oh look, I found it after all http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525.msg3397117#msg3397117 )
I have quite enjoyed danger rooms. Don’t think they are a perfect panacea - you need to keep women out of your military (babies can’t dodge even training spears, who would have thoughts?) and pets can quickly be turned to paste if let in. You also want to set up a repeated (a loop of track, pressure plate and a mine cart and a roller work brilliantly). Also, while you will have skilled dwarves they can still be easily machine-gunned down by elite marksgoblins. And hey, it’s kinda fun to send your dwarves in rather than sitting back and leaving the traps to do their work. Especially when you know you can train some up again relatively easily.
So I’ve been trying to relearn the game after a long layoff using the Lazy Newb pack and watching the FogeyGamer videos. But I’m confused about something.
According to my bookkeeper I have a bunch (over 100) plump helmet spawn. But my farmers keep saying they don’t have any seeds. And my one food stockpile doesn’t show them up anywhere either. I started with a bunch and grew them fine the first few seasons but at some point this “no seeds” thing started popping up.
So where are they? Is this some sort of container issue where I have them but not the proper container because according to the wiki seeds have to be in bags.
Very confused.
Are the seeds listed as an item the chef can cook? If you don’t disallow him from cooking with the seeds, they can cook away your stock of seeds.
No, I checked that. The cook can’t use them. Either way, though, I have a bunch of them somewhere. I just don’t know why they aren’t accessible to the farmers.
Perhaps I’m doing something wrong as far as retrieving seeds after plump helmets are eaten raw? Or is that automatic?
Huh, dunno, and it’s been a long while since I played DF (and a lot of versions ago, I presume). I used to make a little storage closet by my farms just for seeds, and I’d turn off storing seeds everywhere else so they’d only go there. Kind of a pain, but it worked.
I probably explain this in my book! Haha.
Anyway, make a stockpile just for seeds next to your farms and see what happens. Also, have you specifically told each farm to plant pump helms, clicked the letter for each season and set it?
If he hadn’t issued the farm(s) to run on Plump Helmets, he wouldn’t get the out-of-seeds message, would he?
FWIW, I’ve noticed the same issue - I have like 500 Plump Helmet spawns stocked and get the out-of-seeds thing all the time.
Since the farms are running nonetheless (albeit never “full”) and food is the least of my concerns, I mostly just ignore it, but it’s there.
Thanks for the military tips Calistas.
With all you wrote, wouldn’t you agree, though, that the military stuff is at least borderline broken? I mean, having to make 2-men squads or a danger room (a silly thing to begin with, that shouldn’t work at all imo) to get your men have ANY progress whatsoever … that’s a pretty sad state of affairs.
rezaf
I tried the stockpile thing and they don’t show up there either.
Depends on what he ordered planted. He might have put it on the wrong plant.
Thanks for the military tips Calistas. With all you wrote, wouldn’t you agree, though, that the military stuff is at least borderline broken? I mean, having to make 2-men squads or a danger room (a silly thing to begin with, that shouldn’t work at all imo) to get your men have ANY progress whatsoever … that’s a pretty sad state of affairs.
Oh, yes, the training/military system right now is kinda broke. Training is way too slow. You can speed it up by issuing wooden weapons and telling troops to beat on naked goblins. Takes them quite a while to die and your blokes get good experience. Still, it’s fiddly and slow.
So I’ve started a new fort…soundsense really adds a lot to the game - it has added a lot of sounds since I last played. Started training 5 sword dwarves with training swords and wooden shields we will see how that goes.
You can set them right into real gear (if you have the metals) without risk - they no longer kill each other when sparring.