'Stuck in Dwarf Fortress' thread

[DefJam101]

Well I've been playing for a bit now and this game is incredibly fun. I hit a wall, though.. not sure what to do at the moment. I finally got a farm up and running after irrigation hell, as well as a brewery/fishery/masonry/dining hall/bunch of storage areas/bedding area. My new fort then got absolutely butt fucked with immigrants all of a sudden. I went directly from 7 dwarves to 31. It's a tad overwhelming, and I'm still working on building beds for all of them.

Shitloads of animals are running everywhere and taking up my CPU cycles, so I tried to build an animal holding area to put all of them in. I made an animal stockpile with a couple of cages but I can't figure out how to put animals in the cages. I'm also not sure what to do with the metric assload of immigrants I just got. I have like 15 idlers now and I can't decide what to do first. I figure I can start a rudimentary military, but what workshops and new buildings should I work on next?

Also, I can't seem to put a trade depot up. If I check the 'depot accessibility' thing the entire map just flashes red, I have no idea where to put it. Oh, and is there any way to condense stones to make them not take up so much space? Like how you can put food in barrels?


Halp pls

 

[Ashery]

Just got into it a couple weeks ago myself...Damn addictive but I'm in a similar boat as you fps wise...80 or so seems to be a reasonable pop cap for me without animals. Although I defniitely could've done a better mining pattern to help with pathfinding issues...I ended up stopping play on my first real fortress (My second total) because I got overwhelmed by what I could do next and had no idea how to proceed.

but for your questions:

The trade depot access mode(?) measures accessibility *from* your depot, so if one isn't placed, it won't be accessible. Once you place it, you need a three tile wide path to the side of the map for caravans, only one tile for pack animals only. Best place to put it depends on the layout of the fort, but one of the more effective methods is to use an outter courtyard/airlock with the depot in it. Always keep the outter drawbridge/whatever defense open while the inner can be closed at will. Keeps the baddies out but still lets you easily trade.

For the immigrants: (And yes, the first wave is overwhelming)

If you want a military, draft about five of'em and let'em wrestle for a bit while you get armor production up. You'll likely lose one or two to nervous injuries without armor, but you can either make those marksdwarves (They won't spar with nervous injuries, but they'll practice at a range iirc) or retire'em and let'em return to their former job.

You could also turn off hauling duties on your starting 7 and let them focus solely on production while your peasants do the hauling. You should also focus on getting a few of the less vital skills up like engraving and such. Set one dwarf to only engrave and designate massive areas for stone smoothing. My lower dining/housing area was enough to get a couple levels off legendary. You should also start looking into skilling a gem cutter/setter and setting up a metal industry (Using various mining techniques to search for ores/fuel/magma). Once the metal industry is up and running, get enough shields, chest, and head armor pieces made for your recruits so they can start training the respective skills and so that they avoid nervous injuries.

It's also worth it a bit later on (60-80pop) to specialize your haulers. I couldn't set my kitchen on repeat as my legendary cook filled it up far faster than my haulers would unload it (He wasn't set to haul, and most of my haulers were busy moving stone to the surface for defense purposes).

There are other techniques for improving your framerate too, check the wiki/DF forums for those...Avoiding lots of moving water/magma seems to be a big one. I'm also playing on 4x4 plots now instead of 6x6.

 

[DefJam101]

Err, thanks for the suggestions mate but I still have absolutely no idea how to get these animals into the cages. They are really starting to clog up my hallways.

 

[Virtz]

You need to place the cages somewhere via the (b)uild menu and then, using building preferences (q), assign animals to them. Unfortunately, this only works for unowned animals.

 

[Ashery]

I knew I forgot something when I pressed reply, sorry 'bout that, heh...

Virtz answered it though.

On a similar note, make sure you butcher any kittens as fast as possible as they choose their owners and will therefore become uncageable. It also gives a steady supply of bones and leather ;p

 

[Oarfish]

You can also create a kitten based early warning system with rope, they can spot sneakers.

 

[Ashery]

Any animal for that matter, although I tend to favor war dogs.

 

[MisterStone]

You can clean up stone by using the 'i' menu to designate an area as a dump zone. You can actually designate empty space as part of the zone- as long as there is one walkable tile, the dwarves will stand on it and throw stuff into the empty space (which could even be over a magma pit or chasm if you wanted to completely destroy stuff).

To order them to dump stuff after this has been set up, use the 'k' menu to look at objects on the ground. Highlight the object you want to dump and press 'd' to have it marked for dumping. The dwarves will then start picking the stuff up and taking it to the dump zone. This is the best way to make them clean up stone right now.

You can also just select a two tile area on the ground in the corner of a room somewhere, and they will dump all of the stone onto that tile... the stone will just stack infinitely in that one space (right now there is no concept of volume for items, so you can have hundreds of stone units in one tile, or dozens of elephants sharing a single cage- this will eventually be addressed by the dev).

As for an animal holding pen, I think you need to create a pen or enclosure, go the the z-level above it, use the 'i' menu to designate a pit area, and then you can assign animals to the pit. The dwarves will then thrown the animal down into the area you marked. I think that using a cage for this works better though... it seems like the animals can get damaged when thrown into the pit. I am not really sure if this is the best way to use this feature though.


An important thing about the trade depot- if you want to be visited by wagons, you need to clear 3x a path of all boulders, trees, shrubs and so on from one edge of your map to the depot. You can still build a depot if no such path exists, however, in that case the caravan will bring fewer items on pack mules, instead of carts, which carry a lot more stuff.

 

[Destroid]

I recommend butchering your excess animals for meat. I beleive you can carve raw rock into blocks which can then be stored in bins. Alternatively you could make falling animals traps above your entrance to give any seigers a nasty suprise :twisted:

EDIT: Horses and Mules are very strong in combat.

 

[DefJam101]

Do I need to train them in a Kennel to fight or will they just Rambo their way through the goblin sieges without me telling them to?

Also, I might have to restart my fortress now. I've wasted so much time hauling all this stone when I could've just made one little dump pile... o\

 

[Redeye]

It would be great if you could set up a cat farm.

Right next to a rat farm.

 

[Destroid]

Wasting time doesnt really matter in DF, there is no time limit to the game.

As for animals, war dogs will presumably fight better than regular dogs, and they can be assigned to follow your military dwarves around. Dogs are the only trainable animals without modifying the game.

 

[MisterStone]

Do I need to train them in a Kennel to fight or will they just Rambo their way through the goblin sieges without me telling them to?

Also, I might have to restart my fortress now. I've wasted so much time hauling all this stone when I could've just made one little dump pile... o\

In an unmodded version, only dogs can be made more aggressive in the kennels right now. Horses/cows can fight OK, but they usually just run away from dangerous things. However, having them fall out of the ceiling onto unsuspecting goblins would a) hurt whoever they hit, and b) give them no escape, so they would have to fight.

Note that even though only dogs can be made more aggressive, taming a non-tame animal such as a lion, etc. will produce a tame animal that attacks enemies on sight.

 

[Derek Larp]

Sometime the elven traders have tame animals like wolves and bears. If you manage to capture some goblins you can make 'arena fights'. It´s great fun.