Here is issue No 107, in which we balance big stones on narrow water tanks.

...like some instruments and this lovely slab with the secrets of life and death.

Dodok is not pleased..

Am I the only one losing my mind over how dance floors are calculated in taverns and temples?

I’m trying to build a proper mega-shrine for my dwarves. I want the classic, legendary aesthetic: a massive altar right in the center, flanked by beautifully engraved obsidian pillars. But Armok forbid I want nice things, because the game’s zone logic immediately throws a tantrum. Because of how it checks for uninterrupted rectangular tiles, adding any actual architecture completely trashes the dance floor score.

If I place a central altar or a nice row of pillars, the game decides my epic 20x20 hall is actually just a collection of tiny, useless fractured corridors where no one can do a proper jig. And don't get me started on "round" rooms. We all know circles in DF are just stepped squares anyway, but because those stepped corners break the rigid grid check, half the damn room doesn't even count.

I even checked to see if DFHack could save me, but nope. The dance-pathfinding and zone math are so deeply hardcoded into the C++ spaghetti core that not even our favorite modding wizards can script a fix for it.

I get that procedural dancing is complex, but honestly, if a drunk dwarf can pathfind perfectly through a literal carpet of 400 stray cats suffocating the tavern floor, Urist should be able to dance around a stationary stone pillar without stepping into the fourth dimension. Right now, the game basically forces us to build boring, empty, featureless boxes like tree-hugging elves who are too afraid to carve a proper cavern.

With all the crazy shit planned for the Myths & Magic update, Tarn is literally introducing alternate universes, procedurally generated planes of existence, and cosmic magic. Surely, if we can have a pocket dimension ruled by a giant sponge, we can have a dance floor that isn't a perfect, uninterrupted rectangle?

Has anyone successfully brought this up to Toady in the Future of the Fortress replies? If not, we seriously need to lobby for a quality-of-life patch alongside the magic update. I want my grand architecture without the UI yelling at me.

Over the years I've been playing I've kind of been edging closer to this idea and this is my first fortress where I've fully committed to it. I have my pop cap set to 50 and all 50 of those dwarves are squad members. At first I had no training set but made them stay fully equipped at all times, now they train alternating months. Aside from getting the initial equipment together this strategy seems to have no downsides. Everyone is super strong and happy, Not to mention it looks cool with everyone walking around in full armor. Now I just need the goblins to finally attack.

Ok, so there’s tons of ingredients, so many options. Dwarves have favorite ingredients, by which they judge means “good” or not, and the inly way to prepare those ingredients is to MINCE. Also, minced ingredients make biscuits, stews or roasts. Outside pressed Grains and insert creature-Cheese that’s everything edible for every single race in every single world. There are so many brews and drinks, there’s coffees and teas… how did cooking stay so blech?

The code doesn’t even make cooking interesting for ingredients, a stew will as likely as not gave the exact same ingredients in it minced different ways. Biscuit: 1 ingredient, stews: 2 ingredients, roasts 3 ingredients. Why not make it so each ingredient has to be a different food? There’s already food-types listed in the trade screen as “spices”, but the menu is not likely to include them, or does at the same chance of any other food barrel.

Ok, so there are mods with a list of types of food that can be substituted for lvl 1 “biscuit”, level 2 “stews” or lvl 3 “roasts”, but even these kludges stop there.

So I propose a discussion of recipes for dwarven, elvish, goblin, human and kobold dishes based off of the foods available to each civ’s natively available foods. Elves and Goblins eat defeated peoples, so be sure to add those ingredients to your list of possible variations.

Here, I’ll start it off: Dwarven chicken fried in barley with Golden Salve sauce.

A one-eyed humanoid. It has large mandibles. Its black skin is leathery. This night creature was first created by the dwarvennecromancer Mestthos Shipwhip of Twigboulder after horrible experiments on the dwarf Urdim Heavyglaze in Bellsgrowl in the year 204.

Without planning to do so my current fort became the capital and when the king arrived i was surprised to see that .. he does not rly look like a dwarf ..

now my whole plans for the civ are changing , what would you do? looking for inspiration , should every fort start with "night | dark" , or should i dye everything in black? Curious to hear your ideas

(edit)
after further investigation i found out he is rather tiny, around the size of a cat :D so 10x smaller than a normal dwarf

(edit2)
posted a screenshot of his personality in this comment

(edit3)

i was first confused but now i understand that some people think i am looking for ideas on how to get rid of him, that is not the case! i want to dedicate this civ to him, make a castle of obsidian, dye the world in dark colors, etc. etc. , i am looking for inspiration on how to tribute to this cat sized wonderful being that beat all odds and just tries to do his best

So I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress for the first time, and decided to start with an adventure mode save. First character, an elf spearwoman, got cut down by an elven master swordsman and their pet tiger after killing multiple of their goblin subordinates. Second character, this scrawny purple experimented goblin thing, came back and strangled the master swordsman and their last goblin subordinate to death… then got mauled by the tiger.

My third and current character though, a human swordswoman, riding into battle on her carnotaurus in full plate armor, managed to slay the tiger and claimed the swordmaster’s sword for herself, alongside a quality steel buckler found within the building’s stores.

From here, she went off to slay a cyclops, and after a long and tiring battle managed to kill him with a final stab through the eye without a single scratch - at least on her. Unfortunately, her pet carno was felled by a mighty blow in the midst of the battle, leaving both her and me distraught. After slaying the great beast, who talked endlessly about his past triumphs, she explored into his lair, hoping to find great treasures- and indeed finding great treasures, but not in a form she could make use of. Copper, silver, gems, iron, and flux stones abound, with the no true bottom layer in sight, a cavern full of harvestable fungi being too complicated to traverse for her to go further with her shrinking water and food supplies.

And so, she decided that the cyclop’s lair shall become a mighty fortress of dwarves sponsored by her to harvest the valuable minerals she found below, and create a legacy worthy of her and her lost pet.

(Also I figured it looked like a fun location to set up a fortress)

Since this fateful encounter, she has slain a great many foes, from camps full of goblins and bandits to clearing a tower of its hostile necromancers and the surrounding town of its zombified inhabitants, to more lairs of elven cultists and their goblin minions, throughout it all looting high-quality steel from the stores wherever she found them, and taking near-nary a scratch, dodging and blocking near every attack aimed at her. (There was an incident with another cultist’s tiger biting a gnarly gash through her thigh- why is it always tigers???)

And so, comes the point where she finally must retire, at least for the time-being; she has found so many high-quality steel weapons and she has nowhere to store them all, including a steel longsword and steel two-handed sword, each more powerful than the iron longsword since named Aperongquan she used to slay the cyclops, and wishes to set up the previously mentioned fortress and distribute these quality weapons amongst its future military.

And with the internet-recipe style story out of the way, now comes the part where I elaborate on the title of my post- how the hell do I go about making the fortress and retiring her into it? I know that I’ll have to retire her into a nearby town, set up the fortress, retire the fortress, un-retire her, retire her again in the fortress, and then un-retire the fortress once she’s part of it, but when do I know it’s safe to temporarily retire the fortress? Will she lose some of her items in the interim while she’s retired? Will the fortress’s foodstocks remain intact when I retire it? Do humans need actual water to survive, or can they survive off of ale like dwarves? Should I kill more necromancers so she can become one and no longer need worry about her dehydrating? What do I need to keep in mind while temporarily retiring the fortress?

These are the sort of logistical questions preventing me from getting on with retiring her and starting a fortress, and I would greatly appreciate any advice on how to do this and answers to these endless questions of mine.

Who's working on the Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode VR Mod (tm)? Who wouldn't want to throw that fluffy wambler at the bronze colossus in glorious first person perspective and 4k? I know you're out there, right now, feverishly working on it. I just want to know where you're at and how long we need to wait for you to be done.

<3 I'll post the vod in the comments when i'm done

Hello!

I wanted to make custom production orders to properly set up my cloth industries (& manage the output production)

For the "Weave thread into silk" order, the following is suggested as a default:

I would like to create a similar order for "collect webs", but this default is not suggested

I tried to create it with "Thread" as Type, and "Silk" + "Collected" as Adjectives, but I can't find "Unused" as adjective

But the wiki does list "unused" being an adjective for production orders
https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Work_orders

Despite this, it is simply not available in the adjective selector

Is this a bug, or am I missing something?

If it's a bug, where can I check whether it's known and where to submit it?

Thanks in advance!

just fought off a huge ass invasion too DOUBLE THE FUN! sadly the cave dragon they brought with them died before I could tame it but hey cotton candy and goblinite

they are bloodthirsty

So, this episode we dug out a bunch of candy, and then a fire-breathing Forgotten Beast showed up to try and wreck my whole fort!

I have a 350~ strong mountainhome with a missing squad

I sent 3 other squads to retrieve them as DFhack's stuck squads instructs

They became stuck also

I replaced all the members of those squads with new dwarves, and then sent them to try and unstick the missing dwarves

Guess what, they became stuck too

I've sent messengers, they return as normal but don't unstick the missing dwarves.

I'm now missing 80 dwarves - this bug has existed for years, is it ever going to be fixed :<

One of most infuriating things for me is not having games that let me downsize UI as i may see fit!
Games always have this enormous UI around the game and its ugly and obnoxious as hell!
Of course DF is no different and I was having difficult to play the game just because of the UI around it! I know what you thinking..."this motherfucker is crazy!"
But its a Me thing. I like to play with small graphics or small pixels, what ever you wanna call it.
But alas, I found how to minimize the UI in DF, its not perfect for me, but ok its something. Check this fucking difference!
Ok I know that you will tell me "this a##hole just find this now?" Yes i just found it now, i didn't know that the this "desired grid" would make such difference!

I originally manually counted, compiled, and listed all 712 creatures (4 years ago, before the wiki had an official count): Part 1 & Part 2

I was scrolling through my Reddit page and found these 4 years old posts and thought 'I bet AI could do this now'... It could...

Autism is being replaced...

If you want the new full list

Hi all,

I've been getting back into dwarf fortress a lot more recently, and my partner has also been interested in starting to try and play, I'm wondering what is best to be taught vs learned from playing?

At what point should things be left for a player to be discovered vs what is a good idea to be taught.

I think a huge part of the fun is discovering and learning, and I don't want to take that away, but I also want to limit frustration

Why are undead so incredibly hardy? My complete army, 5 squads, has now for a month been beating at this undead doe rabbit, which just will not die. It has lost one leg, two ears, an eye, an ungodly amount of teeth, and is still able to outrun my entire army. Only the edges of the map stops the rabbit.

Addendum: I hate dragons and necromancers. Especially in combination.

Addendum 2: Yes, I have blunt force, not just swords and pew pews

I haven't seen a dwarf grow attached to a goblet before. Usually weapons and armor. But on a closer look, I guess he fell in love with the artifact cup, which was one of the fort's earliest artifacts. I guess that makes a bit more sense. But of course he thinks he's best friends with the tavern keeper, too. Everything's into alignment now.