That’s why I always make each workshop it’s own small room with a door that can be locked in the event it looks like it’s inhabitant isn’t going to be able to finish a mood. Once he’s sat there for a while and made no progress just lock the door and if he goes berserk he’ll be forced to stay in there and eventually starve to death.
The order menu really is quite helpful. When you have some armor/metal crafting to do, first calculate how much coal you’ll need. So say you’re forging a three iron helms - that 3 charcoal for the forging, and at two iron bars per helm, that’s 6 charcoal for smelting iron bars, for a total of 9 charcoal. Designate a big area for tree chopping so you have plenty of wood. Add make 9 charcoal and smelt 9 iron bars to the job queue. Once they’re done, add forge 3 iron helms to the job queue.
If you keep, say, 20 charcoal and 20 iron bars in stock, you can immediately queue up everything in the job list and not have to worry about bottlenecks caused by your woodburner suddenly having an unstoppable urge to attend parties. They’ll take materials from the existing stockpile as needed and when they’ve worked their way through the job list you’ll be left with 20 charcoal/20 iron in stock ready to go for the next job.
As far as trees being rare, you can select a heavily treed biome, and as far as sieges go, I usually dig a one square wide, one squad deep trench almost at the edge of the screen with one access point for the caravan. Soils dig fast and you get some highly skilled miners out of the process, so why not?
I think the problem is you’re talking about making 2 or 3 items, when the reality of making a large, well equipped military is far beyond that. Try equipping 50 or 100 dwarves in full armor and weapons without using coal and you’ll find that 9 units of wood starts rapidly approaching 1000 units of wood and more. And that’s only iron… god help you if you want to try starting a steel economy without coal. :P
That’s not to say it’s impossible to get a military up and running without using coal, but to really mass produce the equipment needed for a real army you’re looking at vast amounts of wood that even heavily forested biomes are going to have problems producing, at least in my experience. Not to mention the huge amounts of dwarf power it will take to burn all that wood over the relative ease of smelting coal into coke.
Of course all this is partly why I get magma smelters up and running early on, but that’s a different story. :)
Heh, in my “current” fortress, I actually did the majority of outfitting with stuff plundered from the goblins that had sieged me. It was a pretty large one, with at least fifty goblins, plus numerous trolls.
It took me a season or two of assembly-line producing storage bins 'round the clock before I could even claim all that stuff.
Later, a caravan ran into an ambush, which also gave me some more free stuff.
I crafted my mail shirts and gauntlets etc - for some reason the gobs never seem to wear those, and it was already pretty annoying.
I have a HUGE stack of wood - I buy everything the elves, dwarves and humans bring, which is a lot. My fort is in a mountainous region, so designating a large number of trees for chopping would be micromanagement hell. I have about 25 levels of “terraces” to work with…
Anyway, sure, I can do some smelting with charcoal. Done that, too.
But I can’t make an automated economy, like I could if I had coal.
I usually have a smelter on auto-coke’ing in that case, and then I never need to worry about fuel at all.
I guess the correct way would be to shrug it off and dig down the 100 odd levels and build magma smelters. I’m not so sure that’s a grand idea with only a couple of green rookies at hand.
@Sarkus: Heh, I had that happen to me as well (though at a later time, so I had plenty of dwarves to replace the victims). Tough luck.
But maybe you’ll know how to train animals in your new fortress now. ;)
rezaf
Nope. ;-) I created the zone and designated it for training but nothing ever happened after that. So I still don’t know what the deal is. And yes, I had a dwarf with animal training free’d up.
I survived the crazy dwarf and then my squads killed an ettin with only one loss. But my attempt to make a well didn’t work out. There was no underground water sources for me to tap so I had to make a long tunnel from a small lake, but even after it drained the water level wasn’t as high as I needed it to be. Not to mention that everytime I tried to place the well it would tell me there was no open space, so I guess I’m missing something as far as preparing the well shaft.
I’ll probably start over since this fortress has been more of a learning game and its starting to be quite the mess of mostly being a spread out single level fortress with 115 inhabitants now.
In the animal menu make sure you have a trainer assigned to the individual animal with ‘t’. There should be a ‘W’(war training) and an ‘A’(any trainer), ‘U’(any unassigned trainer) or ‘T’(specific trainer) next to the ‘D’ after the animal name.
Also note that animals claimed as pets can’t be trained further.
258 pg getting started book
40% off with code TIM40
I think I’ll grab it. I haven’t touched Dwarf Fortress in probably 4 years. This will be great motivation to play again.
As someone who has read this book in both dead tree and dead electron formats, I can attest that it has made me a better lover, much more handsome and a middlingly better dwarf manager. Stick that on the back cover of the second edition Calistas!
Haha that deal saves 85 cents after shipping compared to ordering at Amazon and registering for the eBook for $5.
Thanks man! I am going to go buy some copies! I hear it is awesome and makes a great present/thanksgiving gift/anniversary gift/etc!
Saw this on twitter yesterday. Didn’t realize that our very own Calistas was the author. Gonna snag me a hard copy and a Kindle edition. Maybe I will finally be able to take the DF Plunge, armed with your book.
That 40% off coupon dropped this down into my must buy range. Going to have to use it to get back into the game, I never did learn how the new military works and minecarts are entirely new to me.
Perhaps if this does well a copy for towns and gnomoria could be contemplated? lol
Edit: Reading the book I do see that there appears to be one area you really haven’t covererd, world generation. You do brush up against it but an in-depth explanation would definately be something I’d be intereasted in reading. I mean you do cover the basics but info on how some of the more abstruse settings work would be great. Many of us can spend hours making that perfect world and setting the generation perimeters to more closely match want we want could potentially save alot of time. It’s also an area that I know that used to be fairly unexplained except for the most obvious settings.
Edit: You guys complaining that lava is too far down know that you can set the amount of layers in world creation right?
Yeah, been a bit crazy the past day, which is great!
Thanks for the thoughts, Morb!
Good to see you getting all this attention, btw loving the book. I thought that I knew alot but there are definately small little quirks that I had no idea about, for instance the egg laying habits of birds. Or that artifact mechanisms made traps deadlier.
Thanks, yeah, I guess that’s why it ended up at 238 pages =)
It seems a few of us are messing with this. Any interest in a shared embark to compare how we are using the different systems getting around broken stuff?
Book bought. Only $10 on Google Play. Maybe now I can add yet another addiction to my plate.