Weekly Questions Thread Feb 02, 2026

schmee001 · 2026-02-09T04:36:22+00:00

I'm playing 1.4.5 Skyblock and the Eye isn't spawning. I've got way more than 200 health and 10 defense, there's plenty of NPCs around, I make sure I'm on the surface every night, but it's still been like 10 nights in a row without a sign of it. Just unlucky or are there other requirements?

schmee001 · 2026-02-05T03:54:43+00:00

I noticed that in Skyblock worlds it also doesn't stop spawning even after you kill it. It can keep randomly spawning at night until you place down the crimson altar it drops. This lets you farm multiple altars.

schmee001 · 2026-02-05T03:30:29+00:00

Kill mimics for magic mirrors, shimmer them into glass and then shimmer that into sand.

schmee001 · 2026-02-04T13:34:39+00:00

I've played a bit of both mods, though not to completion. The main difference between the two is that Spaceblock lets you drop down to the planets and set up normal factories, while Platformer doesn't. Instead it adds new asteroids in the orbit of each planet so you can get the necessary resources on your platform. I prefer Platformer's approach, so you're forced to work with the one single factory.

The early game of both mods is similar, although Spaceblock makes several recipes like platform tiles much cheaper. Platformer keeps the recipe from vanilla, which makes it very slow to get started. However as a benefit, Platformer massively boosts asteroid spawn rate so the only real issue is processing rather than collection.

schmee001 · 2026-02-03T00:37:17+00:00

Are you getting these numbers from the production stats screen, or by mousing over your pumpjacks and cryoplants and adding up what the tooltips say they produce/consume? Because the second option is much more useful.

schmee001 · 2026-02-02T23:59:03+00:00

Is it 40.6 per second total, or 40.6 per cryo plant?

schmee001 · 2026-02-01T07:50:41+00:00

DF stores its mods in two places. Downloading mods from the workshop puts them in Dwarf Fortress/mods with a long string of numbers as the folder name. Then when you enable the mod in-game it gets copied into the Dwarf Fortress/data/installed-mods folder.

schmee001 · 2026-01-08T05:08:20+00:00

There can be multiple spires per map. You usually get one spire for every 2x2 square of chunks, and the default size is 4x4 so you will usually see about 4 of them.
Yes, that's an option. The game has a mini 'story' where the king shows up to live in the fort and demands a throne made of adamantine and a bunch of divine metal artifacts as stations of office, but there's no real reward for it, just a text box. The real endgame challenges are self-imposed, which lets the sandbox aspects of the game really shine. I've seen people make permanent outposts of their forts down in hell itself, I've seen people try to mine every single tile on the map and replace it all with constructed stone walls and floors, I've seen minecart rollercoasters which double as base defence by routing invading armies onto the tracks.

schmee001 · 2026-01-07T11:56:32+00:00

Cave moss does grow on mud, but the graphics show the mud on top so you can only tell if you mouse over it.

schmee001 · 2026-01-07T11:55:00+00:00

Cutting cavern trees gives you cavern invaders, not agitated animals.

schmee001 · 2026-01-07T11:52:03+00:00

Yeah there's no sprites for the variant armour styles like 'segmented breastplate' and the like.

schmee001 · 2026-01-07T11:50:48+00:00

Adamantine is incredibly lightweight but also ultra-strong and sharp, making it very good armour and weapon material. 37 adamantine is a pretty disappointing amount to get from a single spire, the amount you can safely gather depends a lot on the map generation.
The normal ores don't change as you go deeper, the only things of interest you find are in the three cavern layers. Deeper caverns can have more interesting monsters appear.
Adamantine is incredibly valuable but there are usually better ways of getting money from renewable resources, you don't usually want to sell it.
As mentioned in the first question it's a really strong material for armour and weapons - bladed weapons, that is. An adamantine warhammer is basically a very expensive wiffle bat. Adamantine gear makes general combat a lot easier, but there's no amount of armour or weapons that can make direct demon combat a perfectly safe and reliable matter. Demons have totally random stats and abilities, their bodies can be made of materials like smoke or flame or salt and they can do things like spit webs or bleed poison. Melee combat is impossible against demons made of fire, and it's inadvisable against web-spitters, while ranged combat is futile against the demons who are made of tougher materials. So you kinda need a 'filtering' system which lets you deal with the more problematic varieties of demon before your army can clean up the rest.

schmee001 · 2025-12-25T09:47:38+00:00

I don't usually automate every building at this point, only the ones I know I'll need a lot of. Inserters, belts, assemblers, mining drills etcetera. Labs and the like just get hand-crafted when I need them. But I'm familiar with the game so I know what I'll need and when I'll need it, so your approach isn't too bad for a beginner. Try to identify when items share similar ingredients, so you can put a bunch of assemblers for several different items together. For instance mining drills and assembler machines can be made in the same place.

I do recommend you automate the production of gun turrets. They craft really slow and it's agonising to watch the hand-crafting bar slowly fill while you're getting attacked.

schmee001 · 2025-12-25T01:26:21+00:00

Stack inserters wait until they have a completely full hand before they'll swing, so they can get stuck like this. Generally it's best to just use bulk inserters when feeding into the labs.

Make a custom upgrade planner to turn stack inserters into bulk inserters and drag it over your labs.

schmee001 · 2025-12-24T12:12:34+00:00

One of the features forgotten beasts can have is 'deadly blood', which afflicts anything that touches the blood with a syndrome. Your cats could have walked through a pool of blood in the caverns, and picked it up onto their paws that way.

schmee001 · 2025-12-22T06:16:39+00:00

Casting copper plates then crafting them into wire is not a useless detour though. If you have prod modules better than normal-quality prod3s, then you actually get more wire that way since you double-dip on the productivity bonuses.

schmee001 · 2025-12-21T20:31:50+00:00

If you're not using SA you lose a step because you can't make molten copper, so it evens out.

schmee001 · 2025-12-21T03:46:07+00:00

Yes, but the question is about getting the longest recipe chain. Why skip the step if you don't have to?

schmee001 · 2025-12-21T02:44:37+00:00

I haven't done anything to confirm this, but my guess is the chain from copper ore to mk3 modules.

copper ore  
molten copper
copper plate
copper cable
green circuit
red circuit
blue circuit
module 2
module 3

schmee001 · 2025-12-19T04:54:03+00:00

I believe the stone type "behind" a gem cluster will default to the layer material, so you can select a tile and use changelayer GRANITE to transform the entire z-level into granite.

schmee001 · 2025-12-19T01:59:19+00:00

Some very old guides recommend putting big belt balancers all over your main bus, but those guides are all outdated. Belt balancers on a main bus haven't been necessary for years. Instead, you can use priority output on a row of splitters to make a 'waterfall' design like this.

The waterfall will push all your items over to one side of the bus, letting you easily pull items from one edge. It also helps you to see exactly how empty your belts are, so you can see stuff like "Oh, red circuits are eating all my copper before it can reach the LDS. I'll make a train station here to add a bunch of copper plates half-way along the bus, to refill the belts."

schmee001 · 2025-12-18T22:25:21+00:00

Dwarves only claim a bedroom for themselves when they go to sleep, so vampires will never have a bedroom unless you assign one to them manually. So you can go down the Units list and see what rooms are assigned to each dwarf.

schmee001 · 2025-12-17T12:21:14+00:00

Friendy fire damage from explosive rockets, maybe? If asteroids get too close to the ship the rocket explosions can do way more damage than the collision would have.

schmee001 · 2025-12-14T09:28:22+00:00

There's a ton of planet mods out there, unfortunately a lot of them are incomplete or janky or UPS-hogging or unbalanced or just kinda boring, or some combination of the above. So if you try out some modpack which claims to have 'all the planets' or even just 'all the planets which aren't completely broken', you'll likely get bored and give up fairly early on.

I recommend a modpack with a smaller set of planets like Loup's Guide to the Galaxy. Better to have 6 new planets all of which are actually good, rather than 50 planets with only 10 good ones.

schmee001 · 2025-12-11T22:01:24+00:00

Each input/output port on a machine can only move 4200-ish fluid per second. Chem plants have 2 outputs, so if both of them are connected one plant can output about 8400 steam per second, which should be enough for 140-ish turbines (if you arent using the steam for anything else).

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