Print

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

[zephyr_hound]

If you're that OCD you could just use reveal to check where the dirt is on the level you want to dig, take the guesswork out of it. Make all the designations for your fortress dig, avoiding the dirt bits, then unreveal, unpause and never use reveal again. You can hit the caverns and adamantine and everything else as normal. I'd say that would count as fair use of a "cheating" tool.

[ancistrus]

I think there is a tool in dfhack called dfUnreveal
Never used it, but if i were you i would
1,dig the room
2, build walls
3, run the unreveal

[Phmcw]

Be creative. Pave what you need and design the rest as an intérior garden, with small pools of water and nice dirt path. Et voilà.

[MarcAFK]

Sometimes i use DF hack to look for the right spot to dig for stuff like this, or sometimes i specifically embark over several layers of the same stone.
Edit: Does that unreveal doohicky cram the sardines back into their can?

[decius]

I go into the cavern, wall off a (normally very large) section, then design a fortress that uses the available space, instead of just carving one out of stone to order. By my first summer, I have an area safe from cavern threats (by means of walls blocking off all cavern edges) and surface threats have to come down the ramp.

[gtmattz]

There is a newish addition to dfhack called 'unreveal', run that and any inaccessible tiles (such as the soil walls behind your constructed ones) will turn black.

[Anathema]

I had a similar issue, in that I wanted my entire above-ground fort to be engraved stone, and also not obsidian.  You have two major options, both involve hacking.  First save your fort before you mod raws.

1) Remove the [LAVA] tag, and place it on any other stone, soil, or mineral.  Now, when you combine water and magma, this material will appear as an engravable stone.

2) Remove the name OBSIDIAN from the entry for obsidian, name it whatever you want.  Find your desired material, and name it OBSIDIAN instead.  Run DFHack, and use DFLiquids to pain obsidian.  It picks the entry in the raws for the name OBSIDIAN, so whatever currently bears this name will be placed.  Keep in mind that a wall crated this way has no floor above it, so you need to place "obsidian" on the floor above it also to make it a real "wall".

Alternatively, move the [LAVA] tag where you want, and then use DFLiquids to place a square of magma with f- then next to it (like in the hallway) place a square of water with f+  This will make the magma remain still, as it's in a non-flowing state, and the water will flow out from its position, touch the magma, and cast obsidian (or what have you).  You can then smooth the floor to get rid of the resulting mud, or place a cabinet/table/chair/etc on the mud to remove it.

Coincidentally, I swapped the [LAVA] token and the OBSIDIAN name with RAW_ADAMANTIUM and ran the game.  Using DFHack, I could then paint adamantine walls that could be smoothed and engraved.  However, when I breached the magma sea, I got the curious message "Obsidian!  Praise the miners!" and there were spires of obsidian, even though obsidian itself lacked the deep_special tag.  This was very strange, but not an issue because I had acres of adamantine already.

You know, there's a way to accomplish that 'legitimately', i.e. without DFHack or changing any raws. You just need to find a spire, one of those square/circular mountains contained in a single tile, surrounded by flatland (could take a few embarks to locate one, but not too difficult with the help of the cliff indicator/relative elevation tabs). Center your embark on it and carve your fort inside the spire, then channel away all the excess dirt/stone (if any) covering your fort, and voila - you have an aboveground engraved natural stone fort towering over a flat plain, no sign of the original spire. Of course if you have other conditions - say you want a spire that also has metal and flux and whatever else, finding that perfect embark could be tricky. I'd say it's worthwhile though just as a matter of personal preference, to have a 'natural' aboveground engraved fort instead of a hacked one.

[MarcAFK]

I've found a few of those spires, they tend to annoy me since they make my extra large embarks look odd, but i should probably turn erosion up to make things neater....

Um yeah turn erosion down and you might get more spire type areas.

[SpiralDimentia]

I'm very tempted to download dfunreveal [dfun. lol.] just for the ability to make these blocks disappear. And I'm one of those people who is unreasonably against the use of dfhack, dfutility, dfmodforanythingelse. I'm very much a fan of unchanging the vanilla. But my [also unreasonable] need to have everything look neat makes that dislike have to take a backseat for now.