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Well starting out it's kinda smart to build a barracks-like building first of course later on you'll want to build a large mess hall so you get the communication bonus among your colonists.

I actually made a rather nice mess hall/comm room/bedroom in a 6x13 space. Currently, there's a pregnant courtesan living in it.

She's been pregnant for near-on a year now, and also has the open-minded trait. I can only conclude that she's not actually pregnant, but at some point in the nebulous past, someone did some SCIENCE to her to make her body perpetually have a belly bump so as to satisfy the peculiar tastes of clientele with a pregnant women kink/fetish.

Whatever brings in the space-bucks, right?

(I also have a Sexually Experienced 15-year-old midworld nerd-cum-medieval farm oaf who likes weaving, so...)

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they get a alittle debuff from it - "sharing bedroom"

but i also like the idea of sharing bedrooms

That's only if you have more than one person sleeping in the same room, no matter how large.

I have only one person sleeping in each canteen, nevermind the fact that half the fort is in and out eating while they're sleeping.

Halida, there's an easy trick to corpse disposal.

Combine your killing field and your graveyard. Not only will those who die in the right spot atop the grave fall right in and fill it automatically, but if you're using a line of explosives with graves to both sides, firing off the explosives will empty the graves. It's like a self-cleaning oven. For corpses.

[wish]

I tend to think of the player as the ship's AI core that crashed along with the colonists.

"The Computer is your friend. The Computer wants you to be happy. Happiness is mandatory. Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution."

As for Dorf Fort, well, you're Armok. Armok despises useless nobles.

I prefer summary reeducation.

And in DF, I wish I was Armok. Then I could have my dorves build an altar, and sacrifice the useless knobs to me upon it.

I did once build a really bitchin' temple, complete with veneration magma forges upon which the best metalcrafters in the fort labored to craft works of deadly beauty and practical protection.

I wonder if anyone else does this: I realized that my colonists don't have any objections whatsoever to sleeping in the canteen, nor do those who eat mind if they do so with a person whose bedroom it is sleeping a few tiles away.


I'm sure this'll be changed sooner or later, but for now I like it. I like to stick social-only characters, Courtesans and Nobs (primarily Courtesans) in the canteens as the keepers. I also combine the canteen with the communications panel room, so the courtesan who lives there should hopefully never be too far away to jump on the blower when a ship arrives.

Does anyone else do this - keep a prisoner around to have your social monkeys (the nobs and courtesans and con artists, assuming you don't do as I do and put the con artists to work at hard labor,) gab at them, spamming "friendly chats" to grind up their Social abilities?

I've got some poor schmuck of a male con artist locked up in my fortress (which has been since the beginning a girls-only place, just for the hell of it,) and he's constantly being gabbed at by two nobs and three courtesans.

I wonder what the poor bastard must think. (Or what they're doing to him. Bwahahahaha. He loves this place, he's happier than all of my actual colonists.)

Also, if you can stand having someone's labor missing for a bit, the best cure for the sad and grumpies is to be thrown in jail and gabbed at until your loyalty is maxxed out. There's something fundamentally wrong, in a funny, hilarious way, when throwing someone in irons to cure an imminent mental break results in them getting out of your prison happier than they've ever been before.

Fire extinguishers. Dear god, we need fire extinguishers, even if it's a research item. Let it be like, a 1x1 equipment rack that you build and it comes with a fire extinguisher when constructed. They can only hold extinguishers, and the normal weapon-hauling behaviors can be subverted to allow colonists to haul fire extinguishers which have fallen to the ground back to the holders. (Make them unsellable when selling weapons, of course.)

Have it extinguish a 3x3 area when used manually. They shouldn't be TOO useful as a weapon, but not completely useless (using a fire extinguisher to stun and disorient an opponent is a time-honored technique of improvised fighting in an urban area.) something like small damage and a very high chance to stun. Ideally, they should extinguish a cone or something, but for simplicity's sake in these early rounds, you could call them "foam grenades" and have them thrown like a grenade.

I'm really, really starting to resent the firefighting AI and everything that starts fire in this game. Fires are, hands-down, the most annoying, most destructive thing to my base. Half of the devastation isn't even caused by the initial fire itself, it's caused by the literally worse than useless firefighting AI.

This is why every boomrat becomes "blow down the walls" time, because it is, by far, faster, safer, and cheaper in the long run to use grenades to blow up anything that's on fire rather than let the mooks attempt to put it out. Even more egregious is what happens when a colonist gets themselves lit on fire, they run around like a headless chicken, setting everything else on fire and running full-tilt away from the colonist trying to put them out. And this is compounded by the lack of the ability to pause the game, select someone who's directly in their chicken-run path, and order that person to clothesline their dumb ass and extinguish them while they're on the ground.

So I just wind up drafting them, arresting them (which auto-extinguishes them,) and then simply re-recruiting my own colonists. Because it's the only effective way to micromanage who extinguishes who without drafting the entire damn fort.

You want an idea? Here's an idea.

During a solar flare, or otherwise at times when the colony has no functioning paste dispenser, disable all food hauling jobs.

It does me no good to have an epic stockpile of raw food if it's in the replicator pattern buffer, dwarven quantum stockpile, or magical extradimensional space, and I can't it out because the paste dispenser is depowered.

Alternatively, allow colonists to procure raw food from the stockpile, if there's no paste dispenser.

They don't need to offer cover. The wall offers cover. The pots just need to be there to prevent hostiles from pathing through the sandbags and getting into melee.

* amused by the image of raiders being thwarted by a base with humble flowerpots in front of the walls and doors

I already use hydroponics tables as pathing blockers in that manner. Pots would be a lot more convenient, though probably more expensive to block a whole four contiguous tiles.

[Exactly.]

I never had that kind of trouble with fire I had to blow it away every single time. How big is your colony? At some point (arounds 30 colonists) I had to assign some colonists to do nothing but put out fires, and it worked well. I also took preventive measures like cutting vegetation around the base.

That is, if your problem is large fires caused by raiders attacks, it's normal for your colonists to struggle to extinguish them and for you to find creative ways to deal with the situation while there's no real fire extinguisher implemented nor fire extinguishing ability upgrade research. Remember the game is lacking a lot of content, so it's rather normal for players to resort to workarounds like you do.

And I must say it seems to be pretty effective if not a bit extreme!

The point is, if there is a fire, and some colonists ACROSS THE DAMN MAP already "took" the job to extinguish it, you can't manually order a colonist who is closer to deal with the fire. So while you're waiting for that retard to go thru the whole map to that fire, said fire lights up more and more stuff -_-

This is exactly my problem. Exactly. Unless you're gonna leave five colonists assigned to fight fires and NOTHING but fight fires.

It doesn't matter if it was a fire lit by raiders (though I do my level best to discourage those with terrain sculpting,) by lightning, or (the most damaging ones,) an "electrical fault" rocket-kick to the crotch discharging upwards of 54,000 watt-days of electricity through a wall and setting fire to everything within ten tiles.

So, ultimately, it's far safer to just draft everybody who approaches the fire to make them stay put, and give one of them a belt of frag grenades to blast down anything that's on fire, after having sold the things two tiles away from the existing fires so they can't get lit.

I have a policy for you - if you don't like the way things are being run, you can leave!<sup>1

1</sup>All colonist departures take place via slave trading vessel. No colonists shall be permitted to depart the site on foot. Relocation to permanent subterranean lodgings² are also an option.
²Permanent subterranean lodgings are approximately 1.8m below ground level.


More seriously, no. It is not one of the colonists in charge of things, it's the player. One of the most aggravatingly frustrating things about Dwarf Fortress is the politics, because the dwarves aren't responsible for any of the decisions. So having some useless twit of a noble get pissed off at the mayor because she issued a mandate that her precious talcum dildos not be exported, and even more ripshit pissed off at the stonecrafter whom she blames for not having fulfilled her mandate to construct talcum dildos (when in fact, it was me who decided I had more important things to use my talcum making, such as styluses for use on chalkboards,) and has three of my good peasants I mean, haulers, and my best stonecrafter locked up and Hammered resulting in three crippled haulers and a stonecrafter who's never going to craft anything more than drool ever again...

That just pisses me off. It's also why I make sure that any noble who arrives very quickly pulls a Stupid Dwarf Trick or otherwise becomes incapable of issuing mandates. Useless and actively sabotaging my fort? I don't call that nobility, I call it treason.

As relates to RimWorld? No.

We don't need politics. We don't need a popularity contest deciding who is in charge - because quite frankly, they're not in charge. The player is, and if the player wants to, they can have that person who is "in charge" arrested and sold to slave traders if they want to. Or they can draft them, sit them on the corner of the map and wall them in to starve to death. Or draft them, have them hold very still, and have five colonists fling grenades at their feet. Or draft them and stand them atop two blasting charges, then light the fuse.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So let's not have that.

How about a lightning rod - protects a large-ish area from lightning strikes by attracting bolts that would otherwise hit within that zone to itself.

This way, you don't have to worry so much about your outdoor agave and raspberry farms being burnt down by dry lightning storms.

So, lately I've taken to leaving frag grenades Forbidden around my fortress, just lying on the ground, so the cleaners won't sweep in and clean them out, and I won't accidentally sell them off. I'm leaving them around as if they were fire extinguishers, so that someone nearby can grab them and put out the fire. You can manually force someone to equip a forbidden item (though it wouldn't be hard to pause, unforbid, click, rightclick, equip, even if not,) so that's not even a problem.

I think it says something is very amiss about this game, largely in the firefighting AI and the inability to manually force someone to override a job that someone else is already doing, that I'd quite honestly rather use fragmentation grenades to manually put out a fire and blow up whatever is burning and rebuild it, than get my colonists lit on fire trying to fight it manually.

Does anyone else do this?

Actually, walls are quite useful. You just need to use them right.

Raiders burn walls under two circumstances.
1: If they cannot draw a path to a building to destroy. (And they only path to buildings, not colonists,)
2: if they get a "burn of opportunity" because the path they're following to a building to destroy takes them parallel to a wall.

The raiders, like your colonists, tend to prefer a faster path if they can find it. The trick, then, is to build a concrete highway that leads them to your killbox and keeps them away from moving parallel to your walls. This is complicated by the fact that it's important to build a concrete slab two tiles thick outside of your walls, as a firebreak.

Build highways away from the walls that lead in through narrow openings, hopefully into a grave-lined killbox. Build your concrete firebreaks, and line them with rubble to make them unattractive pathing targets. And, lastly, line the rubble firebreaks with blasting charges set far back enough that they won't damage the wall, and if someone is climbing over rocks to set fire to a wall, invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule. (Build your 'splosives two tiles away from one another, to get a guaranteed kill.)