Dwarf Fortress you sick temptress, you!

Oh! Awesome pack. Time to try the game again!

Once you get on Lazy Newb, you can't get off lazy newb. Its just so much more convenient.

What has he added recently to the Fortress Mode? Bees?

Here's an exhaustive list of updates about what he's been working on. The release with bees (and related industries) was the most major recent feature release, and also brought in eggs, ceramics, wool, and pasturage.

Oh wow... That's way more help than I expected. Thanks a ton boogle!

So I finally took the time to jump into DF using the aforementioned lazy newb pack and promptly flooded my multi-room fortress. Face-palm. On the upside, I have a better understanding of channels and floodgates. Also, I don't know if you guys have heard, but this game is great.

Have any of you guys made a beach fortress yet?

My preferred fortress type is a flat heavily forested map with with a natural brook or river. I like making big aboveground castles. But there is a lot I have not tried yet including a beach fortress, glacier fortress or evil land fortress.

A beach sounds quite interesting however. But among other things I'm not very familiar with aquifers. Any tips?

I'm building down into a cliff face above where two raging rivers meet in a fork. I've been piercing the outer layer and installing glass windows so that the elite may have panoramic views.

I can never bring myself to start anywhere but at the forested foot of a mountain range, next to a brook or river. It feels too much like Hobbit Fortress to just start in a field somewhere and dig straight down. But that says more about the limits I let cliches place on my imagination than anything else.

I just saw this last night: DwarvesH. Looks like an isometric, somewhat more accessible version of Dwarf Fortress. Anyone here following the development at all or is it a DF taboo to want/discuss something like this?

Montalban wrote:

I can never bring myself to start anywhere but at the forested foot of a mountain range, next to a brook or river. It feels too much like Hobbit Fortress to just start in a field somewhere and dig straight down. But that says more about the limits I let cliches place on my imagination than anything else.

It's the same for me, but it has more to do with my reluctance to go without any of the resources that that combination provides than anything else.

Okay... Downloaded the LazyNewb pack. Dropped the unzipped file into the DF folder. I cannot find, for the life of me, a how to. What the hell do I do with this program? The help file literally says "It's really easy." That's it.

double click LNP.exe, go from there.

I'm sure its been mentioned but I'll throw out that the the complete and utter newby tutorial for dwarf fortress, while now dated, was (and is) helpful for me. I also read a tutorial through the wiki, but the newby tutorial seems to be more my style.

Im about to start working some long shifts while we do some overnight work on our electrical grid here in Texas, and would really like to try to grasp this game, since I can run It on a laptop. I've read the first few pages, but they r so old most the links don't work. I downloaded the zip from the authors site, and of course was completely lost.

Can someone post the "must read" sites to understand this behemoth? I've beaten the x3tc curve so I think I can bear down and get thru the curve on this one too.

Also, is there any sort of tileset that increases the graphics, or is still just ASCII? ASCII isn't a deal breaker, just wondering if there have been improvements made...

Ninja edit: saw clever's post above me. I'll check that out

Tamren wrote:

I'm not very familiar with aquifers. Any tips?

There are ways to remove aquifers from the game entirely, but if you must do it in the proper dwarven fashion, the dfwiki has some good instructions.

primer28 wrote:

Ninja edit: saw clever's post above me. I'll check that out

Also check out the newb pack mentioned on the previous page. Lots of useful things and it can make the graphics more approachable depending on the graphics pack you choose.

In 24 hours I've gone from absolutely lost to decent at losing. I'm sure there is a ton to learn, but I feel like I have a basic idea whats going on.

Good luck!

tagg wrote:
Tamren wrote:

I'm not very familiar with aquifers. Any tips?

There are ways to remove aquifers from the game entirely, but if you must do it in the proper dwarven fashion, the dfwiki has some good instructions.

Hmm looks useful. IIRC the only method I ever used was the magma one. But surface magma vents seem to be super rare in the newer versions. The pump setup seems workable. The only problem is the amount of dwarf power you need to make all the pumps work. Digging below is going to be slow going with only 7 dwarves. Maybe wind power would help, hmm...

I really want to try a beach fortress but I just hate aquifers so much that I try to avoid them.

Tamren the collapsing roof method is the easiest if you have access to stone above the aquifer. You may lose Quintin Sto.... uh... random miner dwarfs with this process.

Why mess with aquifiers at all? Just dig around them. Your dorfs tell you when you're getting close (e.g. "the walls are wet") and they stop digging. So just dig around and deeper. Always dig deeper! *mwuahahaha*

I always avoid aquifers on embark, so I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I'm under the impression that they'll usually completely carpet a level. Apparently, if you're at a junction of biomes, you can potentially find some squares to sneak through between aquifers at different layers, but I think if it's all one biome, you're stuck doing it the hard way.

Hmm... I guess that most of my embarks had multiple biomes. Just about every one of my embarks had an aquifier on it, but I never had problems with it. Well, except that one time where I learned about water pressure pushing the water back up onto the level from which it came... but we won't talk about that one.

One of my embarks was on an island. I wanted to be completely alone on an island, but I don't think that's really possible. So I picked a peninsula. It was supposed to be a "shipwreck" scenario. I'm pretty sure it was all one biome. I had an ocean on 3 sides. I still had no problem digging down. The only issue were some slugmen that happened to be around. Eventually they annoyed me enough that I quit the fortress.

Well, I always avoid them, so I probably am misunderstanding how they work.

DF has gotten a lot harder over the last couple years. It takes a lot longer to get your economy going, but goblins come at about the same speed that they always did. I think I'm gonna have to fall back to a prior save on my most recent embark, because they happened to invade right when I was rejiggering my defenses. It looks I started rebuilding about six months too late.

I like the new 'burrows' feature, but I really don't care for the new weapon/armor/material systems. Modern dwarves are ridiculously fragile, and they train skill incredibly slowly. There's healthcare now, but it appears largely useless without soap, and it's HARD to get soap going. That first invasion of ten goblins used to be an annoyance; now it's lethal.

Prozac wrote:

Tamren the collapsing roof method is the easiest if you have access to stone above the aquifer. You may lose Quintin Sto.... uh... random miner dwarfs with this process.

You still haven't learned that I cannot be killed?

Damn this game is terribly confusing, even following a how to. Cant seem to get my dwarf to friggin mine. It never highlights the ground when I try to select it

primer28 wrote:

Damn this game is terribly confusing, even following a how to. Cant seem to get my dwarf to friggin mine. It never highlights the ground when I try to select it

When you're above ground it defaults to chopping down trees, which might be what you're seeing. Mining down is also different than mining sideways.

To mine:
d - for the 'designations'
d - to select digging/mining
Move the cursor over a cliff face, hit enter. Move it a little ways away (arrow keys) to define a rectangle, hit enter. (can also use mouse)

This should work. If you're trying to dig straight down, you want a channel or a down stair (to dig through the floor) instead of straight mining. Every tile has both a floor and the space above it. Mining only clears out the tile, not the floor.

Thanks for some explanation. I've been up all night, what do u mean by cliff face? What does that look like? Do I need to be working in Z?

Have people been reading the updates lately? He's putting zombies and ghosts in now. I eagerly await the arrival of zombie Quintin Stone.

I'm totally looking forward to when forgotten beasts can raise the dead.

primer28 wrote:

Thanks for some explanation. I've been up all night, what do u mean by cliff face? What does that look like? Do I need to be working in Z?

You shouldn't have to change z-levels on most maps just to start digging, though I usually do anyway. By cliff face, I just mean a place where a hill rises high enough for you to dig in from the side. If you're using the Lazy Newbie pack, fire up Stonesense once your fortress is loaded and it will help you visualize things.

Norfair wrote:

Have people been reading the updates lately? He's putting zombies and ghosts in now. I eagerly await the arrival of zombie Quintin Stone.

I've already got two ghosts in my latest fort. I should really look up what to do about it. That poor fisherman has been hanging around unburied ever since that unfortunate pumping accident swept him too far downriver to reach.