Gnomoria (graphical DF-Less-Lite-Than-Towns-Like)

One thing that confused the hell out of me for the longest time was the placement of crates and barrels and such. I'd tell the guys to place a crate somewhere and instead of taking one of the just about to built ones they'd just move one of the already existing crates, contents and all. Eventually I realised that if I wanted them to use the pine crates I was having made then I should select Pine Crates (0) from the menu and hey presto no more apples in the ore store.

Another tip for when you're delving too deeply and too greedily is to set a local stockpile of 1 or 2 squares amidst the rock or soil you're collecting and make sure that it has a higher priority than the main stockpile. Your gnomes will gather all the rock/soil up into those two squares and when its gathered you can just undesignate the stockpile and the gnomes will the carry the stacks back to your main stockpile instead of individually. Unfortunately this doesn't work for ore, as soil and rock are the only materials that stack but you can instead have a crate dragged down into the mines and use that for the same purpose as a remote stockpile and carry the entire thing back in one go.

Yeap, that works, as long as you deconstruct the crate/barrel/bag before designating the new stockpile, otherwise you're liable to have dwarves hauling individual goods over to the stockpile, though it won't take long to fill up before the storage gets there anyways.

I finished the demo, and while it was fun, I don't think I have the patience to play this during the alpha. I get frustrated seeing all the cool potential things I could do, if only the inbred morons under my charge would actually execute their orders, but there's generally some intervening step that's not clear. Definitely worth checking out once it hits commercial release, though.

Well, the way stockpiles, squares, and workshops light up should tell you what's going on in terms of what gnomes' priorities are at the time.

The last time my gnomes did nothing, I felt stupid for not realizing what the holdup was. It's usually a lack of logs, really, since so much is made of wood (though the stonemason does make stone furniture since mining is usually more productive than woodcutting, it's just that stone furniture is worth less and therefore provides less value to dining halls and personal quarters).

It's really basic things like storage; you can't build a crate before you designate a stockpile (I guess?) so that seems counterintuitive and the inverse of a logical order, but whatever. Then you can issue orders to build it and they won't build it - no explanation as to why, they just don't do it. I probably needed another workshop of some sort, but it lets me place the crates despite the lack of that workshop, unlike the other stuff like beds which you can't place until you have the materials and workshops to build them. Just lots of inconsistencies like that which, taken individually, aren't bad - but in aggregate end up turning fun to frustration and motivate me to exit the game and play something else.

But again, it's in alpha. I don't really expect things to be that polished yet - it's actually surprisingly functional for such and early stage. I don't hold any of that against the game or against Rob. I'm still interested in it, but I'll check back when it's finished or at least further along in development.

I've been tinkering with this a bit yesterday, using my memories of the ongoing LP as a rough guide. I haven't got as far as goblins or setting up a militia yet but I think I have most of the basics down bar forgetting to build a well. Will gnomes drink yaks milk if there is no water or alcohol available?

Also, I think I just realised that you have to manually place constructed crates and barrels in storage areas rather than the gnomes doing that for you. Are they in the furniture build menu?

Most stuff has been fine once you work out the subtle rules like the way the world is built like a pile of sandwiches (wall block -> floor sliver -> wall block) rather than in just minecraft style blocks. Also gnomes can't build things from a ramp that are on the same level as the top of the ramp even though it looks like they should be able to. you have to go; ramp->wallblock + floor -> thing you want to build on level above (in my case usually another wall block). Or at least I think that is the rule. Also, gnomes will dig the first thing they can path to - even if digging it destroys the paths to other designated tasks. So if you want to dig a pit, you have to be very careful what you designate - usually I do it strip by strip so that each designated block can always be accessed by an undesignated one.

You're right about everything but you forgot about stairs. If you want to do multi-level construction work in empty space, stairs will allow you to build floors directly from the top stair, while ramps will not.

And it's Build > Storage > Crate/Barrel/Bag, which can only be placed in a stockpile and do not act as a stockpile. I see this was a complaint by SuperJay and I sorta agree with him, I had suggested to Rob to make storage containers act as individual stockpiles (or linkable via designation).

Okay, so I lied. Played the demo again, just bought the full version, fuck you. I do what I want.

I had a much better time on my third attempt; second attempt I got one of my two builders trapped somehow, so I bailed on that game. This time I got four or five workshops built, made enough beds for everyone, built some basic storage containers and some torches for light. Made a wheat farm, a cotton farm, and a pasture for my yaks. Things seem to be going along okay after the first six days.

I still think the interaction between designations and objects is the biggest problem I've run into - the fact that they behave inconsistently is problematic, and the mechanics of stockpiles and storage containers are unnecessarily convoluted. (I agree with Pogo re: making crates and such just automatically become stockpiles. There's no other function for a container other than storage.) I'm also not clear why sometimes the gnomes just don't use the containers for the purposes I've designated, but I assume it's the unwritten limitations of specific container types coming into play.

You may be trying to use the wrong type of container in a stockpile designation:

Barrels: Liquids only
Bags: Seeds, clippings, cotton fibers, wheat
Crates: All other finished and raw goods (including cotton bolts and bandages), fruits/food

Containers are useless for dirt or raw stone, those two materials can stack up to 64 in one square, while containers only hold 32.

All workshops have their own internal storage of 20, which you can see the worker set aside next to their chair.

Yeah, I figured that out eventually. Strangely it seemed like I could not get them to pick up clippings and store them for the longest time, maybe because the bags I was trying already had other items in them? Don't know, but eventually I put down a couple bags on just generic 'Plant' stockpiles and they finally went around and cleaned em up. Are cotton bags bugged in the build furniture menu, btw? I can't select specific empty cotton bags, so a lot of the time when I try to place new storage for wheat or cotton, the fuckers will just move an existing bag over and leave the new empty bag sitting at the Loom.

I got some gnomads for the first time! Also OMG my yak had a baby!!1!!1 Which must be why my yaks are 'exhausted' all the time, the rigors of parenthood.

I do believe that the crate and bag selections are a little bugged, and it's most noticeably when you're starting out. If you have fresh bags built at the loom, they should show up as just a Bag with nothing in it in the drop down.

I don't recall if bags can hold multiple items, but I'm fairly sure they don't. I'm pretty sure only crates can hold different types of items. The issue with selecting bags is that you can't select the specific item, but most of the time you don't really need to since it's only farming materials which usually stay in exactly the same location, with cotton fibers being the only discrepancy but those are also something that are immediately turned into bandages or bolts.

Do not like:

1. Inconsistencies (mentioned above). Why can't place a "staged" bed (yellow transparent outline, took me a few minutes to figure this out), but I CAN place a "staged" barrel?
2. Having fail states when attempting to accomplish actions; i.e. why can't I build a bed? Current answer is fuck you, that's why; that doesn't cut it.
3. Clicking "move item" when attempting to move an item doesn't actually let you move the item. Well, it probably does, but it's in another one of those fuck you things and is totally not discoverable.

A real game designer needs to do a sweep over this and then I think we're going somewhere. For now its another one of those "talented amateur" things that can just drive me right up the fucking wall.

Oh-ho-ho! "Move" does not mean "move this item to a place," it means "Move the camera to this item, which you're already looking at!" Har har, har, UI design.

To actually move an item, you have to "build" that item but it has to be an item that's already built. No questions! When you "build" that item, you get to select where it's "built" (even though it's already built because if it wasn't you couldn't build it, but no the interface is not going to tell you that) and then pick which of the items you've built that you want to build. And god help you if you can't tell which of those built items is the one you want to build.

So I went out for a while and left the game running (I walled myself in) and this happened.

Holy shit, what are you feeding those critters??

Yea, that's gonna be one smelly cave.


Duck duck duck duck duck duck YAK!

I forgot to set up the pastures to be male only and female only so they fucked their brains out while I was gone. I'm guessing sex itself is their nourishment. They don't die of dehydration like all other creatures in the game so as long as you keep slaughtering them and selling the bones/hides/meat or let the ABSOLUTELY INSANE AMOUNTS OF MILK (I had 7000 beverage at one point, 6k of which was milk) build up you have infinite money. It's a shame you can't straight up sell animals, cuz that is the only way I could manage their population at this point. I have also set up pasture buffer zones that warn me when enemies are near (an emu has died!). I plan on eventually blocking that are off from my castle and letting some goblins in to kill this plague of farm animals.

In the meantime... YAK TACOS FOR EVERYBODY

But seriously dude, emu buffer zones? Like the emu's act as your early-warning system?

That's just sick. Brilliant, but sick.

Here's a better plan: Pull all your stuff out of there, wall them off, and then come back in ten million years. At that point in time you'll find quite the bounty, massive fossil fuel reserves.

That is all they're good for at this point since they've stopped producing eggs. A big enough yak pasture can actually kill small amounts of invaders, and as long as the pasture is cut off from your base, the attackers, if not dead already, will bleed to death. I've got the outskirts of the map divided into discreet corridors that are filled with livestock. At night I can't see invaders in them but the quick succession of Emu has died Emu has died Emu has died gives me a heads up and I start searching for the corpses.

The only way I'm getting metal, armor, and weaponry off goblin corpses, though I also trade for metal. I play too willy nilly to guard large mining operations and now that beetles, skeletons, zombies, and spiders come from underground along with the already tough golems, I'm not gonna start mining until I have at least two squads of expert musketeers with full steel armor.

Holy crap that's awesome.

I mean, I want him to fix it but it's still awesome. Honestly these animals ought to have food requirements. They should probably eat the grass off the dirt squares if you have them outside or else have some kind of "ten hay per animal per season" feeding requirement or something.

Ho boy, more insulting a single programmer who is working his ass off on an alpha and still adjusting the best way to handle the interface of a mechanically complicated game, ok:

1 and 2) You can't do Build>Furniture>Object without having built the object first.
If you go to the carpenter or stonemason and click on an object and still can't build it, it's because of its required materials is not available and will be grayed out in the material selection drop-downs. Why does it become available after you have built the first one? That's certainly a bad design feature and/or bug.

Gnomes will NOT build stuff automatically just because you set a furniture designation somewhere. They will only build what you tell them to build, and after it's built the Builders will place the item at the designation.

3) Move To is something he left in for now and while it doesn't seem like it makes sense, it actually does because you can go to the Stocks screen to overview your stockpiles, and if you want to change anything you would open it and go to Move To. With the UI and management overhaul coming I think this is something that will be more useful, maybe. It's most useful to find a gnome when you're browsing through the Population screen.

If you want to actually move an item, you have to deconstruct it first. It then becomes a floating piece of furniture or storage which will get moved to wherever you have a designation for it.

You guys have to give this game some credit as it does do some intelligent shit. For instance, if your carpenter is set to build:
Birch Door
Pine Crate
and you have no birch planks but you do have pine planks, he will skip the door and build the crate.

Not really insulting the guy but feel free to hyperbole words into my mouth.

The fact of the matter is a) there's a lot of one-man-band indie games out there, and b) nearly all of them have dire UIs. And, regardless of how hard the designer of Gnomoria is busting his ass, the UI is dire at this point in time. So, the point is that maybe some of these DF-alikes shouldn't start with the cool-to-design stuff like whether or not your minions can be wounded in the Prince Albert or not, but rather that a DF-alike should be designed starting with the boring UI stuff.

On almost all iterative projects the main UI work is done near the end, once you know what you need to make a user interface for.

I dunno scharmers, I think it's a stretch to call the Gnomoria UI "dire". I mean, the DF UI is dire. This UI is merely unwieldy.

1. As Gryff said, you don't design the final UI until the end, when you know what you're designing.
2. The UI isn't dire.

Yeah, UI wise Gnomoria is currently the one eyed man in the land of the blind so its going to get credit for that.

Yes, the UI in the alpha of Gnomoria certainly better than Dwarf Fortress. (That's a lovely way of damning with faint praise.)

It's an alpha. Of course it's got rough edges. I dunno why you guys are getting so defensive over scharmers comments. For my part, I just think it's funny that some things in the game are so convoluted.

You insinuated he wasn't a real game designer:

"Real" game designers design a game first while using a hacked-together UI that's just there to adequately test the game, unless the UI is part of the mechanics of gameplay.

I don't know how many fucking times I have to defend the fact that this game is in alpha, but I'll go ahead and keep on doing it, unless I'm faced with arguing with someone that actually makes games and has a different approach.

Pogobro, you don't have to defend anything. In fact, this thread would be more fun and interesting if you didn't. People are going to comment on what's in the game right now. Some of those comments won't be unbridled adoration. What do you care if someone like scharmers either doesn't understand that its in alpha or doesn't care? Just let it go.

Nah, I will defend it, and I don't expect unbridled adoration at all. My criticizing what I think is harsh and unproductive complaints about what programmers do in the indie sphere has been going on for a while. I like to think that this part of gaming is something that can be less hyperbolic than a Kotaku comments section.

New mini-patch notes:

Time to see if the Craft To works. This is a feature that you could regulate already by using stockpiles and the workshop's 20 item limit, but maybe it will be more intuitive this way if you like to use one stockpile for multiple items. I usually split planks from logs, but this way will require less micromanaging. My immediate thinking is that it's very useful for something like coal, where you want to use up your logs but you might not want your blacksmith spending all his time making coal from logs with a Repeat order on it.

The new Grove designation should be interesting and remove some of the micromanagement from tree production.

I found this work in progress of a saved game viewer that load up your gnomes' stats for easy viewing and sorting so you can assign them professions in-game. It's a bit buggy but it does work, and doesn't modify your game. The files have to be placed in your Gnomoria game directory for it to work:
http://forums.gnomoria.com/index.php?topic=2122.0

I tinkered around with this a bit yesterday, and it's obvious that anyone saying the UI is dire has never played Dwarf Fortress. That said, a few things jumped out at me right away:

1) The designation for placing stairs and simple digging seem a bit different. Pogo, is this what you meant when you said that one uses the top of the box, and the other uses the bottom? I think I got it eventually, but it definitely wasn't intuitive.
2) I couldn't figure out why nothing was going to my stockpile until I realized that the dirt clumps had to be moved off. So I designated a clump stockpile, at which point my dwarves used all of their energy moving all of the dirt I was digging to the new stockpile. At that point it seemed like they were able to add a ton of clumps to one square, although it's possible that I just didn't run into whatever the limit is. Is there a way to just have them clean a patch of ground, instead of designating a new pile and hoping they clean the old one before they start clearing the hallways?
3) Along the same lines, it seemed like they were indicating that they were hungry/thirsty/tired for quite some time before doing anything about it. I just had the food that I started with in the original crates, and no beds or dining rooms or anything like that. They seemed to eventually find everything and sleep on the floor, but will they meet their needs any faster if they have a nice place to do it?

And general things that I'm sure are on the wiki:

4) Does the Yak milk that gets generated ever spoil, or is that almost a permanent food source?
5) How long should I work before designating a militiadwarf? I want to make sure I have at least food production and somewhere to sleep, but if everyone's going to get killed before that happens they probably won't mind waiting.

All I can say is that, Pogo, you are one passionate MF'er about things. ;)

*gasp!*

RE: your questions -

1) I'm confused by this too.

2) I don't think there's any way to get them to clear a specific patch of ground. You just gotta give them stockpiles to put the stuff in until everything's cleaned up. (Dirt clumps don't need containers, btw; they'll stack up to 64 in one stockpile.)

3) It looks to me like they'll indicate thirst and hunger (and even tiredness) until they are done with whatever job you've assigned. Which implies that it's possible you could harm them by keeping them at work for too long, maybe?

4) I haven't seen anything spoil / rot yet, but I haven't been tracking it closely.

5) You can probably Forage for plenty of food in the very early game. Building beds will take wood planks and cloth bolts, which means a Sawmill, Carpenter, and Loom; you can probably get those up and running fairly quickly without worrying about a militia.

I almost changed it. Almost.

This is probably my biggest annoyance so far. There has to be/should be a way to clean a specific area. I don't care if we have dirt in the hallways.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding - if there's enough space in a nearby stockpile and that stockpile allows the dirt clumps, they should clean up everything. At least that what my dw-- er, gnomes did.

1) Is a little confusing, sure. Part of it is the way that the z-levels are built like a cake - each level has a main block sublayer and a "floor" thin sublayer. There's no easy way to explain it, I find that it just comes with experience. Make sure you are on the right z-level for what you want to do.

2) There's no elegant way to deal with dirt at the moment. In my view, for dirt at least, gnomes should be able to pick up and carry multiple piles at once. There are a number of workarounds:
a) create a one tile stockpile in the middle of a load of dirt, and set its priority really high. Gnome will gather 64 dirt piles all into one tile (no storage object is necessary). then remove the stockpiled designation, and let the 64-dirt pile all be carried away at once to your main dirt pile.
b) later, when merchants show up, you can offload dirt onto them - this will magically pick it up and essentially destroy it even if it isn't in a stockpile, so it is a quick way to clean.

3) Gnomes will complete their given task (i.e. one object crafted, one tile mined, one object hauled, etc.) before getting food/drink/sleep, but they will interrupt a whole sequence of tasks to take care of these needs. As such, gnomes shouldn't starve to death while working.. You do sometimes seem to see them pushing it to the point where you see messages in their info screen saying "Dying of Thirst", "Exhausted", but this is a little misleading and they seem to make it to food stockpiles in time. The thought bubbles aren't anything to worry about unless you literally don't have food and drink to hand. (I'd advise always having at least 50-100 of each on hand.)

4) Yak milk never spoils. At least, I've never seen it happen, or any reference to it from the developer or in the community.

5) I generally wait until the first influx of gnomads, which comes on the first day of summer. I usually get 3-5 gnomes with a high skill in either Sword, Axe or Hammer, which I induct into my first squad. In the current build, you generally only see the occasional wild animal before the first summer, which don't actively seek gnomes to attack and as such are generally ignorable.

Yeah, my problem is they clean up EVERYTHING. I don't care about dirt in the hallways, I want it out of my workrooms.

That makes sense, thanks. Other than merchants buying dirt, of course. Is there any in-game use for it, or should it be killed completely?