f13.net

Welcome, gnomads, to the Land of Sneers!  We'll see how long I can keep you alive before you're inevitably eaten by zombies, goblins, and/or cave spiders.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/a1.jpg)

There were a couple of requests to do this as a "how to", so I'll try to 'splain stuff as I go, starting with the stuff I'm gonna do before I even unpause the game.  My gnomes have arrived in this new land in a little pile with all of their meager possessions, including some tools, some food, a couple of yaks (very important) and some wheat seeds (also very important).  

The first order of business is going to be getting all that precious agriculture up and running, so I designate a yak pasture (agriculture > pasture) and a wheat farm (agriculture > farm).  I pick some flat areas because a single designated area needs to be all on one level and I don't want to try to manage a yak herd across a bunch of different pastures.  Not all of the land is clear just yet, so I also issue some orders to fell some trees and forage some plants (agriculture > forage and fell).  Once I unpause, my woodcutters and farmers and ranchers will set about felling trees, tilling land, picking berries, and pasturing yaks.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/a2.jpg)

Mousewheeling down (or hitting -) drops me down a few levels, where I'm going to start digging into the mountain (terrain > mine wall).  I have some general ideas already for what I want to put on the main floor, so I start digging some rooms accordingly.  This is all easy to change later too.  Ready?  Let's unpause and let the gnomes work.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/a3.jpg)

A few seconds later my first big room has been dug out, so I can start putting stuff in it. Dirt stockpile (designate > stockpile) to one side so all those piles of dug-out dirt have somewhere to go (later I can set up a prospector gnome to sift them for scraps of precious metal).  I also start outlining my carpentry pipeline, which I want to get up and running ASAP since it'll be needed to build all the other workshops.  Log stockpile on one side, that's where my woodcutters will bring freshly felled trees.  Workbenches in the middle (I'll replace these with sawmills ASAP).  Plank stockpile next to the workbenches/sawmills.  Carpenter next to the plank stockpile.  I'll dig the room out a bit more soon to make room for the carpenter's stockpile.

Unfortunately, to make the workbenches, I need stone, and I don't have any.  Time to do some vertical digging -- I give orders to mine and dig stairs (terrain > mine for up, terrain > dig for down).  I only give orders to dig as far as level -7, since that's as far as you can go without worrying about monster spawns -- should be stone (though probably not metal) at that depth.  The stairs up go to level 1, where I'll be building bedrooms and stuff.

Tune in next time when some stuff will actually get built!  I'm now taking requests for gnome names.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/b1.jpg)

Success!  On level -4 we hit stone.  I'll start my stone mining and masonry operations down here.  Let's designate a room to dig out and go back upstairs to see how the construction is doing.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/b2.jpg)

Green indicates a task that a gnome is actively assigned to -- the two workbenches turned green because my miner produced stone, which means now the materials are available for a builder to assemble the workbench.  You can also see that the gnomes who aren't working on felling trees or mining are busily arranging items into their respective stockpiles.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/b3.jpg)

In not very long at all, the workbenches are all built, and once they're done felling trees, my woodcutters (who are also my carpenters) come inside to start working on the components for the next build job, which is the carpenter.  The crude workbench can produce all of the components that the carpenter needs (but slower than a carpenter or sawmill would, which is why I have three of them -- to the extent I can have multiple woodcutters working at once I want to make sure they have places to work).

Once the carpenter is up I'll be able to build a stonecutter and a stonemason, which will be able to produce the sawblades I need to make sawmills, which will produce planks much faster  than crude workbenches and in turn speed up everything else that's built out of wood.  I'm not going to start any other build jobs until that first sawmill is up, because I want to get it as soon as possible, but once I can produce planks quickly I can start seriously expanding this operation.

Uhoh!  My excavations on level -4 have broken through into a natural cavern.  Scrolling down through the levels I see that this crack runs all the way to level -33, which means that nasty things could climb up through there and eat my gnomes' faces.  (I also see some veins of metal, which I'll be going after later.)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/c1.jpg)

For now, I just build a floor over the crack and wall it up (build > terrain) to make this area safe.  I also designate a stone pipeline that's fairly similar to my wood pipeline -- raw stone pile, stonecutter, blocks, stonemason, finished products.  At this point I can wander off and without any further supervision my gnomes will build the carpenter and then use the carpenter to build the stonecutter and stonemason. 

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/c2.jpg)

In fact, now's a good time for me to give the order to build that first sawmill, since once the stonemason is up it'll then automatically start working on the sawblade.  I also plunk down a trough (built by the stonemason) to make feeding my yaks easier (unfed yaks will wander off; if there's a trough my rancher will fill it with straw and the yaks will eat as soon as they get hungry).  Again, that'll get built automatically once all the prereqs are in place.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/c3.jpg)

Now I'll need to wait a bit for the gnomes to grind through all those jobs.  In the meantime maybe I'll see about getting some sleeping quarters set up...

Upstairs on level 1, I carve out some rooms and give them the appropriate area designations -- a hospital, a great hall, a stockpile for bandages in easy reach of the hospital and the stairs, and a bunch of personal bedrooms.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/d1.jpg)

For now I just put a few straw beds in the hospital -- the gnomes will sleep there in favor of on a bare floor, and I don't want to equip all of the bedrooms with even the meager luxury of straw beds since I don't have any way to get more straw until the first wheat harvest comes in, and I'm going to need most of my starting supply to keep the yaks fed until then.  Actual beds are a ways off since they require a few resources I'm not producing just yet.

Oh, and I plan out some tables and chairs for the great hall since my carpentry operation is up and running now.  Let's take a look at that.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/d2.jpg)

With two sawmills operating at full speed milling logs into planks, I can start building crates and barrels, which greatly increase the capacity of my stockpiles.  I also start working on a brewing operation; fruit may grow on trees, but wine doesn't, and my gnomes will eventually die of thirst if I don't get a renewable source of drink for them.  I forgot to label the stockpiles in this pic, but there's a big grain stockpile that will eventually be shared by the distilleries and the kitchens (for making beer and bread respectively), and above that a fruit stockpile (for making wine), and on the right stockpiles for the beer and wine that the distilleries will produce.  Kitchens and other stuff will go over on the left.

Meanwhile I'm clearing more of the forest outside, both to feed the ravenous sawmills and to make room for more agriculture.

So here's the outside at this point.  Right on the front doorstep is the yak pasture, and I've got a couple of fields on the hillside where I've planted wheat and cotton.  I'm also starting an apple orchard (in space I've cleared by felling a grove of orange trees) next to the pasture.  Items made of apple wood are more valuable than items made of orange wood, and the fruit is equally useful, so if you only have one kind of tree, make it an apple tree.  I could have a bunch of different orchards but why bother?

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/d3.jpg)

I've also started on a training room that opens onto the hillside.  Usually I put this inside but it occurred to me that there's nothing in there which needs to be protected, and the only gnomes which go there will be suited up for combat.  My stonemason and carpenter are working on a set of primitive weapons (stone swords and wooden shields) that I'll be using to outfit my first militia.

As I'm getting ready to draft my first militia, I start figuring out what the squad's strategy is.  My settlement started with a set of metal armor, sword, and shield, so the squad leader will get that -- the other four squad members will have stone swords and wooden shields plus whatever bits of armor I'm able to scrape together.  In previous games I've usually had my unarmored fighters go unarmed and use the "Way of the Gnome" perk that gives them bonuses for being unarmed and unarmored, but this time I'm going with wooden shields and the "Shield Wall" squad perk that will help them block.

First I set up a uniform that will tell the gnomes to equip the stone sword and wooden shield (I don't have bone or leather armor yet, but will start making it as soon as I'm able and those gnomes will just put it on as it's available):

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/e1.jpg)

Then I set up a squad position that uses that uniform:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/e2.jpg)

Then a formation that uses four "Grunt" gnomes and one "Sarge" (another position designed for the one heavily armored guy, this one specifies the standard "platemail" uniform and the perk "taunt" which steals aggro):

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/e3.jpg)

I set up a squad with this formation, assign some gnomes to it, and book them a regular time in the training room so they'll be ready when the first goblins show up...

Here's my squad training up.  So far I've only assigned three gnomes to this squad (out of five slots) because with only 9 gnomes I don't want to pull more than a third of them off their normal jobs for half the day.  Once I get my first gnomads I'll use them to round it out.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/f1.jpg)

I've also started using the "tracked items" option (under "Stocks") to keep track of my agriculture yields.  We can see that I'm still not producing enough grain to keep up with the demand from my brewer and baker, so I'll start expanding that wheat field.  Luckily I've got more fruit than I have room for in my stockpiles, and the vintner has filled a few barrels with wine, so our basic needs are well covered.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/f2.jpg)

Back inside I've got another big chunk of workshops planned out.  Most of this won't come into play until I find something to butcher, but that point is fast approaching and I want to be ready.  The crafting pipelines get a little trickier here -- the butcher produces meat, bone, and hides, which are going to be consumed by the kitchen, bonecarver, and leatherworker respectively.  Leather armor also uses padding, which is produced by the tailor, who consumes cloth woven by the weaver.

The tailor can't be built until I have a bone needle from the bonecarver, which of course requires some bone.  This will need to wait until either my squad kills something (like a nice squishy goblin -- I could send them to attack one of the giant lizards roaming around the wilderness but they might not survive) or I butcher one of my yaks (not gonna do that until they start multiplying and I have excess) or I establish some trade (which I'm going to start working on soon).

Summer arrives, and with it a group of gnomads.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/g1.jpg)

I put them to work as farmers and miners, and add 2 of them to my squad.  No sooner is my squad full than a monitor lizard gets stuck in an excavation I'm working on around the edge of the kingdom, and I send the squad out to do battle with the beast before there's an unfortunate incident with one of my unarmed miners.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/g2.jpg)

After almost a day of pitched battle, the lizard quietly bleeds out while my soldiers are running home to tend their own wounds.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/g3.jpg)

Coming soon: bones!

Fast forward to the start of the fall, and the arrival of a new gnomad, who finds that the entire kingdom is surrounded by a dirt wall that he has to pace around before finding the way in.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/h1.jpg)

At some point this wall will funnel invading goblins into a death trap.  For now it's just a mild inconvenience.  The new arrival is drafted into service as our blacksmith, who will be very busy as soon as I set up a forge.

A honey badger also shows up and tries to start some shit, but all he manages to accomplish is bleeding all over the yaks.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/h2.jpg)

We haven't even finished mopping up the badger blood and converting the dead badger into badger sausages before a group of goblins shows up, no doubt lured by our legendary yak cheeses.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/h3.jpg)

All they accomplish is adding a fresh supply of ground meat to our kitchens.  (Yes, goblins are edible -- and delicious!)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/h4.jpg)

The addition of bone to our raw material stocks has allowed the construction of a tailor shop, and with it many new wonderful amenities -- comfortable beds, a renewable supply of bandages, sacks for hauling grain, and padding for leather armor (the supply of which increases each time we kill and butcher something).

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/h5.jpg)

The bedroom with the fancy furniture and statues belongs to a visiting ambassador (the blonde gnome who can always be found loafing around my Great Hall).  She needs a nicely-furnished room to stay happy, but as long as she's around, merchants will visit periodically from her kingdom and I can trade stuff with them -- I'm producing carved bone statuettes for lack of anything better to do with all these goblin bones, and the merchants usually have useful livestock for trade.

The next project will be setting up blacksmithing workshops to put my new blacksmith to work.

So is this the approachable-version of Dwarf Fortress?  :grin:

It probably looks more difficult than it is, most of what he's describing is higher level stuff for optimization.  It's mostly optional and pretty flexible (my fortresses end up looking pretty different), I think he's just describing the thought process behind why he's doing what he's doing in case someone else is having trouble and wants to copy him, not "ZIS IS DER VUN TRUE WAY TO PLAY" or anything.

IMO What you NEED to know to start out:

• You can mine stone and cut down trees with your starting tools
• You can use wood and stone to build Crude Workbenches, the most basic of all the workshops
• After you've got a crude workbench or two, there are a bunch of different "families" of workshops, one (or more) for each material (stone, metal, wood, etc.) and you can see what they need in the build order.  But you don't really need to care about that at first, because the gnomes will automatically craft the parts you need.  So just drop plans for one of each workshop grouped so that you can locate them, and your gnomes will automatically build all of them... eventually.
• Worst case scenario, if you completely botch your placement, you can deconstruct the workshop and move it somewhere later if you want.
• Winter is a bitch in this game, since your plants won't grow, so make sure you have a lot of food (like, 300 or so depending on your population) stockpiled in the autumn.  Remember that a lot of food is probably going to be doing double duty as drink, too (turned in to wine).
• Attacks from Goblins and other monsters are arguably the other biggest threat, so if you're starting out, you might want to play one or two rounds on "easy" or "peaceful" difficulty, because the military stuff is a bit counter-intuitive at first.
• If you can't figure out why X isn't being built/produced, you probably have a bottleneck somewhere.  When you run out of something, nobody's going to tell you, they just stop work.  This isn't always obvious, (for example, to make a blacksmith you need an anvil, so your first instinct might be to go looking for metal, but you also need wood to make in to charcoal to fuel your forge) so make sure you've always (when possible) got a buffer of wood, stone, cotton, and other common materials.

Yeah, I'm definitely not sure if anything I'm doing is optimal, each new game I start ends up being different based on what gave me trouble in the last game.  There's a lot of other stuff I'm monkeying with and not mentioning, like changing job priorities and assignments (eg I told my farmers to prioritize farms ahead of crafting so they'll get the whole wheat harvest in before they start converting it to beer).  The big dirt wall is a new idea that won't pay off till I invent traps.

Winter has arrived, and the crops stop their production, but our stores are ample, and there is work to be done underground.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/i1.jpg)

This will look familiar to anyone who has played Minecraft -- as we burrow into the earth, we plant torches to keep the darkness at bay.  Below level -7, dark squares have a chance to spawn monsters, so lighting becomes important.  Mining out a few veins of ore is enough to set Kail, our new smith, to work producing some decent armor for Strazos, captain of the guard.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/i2.jpg)

Strazos here took over for the previous captain, Quinton, who was a hell of a fighter until he lost his left arm in battle.  Lack of arm protection might have had something to do with that.   :why_so_serious:  So far we've managed to outfit Straz with a fancy bronze shield and one copper gauntlet, but now we're bottlenecked on leather (which we need for straps).  To make things worse, a band of goblins manages to kill our stud yak before we can drive them off.

Luckily, a gnome merchant comes to the rescue.  Not only can we replace the dead yak, but we can branch out into a new source of food and hide...

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/i3.jpg)

These emus will lay eggs, which we can turn into delicious yak cheese and/or sausage omelettes.  Might need to widen the hallways.

I take it you don't farm underground in this like in DF?

You can but I haven't figured it out yet.  To prepare an area for mushroom farming it needs to be flooded or something.

I wish to volunteer for the militia! Or yak poop cleaning. Either/or.

This is awesome.  I need to make some time for Gnomoria this week.  Maybe I'll finally get used to their wacky selection wireframe dealie.

What helps a lot is to make sure your view is focused on the plane/depth that you want to select on.  You can select stuff from lower levels that you can see, but that's where the selection gets wonky and it gets hard to tell what you're doing.  It's better to mousewheel down until the thing you want to do is the topmost thing visible; then start your selection from somewhere on that plane.

What's the cost for this ?

Currently $8 on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/224500/).  I think I got it for half off during the summer sale, but it's easily worth $8.

My previous question was said without any snark - would you say this is more approachable than DF?

I've always been fascinated by what you all do with DF, but that interface... :uhrr:

Definitely more approachable than DF, a big part of that is because of the interface being mouse driven, rather than DF's keyboard shortcuts.  It's not perfect or anything, there's still a lot of clicking involved if you want to, say, mine out a room, and there's not a lot if direction in terms of what you should build when, but it's way simpler than DF and the graphics make things a lot clearer.  Unfortunately, it's a bit simpler mechanically, too, especially in terms of things like interpersonal relationships (which basically don't exist in Gnomoria) and weird supernatural events (vampires, mythical beasts, etc.).

They do have zombies, which are pretty terrifying because their victims come back as more zombies.  Sadly, unlike with vampires in DF, you don't get to carry on with a settlement full of zombie gnomes.

From deep in the basement, as Kail forges new bronze weaponry and Ingmar polishes emeralds, Quinton announces his latest technological breakthroughs.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/j1.jpg)

This doesn't do much for us just yet, but crossbows and traps won't be far behind.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/j2.jpg)

The goblins manage to kill the occasional yak, but at this point the herd is large enough that it's able to sustain its numbers in the face of occasional losses; a yak is born roughly ever day, and the pasture has reached capacity so that means a yak is also butchered every day.  All of the soldiers are now outfitted with leather armor, and the larder is overflowing with delicious meat sandwiches.

Ore remains an unrenewable resource, so the mining operations have expanded significantly.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/j3.jpg)

The grid pattern seems to be a good way to cover a lot of area looking for veins while using the minimum number of torches and doing the minimum amount of digging.  Tin in particular is a welcome sight since together with the abundance of copper from trading and smelting it means I can crank out a good supply of bronze gear.

The influx of gnomads has dried up, probably due to insufficient grandeur.  This suggests a good project for next time...

Your oddly shaped rooms are offending me.

 :grin:

DF is a more approachable DF :oh_i_see:

My OCD desire to have nice square rooms is at odds with my OCD desire to pack all the workshops and associated stockpiles together as tightly as possible and not have any wasted space.  HALP.

Also hooooooly shit I feel dumb for not getting screenshots of the Fucking Mant Invasion of 2014, but I was extremely preoccupied with trying to keep everyone from getting carried off by Giant Fucking Bugs.

In a nutshell, I was keeping too much food in our stockpiles, and by the time I realized my mistake a mant scout had already found it and called in five mant workers to help relieve us of the surplus.  They killed a farmer, a woodcutter, a group of incoming gnomads, and a bunch of livestock.  I managed to salvage the situation by temporarily disbanding the militia (there were too many mants to fight), sounding an alarm bell to withdraw everyone to the Great Hall (which doubles as a panic room), and letting the mants plunder our food until they went away. 

Not the most glorious chapter in the history of the Land of Sneers, but we live.  I'll be keeping an eye on food/drink stocks more closely in the future, believe me.   :uhrr:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1217291/Misc/archer.png)

LOL.

I got that reference.

That is indeed how you get them.

The gnomes took a vote and decided that if they were going to have to spend days cowering in the Great Hall hiding from Giant Fucking Bugs, it'd need to be a little less cramped.  And maybe have some showers.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/k1.jpg)

We're still working on getting running water (I don't think showers are actually a thing), but the new and greater Great Hall is coming along quickly.  Decorative stone walls (in serpentine), stone doors (in sandstone), apple-wood chairs and tables.  I'm even going to fire up the kiln and start on some ceramic tile for the floor.  Shit's gonna be fancy.

In technological news, Quinton has invented some useful things: traps and crossbows.  Two bronze crossbows have been built and are waiting for me to come up with a new squad formation that will make use of them.  In the meantime I'm finally trapping the fuck out of the gated entrance to my kingdom.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/k2.jpg)

Right before I snapped this screenshot, a bear ran through the line of blade traps around the map's edge and took enough hits to start bleeding, so I'm hoping I'll see a message later telling me it's bled out and I can just go pick it up.  You can see I've built a labyrinth (lined by a trench instead of a wall so that I'll have the option of having snipers take potshots at enemies while they run the gauntlet) and am setting spike traps all along that.  I'm not actually sure yet what the difference is between the two; I think blade traps have more AoE, so I'm having them around the outer edge with the idea of softening up big clumps of lightly armored goblins.

We've also got a new crew of gnomads, so everyone killed in the mant incident has been replaced.  Next task will be figuring out this whole crossbow thing, and maybe doing some more mining because all of my ore has mysteriously been used in trap construction.

The new traps are working out well.  Here's the aftermath of a squad of goblins springing all the traps and then arriving on my doorstep minus a few gallons of blood:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/l1.jpg)

My kingdom worth is high enough now that the goblins come with lots of armor and even the occasional ogre.

The new and improved militia is up and running.  Two squads now, each headed by a guy in full bronze armor, with three light-armored backstabbers and one sniper.  Megrim has been promoted from full-time yak poop shoveler to part-time poop shoveler and part-time marksgnome.  I've also moved the training area over to the Labyrinth of Pain so that my soldiers will see incoming goblins BEFORE they get to my doorstep, and before poor Quinton goes running out to reset the traps.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/l2.jpg)

Mining operations continue; I've mined out a few levels now, which is how I'm able to upgrade my military equipment (I'm working on adding more heavy armor to the squads so there's a higher tank:squishy ratio).  I've also finished remodeling the Great Hall, and added a few more bedrooms to accommodate the new gnomads that the hall is attracting:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/l3.jpg)

New tech developments have been coming in as well; we now have levers and mechanical walls, which might be enough for me to start experimenting with more advanced trap designs.

Thanks for this write up Sam!

Looks good, going to give it a try when I return.  Even if it doesn't quite have the sociopathic level of detail DF has, I mostly gloss over that shit and never pay attention to individual dwarves anyways.  This looks like it still has all the core systems I liked to play with in DF (plus some original stuff).

I'm glad this is actually useful/entertaining to people.   :drill:  I'm taking suggestions from the peanut gallery if anyone wants me to focus on something in particular.

I'm finding it very entertaining.  If I wasn't swimming in other games, I'd be giving it a try.

(Also, what happened to Stonehearth ?)

The last few times I tried the Stonehearth alpha it crashed on me five minutes in, so I decided to give up on it for a while.  It's probably better now, but the longer I wait the less likely I'll find it's still crashy and just give up on it completely.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/m1.jpg)

Fuck.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/m2.jpg)

Aha!

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/m3.jpg)

FUUUUUCK THEY MULTIPLY FUUUUUCK

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/m4.jpg)

OH JESUS CHRIST

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/m5.jpg)

WHY

Tune in next week when we pick the armor off everyone's carcasses (those of you who didn't JUMP IN THE WATER FOR SOME REASON.  PAGZ.) and use it to outfit a fresh-faced group of gnomads who can't wait to die next.

Getting clever with machinery.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/n1.jpg)

This mechanical wall lets me shut off access to my kingdom by having an engineer throw a switch from the inside.  Here you can see me attempting to use it to trap starving alpacas and stop them from wandering off the map (the wheat harvest was disrupted by the mass beetle killings and that's kind of thrown everything else off).

Pick me, pick me!

Upon arriving at the Land of Sneers, Ezrast is handed a poop shovel and a sword.  Welcome, soldier!

My military is now divided into two types of squads -- a firing squad that is outfitted with mostly crossbows (with one armored taunt tank to protect the squishies), and melee squads that are split between "bashers" (armed with hammers and bonuses vs kneecaps) and "stabbers" (armed with swords and bonuses vs fallen enemies).  The idea is the basher softens em up and the stabber finishes them.

So far it's been working well, and I have a row of ogre skulls to prove it.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/n2.jpg)

The goblin armies have started sending iron armor, which I've been melting down and turning into steel swords.  Ogre leather makes good light armor too. 

SEND MORE COPS.   :vv:

I want to be a gnomad who does something stupid as well!

Paelos, you will be joining the engineering corps, which has one of the most important AND stupid jobs.  Every time a trap gets sprung out in No Gnomes' Land, you're going to be one of the brave souls who goes running out to reset it.  If you should happen to run into the thing that sprung it before the military does, your job is to run away at top speed, shrieking as loudly as you can so we know where to send the rescue squad.  For this reason you will not be carrying any weapons or wearing any armor.

You're also tasked with inventing pitfalls and pressure plates ASAP, because I have some fun ideas of things to do with those.

And now here is the last survivor of the most recent group of goblins to attempt an invasion.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/n3.jpg)

RUN, FAT BOY, RUN!

Can you attempt to take a better screenshot of the entrance and surrounding area?  I'm trying to figure out how you are funneling them in like that.

I can't show the entire thing because it involved terraforming the entire edge of the map.   :grin:  I leveled off everything at the edge of the map (to depth 0, which meant carving a LOT out of the hills at the edges) and then made sure there was either a wall or a trench blocking it off.  Then opened up one square to act as a gate, and built some stuff in front of that.  Devising a deadly funnel is easy once you only have one way in from the edge (which is where all goblins, merchants, gnomads, and mants spawn).

I've also got a system of tunnels one level down that connect the edges; that's so that if my engineers or haulers get stuck out there and get surprised by a bear or something, they have multiple directions to flee and can probably make it back in (through the trap gauntlet which will probably kill any pursuer if the military doesn't do it first) instead of getting cornered.

You can see it in the screenshot above -- the ogre is fleeing down the "corridor" along the edge of the map.  The stairs in front of him lead to the tunnel system I mentioned (which is also trapped).

Funny, I didn't even bother with those defenses.

I have 5 soldiers with full bronze and steel swords, and I'm in the process of upgrading my shields to steel as those are counted as weapons (sadly we'll lose that legendary bronze shield in the process).

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=314267048

Heh, "Custom Difficulty".   :awesome_for_real:

I always wanted to be a chickenshit engineer.

The pressure plate has been invented, and now I can do really fun shit.  Like play practical jokes on my builders.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/n4.jpg)

This is a proof of concept for what will eventually be a devious trap.  Windmills supply power through an axle (under the floor) to the pressure plate, which powers the wall.  When nobody is standing on the plate, the wall is down.  When someone steps onto it, the wall instantly pops up and blocks their path.

Unlike the manually switched wall I built earlier, this means that gnomes (and enemies) will see a path to the other side and walk up to it before it springs shut.  I tested it by telling this gnome to build a torch on the other side, and then laughing at her.

My plan is to put plates and power linkages on both sides, so that it will stop enemies the same way, but only after they've run the trap gauntlet and brought themselves in easy range of my snipers.  I also want it to stop my own guys from going outside until everything is clear.  This should give me a pretty airtight defense against future mant/goblin incidents.

Okay, that didn't take too long to set up.  I had to do a little digging and change the layout because the gearboxes (which you need to transmit power around corners or at junctions) act as floors (and can be walked on), but here it is in working order:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/n5.jpg)

Pulling the switch deactivates it and makes the area passable.  My plan is to leave the switch active most of the time and only shut the gate off after all the hostiles have been killed and it's time to go collect the bodies.

Shit yes, it works.

Here's a mob of goblins coming in and springing all the traps.  Note my dudes trying to run out and meet them in the kill zone, and getting stopped.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/o1.jpg)

I throw the switch to lock the manually-controlled wall behind the goblins so they can't flee as my guys start picking them off from across the trench with crossbows.  Then there's lots of blood.

Once it's all over, I deactivate the blocker so my guys can collect the dead and reset the traps.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/o2.jpg)

Then everything is set for the next group of visitors.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/o3.jpg)

Time to start sending "ambassadors" to the goblin kingdom with gifts of goblin-bone figurines so they'll send more dudes next time.

yeah, there's a reason I havn't played it in a month, that game got boring.

Mere moments later, a group of mants arrives, and they go through the same meat grinder.   :drill:  One improvement I think I want to make is adding a manual switch to lock the pressure-plated-activated wall up so my gnomes stop trying to run through it and focus on taking crossbow shots.  Maybe just link it directly to the other manual control so when that switch is thrown, nobody gets in or out of the labyrinth...

Wait, am I dead already? Alas, the life of a gnome is brief.

You died a hero, taking two beetles down with you, if it's any consolation.   :heartbreak:

Apparently my gnomes motto is be quick, or be dead.

So I've got blunderbusses and pitfall mechanisms invented.  Now that I've got my labyrinth tuned to where I can theoretically deal with any number of goblins or mants, I don't need to worry about how much loot I rack up.  Not sure whether I should start digging deeper so I can outfit all my dudes with steel guns and march them to their deaths against an infinite number of beetles (I'm 95% sure they're breeding in these giant caverns that I haven't explored yet, and apparently they'll just keep at it infinitely, which would explain why the game starts lagging whenever I'm near one of those caverns), or see if I can build a better goblin trap.

No no, that sounds like a good end. To gnome valhalla!

Oh no, is my guy dead too?

Also, I vote for setting up volley-firing gnome deathsquads.

Affirmative.  When I have time at home I'll post some stats on your dudes (living and dead).  Gnome-Megrim only had a couple of kills under his belt because he'd been promoted relatively recently, but Gnome-Straz was a veteran and probably killed a lot of shit before he got eaten by beetles.

The f13 gnomes, with notable dates, kills, and skills:

Hutch
Joined: 1st day of Summer, Year 1
Died: 8th day of Fall, Year 3
Kills: 9x goblin, 1x monitor lizard
Skills: Mining 36, Sword 46

Quinton
Joined: 1st day of Spring, Year 1
Died: 8th day of Fall, Year 3
Kills: 2x goblin, 1x honey badger
Skills: Tinkering 228, Sword 14

Strazos
Joined: 1st day of Summer, Year 1
Died: 8th day of Fall, Year 3
Kills: 2x goblin, 1x bear
Skills: Mining 23, Sword 46

Megrim
Joined: 1st day of Winter, Year 1
Died: 9th day of Fall, Year 3
Kills: 2x beetle
Skills: Animal Husbandry 23, Crossbow 36

Pagz
Joined: 1st day of WInter, Year 2
Died: 10th day of Fall, Year 3
Kills: 2x goblin, 1x honey badger, 5x beetle, 1x skeleton
Skills: Mining 42, Crossbow 45

Ironwood
Joined: 1st day of Spring, Year 1
Kills: 10x goblin, 1x ogre, 1x monitor lizard, 4x beetle, 1x zombie
Skills: Sword 57, Horticulture 53

Kail
Joined: 1st day of Fall, Year 1
Skills: Smelting 43, Armor Crafting 19

Ingmar
Joined: 1st day of Winter, Year 1
Kills: 1x beetle
Skills: Prospecting 38, Gemcutting 15

Paelos
Joined: 1st day of Winter, Year 3
Skills: Tinkering 135, Machining 18

Ezrast
Joined: 1st day of Summer, Year 4
Skills: Animal Husbandry 21, Sword 40

I was made to believe I had cut more of a bloody swath across the land than that... :oh_i_see:

I haven't died yet.  That's almost as fun as finding out I was in there at all.

Yeah, I hadn't checked and just assumed you'd done more damage.  Maybe it was because you were the tank; your squadmates musta stolen all your kills.

Gnomoria is currently on sale for $1.99 in the Humble Bundle store for the next 48 hours. :grin:

https://www.humblebundle.com/store

I think if you like sim/Minecraft type bullshit you'd be insane not to pick this up at that price.

I slapped your name on a random farmer the first time you posted in the thread and you've been wrecking shit ever since.

Ironwood is kicking ass. I'm tinkering with shit and running away.

Sounds about right.

Blunderbusses built.  Pimping out the Great Hall to lure more gnomads.

I've noticed a flaw in my gate mechanism, which is that the chickenshit engineers get spooked by the invaders (even though they're on the other side of a barrier) and sometimes run away when I need them to throw the lockdown switch.  Have plans to fix this by building a control room some distance away with all three switches in one spot, and move the tinker bench there so the engies will tend to hang out there when idle.  That ought to vastly improve response times and I bet it'll look cool.

The new control room.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/p1.jpg)

White lines added for illustrative purposes -- most of the actual linkage (lines of metal axles) is underground.  With the new setup the engineers are far removed from danger -- they just sit in this little shed and tinker at the tinker bench.  When bad guys enter through the outer door, the two "lock" switches are thrown so the bad guys are trapped in the labyrinth.  After they've been executed by firing squad, the inner lock and blocker are deactivated so that the traps can be reset and the bodies looted; then the blocker is reactivated and the outer door is reopened.  At no point do any of my gnomes enter a hostile area.

To let in merchants and gnomads, I close the outer door after they've passed it, and then deactivate the blocker on the inner door so they can get in.


(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/p2.jpg)

Blunderbuss training has begun.  It'll take a while to get them as good as they were the the crossbows, but I have high hopes.

I'm now locked in a control room with some levers and desks.

It's gnome tax season.

LOL.

So, annoying development with my control room.  The engineers finished inventing all the things, meaning they no longer have a reason to hang out at the tinker bench.  Now they spend all their time loafing around the Great Hall.

After trying different ways to entice them to hang out in the control room again (for example I tried making it a guard post and assigning them to a special "engineering" squad scheduled to sit there, but they wouldn't pull the switches while on guard duty, lol), I decided it was time to do some more building.

The control room is now part of the newly expanded Great Hall, as seen here:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/q1.jpg)

Axles run from the switches (which are made of solid silver now, because they need to go with the decor) to gearboxes behind the walls that transfer the power up a level to the outside:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/q2.jpg)

What about power?  As a stopgap measure during construction I had a steam engine running inside the Great Hall, but even though we have ridiculous amounts of firewood (overflowing our stockpiles, as you can see by all the logs lying around outside) I prefer renewable energy sources.  So I built a driveshaft that runs almost the entire length of the kingdom:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/q3.jpg)

to another gearbox that links up with a wind farm on the other side of the mountain:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/q4.jpg)

Mechanical response times are way up again, and now I can control the gate mechanism from the security of the panic room, so that's pretty awesome.

Meanwhile, the entire military is getting outfitted with steel equipment (slowly but surely), to the point where we don't actually need any of this high-tech security apparatus anyway, but I still derive great satisfaction from seeing two-headed ogres gnashing their teeth impotently from the other side of a mechanical wall before they're gunned down for their precious hides.

Mining operations have gone down to level -50, which is far enough of a hike downstairs that I've built a new set of luxurious living quarters down there for the miners:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/q5.jpg)

Regular bulk food deliveries keep them from having to come upstairs to fill their bellies, and an on-site prospecting station means they can process large amounts of raw stone into smaller amounts of metal, minimizing hauling time.

I suppose from here there's nowhere to go but down.  I've read that cave spiders are the worst thing in the game and they start spawning at level -78 and lower...

SKULLS FOR THE SKULL WALL!

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/q6.jpg)

In recent news:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/r1.jpg)

LEGENDARY.  The mants will be coming from all corners of the earth to try to pillage that treasure.

Meanwhile I'm relocating my military to the bowels of the earth.  Training grounds, hospital, nicely decorated bedrooms, the works.  I plan to have my miners start opening up the natural caverns, and I want a bunch of gnomes in full steel armor ready to beat the shit out of whatever comes out.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/r2.jpg)

The melee squad has been shifted to full time active duty -- I created a "Soldier" profession that's assigned to do nothing at all, swapped all the heavies over to that profession (no more legendary sausages for Ironwood, he's a full-time kneecapper now), and put them on a 16-hour training schedule.

In the above screenshot you can see a yawning chasm just behind the rooms.  It goes all the way to the bottom of the map.  Are we ready to find out what's living in there?

WORSHIP MY GLORIOUS SAUSAGE.

Oh dear lord.  :why_so_serious:

My firing squads have gotten so deadly that the last group of goblins to face them panicked and turned tail before they'd even made it through the trap labyrinth.  The engies were a little slow on the draw and didn't manage to shut the outer door quickly enough to keep them all penned in, and a bunch of them got away.

Fuck that noise.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s1.jpg)

So here's how this works (I think).  Dudes come into the courtyard via the hatch, which is closed until something steps on the pressure plate (which is only on the inside).  Hatch opens.  Anyone right behind the dude (like more dudes) falls into the hatch, which just leads to the passageways under the labyrinth (only way out is the stairs up into the courtyard).  Once you're inside the courtyard, you can't get back out, because the hatch opens as soon as you step on the plate.  It's a one-way door.

If any of my dudes need to get out (like merchants leaving the kingdom, or my "ambassadors" bringing truckloads of skulls to the goblin lands to piss them off), I throw the switch that opens the escape door on the side.  Eventually I expect I'll want to tie this back to the great hall with the rest of the control levers and the giant wind farm so my lazy-ass engies don't have to walk as far.

Will this work?  My last goblin diplomatic mission is due back any day now, so we'll find out.

Goblins check in...

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s2.jpg)

...they don't check out.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s3.jpg)

 :grin:

Is there a tutorial on this somewhere? I bought it for a few bucks, and have no idea wtf I am doing.  :oh_i_see:

Read the first few posts of this thread?   :awesome_for_real:

I've also found the Gnomoria Wiki (http://www.gnomoriawiki.com) helpful as a reference, but I mostly figured out the basics by just messing around with what's on the toolbar.  In the first few posts of this thread I tried to call out which commands I was using to do the basic startup stuff.

Designate stockpiles, harvest things, build workshops.  (Again, in the start of this thread I call out which workshops are good to build first and that kind of thing, so read that -- I learned the hard way by just trying to build everything and that works too.)  Make sure you have food and drink.  My first few games ended in spectacular defeats, so expect that to happen a few times.

If there's anything specific you're wedged on lemme know and I can do a little tutorial in this thread, but start with that basic stuff and you'll probably have a good idea of where you want to go from there.

A tutorial is on the "to do" list.  I assume he's keeping it until later so that he doesn't have to re-write it every time something changes.

Until then, you've got us to help you!  :grin:

TBH the thing I like about this game as compared with many others (especially DF) is that I was able to just fuck around with it and start having fun without having to sit through a boring in-game tutorial or dig through wiki articles.  I wound up consulting the wiki to figure out how stuff works but I was already hooked by then; when I tried to play DF I just couldn't get into it to the point where I wanted to learn more.

Gnomoria is kinda more like Minecraft that way, where you'll end up going to the wiki to figure out specific pieces of information, but you can figure out the basics of "punch tree, dig hole" very quickly and get an idea for the basic mechanics before you need to delve into the details.

Best goblin conga line yet.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s4.jpg)

...I may have gone a bit too far in a few places.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s5.jpg)

This is around the time I'm wishing I'd built an automated mashing device in there.  Shooting them is taking too long.   :why_so_serious:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s6.jpg)

This isn't even all the corpses.  I'm not sure if we're going to be able to butcher them all before they rot.  Oy.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/s7.jpg)

And this is the scrap pile after we've looted the corpses.  Once Kail smelts all this stuff down we should have enough for our two heavy melee squads and three firing squads to have all steel equipment, and two-headed ogre leather armor for all the shooters.  Hot damn.

When you have too much food lying around, you get mants.  This is what happens when you don't sweep up.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/t1.jpg)

A bit late but KNEEL BEFORE ZOD'S SAUSAGE!!

Who is on corpse and poop duty? They are falling down on the job.

Almost everyone except the full-time soldiers and the engineers is on hauling duty (usually as their lowest priority).  Problem is there's still a giant backlog of goblin scrap to sift through so everyone's too busy to clean up the dirt.

Luckily dirt golems ain't nuthin.  That one armored gnome beat them all to death with a wheelbarrow before his backup arrived, then went back to tidying.

With the way the weapon system works, it was probably a legendary wheelbarrow.

I have had legendary wheelbarrows in other games, but none of my melee weapons are legendary this time because I've done so well with my mechanical/ranged defenses.  Every single gun has a name, though.   :drill:

My new ammo-saving device.  I call it the High Dive.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/u1.jpg)

A manually operated drawbridge leads from the labyrinth to this elevated platform.  The other end of the platform leads into my kingdom.  When the labyrinth is on lockdown and I open the way to this platform, whatever is in the labyrinth will come up here.  They will walk onto the gold pressure plate -- at this point the copper wall to their left (which was on their path forward) raises, blocking them.  The tin wall raises behind them, blocking their way back.  The hatch closes, creating a path forward.  They step onto the hatch, and off the plate.  The hatch opens, with them on it.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/u2.jpg)

This is where they land, 17 stories down.  The ditch around it is so that my gnomes don't get crushed by falling bodies from above until I'm sure they're all done and it's safe to start looting.

This should solve the problem of having to wait for my firing squads to individually execute two hundred goblins as they mill around in the labyrinth -- now I just open a few switches and they'll file to their deaths in an orderly fashion.

The trickiest part of constructing this thing was making sure none of my gnomes fell victim to the trap while it was under construction.  I chose the order in which to build things very carefully and made sure the gnomes would always take the path out that DIDN'T lead to a long fall.  Now the whole thing is kept inaccessible except under very controlled conditions, and the design shouldn't ever result in any litter in the trap itself that anyone will want to try to clean up.

To test it, I send a diplomat off to goblin lands, carrying not only the usual gifts of goblin skulls and sausage, but this time even some of the ogre-leather armor that was too poorly made for any of my gnomes to want to wear it.

This will take a few in-game days to see results.  In the meantime, please admire the lovely Great Hall.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/u3.jpg)

I'm puttering around adding nicer statues to the living quarters too, since I read that it improves the quality of sleep to have a statue made of precious metal looming over you all night.

Oh hey, a million goblins are here.  Let's see how they're doing.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/u4.jpg)

Yes, there's a blood trail in the air because a bunch of them have already had holes shot in them by snipers by the time they take the long fall.  Also, a few of them are crushed by their falling comrades a split second before the fall kills them, so they register as having been killed by falling objects.  LOL.

I don't even know how many goblins there actually were, but it was enough to lag the bejesus out of the game.  I think we might be good on scrap metal for... ever.

You really, really dig on this kind of shit, don't you ?

You savage.

If you like sausage, never ask how it's made.

Especially if it's the Sausage of Zod.

'Legendary Sausage of Zod'

Should be his title, really.

Oh, duh, I can figure this out with the "Stocks" screen since "corpse" is an item.  A bunch have been butchered by now but I've still got about 700 lying around.  

I had on the order of a thousand goblins and ogres attacking my settlement of fewer than 50 gnomes, and killed them all with an elaborate practical joke.   :why_so_serious:

Figured out a good shortcut around the smelting process.  Merchants will take goblin scrap as trade, and it doesn't need to be in a stockpile to be traded -- so I just told a merchant to take away all he could carry in exchange for all of his ore.  Way less labor for my dudes.

You're 300 corpses from a Rob Zombie movie.

 :drill:

Okay, next up I'm going to do the spelunking thing.  I've been putting it off because I wanted all my guys to be well equipped before I march them to what might be their deaths, but everything is as maxed out as it can get.

Spelunking time!

No sooner do we start exploring the caverns than a herd of Walking Dead extras lurches out of the darkness.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/v1.jpg)

Luckily all the goblin target practice has paid off, and gnashing teeth are ineffective against cold steel.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/v2.jpg)

While my military is assigned to stay below ground and fight the undead, my kingdom's above-ground defenses have been delegated to the engineering team, who flip levers in order to manipulate and/or kill attackers.  At one point we manage to get a group of mants trapped in the same room as a few goblin soldiers, with hilarious results.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/v3.jpg)

Below ground, here's an excerpt of Ironwood and Ezrast kicking ass and taking names.  Note that at one point the skeleton picks up a severed zombie leg and tries to beat Ezrast to death with it.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/v4.jpg)

While this is going on, I'm sending gnomes through the natural caverns and having them plant torches everywhere.  I'm seeing if I can render it a spawn-free zone by improving the lighting...

Crushing The Brain !  Oh Yeah !

We've hit molten rock bottom.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/w1.jpg)

No cave spiders yet...

Now what ?

(http://www.weavinggrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/home_alone_12.jpg)

I learned that mining close to lava is bad for gnomes' health.  Apparently it's rather hot.

Oh Dear.  Did you delve too deeply and too greedily ?

There was a big vein of platinum right near the lava lake.  I needed it.  For things.  Luckily the gnome who lost his legs wasn't anyone important.

I was me wasn't it. Damn you.

Purchased.  Fuck it.

It was having a gnome lose his legs in a horrible mining accident that clinched it for you, wasn't it.   :why_so_serious:  Sadly bionic limbs aren't in yet, although they are on the dev plan.

Paelos isn't on mining (or hauling) duty so he's unlikely to die that way unless I start trying to build lava pumps.  In which case he's VERY likely to die that way.  But I don't think I'll be doing that, since liquid is sufficiently wonky that I'm hesitant to even play with water.  After Pagz drowned, I had to drain the lake to recover his equipment (miraculously I managed to do it without drowning any of my miners), and then I built a fence around it to prevent further accidents.

Not much new to report as far as monster attacks.  I did build a new base of operations at level -80 to facilitate greedy delving efforts.  Here's what that looks like:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/w2.jpg)

12 bedrooms in the upper left, dining room and hospital in the middle, training grounds in front of the entrance to the great unlit caverns (which I'm steadily mining away at and lighting up).  The bedrooms have statues of platinum and rose gold, which both makes them highly desirable and minimizes the amount of time their occupants need to spend in them.  As you can see from the pile of corpses, undead periodically lurch out of the darkness, and since they have to go right through my military guys to get to anything valuable, my military guys can just smash them to pieces and then go back to what they were doing.

A few of the melee weapons are now legendary -- even poorly crafted weapons "level up" to maximum quality (and get named) if you use them to kill enough things.  Ezrast has a sword named The Muddy Sword which has slain many zombies.  

(edit) Ironwood's hammer recently acquired the title of the Romanced Wailer.  I couldn't make this stuff up.

My gnomes are all fucking retards and my house is a shitpit.

 :heartbreak:

Also, my yaks aren't fucking.

SAM, WHY AREN'T MY YAKS FUCKING ??!

They don't do it when you're looking.  

Also gestation takes 12 days, so it takes a while for your herd to get to the point where you're popping out a baby yak every day and leading it to the slaughterhouse.  You can speed things up by buying more females from a merchant, but that requires doing a whole bunch of other shit (you have to host a diplomat, build a merchant stall, wait for a merchant to show up, then have stuff to trade him).  It's a lot to juggle while you're trying to get other stuff built.

For your first game just aim for a wheat field (which'll also take a while to actually produce wheat, so plant it FIRST THING or you'll run out of straw and your yaks will starve) and a sawmill.  If you can get that stuff up and running before the goblins and/or mants eat you, you're doing good.  Along the way you'll get a good idea for specifically why your gnomes are retards and you'll figure out how to trick them into being less retarded (like all that stuff I was doing with having lots of specialized stockpiles -- that's all so my gnomes don't do stupid stuff like not build things because there's a big pile of dirt where the finished table needs to go).  Then your next time around you'll already know to do that shit and you'll get further.

You could also play on "peaceful" but where's the fun there?

I think you may need some animal husbandry gnome.  Started again and got another yak right quick.  Previous game had been weeks and weeks in game time and nowt.

You need a gnome assigned to the "rancher" profession (which I think you start with), and your yaks need to be in a pasture, and you need to have wheat straw so your rancher can feed them.  You also need one male and one female yak, which again, you start with, but if you lose one you're boned until you can buy a replacement.

Technically you don't need a "rancher", you just need somebody with "animal husbandry" or whatever enabled -- of the default professions "rancher" is the only one with that.  You can edit the professions and set it so your miners feed your yaks if you want; some people just set every gnome to a profession that does everything and let them manage themselves.  I didn't go into any of that because it's lots of boring ticking of boxes but there's a lot you can do to manage what your gnomes do.  Two major profession changes I ended up making in my game were adding more crafting tasks to the ranchers (to take some of the cooking burden off the farmers) and adding "smelting" to the miners (so I could have one master blacksmith with other gnomes feeding him metal bars so he could work faster).  I also took "hauling" off engineers because I didn't want Paelos off rearranging dirt while I needed him to pull a goddamn lever RIGHT NOW.

Still waiting to encounter a cave spider so I can end this radicalthon with a boss battle.   :awesome_for_real:

In the meantime, I built a water feature.  There's a switch to turn it off because moving water lags the game up something fierce, but here's what it looks like when it's running:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/w3.jpg)

Here's the inside:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/w4.jpg)

There are three pumps stacked one on top of the other; each is turned by an axle (through the wall) that connects to a gearbox.  The three gearboxes are linked by vertical axles, and the top one is linked to the five windmills that power it all and a switch to turn it off.

Utterly pointless but it was fun to build.  Miraculously, no gnomes managed to drown themselves during construction.  I thought about building a new death trap where the goblins get drowned instead of splatted (I could use mechanical walls to seal a room, pump it full of water, then turn off the pump, open the doors, let the room drain, and loot the bodies), but the lag during goblin slaughters is bad enough as is.

Lost two kingdoms today (as well as pretty much all of my Sunday), but I'm learning lots.  There are lots of wee fiddly bits it's best to work out yourself, especially the damn military.

Also, can I just say, the option to track other items in a list is fucking awesome.  No idea if it ever made it in to DF, but it helps SO MUCH.

It's super awesome when you're still trying to figure out how to set up your various production pipelines.  Takes the mystery out of "why can't I build this fucking thing" when you can glance over and see that you're out of wood, or stone, or you aren't producing planks as fast as you need to, or whatever.

At work right now, so I can't check, but can you create new professions ?  When I alter the basic templates it comes up as 'Custom' and I'd rather something more descriptive !

At work right now as well so can't give you the click by click instructions, but yes, you can.

Nice.  I knew you could do that kind of things with Soldiers, so it seemed daft not to have it on professions.

Population > Professions > New

Type new profession name where it says "New Profession".  Uncheck/check boxes and rearrange priorities to your heart's content.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/x1.jpg)

Up to 45 platinum statues in the Great Hall and I don't even know how many rose gold.  Population's up to 54.

Note the perimeter defense system with 5 levers -- if the middle one and rightmost one are both active, anything trying to enter the kingdom will be deflected (that's the middle lever) and then will attempt to detour through the pitfall trap (that's the rightmost lever).  If someone arrives whom I want to let in, I throw the middle lever.  Otherwise the first notification I get of new arrivals is "a goblin has fallen to his death".

Oh hey, exactly as I typed that, it happened:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/x2.jpg)

If they ever patch in winged mants I'm fucked.   :awesome_for_real:

I'm deliberately digging out dark rooms at the bottom level to try to entice cave spiders to spawn because it's the only enemy in the game I haven't seen yet, but still no luck.

This game is brilliant.  Totally addictive and much, much, much easier to get into than DF, while doing pretty much exactly the same job.

However, I've noticed that I have the same problem with it as I do with DF.  The MINUTE that something goes wrong for me, or I think of a better way to do something, I just start again.   :awesome_for_real:

It's a real problem !

Come on Sam, make with some updates today.  I'm at work again and just itching to fire this up on my spare surface which is hidden from view of the rest of the drones. 

At this point most of what I'm doing looks like the stuff I've been doing -- just mining more and incrementally upgrading my equipment. I told my smiths to smelt down any armor that's not better than "average", which means they're churning through HUGE amounts of iron in the pursuit of outfitting every gnome with "fine" steel armor.  Gonna provoke another big goblin lagfest to give me raw material.

If I spend long enough waiting for cave spiders I might revamp my entrance.  The setup I have now has grown organically and I feel like I could do better if I designed it all from scratch.  That might be entertaining.

fnar.


(Also, It's too dark and fiddly to play on a Surface.)

I'm so glad I found this thread.

I'm becoming more retarded as I grow old. Could not figure out how to turn off the music (thanks to Kail for telling me). First kingdom, I made a mine pit, which is not exactly the right way to mine, is it?

You mean, just strip-mining the surface for dirt and stone rather than tunneling down deep to get at the veins of metal?  You can use the Prospector workshop to convert the cheap stuff into random metal bits, so in theory you can get your metal that way, it just might take a while.

I pretty much follow the same plan I use in Minecraft, though, which is to dig a bunch of stairs to get down deep to where the good stuff is and then start digging a bunch of corridors to look for it, placing torches along the way.

I think have to relearn a new system over and over is the problem. One nice thing about games borrowing design from each other is that you don't have to relearn some basic things like how to turn off the sound.

Speaking of retarded, the floor/wall system is a bit shitty sometimes.  I also don't like that gnomes can wall themselves in or leave themselves standing in mid air on a bit of floor, slowly dying of thirst.

Idiots.

It's the hardest part of the game to figure out, yeah.  Each square can have a floor, a floor and a wall, or neither.  Gnomes can only stand in squares with a floor but no wall.  Stairs provide a floor for the square above them.  Etc.  Once you can wrap your head around that AND how the various build orders interact with the terrain (eg "dig hole" removes this square's floor and the lower square's wall, "dig stairs" is that plus building a stair in the lower square, "mine stairs up" replaces this square's wall with stairs, "build stairs up" creates stairs in an already empty square...) you can figure out how to rescue trapped gnomes, but I lost a few like that early on.

I've had four statues as 'Pending' for about a year.

According to the Wiki, statues should be at the Carpenter, the Stonemason and the Metal Chap.

I don't have any options to build them.

What gives ?

Stonecarver (not stonemason) or Metalworker (not blacksmith).  I don't remember the Woodcarver (not carpenter) doing statues but that'd be the equivalent.  Those use different skills as well as being different workshops, so make sure someone is assigned to them -- I *think* miners have stone carving and blacksmiths have metalworking by default?

Yeah, but Statue isn't there as an option on ANY of them.  Tearing my hair out here, 'cause it looks bugged, but I have no idea why.

Everything else is going great on this run through except those.  


EDITED TO ADD : I'M A TIT.  WHOA.  SUCH A GREAT BIG TIT.


Thanks Sam.

FUCKING GODDAMN MANTS.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1411632/Screenshot%202014-10-12%2022.58.32.png)

Unlike Sam, I chronicled the....slaughter.

So, the take away here is don't stock up on food.  Or you get the Mants.

The funniest bit is the 6 or seven guys you can see there dead on hospital beds.

As they died from an advanced case of Mant.

 :drill:

Oh, and for anyone wondering, the 'BloodGod' tally is a little tracker for when I have Goblin skull spare.

Because then it gets put on a stick outside.

Before the dark times.  Before the Mants.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1217291/Misc/archer.png)

Wait, I totally had something for this  :awesome_for_real:

I am now afraid of Mants.

I haven't trained my guys at all or given them weapons or anything. Goblins came and killed my third yak (male, but I still have one of each).

I am not really sure I'm even in control of these guys anymore, because I've told them to do too many things, I think. Waiting for the end to come.

FINAL BOSS BATTLE!

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/y1.jpg)

(http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/131/896/gaijin4koma2_peersblog_1200684608.jpg)

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40386/f13/radicalthon/gnomoria/y2.jpg)

(http://media.ign.com/games/image/article/738/738102/gaijin4koma_peersblog_1200684654.jpg)

I was kinda hoping it'd take a few more hits and maybe spin some webs or inject some venoms or something.  Guess I have to wait for them to patch in a Balrog.

I rarely comment on Radicalthons, but I read all of them and harvest the juicy bits.

I couldn't be arsed walling in the entire map so I made this :

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1411632/Screenshot%202014-10-18%2011.25.18.png)

The power of Wind keeps both pressure plates running.  When the lever is on, one of the plates stops the Gnomes from running out.  The other one traps incomers in two mechanical walls and shuts the hatch.  Naturally, they go for the hatch and it...opens.

Why yes, that is a 10 floor drop to their death.  Why do you ask ?

There's a skeleton doing a poo in our vegetable patch.

And, despite all looking great, that's that game over.

I accidentally tunnelled into a chasm and from it emerged about 50 Beetles (not joking here).  They swarmed up all the levels just eating my men one at a time.  The 3 squads of Militia fared... Poorly.

There was no-one BEHIND the drop trap, so no one survived.

Shite.

Those beetles are the devil.  Supposedly once you have full steel armor they become inconsequential, but at the time I encountered them they ate about half my guys, as you may recall.

I wish I'd taken more screenies, but one dude got his head snipped off.  The descriptions in the game are quite brutal actually.  Especially when he rubbed it in that the chap was also 'blind' and suffocating.  Well, you would be.  You have no fucking head.

I can't see how those assholes ever become inconsequential.  My guys all had heavy weapons and blunderbusses and it was just a fucking carve up.  It was like that scene from Aliens.  Out of the Goddamn Walls indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ycDWywGls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ycDWywGls)

New Playthrough, New Deathtrap in the making.  Currently the spikes and 2 squads hold off the Goblins, keeping food to a minimum so no Mants yet and I'm being hugely fucking careful of tunnels, so no beetles.  Also, putting torches everywhere just in case.

It's interesting that you can potentially 'cheat' by realizing 3 things :

1 - You never ever need to plant any trees.  Ever.
2 - You don't need any farms beyond wheat farms.  Ever.
3 - Getting a Jewelcrafter and Gemshop up quickly means you hardly ever have to do any actual mining except for gems either.

All odd little things that involve the most powerful part of the game (and quite broken, I think) that is the Market Stall.  By making statuettes with the Bonecrafter and Stonedude and the occasional Gemmed Ring, you will be able to buy everything you'd ever need.  When you have 3 pastures with Emus, Alpacas and Yaks, you will have all the eggs, milk and sausages to make constant Sausage or Cheese omelets.  You will also never have to harvest cotton since wool will drop like rain.

The Market chap will come around selling wood and ore and anything else you might need and when you get your second town, it's likely it'll be a logging town and that's you sorted for wood.  For ever.  You can summon the shop dudes almost constantly, so you're only limited by the raw bartering shit you can make.

You can also use multiple Tinker Benches to zoom through the technology in the game and get straight to the 'Ten Drop Of Death' and if you have it all setup, you don't even need to wall off shit except a small patch of land that will host 6 5x5 wheat farms and 3 10x10 pastures.  Make a separate entrance to the second level that filters the baddies down and switch on that floor trap.

Just remember to fucking switch it off when the ambassador or the merchants come because it's funny when they fall to their death, but not if you're about to run out of supplies.  

Using this method, you can pretty much gear up your chaps with some nice armor and weapons and then start delving depths properly.  All I would say is make sure that the way down to the deeps is similarly trapped with Blades and Spikes or the Aliens will GET You.

It's an excellent game, but as ever once you've found an optimal path, you wonder at the usefulness of some of the other stuff.  I still have no idea why anyone would make a Kiln, beyond the ceramic tiles that make things pretty and put the KV up....

But I've been wrong before.  A lot.

Nope, you are correct.  Once you have the death trap running, goblin loot is also easy merchant fodder since you can insult your way to huge amounts of it very quickly.

That is the flaw with this game as compared to DF, I think: you can get to a point where you basically "win".  It's very fun getting to that point, though, so it's not a fatal flaw.

No argument from me.  I've lost a substantial portion of my life to it recently and the 3 fallen kingdoms have been like losing relatives.

Not close relatives, more aunts you didn't like but gave you pressies every now and again.  But still heartbreaking to see them...er...decapitated.

The metaphors not working, is it ?

It is not. No.

Oh!  Really important mining safety tip.  You can bind a key to "show darkness" (it's unbound by default but HUGELY USEFUL).  When you press it, areas that are "dark" (i.e. will spawn zombies and beetles and stuff if you're below -7 depth) are shown with a red floor.  This lets you know where torches need to go.  Only dark squares at the correct depth with a path to your dudes will spawn monsters, so light your own tunnels and don't break through into any natural caverns and you're completely safe.

I totally understood the familial decapitation metaphor, btw.  Must be a Tudor bloodline thing.   :why_so_serious:

You mentioned that (I think it was you) and it WAS a great tip.  Been using it. 

Just to let people know :

This is actually a LOT easier than it looks.  Basically, find an area next to a river or water (more squares for more square foot).  Now dig your farm 'shape' next to it, leaving one wall thickness at one point of the proposed farm.  Makes SURE that all the underground tiles are sheltered from the sun (ie, with a roof ABOVE them, or a whole wall and roof.)  You need to keep your soil moist and the Sunnsss, it burnssss usss precious.

One you do this, select the 'Dig Hole' option at your one wall bottleneck.  Watch the water flood in.  As soon as it's touched all the areas you want to farm, use the 'fill hole' to turn the water off.  Once the water drains a little, you have mud and if you've bought mushroom seeds from the merchant, you can plant them merrily away on the mushroom farm you designate.

I've seen people who've made mechanical walls and levels to re-flood things, but I've never ever seen the need.  Once a tile is moist, it doesn't dry out no matter how much you farm.  It's only the sun that bothers it.  So make all the mushroom tea you want.  Mushrooms also seem to grow quite fast, though I've found them fairly useless myself.

In other news, you can actually run windmills underground in a strange bug - as long as it has a one floor clearance above it, it'll apparently run.  Who the fuck knows how that works.  Wind through the tunnels or summat, I guess.

Well, that escalated quickly;

Lost another Kingdom, which was actually quite advanced and was Rich as Hell and had some great works being built and was about to Own the Universe.

"But How So ?"  You ask.

I don't really know if it's a bug or something, but apparently I left a small area untorched.  This allowed a Single Zombie to spawn.  This fucking guy, let's call him Patient Zero, decided to bite a passing Miner and managed in a single hit to tear out throat.  At the time I was dealing with a Goblin incursion;  and when I say 'dealing with' I was watching them fall ten floors to their death like lemmings while laughing hilariously.

So Patient Zero gets joined by Gnome McThroatRip as he gets up and shambles towards the next fucking asshole who's come to mine that wall unarmed.  And then again.  All the while I'm getting coffee and dealing with Elena making MORE FUCKING HUNTERS on WoW.

I get back and before I can say 'DYING TO GET IN CHORAL', I notice that there's a fucking plague of eight zombies EATING ALL MY FUCKING DUDES.  What was surprising is how well the Zombie Gnomes fared against my platemail wearing fuckers, hence my accusations of bugs or something.  It was almost like they came to life the same 'level' as the chaps who died, including hidden equipment.  The whole fucking dungeon, shuffling and moaning.  It was worse than the Beetles escapade.

Kingdom Falls, curtain goes down, Lauri gets shot, divers alarums.

Damn this fucking game.  It's too good.

That sounds very logical and truly fucking evil.

Yes, I lost an early kingdom that way -- I think it was before I figured out how the spawning mechanics work.  I learned subsequently that if you get a zombie infection, you want to strip the patient of their equipment at the very least so that if they reanimate they aren't armed to the teeth.  Once you have ninja zombies carrying swords it's all over.

I had one zombie infection in the Land of Sneers, which I spotted early and dealt with by putting the patient in a special "quarantine" squad with no uniform and assigning her to patrol duty outside the wall.  She ended up reanimating and charging in, where the real guard squad took her down without further incident (I think it was actually the gnome they call Ironwood who dealt the killing blow).

This was a fun read, thanks!  I don't know if I will ever play this game. I'll probably buy it at least.  But now I'm off to play Minecraft with visions of death labyrinths and fall traps and such. Oh, and I was wondering why you didn't have similar defensive stop gaps set up behind the miners, in case they did dig too deep.

The mechanical defensive setup isn't selective, so it needs to be manually switched off in order for gnomes to get through.  That's pretty rare at the kingdom borders since none of my gnomes have a reason to go out there for the most part, but miners are going back and forth between the tunnels and the "safe" areas all the time.

Self-powered floor traps are selective, but they provide a negligible amount of stopping power compared to a gnome in steel armor.  Once I started digging into unsafe areas I just had multiple squads of fully outfitted gnomes standing at the "border" and nothing that spawned underground came even close to getting past them.  (They still would have had trouble with a goblin attack force just due to sheer numbers -- a thousand goblins can pile into a single square to attack one guy, and no matter how tough you are, if you have a thousand goblins attacking, well, 50 of them are going to roll natural twenties.)

Yeah, I was thinking more an emergency barrier that would be always open except when something unexpected shows up like that zombie that infected Ironwood's kingdom and someone upstairs hits the switch to cut off the losses, sorry bout those guys on the wrong side of the door when it closes! :grin:

I guess once you have the gomepower, resources, and time to build something effective though you may already be past the most dangerous early exploration phases and it's easier to just plug the hole with the army by then, and they can move further in as the dig progresses!

In a pinch you can also close a hole by just putting up a dirt wall, deconstructing a stairway, etc.   :awesome_for_real:  If you're just trying to seal off a breach that's eighty floors down, you've got plenty of time for that.

An alternative could be to set up a death trap mechanism outside your Great Hall, use an alarm bell to pull everyone in there if you've gotten in over your head, activate the death trap once all the gnomes are in (to splat any zombies/beetles/etc trying to get at them -- hope the gnomes all make it in before the monsters do), and deactivate the trap before sounding the all clear and letting the gnomes back out.

NO.  YOU DON'T.  DON'T BELIEVE HIS LIES.

DRUMS IN THE DEEP.

Apparently a lot of updates for this.  Anyone played em recently ?

I must have stopped playing right before the second to last update, because they added thresholds to stockpiles then and I know I used to manage that just by constraining the physical size of the stockpile and how many crates I put in it. 

Prosthetic limbs sound interesting.  I'm tempted to fire up my old save and try to turn you into the Six Million Dollar Gnome.

Automatons too !

Going round again on this one.  They seem to have changed the combat a little and the tinker rate, because it's all  much much harder than I remember.

I have quite a few Gnomes with missing limbs, but not researched Stark Armor yet, so I'm kinda eager for that to happen.

The Prosthetics stuff is actually wondrous and really useful, but oddly, it's one of the last things you research so by the time you get it, you should have armored up your gnomes so much that you will rarely need it.  Having a gnome limping around pathetically almost from the first goblin attack finally get new legs and be zipping about was a sight to see tho.  Shame it was a female or she'd be renamed to Dan or something.

I also have the automatons researched but as yet haven't seen a single golem, despite all my dirty, dirty piles.

Also, the current map has some utterly huge caverns under me, so I expect to get zombie Beetle swarmed any day now.

How do automatons work?  Do you have to have a wild golem and tame it somehow?

IIRC golems only spawn in the dark, so make sure you're leaving those dirty piles somewhere unlit.  Make sure your golem spawning chamber is near the surface if you don't want it spawning beetles and undead too.   :awesome_for_real:

No, you kick seven types of shit out of normal golems and about one in every five will drop a golem core, which can be used to create and automaton.

Still no joy, but if it truly has to be dark, then I've fucked it up big style.  They can spawn in stockpiles now too, so I might make a pile between level 1-7 in the dark and see what I can get....

Other games took over for a while, but I must get back to it.  I want a Robot City.

The way I got them in my game was digging lots of dirt outside (flattening a terrace for farming or something like that) and not stockpiling it because all my haulers were busy elsewhere.  Since I didn't bother lighting the outside (since nothing spawns out there normally), at night it got dark and the dirt turned into a dirt golem.  I also got rock golems once or twice when mining tunnels out if there was a delay getting the torches installed.  Luckily golems are complete pushovers.

AND IT IS ON.  GIVE MY CREATION LIFE.

So, he's basically a Gnome with fuel in him.  It's kinda fun.  I've called him Data.

Because.

Are there any benefits over fleshy gnomes, like not needing sleep, or fuel being easier to produce than food?

Well, yes and yes, I guess.  But he takes a lot of armor plate so he's expensive. Mine cost two grand. Also repairs are said to be expensive. Also it s hard to get cores.   But one wood makes a coal so food is easier.

Ok, that's rather cool.  Robbie got the shit kicked out of him and died, but his Core is just sitting there.  I have a new tab called 'Rebuild Automaton', which allows me to slap some more metal around this core and bring Robbie back to life.

Word.

But can you make him better than he was before?

Oh Susan.  Oh Susan No.  No, Susan, No.

SUSSSAAAANNNNNNNN

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1411632/Susan.JPG)

How many more gnomes did zombie Susan take down?   :vv:

None that time, tho she infected another 5 that are just waiting to pop.  Bit of background;  apart from Charles, she was the only survivor from the original bunch and she had over 300 tinkering due to basically getting the whole mechanism of the place running single handed.

But that was all done, so I gave her full steel armor and a chib and, lo and behold, she swapped it out with some other less deserving sod and got herself killed like a bitch.  I mean, she went down harder than Lori.

Damn.  Only Charles from the original squad, with his unbeatable bronze sword Twistjoker.

I love this game.

I'm trying to think if you can set up a uniform that requires a particular quality level so that you could potentially avoid that by saying that veteran gnomes only wear steel armor.  You'd need to tell the rookies specifically NOT to wear the steel, I guess, otherwise they'll snatch it up first and they're not going to give it up just because somebody else wants it more.

You can do that from the Uniform Tab.

The trouble is, it's a MAJOR pain in the dick...

You can, for example, make a Uniform called 'Charles'.  You can then make a profession called 'Charles' with the right skills and assign the Charles Uniform.  Then, finally, you can make Charles the Profession Charles and tada.

Alas, FUCK THAT.

btw...fuck bears.

Ok so in regards to Gnomes going idle.

Professions are set. When I set some trees to be felled they all suddenly went active and helped haul in the wood and shit. Then went back to idling.

I have a squad training, only 1 of them is doing it, the other 4 are sleeping or idling in the main hall.

I have materials, tasks, professions etc set. WTF???

Are there any good mods that can help you see what tasks are active/see where bottlenecks are?

Never seen any mods myself, though I could imagine some that might be handy.

Idling Gnomes mean they are set not to do anything or they can't do anything.  What is it that you want them to do ?

For example, if you setup a new Farm plot and plant some things that you know you have seeds for, do the Gnomes set to farmer status get up off asses ?

Usually for me, I forget that I don't have proper stone right at the start and then I watch 8 Gnomes jerking off because they can't make a fucking chisel.  What state are your gnomes in ?  Do they have proper paths to get to where you want them to go ?

Sounds to me like you're just missing 'something' especially given that tree fellers went felling trees when told to.

(Another thing you could try is setting one gnome to ALL professions and see what he does...)

Put in a small mining job. Set idle gnomes to mine. They won't touch it.
Clean a couple of corpses up? Won't do it.
Food, drink. Wont do it.
etc etc etc.

This is truly frustrating.

Also wondering what's the deal with weapons. Have a stockpile of various weapons. Have uniform set to be anything and some gnomes won't pick up shit.

GAAARGH.

Hmm... The weapons thing might be a quality issue, I don't think they can use worn equipment (like, equipment scavenged off of dead goblins).  You just smelt that down to get slivers and then make proper weapons out of it.

As for gnomes going idle, I'm not sure.  If they're all in the militia, there are a number of things that can cause it, like ringing the alarm bell and never sounding an "all clear".  I've heard that a bug can cause gnomes who can't find a uniform to idle, but that was an old one so probably fixed.

If they're not in the militia, I'd say it's usually down to either basic needs not being met (hunger, thirst, etc.) a lack of tools (need pickaxes if they're mining) or pathing problems (accidentally deleted a critical ramp or something).

Reading around I heard about a bug in a pirate version that can be solved by putting some tables and chairs in the great hall, so might want to try that?  Otherwise, I dunno.

I have tables and chairs. No pathing problems. Ill try removing them from squad. I dont have an alarm?

This is not a Radicalthon post per se, but it looks like the gnomes have sneaked out of Early Access as of yesterday, Feb 23 (http://store.steampowered.com/app/224500/).

Oooo.  Looks like they have a few mods now too?

What kind of mods Precious ?