Unstick stuck wildlife

Have you noticed that wildlife sometimes gets stuck on the map? This happens most frequently with birds who just seem to freeze in mid-air, but you will also find the occasional giant elephant stuck in a tree (take that, physics!). Stuck wildlife causes issues because they prevent any new wildlife from entering the map, reducing the player's opportunity for FUN.

When the wildlife system is working properly, a small group of creatures enters the map, wanders around for a while (or aggressively attacks you if it is an agitated group), and then leaves the map. Once all members of the group have left, have been killed, or have been caught in cages, then a new wave (potentially of a different species/agitation level) can enter the map.

You can run the fix/wildlife script without parameters to immediately remove currently stuck wildlife, or you can enable it in gui/control-panel on the Bug Fixes tab to monitor and manage wildlife in the background. When enabled from the control panel, it will monitor for stuck wildlife and remove wildlife that has been stuck for 7 days.

Unlike most bugfixes, this one is not enabled by default since some players like to keep wildlife around for creative purposes (e.g. for intentionally stalling wildlife waves or for controlled startling of friendly necromancers). These players can selectively ignore the wildlife they want to keep captive before they enable fix/wildlife.

In related news, the force command has gained the ability to spawn new waves of wildlife: force Wildlife will allow a new wave of wildlife to enter the map regardless of how much wildlife is already wandering around.

Have fun : )

Improved lifestyles for immortals

There's no question about it: being immortal is tough! Fort citizens who are immortal (like necromancers or vampires) have no bodily reason to eat or drink. However, they still have personality needs that can only be satisfied by eating or drinking! Despite not needing the nourishment, they can become distracted and unhappy when they go too long without a good meal.

If you enable immortal-cravings in the DFHack control panel, your distracted immortals will be allowed to satisfy their needs for food and drink like any other citizen. This will help reduce their stress (and solve what many players consider to be a bug), but beware that it will make vampires harder to detect -- they'll no longer have a telltale unmet need for food displayed on their info sheet!

The sky is no longer the limit

Do you dream of castles in the clouds? Enable infinite-sky in the DFHack control panel and go build one!

When enabled, infinite-sky will automatically create new z-levels of sky as you build taller and taller constructions.

Realistic returns from melting items

DF has an odd quirk (just one?) when calculating how many bars of metal you get when melting an item. Depending on the item type, you sometimes get more bars from melting than you used for manufacturing the item in the first place! If this bothers you, you can enable realistic-melting in the Gameplay tab of the DFHack control panel. It normalizes melting returns to about 95% of forging cost per item, with efficiency reductions if the item is damaged.

Text navigation keys

Thanks to the new custom keybindings added in DF 50.14, DFHack text boxes can now support more advanced cursor navigation keys:

• Delete the character at the cursor with the Delete key
• Move the cursor by one word left or right with Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right
• Move the cursor to the beginning or end of the line with Home and End

If any of these hotkeys do not work well for you on your system, you can remap them in the vanilla DF Keybindings config screen. For example, Mac users may want to remap Custom: Ctrl + Left to Meta+Left to avoid conflicts with workspace switching hotkeys.

Dreamfort tutorial video series

The popular Dreamfort quickfort blueprint set now has a video walkthrough! After a showcase of the finished fort, I guide you through each step of fort creation, demonstrating and discussing the design choices of Dreamfort along the way.

Start your journey here: https://youtu.be/N3YpK00Z2VE or browse the entire playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzXx9JcB9oXxmrtkO1y8ZXzBCFEZrKxve

Of course, the written walkthrough is available in-game and online as well if you would rather read: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15TDBebP8rBNvsFbezb9xuKPmGWNzv7j4XZWq1AsfCio/edit?gid=0#gid=0

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.

Some 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 listed as "unavailable" in the docs do not compile yet and are not accessible 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

• fix/wildlife: prevent wildlife from getting stuck when trying to exit the map. This fix needs to be enabled manually in gui/control-panel on the Bug Fixes tab since not all players want this bug to be fixed (you can intentionally stall wildlife incursions by trapping wildlife in an enclosed area so they are not caged but still cannot escape).
• forceequip: (reinstated) forcibly move items into a unit's inventory
• immortal-cravings: allow immortals to satisfy their cravings for food and drink
• infinite-sky: (reinstated, renamed from infiniteSky) automatically create new z-levels of sky to build in
• justice: pardon a criminal's prison sentence

New Features

• force: add support for a Wildlife event to allow additional wildlife to enter the map
• tweak: realistic-melting: change melting return for inorganic armor parts, shields, weapons, trap components and tools to stop smelters from creating metal, bring melt return for adamantine in line with other metals to ~95% of forging cost. wear reduces melt return by 10% per level

Fixes

• Fix mouse clicks bleeding through resizable DFHack windows when clicking in the space between the frame and the window content
• autobutcher: don't run a scanning and marking cycle on the first tick of a fortress to allow for all custom configuration to be set first
• control-panel: fix error when setting numeric preferences from the commandline
• emigration: save-and-reload no longer resets the emigration cycle timeout
• exportlegends: ensure historical figure race filter is usable after re-entering legends mode with a different loaded world
• fix/loyaltycascade: allow the fix to work on non-dwarven citizens
• geld, ungeld: save-and-reload no longer loses changes done by geld and ungeld for units who are historical figures
• gui/notify: don't classify (peacefully) visiting night creatures as hostile
• gui/quickfort:
  • only print a help blueprint's text once even if the repeat setting is enabled
  • fix build mode evaluation rules to allow placement of furniture and constructions on tiles with stair shapes or without orthagonal floors
• logistics: don't ignore rotten items when applying stockpile logistics operations (e.g. autodump, autoclaim, etc.)
• makeown:
  • quell any active enemy or conflict relationships with converted creatures
  • halt any hostile jobs the unit may be engaged in, like kidnapping
• nestboxes: don't consider eggs to be infertile just because the mother has left the nest; eggs can still hatch in this situation
• rejuvenate: fix error when specifying --age parameter
• timestream:
  • adjust the incubation counter on fertile eggs so they hatch at the expected time
  • adjust the timeout on traps so they can be re-triggered at normal rates

Misc Improvements

• DFHack now verifies that critical DF data structures have known sizes and refuses to start if there is a mismatch
• DFHack text edit fields now delete the character at the cursor when you hit the Delete key
• DFHack text edit fields now move the cursor by one word left or right with Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right
• DFHack text edit fields now move the cursor to the beginning or end of the line with Home and End
• Quickfort blueprint library:
  • aquifer_tap blueprint walkthough rewritten for clarity
  • aquifer_tap blueprint now designated at priority 3 and marks the stairway tile below the tap in "blueprint" mode to prevent drips while the drainage pipe is being prepared
• buildingplan: add value info to item selection dialog (effectively ungrouping items with different values) and add sorting by value
• fix/occupancy: additionally handle the case where tile building occupancy needs to be set instead of cleared
• fix/stuck-worship: reduced console output by default. Added --verbose and --quiet options.
• gui/design:
  • add dimensions tooltip to vanilla zone painting interface
  • new gui/design.rightclick overlay that allows you to cancel out of partially drawn box and minecart designations without canceling completely out of drawing mode
• gui/gm-editor: automatically resolve and display names for language_name fields
• gui/pathable: improve calculation and visualization of wagon path to depot
• idle-crafting: also support making shell crafts for workshops with linked input stockpiles
• necronomicon: new --world option to list all secret-containing items in the entire world
• orders: orders sort now moves orders that are tied to a specific workshop to the top of the list in the global manager orders screen
• preserve-rooms: automatically release room reservations for captured squad members. we were kidding ourselves with our optimistic kept reservations. they're unlikely to come back : ((
• timestream: improve FPS by a further 10%

Documentation

• Dreamfort: add link to Dreamfort tutorial youtube series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzXx9JcB9oXxmrtkO1y8ZXzBCFEZrKxve
• The error message that comes up if there is a version mismatch between DF and DFHack now informs you which DF versions are supported by the installed version of DFHack

Removed

• UI focus strings for squad panel flows combined into a single tree: dwarfmode/SquadEquipment -> dwarfmode/Squads/Equipment, dwarfmode/SquadSchedule -> dwarfmode/Squads/Schedule
• faststart: removed since the vanilla startup sequence is now sufficiently fast
• modtools/force: merged into force

API

• DFHack::Units: new function setPathGoal
• Units::setAutomaticProfessions: bay12-provided entry point to assign labors based on work details

Lua

• dfhack.units: new function setPathGoal
• widgets.TabBar: updated to allow for horizontal scrolling of tabs when there are too many to fit in the available space

Structures

• added unitst_set_automatic_professions entry point export to list of known globals