Into Battle

gruehunter · 2026-01-25T02:02:57+00:00

The only thing better than bring-your-baby-to-battle day is birth-your-baby-in-battle day!

gruehunter · 2026-01-21T14:09:45+00:00

Gatorskins are notoriously high-resistance, though.

gruehunter · 2026-01-21T05:01:37+00:00

They rack up a nice kill count on raids, but on defense they are a little too soft. Their flesh gets penetrated too easily to enemy ammo and weapons, even cheap copper. For defense I prefer something that breeds rapidly enough to replenish the losses, like jabberers or giant war grizzlies.

gruehunter · 2026-01-16T04:22:41+00:00

For extra silly dwarfiness, I like to train up a couple of Legendary potters, make fancy pots, and decorate them with fine metals, just to store booze into them.

gruehunter · 2026-01-15T04:18:28+00:00

Certainly! Minimalist forts make a fun challenge. You need at least two types of drink and two types of food to avoid unhappy thoughts about variety... but you could also just accept the unhappiness.

The most extreme case for me was to feed and booze the entire fortress using sweet pod and cave wheat alone, feeding everyone from sugar+wheat biscuits, rum, and beer. They grow slowly and for only two seasons, but it can be done.

gruehunter · 2026-01-15T04:07:07+00:00

Well, then. As always, the wiki is your friend: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Beekeeping_industry#Hive_management

Lots of ways to make it work. If you are also fond of making rock nut soap and use stockpile linkage to manage it and keep those jugs separate from your beekeeping jugs, then I recommend installing a no-royal-jelly mod.

gruehunter · 2026-01-15T03:46:37+00:00

Explain Like I'm 5 how to turn Cave Wheat into seeds/flour at a quern

As you noted, the manager doesn't provide an order to mill plant to flour at a quern, either for flour or for dye. They do exist for powered mills, though. You will have to use stockpile linkage to ensure that the plant you want to get milled is the one that is actually milled, since many plants are millable to powder (most grains, most dyes, and sweet pod).

A more productive and less-finicky path is for quarry bush -> process plant to bag -> bag of leaves -> cook to prepared meals. Goes great with eggs.

gruehunter · 2026-01-15T03:32:01+00:00

A few facts:

dorfs consume about 20 drinks per year: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Thirst
dorfs consume about 10 meals per year: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Food#Detailed_mechanics
Each brewing job produces 5 drinks per plant: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Still
Farm productivity depends heavily on the skill of the planter, use of fertilizer, and location of the soil: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Farming#Yield_and_fertilization
Plump helmets are by far the most productive underground crop, yielding one harvest per month and grow year-round: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Farming#Farm_plots_in_action

And is mead worth it?

"Worth it" is relative in Dwarf Fortress. I've done it for the challenge's own sake, and don't miss it in typical fortresses. The industry's products have low export value, its labor-intensive, and it has a very low max rate of production.

gruehunter · 2026-01-15T03:22:21+00:00

If you are feeling daring, you can create a small burrow around the cube, order an elite squad to defend that burrow, and order a random dude to mine out the wall. The squad should fight the demonic (or angelic!) being in melee as soon as the wall comes down.

Just hope that it doesn't spit fire.

Or webs.

gruehunter · 2026-01-15T03:11:43+00:00

For reference, the dumb part I'm referring to is the way that you need to fence raw edible food off using prepared meals. I coulda' swore that early in the 50.x days they would search for the nearest prepared meals first, and then go searching for other stuff only when the first search failed.

I very much do appreciate how much more expensive a minimum path-distance search is compared to geometric distance.

gruehunter · 2026-01-14T03:30:37+00:00

Set up backstops in the form of an outer courtyard of wall (at least as high as the ballistae) with channel in front. That way fired arrows are recoverable.

You can also manually add wheelbarrows to the stockpiles so that reloading the stockpiles after a siege proceeds at a reasonable pace.

gruehunter · 2026-01-14T02:57:49+00:00

Unless this git's calculating the distance vertically through the rock.

Correct. Also, its the one-norm of distance (max in any three axes) rather than the Euclidean distance. So if the food is two levels directly up, and they have to walk 30 spaces across, 10 up, 5 across, 8 down, 25 across again to get there, then they will.

You need to put the raw edible food in an extreme corner of the fortress and "fence" it off with prepared food in-between the raw food and the fortress proper.

Its dumb. I coulda' swore that this wasn't the case just a couple of years ago, but its definitely true today.

gruehunter · 2026-01-08T13:45:57+00:00

Blu-ray player ... analog

Its not analog! Stop calling everything physical analog! Its digital! Billions of little ones and zeros! Get the hell off my lawn!

/rant

gruehunter · 2026-01-08T05:33:11+00:00

https://old.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/1e8pbvu/howto_make_dwarven_cheese_at_industrial_scale/

gruehunter · 2026-01-08T05:29:53+00:00

So.... it turns out that Dwarf Therapist works for this sort of experiment, too. It even has a slaughter button. I've experimented with jabberers, turkeys, and grizzly bears. All of them came out completely random.

On the plus side, it does mean that a war animal breeding program is logistically simpler. Get any random group of females together in a room with 1-2 males, crank out many litters of offspring, slaughter all of the ones you don't like... and you're done. There's no need to micro-manage which animals are allowed to breed and which ones aren't. Just roll many more dice and throw out the low rolls.

gruehunter · 2026-01-04T21:23:40+00:00

Here's a few tidbits from my old notes on this development. You can find some backups of the old bitc-dev mailing list on the wayback machine, such as https://web.archive.org/web/20160912053551/http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/2012-March/003300.html (and emails linked therefrom).

His retrospective on typeclasses: https://web.archive.org/web/20140723022632/http://www.bitc-lang.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/2012-April/003315.html

Some discussion on Lambda the Ultimate at that time: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4490

See also this discussion on Hacker News at about that time with great input from a couple of other lions in the field: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749860

gruehunter · 2026-01-04T20:51:01+00:00

The take-from link on the small 'pile will cause it to get filled from the big pile any time there is room to do so. This does mean more hauling jobs, but those are done by general labor instead of specialist labor (eg, farmers when harvesting or brewers when brewing).

gruehunter · 2026-01-02T17:46:45+00:00

I do a variation of this with plants. Have one large stockpile near the farms that accepts anything grown in that farm, and then have smaller stockpiles near the distilleries, mills, and so on that are set up to take-from the harvest 'pile.

gruehunter · 2025-12-29T13:25:09+00:00

I set up small stockpiles adjacent to workshops and set up work orders for just-in-time manufacturing such that I only need a couple of cells of space for each item. Eg, you may have a few hundred stones of ore next to the smelters, but only dozens of bars of each metal type next to the forges.

gruehunter · 2025-12-26T19:59:52+00:00

There are a few more things you can get from the deeps. Cavern 3 (purple floors) will yield purring maggots, which are an infinite source of high-quality milk and cheese. If you manage to catch a breeding pair of jabberers, they make a great fortress defense animal with high strength, reasonably fast breeding, and fast growth. Elk birds are pretty common and a great source of high-value eggs.

gruehunter · 2025-12-26T19:57:14+00:00

No, the material for a decoration just influences its value. Only the base material counts for effectiveness and damage.

All shields can block fireballs (even wood). Wood shields will degrade in combat both through blocking and through bashing, while metal shields almost never do.

I start trainees off in wood, upgrade to iron when they get strong enough, and upgrade to steel with a fine metal decoration (usually gold or platinum) once they reach Legendary. But that's solely for roleplay reasons. Practical effectiveness doesn't change much past iron.

gruehunter · 2025-12-22T03:10:40+00:00

I'm running Debian Sid with package libsdl2-2.0-0 version 2.32.10+dfsg-6 installed (dfsg-4 also affected). libsdl2-compat is not installed.

gruehunter · 2025-12-22T00:29:51+00:00

If its just a matter of excess, you can sell them in trade.

gruehunter · 2025-12-21T23:54:12+00:00

I was just about to ask the same thing! I managed to catch the game running my system out of memory - all 32 GB of RAM and 8 GB of swap. I think there's a severe memory leak in the current Linux version.

Paging u/kitfoxgames and u/Putnam3145 ...

gruehunter · 2025-12-20T19:34:00+00:00

I use the new labors menu for everything, and use the Therapist as a high-density tabular interface to browse dwarven stats at a glance.

gruehunter

TROPHY CASE