DF: Hints & Tips

[friznit]

Can add these to the 5punky guide, but I'm picking up all sorts of little tips and need somewhere to stick them rather than make a new post each time.



Dwarf Therapist is a 3rd party app for managing your Dorfs. I've not tried it yet but apparently it's a lifesaver.

Quickfort lets you design your fort in Excel/Openoffice (or any .csv app I guess) and 'import' it into DF, saving a lot of time for bigger forts or repeated areas. Actually, it might allow collaborate fort building on Google spreadsheets..interesting.

Early Game Tips

1 Dorf is enough for plant gathering/farming (fields). Turn everything else off so he doesn't get distracted. He can be made into the brewer later on as well.

Woodcutters/Miners: turn off their hauling duties so they stick to doing their job and don't fuck about.

You can build walls to replace stuff you've accidentally mined out, same way you can also build ramps/stairs rather than mine them. You can even build a tower outside if you are bored enough. Or build a wall around your trade depot and wait for the traders to die...

Quick farms: while all soil types still need flooding (bug apparently), the simplest way to do it is dig down to the same level as a river/pond, mine out a farm area, build a channel to the water, let rip, wall off the channel...profit. You can build a wall over a channel, but if it's just a regular tunnel the dorf won't be able to get there through the torrent of rushing water.

Better way: dig to river, make floodgate, make lever, attach lever, dig out last bit, make pump, assign dorf, pull lever, pause, pull lever again, start pumping, farm.

Start with a barracks to sleep your dorfs in at first. Individual rooms can come later and the barracks doubles up for the militia as well.

Stonecrafters are quick way to make tradable items with your ton of spare stone

Obsidian generator: yeah, nfc. Apparently it's fucking evil though.

[shot2bits]

had a look at the dwarf therapist site and its not known if it works with the most up to date version (0.31.03) which i assume is what most people are using here, but thats a very new version so it should hopefully be updated soon

[Joose]

had a look at the dwarf therapist site and its not known if it works with the most up to date version (0.31.03) which i assume is what most people are using here, but thats a very new version so it should hopefully be updated soon

I would be surprised if it doesnt work with 0.31.03, I doubt that much has changed in the bits that matter. I'll give it a go and see.

Incidentally, am I the only one who keeps reading this as "Dwarf The Rapist"?

[Mr. Johnson]

Incidentally, am I the only one who keeps reading this as "Dwarf The Rapist"?

No, that's what I first read as well, great minds and all that eh?

[Dog Pants]

Some useful stuff there Friz, ta. Also some stuff that's in the guide, but nothing wrong with that. I think I'll give therapist a go too. Keeping track of your dwarf happiness is important and quite tricky. Could do with one that tracks their activity too so you get an idea of how to allocate jobs.

[Dog Pants]

It seems to work. It's also really useful. You can use it to see what your dwarves' labour settings are, what skills they're proficient (and how proficient) in at a glance, what they're up to at the moment, and how happy they are. Assuming it doesn't fuck my game up I'd say this was an essential.

[shot2bits]

i vaguely remember in my last fortress when i had a manager assigned you could set the workshop profiles so only people with a certain skill level or higher can operate them or something like that, if im remembering correctly that could be very handy if you want to make sure theres a workshop available for your legendary level workers

[Dog Pants]

Just took me about 15 minutes to completely revamp my labour settings. Now I've no holes, well distributed skills, and my essential workers don't do menial jobs. It's just a shame you can't do the military stuff from there too.

[Joose]

It seems to work. It's also really useful. You can use it to see what your dwarves' labour settings are, what skills they're proficient (and how proficient) in at a glance, what they're up to at the moment, and how happy they are. Assuming it doesn't fuck my game up I'd say this was an essential.

Yup, according to the official Dwarf Rapist site, 0.5.1 is the latest, and it should work fine with 0.31.03.

I shall be checking this out later. I have a terrible habit of chucking labor at whatever dorf happens to be nearest to my cursor and not doing anything important, so this could be a lifesaver for me.

[spoodie]

I'm not sure what it is but I am sure that no fortress is complete without one - http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-2121-pumpingtheanus

[Dog Pants]

Looks like some sort of moat flooding defence thing. Hard to tell in ascii though.

[Dog Pants]

Handy hint of the day: Set nicknames for dwarves with specific roles (mayor, broker, militia etc) for easy recognition when playing with labout allocation in Therapist (and in game to some extent).

[friznit]

I seem to have inadvertently created a new job role as well I think. I thought I was nicknaming the dwarf, but I can now assign them the role of Cannon Fodder (maybe wrong though, I'm still confused).

[Dog Pants]

You can create job templates to paste onto the in The Rapist. I've just spent 40 minutes poring over the magma wiki learning how to schedule and alert squads. It was painful. I'll put it in the guide, but for now it's useful to know that the military screen has mouse support, so you can just click your way around it. Nice.

[shot2bits]

oh yeah i thought it might be worth mentioning i came across a couple fan made visualiser tools so that you can see your fortress in 3d if anyone happened to make something elaborate and wanted to see what it was like in 3d rather than acsii

most of them seem to just render out a still 3d image, but i saw one called stonesence that a more cartoony isometric view that runs in real time(ish) with the game but is still just a visualiser, kills the framerate though

rps post about stonesense with a video

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/11 ... more-20756

bay12 forum thread with screenshots and d/l if anyone wants to try it

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=43260.0

[Dog Pants]

Hmm. Doesn't seem to work for me. Says it can't find the process.

[shot2bits]

hmm, it might not be updated for this version, there are a few different ones that arent real time (afaik) but are alot prettier

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=608.600

and

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=39541.0

seem to be fairly similar, although the later is supposed to be better

also worth noting that these are probably not great for underground stuff, although im pretty sure you just locate an area in the game and then tell it to render that so it should do inside stuff but i expect youd have the inside view of a room

[Dog Pants]

I've just noticed you can chain prisoners up like you can dogs. I'm tempted to see what happens if I chain my goblin up in the entrance with my war dog.

[shot2bits]

just had a thought, at somepoint would people be up for doing a 5punk style successive game of dorfs?

[Dog Pants]

In theory, but committing the amount of time it would take along with trying to coordinate with everyone else would be tricky to say the least.