Nishasob, "Tradeboards" has lasted for 27 and a half year now and is home of 90 dwarfs (over 50 of which were born on site, since this was played with a population cap of forty). I had hoped to do it without digging at all, but the mandatory first mood required rough gems, so a very small mine was opened and instantly sealed and never touched again after some rubicelles were secured. There may have been a boulder or two from that mine used by the masons, but other than that:
no real digging, no underground constructions. All stone and metal came from imports, the most important building ressource was wood. I kept invaders off for most of the time, which probably didn't do much since the place was fairly peaceful anyway.
Tally after turning invaders on and changing the goblin civ's raws to a siege trigger of 50 people:
megabeasts: zero. Some named critter ended up slab-able as "missing" which might have been a forgotten beast - didn't show up on the units list, though.
semimegabeasts: one giantess, one ettin, one cyclops, two minotaurs (no werebeasts, no vampires, no necromancers)
goblins: mundane all-goblin assault squads, four attacks in total, spread over seven years. 96 goblins slain in open-field combat. Three dwarfs got titles (seems to require five notable kills).
The world used was quite young, so there were no visitors at all to the tavern/temple/library and no finished books were on offer in trade.
All notable slain units got a slab, as well as the one dwarven casualty: a child who was spooked by a black bear, fell into a pool and drowned (no combat report, so probably tried to climb/jump down and slipped). Curiously, some skunks were captured and tamed, and each and every one of those who died (well over a hundred) is eligible for a slab. Only applies to skunks, too, not to other (tamed or common domestic) animals.
Around year fifteen of the fort, caravans started to bug out. Elves and dwarfs recovered and kept visiting, humans had eternal stuck units on site and never sent a new caravan. From year 20 onwards, i regularly forbade the depot just before caravan arrival to force the merchants to spawn in random, hopefully un-bugged spots and it worked alright, although of course it meant no more wagon visits. The weird "phantom units" near the original entrance's map border (tiles which dwarfs have to crouch down and crawl through to pass as though an invisible immobile creature stood there) persisted and new ones were found on the relocated entry; i suspect they have something to do with the bugged caravans but have no idea if they're cause or effect.
Wealth: 9,2 Mio "created wealth" on site, 17,5 Mio exported, ~240 000 gifts. We generated unreasonable amounts of cloth crafts and prepared meals. Seven artefacts generated by moods, five scrolls, 27 named weapons and shields.
Building in treesTree trunks and branches provide support for buildings; walls, floors and the like can be built right on top of branches and twigs without trouble. Furniture and shops can be constructed on branches, too, but not stockpiles. I have not tried muddying branches to see whether farms can be constructed on them - but you'd have trouble getting them properly wet, with more tree and thus no fillable "pond" hole above them. Muddied built platforms (of any material, wood, stone, metal, glass, as long as it's muddied) are usable for farms
as long as the z-level belongs to a farmable biome. I have a working farm on z+7, but a muddied platform on z+11 has "no seeds available for this location".
Most parts of a tree count as "outside", which means you have to construct a roof over them before you can install beds, chairs, tables or coffins. Bridges provide sufficient cover and take less material to build than normal floor (and provide happy thoughts if traffic passes by them). Trees take no harm if a bridge is constructed above them.
Interaction between bridges and trees is weird - twigs are not walkable, and bridges don't make these tiles walkable, either. If you have to cross twigs to pass e.g. from one tree to another, you'll have to build a floor over them.
Trees keep on growing over the years and if a tree spreads its twigs into the area of a bridge, it can make the bridge unpassable in a near-invisible fashion. Fun to troubleshoot. I was lucky and spotted the few cases where this happened before a dwarf came to harm.
Trees don't grow all that large when you look at the normal space consumption of a dwarven fort and don't provide much unbroken usable area: you won't have many opportunities to stick workshops in trees and rooms entirely based on branch floor won't get too big, either, which means your nobles will require fancy furniture to satisfy their room requirements. The most valuable furniture you can generate without imports are plant cloth bags and ropes.
You'll usually have 5+ levels of airspace that trees won't grow into. You can fill that area with buildings without harming the forest underneath. Much of my building efforts were eventually spent making dwellings above the trees.
If you want to use the trees as foundation of your dwellings, you'll have to think about your woodcutting strategy, since wood will also be a major ressource, for building, for crafting and as fuel for metalworking (in case you want a fort that can withstand attacks). While wood only gives one block per log, building from wooden blocks can still be useful - it keeps walls smooth and enables you to still get wood imports from elven and human caravans: all
logs that you own in an unforbidden state are compared to your headcount, and if you have fewer logs than citizens, a caravan will try to bring enough logs to make the numbers equal. So - forbid unreachable felled wood (fallen in water, stuck in other trees), forbid windmills/axles/waterwheels after construction, build from blocks instead of logs - logs in constructions cannot be forbidden.
The ground floor of the whole thing, with kitchen zone (barrel-less raw food stockpile), brewers, butchery (surrounded by wall to not spook other animals), trader bait stockpile and the triple-ramp path to the depot. Everything is secured from the outside by raised drawbridges, with occasional gaps again secured by a cage trap and war dog each. The brook is the source of fishes and water (pumps work through brook tiles, no digging required). In the north, a dance is taking place in the tavern; the military training area in the middle of the tavern is intentional - sparring matches train the barflies in the observer skill. One dwarf got legendary observation skill while working her way up to legendary musician/grand master singer.
The trade depot. Nothing to see here, it's just erected on its own wooden platform four z-levels aboveground. Alas, i couldn't locate a sufficiently large tree.
The temples set right into trees - Convent of Aquamarines and The Shrine of Tombs; on z+1. There's also a small farm plot to the right.
Library, dormitory and archer pillbox, z+6
The archers never loosed a bolt in anger, the tree cover's just too thick for them to see any worthwile target. The pillbox is the room on the bottom right-hand side with the fortification walls.
The library is in the centre-left, where the scroll (white squiggle) is visible on a table. I messed up the library by setting copies per items too high (5) and desired writing materials too low (20): written-on scrolls, quires and bound books
are counted against "writing materials", so 20 materials with 5 copies desired means the library stalls out after generating four original works - all materials present are reserved/used, no unused scrolls will be brought in to pen down new stuff. After fiddling with the settings, one of the two scholars finally managed to squeeze out another new scroll, eventually.
The various beds visible seemingly strewn around the place are what bed"rooms" in trees tend to look like - twigs are uncrossable and cannot be built on, so the actually usable area tends to be much smaller and more fractured than the canopy suggests.
Annnd we're running out of buildable tree features - most tree parts that reach up here to z+9 are trunk parts and twigs. Thus, i plastered over it all with wood-block platforms that then were turned into bedrooms, a memorial hall for the various caravan dead (mostly turned insane after getting stuck on the map border), stoneworkers' area (mason and mechanic shops) and of course the building material buffer stockpile, with its poorly-thought-out array of two-tile-two-stop minecart tracks.
The "roof" of the main fort - mostly bridges but also some amounts of normal floor to allow constructing another carpenter's workshop with its own wood stockpile and a metal furniture stockpile (the forges were getting too full to work properly). The ring around this area is a minecart "patrol" track on "ride always after six days" schedule. The patrol track was built after i set up the duchess' suite in the trees on the east of the map, only accessible by the walking path at "roof" level, thus the weird ramp construction to get the track past the noble suite's accessway. The track of course is way too high up for the rider to see anything of interest. The construction is pretty simple: the cart moves around counter-clockwise, ridden south from its current (starting) position, around a NE corner into the circuit where the realgar roller (orange) working east, which is always on, (re-)establishes the cart's speed everytime it passes. The quartzite (white) roller works west into the NE corner. It's originally off and only activates once the cart has gone around often enough, pushing the cart out of the cycle. To automatically release the cart from the circuit after a given number of orbits, i used Fleeting Frames's ingeniously simple differential-weight counter design:
A willow minecart is let out of its two-tile "one-way" bouncer (NSE ramp with wall N and S, NW ramp with wall N) by the door to the west which opens whenever the patrol cart goes over the pressure plate on its track; the willow cart then pushes a nickel minecart sitting on a medium-friction track stop and returns to its bouncer through a three-ramp "comb" delaying it ~150 steps, enough for the door to shut again. Once it's pushed for the twentieth time, the nickel cart goes off the track stop, cycles over the pressure plate which connects the "finish" roller, pushing the patrol cart out of the cycle. The nickel cart then completes its own short cycle by returning to the track stop.
Twenty rounds on the "patrol" track take about eight dwarf days, so with "ride after six days" there are two rides per month.
The "panic room": three levels below the top of the map, at z+23, there's this 30x40 platform (built on a solid wood
wall block on the z-level below), with a dormitory, dining area, food and drink stockpiles, fully equipped hospital and a cistern (3x4 floor, filled with 6/7 high water). This area is the citizen burrow in case of danger. It has walls all around, all the way to the top of the map, and all access can be blocked via lever-operated bridges. The minecart track with the many pressure plates is a "door blinker" we used to drain a pond to get at the willow logs that had fallen into it. Incidentally, it also helped us to retrieve the remains of the dwarven child who managed to drown in the very same pond some time after.
Where does the water for the cistern come from? It's pumped from the brook (with a wall around the pump) and brought up to z+13 via pumpstack. We don't really stack the pumps, though, they're going up in steps from west to east, then north to south because i find that less messy to build outside. At 20 power per windmill, we barely manage to run four pumps off three windmills.
This one here is the topmost pump, with its own machinery to allow switching off in case any maintenance is required: two gear assemblies and a tile of axle to serve as switchoff load, a hatch cover to block the intake, and a floodgate to flush water from the output.
The minecart that fills the cistern dips into the output tile (on a "flat" EW ramp) to pick up water.
The level immediately above: the minecart goes through from bottom right to upper(ish) left - drops onto the bridge from above, with sufficient northward velocity and gets regulated to water-pickup speed by the eastern ramp array. EWN ramp - NS ramp: the EWN ramp just smacks it to the far end of the NS ramp, which it accelerates off of for the entire length, passes back over EWN without really losing speed, goes around the corner to a NW ramp to increase speed past ~30k but also over a high-friction track stop to limit it to under ~40k. Then it picks up water (hopefully), gets re-regulated to "one downramp" worth of speed and then finally enters the launch ramp which impulse-accelerates it to ~170k and flings it up. The regulation post-pickup means the cart's launch speed doesn't change even if it fails to pick up water. That's important, because:
...this is where it has to land - on z+25, after a launch from z+14. If launch speed varied, it might miss this level entirely. On the full water-fetching cycle, the cart is dropped down to the pump from the middle-right track hook and emerges on the left. Don't be fooled by the track corners on the catching track, the cart's going at ~120k speed, much too fast to care about unbacked corners. Only at the wall it respects the corner (underneath a highest-friction track stop), jumps over the air gap after activating the plate which opens the door in the wall, goes over another, this time "high" track stop, dumps its water cargo into the cistern and bumps into the wall to the northeast. When sending it off, it gets accelerated by a pair of impulse ramps, goes over another door-opening pressure plate to let itself out and gets regulated down to manageable speeds before being dropped down to the loading level 11 levels below.
The cistern-loading circuit is double-air-gapped: once by the eleven z-levels the cart jumps down/up during its round, and also by the same-level jumps the cart performs on the top level: even if the drawbridge to the right is raised and dwarfs can't even safely access the catwalk leading to the tower to the left (a single-wide staircase tower reaching all the way up from the ground level, entirely walled around and built from soap and lead), they can still fetch fresh water for the cistern. Obviously, getting fresh water still depends on the pump array remaining functional.
Another access tower to the right, and the longshot commute station in the middle. It's just a big catching track for minecarts. It connects conceptually to a max-acceleration circuit on the ground level, which shoots a cart all the way up here (to z+25), where it comes in from the north and is brought to a halt via track stops. At the southern end just past the point where the incoming cart stops there's another route stop from which a cart is just tipped over the edge to land on a solitary impulse ramp on z+2.
I've tested both routes via riding several times and they are indeed perfectly safe modes of transportation for dwarfs. Notionally, they could serve as a backup way into/out of the topside burrow.
A little plaything - a high-friction track stop on a corner at the exit of a ramp. Speed is regulated so that with the track stop "suspended" by active pressure plate cart speed is in derail territory and ignores the corner, but if the track stop is in effect it slows the cart enough to respect the corner. The pressure plate itself is on the track branch that gets entered when the corner is taken/the track stop is in effect. Thus, this is a trackstop-regulated repeater circuit, although this one here's just a demonstration model.
P.S. the fort has twenty melee soldiers and six archers. Six of the melees and all archers are only activated in case of trouble - and stationed far behind the front lines, as last backup. Two of the melees are
not weaponmasters. The two most senior squads (made up of the first fort-born children to grow up, so started around fort-year thirteen) have been training non-stop for over ten years and are legendary (+xx) in all military skills (including biter and misc. object, one bit a goblin and shook them so hard the gobbo's spine broke), only "Leader" skill is merely proficient/competent in the squad leaders. They're the only squads to have seen actual battle and the only time one got wounded was when a hammerdwarf got enraged from being crowded during a training session and punched the spearmaster's ankle so hard the joint shattered.
I've never seen it in full swing before, so was quite impressed by how many ornaments dwarfs tend to pick up, especially with a workshop being on "make cloth craft/R" for years and years, with several legendary clothiers to do the work. It's getting difficult spotting the actual clothing among the up to sixty amulets, rings, earrings, bracelets and figurines the average dwarf is decked out in. I summed up the worn goods of the metalsmith i'd been paying extra attention to and it came out as ~18000 military equipment (steel gear including a masterwork spear), ~2500 clothing and ~15000 owned ornaments. Not every dwarf is as grabby, but several thousand ☼ of trinkets per dwarf looks pretty normal. Other small goods were only occasionally claimed - large glass gems, coin stacks...
The fort managed to get a beekeeper and a wax worker to legendary skill. All raw cookable food was kept in a barrel-less stockpile and an extra royal jelly stockpile set up near one of the kitchens, so the royal jelly was properly cooked off once we stopped collecting nuts. That's no joke, as far as i can tell cooks' primary preference is not "solid food in barrels before everything else", but rather "anything that is extracted from a container before bringing it to the kitchen before everything else", which does explain the preference for solid barrel-contents but also the insistence on cooking seeds - one by one - before touching stuff outside of containers and contained stuff that
cannot be taken out of its container, i.e. flour and liquids.
Tl;dr - cooking nuts drives you nuts because they're drawn from bags one by one and have top priority over stuff sitting in the open.
We struck coins every year and ended up with 203 stacks, i.e. 101500 coins total. 100000 of those ended in the "coin vault", a coin stockpile behind a floodgate operated by a lever personalised to the mayor. (The remaining three stacks were claimed as personal property of dwarfs with fitting metal preferences.) The lever also opens/closes a hatch cover right next to it, in case the mayor desires to flush an unwelcome visitor from his sight. Right next to the lever is also a same-colour lever personalised to the duchess, captain of the guard, champion (main fisherdwarf/woodburner) and militia commander, which releases the cats. It's a secret special defence which is almost certain to be entirely useless, since attackers are quite unlikely to get anywhere near the cat cage during an invasion.
We ordered about sixty cut gems per year from the dwarven caravan and put them in our archer captain's capable hands to adorn random crap lying around the jeweller's shop. Apart from the usual mega-encrusted waterskins, we bought a musical instrument made of "liquid dark" from the elves (a bagpipe with a silk bag; since elves don't have normal access to silk, this results in random special materials like demon and divine silk; "liquid dark" was apparently the latter, since the instrument cost almost 30000, with no exceptional craftselfship involved) and encrusted it as much as possible - it broke the 100 000☼ mark eventually.
PPS: of course the fort would likely crumble if attacked by a fire-using foe. While wood walls are immune to flames, the construction is intertwined with the trees of the forest and collapsing trees might well take out crucial supporting structures.
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Topic: Beards in Trees (0.43.05 fort) (Read 873 times)