So here's the thing:
I'd tried running a worldgen with increased quantities of blueberry metal and that certain other spoilery stuff, trying to see if the humans would ever learn to mine or use it after observing the other deep races. I'd set it to open ended, so it would keep running until whenever, but I had to stop it at around 4000 years or so. In the space of about 12 years, an entire desert and the mountains surrounding it hard turned into a single, gigantic orange blob on the map. The cursor on the gen screen wasn't telling me anything meaningful about it, so I'd wanted to take a look in legends mode.
Well, I had pasted several of the good old forum anectdotes from waaaaaaaaay back when into the Mythology gen file, and as it turns out, some dwarf had a sudden burst of inspiration after hearing an old fairy tale. I think it must have been based on the old "dwarven calculator" one. Anyway, it wasn't just a mood, legends says it was one of those "megaproject" secret goals. He started up a mining company to build materials, and after mastering mechanics went on to impress several of the local leaders with his craftsmanship. Eventually he had control of the entire empire through his popularity and influence, and then he started actually building the thing.
Basically, he turned the entire civ into a giant team of hardcore miners. I even saw some of those giant clockwork excavators that Jimm04 had in his world (the one that got worshipped by kobolds after the dwarves disappeared, not the one that the goblins tried to make). They basically turned several mountains inside out to get at the big spoilerite motherlodes, before digging them into absolute craters to get at all the blueberry veins below. I assume that one incident with the other Dwarven kingdom a few centuries back forewarned them of the HFS.
So, with the massive piles of this awesome stuff, he started building a big-old clockwork computer. He'd apparently worked out that the physical properties of these materials would allow the clockwork to keep consistent data across such large distances. There was a test thing built under his old hometown, and once it worked he just kept expanding it. 15 years later, it's huge enough to blot out an entire region of the world view screen. Just going on some rough calculations from the clockwork logic table posted a while back, it must have had RAM comparable to my old laptop.
But that's not the real kicker. What did he need all that computational power for? Well, as it turns out, his civ's religion had a yoga-esque bent, i.e. "Entire cosmos exists inside your body as your body exists inside the cosmos". It was a giant temple to recursion. He was running a simulation of the world. But since he couldn't research everything about the world and put it in, he'd built it to take some rules about how the world works and then extrapolate a fascimile of the real world from that, then run the simulated world. In other words, it was doing worldgen. Dwarf Fortress created a Dwarf that created Dwarf Fortress, from within Dwarf Fortress.
Do you think if I let the world run for long enough, there'll be a Dwarf in that Dwarf Fortress that will do the same thing?
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Topic: Playerlogs from 2050 (Read 115250 times)