Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

My fully-automated-fortress.  Thoughts?
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7811-scholarglazed

Mishthemfikod, Scholarglazed, is an icy hellhole.  In the heart of an evil glacier huddle the last free dwarves in a world, perhaps a universe, enslaved by Armok.  Their soulless brothers wander the ice overhead, seeking these heretics who will not submit.

Yet dwarves cannot run a fortress.  There have been other holdouts, and they have all died.  Most of hunger, some of thirst, some even to infighting.

The miner Atir Olinlolor prayed to his goddess Kun, she of twillight and dusk.  He prayed for her to keep the twilight of his race from passing into endless night.

Many dwarves had prayed to many gods in these dark times.  None were answered.  Armok had seen to that.  Yet Atir was not satisfied.  If Kun did not answer, he reasoned, she must not be able to hear him.  Sketching pictures of ice, ice, dolomite, and ice, he began making a machine.

When Atir came to his senses Kun was with them.  Kun was with them all.  Deep in the ice, beyond Armok's bloody gaze, dwarfkind is preserved in eternal twilight.


I've had an automated fort running off and on for several real-time months.  It's gone 66 years without any significant action on my part.  The only mod is that dwarves tend to have twins, which is completely unrelated to it's automated status.

The trick: macros.  This macro defeats all automatic pauses (at the cost of roughly halfing murdering framerate):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[BIND:MACRO0]
[SYM:F10]
[MACRO:LEAVESCREEN:1]
[MACRO:D_PAUSE:4000]
[MACRO:CLOSE_MEGA_ANNOUNCEMENT:1]
[MACRO:MACRO0:1]

Not bad.  Set up some planters, seal up the fort, and define a 1x1 meeting room, and the fort will last about 100 years.  Then the planters will die of old age, and everyone will quickly starve.  So we need migrants, right?  Good idea, but nope, we can set the professions automatically.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[BIND:MACRO1]
[SYM:F11]
[MACRO:LEAVESCREEN:1]
[MACRO:D_PAUSE:4000]
[MACRO:CLOSE_MEGA_ANNOUNCEMENT:1]
[MACRO:D_HOTKEY7:1]
[MACRO:D_BUILDJOB]
[MACRO:CURSOR_UPLEFT_FAST:2]
[MACRO:BUILDJOB_ADD:1]
[MACRO:HOTKEY_STILL_BREW:1]
[MACRO:BUILDJOB_REPEAT:1]
[MACRO:CURSOR_UP_Z:1]
[MACRO:BUILDJOB_ADD:1]
[MACRO:HOTKEY_KITCHEN_COOK_4:1]
[MACRO:BUILDJOB_REPEAT:1]
[MACRO:CURSOR_UP_Z:1]
[MACRO:BUILDJOB_ADD:1]
[MACRO:HOTKEY_FARMER_PROCESS_BARREL:1]
[MACRO:BUILDJOB_REPEAT:1]
[MACRO:MACRO2:1]
[MACRO:MACRO1:1]
[BIND:MACRO2]
[MACRO:LEAVESCREEN:1]
[MACRO:D_HOTKEY8:1]
[MACRO:D_VIEWUNIT:1]
[MACRO:CURSOR_UPLEFT_FAST:1]
[MACRO:UNITVIEW_PRF:1]
[MACRO:UNITVIEW_PRF_PROF:1]
[MACRO:SECONDSCROLL_UP:12]
[MACRO:SELECT:1]
[MACRO:SECONDSCROLL_UP:3]
[MACRO:SELECT:1]
[MACRO:SECONDSCROLL_UP:3]
[MACRO:SELECT:1]
[MACRO:SECONDSCROLL_UP:2]
[MACRO:SELECT:1]
[MACRO:SECONDSCROLL_UP:26]
[MACRO:SELECT:1]
[MACRO:LEAVESCREEN:1]

This setup is meant for Scholarglazed, but can be adapted without too much trouble.  The trick was to get non-planter dwarves to visit a predictable point.  Could have been done with a meeting area, but I found it more fun and efficient to set up a group of stone stockpiles taking from each other.

"Default" dwarves, such as adults just graduated from childhood, have stone-hauling enabled.  They come move the stones around.  The macro catches a dwarf in that area, and toggles the farm-related skills and stonehauling.  So they run off to make dwarven syrup roasts, booze, and other tasty treats.

Despite their epic eating arrangements scholarglazed has suffered one, maybe two tantrum spirals.  I run it on an older desktop machine, so I'm not sure, but there are roughly 400 dwarf skulls.  I caught the end of the last tantrum spiral and it was glorious: I know there were over 250 dwarves alive at one point, and now there are 9.

I don't really know what caused the tantrum.  Plenty of dwarven wine, but I guess that's the only thing they have to drink... so some unhappiness there.  They also seem to have eaten through the dwarven syrup roasts due to their seasonal nature.  Ok, alright, maybe I'd tantrum too if I had to eat raw plump helmet and dwarven wine for months.  Thought the 1-square meeting room and 100+ legendary socialites would keep them happy, but maybe they were too busy crawling over each other in the meeting area to actually socialize!

Thanks for reading!

[moki]

Wow... interesting use of macros. Never thought of that...

As for the socialising: It makes dwarves a little happier, but it doesn't stop tantrums. On the contrary, if one dwarf is best friend of almost every other dwarf, your whole fortress will descend into chaos when this dwarf dies. His closest friends will be unhappy and one especially unstable dwarf will kill tantrum and kill another, whose friends get very unhappy, kill more dwarves, and so on... you know what happens after that.
If Urist Nr. 250 had no friends at all, nobody would have cared for his death. His body would be buried and life would go on for the 249 other dwarves.

[Loyal]

It's possible one of the roasts rotted.

Friends don't really serve much purpose other than stat boosts. Talking with them improves mood slightly; losing them dours mood by quite a bit.

[Rolan7]

It's possible one of the roasts rotted.

Friends don't really serve much purpose other than stat boosts. Talking with them improves mood slightly; losing them dours mood by quite a bit.

Mm, there's some disagreement about this, but I've never seen a food rot in a food stockpile.  It'll degrade if there are vermin, but not spoil and cause miasma, even outside barrels.  A lot of those plump helmets have been sitting out for many years by now, so if they follow the same rules as meals, I'd say neither are going to go bad.

Also I was wrong about the roasts being gone, I just misplaced them.  The stockpile's still mostly full of delicious caramel.

Thanks for the idea though.

[Grendus]

Did you have a legendary dining room and a mist machine? That's enough to ward off any tantrum spiral in my experience. Even when I lost four or five ultra-friended soldiers to an elite sniper my apartment complex and dining room took care of it (mist machines cause too much lag for me).

[Rolan7]

Did you have a legendary dining room and a mist machine? That's enough to ward off any tantrum spiral in my experience. Even when I lost four or five ultra-friended soldiers to an elite sniper my apartment complex and dining room took care of it (mist machines cause too much lag for me).

I have no dining room, actually!  I put too much faith in the power of conversation.  I've legendary conversationalists/comedians/consolers keep a fortress super-happy, but there's no reason they can't have a legendary dining room.  A mist generator is out: no water, and FPS are already low due to Macro-Kun perpetually pausing the game.

And Moki, yeah, the fact that my dwarves were all friends probably made the tantrum spiral worse (even if it delayed the onset).

The final product will have to be free of tantrum spirals, or eventually the fields will all be destroyed.  I heard dwarves get more needy at higher populations, so the easy solution is to limit the population to something sane like 150-200.  Maybe a legendary dining room and some masterpiece statues will be enough to keep them satisfied at 300 though.  Isn't 300 a hard limit?

Edit: I mean 300 dwarves.  I just want them content.

[expwnent]

300 is not at all the limit for dwarven happiness. Dwarf Therapist will confirm this. I've seen dwarves as happy as 3000+.

[Fossaman]

Do you have a barracks, or at least beds? Getting rid of the 'slept on stone' thought would help some, I bet. So would having tables and chairs. Lack of both of those gives an unhappy thought.

[Loyal]

Mm, there's some disagreement about this, but I've never seen a food rot in a food stockpile.

Not in a stockpile, no. It is possible, though, to have the food rot if nobody collects it from the kitchen quickly enough. It's unlikely, but in 60+ years I suppose anything can happen, yeah?

[Rolan7]

Do you have a barracks, or at least beds? Getting rid of the 'slept on stone' thought would help some, I bet. So would having tables and chairs. Lack of both of those gives an unhappy thought.

Aha!  Good catch.  I have a 10x10 area at the bottom designated into 100 good-sized rooms... so over half my 250 dwarves were sleeping on stone.  Plus the tantrummers destroyed 48 of the beds (and littered the bedroom with bones, but who cares).  I have no source of wood for new beds, but I can define one of the beds as a barracks to improve the situation greatly.

Edit: Curses, the top-left-most "bedroom" was already a barracks.  Still, I'll make the area 300 bedrooms large next time.

Mm, there's some disagreement about this, but I've never seen a food rot in a food stockpile.

Not in a stockpile, no. It is possible, though, to have the food rot if nobody collects it from the kitchen quickly enough. It's unlikely, but in 60+ years I suppose anything can happen, yeah?

This happens to me fairly often in my more normal fortresses, even.  Stupid dorfs.

[Alrenous]

About social happiness...have you read the Real Wagon thread?

[Vattic]

Cool, I had considered setting a fort up and leaving it running alongside Dtil unpausing. Hadn't considered setting macros up though, I was just going to order more made a couple of times a day.

I'd like to see a strong guard on the entrance with the rest of the dwarves not allowed outside for ease. Might make things more fun.

[Sphalerite]

Divert a water source to make a mist-producing waterfall in the 1x1 meeting room.  The mood benefits from mist stack forever.  I tried a similar fortress once, and found that after a few decades of standing in mist left a dwarf incapable of ever being anything but ecstatic, even living off cold plump helmet and sleeping on stone.

[Blaze]

Maybe a failed mood or mandate that caused it?

Edit: Disregard that, I missed the >Several real-time months< part.

Did any dwarves die of old age in there? I hear immigrants have randomized ages so they might have bought the farm in those 66 years.

[100killer9]

How do you keep goblins out while letting migrants in?
EDIT: Oh, all the children are offspring.
But how do you have the stone stockpiles take from each other?