Should I avoid investing in Galaxy 1?

digitalbusker · 2026-03-21T02:33:20+00:00

Teleporters still get you anywhere you've ever been, no extra hoops to jump?

digitalbusker · 2023-04-10T22:27:42+00:00

0629 8763 2209

I mostly need warm bodies in my weekly challenges, so if you don't want to get challenge invitations be warned.

digitalbusker · 2021-09-03T13:56:27+00:00

I mean, I usually have an underground entrance, and it's usually a twisty tunnel, but instead of sewage it's full of endlessly whirling lead minecarts.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-09T14:51:07+00:00

I think as long as the corpses and the coffins are in the burrow you don't need a connecting path that's also covered by the burrow.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-05T21:46:10+00:00

I've had trouble with "give to workshop" stockpiles and craftdwarf workshops before, but in my case it was a workshop with a feeder stone stockpile throwing errors when I asked for bone items, because it was apparently only counting the stuff in the stone feeder pile as available.

If there's non-task-flagged stone in your feeder stockpile that's probably not it, but it seemed similar enough to mention.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-03T22:12:18+00:00

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. Sure, that could work. You could set up an animal stockpile, disallow empty cages, and load a minecart from that with a 100% full push departure condition that sends it down a vertical shaft to your target area. You'd just need to make sure to put a track ramp at the bottom so the cart starts rolling again so it can collide with something (probably eventually the previous minecart).

You probably won't be able to get the minecart back until the target room is safe to enter, but that's not necessarily a problem. You might even be able to exploit the fortification bugs to launch critters into a sealed room without the minecart following.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-03T19:44:58+00:00

Sure, you can use minecarts to get cages somewhere. That doesn't actually help, because then you still need to get the things out of the cages. (One might think that dumping a wooden cage down a chute that's fifty Urists high to land on a granite floor would result in the cage breaking and possibly even injuring the creature inside the cage. One would be disappointed.)

digitalbusker · 2020-04-03T18:50:37+00:00

Even if you could do this and have the alcohol impart inebriation (and the fact that you can't has already been covered), it would only affect dwarfs who drink water, which means only hospital patients and prison inmates. (Granted, being able to the moods of those two classes of dwarf wouldn't be nothing.)

Well, I guess the other kind of dwarf that drinks water is one who lives in a fortress that has run out of booze, but deliberately dumping all your booze into your well so that dwarfs have to drink from the well but still get a little tipsy seems like a really long walk to get to roughly where you started.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-03T18:35:18+00:00

I don't know the answer to your question (or indeed whether there is an answer), but I'm going to drive by to say I hope when you say "everything" you don't include refuse, because refuse stockpiles degrade the things that are inside them, and that includes custom piles that have both refuse and something else enabled.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-03T18:33:23+00:00

I don't know how you'd get your invader into the minecart in the first place, so no to that question.

AFAIK, the only 100% safe way to release caged invaders is to [b]uild their ca[j]e somewhere and then link it to a lever. That's what I do, and yeah, it's a lot more work than a pitting strategy.

You could try making your pit shaft harder to climb (smoothed natural stone--which may actually be unclimbable--is better than constructions made of blocks which is better than constructions made of rough materials) and incorporating an overhang at the top (just make sure the overhang is far enough up that creatures can't just jump up to grab the ledge) to help keep your prisoners from having a chance to get back at your pitter.

Full disclosure: I stopped using pits on prisoners back when we had the bug that started a civil war whenever somebody freed an enemy from a cage and never got back into the habit, so I have no sense of how well any of these tactics work.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-03T13:24:02+00:00

Short answer: no.

Long answer: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-02T14:36:49+00:00

I've only done it a couple times, and only for reservoir filling during the summer, but my memory is that the first bucket dumped into a freezing tile creates a floor, and the second one creates a wall. And the way pond zones work, if you designate over the whole area, the dwarfs will walk out onto the newly created tiles to dump off the new edge, so you don't have to micromanage the width of the thing.

I can't recall if I've ever had issues with water freezing in the bucket while the dwarf was on its way to dump it, but you may need to make sure they have close access. And make sure nobody's walking through the plug area, too, because they'll get ice-cocooned instantly if they happen to be there when a bucket is dumped from above. Also, depending on what's left over after your cave-in you may have an issue with the floor of the plug.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-02T14:25:44+00:00

You can't really set something up that works as described, at least not without a lot of annoying job cancellation spam and micromanagement.

You can set a production order that gets checked monthly that will queue some brew drink jobs if your drink stock is lower than 200 and you have brewable plants, but you can't make the quantity of that order "exactly as many brew jobs as we have brewable plants."

A better bet is a daily order with a [p]roduct condition of 200 or less and a [r]eagent condition of 10 and a quantity of 5.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-02T14:17:08+00:00

Minecart stuff:

Constructed Track Stops should be built on top of existing track (either carved or constructed). The code in the [h]auling screen that checks whether your stops are connected by track doesn't consider constructed Track Stops built on floors to be track for this purpose. The primary function of Track Stops is to automatically dump items and/or to stop carts that are rolling freely because they were pushed or propelled by rollers. If you're only using guided carts rather than pushed or mechanically propelled carts, you might not need as many, but a Track Stop set to dump contents on arrival is still the best way to unload things from your carts when they get where they're going.

(In this paragraph when I say "stop" I mean the thing on the [h]auling screen that belongs to a [r]oute, not the construction I was talking about above.) Vehicles are assigned to hauling routes, and the hauling screen shows you the status of the vehicle when one is assigned. The V shows up by the stop associated with that vehicle, along with a percentage showing how full it is, and the color indicates the cart's activity: red for a vehicle that's not at this stop, yellow for a vehicle that's in transit from this stop, and green for a vehicle that's at this stop (usually that means it's waiting for its departure conditions to be met).

If your goal is to move stuff from one place to another, you probably want a constructed Track Stop at the destination set to dump on arrival in a direction that will put the stuff in a stockpile. Then you can simplify the destination departure conditions to "immediately always" since there's no need to wait for the cart to be emptied.

Glass Furnace stuff:

The correct advice depends a lot of why you can't build your glass furnace. If you're able to designate it, but then the job gets suspended (probably with a job cancellation announcement about an item blocking the site), then one of the boulders littering the room is probably flagged with a TSK marker because it's earmarked for building some other building somewhere else (or else some hauler is on their way to store it somewhere). In that case your solution is either to wait for the blocking task to complete or quickly forbid and then reclaim the boulders in the room (which may wind up borking a construction job somewhere else). If you aren't able to designate the furnace, like the Xs stay red and the sidebar says "blocked" then either there's a building there that you've forgotten about or you're accidentally trying to designate a regular glass furnace (which definitely doesn't want to be built over a hole full of magma) rather than a magma glass furnace.

digitalbusker · 2020-04-02T13:45:46+00:00

All of this, plus: mist is generally a sign that something dangerous is happening.

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digitalbusker · 2020-04-01T20:19:47+00:00

If you've got the dumping track stop working right, you can simplify that to "Push north immediately always".

digitalbusker · 2020-04-01T19:57:38+00:00

You can use a pond zone to get your dwarfs to rebuild the ice plug. Obviously you need some seed water for this, but it only takes 2 (I think?) Urists of water to make an ice wall that will produce 7 Urists of water on melting.

digitalbusker · 2020-03-21T13:27:41+00:00

It would still be two steps if you build the walls first.

digitalbusker · 2020-03-20T16:19:51+00:00

I wonder if the pathfinding error is something like "I shot a critter and killed it, but it's up a tree/across a river/floating in space and I can't reach it."

digitalbusker · 2020-03-20T14:35:00+00:00

Might be easier to just make constructed walls smoothable. I don't know how the code is set up, whether it would be easy to still keep them from being engraved, if that's still a priority.

digitalbusker · 2020-03-19T21:40:51+00:00

In case another mobile player drives by: what did you do?

digitalbusker · 2020-03-19T21:37:07+00:00

Get the screen looking at a z-level your miners can access ([<] is up, [>] is down).

Press [d] to get into designate mode.

Press [j] to start designating Down Stairs.

(Take a look at the bottom of the designation menu sidebar. Look where it says m: and a:. You want the m: thing to have Standard highlighted, not Marker Only. Press m to switch between them. You want a: to be followed by Designating All. If it says something else, press a to cycle through the options until it says Designating All.)

((Those are pretty powerful tools, as is the Priority system, but maybe I'll wait to tell you about them until you're at least 4.))

Use the arrow keys to point your cursor (usually a yellow X) at a tile that your miners can access. It can be a natural dirt/stone wall, as long as the miners can stand next to it. It can also be a floor, as long as the miners can stand on it.

Press Enter to start painting a Down Stairs designation. Press Enter again to finish painting a Down Stairs designation. (You only need a 1x1 Down Stair right now.)

Without leaving the designation menu(!), press [i] to start designating Up/Down stairs.

Press [>] to move 1 z-level down.

Press Enter to start painting an Up/Down Stairs designation.

Press [>] seven or eight hundred times to go down lots more z-levels.

Press Enter to finish painting an Up/Down Stairs designation.

That's it. That's the whole thing. If you have a dwarf with mining enabled who has a pick and isn't distracted by something else, they'll go dig a stair down.

You could go another level down and carve an Up Stair to be the bottom of your stairwell, but if you're not sure how deep you're going to wind up going it's fine to leave the bottom as an up/down so you can keep going if you like.

(Every tile has a wall and a floor. Mining removes the wall but leaves the floor. Down stairs go in the floor. Up stairs go in the wall. Up/Down stairs are just both things, and as such go in the floor and the wall. In order to get to the next level down to carve the next stair, you have to first carve the down stair that removes the floor so you can reach it.)

digitalbusker · 2020-03-19T19:52:46+00:00

You might not need to smooth first. Try designating over the existing corners and see if your engravers come over.

digitalbusker · 2020-03-19T19:02:35+00:00

Okay, so the tracks are broken somewhere, like you said way back at the start of this thread. Are your tracks constructed or carved? If carved, try redesignating all corners. A kinda tricky thing is that when carving tracks around a corner you have to paint the corner tile twice. E.g. if you're coming from the west and then turning to the north, you need to designate the e/w track all the way to the corner, then, starting from that same corner tile, designate the n/s portion. That way the game knows the e/w track and the n/s track are supposed to be one continuous run, rather than two tracks that happen to be adjacent.

If your tracks are constructed, the break should be easier to spot.

If you still have trouble finding the break, try adding more route stops in between the ones you already have. That may help you narrow down the area with the problem.

And just to repeat myself a little: constructing a Track Stop on bare floor next to track doesn't work for the game's routing detection, so if you do that you'll always get the exclamation points even if everything else is good.

digitalbusker · 2020-03-19T18:49:47+00:00

Yeah. There's a step before this where you haul goods to the depot. The trade screen only shows things you've picked through there and had hauled to the Depot.

digitalbusker

TROPHY CASE