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[Puzzlemaker]

That sounds awesome.  I would love to see the map when you have it ready.  Good luck!

[Kofthefens]

I have a few questions:

1. What will you do about nobles?
2. What is your procedure with migrants? Are you segregating them by job or by wave. It appears to be by job what what I've seen, but wouldn't that possibly 'contaminate' a bunker?
3. How can something possibly be this awesome?

[Martin]

I have a few questions:

1. What will you do about nobles?
2. What is your procedure with migrants? Are you segregating them by job or by wave. It appears to be by job what what I've seen, but wouldn't that possibly 'contaminate' a bunker?
3. How can something possibly be this awesome?

Not sure what to do about nobles. Right now Morul is taking all of those slots, because, well, shit. But yeah, we're going to have to deal with that. Pretty much everyone should have a qualifying bedroom, etc. just as part of the story, so mayors etc are covered. The other positions, I'm not so sure. There will be basically no justice because everyone is quarantined, but we should be well equipped to satisfy noble demands.


Migrants will be isolated in each wave and then when they've been determined to be safe, then be sorted. Generally I expect that families that come will all take a bunker and that'll be that. Each bunker is a job skill. Everyone that goes in the soap maker bunker will be a soap maker - mom, dad, kids, grandkids - a glorious 3 day future being tasked with breaching the volcano or being a forgotten beast meat shield in whatever fortress they later migrate to. The rest of the wave I hope to pair up as best as I can. I think the mismatches will have to either combine with the next wave, or, well… I've already got caskets full of migrants, an obsidian farm planned, masons to skill up, and almost endless catacomb space.


I'm hoping it'll be awesome. It's flat-out overwhelming right now as I work out the dig order. I've laid out the power plant, and cistern, which needs to be pretty big to feed the obsidian farm, and should be fully automated - detecting water level, letting more in, detecting level in the sub levels, auto pumping - plus the same happening in each bunker well. I've laid out the lever floor. It's a roughly ⅓ scale version of the top level of the fortress. It's a lot for 7 dwarves to do, so the order matters a great deal in order for anything to get up and running any time soon. But I think they're just about ready to go. While they dig, I need to make blocks like mad so that when we're ready to breach the cavern and head down to magma, that we can wall the caverns in - which is gonna be wicked hard in a 5x5, even with Morul helping. If there's water down there, it's going to be wicked hard to plug that up - but if I find magma, I can load up minecarts and use them to create an obsidian dam. That'll be a cool new thing to try.

[Kofthefens]

What about corpses? Will you have a catacomb bunker who will manage burial?

[Martin]

Each bunker will have a tomb for their own family. All others will go in the catacomb.

[Hanslanda]

This sounds epic. I have nothing to contribute at the moment, but I will be watching with great interest. Martin, I award you two full internets for insane skill, skilled insanity, and impressive originality. Good luck.

[Martin]

Summer 554


I've had it with these goblins! Four ambushes this season - followed the elves right to the depot. I've killed 54 so far - they're not going to get inside, but there are limbs and armor strewn everywhere. We can't afford to pick all of this up. Just getting the body parts disposed of is a major challenge.


We've fully excavated the farm bunker on the way to getting the trade bunker done. It's a priority. We need a safe way for traders to get in, if only so we can close ourselves off and get some work done. Last autumn they ambushed the dwarven caravan and destroyed two wagons. So much for a laying low here - I now wish we had started with the trade area. The size of the trade bunker and its distance from the center of the fortress means it'll be probably two more seasons before we can get it operational. Squirreling around in the maintenance shafts is a nice change of pace, though.

[Martin]

Summer 555


The trade bunker is up and running. The elves were the first since we opened it, and they found the entrance easily and entered without disturbance. It's very far from the main entrance, but we're slowly getting things moved around and some of the stockpiles sorted out. The main entrance has only had a perimeter at the inner wall and we're finishing up getting the middle wall secured at that point. From here out, I'll try and engage invaders between the two to limit the scope of the cleanup, and allow it to be done safely. We still have a good bit of cleanup outside the middle perimeter to do and some wood to haul inside as well. I think we can finish that before Autumn.


The depot won't be ready for habitation for a while yet - it's near the surface and there's a great deal of stone flooring to lay and still a number of levers to hook up to make it foolproof. I've dug out the power plant area, and we'll be preparing that next and getting ready to set up the cistern, which needs to be at least partially operational in order to get the power plant running. We're having an argument about how best to manage the water pressure with the cistern and feeding all the various levels.


Because of the amount of hauling back and forth to the depot bunker, we've started excavating the rail lines leading from the central core to the depot to help speed things up. That should be ready in about 2 seasons. From there we should be able to wrap the trade bunker and starting the finishing work on the farm bunker.

[Martin]

Winter 557


The caravan just arrived with some slightly encouraging news. Our presence has had an unanticipated benefit - traders are reporting that it's gotten somewhat safer traveling around the realm, but more dangerous near us. There's a bit less of a sense of urgency that we receive migrants soon, which is a relief as progress has been unexpectedly slow. We've been sieged twice by the undead, and the caravans had to turn away each time. There have been constant goblin attacks, and we barely got the dead bodies in after the last one, and turtled up so we could get some work done. There's still several hundred items strewn outside the middle wall and an overflowing pile of armor and clothing that we dumped over the side into the to-be butcher bunker. Three dwarves are focused on cleaning, two of us are mining and engraving, two are handling masonry.


We're still laying floor and doing wall replacement around the fortress. The outer cart loop is dug, smoothed, and track laid - and stone moved out of the cart path for half the loop as it'll be dangerous to do once carts are flying around there. The farm is smoothed, but still needs to be outfitted. The power plant is smoothed but needs to be cleared and constructed. We don't have enough wood so we'll build it in phases. The lever room is dug and being smoothed. The cistern is about to be partially dug - just enough to get the power plant started. It'll then be drained and finished later.


We're good on food and booze. The main problem has been dealing with the distances inside the fortress, as it's exceedingly spread out, and moving the stone has been unbearably slow. The new depot bunker, even though it's far from the center of the fortress, has worked wonderfully and saved us from having to haul in ambushed wagons. Things are looking up. Oh, and we're not 7 any longer. We're now 12. I've done many things but never been a father until now - to two sons. There's another boy and two girls running around now as well. If only we could get them to carry some of these stones.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's been a wicked combination of variables. From the depot to the power plant is 240 tiles straight line, but nothing is a straight line because with everyone being quarantined, building a circuitous route for the carts was the priority. Even with fewer stone, stone hauling is no faster than before due to the weight and we're mostly dumping stone for each bunker resident to pass along via cart rather than trying to handle it now. But the real killer is that with so few dwarves, the job system puts VERY few jobs in the queue, so we're getting no benefit from the hauling changes. In fact, it's quite a bit worse because instead of a dwarf grabbing an item and hauling it to a stockpile, they go get the bin, then pick up the item, look for other items in the queue they can also pick up - and there's nothing else in the queue. So even with dumping from one tile the dwarf walks off 5-10 tiles before the next job shows up, they walk back, dump, etc. I think with at least 20-30 dwarves it works well, but below that it's a bit worse than before - at least for bin items. Barrels and furniture are about the same.


The power plant will use the flowing water off the map trick. I just can't afford the FPS drop in this fort with any other technique. So deal. It'll be 250 water wheels when done which is about 2.5x what I expect the fortress may need. But I can build it out in segments as we need. We'll start with probably 30. I'm still not sure how to handle the cistern. It needs to be really large to feed the obsidian farm, so it needs to draw off the river frequently and it needs to feed water out to multiple z-levels so I'm considering a cistern that reaches a bit below the lowest level I'll need and building a pump stack back that draws from the bottom and feeds out pressure regulated water to the two well levels and the obsidian farm level. Right now it just needs to fill the power plant next to it, and then we can dig down later. Wells can wait. They can go in after migrants have arrived.


I'm just stunned at the frequency and size of these attacks with such a small fortress. I've been working really hard to avoid combat because of the hauling, but even so Morul has 108 kills so far. We've had 4 undead sieges. They're small, but they're coming frequently. That necro was hiding out inside the fortress for 2 years - we caught him on the way out. I thought we dropped the farm layers on him. I don't know why he didn't raise anything - we hauled at least 3 seasons of ambush bodies from the top to the bottom of the fortress where the atom smasher is. We're sealed up tighter now.

[Puzzlemaker]

Sounds awesome.  Have you considered accepting migrants temporarily to help with the hauling, or are you hell-bent on it remaining as the starting 7?

Excited to see what becomes of this!

[Martin]

It's really tempting to take migrants to help, but I'm going to stick it out. This is something of a dwarven civil engineering experiment, and lessons are being learned here. Having Morul has made it tolerable. I can throw him outside to deal with threats and not worry about the other dwarves getting shot up (though the gobbos have done wonders for thinning my animal population) and even against the other legendary miner he's easily 2x faster mining. And engraving is sooooo slow until you get to legendary, but Morul engraves almost as fast as everyone else walks. If I had 7 of him, I'd be done by now.


And there are other little tricks to remember. When engraving long hallways, smooth the floor first, then smooth the walls - once they get going in a line they'll beeline to the end, where if you give them the walls and floors together they go this way and that, and jump around a lot. Once they start carving tracks, they stay on the tracks without smoothing the walls on either side which was nice. Burrows has been helping keep everyone focused, but it doesn't seem to work for stone hauling. I want to be able to take all the stone in a bunker, haul it to one stockpile and then have the mason turn it into blocks. I can't seem to get the stone hauler to only see stone inside the burrow, so it's nonstop job cancellation spam.

[ignatzami]

I've seen a lot of issues with the new stone hauling. I've found that once you have a wheelbarrow, or two, assigned to a stockpile dwarfs won't haul by hand into that stockpile. It's strictly anecdotal, but it's a real pain where I've seen it. You can of course mass-forbid stone outside of your working area as well.

[Puzzlemaker]

How is progress going on this?

[Ghills]

This does sound great, but it should be in the DF Community Games and Stories subforum. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=14.0

[parlor_tricks]

Its a mega project with flavor text and  - plus its neither a community game nor a story just yet.

ALso Martin -

What about Vampires and Were Creatures?

Also, if Necromancers come and start raising critters from the butchers shop, wouldn't that mean all butchers die? As do hunters/anyone who creates refuse?