Too Long For A Reply, But I Hope You Dont Mind The Answer To It:

Too long for a reply, but I hope you don’t mind the answer to it:

So actually the difference is kinda straightforward ironically enough. Engraving is skill regarding engraving images into walls and floors. Stone carving is carving of stone into objects, particularly trade goods. Stone cutting is cutting stone into furniture or blocks. The easy way to tell is which station they do it at. Engravers only engrave things through the engrave command. Stone cutters are those who smooth floors, carve fortifications or minecart tracks, and work at the stone mason’s workshop. Stone carvers work at a craftsdwarfshop.

Masons btw are those that build the walls, drawbridges and other structures that need to be assembled if they’re made out of stone blocks or stones

Edit: Stone Carvers carve fortifications & mine cart tracks. Stone crafters work at a craftsdwarfshop. There’s also a recipe on the stone mason’s table that uses stone carving instead of cutting, but I don’t know which one it is. Stone cutters still smooth floors, so that information is accurate. Tbh, just cross-train your stone workers imo, excluding stone crafting. You’d rather have a strange mood on a stone cutter than a stone crafter

Dwarf Fortress is truly the game of all time.

These are all distinct skills. How in gods name am i meant to intuit the difference between Stone Carving and Stone Engraving

Come to think of it, asking a dwarf a question like that is liable to attract some strange looks. In dwarf culture you'd have to be a special kind of idiot to not know the difference between carving and engraving, after all. This is just Dwarf Fortress providing the authentic culture shock experience

I can add a small bit of info on her. I believe she’s lived in my fort since 106-107, but I’m not exactly sure, I’ll try to crack open legends later to search for her & Kulet later. I’m pretty sure the 2 other older kids are also born in the fort?

As for the small potrait/fort sprites, in my experience DF Premium only generates a dwarf sprite for a creature if it visits one of your forts or is encountered in adventure mode. In my experience I can’t say I’ve seen a creature in adventure mode and then checked them in a fort without them being there, like a relative. As far as I know all my “living relatives” for my dwarfs that have sprites all migrate with them.

Ustuth has a few relatives and such that are historical figures without sprites, and I’ve never seen a creature in fort mode that wasn’t a historical figure, only in Adventure Mode have I encountered non-historical figures with sprites. Presumably because all figures at a Fort automatically get names in case you click them and therefore are saved as historical figures

Did you find your missing baby?

Not yet. Kulet is still missing. I admit my schedule has been rough for playing DF as of recent, and my most recent time has been spent on a new fort (The Sea Adventure, a Sinister Ocean/coastal embark). Kulet is from my 4th Fort (Idk the name it was too long). Short summary of my forts though:

1st Fort, Bustmoment: -Tutorial embark. Went fine initially, set up large bedroom complex, good dining hall, and food/alcohol production. Decent traps for surface entrance. Lack of understanding of how Fortifications work lead to bad usage of them, and ultimately made the surface defenses scary to operate. Meanwhile I breached the first cavern layer and only the first, and got involved in a nasty war on Olm people, that kept dragging my dwarves into the lake. Eventually after losing a major military engagement, I dropped the save and made a new world. (I didn't know about Retirement at the time)

2nd Fort, Steelfortress: -The infamous war on birds started here. Embark was a neutral badlands with high savagery & a light aquifer. Aquifer posed no challenge and I was within a year having settled with all three caverns pierced, and a decent magma forge set up. Traps and such were more aggressively deployed, and there were more than a few battles (Internally referred to as the "Great Cavern Wars" against Ant-People) to carve out certain areas underground for farming. Ultimately what drove me to abandon this fort was a 9 month long battle against giant flying agitated wildlife. During that I built up a decently large and armored military, which while incapable of fending off the birds, was apparently itching for World Domination. (More on that later. Though also on another post of mine)

3rd Fort, "Lake of Something" (Name forgotten again): -Having felt a High Savagery was too much & Light aquifers too easy, I searched for a heavy aquifer and got a lake location I liked. After starting the first year, and trying to dig down, I almost immediately hit the heavy aquifer and got stuck for over a year trying to get things stable, and set up a method to pierce the aquifer before beginning to build the fort proper. Unlike the previous forts which had surface trading depots, I decided to move this one underground. Like other forts before and after, I then began to quickly dig towards the bottom, and set up small areas within each cavern to work in, or blocked them off after discovering them. Ultimately nothing particularly notable happened that sticks out in memory, but the fort was ultimately abandoned due to the Cave Adaptation fix update rolling around. Knowing most dwarves had likely developed it in this fort, I decided to take a break from Fortress mode, and play some Adventure mode.

(Which I decided to retire my second fort, as my save of it was in the worst condition of the three, and I originally wanted to retire the fort by "Succumbing to internal invaders" or similar but a standard retirement was an option and I viewed as more desirable)

4th Fort, Desert Mines of Good (or something): -After playing around in Adventure Mode in the 2nd fort's world, I got an itch to start a new fort again, and was talking with my brother. We ultimately came to pick a fort in a Good and Neutral biome cross between "Desert?", badlands and Grasslands. Among world history, as it shares a previous fort, I decided to embark from that Civ again. Just to find out when the Liason came by, that 2 of my 3 dwarven neighbors were at war with me. Going through Legends mode further told me it was my Civ that seemed to have started the war, with all attacks coming from my prior fortress after I retired it. The whole time I was trying to rescue kidnapped children from Goblins in Adventure Mode, it turns out my fort was just attacking EVERYBODY. I played this one until around 1-2 weeks ago, when I began wanting to try messing with some mods for the first time.

4.5th fort, Some volcano Fort I think?: -I had a friend over and I was talking about DF, as you do, and he got curious about the game and wanted to see what it was like. So I booted the game up, showed world gen, we picked an embark, and then retired it to go to it in Adventure Mode. We then made an ideal character for him, and then foolishly rolled up a Worm Man with over 100 pet worms, and crashed the game. I haven't talked with said friend yet, and was gonna play in that world when talking with them.

5th Fort, The Sea Adventure: -That leaves us with our current fort. It's a sinister oceanic embark, and I brought a few adventurers there, including a Dwarf-me, a dwarf-version of my brother, and an anomalocaris (one of the mods) woman of one of my roommates (And their cat as a pet cat, who died to Goblins). Originally the plan was to grow Sliver Barbs & catch Precambrian Arthropods for an aquarium, but I don't know how to do the later half. The Roc attacks have been on this fort.

I did something similar with a friend the other day while showing him the game. We set it to Adventure Mode, made him a mantis woman (Gelder of course) and set up all their skills and spent their money. We then turned around and made a worm man so we could spawn on the main continent, and while trying to pick equipment… we saw Pet Worm… and we had about 600 or so spare points. We spent them ALL ON WORMS. So a mantis woman and a worm man and his worms.

At this point I figured I’m probably just humoring him to even see if we can leave character creation like this. But the game loads, sticks us in an Elven retreat, and I check and we’ve got a fuckton of worms crawling on our worm man, who is stuck in a tree… after an impromptu climbing lesson, we’re out of the tree, and ready to travel to our Dwarven fort of choice to settle down for some Fortress mode shenanigans. So we open the travel menu and *then* the game crashes. But climbing a tree with 100 worms on my shoulders and head was fine lmfao

Trying out the Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode beta finally, I rolled up a black bear man with 40 pet turkeys. He's from the same civ as Fort Bowloar but on a different landmass, I guess it couldn't be selected because it's on a different continent from the rest of the civilization.

Having this many turkey followers seems to be a bit of an issue (for some reason), every step they're going prone and standing back up as they enter and exit each others' spaces, generating a message that needs to be clicked through.

I experienced a bug where I was up a tree after exiting the travel screen, and I could climb down but my 40 turkeys were stuck up there. Thankfully traveling again brought them down.

We found a goblin site but it was populated by neutral dwarves and goblins, for some reason. Maybe we conquered this site during world generation? Still couldn't travel or make a campfire until leaving. Also Bowloar mention!

After leaving the goblin site we were attacked by dingoes! Until this exact moment I had not realized that my turkeys have natural predators.

It's pretty gruesome. A quirk of mass combat in this engine when you're controlling a single unit is that things tend to move into adjacent spaces when they dodge attacks, which means they ping-pong around a bunch when being attacked by 40 turkeys simultaneously. It was very hard to get into melee range. I got two hits in on one dingo. (they were pretty good hits, though)

The turkeys won with three dead and a lot more grievously injured. Perhaps from this humble beginning there will emerge a scarred and battle-hardened uber-turkey who will be the perfect adventuring companion. Or, possibly the rest of them will bleed to death.

To honor the dead I must respond to this tragedy in accordance with the customs of my people.

Figured I'd share some of my favorite screenshots from Oxygen Not Included. Screenshots range across the Beta days of Spaced Out!, I know 1 & 2 were from a 1-dupe colony setup on the 3rd world of my cluster. The 3rd image is my "Baby Boiler" for Petroleum. 4 is Beetas and 5 I thought the way they all looked disappointed was funny.

Funfact, if you dig into the lore of the various dupes, these bits of lore about their personalities line up with the Gravitas Employees with the same names. The best example of this Devon's dream of a toast-blog are due to the Gravitas Devon actually having a Toast blog, called "Toast of the Town". There's a few emails about it.

Why are dups so funny

GIRL. HOW MUCH SHIT CAN YOU OWN?!

Hey girl...maybe share some shit for the rest of us?