Print

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

[FleshForge]

The chunks of ice that are left behind after mining through them do melt, but not into usable water; they leave a "contaminant" that will eventually be cleaned up by idle dwarves, and cannot be used for irrigation or drinking.  A shame it works this way really, it would make sense if they melted into useful water.  You have to drop entire chunks of ice via cave-in to make use of frozen water and that's really dodgy, sometimes the stuff won't thaw etc.

[Osdeath]

As a man who likes his glaciers, the easiest method is just to dig down and wall yourself off a nice cavern section that's already been muddied, the whole collapsing ice method works, well it did in 40d, I haven't been able to make it work in 2010 yet.

[Valkyrie]

I think Bronimin & FleshForge are right, at least for 40d (I haven't tried it in 31.x) - melted ice-rock yields 'water' as an item, ala the remains of a Forgotten Beast composed of an odd substance or like metals melted in magma that turn into solidified pools (ex. Silver Bar -> Molten Silver -> Silver, good for nothing but being a siren's call to your Cleaning-enabled dwarves, who might attempt to clean it up before the magma's actually gone ...).  The 'item' doesn't have any water-functionality, nixing melted ice-rock as a way to wet things :/

(ice-rock (mined from natural ice walls) as distinct from natural ice walls themselves, which *do* melt into real water)

[fivex]

Can't you "mine" the glacier and bring the ice "rocks" to your farm site to muddy it when they melt?  You might need to enable picking up refuse outside to get them to carry the ice in (garbage dump in the center of the farm and tell them to dump the ice rocks), but i know the ice will melt once you get it underground.

I haven't tried this, so I won't be surprised if there is something that prevents this from working.

i think that the ice rocks just melt to form a water item (if this makes sense). same as when a rock melts in magma, it gives a magma item.

Or an ice item, depending on the biome.

[Tripwyr]

How would one go about releasing a caged animal once tamed?

[Arekis]

A couple of things I noticed in my embark in the glaciers:

You can construct workshops out of ice in the ice layers.  I think the wiki says they will deconstruct immediately, but that is not the case (maybe in the rock layers).  However, some workshops did deconstruct eventually, though I'm not sure why.  I don't know if DF keeps track of "foot traffic" temperature or whatnot, but it seems the busier workshops deconstructed eventually.

You can set up food stockpiles in the ice layers.  Food and booze will not freeze, but lye will.  If you set up your depot outside, the barrels of blood and lye will also freeze I believe.

I built a well closer to the surface with the reservoir about 20 z-levels below.  Turns out that it takes a long time for a bucket to go down and up 20 levels.  Never really thought of this but was very frustrated when a dehydrated patient was about to die and the bucket was going oooh so slowly.

I brought a pair of axedwarves with me so breaching the first cavern was very easy.  I quickly walled off a useful section for farming and some tree harvesting.  But I would definitely recommend bringing some lumber at the embark.

How would one go about releasing a caged animal once tamed?

Construct the cage (b - j, use x to expand list).  Then query it (q) and go to assign ('a', I think?) and deselect the animal.  A dwarf will come along and free it.

[Shoku]

If you give yourself like 1000 more embark points in world gen you should definitely be able to bring enough cows. I don't think you quite have to butcher one every season depending on how many immigrants come but even so you'll probably want farms on the readybefore a year or 40 dwarves.

I haven't tried butchering the calfs so I'm not sure how much less they give but I bet three cows and a bull would pop them out often enough. Few more than that and you might be ok just butchering the male calfs.

[Svarte Troner]

I had a good fortress on a tundra a little while ago. The fort lasted like ten years, which is kind of long for me. I just dug down to the cavern which was about half full of water. The cavern had these 10x10 wide spires that were maybe 7-8 z levels high and I just built my entire fortress in them. I had little walkways connecting the spires and it was really cool. Unfortunately, Urist McTantrum decided to destroy the lever controlling my drawbridge to the outside while the bridge was still down, allowing goblins to come in and slaughter my unprepared dwarves (Don't know why I didn't build a proper military).

[Bronimin]

-

[Jayce]

I just embarked on the shore of the permantly frozen artic sea,big problem with water at first.Solution dig a big pit under the frozen sea,then collapse a huge sheet of ice in it = instant 5/7 water pond.

[Jake]

It's probably a lot less hassle to just buy lots and lots of cheap food and live off that whilst you dig in, and concentrate on churning out stone crafts to trade for food for at least the first year; unless I'm doing something wrong, it's a minor miracle if the wagon's been emptied and my dwarves have a dormitory and dining room by midsummer.
And I'd think twice about leaving that axe behind; they're currently among the most lethal weapons in the game, and even in calm surroundings you'll meet some disagreeable local fauna down there. If you think you can spare the points I'd advise bringing a hunter as well, and spare bolts for their crossbow; not only will you have some ranged cover if something Neutral Hungry pops up, but I think they might hunt in the caverns if there's nothing to be had on the surface, and it's one way of mapping them.