/dfg/ - Dwarf Fortress General

And the wiki probably or just ask dumb questions here

Okay, before starting, what's the different between the basic game and the starter pac in the OP?

I believe the starter pack gives you access to some tilesets a bit easier and probably includes other utilities when they're up to date, I just play the base game

Starter pack includes a UI for changing some settings that you have to change by editing a txt otherwise. Apart from that, it comes packaged with some other third party utilities that you can easily get elsewhere.

Basically, the starter pack offers a crutch that will prove counterproductive in the long run. It adds no functionality to the game, since all the settings can be changed elsewhere, and since all third party utilities can be downloaded separately. It does, however, make a lot of players unable to play without it, meaning that they often have to stick to obsolete versions, even when newer ones are available.

Now is a great time for you to learn playing the vanilla game. You can try the starter pack out afterwards if you like, but it's best to learn the base game first, since that will give you a better understanding of the game.

oh sweet lord, DFHack alpha for the latest version and it includes a dwarf therapist
the game just became a lot more accessible.

thisit's better if you avoid therapist and dwarfhack at first, otherwise you might turn into one of those faggots who are completely unable to play without it

Make crazy shit happen, see crazy shit happen, tell others about crazy shit that happened (in game and on here), explore, create, dig, die, start again.

This 100%. The starter pack doesn't do anything you can't do yourself, I learned to play on the starter pack and was surprised how little it actually did once I switched to vanilla.

>dwarf fortress purists actually exist

No, the base game is not worth playing over the starter pack. The starter pack includes DFhack, which is absolutely vital for those rare cases when an underground spider or a kea man get stuck in a tree and make the fortress you've been working on unplayable because you get 2 fps. There's also a therapist-style job enabling/disabling UI included in the pack that is ingame, allowing you to bypass mostly what therapist offers so you don't need to tab out every time you want to manage mass jobs. The only thing you need therapist for is to see which units make the best soldiers. Armok Vision is another great utility as it allows you to see your above ground fort in all its three dimensional glory.

>but it's best to learn the base game first, since that will give you a better understanding of the game.

This is just horseshit, there's nothing in the pack that removes elements or makes them more obscure. If anything, the utilities in the pack will allow you a deeper understanding of the game. I had no idea dwarves had their own strength/toughness/agility/endurance till I used therapist, and there's absolutely nothing in the game that would tell you this information either.

>and there's absolutely nothing in the game that would tell you this information either

Let me correct this, there's absolutely nothing in the game that would tell you this either if you don't enjoy reading your 100 dwarf's descriptions and manually writing down and keeping track of which dwarves have the best soldiering stats. And even then, unless they're exceptionally bad or good in one of these stats, the character description screen won't make note of it.

>If anything, the utilities in the pack will allow you a deeper understanding of the game
Did you even read my post? I wrote that the utilities are easy to get elsewhere. I am NOT an anti-utility purist, I just don't want to rely on a useless middle man to use them.

All of the other shit you described is part of DFHack, which can also be easily installed without Starter pack.

Your argument boils down to
>Starter pack is necessaty because it has DFHack
My question is: why not just install DFHack, then?

>I had no idea dwarves had their own strength/toughness/agility/endurance till I used therapist, and there's absolutely nothing in the game that would tell you this information either.
This is also total BS. Their attributes are described in their thought screens. If you missed that, that's a shortcoming on your side.

Most of your issues are not issues at all. I play without dwarf hack just fine.

Managing jobs efficiently is also part of the game.

dfhack isn't even stable yet and about the only thing I like it for is remembering menu position

See this: I get the "muh vanilla purity" stuff, but there are things that I like doing and having access to and like more than the way vanilla does them. Similarly I build my own dfhack off the dev branch and swap in my own version of numerous scripts/keybinds/etc.

The starter pack value is in the little interface window to make a lot of stuff easier for people who don't default to working through a terminal on another screen.

It's the same reason I keep a link to the kde file browser, I can locate and open and edit files through the konsole window I always have open, but some things are easier to drag/drop/click/identify visually than it is to mv/rm/ls/tab completion at times.

Having some trouble,

I have dwarves with wood hauling and wood cutting turned on, and I have trees set to be cut down, but all my dwarves just sit there and idle.

I have a wood stockpile and I don't have any orders to not carry wood

I have crafted several iron axes

With the LNP and whatnot you get the little window that lets you click a button and swap tilesets, launch with dfhack, change basic settings, etc, all without having to pull up a text editor and know the right tags and whatnot for all the shit in the folders.

(same with not just using command line all the time, mostly because dolphin has the little preview icons for my df screens and pr0n, the screens I can TellByFilenameUsually, but I've got too many 720p_1454593.mp4 type vids to keep track of without seeing the thumbnail/previews)

They aren't set in military squads or in burrows are they?

Nope, haven't messed with either of those yet.

Are your iron axes properly stored? Sometimes if your goods are still in the workshop that made them and not in a stockpile your dwarves won't use them. I believe this happens when you have a stockpile that is inaccessible. Your dwarves queue up the job to take the finished product to the stockpile, but since they can't get there they never finish the job. Since the job never gets finished, other jobs requiring that tool never get started. So my real question is do you have an inaccessible weapons stockpile somewhere? If you don't have a weapons stockpile at all, you should make one.

Actually, something weird is going on

I put some axes into the blacksmith , but they aren't getting made, and the queue clears, no message or anything.

Same with the woodcrafter, nothing gets made but it was working earlier.

I do have a weapons stock.

I notice nobody walks over to the smith shop, but I have the labor enabled on everyone

You've got the bars and fuel or magma right?

...fug

OK, don't have those, but I can't even make a training axe, it disappears from the queue without being made as well. What am I missing there?

logs, presumably
but training axes don't work for cutting down trees as of 43.03+
do [z], go to stocks, see what weapons you have. The standard embark includes 2 picks and 2 axes.

About to embark on my first game. I'm following the wiki's Quickstart Guide and it says it is quite important that I look for a place that has no Aquifer. Why is this? I've found a place that matches with everything the guide wants (even the optional stuff) but has an aquifer.

Copper picks and 2 crossbows.

I am, however, running version 40

hey man, that shit happens.

Mostly because the quickstart guide is written for cowards. It's just somewhat tricky to get below an aquifer for the first time, but you should learn how to do it.

The easy-mode way to find out: they flood your fort

The fun way to find out: just try it and find out

My first time punching through an aquifer took me over 3 hours, and I felt I was already an experienced DF player. It's nice if you want a challenge, but if you're just starting out I imagine it will be a horrible experience. Also, an aquifer is a layer of stone that infinitely produces water on the tiles next to it. If you embark right on top of an aquifer, you probably won't have access to any metal ores if you can't punch through it.

>version 40
...that shouldn't happen though, 40.24 was all promise, 43.05 is the start of that promise being realized.

40.19 gave us activated worlds, and 43.05 means you get soldiers that will train and become weapon lords living in goblin and elf sites and they'll show up properly armored (no more helmet+body armor only) now, and you can use a force of recruited mercenaries to slaughter the siege after it gets done clearing the bards and scholars out of your tavern!

That's great and all but I still need logs.

aquifers will become the most efficient defense once toady adds enemies that can dig/break walls and there's nothing you can do about it

My possessed dwarf made a crossbow from someone's pet cat.
Should I keep it as a weapon, decoration, or sell it to the happy merchants(I've just embarked)?

What happened to the axe that you embarked with?

I don't think I embarked with one.

I guess I'll update to version 43 and start over

Oh wait, I see that you embarked with no axes. If you can find a lair of bitumous coal then you can get fuel for your furnace, otherwise you might be fugged.

check the 06/20/2016 entry

Don't think you can sell artifacts, can you?

Am I a cheating scumbag if I use DFhack to spawn 1 tile of 7/7 lava to use as a garbage dumb to save fps?

Not if you do it in middle of your tavern and accept the results no matter what.

Why do my dorfs refuse to make charcoal at furnace?

Got any dwarves with woodburning labor enabled?

I thought it was furnace operating.

...

There are no issues with dwarves taking items straight out of the workshop. They don't need to be put into a stockpile at all to be used.

World activation was .40.01, it was the whole reason it took so long between .34.11 and .40.01.

Use it. You can't sell artifacts anyway.

I can play without dfhack but dwarf therapist is just so necessary, manually changes dwarves' jobs is such a pain in the ass.

The 06/20/2016 entry of what?

the dev log, of course

Are you only designating the bottom of the trees to be cut down? If you are designating on several z-levels it tends to prioritize the middle or top of the tree which usually isn't routable.

If you mod in more than one race that trades during a certain season, do you get more trade caravans that season, or does it randomly choose between one of the two?

>I had no idea dwarves had their own strength/toughness/agility/endurance till I used therapist, and there's absolutely nothing in the game that would tell you this information either.
Fucking retard
And you claim it ain't a crutch...

>reading your 100 dwarf's descriptions
It's always in the same spot and is color-coded.

I was thinking about the fixes for world-gen battles and off-site battles where they were first having people stuck asleep, then having attackers autowin, plus the emotion rewrite.

3 caravans come a year, Player Entity caravans, Elven caravans (because of [TREE_CAP_DIPLOMACY]) and a civilization without [TREE_CAP_DIPLOMACY] (unmodded, this would be humans). Seasons aren't the deciding factor and Dwarf Fortress even has compatibility for multiple caravans in one trade depot.

And is extremely vague and only shows up if the attribute in question is significantly above or below average.
If an attribute isn't even listed, it could be anywhere between 30% percentile to 70% percentile and you have absolutely no way of knowing.

alright purist fags, tell me how I check dwarf or animal size without hack or the rapist, and also sexual orientation

checkmate

no one has argued against DFHack. we're only saying that you don't need Starter pack to use hack.

You don't need the starter pack for perfect world, therapist or legends viewer either, and you don't need it to adjust things like population cap, visitor cap, invader cap, autosaves, tileset, the presence of aquifers, etc.

How do I make my dwarves pick up fruit from the roof of my surface buildings?
I already made a fruit gathering zone and the roof is accessible to dwarves.

You're absolutely right. Most of those things you can adjust are in the init.txt except for tilesets (kind of) and aquifers (which are in raws/objects/ in organic_stone_layer.txt, organic_stone_mineral.txt and organic_stone_soil.txt then all you need to do is remove [AQUIFER] from them)

>organic_stone_layer.txt, organic_stone_mineral.txt and organic_stone_soil.txt
kek
inorganic_stone_layer.txt, inorganic_stone_mineral.txt and inorganic_stone_soil.txt

Neither of those things happened in 40.19 either.
bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=146043.0
Also neither of them are world activation. And the sleeping armies bug still hasn't been fixed.

Why do you feel privy to this info anyway? I just always have my perfectly competent military trained somewhat, armed with what I can get.

You can make a perfectly functional fort without knowing exactly how many good boy points each dwarf has. The fuck you need to know precise size for? What function does that serve? (Inb4 some autistic reply. You know an elephant is bigger than a pig fuck off. )

In short any "problems" run into with the lack of knowing these things just give me more FUN, so, whatever. Bring on the gay giraffes.

LNP users everyone

>The fuck you need to know precise size for
Because it directly affects butchering returns and combat effectiveness.
A small dwarf will be much weaker than a large dwarf when at equal skill level and equipment.
Almost every animal in the game reaches adulthood at 1 year, but doesn't reach full size until 2 years, and you'll be wasting tons of meat by butchering them as soon as they hit adulthood.

Attributes are also extremely important. Yes, they are trained up over time, but they have caps based on what the dwarf started with, and every single one of them is absolutely critical to everything you do, with the sole exceptions of musicality, disease resist and recuperation.
It's important to know which dwarves have good attributes and which don't, so you know who to assign to what jobs. Your military should be reserved for people who have outstanding attributes since that guy with 34% strength and 22% agility is going to be totally useless and die the moment he gets in combat with anything that matters.

>I'm too stupid to understand how attributes work, so anyone who does and realizes how important they are is bad
??????

You really don't need to min/max like that.

>DUDE just turn off ur brain lmao
>who cares if ur militia is shit just start a new fort lol

I wasn't saying that at all, but here's your (You) anyway.

Sure you don't need to, but really you don't need to do anything except embark next to a river and have a farmer assigned to a 3x3 plump helmet farm.
Anything past that is minmaxing.

>A small dwarf will be much weaker than a large dwarf
Not much weaker, there's not a very large range by default.
And you can see dwarves' attributes on the thoughts and prefs screen. Anything that deviates from the median is listed there.

>mfw Purist McScrub tries to tell me not to minmax in my autism simulator

You still haven't told us why you would need LNP for this.

DFHack should be enough.

>Anything past that is minmaxing
Holy shit you are a dumb.

Thanks!
Just some chum from London

>Anything that deviates from the median is listed there.
False. It needs to be below the 29th percentile or above the 71st percentile to get listed. That's a HUGE deviation from the norm that gets totally ignored. Dwarf A can be literally twice as strong as Dwarf B and neither of them gets a mention of how strong they are.

Considering you're the one who doesn't know what minmaxing means, I think you should probably stop posting.

>>I'm too stupid to understand how attributes work
I know dude, that's what I was responding to.

Because DFHack doesn't tell you unit size or attributes as well as Therapist does?
You don't need LNP for it, it's just the best tool for the job.
It gives you everything you could possibly need, everything could possibly want, and a little bit more, and does it better than any of the alternatives(AKA vanilla since LNP includes pretty much every 3rd party program under the sun) and the only argument against it is some purist appeal to masochism "but you don't NEED it!".

Can we not shit up the thread arguing about shit that doesn't matter? Can we argue about tilesets instead? Or how wide stairways should be?

x3 of course

>stairways
Only fags use stairways.
Ramp only master race.

You take that back you son of a bitch.

Except LNP tends to have all that shit outdated so you would be better of downloading everything yourself.

Anyone up for a migration to discord?

Veeky Forums discords are autistic

You are completely right.

so. can i get a thumbs up from the drawfags that theyll do these months

Drew - Autumn: limestone sandstone timber
Dots - Winter: moonstone opal obsidian
Frown - Spring: granite slate felsite
Honest - Summer: hematite malachite galena

also should it be in the order of granite = january (to better reflect the game) or opal = january (to better reflect real life)?

and on the subject of holidays. which ones should be on the calendar from real life and in game? im already going to be doing nationally recognised and widely accepted ones such as valentines day, new years, christmas, halloween and a few others. as well as ill be doing werebeast transformation days from the wiki (dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Calendar)

how far into 2018 should it go? just a small 6 month? full blown pages through march? none at all?

and the color scheme, should i use default DF color pallette or a modified one or just any one i want?

thats all the questions i have for right now. but if you could do this poll it would be awesome so i can get an idea of how likely it will be for this to go through.

strawpoll.me/12064038
strawpoll.me/12064046

wallpaper so you all tolerate my autism and are more likely to read my post

Never. I bet you even embark on sedimentary stone layers you pansy.

When was the last time anyone ever got a fell mood? Has the new emotions system influenced how often they show up, if at all? Am I just unlucky?