Idle crafting

Dwarves will now have to option to go craft something when they have the need. The only thing you have to do is designate a Craftsdwarf's workshop as a place where dwarves can elect to go to do their crafting.

At the bottom of the "Workers" tab, you'll now see an option for "Allow idle dwarves to satisfy crafting needs". The option will only be toggleable if the workshop is not assigned to a master. If you set this option to "yes", then you'll see crafting jobs start to appear as your idle dwarves figure it's time to go craft something. Feel free to trade those crafts away to the next caravan.

This feature works best if you build a separate Craftsdwarf's workshop (or two) specifically for idle crafting, and you set the number of "General work orders allowed" to zero on the "Work orders" tab for the workshop. That way, the workshop is kept free for dwarves to use in their down time.

If you have the "Permitted General Work Order Labors" customized for the workshop, the kinds of crafting jobs that dwarves will do there will respect the setting. Note that you must have at least one of Stonecrafting or Bone Carving enabled for the workshop to be used for idle crafting.

Room reservations

This is actually two things in one: a bugfix and a quality of life tool. The bugfix part takes effect automatically when a unit leaves the map. The most common situation is a squad going out on a raid. You may have noticed that when a unit leaves the map, they lose ownership of all their rooms. If you have carefully assigned specific bedrooms to your squad members, you'll be annoyed to see the rooms snagged by some random dwarf while your squad is away. This is even more impactful if you have nobility or administrators in the squad: their room requirements will be suddenly unmet.

Now, when your units leave the map, their room will be reserved in their name for when they get back. The room's zone will be disabled, and you'll see a message when you click on the zone telling you who the room is reserved for. You have the option of cancelling the reservation and making the room available for general use, if you want to.

The second part of this feature is the ability to reserve rooms for specific noble or administrative roles. You can make a fine office and pre-reserve it for when a baron is appointed. The office will be disabled until a baron appears, and when someone is appointed to that role, the room will be automatically assigned to them. You can even prepare for the situation where you have many barons. If you prepare and reserve 10 offices for the baron role, one office will be assigned to up to 10 barons when they appear.

This is also very useful for administrative roles like managers. If you switch managers frequently, it can be a hassle to reassign the office each time. When you reserve the room for the manager role, the room will be automatically reassigned when a new citizen is appointed to the role.

Ethics violation warning

It is now much harder to accidentally offend the elves. To be clear, you can still offend them if you want to. It's just harder to do it unintentionally.

When you select items for trade in the bartering menu (when you are actually specifying which fort items to trade for which merchant items) and have an item selected that will cause the elves to declare you a heathen, you'll see an "Ethics warning" badge next to the Trade button. Clicking on this badge will list the offending items, and it will give you an option to deselect them. If you click the Trade button anyway, you'll get one final confirmation to make absolutely sure you know what you're doing.

Give it a try! Remember, happy elves bring friendly giant animals instead of hostile ones! : )

PSAs

As always, remember that, just like the vanilla DF game, DFHack tools can also have bugs. It is a good idea to save often and keep backups of the forts that you care about.

Many DFHack tools that worked in previous (pre-Steam) versions of DF have not been updated yet and are marked with the "unavailable" tag in their docs. If you try to run them, they will show a warning and exit immediately. You can run the command again to override the warning (though of course the tools may not work). We make no guarantees of reliability for the tools that are marked as "unavailable".

The in-game interface for running DFHack commands (gui/launcher) will not show "unavailable" tools by default. You can still run them if you know their names, or you can turn on dev mode by hitting Ctrl-D while in gui/launcher and they will be added to the autocomplete list. Some tools do not compile yet and are not available at all, even when in dev mode.

If you see a tool complaining about the lack of a cursor, know that it's referring to the keyboard cursor (which used to be the only real option in Dwarf Fortress). You can enable the keyboard cursor by entering mining mode or selecting the dump/forbid tool and hitting Alt-K (the DFHack keybinding for toggle-kbd-cursor). We're working on making DFHack tools more mouse-aware and accessible so this step isn't necessary in the future.

New Tools

• embark-anyone: allows you to embark as any civilization, including dead and non-dwarven civs
• gui/family-affairs: (reinstated) inspect or meddle with pregnancies, marriages, or lover relationships
• idle-crafting: allow dwarves to independently satisfy their need to craft objects
• notes: manage map-specific notes
• preserve-rooms: manage room assignments for off-map units and noble roles. reserves rooms owned by traveling units and reinstates their ownership when they return to the site. also allows you to assign rooms to noble/administrator roles, and the rooms will be automatically assigned whenever the holder of the role changes

New Features

• caravan:
  • DFHack dialogs for trade screens (both Bring goods to depot and the Trade barter screen) can now filter by item origins (foreign vs. fort-made) and can filter bins by whether they have a mix of ethically acceptable and unacceptable items in them
  • If you have managed to select an item that is ethically unacceptable to the merchant, an "Ethics warning" badge will now appear next to the "Trade" button. Clicking on the badge will show you which items that you have selected are problematic. The dialog has a button that you can click to deselect the problematic items in the trade list.
• confirm: If you have ethically unacceptable items selected for trade, the "Are you sure you want to trade" confirmation will warn you about them
• exportlegends: option to filter by race on historical figures page
• quickfort: #zone blueprints now integrated with preserve-rooms so you can create a zone and automatically assign it to a noble or administrative role

Fixes

• DFHack screens that allow keyboard cursor and camera movement while focused now also allow diagonal and Z-change keyboard cursor keys
• DFHack state for a site is now properly saved when retiring a fort
• prevent hang when buildings in zones are destroyed in the case where the buildings were not added to the zone in the same order that they were created (uncommon)
• System clipboard: when pasting single lines from the system clipboard, replace newlines with spaces so they don't show up as strange CP437 glyphs in-game
• buildingplan:
  • improved performance in forts with large numbers of items
  • fixed processing errors when using quick material filter slot '0'
• deep-embark:
  • fix error when embarking where there is no land to stand on (e.g. when embarking in the ocean with gui/embark-anywhere)
  • fix failure to transport units and items when embarking where there is no room to spawn the starting wagon
• empty-bin: --liquids option now correctly empties containers filled with LIQUID_MISC (like lye)
• exterminate: don't kill friendly undead (unless --include-friendly is passed) when specifying undead as the target
• gui/create-item, modtools/create-item: items of type "VERMIN", "PET", "REMANS", "FISH", "RAW FISH", and "EGG" no longer spawn creature item "nothing" and will now stack correctly
• gui/design: don't overcount "affected tiles" for Line & Freeform drawing tools
• gui/pathable:
  • fix hang when showing trade depot wagon access and a trade depot is submerged under water
  • fix representation of wagon paths over stairs and through doors
• gui/settings-manager: work details overlay no longer disappears when you click on a unit in the unit list
• gui/teleport: fix issue when teleporting units that are not prone, resulting in later issues with phantom "cannot build here: unit blocking tile" messages
• regrass:
  • no longer add all compatible grass types when using --force without --new
  • --mud now converts muddy slade to grass, consistent with normal DF behavior
• rejuvenate:
  • don't set a lifespan limit for creatures that are immortal (e.g. elves, goblins)
  • properly disconnect babies from mothers when aging babies up to adults
• strangemood: manually-triggered Macabre moods will now correctly request up to 3 bones/remains for the primary component instead of only 1
• timestream: ensure child growth events (that is, a child's transition to adulthood) are not skipped; existing "overage" children will be automatically fixed within a year

Misc Improvements

• Dreamfort:
  • integrate with preserve-rooms to assign relevant rooms to nobles/adimistrators
  • smooth tiles under statues and other large furniture that you can't easily smooth later
• assign-minecarts: reassign vehicles to routes where the vehicle has been destroyed (or has otherwise gone missing)
• buildingplan: only consider building materials that can be accessed by at least one citizen/resident
• fix/dry-buckets: prompt DF to recheck requests for aid (e.g. "bring water" jobs) when a bucket is unclogged and becomes available for use
• gui/control-panel: include option for turning off dumping of old clothes for tailor, for players who have magma pit dumps and want to save old clothes from being dumped into the magma
• gui/family-affairs: you can start this tool by the name gui/pregnancy to start directly on the "Pregnancies" tab
• gui/sitemap:
  • show whether a unit is friendly, hostile, or wild
  • show whether a unit is caged
• position:
  • report current historical era (e.g., "Age of Myth"), site/adventurer world coords, and mouse map tile coords
  • option to copy keyboard cursor position to the clipboard
• sort: can now search for stockpiles on the Places>Stockpile tab by name, number, or enabled item categories

Documentation

• add documentation for dfhack.items.findType(string) and dfhack.items.findSubtype(string)
• gui/embark-anywhere: add information about how the game determines world tile pathability and instructions for bridging two landmasses

Removed

• quickfortress.csv: remove old sample blueprints for "The Quick Fortress", which were unmaintained and non-functional in DF v50+. Online blueprints are available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WuLYZBM6S2nt-XsPS30kpDnngpOQCuIdlw4zjrcITdY if anyone is interested in giving these blueprints some love

API

• DFHack::cuboid: cuboid::clampMap now returns the cuboid itself (instead of boolean) to allow method chaining; call cuboid::isValid to determine success
• Items::createItem: removed growth_print parameter; now determined automatically
• Units: new isWildlife and isAgitated property checks

Lua

• Overlay widgets can now assume their active and visible functions will only execute in a context that matches their viewscreens associations
• dfhack.items.createItem: removed growth_print parameter to match C++ API
• dfhack.units.isDanger: no longer unconditionally returns true for intelligent undead
• dfhack.units: isWildlife and isAgitated property checks
• gui.simulateInput: do not generate spurious keycode from _STRING key inputs