Disclaimer: I just discovered dwarf fortress and it seems like an awesome game, so after some reading in the forums and the wiki I installed v0.34.10 and started my first fortress. This ongoing story might be a bit boring to seasoned dwarves, but for me it's all new and my way to ask for help. The questions are under the text wall.
I'm young, I'm strong, I'm bright, I know it all and I can do anything! I'm Urist McNoob and this is my tale.
To do anything first requires the opportunity to do at least something and there's nothing to do here. The dwarves in Mountainhome are as boring as the name, doing nothing but toxicate, proliferate and procrastinate or as my friend Ducim would put it "drink, fuck and sleep". Long story short, I use the first opportunity to escape this "hellhole" (it dawned to me much later that that's not a good simile) and take the lead in a well-formed and thought-out expedition of a bunch of eager youngsters to find riches in foreign lands. Our average age isn't even 50 and of course no one got the idea to take someone more experienced. I was told I wouldn't last two years out in the wild, three tops. I mean, we are young and motivated, what could possibly go wrong?
Naturally I take the lead as the brightest and most educated. Malicious gossip has it, that it's only because my uncle sponsores most of the equipment, but that's just out of jealousy of my superior intellect. Armed with the newest edition of the Dwarven Compendium of Everything (DCoE for short, aka the DF wiki), I choose a nice spot near a river, because my tracker reported easily reachable metals and we dwarves love metals! Only booze is better and the first dwarf to invent a booze made of metal will be crowned king for eternity. The surroundings are reportedly "calm", but there might be different interpretations of this word as I discovered later in some heated discussions with my tracker. There aren't many trees around, but we're not tree-hugging, pointy-eared hippies, so no problem there. Following the beginners' guide in the DCoE we start digging a straight tunnel into a nearby cliff, wide enough so wagons can enter and long enough so we can see potential intruders. Digging deeper we set up basic accomodations like a brewery and some living quarters. Now the only thing outside are the refuse pile and the pasture for our horses. The dogs and cats roam freely in our halls. Digging and building more we try to create a new home following my predominant vision. This seems more complicated than it sounds and soon all descends into chaos. It's mostly because of these undisciplined greenhorns, but I do my best to get some order in the halls. After setting up shop the basics seem covered so we went on to choose a proper name for our grand fortress. Soon my proposal achieves wide acceptance after threatening to blow up the rest of the booze that is. Now we're living in the mystical "Mists of Time", a name that promises grandness indeed.
So much to do and so little time. Urdim the carpenter constructed some crude beds and Bim the mason made some tables and thrones out of rock, so we don't have to sleep and sit on the floor anymore. Things move on, but slow like a snail in molasses. I miss the comfortable beds and chairs from Mountainhome, but we will soon have thrones of gold embedded with diamonds! This thought gives me new energy and obviously we need to protect our future wealth, so in my ingenuity I device an incredibly complex apparition, which I name the Giant Rock Smasher 3000! The others call it stone trap, but that doesn't really capture my genius. Well they're called stone traps in the DCoE, but it still seems inapropriate.
The first setback! Experiments with the wagon and the new defenses show that potential trading caravans cannot enter our fortress if we install traps, although the basic fortress guide in the DCoE states otherwise. I will have to come up with a complete new approach to our defenses, the straight tunnel won't do it. For now a second tunnel is being dug for wagon access and this one can be sealed off completely. Not a very intelligent solution, but for now it has to do.
Another setback, a horde of rhesus monkeys stole our supplies, luckily the booze barrels were too heavy for the little buggers. On the plus side we captured one in a cage. Ducim is interrogating him right now to get informations about their hide-out!
When fetching a drink I noticed a horse in the mess hall. I don't think it belongs there, it seems too stupid to find grass or maybe it likes booze better, it's a dwarven horse after all. After checking the pasture I noticed I didn't assign the horses to it. Didn't know that was necessary or even possible. There seem to be one or two things I don't know after all! But there cannot be many and surely only minor details!
Our cats and dogs are breeding like crazy, at least they get some action. In my late night studies in the DCoE tome I found a notice scribbled at the side of a great disaster that happend to an ancient dwarven realm dubbed "catsplosion", an uncrontrolled spread of cuddlywuddlyness. Until this day I thought this was made by some crazy old fool, but having seen the multiplication rates of cats first-hand and being well versed in dwarven math (one wine plus one rum are equal to one meal) I know of the danger of exponential increase so I order all cats being caged for the meantime. Crisis averted, but I notice a lot of problems being only suppressed not properly dealt with, this can lead to a lot of future mayhem. Oh well, I'll deal with this later.
The traders have arrived! A dwarven caravan fully loaded with goods we haven't seen since our departure from Mountainhome has arrived and made its way to our trading depot. Accompanying it are a few kobold thieves, but my Rock Smashers 3000 and the caravan guards shorten their life spans drastically. I claim a silver dagger of one of the thieves, my first weapon since Bim uses the only battle axe to chop down trees. It was intended for defense purposes, but for now the rock smashing seems to work more or less.
Establishing trading proves difficult, since our broker is in constant "meetings", i.e. booze-induced komas.
It's winter now and right before the departure of the caravan we manage to get some trade negotiations going. They refuse to take some of Bim's finest stone coffers because of the weight, but I can interest them in some low value gems we dug up. Trying to trade that plus the caged monkey and the "found" silver dagger for some iron and steel weapons proves disastrous even when offering 25% more than requesting. Maybe it's the dagger, maybe they're just a bunch of greedy dwarves, but that's a pleonasm. Anyway they storm out without a single item traded and I still haven't got any weapons but the puny silver dagger.
Some immigrants reached us, inquiring about their skills is unnecessary because their smell gives it away from 200u, we got us a bunch of fisherdwarves. Oh well, maybe now we can eat some fishes between all the booze orgies.
We are now 11 dwarves in our small fortress and after the first year a lot of problems have emerged, that I haven't truly anticipated. For now getting some weapons has the highest priority, so the rest has to wait.
The year ends with a shock. It starts harmless, some fisher doesn't like to fish near a rotten monkey skin so I order the cleaning crew. To my surprise they come back only to report the rotten skin attacked them! How is that even possible? Further studies in the DCoE reveals much more horror than I imagined in my wildest nightmares: We got ourselves a necromancer! I order all dwarves inside and hopefully the necromancer and his undead servants get bored and leave soon. "Calm" surroundings indeed! My tracker is about to get hammered! On a sidenote the refuse pile outdoors may not be such a good idea after all!
Year 2 and we're still here! Some more immigrants were assigned to help around with cleaning and working the now established furnace, so we start smelting tetrahedrite, the only useful ore found so far. The resulting copper is made into axes and other sharp instruments of death, while we got lucky and some tetrahedrite even had silver embedded, which makes shiny hammers! Dwarves love hammers! All that smithing made my friend Ducim go crazy it seems. He suddenly stopped everything and is just sitting in his forge muttering about bars and bricks. He surely doesn't mean soap bars and we got tons of rocks, but nothing appeases him. I really start to worry about him after it didn't change in a few weeks. He doesn't even drink, that cannot be healthy! Bim the mason is trying everything he knows to help Ducim out with his bricks, but for now it doesn't work. Oh well, he will get sober someday and snap out of it for now I have to sort about the immigrant waves hitting the Mists of Time. Making proper military squads is the first priority and having 5 soldiers and 4 marksdwarves gives me a sense of security, although none of them has much combat experience. The weapons are poor at best, Nil, their leader, is using a copper spear made by Ducim just before he hit his rough spot.
Good news everyone! One of the newest immigrants proved useful, we now have a master woodcutter, bowyer and carpenter. His beds are masterpieces and I try to get my marksdwarves to drop their copper crossbows in favour of beautiful carved wooden ones, but dwarves looove metal. We have some miasma problem down in the kitchen area and it's stinking up half the fortress. That particular problem I have to refer to someone else, I'm a thinker, not a plumber!
There must be a music festival somewhere, because pointy-eared hippies have established a drum circle in our front yard. We traded some tables and stone hatches for cloth and wood, since we still haven't found any coal.
Bim found a solution! One of his blocks deemed worthy of Ducim's vision and he created Gazothbomrek "Slothwhipped", an artifact copper spear! Nil will be so happy to dump her wry simple one for this true piece of superb dwarven craftsmanship! Oh and we got our smith back, so weapon production can resume. Sadly his sudden geniality didn't last long, his weapons are of poor quality again. He's still the best we got, so we make due. We are 34 dwarves now. No sign of better metal or coal so far, but we keep digging. 12 levels below our starting point and we fear what we might encounter in the depth of this not-so-calm mountain.
--- will be continued---
I learned so much in this one and a half year of playing, but I have still a lot of questions.
The most pressing problem is how to create a garbage dump or chute inside to get rid of refuse. I imagine some kind of pressure plate-channel-hatch mechanism, but I'm really fuzzy on the details. How do you solve this problem in your fortress?
Oh and I would love to get some coal and better metals and flux stone, can I find that stuff near the surface or do I have to dig deeper? I'm afraid of hitting the caverns unprepared to be honest.
Edit: Continuation of the story is at the bottom of the second page, look for orange text preceding the wall.
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Topic: My first fortress! (Read 10669 times)