Anyway to filter announcements?

I don't really need to know a hundred times every season that I don't have a certain seed (usually because a dwarf is hogging them all). I would like a way to filter all or some of these annoucements so I can see more important things, like a Forgotten Beast has started slaughtering people.

Solution 1:

There are a couple of things you can do to control the announcement messages that are displayed at the bottom of the screen.

The announcement mentioned in the question ("Urist McFarmer cancels Plant Seeds") is a job cancellation announcement, and is often referred to as job cancellation spam due to the frequency that these messages are announced.

Dwarf fortress allows you to control the amount of this type of announcement from the standing orders menu in game:

• Press o

• Then pressing x will cycle through the different options for the amount of job cancellation messages that are shown

  • Announce no job cancellations
  • Announce some job cancellations
  • Announce most job cancellations
  • Announce all job cancellations

It is worth mentioning that this setting applies to all job cancellation messages, not just cancelling planting seeds.

Another thing worth mentioning is that job cancellation messages are sometimes indicative of other problems. For example, excessive plant seed cancellation messages are often associated with a bug and I would recommend reading the bugs section on the DF wiki farming page for workarounds.

The other thing you can do is control how each of the different announcement messages affect the game, like whether a certain type of announcement pauses the game or re-centres the screen. To change these settings you'll need to edit the announcements.txt file which can be found in your Dwarf Fortress directory in the data/init/ subdirectory. If you open up the file in a text editor, it has some information about the different settings that can be changed. However, I would recommend referring to the wiki for some more in depth instructions about how to edit this file: Announcement and Announcements.txt