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[NCommander]

I've always been fascinated by the "last of their kind" stories and having been inspired by Archcrystal, so I've been tempted to make a Dwarven fort around this theme as a community fort. I've been working from 43.03 as a base, and made some changes to the raws:

 - Dwarfs don't trade
 - Humans are hostile
 - Goblins ambush again
 - No outpost liaison

(this has had the effect of seemingly preventing migration outside of the first two waves, but see below).

I haven't decided what to do with the elfs, though at the moment, they tend to get murdered horribly in worldgen by the humans; I've only had a few worlds reach even 125 with the hippies still kicking. May be interesting to play with them out. In my mind, the plot is humans were overtaken by demons (which can happen in worldgen, rarely), and corrupted by their evil, they turned everything they had towards extermination of dwarven kind and have nearly succeeded through sheer attrition.

A small group of survivors have fled into the badlands, hoping the hostility of the region may protect them from discovery. The pop cap will be set at 21 (7*3), and the strict pop cap will be left at 220, allowing possibility of more through babies.

I'm still genning worlds trying to find an evil embark that's difficult, but not completely inhospitable (thinking possibly going with husking weather, but no undead). DFhack will be used to turn on digging invaders, or anything that seems thematically interesting or correct.

I'm open to ideas on any raw tweaks, or even thoughts on biome or anything else. I'm still in the process of moving, but I'm hoping I can get this properly started something this week ...

[BlackBronze]

Have them seek shelter in an abandoned fortress, only to find that the reason why its previous owners left is still there, sulking about in the shadows.....

Essentially, do a reclaim. Nothing says desperate more than picking up the bones of a fallen fortress! Plus, any FB that was responsible for its demise will still be there. The reason why not many people talk about it is that the FB is most of the time hidden in one of the many rooms. And let's be honest, who has time to check EVERY bedroom for the darn thing?

[Fleeting Frames]

If you do the above, how about you pick the deadliest FB? Firebreathing steel spider with monarch butterfly wings would be terrific reason to die, but if doing 0-point embark there would also be reasons to go into the fortress.

It's kinda disappointing when a startled miner ends the FB in two pick swings.

Also, for "humans overtaken by demons", how about doing a prequel fortress where you get humans to siege you with force your dwarves would lose to 1-on-1, spawn the demons, and then retire in the middle of a siege?
Can even do that several times once they're at war with you and then run an automated hermit nanofort for a decade while you sleep to let the underworld percolate through the world.

Biome: Not completely inhospitable, but not a nice place to be....

Overlapping terrifying/untamed wilds jungle biomes with maxed out drainage - and if possible, multi-layer aquifer right beneath the surface - would give the fun of undead giant keas, but also reasons and safer place to start and stay on surface, especially if there are reasons to prefer tree booze (such as some raw tweaks).

One of the low-rainfall biomes will have better FPS, but once you get underground in one of those there isn't much reason to stay topside at all beyond trade, visitors and migrants - none of which fit the theme of the fortress, and digging hostiles only greatly simplifies defence - but I don't think you want a recreation of the Undergrotto in a fortress where you want surface to attack dwarves. (Consider melted dwarf merchant ghost hostiles instead if you want unavoidable random deaths.)

If you want to force taking the fight to invaders instead of letting the invaders into central staircase, Clobbermountains uses banshees that cause noise when not killed for a time. Another option would be to use time-delayed syndrome to let them "assume" ghostly form - essentially, creating a murderous dwarf, then killing it in a single step.

Or ultimately you could also put rules stating whatever playstyle you want in the OP.

[NCommander]

My thought was to find a cave in an evil biome. I'm not inherently against turtling, but I make it a point to try and kill everything hostile on the map. That's a lot harder if you're dependent on a dwarven breeding program to get new recruits. I've genned a few worlds, but haven't found any I liked yet.

I was also going to run the diggingInvaders plugin to make turtling much less viable.

The survivors from the last mountainhome fled into the caverns during the fatal siege, wandering for months and surviving off plump helmets and such until they found a path to the surface. Also justifies that no one knows where they are. Things like the king and the rare migrant can be other survivors.

I don't think a 0 point embark is possible if you're not going to trade. You need an anvil, or get stupidly lucky with a mood (granted, I'm good with DFhack, I can force a moody carpenter to made a wooden anvil, then bootstrap an iron anvil from that). However, for moods to kick, you need 20 dwarfs minimum. Might be interesting way to start the ball rolling, though I was thinking of doing this on DF 43.03, which means I'll need to get a stone axe somehow, or embark with a single pick, and axe, and pray.

For the underworld, they're not historical figures last I checked, I don't think if I breach the clown car I can get them to take over the humans.

[Fleeting Frames]

While I have not encountered any invaders, digging invaders doesn't seem that hard of a problem if you don't have to allow anything else in - just ensure most direct path is deadly to anyone who passes through it - much simpler than selectively killing stuff, which is why I mentioned forcing surface tree booze to have flying steel/fire titans complicate things - and the digging behaviour never comes into play.

Additional probably unnecessary security could be done by first digging air gaps around the rest of fort (which is as simple as designating 2 extra tiles after workshops), then filling likely detours with impassable floating buildings to deter rare flyers.

And then maybe adding magma, because invaders think magma is not cool.

For anvil and 0-point embarks, I was speaking of reclaim fortresses there - those do include pre-built anvils, axes, picks and little food (not on stockpile so spoils quickly). Outside of that, if wiki is right native carpenters will never produce an anvil (it isn't in the list of allowed mood results).

Of course, playing without an anvil does give a reason to seek visitors (to rob blind) and kill invaders (for their axes, at least), though picks could be a problem for a while - bonecarvers who like picks will produce them with moods, however.

As for demons, some of them will become named figures once  you let them kill most of your dwarves - don't those function as historical figures? (I have not tested the idea, myself - no long forts yet.)

[NCommander]

I need to look at doing reclaims and see what it gives me to work with. If we can get an anvil and a pick right from the get-go, a zero-points embark makes sense thematically, though I might bring some animals, it can be hard to get a breeding pair of anything for leather. An embark with a herbalist can pull out a stupid amount of plants from the caverns to get the fort a quick food and booze supply.

EDIT: so looking at two reclaimed forts, you actually start with a lot ... hrm ... I don't know of any community games based on reclaimed forts ...

[gchristopher]

Using dfhack to tweak an embark is way, way easier than genning repeatedly to find one if you're looking for things like fun evil weather. Spish and I worked on that for the most recent Battlefailed and it worked out well.

[NCommander]

Using dfhack to tweak an embark is way, way easier than genning repeatedly to find one if you're looking for things like fun evil weather. Spish and I worked on that for the most recent Battlefailed and it worked out well.

I've looked at editing the biome flags but couldn't work out the magic ones for weather; any idea which structures I need to look. Would fit well with the theme of the world being corrupted beyond recongization. A reclaim will give me an anvil for sure. I should have enough melt objects to successfully get a pick out of it if I don't start with one.

I dislike the one-tile wide ramps, but I can always re-engineer those I suppose. With a max of 21 dwarfs for 12 years, I'm going to need to go for minecarts for max efficiency.

I think my plan is to change dwarfs to settle in evil biomes so I can get an abandoned fort on one, and reclaim it. I gave humans babysnatcher which gets them always hostile (and tends to get the elfs wiped out in worldgen) and may modify it further than that at cost of the human siege message "The enemy has come and laying siege to the fortress".

If I can get humans to build dark towers, that should get them to get a lawgiver who is a demon ontop of it.

[gchristopher]

Yeah! The structure that associates weather with a biome was found fairly recently. It's:

Code: [Select]

df.global.world.interaction_instances
Which contains an array of biome-to-evil weather associations.

The second field, interaction_id, is the index of the interaction in df.global.world.raws.interactions. (The main entry for a particular set of evil weather/reanimation.)

The fourth field, region_index is the index of the region in df.global.world.world_data.region. So if you find your region in that array, you can use it to check what weather the evil biome will have.

I really should devote a few weekends to writing stuff like that down.

[NCommander]

Neat. I don't think dwarfs will naturally settle in evil biomes, at least not without further tinkering of their soul/raw edits. I think I've got humans working though to be properly created with a demon as their leader by changing their default start type to DARK_TOWER. I'm still working through the raws to figure out what else I want to edit.

If I don't do evil, I'm sorta tempted to go for a desert embark or possibly glacier. Woodlands almost always is too tame though you do get a good variety of critters.

EDIT: so far so good. Humans always generate with a demon leader in worldgen. Also means my world is overflowing with vaults which is probably interesting for plot reasons. Hippies now have a 50-50 chance of surviving worldgen. I think I'm going to forgo reclaiming a fortress. I can't get them to generate in good locations with flux and iron. Guess we're doing an actual embark.

[Thundercraft]

Posting to watch...

I've always been fascinated by the "last of their kind" stories and having been inspired by Archcrystal, so I've been tempted to make a Dwarven fort around this theme as a community fort. I've been working from 43.03 as a base, and made some changes to the raws...

I've been meaning to try a "last of their kind" fort ever since I first read someone doing this a few years ago. This was back when the only way to "reclaim" a fort was a roundabout way through tools like DFHack and DFusion. (Or was it even before that?) I still plan to do such a fort. Though, I certainly would not attempt it with extra Fun stuff like turning off trade and making all humans hostile.

Actually, my goal will be to make a successful and well-defended fort, retire it, adventure some, build a new successful and well-defended fort, retire it, and repeat - until the population and trade of dwarves have climbed back from the brink of extinction to become rather successful and likely to thrive. (That'd be my goal, but I don't know how plausible it is.)

Using dfhack to tweak an embark is way, way easier than genning repeatedly to find one if you're looking for things like fun evil weather.

If one is looking for a certain type of evil weather or something, that makes sense. But to even get a "last of their kind" situation should require at least some genning repeatedly. (Though, one could mod the raws like NCommander did to make it much more likely that dwarves are barely surviving or wiped out.)

[NCommander]

Well right now, I've given up trying to reclaim a worldgen fortress. You can get some interesting results by doing it, but its going to be too fiddly for what I want. I'm fairly happy with the way worldgen turns out right now. I get humans ruled by demons, no liason/no trade. Elfs may or may not be friendly (I've gotten 2/3 worlds where we're at war). I might just throw babysnatcher on them for good measure though elven sieges can be down right scary.

Thinking going for a 2x2 embark and seeing how many generations of dwarfs we can get going and survive. I'll probably give myself a small break and avoid an aquifer. I can breach one, but its tedious and tends to make everything else a lot more of a headache.

Some experimentation also got me a few marriages so I'm fairly sure I can get them to breed if I do some micromanagement.

[NCommander]

Huh, interesting



Apparently changing the output liaison cocked something up. I've never seen two dwarven civilizations on the C menu before. Wonder if I can get seiged by them ...

[Fleeting Frames]

Ah. When you say you want to build a community fort, you mean giving a story to the community, rather than succession fort, right?

I had previously been assuming the latter.

As far as glacier embarks go, surviving on a one with 0-point embark might be bit more difficult than you want. No way to get below unless embarking on top of a cave when playing without migrants or trade, and only vomit to drink.

@Thundercraft: Wiping out dwarves in worldgen is pretty easy tho with pre-set value interface. Just paint N mountains, have 1 dwarven civs and N-1 mountainous caves. Give the world some megabeasts (and their caves) for good measure. They'll be attacked from all sides from the world "go!" and die.

[NCommander]

I did actually start the fort: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=158932.0 based out of what came out of this thread.

I don't think it would work as a succession game due to the sheer number of turns it would take to get even one generation of dwarfs to become adults.