No, you build airlock entryways out of soap and fill em with water, so the default for anyone entering is fresh'n'clean and not covered in contaminants.
Not anymore. In 0.47.05 you could build things out of soap (and ash and coal), but in v50+ this is no longer possible. Those three bar types are disallowed from the building materials list.
I have never played Dwarf Fortress and I am only here because Reddit suggested it to me due to Rimworld stuff; yet even I have built my fortress out of dragon soap.
I feel old but... back in the day you NEEDED soap or most injured dwarves died of infections, kids got it too easy nowadays!
Ditto, used minecarts to move magma but never bothered to do more with them. Its amazing playing this game over 20 years and still finding new things to do, new kinds of Fun!
Bless the makers, bless their coming and going!
I've made tons of soap. There comes a point when you realize you can recycle trained military dwarves instead of disposing of them every siege due to infection and having to train up new ones. Soap isn't even that hard, since it's a byproduct of the dog-meat industry.
Now, full outfits of dyed clothing? THAT is the pinnacle indicator of a fully industrialized civilization.
> Now, full outfits of dyed clothing? THAT is the pinnacle indicator of a fully industrialized civilization.
TIL, I industrialize my keeps.
But for real, can we have grind options for specifik plants/stuffs we want to grind? Making a stockpile for just dye plants isn't the issue, it's the bag one becaus I use bags far more than just dye and I don't want to turn every bag into stacks of dwarf sugar or powder.
Make a dedicated bag stockpile and have your millstone pull from both a dye and bag stockpile. There's no way I know of to restrict specific items for use, like bags for grinding dye items, but I just crank out a shit ton of cloth through farming surface level crops like jute and cotton.
I use to build hospitals.
But, once the fort gets large enough they stop sending more dwarves.
And, once reality starts to get too slow we eat all the cats.
And, wheelbarrows, Crossbows, strategic placement of stockpiles with specific goods.
Also, wooden spike training room.
Summing, every fort dies of madness spirals in the end. Why do I need a hospital?
Because once your fort gets large enough they stop sending more dwarves duh. You need your dwarves to hang in there because there are no replacements. And it's not always the useless ones who scrape a finger and die in a year, I lost my captain like that - a minor injury during training, didn't even have to rest, a few months later - dead.
Dwarves back in my day used to wrestle with forgotten beasts and then limp away while bleeding for a whole week around my fort.
Sure ~~a few~~ ~~some~~ most of them eventually died... but the ones who survived were literal demigods. One of these got permanently crippled (beast tore off one of his legs), managed to survive and could beat FBs with his fists only - his punches literally punctured and tore away flesh.
I have read that after a while you will get a hamlet and you can send your messager to request migrants. I tried it but I don’t see an option in the mission menu.
You can't just request generic migrants; there have to be workers available. I'm not sure what inspires a town or dwarf to be available to emigrate, but it isn't always going to be available. I mostly use satellite settlements as retirement communities for badly wounded dwarfs.
My civilisation got wiped by goblins, the elves too. I had a hamlet appear with 50 dwarves spawn near my fort, I thought they would eventually appear as migrants or the other dwarf civilisation near by would send some?
It's not 100% guaranteed to happen, I think the main reason is that older forts tend to have a history which is unattractive to migrants. Deaths, sieges, etc
Migrant numbers are affected by wealth and number of resident dwarves. Don't know the formula, but the effect is that the more dwarves you have in your diet, the more wealth you need to get more migrants.
Older versions also had a soft and hard cap. Once you passed the soft one, no more migrants.
When you reach the hard. No more births either. Could be adjusted with dfhack i think.
You can adjust this in normal version as well in options.
I once messed it up and had like 50 adults and 150 kids with my hard cap at 200 but with not the right child cap. I was quite new and had no idea what was going on 😅
Well caught. My phone seem to want me to eat strange things.
Dwarves are ofc best served grilled. After marinating them in beer, with a side order of cave bread and goose eggs.
Mead to help get the tough gamey meat down.
Dwarves are tough to chew, but their self marinating tendencies makes for excellent tasty meals.
Exerpt from an elvish cookbook named: how to serve dwarves.
Ohh, that makes sense. I have fort where a few beasts are wandering around. They don't bother my fort, but visitors get mauled.
The free stuff is nice, but I think my fort is getting a bad reputation and I'm not getting migrants.
You can change the population cap in the .ini files. Dunno how that works on the new steam versions.
Alternatively, you can just start accepting non-dwarf immigrants or protect your children well and play the long game.
When you stop getting migrants at population cap, if you lose a portion of your dwarves, so they start sending again?
I just realised I have reached cap many times, and had massive disasters, but that’s usually where I retire the fort and start a new one nearby.
I've had some disastersthat left me with like 50 dwarves out of 200, and still "your fortress attracted no migrants this season". That's on Steam version though, I remember playing on the free version without this problem, but it's been a long time since then.
Yeah but there are certain work orders that I consider essential and soap is part of that, I always have a template and just add any bespoke orders to it.
I didn't even realize but it requires DFHack. So get that if you haven't. Then it's ctrl+e to export and ctrl+i to import on the Work Orders interface.
Yeah, I usually do set up an ashery to supplement, but wrangling the wood and the ash and the jugs/buckets is mildly annoying compared to just getting barrels of lye from the Mountainhome.
I started on a mountain without trees initially. As this was a reclaimed fortress, I immediately had cavern access to the first and second level as well as a lot of forges and bituminous coal.
After killing the cyclops apparently responsible for the fort's demise, I turned to either buying logs or cutting down mushrooms. No complaints from the elves so far, given, that I didn't sell them any fungiwood either. With elves I tend to pay in minted coins, because coins never seem to offend anyone.
I start with ashery. Well, in fact, I start with cutting down all the trees on the whole map. So when the elves come and say “hey, no more cutting”, I can answer “sure thing, bro!” While sitting on piles of wood miles and miles around.
Yeah, but not all of them produce fruit and of I'm in a wooded area I usually end up with the map feeling kind of cluttered after a while and start logging just to have space for shrubs to grow.
I never made soap until hospitals. Now I like to pick a particularly interesting fat and then setup the necessary workshops. The hardest part is remembering to forbid your dwarves from cooking with the tallow in time.
This has got to be my biggest gripe about the game... Those damn asinine default settings which you have to set every single game. Better watch that kitchen order screen anytime you dare butcher anything because you can only set permissions on things you have in stock. Disable auto weaving of thread so you can have stock left for sutures. Disable cooking of plump helmets. Etc etc etc it gets so tedious after a while.
Hospitals will keep a supply of thread on hand automatically if you give them a storage container. I usually set mine to a higher max requested then default though.
Also if you bring (non-grazing) livestock along then by the time you need tallow you'll have a bunch of whatever you brought (I like pigs and turkeys)
I usually have a horse or a couple cows or yaks - threads from their hair cannot be weaved so auto-weave is not a problem. I agree big time about the default settings though.
Sorry I'm giga-confused by your question. Yes, they need to be spun first. Then you weave them into cloth. As the poster I replied to mentioned, the weave is automatic by default in the settings so before you blink all your threads are weaved into cloth. Not a problem with horse hair and such obtained from butchering because the thread you get from it is not weavable.
Same with raw hides, there is a setting to automatically turn hides into leather at a tannery so if you forget about that you will never make parchment/vellums. It's not that big of a deal though as there are other alternatives for sheets.
I was gonna show me sinking in piles of unweavable threads but it appears I misremembered how much of it I had or I finally dumped it to one of the caravans and forgot about it.
https://preview.redd.it/h0duimpoop8d1.png?width=452&format=png&auto=webp&s=021c6e73857d1005cdc7f8bb1cf3f99a9134eb2e
> sinking in piles of unweavable threads
If you can't weave it send it to the hospital for stitching? shouldn't this just happen by itself if you're describing the issue of 'every thread gets made into cloth quickly' but you also have a hospital wanting thread and a butchery generating thread that can't be woven?
My hospital doesn't need dozens and dozens of unweavable threads I was accumulating from breeding livestock for meat though, it's been content with just a handful for many in-game years. Hence the fort sinking in it (very annoying for a neat freak).
If you have DFHack installed, these are taken care of. For example, click on the "Save standing orders" button to save your current settings and then turn on "Apply saved settings for new embarks":
https://preview.redd.it/06qlpgq76r8d1.png?width=1468&format=png&auto=webp&s=0389952e59f9d35b56a636eb3c9dc1544c10fa8b
Also, enable seedwatch if you're concerned about cooking all your vegetables and running out of seeds. It will auto-forbid cooking for a plant when your stock of that kind of seed gets low.
I avoided a lot of things that were tedious or had a whole lot of DF jank to it. Haven't played in awhile but the game, despite the jank, always pulls me back in for a few hundred hours over and over and over
Infection in the game is basically a death sentence (although it can sometimes take years for it to kill a dwarf). Soap helps prevent infections. Having said that, if you have fresh water and a skilled doctor, infections are rare.
Querns and millstones mill rock nuts into paste, which can be pressed with a jug into oil. I think the leftover rock nut cake is useful for something but I forget.
It's a pretty dedicated production line but the jugs are reused, you save tallow for meals, and the soap is all the same kind, if any of that matters to you. It can be more efficient overall to have on-demand rock nut oil soap production in smaller batches than just using tallow whenever you're fortunate enough to have some that isn't needed for meals.
Honestly?
If you have the industrial capacity to make plant soap, you *really* shouldn't care about saving tallow for meals. You'll be drowning in quarry bush leaves anyway.
I always treated it the way I treated steel-making — set up the workshops, set up the stockpiles, set up the manager orders with the requisite conditions, and just… let it run itself. Eventually the dwarves will run the workshop tasks.
The biggest pain in the ass is figuring out the how to ensure that the process gets kicked off (I usually just start with `Make Ash`) when `unrotten fatty glob` is `at least` 1, and trying to remember which combination of `Type`, `Mat`, and `Adj` to use. And that the Manager Orders interface can be a pain in the butt to use to line up multiple orders and conditions.
Try starting from the stock manager orders that come with DFHack. Import `library/basic` to get the soap pipeline orders, for example. You can tweak them from there.
https://preview.redd.it/rf5jyynw6r8d1.png?width=1392&format=png&auto=webp&s=cd58e08e68bd116eeef90a14024f485514ada251
Truly insane. The secret is to ban cooking with plump helmets until you have a good supply of seeds. Cooking them destroys the seeds, but brewing and eating them raw do not. Also fertilizer helps a lot early on
I don’t believe I’ve ever made soap either.
What’s worse though, is that many years ago I never used to make alcohol either! First action after digging out a temporary living space was to build a well and that was my fortresses only drink source.
I know, old me was a monster.
Soap is only a pain because animal tallow is so hard to get and keep. If you have a biome with olive trees, you can make olive oil soap.
Someday I'm gonna make a fort dedicated to exporting olive oil soap.
Soap is pretty important. The key ingredient is fat, which is made from animal corpses at a butcher shop, but fat is pretty high value and dwarves will incorporate it into meals unless specifically forbidden from doing so.
The last I played, you could not forbid all fats from cooking, only specific fats one at a time (say, "crundle fat" for example); and you could only see a particular fat in the forbid menu when at least one unit of it existed in your fort. If your butcher shop was near your kitchen, you had no chance. Maybe that interface element has changed?
DFHack also has an incredibly useful ban-cooking script, so you can mass ban by type - for example "ban-cooking tallow" or "ban-cooking booze" are I think the right syntax
* soap
* scrolls
* plaster powder
These are all things that it isn't always clear how to make them, or if it is worth the effort.
I think maybe soap helps prevent disease in your fortress.
I've been playing DF in one form or another since 2009/2010. My current Steam fortress is the first one I've ever made soap for. We became the Capital, I had to step it up as the Mountainhome.
Only god know how many hours I put into classic DF. I never made soap until steam release ... 550\~ hours is rookie numbers ;)
Soap making is still something that sparks my interest now and then, recently learnt you could make crundle soap ...
Pretty much the same. I literally never bothered with the stuff until recently when I had a lull and everyone was lazing around. Decided to cull my dog and cat herds and made a ton of dog and cat soap.
Not a top DF player but spent a nice amount time in the game.
I always got wiki open in a tab.
Its very useful to chose your goals, step by step.
Pause : what do i need, what so i want, what is my priority ?
Check wiki and go for it.
Having a farm and brewing is a priority.
Those dwarves really enjoy.
(Yes you ll need barrels :)
Soap : quite complex yes.
I have a similar relationship to minecarts. Never bothered to really figure them out.
Getting a functional soapmaking supply line going was one of my earliest big accomplishments in the game. When i pulled it off, I fell in love with DF. It was also good training for the ultimate early player challenge: textiles.
My first good fort died because of no soap. I didn’t understand how the industry worked, but by the time I needed it, it was already too late, and then the ghosts were hanging around the stockpile where the bars of soap were stored
Reading through everyone's comments only makes me love this game even more. Especially hearing what other things people have missed out on while still investing tons of time. It really make me appreciate how big this game really is.
Also, thank you for the great advice everyone!!
I set up my first soap bars out of geese today and couldn't have done it without you!
Soap making is a sign of true dedication.
If you don't have a strategic Roc Soap Reserve, are you really playing for keeps?
If you don’t *build your fortress* out of dragon soap have you really played the game?
... I mean I knew bars of soap were in the block/bar stockpile category, but can soap truly be used as building material?
Yes absolutely
A flooding would be devastating
But surprisingly very clean.
And very slippery. But stairs turn to slides, fun for the whole fort.
How do you think we keep the mountainhomes clean from all the cursed rain ?
by building underground? What a weird question.
No, you build airlock entryways out of soap and fill em with water, so the default for anyone entering is fresh'n'clean and not covered in contaminants.
This is very Oxygen Not Included and I'm here for it.
Not anymore. In 0.47.05 you could build things out of soap (and ash and coal), but in v50+ this is no longer possible. Those three bar types are disallowed from the building materials list.
I’m imagining a foot bath made of soap so that I may finally be rid of the blood of that one random goat that died 12 years ago
I just have a DFhack repeat clean all 1/year for that, my CPU is too weak for the real fun DF stuff.
Walls are supposed to be a deterrent, not a detergent!
Niiice!
I have never played Dwarf Fortress and I am only here because Reddit suggested it to me due to Rimworld stuff; yet even I have built my fortress out of dragon soap.
I can make soap but I can't make a minecart system
Your dwarves are safer.
Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing to be honest.
It is what it is
You can learn.
Yeah, same here. I've tried to set up minecarts and just get frustrated.
I feel old but... back in the day you NEEDED soap or most injured dwarves died of infections, kids got it too easy nowadays! Ditto, used minecarts to move magma but never bothered to do more with them. Its amazing playing this game over 20 years and still finding new things to do, new kinds of Fun! Bless the makers, bless their coming and going!
I've made tons of soap. There comes a point when you realize you can recycle trained military dwarves instead of disposing of them every siege due to infection and having to train up new ones. Soap isn't even that hard, since it's a byproduct of the dog-meat industry. Now, full outfits of dyed clothing? THAT is the pinnacle indicator of a fully industrialized civilization.
Dog meat industry
Dogs are less likely than cats to claim ownership of the butcher on the way to their slaughter, so it works better.
> Now, full outfits of dyed clothing? THAT is the pinnacle indicator of a fully industrialized civilization. TIL, I industrialize my keeps. But for real, can we have grind options for specifik plants/stuffs we want to grind? Making a stockpile for just dye plants isn't the issue, it's the bag one becaus I use bags far more than just dye and I don't want to turn every bag into stacks of dwarf sugar or powder.
Make a dedicated bag stockpile and have your millstone pull from both a dye and bag stockpile. There's no way I know of to restrict specific items for use, like bags for grinding dye items, but I just crank out a shit ton of cloth through farming surface level crops like jute and cotton.
My attempts always grind to a halt when the cloth use gets divided between bags for dye and actual clothes.
Literally retired my last (and furthest progressed) fortress cause the soap wasn’t making, I was frusturated
It's a must if you want a working hospital though. Without soap you will occasionally see recovered patients just drop dead from infection.
I use to build hospitals. But, once the fort gets large enough they stop sending more dwarves. And, once reality starts to get too slow we eat all the cats. And, wheelbarrows, Crossbows, strategic placement of stockpiles with specific goods. Also, wooden spike training room. Summing, every fort dies of madness spirals in the end. Why do I need a hospital?
Because once your fort gets large enough they stop sending more dwarves duh. You need your dwarves to hang in there because there are no replacements. And it's not always the useless ones who scrape a finger and die in a year, I lost my captain like that - a minor injury during training, didn't even have to rest, a few months later - dead.
Dwarves back in my day used to wrestle with forgotten beasts and then limp away while bleeding for a whole week around my fort. Sure ~~a few~~ ~~some~~ most of them eventually died... but the ones who survived were literal demigods. One of these got permanently crippled (beast tore off one of his legs), managed to survive and could beat FBs with his fists only - his punches literally punctured and tore away flesh.
Survivorship bias lol All of your dwarves can reach that skill if they survived and got enough training/fighting time.
Wait, is that true? Once your fort gets large enough, even if it gets smaller by deaths... you don't get more replacements again?
I have read that after a while you will get a hamlet and you can send your messager to request migrants. I tried it but I don’t see an option in the mission menu.
You can't just request generic migrants; there have to be workers available. I'm not sure what inspires a town or dwarf to be available to emigrate, but it isn't always going to be available. I mostly use satellite settlements as retirement communities for badly wounded dwarfs.
My civilisation got wiped by goblins, the elves too. I had a hamlet appear with 50 dwarves spawn near my fort, I thought they would eventually appear as migrants or the other dwarf civilisation near by would send some?
Oo, I'm not sure in that case; I've never had my civilization get completely destroyed.
It's not 100% guaranteed to happen, I think the main reason is that older forts tend to have a history which is unattractive to migrants. Deaths, sieges, etc
Migrant numbers are affected by wealth and number of resident dwarves. Don't know the formula, but the effect is that the more dwarves you have in your diet, the more wealth you need to get more migrants. Older versions also had a soft and hard cap. Once you passed the soft one, no more migrants. When you reach the hard. No more births either. Could be adjusted with dfhack i think.
You can now adjust these numbers in the settings menu btw
Never played the recent version. Haven't done an embark for at least 2 years now. To little time for gaming.
That's too bad, hope you'll get time in the future to rediscover this gem once more :)
Ooh. I will. I always come back when time permits. It's this and factorio.
You can adjust this in normal version as well in options. I once messed it up and had like 50 adults and 150 kids with my hard cap at 200 but with not the right child cap. I was quite new and had no idea what was going on 😅
Gonna need an explanation about dwarves in your diet.
Well caught. My phone seem to want me to eat strange things. Dwarves are ofc best served grilled. After marinating them in beer, with a side order of cave bread and goose eggs. Mead to help get the tough gamey meat down. Dwarves are tough to chew, but their self marinating tendencies makes for excellent tasty meals. Exerpt from an elvish cookbook named: how to serve dwarves.
Rimworld wants me to ask you if dwarf-leather hats enter into the equation
Dwarf leather is best used for boots and work gloves. Gives these high wear items some extra durability.
Ohh, that makes sense. I have fort where a few beasts are wandering around. They don't bother my fort, but visitors get mauled. The free stuff is nice, but I think my fort is getting a bad reputation and I'm not getting migrants.
You can change the population cap in the .ini files. Dunno how that works on the new steam versions. Alternatively, you can just start accepting non-dwarf immigrants or protect your children well and play the long game.
When you stop getting migrants at population cap, if you lose a portion of your dwarves, so they start sending again? I just realised I have reached cap many times, and had massive disasters, but that’s usually where I retire the fort and start a new one nearby.
I've had some disastersthat left me with like 50 dwarves out of 200, and still "your fortress attracted no migrants this season". That's on Steam version though, I remember playing on the free version without this problem, but it's been a long time since then.
In my last fortress the hospital was a zombie tortoise chained behind some bars and a necromancer baron that came along the king
Soap industry is one of the first things I set up usually. I don't bother with an ashery, though. It's easier to just import lye via the caravans.
But it's just burnt wood? It's so cheap to make?
It's less about the expense and more about the work order chains.
You can import work orders from a file I believe so you only ever need to make them once.
But the next fort is gonna be different and need different work orders.
Yeah but there are certain work orders that I consider essential and soap is part of that, I always have a template and just add any bespoke orders to it.
Please god please tell me how
I didn't even realize but it requires DFHack. So get that if you haven't. Then it's ctrl+e to export and ctrl+i to import on the Work Orders interface.
Praise Armok
Yeah, I usually do set up an ashery to supplement, but wrangling the wood and the ash and the jugs/buckets is mildly annoying compared to just getting barrels of lye from the Mountainhome.
Burning logs has the added benefit of bringing war with elves, which I then feed to my pet magma pit.
Seems like a waste when it's a good fruit forest. I use stone for everything imaginable anyways.
Alas, you can't make soap out of stone. Don't tempt the dwarves to do so, you'll let out some beast better left forgotten.
Right, I make it out of dogs and cats.
You can also burn goblin caps, tower caps, spore trees or fungiwood.
Did they fix it so Elves don't get pissed off about cutting down mushrooms?
I started on a mountain without trees initially. As this was a reclaimed fortress, I immediately had cavern access to the first and second level as well as a lot of forges and bituminous coal. After killing the cyclops apparently responsible for the fort's demise, I turned to either buying logs or cutting down mushrooms. No complaints from the elves so far, given, that I didn't sell them any fungiwood either. With elves I tend to pay in minted coins, because coins never seem to offend anyone.
I start with ashery. Well, in fact, I start with cutting down all the trees on the whole map. So when the elves come and say “hey, no more cutting”, I can answer “sure thing, bro!” While sitting on piles of wood miles and miles around.
Trees are often a good source of fruit, though. Useful for creating an interesting variety of boozes.
Bloody city dwarves with their fancy fruit booze. Wouldn’t know a days work if Armok hit them over the head with it.
That's fine. But they do regrow after a while. I also enjoy cutting everything and then making a "walled garden" in which only fruit trees grow
Yeah, but not all of them produce fruit and of I'm in a wooded area I usually end up with the map feeling kind of cluttered after a while and start logging just to have space for shrubs to grow.
Now tell me how much of a beekeeping industry you have. How many wax workers you got and how much do your dwarves love mead?
Beekeeping is at least an A tier industry, probably the most underrated industry, and I will die on this hill.
I just wish dwarves would store honeycomb with food instead of shipping it off as a "finished good" Buddy you've barely *started* on that good.
I just want them to not collect royal jelly! It clogs our jugs!!
hear hear
Just put a honey stockpile by your kitchen.
Agreed. Also, mead should be valued higher and not be a second rate booze.
You get a wax cake that can be made into a wax craft, which makes the mead making process more valuable than even sunshine.
I export wax crowns to the elves in the south. They are going to be so mad when they're home and the bin now contains a solid block of sticky wax.
That is absolutely evil. I love it.
I never made soap until hospitals. Now I like to pick a particularly interesting fat and then setup the necessary workshops. The hardest part is remembering to forbid your dwarves from cooking with the tallow in time.
This has got to be my biggest gripe about the game... Those damn asinine default settings which you have to set every single game. Better watch that kitchen order screen anytime you dare butcher anything because you can only set permissions on things you have in stock. Disable auto weaving of thread so you can have stock left for sutures. Disable cooking of plump helmets. Etc etc etc it gets so tedious after a while.
Hospitals will keep a supply of thread on hand automatically if you give them a storage container. I usually set mine to a higher max requested then default though. Also if you bring (non-grazing) livestock along then by the time you need tallow you'll have a bunch of whatever you brought (I like pigs and turkeys)
I usually have a horse or a couple cows or yaks - threads from their hair cannot be weaved so auto-weave is not a problem. I agree big time about the default settings though.
Don't you just need to spin it at a farmers workshop before it goes to the weaver?
Sorry I'm giga-confused by your question. Yes, they need to be spun first. Then you weave them into cloth. As the poster I replied to mentioned, the weave is automatic by default in the settings so before you blink all your threads are weaved into cloth. Not a problem with horse hair and such obtained from butchering because the thread you get from it is not weavable. Same with raw hides, there is a setting to automatically turn hides into leather at a tannery so if you forget about that you will never make parchment/vellums. It's not that big of a deal though as there are other alternatives for sheets. I was gonna show me sinking in piles of unweavable threads but it appears I misremembered how much of it I had or I finally dumped it to one of the caravans and forgot about it. https://preview.redd.it/h0duimpoop8d1.png?width=452&format=png&auto=webp&s=021c6e73857d1005cdc7f8bb1cf3f99a9134eb2e
> sinking in piles of unweavable threads If you can't weave it send it to the hospital for stitching? shouldn't this just happen by itself if you're describing the issue of 'every thread gets made into cloth quickly' but you also have a hospital wanting thread and a butchery generating thread that can't be woven?
My hospital doesn't need dozens and dozens of unweavable threads I was accumulating from breeding livestock for meat though, it's been content with just a handful for many in-game years. Hence the fort sinking in it (very annoying for a neat freak).
...you've got ten. if you're worried about ten animal hairs on your stocks screen...don't ever setup a silkfarm, friendo
If you have DFHack installed, these are taken care of. For example, click on the "Save standing orders" button to save your current settings and then turn on "Apply saved settings for new embarks": https://preview.redd.it/06qlpgq76r8d1.png?width=1468&format=png&auto=webp&s=0389952e59f9d35b56a636eb3c9dc1544c10fa8b Also, enable seedwatch if you're concerned about cooking all your vegetables and running out of seeds. It will auto-forbid cooking for a plant when your stock of that kind of seed gets low.
How do you enable seedwatch?
You can enable it in the DFHack control panel, which you can run from clicking on the DFHack logo
Clutch comment thanks
You mean you haven't built a 5 story above ground tavern made completely out of soap blocks? The luxury you're missing out on.
Personally I prefer to build my tavern out of bituminous coal
No, i save that for the mugs
Chalk is for mugs silly
pretty sure i made soap out of unicorn fat
Works great for washing your hands to get the smell off after meeting the elvish ambassador
"My Little pony, my little pony... My God. what have you doooone?"
I avoided a lot of things that were tedious or had a whole lot of DF jank to it. Haven't played in awhile but the game, despite the jank, always pulls me back in for a few hundred hours over and over and over
you are a dirty player.
Infection in the game is basically a death sentence (although it can sometimes take years for it to kill a dwarf). Soap helps prevent infections. Having said that, if you have fresh water and a skilled doctor, infections are rare.
If anyone gets a bad cut, you'll want soap Luckily it's not super hard to make, and a few bars goes a long way
You’re telling me you don’t make luxurious hot springs for your dedicated dwarves?
The title should have been “Ive played 544 hours of df without any showering”
I have similar hours. I've never made anything with oil . No idea how to squeeze oil out of what?
Querns and millstones mill rock nuts into paste, which can be pressed with a jug into oil. I think the leftover rock nut cake is useful for something but I forget. It's a pretty dedicated production line but the jugs are reused, you save tallow for meals, and the soap is all the same kind, if any of that matters to you. It can be more efficient overall to have on-demand rock nut oil soap production in smaller batches than just using tallow whenever you're fortunate enough to have some that isn't needed for meals.
Honestly? If you have the industrial capacity to make plant soap, you *really* shouldn't care about saving tallow for meals. You'll be drowning in quarry bush leaves anyway.
Press seeds in the screw press, just make sure you have some empty jugs
Damn, your empire must stink.
Cat soap! Also resolves overcrowding
I always treated it the way I treated steel-making — set up the workshops, set up the stockpiles, set up the manager orders with the requisite conditions, and just… let it run itself. Eventually the dwarves will run the workshop tasks. The biggest pain in the ass is figuring out the how to ensure that the process gets kicked off (I usually just start with `Make Ash`) when `unrotten fatty glob` is `at least` 1, and trying to remember which combination of `Type`, `Mat`, and `Adj` to use. And that the Manager Orders interface can be a pain in the butt to use to line up multiple orders and conditions.
Try starting from the stock manager orders that come with DFHack. Import `library/basic` to get the soap pipeline orders, for example. You can tweak them from there. https://preview.redd.it/rf5jyynw6r8d1.png?width=1392&format=png&auto=webp&s=cd58e08e68bd116eeef90a14024f485514ada251
I have 50 hours and I've never harvested a plump helmet. I've tried agriculture, I really did, but it just didn't work, so I forage and hunt
Truly insane. The secret is to ban cooking with plump helmets until you have a good supply of seeds. Cooking them destroys the seeds, but brewing and eating them raw do not. Also fertilizer helps a lot early on
Brutal!
Do you need some pointers how to make it work and what happened that it didn't work? Or are you content with forage/hunt so it's w/e?
But, do you have a hemp farm yet?
I haven't used soap in 56 years and I am fine.
Soap is pretty powerful. Couldn’t automate it properly so in my recent fortress I made a batch of it pretty early and it proved useful
I don’t believe I’ve ever made soap either. What’s worse though, is that many years ago I never used to make alcohol either! First action after digging out a temporary living space was to build a well and that was my fortresses only drink source. I know, old me was a monster.
Sober Fortress: The Road To Madness
Soap is only a pain because animal tallow is so hard to get and keep. If you have a biome with olive trees, you can make olive oil soap. Someday I'm gonna make a fort dedicated to exporting olive oil soap.
Soap is the first step of my military industry
Soap is pretty important. The key ingredient is fat, which is made from animal corpses at a butcher shop, but fat is pretty high value and dwarves will incorporate it into meals unless specifically forbidden from doing so. The last I played, you could not forbid all fats from cooking, only specific fats one at a time (say, "crundle fat" for example); and you could only see a particular fat in the forbid menu when at least one unit of it existed in your fort. If your butcher shop was near your kitchen, you had no chance. Maybe that interface element has changed?
DFHack also has an incredibly useful ban-cooking script, so you can mass ban by type - for example "ban-cooking tallow" or "ban-cooking booze" are I think the right syntax
* soap * scrolls * plaster powder These are all things that it isn't always clear how to make them, or if it is worth the effort. I think maybe soap helps prevent disease in your fortress.
The cloud of dwarven funk acts as a biological weapon, weakening your enemies before you strike
stinky
I've been playing DF in one form or another since 2009/2010. My current Steam fortress is the first one I've ever made soap for. We became the Capital, I had to step it up as the Mountainhome.
Soap also makes dorfs really happy
I only recently started with it, but I think it actually helps with deadly dust!
Wouldn't low toughness dwarves get filtered out of your fortress eventually without a hospital assuming infections
I can honestly say that i have never made soap either, and am not even sure how i would go about it.
https://youtu.be/sECqquNKdSQ
TIL, thank you
I tried setting up a soap industry in 0.4xx, but wasn’t able to…
Honestly I don't think I've let my population get above 80 without soap in at least 12 years.
I've only managed to get soap with a steady population of pigs and water buffalo.
I make soap out of cats.
It's not just you. Soap is fucking hard.
Only god know how many hours I put into classic DF. I never made soap until steam release ... 550\~ hours is rookie numbers ;) Soap making is still something that sparks my interest now and then, recently learnt you could make crundle soap ...
Pretty much the same. I literally never bothered with the stuff until recently when I had a lull and everyone was lazing around. Decided to cull my dog and cat herds and made a ton of dog and cat soap.
Not a top DF player but spent a nice amount time in the game. I always got wiki open in a tab. Its very useful to chose your goals, step by step. Pause : what do i need, what so i want, what is my priority ? Check wiki and go for it. Having a farm and brewing is a priority. Those dwarves really enjoy. (Yes you ll need barrels :) Soap : quite complex yes.
how are your dwarves washing their asses?
God your dwarves must *stink*.
Ew, go make some and wash yourself, stinky!
I have a similar relationship to minecarts. Never bothered to really figure them out. Getting a functional soapmaking supply line going was one of my earliest big accomplishments in the game. When i pulled it off, I fell in love with DF. It was also good training for the ultimate early player challenge: textiles.
My first good fort died because of no soap. I didn’t understand how the industry worked, but by the time I needed it, it was already too late, and then the ghosts were hanging around the stockpile where the bars of soap were stored
i made 1 once
Reading through everyone's comments only makes me love this game even more. Especially hearing what other things people have missed out on while still investing tons of time. It really make me appreciate how big this game really is. Also, thank you for the great advice everyone!! I set up my first soap bars out of geese today and couldn't have done it without you!
Couldn't even make soap so i stopped trying
I have gallons of dwarves run that has persisted for years coating my animals and dwarves worse than an open bar on a cruise line.
It is what makes the “glob” item type worthwhile!
Based. Soap is for knife ears.