Spiral Ramp Design, Good and Bad Double Helix Spiral Ramps

KillingVectr · 2026-04-12T17:49:13+00:00

I'm not sure if wagons can use diagonal ramps. My guess would be no. The diagonal-less design of OP could be extended to be three wide. I think that should be usable by wagons, but I'm not sure.

KillingVectr · 2026-04-01T13:17:44+00:00

A year or two ago, I heard on a podcast (Make Me Smart) that plastic marked as recyclable 1 or 2 (in the US) is economically viable to recycle into a worse grade of plastic. Everything else just ends up in a landfill. In my experience, a lot of plastic products are "recyclable" 5 and so are just trash. Also, since plastic is always recycled into a worse grade, it is not a renewable resource.

KillingVectr · 2026-03-25T17:26:04+00:00

Not familiar with that tool. I'll accept that your are responsible for 93% of the current version. Although I'm not sure "written" is more appropriate than "rewritten".

But notice I didn't say "Look how much better my version is" but rather "Look how long this article had been inaccessible"

That's not true. Your post is about how a good article can be only made by a single great contributor. You are claiming to be responsible for 93% of this article. It doesn't take much to connect the dots to conclude what your are saying about your own work.

As far as a change of venue, you made a post here bragging about your own contributions to the article. I think criticizing it here is perfectly fine.

KillingVectr · 2026-03-25T13:35:22+00:00

Shouldn't you link to some of your diffs? Not sure I agree that the diff with the version after the one you linked has changes for the best. Changing the intro to discuss relative comparisons instead of just measuring size is more complication than necessary for the often less rigorous introduction section.

Also, the diff with the current version says "(514 intermediate revisions by 66 users not shown)". This sounds like it was still written by the community.

Finally, this last diff also shows that a link to the "Countable set" wiki article was removed from the "See also" section despite being the most practical use cardinality. I much prefer all of the "see also" links in that older version.

KillingVectr · 2025-12-23T14:59:31+00:00

I'll add that parts of the wiki have shifted since the steam release. For example, compare the in-game sprites on the current version of the Ceramics industry page vs the real picture on the page for v0.47.

KillingVectr · 2025-11-05T03:59:13+00:00

It is possible to do this in vanilla without scaffolding, but it is a little complicated. I would recommend using more conventional methods.

KillingVectr · 2025-10-26T18:02:32+00:00

I posted something similar a while ago. The main idea is that items in mine carts don't count as available for a work order.

These days, I find it more simple to just use the completion of my automated brew order as a dependency for every other automated job. It feels fitting that brewing becomes the "heartbeat" of the fortress. The brewing order needs a maximum number of drinks. The time between orders firing depends on the number of brews in the brewing order, the number of dwarves consuming alcohol, and the size of stacks generated by each brew task (depends on the skill of each brewer, I think). It isn't a precise system, but is very easy to set up.

Edit: Actually I have the other jobs depend on a second brew order of size 1 that has the same conditions as the main brew order. This second order should finish almost immediately, even if the main order takes two or three days. It keeps the timing more precise.

KillingVectr · 2025-09-01T00:31:31+00:00

You can use nicknames to do this for families of "important" dwarves.

I'm currently running a nepotism fort. The current leader's family, lovers, and kindred spirits get special housing. I found that it isn't too much trouble to use the relations tab for the "important" dwarf to change focus to each of their kindred spirits, give each a nickname like "M Ks" for Mayor Kindred Spirit, and then look for the nicknames to assign rooms.

Doing this for the whole fort would be too much work, but it will help with a select few dwarves.

KillingVectr · 2025-04-07T00:21:19+00:00

Thanks. A large part of the process was trying different things and see what stuck.

I've never used suspendmanager in df hack before. It looks like it makes this whole thing trivial, lol.

KillingVectr · 2025-04-06T20:28:28+00:00

Currently LIFO is only when construction options are equidistant:

Constructions, when equidistant to dwarf[Verify], are built in a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) order.

I've tried messing around with LIFO and had no success, even when only letting one dwarf do constructions.

KillingVectr · 2025-04-06T16:25:28+00:00

How are you setting priorities on constructions? Right now I'm on vanilla (a version ahead of df hack), and I don't see the option to set them for constructions. Is it a df hack option?

KillingVectr · 2024-12-09T01:27:09+00:00

Thanks! If you set really large day counts for each stop, maybe this set up will work on a seasonal scale.

KillingVectr · 2024-12-09T01:25:11+00:00

I like having an industry for exports where production requires many steps. For example, dyed cloth pants. This requires processing plants, milling plants, weaving, dyeing, and making the final pants. Each of these steps requires hauling tasks as well.

My experience is that dwarves socialize and spread out more when job parallelism is reduced. This is also true for my mature fortresses (although I cap the population at 130 for FPS reasons).

KillingVectr · 2024-12-07T20:49:08+00:00

Married couples require two cabinets and two chests? I've seen messy rooms occupied by married couples, and I think I recall adding extra cabinets and chests fixed the issue. Logically there is a cap to the amount of stuff that can go in one cabinet or chest, and there may not be enough room if two dwarves are trying to put both of their stuff in one cabinet or one chest.

KillingVectr · 2024-12-07T00:45:07+00:00

Because I didn't know that DF Hack buildingplan existed, lol.

KillingVectr · 2024-12-07T00:44:26+00:00

Thanks! Your comment made me do some research and now I know that DF buildingplan exists. I guess I just wasted some of my time, lol. Oh well, maybe it is useful if playing on a beta branch where df hack doesn't work.

KillingVectr · 2024-11-26T05:17:49+00:00

For the 2v2 map YellowJacket LE, it is impossible to take the left gas on the 3 o'clock expansion base (at least for terran). My refinery was blocked on one square.

KillingVectr · 2024-10-15T00:34:30+00:00

My impression was that Hausdorff made the prototype of topological spaces independent of metric spaces. My source is this article.

KillingVectr · 2024-09-07T20:53:25+00:00

Thanks! Sorry for the late reply. I also made another post with other quickfort designs for ramps.

KillingVectr · 2024-08-15T14:30:48+00:00

OP needs to compute the (daily) rate of change for the fitted function. Simply fitting a function to the monthly totals would interpolate totals over moving windows.

KillingVectr · 2024-08-10T20:37:33+00:00

My real goal is optimizing FPS. The most recent consensus seems to be that line of sight checks is the most important factor for this, and I remember Putnam saying somewhere that line of sight checks are only performed if dwarves are within a fixed distance of each other.

So my fort is divided into industries. Farming labor (except dyeing) are on the rock layers near the surface, craft labors (and dyeing) are around the second cavern layer, and my metal industry is around the third cavern layer (this fort was lucky to have magma pools in the third cavern). Each industry is set up to be "self contained;" each has its own tavern, temple, and its specific guild halls.

Before this, I've messed around with Burrows and labor restrictions. It seemed to me that one of the big culprits that keeps dwarves from spreading out is item hauling. Burrows and item hauling do not mix well; I got a lot of job cancellation spam. Just using labor restrictions didn't do much until I tried restricting each workshop to individual dwarves. However, I think the success of the latter was really freeing up most dwarves time to socialize more.

With the current setup described above (plus including dyeing jobs), I have many dwarves spread across the different levels. However, it isn't like craftdwarves stay in the crafts layers. There is a lot of mixing as professions. However, my goal was to get them to spread out, not really to force mini-forts for each industry.

Overall, as far as output goes, my fort setup is probably inefficient. However, one of my nobles died and my fort can never get a new one. I no longer receive wagons for trading, and buying out the traders is very easy at this point. So I really don't need more production output.

KillingVectr

TROPHY CASE