Profilename1

It was quite the battle.

And it just gets worse. I tried to wait them out, but even when they left a few stayed behind, lurking in the treetops:

I knocked over one tree with a ballista, and those creatures left voluntarily. I took about thirty casualties clearing out the second tree.

A year later, the horde returns, and right now I'm ignoring them because there's lots of work inside the fortress that needs done, and I've got a decent tree farm up and going. I'm thinking it's time for Operation FTW, but I'll have to wait until they leave to set up it for the inevitable third return.

Tip: If you have visitors wandering around your base, you can go under the knowledge task to see what all books they've read in their lifetime and what kind of books they are. That way, you can search for somewhat unusual types like novels, chronicles, cultural histories, biographies, autobiographies, dictionaries, dialogues, and etc.

I really wish this functionality was on the written objects screen. Right now you just have to go off of the title. This work, unfortunately, wasn't written in my fortress and we don't have a copy of it, either. That said, I do have a pair of autobiographies and some cultural histories.

What I would like to do is figure out a way to reliably make dwarves produce biographies. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how. The only requirement that I know of for a dwarf to produce a biography is knowledge of the biography topic, which can be obtained either from them reading a book on the subject (easy) to discovering it themselves (very, very hard and random). After that, I don't know if they have to be assigned to a library or not to actually produce the biography.

That sounds simple, but the thing is that dwarves are practically-minded. They seem to prefer to write manuals and guides about topics they know than novels, biographies, and etc. What if you had a dwarf that knew only of biographies and of no other topics, though? They might write one guide on the subject of writing biographies, but will they stop writing guides after that and start writing biographies?

The problem is, once you have a big library, dwarves tend to swarm it and learn about all the topics. It's hard to pick and dwarf that's "unpolluted," so to speak, and I suspect that if they've avoided the library that much, they'll be poor biographers anyway.

One idea I've had is the Dwarven Monastery. We take kids that just turned 18, which haven't had a chance to read books yet, and slap them in a private, sealed off room with writing materials, food, and drink. Toss in a bookshelf and make a tiny library only they can access. Assign them as a scholar, and throw down a book on biographies as inspiration. Then, see what happens.

Note that what kind of books your dwarves write has literally no gameplay impact. This is just for Armok and maybe internet points. Damn it, I want my dwarves to have quality literature!

Recently I listened to the Specials self-titled 1979 album and really enjoyed it. I've been wanting to try out some Ska music for awhile now because it's a genre I don't know a whole lot about. What recommendations do you guys have as far as Ska music?

I've got some big plans for this fort. I've got a few megaprojects in mind and I'm going to try and finally make Mountain Home. I'll be sure to post more about it once it's finished.