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[Bortness]

Etostamost is in its ninth year, by some margin the longest fort I’ve ever played, mostly due to the “start over” compulsion from which I suffer in spades.  In fact, the fort languished in exactly that limbo for a long time, until I came back to it recently and found a surprising amount of joy in its developing maturity.

Highlights currently include:

    a phenomenal library boasting over 100 books

    another 100+ books which have been brought to the fort by adventurers, which are apparently still property of the individuals or some such thing as they are not being incorporated yet into the library.  I figure I might need to kill the adventurers somehow to open up the ownership tag, similar to how killed caravans drop their previously “owned” goods to be claimed by the dwarves.

    One of those adventurers (human swordsman Sprinkles Pumpkinballs) is currently walking around the fort carrying the secrets-of-life-and-death slab from the local necromancer’s tower.  This slab is behaving the same way as the books as far as ownership is concerned.

    The other three adventurers on-site are a mosquito man (Suckie), a brown recluse spider man (Bitie, missing several arms from combat), and a tick man (The Tick, slayer of like 9 necromancers at the tower but too small to haul the slab effectively out of area and into fast-travel land, necessitating Sprinkles for that specific job)

    a massive war dog pack which is currently swarming around the temple district, all distracted

    62 human and animal members of a merchant caravan, a 7-man-and-goblin performance troupe and a 12-man highly skilled military squad which are all marked “hostile” but merely wander around the fort

    A group of 32 “merchants” listed as citizens of the fort.  What were likely their pack animals are listed under our livestock as “tame”, but do not have the “stray” tag.  These are all distinct and separate from the “hostiles” listed above.

    A 40-bed hospital setup, fully stocked with everything including soap, with internal water sources fully plumbed – drainable, refillable

    A tavern and inn with internal drinking water reservoir and active waterfall which empty into the caverns on the fort’s master drain.  The fort utilizes an automated pressure-plate actuated system which drains the sump only when it fills, holds the bridge open only as long as it takes to empty, then closes it again to maintain the greatest possible cavern security.

    The basics of a fluid logic system, which is currently used to control the cavern drain, and also to refill itself when its own reservoir gets low.  This system consists of a 4z reservoir with three pre-built output branches on the bottom level: one branch is used for the drain and the reservoir refill controls, the other two are ready to go but unutilized and available for future needs.

    146 adamantine wafers, 184 steel bars (very healthy steel industry, limiting factor right now is typically charcoal availability)

    A six-squad military which is completely outfitted head-to-toe in locally forged steel.  Their training regimen and combat experience has several of them at Lord/Master level already, with several more well on the way.  A recent 22 goblin siege was put down with the only dwarven injury being a bruised hand.

    An internal battlefield setup with lever/bridge pathing control which allows the military forces to engage enemies underground without the troubles imposed by cave adaptation

    An enormous amount of vomit due to the aforementioned cave adaptation

    A(n accidentally) well-flooded cavern system, as the water dynamics of the fort have a tendency to get a little chaotic on reclaim, and dumping the entirety of the fluid logic reservoir into the caverns is a bit easier than expected.

(continued...)

[Bortness]

Keep in mind that I’ve just reclaimed the fortress after being retired in order to allow for the Adventure Mode shenanigans.  I’m sure this accounts for a lot of the weirdnesses, especially since I retired several adventurers in the fort who had just gone by and slaughtered nearly everything alive in the local necromancer’s tower.  On the last visit there, the living inhabitants kept exclaiming that The Old Boat (my Dwarven civ) is at war with them.  There must be some triangulation of diplomatic relationships going on in this situation, which goes a long way towards accounting for the non-hostile “hostiles”.  The citizen traders may be related to the fact that the king has moved in and made us the new mountainhome.  I think these new citizen traders are probably the old mountainhome caravan which has visited us in the past, now in residence at the new digs.

There are some additional upsides and downsides to the reclaim.  One item in particular seems to be a bit of both: various items in the stockpiles are missing.  On one hand, the overwhelming number of spider webs in the caverns are all gone.  The 3000+ “silk threads” were an obvious source of processing delay in various operations within the game, contributing on some level to frame rate issues.  Similar but less beneficial is a vaporization of all the fort’s drinks, meat, fish, and prepared meals.  Etostamost boasted (ha ha!) nearly 2000 drink, 2000 – 3000 meat and fish, and nearly 19,000 (!) cooked meals.  They are all gone on reclaim.  Brewers, hunters, and cooks are working feverishly to replace the lost assets.  Naturally, the 37 quintillion useless rotten bones, mussel shells, and random teeth littering the map all remain.

Also, as I’m sure most of you are aware, nearly every unbuilt item in the fortress is in a random location on the map.  This is already true before the Fortress Mode reclaim – any adventurers visiting the site in Adventure Mode will find that the dwarves essentially detonated a low-order explosive right in the middle of the stockpile the instant the fort was retired.  Having a hard time finding that adamantine helm you’re looking for?  It’s probably on top of some 15z hill in the corner of the map.  Or in the damn caverns somewhere.  It also appears that all items have been removed from their bins and barrels.

This caused the fort to hit a blistering TWO frames per second for a few minutes immediately after reclaim as every single last dwarf pathed to Narnia and back while working out stockpile routes.

--(( fort runs for a few minutes ))--

Wait wait wait wait wait.  The king is gone.

The nobles screen no longer lists the king, nor the outpost liaison.  The “royal guard”, the four legendary martial dwarves which accompanied the king, remain.  I can’t remember the regent’s name, so checking the units list for him is not an easy task.
The nobles screen makes it obvious that all the built containers (chests, bags, cabinets) in the fortress have been unbuilt and blown around the map at random with all the rest of the goods.  This also reminds me that the current mayor is a goblin who originally applied for residence as part of a performance troupe.

I need to get all the chests and bags returned to the critical locations in the fort – the hospital, library, tavern, and etc.

--(( fort runs a while longer ))--

Traders just arrived… and all of my large steel serrated discs are gone.  In an update to the “everything has been removed from bins and barrels”, it now seems that anything in a container when the fort was retired is gone completely, vaporized.  We’re frantically trying to piece together some trade goods in their place.

Ah, they arrived with an outpost liaison, who introduces himself as being from the Mountainhome, and offering goods as normal.  Apparently our new status as Mountainhome didn’t survive the reclaim cycle – that’s why the king is no longer present.  Still odd that the Royal Guard remains.

I guess that should do it for now.  I’m continuing to run the fort, so for sure there will be further updates in days to come.

[mikekchar]

Yep.  That pretty much matches my experiences.  The traders that join your fort are likely caravans that came by while you were absent and  got scuttled.  The traders join the fortress and in my experience the livestock hangs around with the "hostile" tag (while not actually being hostile).  Any visitor that was visiting your fortress (or subsequently came while you were absent) also becomes "hostile" while not actually being hostile.  There is a bug logged.

You may find large stacks of your goods in strange places.  This will probably account for many of the things that you are missing.  Food and seeds seem to be especially prone to this phenomenon.  They will be unavailable and nobody will touch them, but they will hang around forever (and even start to rot).  It initially amused me that the cheesemaker's quarters was filled with 52 cheese and 100 walnuts, but the miasma disaster afterwards was not fun.  If you manage to shift these stacks, they will become yours again.  I did this by building something in the tile that the stacks occupied.  This caused the stacks to be shifted and then they became available again.

The disappearing booze appears to be intentional, as are the emptied bins and barrels.  I think the intention is to dissuade you from retiring and unretiring frivolously.  To be honest, I don't really understand why that would be an issue but, whatever...

I have found that apart from the hostile visitors, everything can be cleaned up again over a period of a few months.  I didn't know about the revocation of the mountain home.  That's quite interesting.  I like to retire and unretire fairly frequently because I like to be engaged in the world.  I'm hoping that this becomes a more supported feature in the future.

[Urist9876]

Most things remained in place in the few times I went in adventurer mode to look at a fortress.
No problem to get to the sunshine booze.
I started as adventurer in those fortresses though. So there was little time to move things.

For some reason they disliked chests tied to locations: the chests in the inn and library where standing in the doorway.