I was pretty excited to jump into a new version of DF, but yesterday's fort was an unmitigated disaster:
I genned a medium map; it's a custom island, but I think it's pretty standard. From there I found what I thought was a pretty good embark. The Ugly Jungle, the
Terrifying biome, rings a Joyous Wilds lake:
I figured it was a fair trade. Good waters, evil lands. At least I wouldn't have to worry about undead fish!
My audacious plan was just to bridge the lake. It's nothing special, but I don't normally do any kind of megaproject to begin with. I'd wanted to build something for an adventurer to visit, something that would leave a mark on the world. I claimed a whole 2x5 embark
on a netbook, and I was prepared to deal with the slowdowns, anything to bridge the lake:
Instead I got a lesson in humility from the ramped up difficulty of
Terrifying biomes.
I guess I should've seen it coming. The first few weeks were quiet. I had plenty of time to gather dead wood, carve out a moat, start farms and rooms and offices even.
Then the wren-people showed up. At first, it was no problem. My hunter was carrying steel bolts, and archery seems a lot deadlier now. Wren after wren was shot dead. The volume of creatures was a little alarming, but my hunter was having no problem.
And maybe, reading this, you all can see what I didn't at the time. These are
zombie wrens. The game really titles them zombies. I'm not sure if I just missed zombies in the last release or what, but I definitely had no clue what was going to happen next. And I definitely no clue that the game was labeling them
accurately.
Here's an idea of what I was watching. Wrens would land in our little work camp, my hunter would kill them efficiently, and life would go on. Hostile creatures are sort of given on
Terrifying embarks, and really, my hunter was getting excellent experience. Why worry?
The noose started tightening sometime in the second month, I suppose. After being harassed off and on by wrens, a new creature showed up: thrips. I have no idea what a thrip is, but they know exactly what dogs are and they slaughtered them first. Straight up slaughtered. I'd hesitated on building kennels and training the dogs, and I guess paid the price for that.
The Wrens and the Thrips were coordinated; I had started to sense the magnitude of my mistake picking this embark. One of the dorfs was caught in the killing as well. I forget which one exactly. Thinking back, it must've been the leatherworker. I hadn't quite gotten to creating export goods, and I never did once the attacks started.
And I guess I had other more pressing concerns for the dorfs on my mind. The hunter was out of bolts, and I had to draft him and the miners into a militia. The three of them stood guard outside and beat down any hostile creatures that would wander past.
In the mean time, I was desperately trying to coax the carpenter, the expedition leader, and the grower back inside. Crops were going to rot soon, and the hunter needed
something to fire. Wounds were slowly accumulating on the militia, broken toes, bruises, major cuts. It wasn't serious injury, but I knew chances were dwindling the longer they were exposed.
It wasn't until Felsite, the third month, that I realized what was happening. I knew there were scary creatures out there and that was slowing down my orders. But I had to take a closer look at the alerts I was getting:
If you look closely, you'll see that
mutilated corpses are interrupting my civilians. The dead bodies were rising. Soon it was
all of them. The wrens, the thrips...the
dogs and the
dead dorf. Soon body parts were rising. The chitin from a creature would animate by itself and attack. Legs and arms would rise and frighten anyone not in uniform. Attracted by blood and entrails, blood gnats buzzed nearby incessantly. It was an ugly, ugly beginning to the end.
And like I had predicted to myself earlier, there was no time to heal wounds from all the small attacks. There was no time to eat or drink or sleep. All six dorfs were "drafted", really it was a desperate last stand. And over time they got sloppy. They were wounded and tired, there was really no denying that.
One dorf was easily struck down, separated from the rest of the militia group.
And another turned up dead in the pile of carnage days after the fact.
So, day after day, the survivors killed the undead. Killed their own dogs. Killed their colleagues, friends, and in one case their lover. And the next day, they had to do it all over again.
It's now summer. There are four dorfs left.
The carpenter has killed thirteen zombies, mostly dogs. She's unhappy, naturally, but otherwise in decent mental and physical health.
The leatherworker -- who I guess survived, how about that -- has killed nineteen. Two of those kills are revenge kills against named zombies. Turns out the leatherworker is the expedition leader. The grower must've been the first to die. In any case, the expedition leader is actually quite happy though she complains that she's hungry.
The hunter is in bad shape. He nearly bled out at one point, and he has broken bones in his hands and feet. Some of it has healed back to "dented", but he has a hard time moving around. I've been keeping the militia stationed near him, as he is the commander, and that's probably the only reason there's four instead of three survivors.
The hunter has thirty-two kills, having to have put down a named zombie
twice already. Mentally, he's been unstable. Tantrums after losing a friend and nearly dying himself. Though his own "satisfaction at Work" has kept him from completely slipping over the edge. Mind you, his only work has been killing the undead.
Lastly, the manager has also survived. Though, he's perhaps fared worst of all. He fell in love with another in the expedition, but she was not one of the survivors. He has nine kills to his name, one of them a dorf. I'm worried he had to put his own love down.
But, and this intrigues me most, the manager's mood is
ecstatic. The manager is this physically strong, and optimistic dorf that can't even be disheartened by having his spine broken and having to lie helpless in the woods by himself. His lover is dead. The expedition is a failure. There is a lack of
dining chairs he's complained about, and
still, he insists on being ecstatic.
His personality page deserves a look, for sure:
I'm not sure where to go from here. You know, at one point, early in the embark, the moat that surrounds the work camp actually had living pond turtles. Real live turtles, they show up as green gems in my tileset. It was such a false sense of security, looking back.
There've been a few lessons so far. The biggest one being about combat. Something is a little wrong right now: ordering three dorfs to kill one zombie, for example, results in one dorf attacking and the other two cowering in the woods.
Stationing like with FBs is key to getting militia squads to engage with numbers.
I never got a "Dorf #3 has been struck down" message. It was just, "Urist McDeadfornow has been found dead". That was kind of cool to see a new feature in action, even at the expense of a survivor.
Tomorrow, I'll look into playing out the last days of the last four. Seeing if anything else interesting comes up.
Author
Topic: Ivywind, a tale of caution (Read 1058 times)