Pre-Steam, I used a practice spear room for training. Just set the squad to congregate in a room full of practice spear traps. Attach the traps to a lever located in a well-populated area, and set it so any dwarf can flip it. Lots of poking and dodging and blocking practice means soldiering experience and only minor injuries at worst.
Apparently, there are less FUN! ways to train now.
I had something very odd happen while I was playing last night… never seen anything like this before. Frequently when I’m starting a new game, I forget to build a Trade Depot. Then the caravan shows up in the fall and I get an alert that the trade caravan doesn’t have anywhere to unload, and I have to hurry up and build a depot.
There was a delay getting the depot built - the construction got suspended somehow and it took me a while to figure out what was going on and get construction resumed.
The merchants come in and start unloading, but then one of them gets attacked (and killed) by a wolf. Another merchant who is an axedwarf or speardwarf goes chasing after the wolf, and there’s another merchant who’s just standing there about 20 squares away from the Trade Depot and he won’t move. So I’ve got a depot full of goods, but there’s nobody to trade with, I can’t figure out how to get the traders to come back and no way for me to just grab the loot. It’s a very weird situation.
That’s where things stood by the time I saved and stopped playing for the night. I’ll be curious to see how the situation resolves.
It’s nearly a year later (game time) and the one merchant is still standing there about 20 squares away from the Trade Depot, and the axedwarf merchant who went chasing after the wolf appears to be stuck in a river at the edge of the map. It’s surprising after all this time that they haven’t drowned or starved to death. (Athough a couple of the animals they brought along have starved to death.)
Meanwhile the ghost of the merchant who was killed by the wolves started haunting the fortress, so I built a tomb for him. At the same time I had a metalcrafter go berserk and died because he got possessed by a strange mood but I didn’t have a metalworker’s workshop built yet so there was no workshop for him to take over. So I built another tomb for him, but what appears to have happened is that the bones of the dead merchant wound up in one tomb, and his ghost wound up in the other, and then the bones of the dead metalcrafter got put in the same tomb as the bones of the dead merchant.
I’m about due for another trade caravan and am waiting to see if one shows up or if the current situation prevents another caravan from arriving. Maybe I should remove the first trade depot and build a new one? If I did that I wonder if it would free up all the merchandise that is in limbo from the first caravan in the trade depot.
Mid-winter, no trade caravan this year, the two merchants from the previous year still frozen in place. So I went ahead and removed the trade depot. The merchant that had been standing a ways off immediately grabbed his yak and started wandering around aimlessly. I put the camera on him to follow him, and he eventually meandered off the right edge of the map. I scrolled over to the left edge where the axedwarf merchant had been stuck in the river, and he was gone too.
Meanwhile a stream of dwarfs from my fortress ran out and snagged all the goods that were left on the ground when the trade depot was removed. So, free stuff!
Bumping the thread again to announce that it looks like Adventure Mode is now available! I hadn’t played DF for a while, getting sidetracked with playing through the Subnautica games again. Fired it up yesterday morning and saw that Adventure Mode had been released.
I never played Adventure mode on the “classic” version of the game, but decided to start a game in the Steam version just to see what it was like. Hoo-boy! I think I’m going to need to find some YouTube tutorials. I tried to do the in-game tutorial but it was not much help at all.
It took me over a year but I definitely got my money’s worth.
I had played a decade ago and struggled mightily. The new UI is more to my liking and I’m relying heavily on wikis and videos that didn’t exist back then.