Print

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

[MrLobster]

I've come back to Dwarf Fortress after some time away, and I gotta say I really miss being able to start with magma pools/tubes near the surface in pretty much any type of terrain I wanted.

I appreciate that I'm guaranteed magma now, and I know it's probably good that it's inconvenient ... but darnit, it's just a pain to use. It's wayyyy down there. Every time I get to this part of the fortress design I go, "Really, is this how it is now?"  Totally magma-spoiled, I am.

So, is everyone just putting their forges deep and eating the hauling penalty or designing around it?  Are people building mighty pump stacks and multi-stage magma pistons through the caverns?  What's the best way to do it?

[dwarfhoplite]

I always generate worlds in which magma is only about 10 levels down.

[Saiko Kila]

So, is everyone just putting their forges deep and eating the hauling penalty or designing around it?  Are people building mighty pump stacks and multi-stage magma pistons through the caverns?  What's the best way to do it?

You're unlucky There are magma pools still (I got one on the first try with default params), also in default world it is possible that magma sea is relatively shallow. However, building pump stack is not that bad (I use nickel for pipes/screws and gabbro for blocks most often). I don't like pistons, because I want more magma than they can give.  Anyway, if you can't find the good place - or magma isn't your first priority - just modify the params to get shallow magma sea any time.

[Naryar]

Volcanoes !

Also, you can also diminish the number of cavern levels. If you get only 1 cavern level you'll get magma between z-20 and z-30 in most cases.

[warwizard]

If I want magma, I embark with a volcano, my current fort has magma about 70 tiles from the fort entrance on the same Z level. My problem is getting water from the brook 250 tiles away and 20 Z levels down :-)

[brucemo]

Magma in default embarks sometimes goes from the sea to one of the caverns, via a pipe.  If you are lucky you can find it very high, as little as 20 or 30 z-levels below the surface.

[slink]

I just drill a stairwell straight down, and build my forges and metal bar storage near the magma.  Up/down stairs seem to be fairly quick to travel upon, even for 100 levels.  I protect the stairwell with walls where it passes through open space in caverns.  The only problem is if I accidentally come out over water.  Then I have to make a jog in the path downward and that adds transit time.  Not much, though.  At first I did try making pump stacks.  Building the stack was fun, but the powering of such a large stack was a pain.

[bitesh]

I recently embarked on a fort which had a magma pool in the first cavern layer, about 20 to 30 z-levels from the surface. The downside was the only thing I could smelt was zinc.

[albatross]

I'd suggest using DFhack 1) to list the ores on the map and their amounts, just for a quick glance, and 2) to pause the game, reveal the map and see if the underground portions are at least not unacceptably tedious to deal with. Then undo the 'reveal' cheat, simply because playing with 'reveal' on can ruin the map. I have experience about that. If you have an iffy memory like mine, and if you can resist the urge to not use DFhack again, you'll have fun time trying to remember where the good, the bad and the ugly stuff were

[BastiBasti]

Simply Answer- Minecarts! (soon)

[oven_baked]

I just have a bunch of haulers to move stuff up and down.

My Logistics is simple:
Ore from ground -->
nearest ore pile -->
pile by magma smelters/forges -->
metal -->
pile by magma forges/smelters -->
stuff -->
general stock pile by magma forges -->
surface pile -->
sold/used


I found a pool reasonably high up that i dug a cistern next to, dug out a big room above and channel down to build new smelters and forges. Next to the smelters i have an ore pile and next to the forges is a bar pile and a finished goods, armor, weapons and furniture pile.
Works really well, and keeps many dwarfs occupied moving stuff up and down.

[rtg593]

I embark where there are volcanoes and aquifer, so everything is covered :p

The LazyNewbPack comes with a seed of a world, has some really nice sites, especially volcano ones. One is basically in a forest.

[i2amroy]

The time it takes to walk down 80 z-levels on  stairway is no longer then the time it takes to go 80 tiles horizontally (which is about the distance form one side of my workshop areas to the other), so I tend to just make my forges down near the bottom of the map. Set up your metal stockpile down there and turn off hauling for your metalworkers and there really isn't any slowdown in production, it just means that I get to give an extra 5 or so of my idlers work to do.

[GoldenShadow]

I use the magma piston for me fort. I altered the design slightly so I don't need those bridges to catch the magma. Just carve some channels in the top of the piston so it catched the magma in a "cup" of natural stone walls on the piston itself. You can make the channels single tiles so they fit perfectly under the forges. Then excess magma flows off the edges of the piston and the rest dries up.

[rtg593]

I use the magma piston for me fort. I altered the design slightly so I don't need those bridges to catch the magma. Just carve some channels in the top of the piston so it catched the magma in a "cup" of natural stone walls on the piston itself. You can make the channels single tiles so they fit perfectly under the forges. Then excess magma flows off the edges of the piston and the rest dries up.

Well that's pretty ingenious :p

If you have no other use for magma, at least