SwissLionWe are beside ourselves!Registered Userregular
So I've been playing fortress mode for a decent while, and seeing as adventure mode got a lot of updates this recent time around, and my favourite part of fortress mode is watching my heavily armoured dwarves wrassle things to death, I figured I should give it a go.
And it seems I could use some pointers!
So far I thiiiink I've completely misunderstood the quest system, at the very least, so any tips around that area would be great.
Also are coins basically pointless? Is there any way of determining which Civ a pile of coins or a town belongs to? Is there even anything worth trading for once I'm fully decked out in iron armour, and haven't seen any steel?
Dwarf found drained of blood in dining room containing roughly 80 dwarves.
No witnesses.
e: Think I found him. He is recent arrival and doesn't have a deity/hasn't been cursed. However he has eat/sleep status and has 'took joy in slaughter lately' with 0 recorded kills. Assuming he must have been infected by vampire blood at some point in history.
Rami on
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
Nah, the tileset makes designated smooth stone look black.
I haven't played in a little bit because this is the longest I've ever played a fort and I just had my first dwarf die of old age. That brings me down from 120 dwarves to 119, and I don't know what the migrants are going to do. I think the liason is still here too. The bugginess of .34 means that the slightest population fluctuation from my cap could get me endless migrants forever and I really don't want to have to do that much killing and burials.
I could kill the liason or try to have a baby really quickly, or see what happens, I dunno...
This game is the absolute worst for eating my day away.
I hop in to play a season or two, next thing you know I've been playing for hours.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
So, is there a good way to tell if someone is a were-dude? I had a guy get his hand scratched by a werebadger. The badger ran off and my guy just has a yellow wounded hand... should I kill him now or wait and see if he turns?
So, is there a good way to tell if someone is a were-dude? I had a guy get his hand scratched by a werebadger. The badger ran off and my guy just has a yellow wounded hand... should I kill him now or wait and see if he turns?
I don't think you'll know until they turn. A scratch may be okay, I think it's bites that are the problem.
If he's not super valuable, you may want to just make him a noble, wall him into a room (not doors, walls) with a well and a long-term supply of meals, and see what happens. He'll transform once a season if he's a werebeast.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
Eh, too late, he turned as I was walling him in. War dogs tore him apart before he could do any damage though. Guess they have silver teeth
Okay, so I have to admit that I managed to not play this all that much in between when all the military subsystems went in and recently, so I never really got the hang of the advanced military stuff.
Fast forward a bit, and my current fort is under siege by a necromancer and 50+ undead. They've invaded from the western side of the map, and I've gone ahead and created a bit of a fortress out of the mountainside, figuring to give my marksdwarves some live target practice.
The only problem is that the fuckers absolutely refuse to engage the enemy.
My dwarves, let me show you them.
In red, you can see the current location of the undead horde (or some of it, anyway). Over on the right of the picture, you can see my little holdfast. I have 4 fortifications carved into the walls (in blue). First, I tried ordering my (s)quad of marksdwarves to (m)ove into the room. This resulted in maybe half of them showing up, walking into the room, and basically hanging out by the door. Occasionally, maybe one dwarf would walk up to the fortification and fire off a couple shots, but then he'd stop shooting, and the majority of the dwarves never even made it that far. I tried adjusting where my "Move" command was targeted - to the Patrol Point (in orange), to right behind a fortification, to the north of the room, to the south, etc. Nothing changed in the dwarves behavior.
Then, I tried setting up a burrow (marked in green, called "Western Approach"), and adding a new alert "Defend the Western Approaches." For that alert, I set the order to "Defend Burrow" targeting the "Western Approach" burrow with minimum dwarves equal to 3 (the squad was 6 dwarves strong). I applied that order to every month for both of my squads (marksdwarves and melee dwarves). I then made that the active alert for my marksdwarf squad. They all switched from civilian job descriptions to military, and then ... they hung out in their rooms and the dining hall. They refused to move to the burrow indicated.
So, then I set up a patrol point in the room (orange) and another in the hallway beyond it, out of line of sight of the undead outside, where I created an ammo stockpile (having read that marksdwarves won't reload their quivers if they can see a badguy). Then I linked them on a patrol route. I changed the alert orders to assign dwarves to that patrol route. Similar to the first option, they'd run into the room, fail to move up to the fortifications, and then leave.
So, uh, WTF? Why won't my marksdwarves fuckin' do anything?
The squad of 5* has 350 rounds of metal bolts assigned to them, with "Combat" usage enabled, and every dwarf I checked had at least 50 iron bolts in their quivers.
At this point, issuing (m)ove orders near the fortifications has caused two dwarves to go running outside to meet the undead, which has resulting in two dwarven casualties and 0 shooting-from-behind-the-wall. (You can see one in this picture; it's the helmet-looking icon in the red area.)
Playing along with captnduck is a lot simpler than playing my own world along with his videos, since everything matches up on screen, and it's also MUCH easier than playing the game with just a written tutorial.
So, uh, WTF? Why won't my marksdwarves fuckin' do anything?
Well for one thing, burrows don't force dwarves to stand in those locations. They will only perform work in those locations if work is available there. They may decide to go stand there when they are on break, but they don't have to go there.
For another, what allowed your dwarves to get outside when you issued the move order? Shouldn't they have been blocked from going outside with locked doors or something? If they have no path to the outside, they should attempt to cluster near the wall safely indoors. In fact you might be able to order them to stand just outside and they would stand against the wall in an attempt to go as close to that location as possible.
I remember having similar problems trying to force dwarves to shoot because they wouldn't stand next to the walls. Ultimately what I needed was a narrow hallway of only one space, which I ordered them to move to, and then they had no choice but to stand next to the wall.
You need something like this:
And even then it won't work too well because not enough fortifications are carved, lots of them will stand in the hall doing nothing.
But at the same time, you want to be a bit careful, because if you can shoot out, enemies can shoot in. I think even if you have a channeled space between the wall and the fortification, they can shoot in. Might want to be a level above or something.
So, uh, WTF? Why won't my marksdwarves fuckin' do anything?
Well for one thing, burrows don't force dwarves to stand in those locations. They will only perform work in those locations if work is available there. They may decide to go stand there when they are on break, but they don't have to go there.
Fuckin' a, that's obnoxious. That makes the "defend burrows" order not tremendously useful.
For another, what allowed your dwarves to get outside when you issued the move order? Shouldn't they have been blocked from going outside with locked doors or something?
The undead were all very happy to just hang out on the extreme western edge of the map, tanking my FPS (from 60-70 down to 20-30) but ignoring everything that was going on elsewhere. I ordered the marksdwarves into the room, and all of them went (I thought); it was only when I got a "So-and-so has been found dead" announcement that I realized two had decided to go outside, which brought the undead closer in, which prevented civilians from doing any work in the holdout, which prevented finishing the fortifications ...
You need something like this:
[One Tile Wide Path]
And even then it won't work too well because not enough fortifications are carved, lots of them will stand in the hall doing nothing.
Yeah, apparently. The fact that you can't get marksdwarves to do their job without a lot of manual hand-holding is pretty bullshit.
But at the same time, you want to be a bit careful, because if you can shoot out, enemies can shoot in. I think even if you have a channeled space between the wall and the fortification, they can shoot in. Might want to be a level above or something.
There's a minimum archery skill level required to shoot through a fortification when not standing next to it, and being closer to the fortification than the person shooting you gives you a large bonus to your defense. Common practice is to channel a moat next to your fortifications to ensure that you're always the one closer to the wall.
Unfortunately, the undead are now all over that side of the hill, so I can't get a civilian miner out there to channel out the moat, and the undead are most of the way up that hillside, so I'd have to go up quite a few z-levels in order to "get above them," but the miners would still be in-sight of the undead farther down the hill.
So I'm building another, better archer position with hookers and blow catapults and a moat to the south, hopefully well out of aggro range. We'll see how that works.
The best military related thing you can do at the start of a new fort is build 40 cage traps in a solid circle around your entrance.
Yeah - I had those, and some weapon traps with green glass serrated saw blade circle things, but the undead just refused to do anything - like, a year later, they were still just hanging out on the western edge of the map.
So, to save my framerate, I tried to make them go away.
I was sieged in spring of my second year. I had cage traps all around the hatches to my underground base, and what I would do is leave a hatch unlocked so the goblins would approach, then lock it just before they could come inside. A few would get trapped and the rest backed off, then just repeat.
At some point though I caged their leader and the rest just stood around not knowing what to do. That was a bit worrying but eventually their random small movements got them all trapped.
With undead zombies probably won't do anything unless the necromancer is there to lead them. I had one show up with 3 necros and after I chased the necromancers off the map the zombie just stayed where it was for a few months before I sent someone to kill it.
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
One thing I learned from Cloudspears (under zombie assault every few years), is that archers stationed near fortifications won't necessarily look through them.
Unless you build a wall behind them. IE, you want them to be in a narrow hallway, right next to the fortifications. If possible, make the wall thick so they can't stand on the other side of it and still be close to the designated 'station' area.
And yeah, carve fortifications into everything you can reach.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
So here I am minding my own business learning how to make farms and nest boxes and here comes Datan Doroksigoth, an intrepid and also POSSESSED dwarven child who claims my primary craftsdwarf workshop and starts work on a mysterious project
I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT THIS
HANDLING POSSESSED CHILDREN IS PROBABLY VIDEO #5781 IN THIS TUTORIAL SERIES AND I AM ON VIDEO FIVE.
Yeah, so long as he's managed to find all the items that he wants to craft his project then you should be golden. If press q to look at the workshop he's in, it should hopefully say something along the lines of "Datan Doroksigoth works furiously". Otherwise it'll have some text hinting at what items he likes, and you have to figure it out and make them available to him (or google it).
If they go too long waiting for said items then things can get... interesting
One thing I strive for in my forts is not total happiness, because if all the dwarves are super happy, you will never get a dwarf who enters a macabre mood. And if that never happens, he will never kidnap his neighbor and bring him to the butcher shop, and use his torso for a legendary artifact.
Do dwarves not get sad thoughts from a friend who dies that way?
I could see there being an awesome thought "was recently proud to see his friend's remains used in the creation of an artifact."
Also, how sad of a thought do dwarves get from a friend who dies of old age, if at all? Would suck to have tantrum spirals over that. Dying of old age is an incredible feat in DF.
oh for sure they would get sad thoughts about him being murdered, I haven't really had a tantrum spiral in a long time, unless like half the fort was murdered in a raid. I also don't think I've ever had a dwarf die of old age ever and I've been playing since 2d DF
oh for sure they would get sad thoughts about him being murdered, I haven't really had a tantrum spiral in a long time, unless like half the fort was murdered in a raid. I also don't think I've ever had a dwarf die of old age ever and I've been playing since 2d DF
Their lifespan is so long that you'll basically have strip-mined the whole map by the time even one of your original seven starts getting on in years.
In a similar vein, kids take forever to grow up, playing a no immigrant embark means you are settling in for the long haul if you plan on making more dwarves.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
You need more dwarven hot tubs!
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
My fort has been around 10-11 years and the dwarf who died of old age was 169. Looking at the rest of the population, there's a pretty even distribution of ages, I have a lot of them who are 150+. Not sure why nobody else is seeing dwarves die of old age! Must go through forts like candy. Though of course this is my longest fort ever and I have invasions off and only one dwarf has died ever (strange mood guy at the start).
My militia captain had to bludgeon one of the children to death after it went into a mood. Happy times.
Meanwhile, shenanigans in the fort. Another death to vampire attack, that makes 3! Could not find the culprit though, and then my new guard captain was found murdered.
Turns out that someone released one of my previously convicted vampires and after stopping for a snack, he went to revenge kill the person who locked him up in the first place. None of this would happen if I could get cages to work as jails, but they just won't.
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
All my detected vampires now get drafted and stationed under a conveniently opened drawbridge. Then the bridge is let down and the vampire mysteriously vanishes.
I assign vampires to eternal lever-pulling duty, and then lock them in. They're handy for keeping a fortress alive in case something catastrophic happens.
Posts
I gotta put in rock floors I guess to stop the saplings from growing inside.
And it seems I could use some pointers!
So far I thiiiink I've completely misunderstood the quest system, at the very least, so any tips around that area would be great.
Also are coins basically pointless? Is there any way of determining which Civ a pile of coins or a town belongs to? Is there even anything worth trading for once I'm fully decked out in iron armour, and haven't seen any steel?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
No witnesses.
e: Think I found him. He is recent arrival and doesn't have a deity/hasn't been cursed. However he has eat/sleep status and has 'took joy in slaughter lately' with 0 recorded kills. Assuming he must have been infected by vampire blood at some point in history.
Nah, the tileset makes designated smooth stone look black.
I haven't played in a little bit because this is the longest I've ever played a fort and I just had my first dwarf die of old age. That brings me down from 120 dwarves to 119, and I don't know what the migrants are going to do. I think the liason is still here too. The bugginess of .34 means that the slightest population fluctuation from my cap could get me endless migrants forever and I really don't want to have to do that much killing and burials.
I could kill the liason or try to have a baby really quickly, or see what happens, I dunno...
I hop in to play a season or two, next thing you know I've been playing for hours.
I don't think you'll know until they turn. A scratch may be okay, I think it's bites that are the problem.
If he's not super valuable, you may want to just make him a noble, wall him into a room (not doors, walls) with a well and a long-term supply of meals, and see what happens. He'll transform once a season if he's a werebeast.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Fast forward a bit, and my current fort is under siege by a necromancer and 50+ undead. They've invaded from the western side of the map, and I've gone ahead and created a bit of a fortress out of the mountainside, figuring to give my marksdwarves some live target practice.
The only problem is that the fuckers absolutely refuse to engage the enemy.
My dwarves, let me show you them.
In red, you can see the current location of the undead horde (or some of it, anyway). Over on the right of the picture, you can see my little holdfast. I have 4 fortifications carved into the walls (in blue). First, I tried ordering my (s)quad of marksdwarves to (m)ove into the room. This resulted in maybe half of them showing up, walking into the room, and basically hanging out by the door. Occasionally, maybe one dwarf would walk up to the fortification and fire off a couple shots, but then he'd stop shooting, and the majority of the dwarves never even made it that far. I tried adjusting where my "Move" command was targeted - to the Patrol Point (in orange), to right behind a fortification, to the north of the room, to the south, etc. Nothing changed in the dwarves behavior.
Then, I tried setting up a burrow (marked in green, called "Western Approach"), and adding a new alert "Defend the Western Approaches." For that alert, I set the order to "Defend Burrow" targeting the "Western Approach" burrow with minimum dwarves equal to 3 (the squad was 6 dwarves strong). I applied that order to every month for both of my squads (marksdwarves and melee dwarves). I then made that the active alert for my marksdwarf squad. They all switched from civilian job descriptions to military, and then ... they hung out in their rooms and the dining hall. They refused to move to the burrow indicated.
So, then I set up a patrol point in the room (orange) and another in the hallway beyond it, out of line of sight of the undead outside, where I created an ammo stockpile (having read that marksdwarves won't reload their quivers if they can see a badguy). Then I linked them on a patrol route. I changed the alert orders to assign dwarves to that patrol route. Similar to the first option, they'd run into the room, fail to move up to the fortifications, and then leave.
So, uh, WTF? Why won't my marksdwarves fuckin' do anything?
The squad of 5* has 350 rounds of metal bolts assigned to them, with "Combat" usage enabled, and every dwarf I checked had at least 50 iron bolts in their quivers.
At this point, issuing (m)ove orders near the fortifications has caused two dwarves to go running outside to meet the undead, which has resulting in two dwarven casualties and 0 shooting-from-behind-the-wall. (You can see one in this picture; it's the helmet-looking icon in the red area.)
* 6 starting, 2 casualties, 1 draftee.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I hope one day Grandpa Urist will tell us the full story of Copnut Styledgift, whom I have to imagine as some kind of human adventurer-pimp.
Playing along with captnduck is a lot simpler than playing my own world along with his videos, since everything matches up on screen, and it's also MUCH easier than playing the game with just a written tutorial.
Well for one thing, burrows don't force dwarves to stand in those locations. They will only perform work in those locations if work is available there. They may decide to go stand there when they are on break, but they don't have to go there.
For another, what allowed your dwarves to get outside when you issued the move order? Shouldn't they have been blocked from going outside with locked doors or something? If they have no path to the outside, they should attempt to cluster near the wall safely indoors. In fact you might be able to order them to stand just outside and they would stand against the wall in an attempt to go as close to that location as possible.
I remember having similar problems trying to force dwarves to shoot because they wouldn't stand next to the walls. Ultimately what I needed was a narrow hallway of only one space, which I ordered them to move to, and then they had no choice but to stand next to the wall.
You need something like this:
And even then it won't work too well because not enough fortifications are carved, lots of them will stand in the hall doing nothing.
But at the same time, you want to be a bit careful, because if you can shoot out, enemies can shoot in. I think even if you have a channeled space between the wall and the fortification, they can shoot in. Might want to be a level above or something.
Fuckin' a, that's obnoxious. That makes the "defend burrows" order not tremendously useful.
The undead were all very happy to just hang out on the extreme western edge of the map, tanking my FPS (from 60-70 down to 20-30) but ignoring everything that was going on elsewhere. I ordered the marksdwarves into the room, and all of them went (I thought); it was only when I got a "So-and-so has been found dead" announcement that I realized two had decided to go outside, which brought the undead closer in, which prevented civilians from doing any work in the holdout, which prevented finishing the fortifications ...
Yeah, apparently. The fact that you can't get marksdwarves to do their job without a lot of manual hand-holding is pretty bullshit.
There's a minimum archery skill level required to shoot through a fortification when not standing next to it, and being closer to the fortification than the person shooting you gives you a large bonus to your defense. Common practice is to channel a moat next to your fortifications to ensure that you're always the one closer to the wall.
Unfortunately, the undead are now all over that side of the hill, so I can't get a civilian miner out there to channel out the moat, and the undead are most of the way up that hillside, so I'd have to go up quite a few z-levels in order to "get above them," but the miners would still be in-sight of the undead farther down the hill.
So I'm building another, better archer position with hookers and blow catapults and a moat to the south, hopefully well out of aggro range. We'll see how that works.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Apparently, it was not out of aggro range.
My stationed melee dwarves decided to charge the undead horde for no particular reason.
It did not end well.
Oh, well - new fort time with 40_08!
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Yeah - I had those, and some weapon traps with green glass serrated saw blade circle things, but the undead just refused to do anything - like, a year later, they were still just hanging out on the western edge of the map.
So, to save my framerate, I tried to make them go away.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
At some point though I caged their leader and the rest just stood around not knowing what to do. That was a bit worrying but eventually their random small movements got them all trapped.
With undead zombies probably won't do anything unless the necromancer is there to lead them. I had one show up with 3 necros and after I chased the necromancers off the map the zombie just stayed where it was for a few months before I sent someone to kill it.
One thing I learned from Cloudspears (under zombie assault every few years), is that archers stationed near fortifications won't necessarily look through them.
Unless you build a wall behind them. IE, you want them to be in a narrow hallway, right next to the fortifications. If possible, make the wall thick so they can't stand on the other side of it and still be close to the designated 'station' area.
And yeah, carve fortifications into everything you can reach.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
I DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT THIS
HANDLING POSSESSED CHILDREN IS PROBABLY VIDEO #5781 IN THIS TUTORIAL SERIES AND I AM ON VIDEO FIVE.
Unfortunately, since it's a child AND it's a craftsdwarf workshop, that's pretty much a terrible combination.
If they go too long waiting for said items then things can get... interesting
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
I could see there being an awesome thought "was recently proud to see his friend's remains used in the creation of an artifact."
Also, how sad of a thought do dwarves get from a friend who dies of old age, if at all? Would suck to have tantrum spirals over that. Dying of old age is an incredible feat in DF.
Their lifespan is so long that you'll basically have strip-mined the whole map by the time even one of your original seven starts getting on in years.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
I guess it could happen, but I've never seen it.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Meanwhile, shenanigans in the fort. Another death to vampire attack, that makes 3! Could not find the culprit though, and then my new guard captain was found murdered.
Turns out that someone released one of my previously convicted vampires and after stopping for a snack, he went to revenge kill the person who locked him up in the first place. None of this would happen if I could get cages to work as jails, but they just won't.