Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Gentlefish]

Why not just shove the dwarves who have already had moods into the panic room? It's been stated that they cannot mood, therefore are a safe bet.

[Tevish Szat]

Soil is key.  To survive for indefinite time, your dwarves need to be able to farm.  Having access to a soil later is important.  In fact, if you can grow plump helmets and pig tails, you can last as long as you please.  A minimal survival-cell will include a farm plot, bedrooms, a still, a dining hall, and a quantum stockpile for food and drink, and a trash compactor for refuse.  It could be built all on one level, or over multiple Z.  It should be populated with 5-7 dwarves upon creation and the fully sealed.  Those dwarves have no labors and duties other than farming, eating, and replacing their clothing so they don't go insane.  Hand pick dwarves with as few friends outside your chosen circle as possible: fresh migrants will do just fine.  They can make friends with each other as much as they want once inside, but they need to be unaffected by the fall of the outer fort.  Making their rooms really nice helps so they get constant good thoughts.  The only thing that might trouble you is one of your survivalists mooding, so leave them a pick and a supply of mood items.

You could also survive with a single vampire bricked up in a 1x1 box, as long as said vampire is dressed in gear that won't wear out (Armor uniform replacing clothing) and doesn't mood.  If your vampire creates an artifact before imprisonment or moods while the fort is safe (and thus can be sent out to complete mood, and then be bricked up again), you are perfectly safe.

[fractalman]

There is another approach: nearly-modular fortress design.

build the entire fortress out of square (or other tessleating shape) elements; travel between such elements should pass over traps AND through doors.  Each square should have the bare essentials within itself, in at least limited quantity, and one or two specialty goods. 

eg. seeds, booze, foods, farmland and a building material should be present in every single room, but there's no need to try to cram a bed,  dining table, graveyard and gem stockpile into every single room-but a given room should have at least one of these things.

Mid-term things like wood and stone should all be available without going through more than one or two doors.

Things like cloth can be set up with even a singe rope reed or pigtail seed given enough time, and need not be prioritized. 

Pretty much everything else can be scattered throughout the fotress at arbitrarily low densities; sure, you need a pickaxe, but if you're on lockdown, you're probably not doing much mining anyways. 

you can scatter super-rooms throughout the fortress by removing the barrier between two rooms; only recommended for waterfalls, dining rooms, and royalty bedrooms. 

[jellsprout]

The most minimalist solution would be to wall in a vampire or werebeast. You can give them a small obsidian farm to make slabs for memorials and if you feel exploity you can also give them a magma smelter, forge and some steel and abuse smelting oddities to make giant stockpiles of steel weapons and armor.

[Geldrin]

In my current fort, Eagleboulder, I've got some very unfortunate events that led to an inevitable tantrum spiral. But I didn't give up so easily. (I cannot let a fort filled with hundreds of tons of gold fall.)

When I saw that I can't avoid the the doom from witch there is no escape, I decided to make a new, separate colony deep down in the cavern layers, so I sorted out those dwarves who might be not affected by the fall of the fortress. (Either by choosing sociopaths, and fresh immigrant families.) It was a hard work to assemble this small survivor team of ~30 people, but it had totally worth the effort.
I sealed them off with only a few picks and axes, and I ordered them to immediately dig themselves a shelter to hide, and make farm plots on the cavern floor. I had to set up a mini-outpost nearly from scratch. While the majority of the team gathered food and giant mushrooms from the caves, the carpenter and the mason started to crank out beds, and furniture. They've made a poor dining hall, a small stockpile for food, as well as a kitchen, and a still. The stockpile slowly filled up with booze and food, and everybody was fine.

Meanwhile, in the upper fort, witch was completely sealed off from the surface and the outpost too, the madness spread through every corner of the dwarven halls.
Nearly half year later, after the clouds of miasma flew away, I found only four hapless dwarf being still alive between dozens of rotten skeletons and scattered furnitures. A children, a medic, a swordless recruit, and a mad one running around babbling.

The fort's population dropped from ~160 to ~30. I spent a whole year to clean up the corpses and the blood, and one other to bury the dead properly.

But now, new immigrants are coming, bringing new life into the great halls of EagleBoulder. The survivors had broken down the walls, and reclaimed their old homes, and fired up the furnaces again.

Damn, I love this game. And hey, I survived a tantrum spiral!

All in all, a safety-outpost could be very handy.

[Sutremaine]

Why not just shove the dwarves who have already had moods into the panic room? It's been stated that they cannot mood, therefore are a safe bet.

If you have a small fortress, or a young one, you might not have enough dwarves to be able to add that to the selection criteria.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Seconding Tevish.  Give a dwarf a barrel, he drinks for a day.  Teach him how to brew...

Designing a panic room is really very similar to your first steps of settling a new area.  The priorities are the same.  So deciding how to stock it is easy-- just stock it with whatever you need for new embarks.

A walled off section of cavern is the best place for a saferoom, because it has good soil, and likely the potential for some silk.  Make it as big as possible (for trees, mostly), then leave a pick, an anvil, and an axe in there.  Even if it's deep, it's not really far from the surface-- just ten or twenty steps up a staircase.

Don't build or dig too close to it.  The design is such that if your panic-room dwarves need more stone, they dig for it.  If they need more food or booze, they grow it.  If they need more wood, they chop it down.  If there are spare dwarves and they need more cavern, they build an airlock and try to claim some of it.  The idea isn't that the panic-room dwarves have everything they need-- it's that they have the capability to build everything they need.  Just like starting a new fortress.

If you want to go from there, a safe water source is a priority, and not too difficult to set up, not in most caverns.  A little bit of stockpiled (and probably forbidden) food is a good idea.  As many slabs as possible are a good idea.  Moody dwarf traps aren't a bad idea, but they're not necessary.  If there's more than one dwarf in your panic room, though, all you have to do is get that dwarf to build a workshop that can be walled off, and if there's only one, you don't really have to worry about it anyways.

All your panic room dwarves have to do is eat, drink, and not go crazy.  Anything else-- danger room training, armor, workshops-- they can build as they see fit.  If you want greater survivability, you can get it by having a larger number of panic rooms, with independent populations.

Usually, if a fortress is close to falling, the outside is no longer safe, but in certain circumstances (say, drawbridged single entrance, and you fall to a misjudged deep dig), migrants can be very survivable, since they don't really know or care about any of the dying inhabitants.  It's not a bad idea to make a panic room accessible from the map edge.  There are Roach Hotel designs (dwarves get in, but they don't get out) that can make these useful even if the outside is very dangerous.  Civs trigger pressure plates can be very handy.

The best thing to do, of course, is to think ahead, and have those panic rooms staffed by dwarves who have never met any of the other fortress inhabitants.  That gives you a good head-start on the happiness problem.  The only major concern besides happiness, food, and drink is ghosts.

[Thundercraft]

Some useful and interesting stuff here. Posting to watch...

Also, I felt others might be interested to know that parts of the Parties: worth it? thread coincide with this topic. In particular, some discussed their isolationist strategies in creating "dwarf pods", such as an "Iso-booth" with "2 to 3 dwarves in a living/producton unit." And Sutremaine even has a detailed diagram of his design, with a reference for his mine cart transportation system.