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

I should say those levels I mined out roughly 60% of the map with a comple of caverns making the full map (not impossible, but way to tedious). Traps and crossbows seems very limited. I think I have had one combat so far (out of five or six) where a crossbow shot does more than cause bleeding. I have currently setup several civilian military squads and have them run around with leather armor as I notice standard food production stops during winter (as in strawberry/apple/wheat) and only sausage prodcution keeps rolling. I do notice the yak and alpaca population goes up during that time. I am currently working with only a single tunnel into my base (from the wild) that leads directly into the training room for my squad of mostly bronze armored weapon and board gnomes with my backup crossbow squad ready to run in and pew pew from afar. I have traps lined up along that single path, but so far not one trap has killed a gobbo.

What are they made out of? I found copper traps to be fairly useless, but steel traps regularly lop limbs off armoured gnomes.

You're safe from all underground baddies until -10 or so. Once you hit metal beyond copper skeletons and golems will start hassling you.

Gryff,

I am currently just using Malacite, so equal to copper. The crossbows are the same. I have finally stuck a ton of tin, but it is on levels 34 and 37. I have iron zeroed in after finding it lining a cavern wall. I am enjoying the game a lot.

I wouldn't bother with copper traps then unless you have a tunnel of death setup. Someone on the gnomoria forums did a test and found that goblins could get through about 50 copper traps before dying. I haven't found crossbows (or even blunderbuss) to be very effective unfortunately.

That is good news indeed, since I seem to be finding a whole lot of coal, copper and sapphires in my mining on -3 and -4. Knowing I have 6 more levels to mine out before needing to worry about things spawning in the dark is excellent news. If I can find some tin or trade enough with the merchants I could have a fairly impressive army kitted out in bronze by then.

Almost had a disaster last night. I left the "gate" in my dirt wall open for a few hours to let Gnomads in when they spawned (it was Day 1 of Winter) and 4 goblins managed to rush through as a group at the same time 3 of my 5 military squad guys were taking a break either eating or sleeping. Of course 2 of the guys on break were my two outfitted with copper/bronze armor, and I ended up losing not only the two unarmored military guys in the assaualt but a pair of worker gnomes as well. On the bright side shortly thereafter I had an influx of 10 Gnomads, swelling my population to around 24 gnomes, as large as it's been to date. Food and drink are starting to become an issue. I may have enough to last the winter (about 200 of each left currently), but I need to expand my farming and ranching operations and build and utilize a butcher and kitchen sometime soon (for the extra food the yaks can provide). I will need to expand my walls a bit and plant some new apple orchards and strawberry groves. Can wheat be used to bake bread as well as make beer? I haven't planted wheat yet.

Yep, and with bread comes sammiches.

Careful with peoples' perceptions on spawning depths. Some people find beetles at -1. It's not as set in stone as one may think. I usually find copper by -4 or so on my worlds, but some people don't find it until -10.

Fun! I assume that the more complex the food the more sated gnomes will be and the less often they will need to eat? So something like strawberries<bread<sandwiches<cakes(or whatever)?

Correct.

Winter has come. I was not as prepared as I thought, and now have a food and drink shortage.

Running low on available outdoor real estate I expanded my borders a bit. After the influx of gnomads on the first day of winter I was able to put together a fairly competant full-time military squad (all with 15+ fighting and 20+ in a weapon skill) and a full squad of militia with double digits in fighting and weapons who are currently assigned to normal duties but whom I will put on training every so often to improve their skills in the event I need to cull from their ranks to replace lost full-time warriors. Anyway, I set my military squad to patrol an area just outside my initial compound and was able to extend walls and terraform a bit so that I now have about twice the space I had previously, all now safely enclosed in walls/cliffs. I immediately planted a wheat field and a secondary strawberry field, and will plant a second apple grove there as well. Later I will add pastures for animals other than yaks. Once spring arrives I plan to expand simple food production and set up the needed workshops and support for complex food production so that I do not run low again next winter.

None of that helps my immediate need however as nothing grows in winter. I located a nice grove of apple trees not far from my settlement and once again assigned the military to patrol while the workers foraged the area for apples and strawberries. This has temporarily solved my food shortage, and there is another apple grove I can raid should the need arise before winter is done. However, my yaks are not producing enough milk for everyone, and I can only use a small percentage of the food reserves to make wine, so I am going to run out of drink before winter ends. I have a well inside my compound. Will gnomes simply go to it to drink if there is nothing else, or do I have to do something with it to extract drink from the well?

Also, I built a tinker shop, and a gnome is in there tinkering, but when I click to open the panel for Tinker nothing happens. Do tinkers not work like carpenters and other workshops where you can assign tasks? There doesn't seem to be a way to get to a tasks screen for mine. Maybe I need to provide something else?

Meserach or Pogo would know for sure, but my understanding is that tinkers just kinda do their thing and randomly 'discover' new items that you can then produce via Engineering.

SuperJay's correct. You just have to let him sit there and work on new discoveries, though you don't have any progress of knowing when those discoveries happen. The discoveries seem to be independent of the workshop, so you can setup more than one tinkerer if you want to help discovery go faster.

Since the newer version seems to not have the corrupted save game issue, I've gotten back into this. I'm just about done with Winter of Year 1 in my new game and I think my tinkerer may have just discovered the stuff needed to build a crossbow. *keeps fingers crossed* I can't check my wealth right now, but I know it's getting pretty high. One of the reasons I walled myself off was due to the last goblin attack - 3 gobs and 2 trolls at the same time. With only copper weapons that attack killed 3-4 of my warriors. I need bronze weapons and armor badly, which I'm currently working on making.

A few things I've learned - either by asking here or learning on my own:

1. Wood is far, far more important than most new players realize. The number of crates, torches and the amount of coal you'll need is enormous, which all requires wood (unless you find a lot of coal seams). Make sure you have really large groves of trees built early. You'll need them. If your groves aren't 100+ trees, they're not nearly big enough.
2. You'll need to save a lot of food for winter. My 20+ group of gnomes have made a huge dent in my food - down from 450 to 150.
3. Make sure you have the ability to wall yourself off pretty easily. You may find it beneficial to do so from time to time. I barricaded my gnomes in for the winter once the merchant didn't show up (the merchant doesn't show up in winter?). I know that potentially cut down on my food supply because I didn't have any goblin sausage, but it became pretty necessary due to the difficulty of the last goblin attack.
4. The best way to mine an entire level is as follows (and I got some of this from the guys here):

Step 1 - Dig down and dig a fairly large (20 x 20 area) around your stairs

Step 2 - Set 4-5 tiles in that area for stone collection, give it higher priority and have your workers clear the larger area. Make sure it's totally lit.

Step 3 - Move a couple of crates to the larger area and designate it all for raw metals and raw gem collection. Give it a priority 4.

Step 4 - Designate a tile or two for a guard post and move a squad of guards down to that level.

Step 5 - Make one long vertical mining cut across the entire zone. Make multiple horizontal mining cuts across the entire zone about 10 blocks apart to expose any seams.

Step 6 - Mine the seams, collect the ore in the bigger area.

Step 7 - Wall off the tunnels leading from the collection area.

Step 8 - Then you can un-designate the collection area and move the goodies upstairs.

I just had tremendous success leveling -17, collecting a ton of copper, malachite, silver and tin ore as well as probably 30+ gems. It took a while and I did have some monster spawn, but with my guards right there they were able to intercept and kill the monsters before my miners were touched. As I get deeper, I might consider putting a bandage station one level up from where I'm mining.
5. You'll need massive storage soon, but you better be organized. I'm using level 0 as my main level, great hall, kitchen and food/wood/ore storage. Level -1 houses the personal quarters and metals/gem/engineering. Level -2 will be more storage.
6. Proper planning saves a bunch of headaches. For example, I have one gate in and out of my valley. Next to the gate are the training grounds and one of my soldier squads stays there all the time. Beyond that is my yak farm. Then comes my regular farms, groves and the entrance to my caves. So any attackers will get engaged right at the wall by my trained squads. This keeps invaders off my workers. I didn't lose anyone until the 3rd day of fall.

I'm again having a blast with the game. If I have crossbows, my next squadron will be stationed on the wall with the bows. YOU WANT ME ON THAT WALL. YOU NEED ME ON THAT WALL!

I found that my gnomes had difficulty keeping up with the work required for large groves. I had much better luck with multiple smallish groves. It seemed that with the large groves they would often leave clipping jobs half way done and not get back to them for days, whereas my small groves are clipped, cut and replanted pretty much as soon they can be.

Small is ok so long as you have enough. One of my early mistakes was not planting enough trees to tend to.

Definately, I try to have a stockpile of 400-500 logs before winter when I am working metal. I usually don't manage it before the second winter though. Metal production really falls off during the first winter for me. I never get enough coal from mining :(

I survived my first Winter in Gnomoria! (I should now get a t-shirt that says that, right?)

It was close though. The food shortage became so critical that I had to open the gates and attempt to forage for enough to survive until spring. I had guards out patroling nearby apple orchards and strawberry fields while workers furiously collected food. On the final day of winter I was foraging so far from the main gate that gnomes would sometimes fall into an exhausted sleep on their way back and simply pass out wherever they were in open country. It was tense, but I didn't lose anyone to hunger, thirst or goblins. I've learned my lesson, and will be stockpiling much greater amounts of food and drink, an using more advanced forms of each, to bridge the sparse time of Winter and early spring before things bloom again.

While waiting for spring to make stuff grow once more I built the Butcher, Kitchen and Leather Worker. It was then I discovered that Goblins are butcherable, and apparently on the menu! Good thing too, as it wa sonly through the use of goblin, honey badger and monitor lizard meat that I was able to prevent starvation in the final few hours of winter. I was only mildly disappointed to find that gnome was not included in the meat list. Hey, I'd go there if I had to!!

After surviving all winter I did lose a couple of gnomes in early spring. I opened my gates to allow Merchant access, and gnomes immediately rushed out to collect...seeds. Of course they ran smack into a monitor lizard and a pair of goblins, and I lost two workers before the military was able to dispatch the threats. I really do not like that gnomes will run halfway across a map for a damn strawberry seed. I wish there was a button similar to "Cancel Task" that could be used to simply delete something from the gnomes "queue". Barring that, some kind of "warning bell" you could activate to make all gnomes not in a squad rush back to the great hall would suffice. It sucks to see gnomes pouring across the landscape and being slaughtered by enemies just to retreive a seed, a copper weapon or the ultimate insult, a goblin corpse.

Once the Spring merchant arrived I was in good shape once again. I traded a ton of seeds I don't need plus a lot of bones and other small items for desperately needed tin (not finding much in the mines), wheat and apples to make wine. I'm now well stocked on food and drink, with plenty more to come during the next spring-fall cycle. Time to concentrate on improving my mining and the weapons and armor of my troops. I've intentionally kept my kingdom value fairly low so far to avoid having to take on bigger enemies than I can handle, but that won't last forever.

Couple of questions:
1) Are bones used for anything? I just sold a bunch of them to the merchant because they were taking up space and don't seem to be useful.
2) Leather Armor - How do I get my troops to wear it? I made several sets of gloves and boots out of hides, but none of my military seems to be interested in wearing it, and Leather doesn't appear in the options under Uniforms.

A couple of answers:
1) Bones are currently completely useless, give them to the merchant and be thankful he doesn't charge for removal. :)
2) Create a uniform with leahter armour and no weapons then create some squads with the militia perk. Stick your civilians in this and they will wear the leather armour.

This game still has me in thrall every night for a couple of hours at least.

I'm now into the third year and have my food/drink issues solved (2000+ of each and growing) and have a thriving set of workshops. My tinker is discovering things like crazy (not that I've been able to make many of them as of yet) and my butcher, kitchen and leather worker have all been very busy turning goblins, badgers, bears and yaks into tasty sausage, sandwiches and leather armor. I have one military squad of veterans outfitted with bronze breastplates and helms, another squad of newer soldiers with copper, and all my other gnomes have been assigned a uniform of all leather everything (the soldiers wear leather where they can't get bronze or copper). Is it worth crafting copper greaves, boots, gloves and pauldrons for soldiers, or just wait until bronze is available?

With food, wood, cloth, beds and other neccessities taken care of, I've begun focusing on expanding downward into the mines. I was fairly lucky in the first couple of levels while excavating my living spaces and workshops in that there was mostly marble with a lot of copper, coal and sapphires. Tin was not showing up though, so I dug a few small stairway rooms down to about -12 where the marble started turing to basalt and sandstone, and there I found tin veins, more copper, more coal, sapphires and now emeralds as well. So I've set my gnomes to mining that level by creating a large 20x30 room and making a single tunnel in one direction to the edge of the map, then making branch tunnels off that main tunnel every 3 squares so that any veins of useable material will be revealed. This seems to work well, and allows me to seal up the tunnels when finished to prevent skeleton and golem spawns (of which I have had several).

In the 20x30 central space I have put torches to keep things from spawning as well as a training grounds for the veteran soldiers so they are stationed there are ready to fight any skeletons and golems. I also have a small stockpile of bandages set to priority 3 (so they are always replaced first when used) so the soldiers do not have to go back upstairs if injured. Finally, I have set up two stockpiles, one for soil and stone, the other for coal, metal and gems.

One thing that drives me nuts is the need for the gnomes to go around and collect up all the raw stone and soil BEFORE they will collect the gems, metal ore and coal. This should be the other way around, as that stuff is so much more useful to the gnomes. What I've tried is setting the raw stone/soil stockpile to priority 4 (so it's used before the ones on higher levels) and the gem/metal/coal stockpile to priority 3 so that hopefully gnomes collect those items to fill that stockpile first. Is this the correct way to get them to behave that way? The idea would be that I could then seal up the tunnels with all the raw stone/soil still present and never need to have them collect it. I assume if I then undesignate the gems/metal/coal stockpile after they've all been collected the gnomes will transfer the stuff back upstairs to the main storehouse stockpile?

So far I have intentionally kept my Kingdom worth low (20K) to avoid spawning tough enemies. It means haveing less Gnomads, but I'm getting by OK for now and training my military on the skeletons, dirt/clay golems and copper armored goblins that seem to be my main threats.

I think if you just disable the raw stone and soil stockpiles then the gnomes won't collect them at all. Then they will collect only the gems and ore.

I rarely bother crafting copper armour or weapons, for two reasons: raw copper bars are an ingredient in bronze, which is far superior; and you'll be pulling a fair amount of copper armour and weaponry off dead goblins for a good while.

I always set raw stone stockpiles to priority 5 or 6, and soil to like 10 or something. This should prevent them hauling that stuff about when they should be doing other things.You can also suspend the stockpiles.

In fact, on stockpiling priority in general:

Gnomes only do stockpiling (hauling) jobs if they have no crafting, mining, felling, workshop attending, tinkering or basically anything else to do, and if they have the hauling job ticked. (I generally make sure everyone has hauling ticked, except soldiers). As such, in a busy kingdom gnomes won't do hauling often, so managing stockpiling priority is important so that when gnomes do have time for hauling they spend it on the right things.

Reserve priority 1 as a special emergency priority, which you only bump things up to when you need them hauled right now.
Similarly, reserve priority 2 for things you'd like a prompt focus on. Bandages can hang out here more or less permanently, since you really do need to be sure to have those always on hand near your soldiers as time really is of the essence.
Priority 3 is my general finished goods priority. You want to get stuff out of the workshops pretty promptly after it is made, because the more items piled on a workshop space the less efficient it is and the slower it operates - in fact they shut down altogether if 20 items are piled up. All my stockpiles collecting finished goods next to their associated workshops are set to priority 3.
Priority 4 is my high-priority raw materials level; so if I need planks or coal made, I bump the logs stockpile up to 4. this way, it's the first thing gnomes stock once all the workshops are cleared of finished goods.
Priority 5 is all other raw materials, except ones which there's wayyyy too much of, like stone, seeds, clippings and possibly later on, food and drink. If you have your direct food sources like strawberry farms, yak pastures (milk) and so on, reasonably close to your workshops, dining room and bedrooms, there's not much point hauling them to a more central location - people can just grab them from the floor at need. Ingredients for Kitchen cookery like wheat and meat are worth hauling though, to make workers there quicker.
I set clippings, seeds, raw stone and soil to priorities of 6-10, but in general I feel that if gnomes are spending lots of time hauling these then they're underemployed. Moving soil in particular is a near-complete waste of time, so if gnomes start doing that I take it as a signal that something is wrong and I need to check why nothing more worth hauling is being produced.

You should reduce the amount of stockpiles you have for soil and raw stone, they're the two most abundant resources and there is also no need to pick them up from the floors of your lower mines.

Another note on hauling is if you want to set dedicated hauler gnomes, you can. Workshop gnomes will go and grab the materials they need that is closest to them, regardless of whether or not they have hauling enabled. So my suggestion is actually opposite of Meserach's, in that if you don't want your workshop gnomes getting tired from hauling after they're done crafting, they'll spend more time resting up for the next time you need them to make 20 planks as fast as possible.

Good advice, thanks guys!

I think I'm following most of those priority rules. One thing I should do is separate raw stone from my general stockpile. I have one big room where the stockpile is raw stone, logs, raw metal, raw gems, coal, etc.. Basically it holds every raw material besides soil, cotton and seeds. If I separate raw stone out of that it should allow me to designate the stone stockpile as a 7 or 8 for now (I have like 1500 raw marble, don't need any more for quite some time) and then put a higher priority on ore, gems and coal, thus leading to the collection of those items first. The goal would be to simply seal off the tunnels once the ore, coal and gems are collected, leaving the uncollected raw stone to lay there forever once the path to it is broken.

On the subject of yaks. I've separated mine into an all male pasture outside my gates (they are pretty effective goblin killing machines and give a nice early warning of trouble) and an all female pasture inside. Somehow, despite the separation, yaks continue to be born. While I am in awe of the power of yak sperm to fertilize over great distances, I need to curb the booming yak population and separating the herds isn't cutting it. Do I need to simply not have any female yaks to curb yak growth?

Why not just eat them?

Yeah just slaughter them at the butcher. When you get to 40 gnomes those sandwiches go quickly.

A couple days ago I started a new world, and just last night I lost my first gnome. :( I'm still getting the hang of the military aspect, and while I had a squad of defenders set up from the first influx of gnomads, I forgot that everyone will attack whenever there's a threat. My one Rancher gnome was off somewhere coaxing new yaks back to our the pasture when he got attacked by a goblin, and while desperately trying to get him out of combat, I assigned him to a new squad that I ordered to a guard point inside our main chamber. Well, he did get out of combat and my actual soldiers killed the goblins, but then the wounded rancher bled to death and died right in the main hall. Everyone's pretty distraught.

(BTW, what the hell do you do with the bodies of fallen comrades?)

I was reading this thread backwards (as one does) and so thus:

And just for a moment there thought to myself: "Brilliant!"

Clearly, I'm overly familiar with food privations of gnomes and dwarves.

So this weekend I basically cracked out on this game for hours at a time. All my previous problems with it remain, but I seem to have stopped caring about them in the rush to delve deeper and greedier, build ALL THE THINGS, form and equip my elite commando force, and so on.

Through hard work, impeccable planning, and lots of trial and error, The Venomous Twilight has survived its first winter. Food and drink weren't a problem, but wood was - and thus coal, and thus torches, and thus mining, and thus all metal-forging. The great push to bronze gear for my crack team of battle-hardened soldiers (The Drinking Scions of Vengeance) was held up by these problems in the metallurgy department, but they've since been resolved. I've got a second part-time militia squad going of reservists who are more lightly armed and armored weekend warriors who are dedicated Haulers when they aren't on duty. Which works well b/c I can now alternate the squads assigned to the Training Ground such that the Drinking Scions actually get some downtime to sleep and eat. Minor detail, that.

So far the worst enemy I've run across was a bear. A single bear mauled most of my first squad to death, it was tragic. It did so because my soldiers are like the terriers of the gnome world - fearless and eager for battle, yet small and easily crushed. Learning experience there - don't leave the "Defend gnomes" checkbox marked on your squad formation if you don't want them sprinting across the map to kill a thing just because it wandered within a few miles of your settlement. Other than the bear, we've handled the goblins, golems, skeletons, and zombies fairly well.

By the by, is there a way to build bridges over rivers? One side of my world has a river running along it, so I keep having goblins come in on that edge of the map, get stuck on the far side of the river, and then eventually die of thirst. Which is defensively convenient, but it's messing up my Butcher menu, which is filled with goblin corpses that I can't carve up into tasty slices.

To build a bridge you have to build floors. If you want to make it "realistic" by building walls under those floors, then you'll have to build a 2x2 bridge in a floor > wall > floor configuration using the first floors as construction scaffolding for the walls.

Hm. I tried building new floor tiles extending outward from the existing surface next to the river, but it didn't work. Or it didn't seem to work, at least, given that the work order just sat there not getting done for a couple days. It'd be really nice if eventually the game added some indication that a thing is not possible versus a thing just isn't done because your gnomes are lazy.

I don't care about realism or cosmetic appeal, I just want a functional pathway to the part of the map that's cut off by water, so that the goblins can bring me their meat with their usual single-minded efficiency.

What did you order the floor be made out of?

Also, make sure you gave the orders on the correct z-level, it can get confusing when creating and removing floors.

I don't recall offhand - maybe dirt? Do you have to use wood or stone, I presume?

Z-level for floors HAS to be the same level as the floor you're building from if you're making floors out in empty space, which you are. If you want to be sure you're on the right z-level, click on the floor you're trying to extend from, it should show it as red because there's a floor there, and then extend the build order outward over the river.

You don't have to use wood or stone, dirt doesn't fall.

Dirt should be fine (although I have found it is best to specify dirt clumps specifically, a general "soil floor" might also end up getting made out of clay clumps).

Huh. I'll try it again next time, then, because everything you guys are saying is what I'm doing. (I double-checked Z-levels too, since the selection can be wonky.) Thanks for the tips.

Should work just fine then if your builders aren't already busy doing other things.

An update from The Venomous Twilight, and some more questions / thoughts for the experts like Meserach and Pogo

- We're going into our second winter. Food stores are over 1000 each of food and drink, and my yaks produce more milk than I know what to do with, thanks presumably to some form of genetic engineering that increases Yaktation.™ I have plenty of fruit fields and orchards for more wine if need be, and wheat production finally increased by expanding my farming operations. Wood is my one concern, as that was my biggest (well, only) problem last winter. You run short on coal and storage containers, and everything grinds to a halt.

- The Twilight's Mining Corps has located a surprising amount of silver ore and raw sapphires, and our Jewelers and Gemcutters are hard at work making elegant baubles for trading; these things trade for 500-1000 gnomebucks apiece and barely take any materials. Is jewelry useful for anything other than trading, btw?

- I've deliberately kept my kingdom value low so as to try and avoid mants or other tough beasties. (We've encountered just two ogres so far and they both drowned; no mants yet.) However, the last two migrations brought only 2-4 gnomads, and I'm on the eve of one more potential wave of settlers on the first day of winter. I presume I need to increase kingdom value to attract more gnomads? What's the most effective way to do so quickly - just make a Terracotta Army out of gnome statues, like Shake did?

Here's some pics of the Venomous Twilight's crude, sprawling fortress:

The elite soldiers of the Drinking Scions of Vengeance relax in the 'Great' Hall during their off-hours, scoffing at the peons busy with mundane tasks nearby.


Agricultural planning is not a strong suit of the Farmers and Ranchers in The Venomous Twilight. Dutifully guarding our sacred yaks (and the front doors), The Sweaty Crowns of Treasure trains with rusty copper hand-me-downs at the Proving Grounds.

I don't know how you don't have more gnomads :( You have more kingdom worth than I've had, and certainly more than meserach at that stage of the game.

What's your actual current population? The number of gnomads is heavily dependent on your current population as well as your worth - effectively each extra point of population "costs" considerably more Kingdom Worth. I think at the moment there's a sort of "soft" cap around 45 gnomes, where it becomes almost impossible "expensive" to attract more.

The best way to boost your worth to attract gnomads is to designate a dining room as a Great Hall (make sure the box is ticked in its menu) and pack as much stuff with high worth in it as possible. This is another use for high value good like jewellery, beyond just selling it.

Another use for high value items is to stack them inside bedrooms to raise their worth, and thereby decrease the amount of time gnomes need to spend sleeping.