thesassymarquess

[thesassymarquess]

how to create the worst edible of all time:

[thesassymarquess]

only thing that comes to mind today.

[thesassymarquess]

Gleba

What's this? More Gleba content on my blog that's becoming increasingly Factorio focused?

Yes. Today we're focusing on everyone's favorite Gleba intermediary BIOFLUX. I've been working on some new designs for it for my MP game. We're hitting the late game and my previous base with around 90 SPM isn't cutting it anymore. We're routinely having Lime Science as our bottleneck, and it's not helped that every shipment of bioflux out stalls our science production. So I've been looking into creating a new build for producing bioflux in mass, with attention being paid to late-game technologies. So I am designing with consideration for beacons, modules, & stack inserters (though these designs feature none of them. Instead I try to get the basics down, so they can be upgraded with quality, surrounded by beacons, & have stack inserters placed in as well). Since I've gone to the trouble of designing 2/3 of my planned layouts (I had a third layout, which I've decided to abandon in favor of testing the other two).

So with the idea that we want this to be a late game build, we're running with a few constraints and other considerations.

No Quality

Bioflux here is being produced primarily for export. As biter spawners don't benefit from quality bioflux, it's not worth complicating the build for, or trading off the below point.

Maximize freshness

We want to maximize the viable time of the bioflux on Nauvis. Easiest way to do that is to maximize freshness, and have a good spaceship (Which... is a different topic altogether. Perhaps a post for another day).

Space for Beacons

I want there to be space for at least a beacon for every single machine. We're beginning to regularly roll out fairly decent quality modules of the speed/prod variety, and I'm planning on building a much larger Gleba, so using modules is on the board. Plus my current issue with power on Gleba is actually having too much chemical fuel, and not enough usage, as my heating towers are throttled for better efficiency... so I have spoilage backups. Weird problem to say "I have too much power" but I do.

Shoots for the Bioflux ratio of 6 bioflux -> 5 Yumako Mash & 2 Jellynut chambers

The ratio is honestly kinda awkward at first, trying to figure out a good way to lay it all out, but I realized after a bit there were some decent layouts possible.

Fits within a robo-port grid

Fairly self-explanatory goal. I like having my roboports laid out in a perfect square grid. If I can fit the build within that, even better

With that in mind, I'll move to the designs. I'm testing them on a Nauvis sandbox (because the sandbox puts you on Nauvis by default

The first module. I found it has some of the worst space efficiency, I can't evenly put beacons around most of it in a tilable manner, and then I realized I'd have to braid belts in for the yumako, bioflux, & spoilage unless I wanted to have a 5-item belt monstrosity... So it's either a triple-braid, a rotting sushi-belt, or the design gets canned. Admittedly, a triple braid is manageable, and could be worked in such a way to hit the machines in the right order I believe, but... the final nail in the coffin here is a weird one... I don't want to belt jelly if I can avoid it. So those things altogether made me decide the design was best stopped here. I chose to share it, as it's the only design that most of it can be used with an 8-8 beacon array. It might be a good starting point for a different design for someone else.

Despite the name indicating this is the B module, this was the third module designed. It got its name from its placement between module A and C during my initial designs, while I was searching for a placement method I could use to place the biochambers such that every chamber was adjacent to the biochambers needed in the production line. I'm using infinity chests to test that all chambers fire up correctly with no downtime while running, and then run the bioflux through a steel chest before into another infinity chest to delete them. That lets me get a look at the freshness of the outgoing bioflux, and I can get a rough idea of which design is "fresher". Now earlier I mentioned that beacons are a priority for these designs, and I didn't abandon that principle. Instead, what I realized would work best would be to run pairs of beacons in the center of the yumakos, on either side of the central inserter. There should be enough space to fit a single beacon (Unfortunately I can only fit one beacon in there, there's no way for a second beacon to reach the center chamber). Another note on this design, is that it's tileable, so it can be connected front or back. It's main pitfalls are the belt-braiding (I tried a mixed belt, it didn't work well), and the low number of beacons that can affect the center. Finally, I'll give the freshness rating, which came in at a nice 96% freshness (We use fresh fruit spawned in infinity chests, they don't begin rotting until the inserters pick them up and put them on the entry belts. I ran this while the other I worked on the other designs before adding the freshness counters. So the system was already "Hot")

I also flushed the design by stopping fruit coming in, and then later restarting it, to see if it could clean itself out, and recover from a stall. I think this is the better design, even though it doesn't have nutrient production, as nutrients are fine to be wasted in my eyes, are easy to mass-produce, and a base without flowing nutrients has bigger problems generally. I originally wanted it to be nutrient independent, and capable of restarting itself, but I'll likely just have to make the nutrient production contain a nutrient-rebooter. And... considering this is for biter eggs, it's not impossible I might decide to start shipping eggs over for overgrowth production, and using them as a primary nutrient source...

Finally is module C. So this module uses a jelly belt again, but it's a lot tighter in build than Module A. Also due to the positioning of the biochambers, it's possible to use a 4-4 beacon setup with it as well. However... I've decided that if this module ends up in my base, it's either going to be for nutrient rebooting. If you look at the top row, the belts are placed at distances where yellow would work, but I found that they both require red-belt levels of throughput to keep up with the jelly & bioflux productions. In fact, the Jelly production needs at least a blue-belt, and I think actually needs a green belt to *actually* work right. That's because each biochamber outputs 12 jelly per second, and together that 24 overwhelms the 22.5 items per second of a single express belt by just a small bit. Scaled up with a 4-4 beacon setup with legendary modules, beacons, & biochambers, I think it might overwhelm the throughput of a stacked turbo belt. I didn't move to test these in legendary form admittedly, because once I got both designs working, I watched them run and waited to see if flaws began to show up. And for this build, they did. I had to rearrange the spoilage out a few times, noticed the last two bioflux chambers weren't running, which again have stalled, this time due to no Yumako. They've been routinely having problems getting sufficient yumako mash or jelly. And then they had an output issue. Ultimately I came to the conclusion if the build was struggling at common quality with no beacons, it'd perform worse with beacons & modules & quality, and there's a chance stack inserters would not be enough to save it. Finally, there's the freshness results. This build had a lot more variability in it. It stabalized around 95% freshness, but had drops down to 80% which is likely due to the input starved machines.

[thesassymarquess]

Figured with all the talking about how Sushi I did recently, I should share this sushi mall design I made. It relies on using smart inserters with a read all belt to maintain the correct quantities of items. I tried to design it to be easy to use, but I haven't used this design myself (I use a modified version mixed with my Smart Mall control for a Space Mall for White & (Dark) Black science. I might share my ships if there's a demand for them

[thesassymarquess]

Factorio’s Module Problem

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it’s been an issue that’s bugged me arguably from the day I started playing Factorio. It’s the Efficiency Module. Specifically Efficiency Modules 2 & 3.

I’ve been thinking about this in no small part due to the fact in my MP save, we decided that each planet should specialize in their respective modules, and as the Gleba player that means I’m in charge of 2 modules, Productivity on Nauvis & Efficiency on Gleba. I’ve got both set up churning out a decent number of them, and upcycling the lower quality ones, at least for Prod mods, I’m waiting on a shipment of quality modules to start it on Gleba.

Which brings me to my issue. I don’t really like efficiency modules, I never have, and as the player with the most experience, my group follows my lead in this kinda thing.

When I first started playing Factorio, I believe the modules had only just been added an update or two ago, and I didn’t frequently use them. I tried with all three, and ended up sticking to Prods & Efficiency modules at first. But then I realized I didn’t care about pollution, so efficiency modules were only good at saving power, and I could just scale that up and ignore the pollution still. This was before nuclear OR flamethrowers, so my defenses were entirely laser turrets and solar. I’d just expand my solar grid since I cleared a large space & scale up.

I took a much longer time to warm up to the speed module, having to do the math and learn that while it increases the power cost to run the machine, the time saved reduces the electricity cost per item… from that moment on I was a believer in the Prod/Speed combo, especially after I saw how compact a Prod 3/Speed 3 Furnace stack was.

This left me only ever making efficiency modules for power armor. I did recognize the pollution reducing benefits of the module, but once you unlock flamethrowers and set them up as defenses, I found pollution management to be irrelevant. Flamethrowers will take care of even behemoths decently enough without any space science research, and by the time they show up (I actually hadn’t seen a behemoth before playing Space Age, and I’ve beaten the game a few times) I’ve already established all the sciences available in the base game.

So ultimately I find their usage… lackluster. But it gets worse, because it’s not just their usage I have to consider that they’re competing for a module slot. And that’s against a Speed & a Prod mod and both are good. Let alone in the base game, I can make the competing modules for the same price, so I usually have to consider which to craft before I’m even at that point.

But I should amend that I think the Efficiency Module 1 is actually good. When it comes into the game it provides a decent power reduction, is fairly cheap, and most players don’t have bases ready to handle the downsides of the other 2 modules.

So now with that out of the way, I’ll mention how they fair in Space Age: Poorly. Ironically despite the fact that the T3 mods have different costs now and the T3 Efficiency mod is the cheapest now (taking 10 spoilage in addition to the standard 5 blue, 5 red, and 4 of the T2 module), it still doesn’t hold up well. Like the Speed/Prod combo is broken because now it’s more viable to look at either Quality only, Prod/Quality, or Speed/Quality, and I think this is awesome that it isn’t straightforward what modules to combine and how anymore, but… efficiency is rarely the answer now. It still shines in reducing pollution on Nauvis, has a new role in reducing nutrient consumption on Gleba, and the power reduction can still be useful in a few places, but… 4/5 planets have power production mostly unchained from their pollution mechanic (Gleba pollution comes from farming mostly, very little is needed to produce significant power) and the last place is Space, which is a great place for the t1 modules, but… T2 & T3 you’re likely to be looking at foundries if it’s going to Aquilo & you’ll need nuclear or better anyways at that point, so power is less an issue than making sure it’s fast enough for ammo production, which… puts another win to speed modules here, because they’re better for churning out more in a smaller area, which is what you want there. Yeah, you do want to reduce power usage, but if you’ve got a reactor you’ve got 5.8 MW of power per turbine to play with, and a minimum of 40MW of heat too. This gets worse if you use quality reactors OR Fusion reactors, as the power density increases a LOT. The smallest fusion reactor build puts out 50 MW of power.

So… the real reason for this post though, is this. I felt something was off in the scaling of the efficiency module, and I realized what it is. It scales differently from all the other modules, which (with one exception) scale all the same.

Prod mods go 4% to 6% to 10% (1, 1.5, 2.5)

Speed mods go 20% to 30% to 50% (1, 1.5, 2.5)

Quality mods go 1% to 2% to 2.5% (1, 2, 2.5)

So those three (with the exception of the Quality 2 mod) all scale the EXACT same for their upside.

Efficiency mods go 30% to 40% to 50% (1, 1.33, 1.66)

If they followed the same ratio, Efficiency mods would have either 30% -> 45% -> 75% or 30% -> 60% -> 75%. Which might be enough to justify making them. Even that though… I’m not sure if it’s enough, as they STILL have to compete against the other mods because there’s only so many slots, and power is one of the easier things to scale up, rather than mines or a build itself.

I just wish there was MORE of a reason to use the T2/T3 efficiency modules. They’re basically useless as far as I can tell since they’re weak and by the time you get them, they help with a downside that’s much easier to just deal with instead.

[thesassymarquess]

[thesassymarquess]

Gotta state that according to US flag code, you DO NOT burn the flag if it touches the ground. You only burn the flag if it is soiled or damaged beyond repair, it needs to be done by an authorized organization (there are three afaik, AND THE CUB SCOUTS ARE NOT ONE. Boy Scouts (older demographic) is though), and that the burning is a special ceremony called a retirement. If you drop the flag, you just pick it back up, and brush off the dirt. Like a five second rule.

Like that whole “Burn the flag if it touches the ground” thing is an urban myth and ironically can be disproven by looking at official federal regulations published online. I’m not saying I don’t believe this story, I believe people have enough misconceptions to believe this is true, as I ALSO heard this in American Cub Scouts.

The flag isn’t machine washable, but from what I understand that’s for respect rather than a concern of physical integrity.

[thesassymarquess]

Gleba

And how I learned to love the spoilage.

I feel I should preface this by saying that I love Gleba. I find it to be the most challenging planet in the expansion, and the second-most challenging aspect. I only find Space Platforms harder, and with that it's specifically going to the shattered planet, and that's probably because my platform is too small.

Starting with my first Gleba I landed on, we'll go over how I tamed the fungal ball we call this planet. This is technically what I call my "second" base on Gleba, but the first base was built in the same place, with the same towers and such. It was basically just replaced with the new base, which then had 2-3 revisions done as well.

Starting with my farms, you can see I've put some significant investment into their defenses. On this Gleba, which was my first Gleba, I put a lot of focus in trying to squeeze as much production out of a single tower as possible. The tower itself is circuit controlled, using a connection between the outgoing belt, the incoming inserter and the tower itself. The tower turns off if it has no seeds, the inserter only puts seeds in if the quantity of fruit on the outgoing belt drops below 300 or so. This is the same for both the Yumako and Jellynut production lines. This helps stop overproduction of each fruit, and tries to keep the fruit roughly as fresh as possible, without causing the main base to stall at all.

So here is the initial lazy river of a base. The outer white belt is a nutrient belt, traveling around the entire place. This aspect has had the least revisions made to it. Top to bottom, left to right, each "loop" contains one set of biochambers, generally to make multiple items out of different qualities, starting with Jellynut processing. Next is bioflux to nutrients, iron bacteria, copper bacteria, sulfur, carbon, and then legendary carbon. Along the bottom is Yumako processing, Bioflux, Plastic, Carbon Fiber, Rocket Fuel, Eggs, and Lime Science.

The recyclers are to produce higher quality bioflux for science production (The base uses rare quality eggs/science), and my spoilage upcycling area. I'm planning on massively scaling up the spoilage upcycling at some point, but I lack the biochambers right now.

Here's a closer look at Science production. Since this was originally built for rare-quality science, it's had to have epic & legendary retrofitted into it. I do think if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably not set science up as rare... but I'm still looking into actually setting up an upcycler for high quality lime science, since it's actually pretty easy. The biochambers are set up to only allow eggs to be added if we already have bioflux in the chambers, this prevents eggs from staying in any chamber other than the egg reproduction lines. Note the absence of turrets in this area. While I've had accidents previously (note that this area currently ISN'T running, as the eggs hatched and I haven't replaced them yet), the only problems with destruction I've had inside the base, was when some stompers tried to build a new egg raft by the power plant...

Here's the production lines for LDS & Processing units, including an upcycler, and a Legendary LDS crafter (Sending to Nauvis for high quality space parts). The ammo production lines are also here.

Finally the power plant and mall. The mall does include a biochamber crafter, a lube biochamber & soil assemblers. The heating towers have circuit control to only add fuel if a tower drops below a certain temperature, and another one to trigger an emergency fuel supply of rocket fuel (because I had a brownout issue with the prior base). Last time the system went down was because I accidentally disconnected one of the seed lines, and burned all of my Yumako seeds, and I didn't notice until an emergency alarm went off to let me know the power was critical.

Overall, this base served me well enough to complete the game, but has shown its cracks in how it worked, and what its capable of. With what I learned from making it, I designed a much better successor to it, and I'm going to show that off next.

So starting at my farms, I decided to try and maximize the soil usage, rather than the towers. So I build multiple towers with no overlapping coverage, and making sure the towers were built with access on non-farmable (without overgrowth) soil. I'm still on the fence if I want to go overgrowth, but I think I'm just going to build more farms instead, since that seems to work as well, and is much easier. The Jellynut looks very similar, just flipped vertically. Going with a rail network was done to decouple the dependence on the base the old design had. Now I can instead connect up the fruit train with a base needing fruit, and the resupply train with a resupply base. I'm planning on later using this to build several independent bases that specialize in one or more products, and just shipping more stable ingredients around.

The railyard is an absolute nightmare, that I'm GOING to fix, but I was trying to clear that stone patch first, and also I did underestimate the space I needed. Still it proves that an unoptimized solution still works for Gleba because this? Is awful. I genuinely forgot about it until I looked at it... Also now's a great time to mention that the trains are all circuit controlled. So a station sets a request for fruit to send a train out, and the trains go to the farms based off which farm was least recently visited. It's all done through some fun circuitry that wasn't that complex. (Agricultural towers get told to harvest when a train is inbound & station priority is set by how many minutes its been since a train departed the station. So they prefer to visit farms that haven't been visited recently... i.e. ones that should have fully grown trees.)

So I used a similar ordering for the production lines, however, instead of using a flow-through design, I swapped to a dead-end line for everything but bioflux & lime (agricultural) science. I also stopped using quality along the production. Part of it was to simplify the build in the rush to agricultural science (I was playing an MP game, and trying to beat my friend to producing our respective planetary sciences. I was on Gleba, they were on Fulgora. I beat them for science, but lost in exporting... mostly because my first batch went bad before I had a rocket load.) I use similar techniques for handling eggs, and the belt going around the whole base is instead a spoilage belt, both for dumping spoilage onto to remove it from dead ends, and to stockpile for the bootstrapping assemblers to restart the base if something goes horribly wrong (which they have run, but I haven't noticed the base shut down, so they're clearly doing their job right).

So like before, here's the power plant, and it relies on the same system as before, only major change is that I'm using indicator lights to indicate the status of each heating tower. It's cool, and lets me see the system's status at a glance. Likewise, you can see biolubricant and the two soils got moved into the main production line area. I didn't feel like saving that 20 or so jelly at the end of the belt, so it just rots into spoilage (which is primary what the power plant burns. Spoilage, eggs, & rocket fuel).

Lastly the mall is to the north, crafting all the oddities I need, and there's a small processing units & LDS setup built to supply the trains & rockets with whatever they need to keep them going.

A major change I did with this base compared to the prior is utilizing a singular piece of tech I figured out while setting up some stuff on my previous save's Gleba for exporting Bioflux.

So all incoming science gets loaded into this passive provider. It holds roughly 1k science, which is one rocket load. Once it has more than 1k science, the inserter behind it turns on and pulls out the most spoiled science packs. Since they go into a steel chest, they are no longer available to the logistics network, and will never be loaded into a rocket. Likewise, I could change this to stockpile more science before throwing it out for rot, but our base isn't ready to receive that much science just yet. I think if anyone takes anything from this post, they should take this system, as it *will* make sure you have only your freshest science, eggs, or bioflux available for rockets. If you have a freshness problem after setting it up, you don't have a freshness problem, you have a production problem, and need to scale up, which is fairly easy to do, because bioflux, lime science, and eggs are all high-throughput recipes.

Having covered my Glebas, I am considering showing my sushi Aquilo (Fulgora is also a sushi system, but I think it's far less interesting than Aquilo)

[thesassymarquess]

me at the migrants arriving to my fort

[thesassymarquess]

This is interesting coming from a post-expansion perspective. I do feel Space Age in some ways tried to approach this problem, and succeeded in some ways. Ultimately someone else pointed out very well that this isn’t a problem inherent to Factorio. It’s a problem that stems from how humans approach problem solving as a whole. We like to find one-size fits all solutions that we can apply over and over again. Ultimately what the expansion tried to do to solve this problem was to introduce new mechanics to act as new constraints. Spoilage is a constraint, constraining your throughput by time. So is Aquilo’s increase power draw for bots. Likewise Fulgora’s inverted crafting tree and Vulcanus’ lava do force you to rethink how you approach certain problems and they don’t reward a one-size fits all solution. Sure, a bot base WILL WORK for EVERY planet, but…

Spoilage will cause a lot of unnecessary bot work, and bots do NOT take freshness into account, which I think is intentional. Aquilo requires a lot of bots to get anything done in a timely fashion and they drain power like crazy too. Fulgora’s biproducts likewise introduce more jobs for bots. They end up becoming very unscalable on 3 of the worlds, and I think that’s a good thing. Ultimately it won’t stop you from just building huge bot bases on them, but it definitely works to discourage that. Each planet tends to have different optimal solutions, and we’re currently in a time where we’re free to explore those. Admittedly there’s still some of the old problem as the “LDS Shuffle” presents a new endgame homogeneity for solving the Legendary production problem, but something like it would evolve regardless. I admit… I also turned around and went to modded playthroughs after finishing the vanilla game for similar reasons. And I still am doing that, but now it’s less of to explore the fun of the base game, and more to explore new mechanics because I like seeing how people try to create their own challenges for mods. Like I’ve been meaning to do a playthrough of Ultracube myself

there's something kind of amazing about this. that you can take an obviously terrible design approach on purpose as a challenge and then on some level it turns out there's still a one-size-fits-all solution that is... maybe not 'optimal', who knows, but, highly optimised? the whole factory is in large part the same basic building block stamped one time after another. the design constraint prevents the already-existing standard solutions from working but then you find there's a new kind of standard solution, even more uniform.

and on some level you'd think that was an artefact of this run, but no. i've seen this guy's other challenge runs, like the beltless one and the all-burner one. they all end up with 'yeah turns out there's a standard solution i am just going to keep implementing over and over'.

i am reminded of what @definitelynotplanetfall was saying about how the main bus architecture and more broadly the factorio 'meta' of standard arrays for doing things means it's very easy to just take The One Tool That Solves The Problem and implement it and it feels... a bit like drudgery? idk i don't want to put words in their mouth that's the impression i got from what they were saying. and like at the time i pushed back a little because, like, i am having fun playing.

which i am, but. idk. there's something there. it seems easy sometimes to take the tools that simplify your life in this game a little too far and simplify the fun away. but at the same time it's also the case that i hate it when i grow used to a tool and it goes away, like when i started a vanilla playthrough for reasons a while back and noticed how much lacking simple things like module inserter and autodeconstruct was annoying me.

[thesassymarquess]

Factorio Space Age: Gleba

Since I recently reblogged a post about Gleba, I figured I should go into more depth about it. In a week or two when I graduate I’ll go into more detail about it, but I’ve probably spent the most time of the expansion on Gleba, exploring things like Quality, the circuit network changes, and sushi belts. I admit some of the tech I learned on Gleba ended up being essential for a later rebuild of Fulgora & stuff I learned on space platforms went to Aquilo, and then what I learned there got brought back to space.

Regardless I figured I could share some of the overall lessons I learned on Gleba & beyond during the DLC that helped me “master” Gleba.

-Identifying where spoilage & freshness matters

There’s a total of about 13 items that can spoil, and they spoil into one of six things: iron and copper ores, spoilage, and enemies. As you want iron/copper ores, we can ignore spoilage here, they become the thing you want typically so except in the production loop, this is a good thing. For spoilage, it’s an item, and you should generally assume anything that stores a spoilable item in it, is going to at some point have spoilage in it, and it will need to be removed. EVERYTHING, including things like biolabs. Lastly enemies, they don’t leave behind items so you don’t need to clean out the machines, but you probably don’t want them wandering around, so you likely want some defense to kill them if they show up. They can wreck havoc on things like space platforms or power plants if they get there, but generally they’re more a nuisance than a threat, so long as you don’t let a massive amount spoil at once… (Most I did was let 100 biter eggs spoil in a chest surrounded by lasers. Didn’t even notice it happened).

So clean up spoilage, and handle “Hazmats” (eggs & spawners) with military or disposal methods (pentapod eggs can be burned & biter eggs mulched into nutrients). Another tip for the Hazmats is to not store them in chests unless necessary (rocket silo loading), and to not put them in assemblers/biochambers unless they are the only missing item. I seriously recommend setting agricultural egg inserters to hand size 1 & to only insert if they have bioflux. (Wire the biochamber to the inserter, use read contents & enable/disable). It might slow down your science slightly but it does make it so you don’t need turrets by the science area.

Spoilage itself can be easily disposed of by either converting it inefficiently into nutrients, or burning it in a heating tower. Personally I use nutrient crafting as a spoilage upcycling system to produce high quality spoilage for efficiency modules, or high quality carbon for coal synthesis w/ asteroid mining for the matching sulfur. (I.e it’s a supplement for Legendary plastic for red circuits and LDS shuffling…)

As for where freshness matters, it actually only matters in a few places. Not all recipes do actually inherit their freshness from their parents (bacteria & pentapod eggs are top of my mind, but I think Fish also don’t), nor does freshness matter if the finished product isn’t spoilable. Ultimately freshness only really matters in the items directly connected to lime (agricultural) science as it’s the ONLY item in game that freshness impacts how useful it is. 5% fresh bioflux will feed a biter nest, as will 5% nutrients a biochamber & so on. Freshness only really matters if you need to move something or if it’s for lime science. So generally with that in mind you can send all your near rotten fruit and other spoilables for producing things like ore, rocket fuel, plastic, lubricant, sulfur or carbon fiber.

Another key idea is “shelf-stability”. You generally want to move raw fruit, bioflux & lime science around because they have long shelf lives. You don’t want to move jelly, mash, or nutrients around because of their short shelf life. It’s much easier to move jellynut, yumako, or bioflux instead and all of them are more space efficient to move as well.

-The Spores, Simplicity, & Quality triad

From what I found it is impossible to create a base that is simple, spore-efficient, & produces quality. At best you can do two, and I suspect it is genuinely impossible to do all three because of how they interact.

So I suppose I should define what I mean by these things. Spore efficiency is basically a measure of how much of the fruit products you make turn into spoilage. A more spore efficient base has less products rot. Why? Because the less products that rot, by definition, the more of your harvest WAS used for production rather than was wasted. While spoilage has its own uses, it isn’t ideal for most production in your base, unless you plan on mass producing only coal. Simplicity is how much of a headache setting everything up is. The more circuit conditions, belt priority shenanigans, and other complexities in the build, the less simple it is. And quality production, I mean large scale quality production, which usually relies on inter-step processing to roll up the products.

But wait you might be asking yourself, this implies it’s possible to build a quality base that’s easy without it being a major headache? Yes! Quality lime science is arguably one of the easiest sciences to produce in quality, only truly rivaled by the easy of quality space science in the late game! My first rocket silo of lime science was 1k rare science. This is because pentapod eggs are a catalytic recipe that can take quality modules, and so rolling up a high quality egg once is super easy, and then you just need to keep feeding it with high quality nutrients… which comes from bioflux, the other item you want to raise in quality! And you can even use a spoilage upcycler to supplement this to prevent the eggs from going off. I’ll show off a surprisingly easy to design base for producing rare quality science in the early Gleba game sometime later when I show off some Gleba designs.

However I do need to point out that the triad does inherently conflict. Trying to reduce spoilage amounts by simply reducing fruit in caused quality to stall. Trying to get quality up again caused it to become more complex, making a newer less-complex design required me to gut quality… you have to decide WHAT you value going in.

So for my MP base I decided I would cut quality, and focus on spore efficiency, as I wanted to produce the most science with the least spores, as I couldn’t rely on Tesla Turrets from Fulgora to protect me.

-Spore efficiency maximization

One of the best ways to actually improve spore efficiency is to start at the fruit production itself. Every second a raw fruit is waiting around, it is getting one step closer to rotting. Why harvest if you don’t need to? Keeping planting going without harvesting is simple if you keep in mind that agricultural towers prefer to plant first, then harvest. So if you wire the tower to anything, and set it to output inventory & only work when seeds > 0, it will only work when it has seeds in it, and will prefer planting first. Which means it will only harvest if there are no plantable spots and you put seeds in. Which means you can control harvesting by controlling when an inserter loads seeds in. So have the inserter only put seeds in when you need more fruit (you can use a circuit condition, like fruit less than 50 (one harvest) to determine when to start a harvest and load seeds in one at a time, if this is your only condition, you’ll probably produce 2-4 stacks at a time depending on your inserters).

Likewise… if you control when you process the raw fruit into jelly/mash then you can again further reduce spoilage. You can use a similar method to the harvest, but by turning off the biochambers for those lines. This reduces fruit usage, which will decrease tower usage & spore output… yet since you only produce the jelly/mash when needed, the assembly line shouldn’t actually slow down. What might happen though is that your power production dips because you’re not burning as much spoilage.

Well that’s a very easy fix. Gleba has the CHEAPEST rocket fuel recipe in the game, especially if you look at the fuel values of its ingredients. It is the ONLY power positive rocket fuel recipe in the game without productivity, and it has a default 50% bonus to it too! Literally no other rocket fuel recipe can get that bonus except the base recipe which requires exported biochambers to Nauvis! (Or Fulgora technically, but why would you do that? Oil is free there) Which is its own nightmare. So you can actually just burn rocket fuel for power in a heating tower! Which has a 250% fuel efficiency, meaning 100 Mj of chemical energy (one rocket fuel) becomes 250 MJ of electrical power! Excluding startup costs for the heating towers.

Well I’d recommend against burning all your rocket fuel because that’d just gobble it all up, but what you can do is measure the temperatures of your heating towers, and if they drop below a certain threshold (I recommend at least 600 degrees) to feed in rocket fuel.

Since I hooked up this failsafe to my power plant the only blackout I had was when I accidentally burned all my yumako seeds and stalled the entire factory, and it took almost an hour for it to begin to get close to a brownout, and it hadn’t when I found out the problem (I had an alarm if the power plant went critically cold (all towers below 600 degrees), so I could intervene before power goes out)

How you decide to reduce spoilage from here is up to you. I decided on my second run to just dead end belts and extract spoilage rather than run them all to the incinerator, so that lines could just pull half rotted mash/jelly for things like lube and ore. Only bioflux has a flowthrough section, and I overbuilt lime science & eggs so it never backs up there either (I’d much rather have rotting lime science than make half rotten lime science)

-Finally… solving the “How do I load my freshest items into a rocket?”

This is much easier than people think. It takes 2 chests, a logistics provider of some flavor (I use red) & a steel chest (wood/iron would work too). I then place the chests a tile apart, and have the inserter wired to the logistics chest. It’s set that if I have more than my desired storage amount (usually one rocket’s worth, sometimes two rockets) it grabs the MOST SPOILED item from the provider and puts it into the steel chest. This removes the item from the logistics network (and the rocket silo therefore) which will turn the inserter back off if the chest no longer has more than enough for the rocket launches requested & reduces the average spoil time of the chest. This is key. The individual items are still spoiling, I’m not managing to magically remove spoilage, but I am reducing the average spoil amount. When a rocket comes, it takes the items from the provider chest and it will gradually fill up again. Since only the freshest 1k items are typically available, this means I always load the freshest items I have. I could then feed in some items back from that “rotting chest” if I wanted to, but I find it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and I’d rather just produce a fresh 1k usually… I might play around with feeding it back in, but I only do this with science… extracted bioflux in this system gets fed into production elsewhere, instead of into a secondary chest. The whole point of the chest was just to act as a large storage vessel for composing science to spoilage.

Anyways, as someone who actually liked Gleba I talked about everything I can without getting into the specifics of like… how to build Gleba with bots, belts or trains… which I would love to cover at some point, because I do think there are too many content creators out there that don’t do Gleba justice… (Looking at Nilaus… I died inside when I saw he just plopped down a bot-base and a parameterized biochamber mall essentially. Dosh likewise also disappointed me on his OG Space Age run with his Gleba (import based) and Fulgora (bot based). I did love Doc Jade’s nightmare scrap train Fulgora though. He understood that the most fun can be had in the creativity of a solution, not necessarily the efficiency)

[thesassymarquess]

So as someone who recently finished Space Age, I have to say, I had to return to rebuild, unclog, or fix a bottleneck manually on Fulgora, Nauvis, & Gleba. I’ve had to do it the most on Gleba, but at no point did I find it so hopeless I had to reload my save. I did rebuild my entire base 3 times roughly, and I’m still not super happy about it, but I really did enjoy it, and it was one of my favorite planets. Spoilage was and is my favorite mechanic, and I’ve built 2 completely different Glebas on a singleplayer save, and a multiplayer save. Gleba is a beast and it rewards approaching it differently. All my Glebas have been belt-based for almost every “core” resource (My mall is bot-based and that’s it, it matches all my other bases except Aquilo, which has no bots at all, not even to load the one silo I have). I think overall I can agree with several of your points, like the terrain is very unclear, and I think a major part of it is due to how Gleba got trimmed down in scale over development. I suspect the reason why Gleba has roughly 4-6 different biomes (Green marsh, Red Marsh, Grey marsh, Rock highlands, yellow highlands & lakes) is due to it originally having more fruit lines.

I don’t know when your post is from, but one of the patches from a month or two ago MAJORLY fixed a huge gripe I’d had with Gleba. And it was BAD. I’d noticed while playing on my first save that the spore clouds spread far and fast, but not densely like they do on Nauvis, and came to the hypothesis that spores aren’t absorbed by terrain (which was a bug or balance change). Wube has since changed this, giving the terrain spore absorption, and since this change happened, I’ve found the same base produces far less spores on the map, and attacks massively scaled down.

On power… a lot of people seem to ignore that rocket fuel is a very viable fuel source for the heating towers on Gleba, and it’s very efficient to do so. I circuit control the heating towers to only input spoilage/spoilables if they’re below 950 degrees, and if they drop below 600, I flood my incinerator line with excess rocket fuel. Since I set this up, I’ve only had a blackout once, and it was after the whole base crashed due to accidentally incinerating all my seeds once, over an hour before it blacked out.

But yeah, I do agree you have to have most of your base built out, like a bare skeleton of the production line to actually hook it all up. Ironically, as I come from software engineering, it felt like having to do all the documentation first, before getting to “code”, because I had to have a roughly finished setup first, but… you can do that with roughly 6 biochambers to set up biochamber production, and lay it out in an easily expandable setup. I’ve tried a few different methods (all belt-based) so far for my Glebas and I still have ideas for refining and experimenting with new layouts. I’ve tried actually liked my second game’s Gleba better because I was more ambitious with setting up my infrastructure, and made it much more expandable/experimental. My OG base has a direct belt connection from farms to processing, uses quality, and basically has struggled ever since I got epic quality unlocked. Like I’ve redesigned it more than a few times and every time felt really proud. It challenges me in a way the overhaul mods never did before.

My MP base is built almost exclusively with just Gleba and Vulcanus tech. I do have turbo belts, foundries, big drills, and EM plants, but no recyclers, Tesla turrets, or artillery. (I’m technically waiting on our Fulgora player to export those, but we don’t have them researched and our Fulgora is out of rocket fuel, and I don’t want to touch someone else’s planet. Our Vulcanus player hasn’t set up a production line for artillery either, so I’m actually just defending with only gun turrets atm). Like the power plant is just a 3 heating tower setup, I only burn spoilage, eggs, carbon & rocket fuel (burning fruit is more fuel efficient, but I’m using a main-bus that cleans itself instead of a flowthrough design, the reason was to reduce spore production rather than maximize freshness like my other base. I only have a flowthrough section for bioflux, as I determined only bioflux & lime science freshness matters). I say this Gleba is more expandable, as if I wanted to, since I used a rail network, I could just add more farms to the network, move to a new highland area, design and setup a new base, and then start sending in the trains once it’s ready and either keep two bases, or decommission one. I’m legit thinking about designing different bases spread across the map for different products, so I can have them specialize how they handle the chain to take more or less advantage of the different build styles. It’s funny because now Gleba is the planet I look forwards to because I like trying to figure out better ways to handle it. (I am doing similar on Fulgora, trying to find ways to optimize my scrap production for science, modules, and holonium products simultaneously while reducing waste… it’s an interesting challenge, but it pales in comparison to Gleba.)

Ultimately, I do think Gleba is ironically the hardest planet in the game, by far. The only part of the game I have found can even compare with its difficulty is the shattered planet, and I do think more people should try to keep a more open mind about Gleba. I do really appreciate the people who say “I want to like Gleba” because it is worth liking, but it does have its flaws. Gleba tests you in ways that very little else does, and I admit some of that is frustrating. Especially since Gleba’s rewards are unfortunately not helpful outside of research or combat. The Biochamber & Biolab do not compete with the possibilities Foundries & Big Miners or Electromagnetic Plants & Recyclers offer to bases. Like I love the biolab, but… it doesn’t warrant a base redesign on any planet other than one build on Nauvis… the EM plant and Foundry offer worthy redesigns on EVERY planet, AND SPACE PLATFORMS. Meanwhile… outside of Gleba the agricultural tower and biochamber ONLY have uses on Nauvis, and BOTH are really niche… like 50% bonus to oil cracking, rocket fuel, & fish breeding and infinite wood… cool if you’re doing legendary wooden power poles, but if you’re not, completely useless. Likewise fish breeding is ONLY useful for quality spidertrons, which… is unfortunately a quantity beats quality area… there is no real time I can think of when one legendary spidertron would be better than 5 common ones. It just feels like bragging rights, and we already have mech armor for that.

The problem with Gleba

There's a game I'm a big ol' fan of and don't write about enough called Factorio. It's an interesting beast of a game. There's a lot of RTS DNA in it, and a lot of grand logistics puzzle/progammer-brain game. The main appeal is that as a the player, you are running around setting up a giant tangled mess of machines, conveyor belts, and little robot arms to produce large amounts of stuff to feed into research machines, teching up to more on more complex stuff, requiring you to scale up more and more until eventually hitting a win condition, but the more you expand and produce, the more the resulting polution causes your basically-Zerg neighbors to become larger and more aggressive. There's a really great inherent push and pull to this where if you're new to the game and just kinda struggling along, you generally have a lot more leeway on enemy aggression, and if you're really confidently rushing through (or just seriously overbuilding all your production), big deadly attacks roll in super early and you'll have to be way more aggressive about defenses.

Back in October, Factorio got an expansion, which I described while streaming it as the sort of expansion that's for "real Factorio sickos only." It makes the game significantly longer and more difficult, mainly in that normally, you advance through 5 flavors of science packs, each more of a challenge to produce at the rate you'd like, then head off into space. In the expansion, you can get into space with just the first 3 science flavors, but to hit the new victory condition, you need to be producing the original 5, plus an additional 5, one produced on orbital space platforms and the rest each coming from setting up bases on 4 new planets, each of which basically require you not only to start your big setup from scratch, but have their own resoruces, tech trees, and obstacles, meaning you end up playing 5 variations of the base game, simultaneously, and an extra logistical challenge in tying their science outputs together.

As a real Factorio sicko myself, I love this, for the most part. I have long since mastered the base game to the point where it's fairly trivial for me to get a thriving base going on what's now just the starting planet, and set up defenses that won't hold up INDEFINITELY without any further input from me (places to mine up the most basic resources do eventually run dry and one must push out into the map to set up new outposts now and then). So hitting a point where I have to just step away from my primary base and spend several hours setting things up on new planets is a cool change of pace.

And of the new planets, three of them are just fine. There's a volcanic planet where there's no water with which to set up the usual early game steam power nor the late game nuclear plants, nor can you mine for the iron and copper you need to produce basically everything in the game. The big challenge is figuring out the new tech tree and how to get the basics set up, then in realizing just how incredibly generous this new tech tree is with everything, and how much more efficiently you can set everything up, and the normal enemies that would be harassing you have no real equivalent. There ARE stupifyingly large and tough new enemies, but they won't come to you. They camp out around the map, guarding their personal territory, and requiring you to essentially handle a boss fight every time you need more territory to set up your stuff or harvest finite resources (but honestly, in practice, you'll need to expand in this just once, most likely).

Another planet's main hook is that literally the only resources to work with come from setting up your mining drills on the ruins of a long-dead civilization, pulling up an odd slurry of what in the base game are end-game resources. Complicated electronics, fuel, and superstructure materials just come out of the ground, and need to be broken down in recyclers for the actual base resources, which is just sort of hilarious. And the real puzzle is you have this mixed slurry of all these resources you need to sort out, then also deal with the incredibly unbalanced ratio, and find some way to keep the resource pipeline flowing and not getting gummed up with all that concrete and super advanced electronics you don't actually need that many of. And the final planet, only unlockable after mastering the rest, needs a good interplanetary logistics network as you need to important damn near everything from elsewhere.

All of this is great. Head to a new planet, spend a couple hours puzzling out it's quirks and how to set up a new rocket platform, its required inputs for perpetual rocket launches, and how to produce each planet's science flavor to send home. Then since it's been a few hours since you've checked on your main base, you head back, do some maintenance, maybe move some mines, maybe take a moment to make upgrades everywhere as each planet also has some infrastructural stuff that can't be made anywhere else, giving you better production structures and faster conveyor belts and so forth you might want to use everywhere. But then there's Gleba.

The gimmick of Gleba is it's the biological planet. There's no metal to work with (technically). No oil. Solar power doesn't even work particularly well. So like the volcano planet, you have to reinvent the wheel with everything using a new tech tree where you harvest two types of fruit, throw them into a series of goop-filled tanks powered by "nutrients" rather than electricity, and various combinations of byproducts your tanks spit out let you make literally everything you're ever going to need. In fact, a properly set up Gleba base becomes a perfect closed system, circulating seeds back to the two fruit farms for an infinite suppy, producing all the nutrients required to keep everything running, and enough surplus production of some form or another to feed into incinerators to provide electricity for the few things that still need it (basically just the inserters moving things from one tank to another).

And then there's the downsides. First, and this is a real serious problem for anyone dealing with this for the first time, Gleba has a real serious problem of "what the hell am I even looking at?" Everywhere else, there's pretty clear divisons between flat open ground, cliffs, some sort of liquid, and whatever useful resources you can harvest, without anything else really factoring in. And then here's Gleba.

I love the visual variety, but for comparison's sake, the base game looks like this:

It is very clear where the water is, it is very clear that there is a big patch of copper you can mine up. Meanwhile in these Gleba screenshots, you can't make out where the important resources are (a bit of a cheat because I didn't actually include the biomes where either of the plants that matter grow), and it's honestly quite hard to tell where the water is (I'm PRETTY SURE there's some in every screenshot, and probably a lot more than you'd think as it looks real different when very shallow)... oh and almost all water on Gleba is shallow to various degrees so you can't even go by what's walkable, you'll only really notice an area is flooded when you try to place stuff on it. It will probably take you quite some time before you can even successfully identify what's important, where it comes from, and where you have enough dry land to set your base up. And during that time you'll probably start dealing with the second complication.

Everything rots on Gleba. Well, almost everything. Stuff you build is fine, but the two important fruits, their intermediary peeled forms, the main intermediary material you make from mashing them together, the nutrients that power everything, the bacteria that you need to breed for your basic metal supplies, the one ingredient I haven't mentioned, and even the science packs you're eventually going to be exporting decay over time. Fresh picked fruit spoils in an hour. Peeled fruit and nutrients only last a few seconds. And once stuff rots, generally, you have this completely different item called spoilage, which is going to gum up all your automation by blocking conveyor belts or the input slots of machines and it can be pretty difficult to clear out.

Also as some things decay VERY quickly, any number of problems can cause something vital to spoil in transit, like say the nutrient supply to getting fruit initially processed, or the nutrients powering your production of nutrients, and everything's going to grind to a halt. Including the little inserters that move stuff to the burners providing power to those very inserters. So it's not at all uncommon when setting stuff up on Gleba that one tiny thing will be wrong, maybe as you cut off a belt to reroute it for a change in your overall design, everything rots, the whole base dies, and you have to go around clearing out rotted gunk from literally everything by hand, hand-produce a few nutrients from said rotted gunk, and slowly manually restart everything. Meanwhile we have the last issue to worry about.

Gleba is the one planet other than the one you start on with aggressive enemies to worry about. And there's a lot more to worry about from them. As the above sizzle real shows, they're significantly tougher on an individual level, but also, having these cool stretchy legs, they ignore all terrain. So you can't funnel them to choke points with walls, and they're likely to skim over water you can't build on in their approach. So you just sort of have to have a huge amount of standing firepower where they're likely to attack, which will only be your tree farms (and the path they need to take to them) which will be two very remote locations that are more or less completely flooded out... and your defenses most likely will require a lot of electricity, which is hard to get.

Also that last ingredient you have to worry about rotting? These things' eggs. Yeah both the buildings you use to produce everything on Gleba, and the science packs you eventually export, require the eggs of the local monsters to produce. Good news is, you really just need to risk your life attacking their nests to run off with a couple to start with, since you can make more eggs from eggs without too much trouble, but if one sits around for a few minutes without being processed, it hatches, and now there's a bunch of baby monsters freaking out in the middle of your base. And more importantly, after you clean that resulting mess up, you have to go on another super dangerous safari to get fresh eggs.

Now, individually, I actually love all this. There's some delightful cruelty and the puzzle of working out how to keep everything from rotting and clogging everything up in a fail-safe way is pretty neat. But putting it all together, there's two big things here that just feel real real bad.

First there's the pollution system that makes me love the base game so much. If I'm barely mining and producing stuff, I'm not causing a lot of pollution, so enemies aren't getting big and scary. If I make some huge mistake like, oh, running my whole base on coal power, scaling up a ton, and forgetting that I'm just plain not bringing enough coal in to sustain that, and my entire base de-powers and grinds to a halt, that's pretty bad, but I am producing zero pollution until I get it back online. If some small part of my factory stops working, because I'm massively overproducing something or I'm under-producing something, some machines are just going to stop doing anything until they get what they need, or have a place to dump their stuff, and even mines will stop mining if their output backs up.

Gleba... doesn't work that way. When anything goes wrong in any way, you go from having a ton of stuff you've produced to having a ton of spoilage. Or if you have some safety valves, you are suddenly tossing a massive overproduction of eggs or science or something straight into the furnace. But you're always going to be planting and harvesting the important plants (unless all your fruit rots on the line and there's no seeds to plant) whether you're really doing useful things with that fruit or not, and that's the one and only thing that generates "pollution" (officially it's spores that smell really delicious as a byproduct of harvesting). So catastrophes that end up being more of a full reset than a pause still leave you with jacked up pollution and much deadlier attacks, and that self-balancing difficulty just doesn't happen.

The other big problem, and this may be a bigger one, is you're really discouraged from tweaks and experimentation. You really are just sort of forced to fully design and deploy your entire Gleba base, with every emergency pressure valve and contingency, and the full production line to producing the final products you're shipping offworld before you even "plug it in" and start the actual plant harvesting. You can't really slowly build it up as you go (largely because you kinda get all your power by burning overproduction at the end), making a tiny change is going to make something start starving or backing up which can cause a disaster within seconds, and you either need to really really carefully manage ratios, or commit to massive overproduction and burning everything (spiking the difficulty).

So the first time you ever set up a base on Gleba, you're probably going to spiral into a failure state and need to reload from when you first landed there, maybe several times. But once you know what a functioning base looks like, either from your own trial and error or copying from someone else, you're going to have a nice little blueprint saved of this very nice compact efficient closed-loop base you can just stamp down on future play-throughs, hook up, and basically never have to look at again, ever. I was prompted to write this because I'm doing my second run of the expansion, got set up real quick here, and it's going to be a couple hours still before my defenses even get tested. Meanwhile I have basically all the Gleba research done already. There's no middle ground here between overwhelming and frustrating and a totally dull turn-key setup. Which is a huge shame!

Of course I'm also saying that before testing my defenses. The other inherent problem with Gleba is that from the moment you set foot on it, you do inherently have two planets with a steadily increasing difficulty modifier. Plus the science rots. So you are always going to have to divert SOME mental processing cycles to babysitting it at least a little bit even after you've solved the planet, even if it's just remembering to clean rotting science out of the labs on your starting planet here and there. And that really makes it into something you're still going to want to put off visiting for as long as possible even after playtest response to it being such a nightmare lead to the developers locking all sorts of cool researchable goodies behind it.

And then thing that really bothers me about all this is I can't really think of an easy fix for it. The closed loop where overproduction gets burnt is too conceptually foundational to really mess with. The cascading difficulty spike you could maybe fix by tying it to space launches and not basic production (rockets ignite methane in the air and freak the locals out)? Make solar work OK or take inserters out of the equation maybe by just letting belts feed directly into and out of the important machines here? If nothing else it'd certainly help if coastlines were more obviously marked in some way.

Also like... I'm not an outlier griping about this. Everyone hates Gleba. I just want to be the weird contrarian who thinks no, rotten planet is super rad, you should head there first even, get all that cool stuff to use elsewhere but... no there really are problems with it that are always gonna suck.

[thesassymarquess]

Yes actually! That was part of 51.08 I think? It was a very recent change like 2-3 minor updates ago, I think it was 2 months now? It’s significantly more balanced, and I’ve got a 5 year fort and find it really isn’t that profitable to sell food anymore. Like the only meals that sell well are masterworks with huge serving numbers, and my cooks don’t make many of those. They make plenty of masterworks, and even use stuff like flour & cheese, which used to guarantee expensive meals, and my typical prepared food barrel is like 300-500 value. A far cry from the 3000-5000 days. I still make the meals and occasionally sell 1-2 of them, but you can no longer just buy out a caravan from meals alone. As much as it hurt my early game economy, it rewards diversifying your economy, and ironically I find it’s much easier to manage my forts when I can’t use food to explode the fort’s value for huge migrant waves. It took 5 years to grow to a duchy, and I still only have a population of 140 or so dwarves, and the goblin sieges are much smaller too. Granted I do get more titans and semi-mega beast attacks, but I feel a lot less strain on my military and fort. I still only really have one squad of half-competent axedwarves defending the fort, and they’re clad in a mishmash of junk. Too busy actually building the fort than having to focus on building a strong army to defend… fancy food.

It’s ironic how much I like that change despite having definitely abused the system historically. Nowadays I run like five different industries for my economy, chief among them a “distressed” clothing chain. I just really like setting up the whole tailoring and dyeing chains

Playing Dwarf Fortress, and so are a few of my friends now, so I figured I’d document some common pitfalls I know of, and how to avoid them.

Strange Moods:

-Best way to handle these?

First, build one of each of the following workshops: Craftsdwarfshop, Carpenter’s, Stoneworker’s, forge (either kind), jewelers, glass kiln (any kind), kiln (any kind), bowyers, mechanics, leatherworks, & clothiers. This is all the different types of workshops a dwarf may claim. Don’t worry about fueling a workshop, moods don’t need fuel.

Second, ideally try to keep a supply of at least one of the following items: A boulder, a log, a block, a bone, a cloth, metal bar, an uncut gem, a tanned hide, raw glass, and a cut gem. This is roughly all materials a dwarf may demand for their artifact. Tbh, you *can* cut gems (or polish stones) when a mood occurs, but it’s easier to keep a few on hand prior. Generally they need one item based off the workshop type they claim, then the rest seems to be somewhat random/based on their likes. Each time they collect an item for their artifact, it resets the timer for insanity. Generally in my experience dwarves really tend to grab boulders a LOT. But that’s based off my total experience, my recent experience has been a lot of bars, so it depends on what the dwarf’s workshop chosen is. I’ve been having a lot more metal required because most of my artifacts have come from my metalsmiths

If they’ve been standing at the workshop for a while, bring up their menu and see if they’re crafting the object, or shouting. If they’re shouting, it will cycle through hints or outright stating what the dwarf wants for their artifact. Generally artifacts are WORTH getting a hold of because it gives the dwarf a significant skill boost & a high value item. Worst case you put it in a display case somewhere to boost room value

Animals:

-My animal starved to death!

This only happens to grazers. You need to set up a pasture somewhere with some kind of growth on the soil. At the beginning you’re going to be limited to the green surface grass. If you want to keep them underground, you’re going to have to dig into one of the caverns, which will trigger some sort of fungal growth on underground natural tiles within your fort. Surprisingly as it may seem, this is perfectly safe for your farm animals to eat. Generally a rule of thumb is, if it is egg laying, or smaller than a dog, it is not a grazer, and does not need soil/some grass like substance to survive.

-My animal starved to death in a cage. Why won’t my dwarves move it!

So, going with the above, a pasture zone must be marked, and then animals must be assigned to those areas. After setting up a pasture, click the icon with a plus over a horse to assign animals to it. Any semi-domesticated animal can be assigned to a pasture.

-Why won’t my chickens lay eggs

They need a nest box to lay eggs in. Generally place a pasture somewhere (I like to do it underground as I have yet to find a grazing egg-layer) and build nest boxes there. Dwarves will automatically harvest eggs from the boxes, including fertile ones which may make farming for leather/meat harder. You can seal the room and forbid entry until the eggs hatch, and then forbid them, or have no stockpiles accepting eggs. Then eggs will only be taken by cooks, and only when they’re cooking.

Migrants:

If you are struggling attracting migrants, a major factor is your exports. Basically fortress wealth, and wealth exported are two of the factors that determine your migrant waves, the last factor is the health of your civilization, which is basically just the population. Weirdly enough, migrants are built different, as I’ve played in dying civs (one SURFACE fort with 20 dwarves, this was the only NPC settlement for my Civ) and had migrant waves of 30+ dwarves. Basically the more high value goods you make, and the more you trade them, particularly with the home caravan, the more migrants you’ll get.

Children:

Dwarves only produce children if they’re married, and the parents have time to… get intimate. Fortunately the getting intimate is more “having idle time in a bedroom together” at which point, if it’s a married male/female pair, the female will become pregnant. The game does not display information on pregnancy at all, and all pregnant creatures will just carry on their normal business until they give birth, at which point a dwarf will abandon her current task to “seek infant” at which point they will pop out a baby, you will get a notification of this, and they will pick the child up and go back to doing tasks. Dwarves are capable of having multiples, and I have seen twins, triplets, and even a very weird case of quadruplets… which is its own story.

Trading:

Of the four types of civilizations that exist, you can trade with 3 of them. Elves trade in the spring, humans in the summer, and dwarves in the autumn. Each offer different advantages… mostly… to trading with them.

-Elves:

Generally the most annoying and least useful trading partners. Trading them anything made from wood or an animal product upsets them, instantly ending the trades, and sending them home. If this happens enough, they will declare war and begin sieging your fort. Generally elves are great for selling low-quality stone, (green) glass, or metal objects to. Silk and cloth can be safely traded, but yarn cannot. Generally it’s best practice to only trade rock, green glass, and metal objects to avoid offending them. Due to elves not sending merchant nobles to negotiate, they have no export requests for better trading, and you cannot request imports from them. Despite this, they can make an excellent source of exotic animals, cheap barrels, or offer a way to trade rock crafts for food.

-Humans

Humans know a good deal, and actually care about trade. Humans tend to reach out among the first outsider civs to trade with you. They don’t always send a merchant nobles, but once you have a baron or higher, they tend to much more frequently. Humans are amazing trading partners as they offer unique trading resources from dwarves. They have no offendable rules either, but they actually do defend their goods. They can be reliable for exporting in rare crops, seeds, or other materials, and they will happily trade you pretty much anything they have access to. So while you can’t get steel from them, you can get surface crops, more varied animals, and bladeweed dye and other fabrics.

-Dwarves

Without player intervention, you will only usually receive a Dwarven caravan from your home Civ. You can by contacting other Dwarven civs get other civs to send merchants to your fort as well. Dwarven caravans are much like human caravans, but carry steel. They also only carry crops and items unique to their Civ, which is usually pretty much exactly the same as yours. Dwarves do also send merchants to negotiate import/export deals as well, notably the outpost liaison being your factions representative.

-Getting new trading partners

Send a squad out to an uncontacted Civ and set the mission to “demand one-time tribute” civs either pay the tribute, or reject it, and it seems to have little impact on the civ’s opinion of you/your fort. Once this is done, they can start, and often do, sending caravans your way when the correct season starts.

-Getting better trade goods/merchant nobles

Traders bring more goods the more profitable trading was with you historically. So the more you trade, the more they bring. So if a trader brings nothing of interest to you, you buy nothing, and they leave, next year, they are likely to bring even LESS. So to prevent this, it can be a good idea to buy things even if they aren’t that useful. I commonly try to buy all the food I can from the merchants, as I can usually use it, and it encourages the merchants to take more items, which can end up being items like codexes/scrolls that I really want. Likewise the more successful the trades are, the more likely they are to send a noble for trade agreements. They don’t always send them though, so it is possible to miss them for a few years, even when trading seems to be going fine.

Hospitals:

-You will need a hospital before you think you do. But you do not need a Good one really. A basic hospital is something like a few beds & tables in a room together. You should also have a water source, some buckets, a textile industry, and some splints/canes. The only specialty thing you really need is a single traction bench. Just make a table, rope and mechanism, and combine them for a traction bench at a mechanics. Soap isn’t strictly necessary early on, nor is having security in the hospital. Bleeding out on the hospital floor is a major improvement to bleeding out anywhere else.

-Soap

It reduces infections and will lower mortality rates, but generally a hospital itself will do a more significant job at that. Still if you need to make it, you need at least 5 buildings roughly. Soap needs lye, which needs ash and needs to be made in an Ashery and a wood furnace respectively. Soap also needs either an oil, or a tallow. Oil is made at a screw press from certain plants, tallow is made at a kitchen from roasting fat. Fat is gathered at a butcher from butchering (animal) corpses

This is it for part 1. If there’s other questions or tips, I can do a part 2

[thesassymarquess]

Yeah, I probably should have prefixed that the most important one to stop insane dwarves is a craftsdwarfshop, as for new players, that's going to be the majority of their artifacts. Likewise, the threshold at which dwarves start having the moods is 20 dwarves, though I think it can be changed in world settings? I personally find artifacts are really good for sprucing up rooms for either nobles or value requirements, at least when you're new to the game, but that does tend to invite thieves...

Forbidding certain materials during a strange mood is really nice. It took me a while to realize I could do that, but yeah, if I notice an armorer or weaponsmith is having a strange mood, I ban all bars except steel, to... encourage them to make a GOOD piece of equipment. I've had enough of "Zinc gauntlets" for my lifetime I think. Likewise, I tend to ban all iron ores during strange moods for similar reasons. (Yes, strange moods can result in dwarves making artifact items that are normally impossible to make, like non-wood beds, non-weaponsgrade metal weapons/armor, or other... interesting objects. I've seen jewelers make cages out of gemstones before, was actually pretty awesome, because I set it up as my monarch's terrarium in his throne room.)

I don't know if magma forges losing magma still results in insanity, but I did forget that. Weirdly though, they'll use an unpowered magma forge fine from what I've seen, I think it's only if it has magma, and then doesn't suddenly, that they have an issue.

Yeah, the tree thing is REALLY IMPORTANT. Pick big trees, especially if you have a low cutting count... My elves said 5 trees. Damn savage wilds. I still find trading with them worthwhile, but that's usually because I just sell them junk items like stone mugs & low quality pottery. But that's because I love DF's trading system a LOT. So I tend to make a ton of trade goods. I once had a fort that had like 3-4 caravans a season. Elves tend to get my lowest-quality goods, so long as they aren't clothes, animal or wood based. My trade with elves is more training for my broker & craftsdwarves than anything else. I love buying out an elven caravan for a hundred shitty bracelets, rings, & mugs.

Playing Dwarf Fortress, and so are a few of my friends now, so I figured I’d document some common pitfalls I know of, and how to avoid them.

Strange Moods:

-Best way to handle these?

First, build one of each of the following workshops: Craftsdwarfshop, Carpenter’s, Stoneworker’s, forge (either kind), jewelers, glass kiln (any kind), kiln (any kind), bowyers, mechanics, leatherworks, & clothiers. This is all the different types of workshops a dwarf may claim. Don’t worry about fueling a workshop, moods don’t need fuel.

Second, ideally try to keep a supply of at least one of the following items: A boulder, a log, a block, a bone, a cloth, metal bar, an uncut gem, a tanned hide, raw glass, and a cut gem. This is roughly all materials a dwarf may demand for their artifact. Tbh, you *can* cut gems (or polish stones) when a mood occurs, but it’s easier to keep a few on hand prior. Generally they need one item based off the workshop type they claim, then the rest seems to be somewhat random/based on their likes. Each time they collect an item for their artifact, it resets the timer for insanity. Generally in my experience dwarves really tend to grab boulders a LOT. But that’s based off my total experience, my recent experience has been a lot of bars, so it depends on what the dwarf’s workshop chosen is. I’ve been having a lot more metal required because most of my artifacts have come from my metalsmiths

If they’ve been standing at the workshop for a while, bring up their menu and see if they’re crafting the object, or shouting. If they’re shouting, it will cycle through hints or outright stating what the dwarf wants for their artifact. Generally artifacts are WORTH getting a hold of because it gives the dwarf a significant skill boost & a high value item. Worst case you put it in a display case somewhere to boost room value

Animals:

-My animal starved to death!

This only happens to grazers. You need to set up a pasture somewhere with some kind of growth on the soil. At the beginning you’re going to be limited to the green surface grass. If you want to keep them underground, you’re going to have to dig into one of the caverns, which will trigger some sort of fungal growth on underground natural tiles within your fort. Surprisingly as it may seem, this is perfectly safe for your farm animals to eat. Generally a rule of thumb is, if it is egg laying, or smaller than a dog, it is not a grazer, and does not need soil/some grass like substance to survive.

-My animal starved to death in a cage. Why won’t my dwarves move it!

So, going with the above, a pasture zone must be marked, and then animals must be assigned to those areas. After setting up a pasture, click the icon with a plus over a horse to assign animals to it. Any semi-domesticated animal can be assigned to a pasture.

-Why won’t my chickens lay eggs

They need a nest box to lay eggs in. Generally place a pasture somewhere (I like to do it underground as I have yet to find a grazing egg-layer) and build nest boxes there. Dwarves will automatically harvest eggs from the boxes, including fertile ones which may make farming for leather/meat harder. You can seal the room and forbid entry until the eggs hatch, and then forbid them, or have no stockpiles accepting eggs. Then eggs will only be taken by cooks, and only when they’re cooking.

Migrants:

If you are struggling attracting migrants, a major factor is your exports. Basically fortress wealth, and wealth exported are two of the factors that determine your migrant waves, the last factor is the health of your civilization, which is basically just the population. Weirdly enough, migrants are built different, as I’ve played in dying civs (one SURFACE fort with 20 dwarves, this was the only NPC settlement for my Civ) and had migrant waves of 30+ dwarves. Basically the more high value goods you make, and the more you trade them, particularly with the home caravan, the more migrants you’ll get.

Children:

Dwarves only produce children if they’re married, and the parents have time to… get intimate. Fortunately the getting intimate is more “having idle time in a bedroom together” at which point, if it’s a married male/female pair, the female will become pregnant. The game does not display information on pregnancy at all, and all pregnant creatures will just carry on their normal business until they give birth, at which point a dwarf will abandon her current task to “seek infant” at which point they will pop out a baby, you will get a notification of this, and they will pick the child up and go back to doing tasks. Dwarves are capable of having multiples, and I have seen twins, triplets, and even a very weird case of quadruplets… which is its own story.

Trading:

Of the four types of civilizations that exist, you can trade with 3 of them. Elves trade in the spring, humans in the summer, and dwarves in the autumn. Each offer different advantages… mostly… to trading with them.

-Elves:

Generally the most annoying and least useful trading partners. Trading them anything made from wood or an animal product upsets them, instantly ending the trades, and sending them home. If this happens enough, they will declare war and begin sieging your fort. Generally elves are great for selling low-quality stone, (green) glass, or metal objects to. Silk and cloth can be safely traded, but yarn cannot. Generally it’s best practice to only trade rock, green glass, and metal objects to avoid offending them. Due to elves not sending merchant nobles to negotiate, they have no export requests for better trading, and you cannot request imports from them. Despite this, they can make an excellent source of exotic animals, cheap barrels, or offer a way to trade rock crafts for food.

-Humans

Humans know a good deal, and actually care about trade. Humans tend to reach out among the first outsider civs to trade with you. They don’t always send a merchant nobles, but once you have a baron or higher, they tend to much more frequently. Humans are amazing trading partners as they offer unique trading resources from dwarves. They have no offendable rules either, but they actually do defend their goods. They can be reliable for exporting in rare crops, seeds, or other materials, and they will happily trade you pretty much anything they have access to. So while you can’t get steel from them, you can get surface crops, more varied animals, and bladeweed dye and other fabrics.

-Dwarves

Without player intervention, you will only usually receive a Dwarven caravan from your home Civ. You can by contacting other Dwarven civs get other civs to send merchants to your fort as well. Dwarven caravans are much like human caravans, but carry steel. They also only carry crops and items unique to their Civ, which is usually pretty much exactly the same as yours. Dwarves do also send merchants to negotiate import/export deals as well, notably the outpost liaison being your factions representative.

-Getting new trading partners

Send a squad out to an uncontacted Civ and set the mission to “demand one-time tribute” civs either pay the tribute, or reject it, and it seems to have little impact on the civ’s opinion of you/your fort. Once this is done, they can start, and often do, sending caravans your way when the correct season starts.

-Getting better trade goods/merchant nobles

Traders bring more goods the more profitable trading was with you historically. So the more you trade, the more they bring. So if a trader brings nothing of interest to you, you buy nothing, and they leave, next year, they are likely to bring even LESS. So to prevent this, it can be a good idea to buy things even if they aren’t that useful. I commonly try to buy all the food I can from the merchants, as I can usually use it, and it encourages the merchants to take more items, which can end up being items like codexes/scrolls that I really want. Likewise the more successful the trades are, the more likely they are to send a noble for trade agreements. They don’t always send them though, so it is possible to miss them for a few years, even when trading seems to be going fine.

Hospitals:

-You will need a hospital before you think you do. But you do not need a Good one really. A basic hospital is something like a few beds & tables in a room together. You should also have a water source, some buckets, a textile industry, and some splints/canes. The only specialty thing you really need is a single traction bench. Just make a table, rope and mechanism, and combine them for a traction bench at a mechanics. Soap isn’t strictly necessary early on, nor is having security in the hospital. Bleeding out on the hospital floor is a major improvement to bleeding out anywhere else.

-Soap

It reduces infections and will lower mortality rates, but generally a hospital itself will do a more significant job at that. Still if you need to make it, you need at least 5 buildings roughly. Soap needs lye, which needs ash and needs to be made in an Ashery and a wood furnace respectively. Soap also needs either an oil, or a tallow. Oil is made at a screw press from certain plants, tallow is made at a kitchen from roasting fat. Fat is gathered at a butcher from butchering (animal) corpses

This is it for part 1. If there’s other questions or tips, I can do a part 2

[thesassymarquess]

I spent so long scouring the map looking for this dwarf... Turns out they got crushed by the trade post airlock bridges somehow... it was a ONE TILE BRIDGE. Explains why I couldn't find a corpse. I just decided to pretend they never existed for all dwarves that just disappear without a corpse after this. Just waiting to see if a ghost shows up to confirm they existed.

[thesassymarquess]

Responding to both the reblog above, and the tags from dwarvendiaries, I would like to note, I tried to *mostly* cover stuff for the first couple years that a less experienced player may be concerned with. I admit forgetting there's three different fabric types (technically 4, but dwarves never want metal cloth thankfully) was something that slipped my mind and is a good catch.

Yarn comes from animals, Cloth from plants & silk from spiders/monsters, and all three can be requested for moods and are NOT interchangeable with each other. As far as I can tell, this and value are the main differences between them use-wise. Production-wise which is easiest depends on what you have available. I personally find Silk usually the easiest to stockpile, but that is because I captured a Giant Cave Spider in one fort, and a Forgotten Beast in another... That is not necessarily an easy or safe idea, but if done offers a massive amount of silk for free. Likewise animals can be sheared for a large amount of wool fairly regularly. My textile industries personally tend to be capped by clothiers/dyers/dye rather than cloth usually.

As for moods, it is true that the type of workshop a dwarf uses can be semi-easily manipulated. My latest fort shows as much, where 4/6 artifacts made in the fort so far (summer of the 5th year) have all been metal. Part of it is luck (I've gotten lucky metalsmiths have gotten the pick so far), part of it is manipulation... (I've trained approximately 1/3rd of the fort by my estimate in some level of a metalsmithing skill. Mostly armorsmithing, metalsmith's were my second guild to form, forming about a month after farmers & a week before craftsdwarves)

Which I suppose brings up another topic, petitions for locations. *Generally they are always worth pursuing*. I can't think of a reason why you'd want to take the unhappiness hit for denying one, considering that a guild hall can: -Be restricted to only guild members (preventing training of undesired skills by new dwarfs) -Teaches dwarves skills without them needing to do labor -Are a nice and convenient source of happy thoughts

Meanwhile temples offer happy thoughts, and a new method of dwarves venting their issues & clearing their needs for prayer.

You should definitely consider setting up guilds for skills you value, especially a doctor's guild, as it offers a way to keep doctor's skills sharp without dwarven pain.

Also from a prior reblog, there was mention of how elves "could" send nobles to negotiate tree cutting limits. They still do do this, and they start once you have a baron/count/duke, i.e. when Humans typically begin sending their own nobles, and dwarves & humans send wagons. Following the limits results in a positive relationship with the elves, breaking them results in a negative relationship. Ultimately break it too many times and they go to war. Also notably important... they don't become more lenient if you chop down less trees. The number picked seems somewhat random in my experience, and is based off the skill of your mayor? (maybe the ruling noble?) as well as the wildness of the area you settled in... which will be a problem for me with my latest fort unfortunately...

Lastly, I do want to add there was a bit more I wanted to talk about (Like werecreatures) but I don't want to clutter this post up too much, but I do know if DF players enjoy one thing it's reading.

Werecreatures, necromancer experiments, necromancers, and vampires do not show up at worldgen. Certain events in worldgen need to occur to incite them into existing. For Werecreatures & Vampires, a civilization, usually dwarves or humans, need to build a monastery, and then a creature (usually an elf or human, but I just found out from a friend that dwarves can do it too, like as I was typing this. I'll write up what I got from that story elsewhere, but the funny news is your fort's dwarves can profane god too!) has to profane the temple, which is typically done by toppling the altar. Likewise, Necromancers require a race that has a set lifespan (humans or dwarves typically), and one of them needs to decide they fear death, and go on a search for a method to avoid it. This can result in them discovering the secrets of life and death (necromancy) and becoming a necromancer. Afterwards, they typically build a tower somewhere, and other necromancers are welcome to join them. They also may begin experimenting on creatures creating hybrid soldiers for their armies. Unlike the other 3 mentioned prior, necromancers tend to show up in around the first generation of humans or so, so a 100 year world will typically have necromancer towers beginning to sprout up.

The reason I wanted to talk about werecreatures, is werecreature infection containment, which is typically best done by securing the hospital in such a way you can lock down either the whole hospital, or an individual patient during a full moon, to see if an injured dwarf got infected. Since they *usually* are capable of breaking down doors, this requires either a drawbridge or a Cask of Amontillado solution.

Playing Dwarf Fortress, and so are a few of my friends now, so I figured I’d document some common pitfalls I know of, and how to avoid them.

Strange Moods:

-Best way to handle these?

First, build one of each of the following workshops: Craftsdwarfshop, Carpenter’s, Stoneworker’s, forge (either kind), jewelers, glass kiln (any kind), kiln (any kind), bowyers, mechanics, leatherworks, & clothiers. This is all the different types of workshops a dwarf may claim. Don’t worry about fueling a workshop, moods don’t need fuel.

Second, ideally try to keep a supply of at least one of the following items: A boulder, a log, a block, a bone, a cloth, metal bar, an uncut gem, a tanned hide, raw glass, and a cut gem. This is roughly all materials a dwarf may demand for their artifact. Tbh, you *can* cut gems (or polish stones) when a mood occurs, but it’s easier to keep a few on hand prior. Generally they need one item based off the workshop type they claim, then the rest seems to be somewhat random/based on their likes. Each time they collect an item for their artifact, it resets the timer for insanity. Generally in my experience dwarves really tend to grab boulders a LOT. But that’s based off my total experience, my recent experience has been a lot of bars, so it depends on what the dwarf’s workshop chosen is. I’ve been having a lot more metal required because most of my artifacts have come from my metalsmiths

If they’ve been standing at the workshop for a while, bring up their menu and see if they’re crafting the object, or shouting. If they’re shouting, it will cycle through hints or outright stating what the dwarf wants for their artifact. Generally artifacts are WORTH getting a hold of because it gives the dwarf a significant skill boost & a high value item. Worst case you put it in a display case somewhere to boost room value

Animals:

-My animal starved to death!

This only happens to grazers. You need to set up a pasture somewhere with some kind of growth on the soil. At the beginning you’re going to be limited to the green surface grass. If you want to keep them underground, you’re going to have to dig into one of the caverns, which will trigger some sort of fungal growth on underground natural tiles within your fort. Surprisingly as it may seem, this is perfectly safe for your farm animals to eat. Generally a rule of thumb is, if it is egg laying, or smaller than a dog, it is not a grazer, and does not need soil/some grass like substance to survive.

-My animal starved to death in a cage. Why won’t my dwarves move it!

So, going with the above, a pasture zone must be marked, and then animals must be assigned to those areas. After setting up a pasture, click the icon with a plus over a horse to assign animals to it. Any semi-domesticated animal can be assigned to a pasture.

-Why won’t my chickens lay eggs

They need a nest box to lay eggs in. Generally place a pasture somewhere (I like to do it underground as I have yet to find a grazing egg-layer) and build nest boxes there. Dwarves will automatically harvest eggs from the boxes, including fertile ones which may make farming for leather/meat harder. You can seal the room and forbid entry until the eggs hatch, and then forbid them, or have no stockpiles accepting eggs. Then eggs will only be taken by cooks, and only when they’re cooking.

Migrants:

If you are struggling attracting migrants, a major factor is your exports. Basically fortress wealth, and wealth exported are two of the factors that determine your migrant waves, the last factor is the health of your civilization, which is basically just the population. Weirdly enough, migrants are built different, as I’ve played in dying civs (one SURFACE fort with 20 dwarves, this was the only NPC settlement for my Civ) and had migrant waves of 30+ dwarves. Basically the more high value goods you make, and the more you trade them, particularly with the home caravan, the more migrants you’ll get.

Children:

Dwarves only produce children if they’re married, and the parents have time to… get intimate. Fortunately the getting intimate is more “having idle time in a bedroom together” at which point, if it’s a married male/female pair, the female will become pregnant. The game does not display information on pregnancy at all, and all pregnant creatures will just carry on their normal business until they give birth, at which point a dwarf will abandon her current task to “seek infant” at which point they will pop out a baby, you will get a notification of this, and they will pick the child up and go back to doing tasks. Dwarves are capable of having multiples, and I have seen twins, triplets, and even a very weird case of quadruplets… which is its own story.

Trading:

Of the four types of civilizations that exist, you can trade with 3 of them. Elves trade in the spring, humans in the summer, and dwarves in the autumn. Each offer different advantages… mostly… to trading with them.

-Elves:

Generally the most annoying and least useful trading partners. Trading them anything made from wood or an animal product upsets them, instantly ending the trades, and sending them home. If this happens enough, they will declare war and begin sieging your fort. Generally elves are great for selling low-quality stone, (green) glass, or metal objects to. Silk and cloth can be safely traded, but yarn cannot. Generally it’s best practice to only trade rock, green glass, and metal objects to avoid offending them. Due to elves not sending merchant nobles to negotiate, they have no export requests for better trading, and you cannot request imports from them. Despite this, they can make an excellent source of exotic animals, cheap barrels, or offer a way to trade rock crafts for food.

-Humans

Humans know a good deal, and actually care about trade. Humans tend to reach out among the first outsider civs to trade with you. They don’t always send a merchant nobles, but once you have a baron or higher, they tend to much more frequently. Humans are amazing trading partners as they offer unique trading resources from dwarves. They have no offendable rules either, but they actually do defend their goods. They can be reliable for exporting in rare crops, seeds, or other materials, and they will happily trade you pretty much anything they have access to. So while you can’t get steel from them, you can get surface crops, more varied animals, and bladeweed dye and other fabrics.

-Dwarves

Without player intervention, you will only usually receive a Dwarven caravan from your home Civ. You can by contacting other Dwarven civs get other civs to send merchants to your fort as well. Dwarven caravans are much like human caravans, but carry steel. They also only carry crops and items unique to their Civ, which is usually pretty much exactly the same as yours. Dwarves do also send merchants to negotiate import/export deals as well, notably the outpost liaison being your factions representative.

-Getting new trading partners

Send a squad out to an uncontacted Civ and set the mission to “demand one-time tribute” civs either pay the tribute, or reject it, and it seems to have little impact on the civ’s opinion of you/your fort. Once this is done, they can start, and often do, sending caravans your way when the correct season starts.

-Getting better trade goods/merchant nobles

Traders bring more goods the more profitable trading was with you historically. So the more you trade, the more they bring. So if a trader brings nothing of interest to you, you buy nothing, and they leave, next year, they are likely to bring even LESS. So to prevent this, it can be a good idea to buy things even if they aren’t that useful. I commonly try to buy all the food I can from the merchants, as I can usually use it, and it encourages the merchants to take more items, which can end up being items like codexes/scrolls that I really want. Likewise the more successful the trades are, the more likely they are to send a noble for trade agreements. They don’t always send them though, so it is possible to miss them for a few years, even when trading seems to be going fine.

Hospitals:

-You will need a hospital before you think you do. But you do not need a Good one really. A basic hospital is something like a few beds & tables in a room together. You should also have a water source, some buckets, a textile industry, and some splints/canes. The only specialty thing you really need is a single traction bench. Just make a table, rope and mechanism, and combine them for a traction bench at a mechanics. Soap isn’t strictly necessary early on, nor is having security in the hospital. Bleeding out on the hospital floor is a major improvement to bleeding out anywhere else.

-Soap

It reduces infections and will lower mortality rates, but generally a hospital itself will do a more significant job at that. Still if you need to make it, you need at least 5 buildings roughly. Soap needs lye, which needs ash and needs to be made in an Ashery and a wood furnace respectively. Soap also needs either an oil, or a tallow. Oil is made at a screw press from certain plants, tallow is made at a kitchen from roasting fat. Fat is gathered at a butcher from butchering (animal) corpses

This is it for part 1. If there’s other questions or tips, I can do a part 2

[thesassymarquess]

Get boxed stupid idiots