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[Doodooist]

Why is this game called Dwarf Fortress if fortress mode not even nearly as deep, complex and fun as, for example, kobold kingdom mode?

Anyway, after Big Bug Busting Marathon in 2047 the game became too predictable and boring, so I started playing in rejected worlds. I must say, it is something! Strange and bizzare adventure to the land of unknown: Mosquito volcanoes. Bromium rivers. Vermin civilizations.

Once I got "Inverted World": Demons lived high in the sky in little slade boxes, under them were cavern-shaped floating islands, and on the ground there was one big field of tree roots.

Another time it was world populated only by elf-shaped megabeasts. I runned around as human adventurer, talked with some priests, and was told that they are the only and true elves, and all those guys with pointy ears are their children, who got lost in the Age of Shifting Dimensions, but there were no such age in the Legends Mode.

The food is a problem, though. Most of rejected worlds are lifeless, so, my embarks don't live very long. I once managed to build a portal to other Plan to gatcher food, but it was very warm Plan, and all my dwarves were burned by stream of hot air.

[Jellycat12]

Why is this game called Dwarf Fortress if fortress mode not even nearly as deep, complex and fun as, for example, kobold kingdom mode?

Anyway, after Big Bug Busting Marathon in 2047 the game became too predictable and boring, so I started playing in rejected worlds. I must say, it is something! Strange and bizzare adventure to the land of unknown: Mosquito volcanoes. Bromium rivers. Vermin civilizations.

Once I got "Inverted World": Demons lived high in the sky in little slade boxes, under them were cavern-shaped floating islands, and on the ground there was one big field of tree roots.

Another time it was world populated only by elf-shaped megabeasts. I runned around as human adventurer, talked with some priests, and was told that they are the only and true elves, and all those guys with pointy ears are their children, who got lost in the Age of Shifting Dimensions, but there were no such age in the Legends Mode.

The food is a problem, though. Most of rejected worlds are lifeless, so, my embarks don't live very long. I once managed to build a portal to other Plan to gatcher food, but it was very warm Plan, and all my dwarves were burned by stream of hot air.

Whoo. That's really more likely than the others.

[Mesa]

The latest addition of Gravity Cores (SPOILERS: You can find them at the very center of a given world) I had a lot of FUN trying to create a legitimate flying fortress.
Luckily FiveToe has shared a detailed tutorial that I followed step-by-step and soon The Bloodbook of Adamantine was gently hovering above the land of The Future Planet*.

It took me a good deal of switching back and forth between Fortress and Adventurer mode to get everything right - I had to bring in a LOT of resources from literally every settlement in the world - and despite of the fact it was a pocket world (toying around, you know), it was still pretty hard to pull off (GET IT?).

But after the last barrel of sunshine has been put in the stockpiles, The Bloodbook of Adamantine was ready to go - with its own orchards and "town" portals, I was confident about it being self-sufficient until the world's end.

Which sadly happened - when the demons came (was a bit too greedy about adamantine), The Future Planet was wiped out in merely half a year. Not that I particularly cared about it, since my fortress was high in the sky and the demons could basically go and **** themselves.
And then I realized that I can open a portal to another world of mine - with a help of my demigodly character, that is.

With some mocking around (and nearly falling down to the ocean after trying to cast a spell in the Gravity Core chamber), the gap in space time fabric was finally opened and The Bloodbook of Adamantine set full steam ahead to go where no dwarf has gone before - to the world of The Windy Realms**.

Surprisingly enough, right after my arrival I got an announcement "The ground shakes as a mysterious force enters the world..." - as you might imagine, I was really confused, since I never really had an event like this happen before. I decided to continue on and ordered my dwarves to drive the fortress ahead until they find a settlement.
It didn't take long, honestly - two weeks later, we hit Afterhold***, which seemed to be the Mountainhome of Iced Pillars, the biggest dwarven civilization in the world (which was a whopping 1990 years old, by the way). Once we were directly over it, I switched over to Adventurer mode and decided to visit the city as my character (because even in 1.1.0e the dwarves have a bad tendency to screw diplomacy over). And then I realized - they have no town portals, so how am I gonna get down?

I wasn't ready for this. I was pretty sure that the dorfs down below were pretty angry at a giant island above their heads, but I suppose this was the least of their problems - suddenly, I got a message "A weaver has arrived!".
What the hell is a weaver? I never saw anything like that before.

I looked around to see where the "weaver" has appeared and I saw a & in the Gravity Core room. I looked at his name "Skitskurr, the Weaver". The name seemed pretty undwarfy, if you ask me.
Then he started talking:
"I am Skitskurr, the one who keeps the fabrics of time and space unfaded and silent - and YOU have ripped them apart. Armok himself has sent me upon you to stop your unthinkable crimes!"

What, you're telling me I can't mess around and visit other worlds with my flying fortress? Then, one frame later, I got another message: "Your Gravity Core has been destroyed." - and it was all gone, so was the Skitskurr.
You can only imagine the Fun that ensued shortly after - a whole fortress fell down onto a Mountainhome, killing the monarch, his guard, his children, pretty much everyone. "The Iced Pillars have declared war." All the dwarves in my no longer airborne fortress were dead, and I was nearly dead myself. Then I got one last message from Skitskurr - "Life is a very thin thread...".
And then the angry dwarves came around - "You are deceased."


A few years of work wasted...All the adamantine, every one of those Legendary dwarves and their stories...
I love this game.


* - this has been a name of one of my worlds in the past.
** - ditto.
*** - one of my common names for all kinds of things
Also, props to anyone who gets a reference that Skitskurr was.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Okay, seriously, stop. DF will not pass 1400. Stop giving dwarves futuristic tech.

*shrug* Modded game. But yeah, whole "AI gets out of DF and takes over real world" crap gets old quickly. Any story of this kind automatically destroys my suspension of disbelief. Someone would thought that if 2050 average computer would be capable of maintaining AI created from code that was not specifically programmed to create AI (this in itself is another kind of impossible), then today's supercomputers in research centers in USA and all around world would already create it, here and now. While they are not 40 years in future compared to today desktops, sciencists certainly try their best to create code that is capable of being something more than set of instructions.

Ah well, Sturgeon's law and all of that. I will read this again to feel better and pretend that rest of this thread does not exist.

DF's plans for the AI come close to artificial intelligence.
But yeah, taking over the world is interesting once and stupid the hundredth time.

-----

My newest world looks interesting. I set the number of continents low and the number of islands high on a Miniature world (9×9), so there was one "continent" a dozen miles wide and several dozen islands ranging from little atolls and outcroppings of rock maybe 100 feet across to rocky ones smaller than Anuta. I also set civilizations to max and starting technology to low and variable. There were inhabitants on every islet, all fisher/gatherers. Agriculture developed earlier than expected, but I guess that it's hard not to grow food on that little land. On the mainland, the main biome was this savage forest; humans went extinct fast, but elves thrived, goblins survived in one tower once they summoned a demon (a Blind Beast, like a bat-headed fish twisted into humanoid form, but with no eyes and lime green scales) to protect them. The middle of the "continent" had some rocky hills and a volcano, which the dwarves filled fast. The islanders lived in bands of only a few dozen to a hundred each and spent most of their non-survival time on warfare, so they didn't get past basic stone tools. The biggest superpowers were the mainland elves, who had stationary hunter/gatherer settlements, and the mainland dwarves, who farmed sugar cane in the highlands and  were the only civilization with metalworking. They discovered picks about 600 years in (the worldgen was set for 1,249 years), the caverns in 750, and bronze around 1,100. At this point, dwarves had farming settlements all along the caverns and sugar cane was a crop the househusbands in the rich households grew mainly for recreation. Queen Bombek IV ordered many bronze spears made and started a war of conquest, but it wasn't easy, as the elves and their advanced magic had already conquered all nearby islands without a megabeast guardian and made an alliance with the goblins. The forests of the island were burned in 1,221, which just strengthened the resolve of the elves and let the goblins come back stronger than ever, having summoned many Skinless Imps (finned rats with firey breath) en masse in the early 1230's.
Oh, and there are kobolds--a small empire formed in a warm northern archipelago in 832-847 when the local reef titan (a winged fox, beware its hypnotic gaze) enthralled the chief of the biggest clan and lead him on a war of conquest, and smaller groups dot the world, but they're not big players.

Advice? What should I do?

[Helgoland]

Get an adventurer and give the dwarves the knowledge of steelworking - they will never have superiority in numbers, they will need superiority in equipment. Then become a general, I guess; at least in the wars I've led I'm better at setting up traps and ambushes than the AI.
Ultimately wipe out the goblins, and put the elves in their rightful place - hunter-gatherers that basically cater to your dwarves.

[Mesa]

Okay, seriously, stop. DF will not pass 1400. Stop giving dwarves futuristic tech.

*shrug* Modded game. But yeah, whole "AI gets out of DF and takes over real world" crap gets old quickly. Any story of this kind automatically destroys my suspension of disbelief. Someone would thought that if 2050 average computer would be capable of maintaining AI created from code that was not specifically programmed to create AI (this in itself is another kind of impossible), then today's supercomputers in research centers in USA and all around world would already create it, here and now. While they are not 40 years in future compared to today desktops, sciencists certainly try their best to create code that is capable of being something more than set of instructions.

Ah well, Sturgeon's law and all of that. I will read this again to feel better and pretend that rest of this thread does not exist.

DF's plans for the AI come close to artificial intelligence.
But yeah, taking over the world is interesting once and stupid the hundredth time.

-----

My newest world looks interesting. I set the number of continents low and the number of islands high on a Miniature world (9×9), so there was one "continent" a dozen miles wide and several dozen islands ranging from little atolls and outcroppings of rock maybe 100 feet across to rocky ones smaller than Anuta. I also set civilizations to max and starting technology to low and variable. There were inhabitants on every islet, all fisher/gatherers. Agriculture developed earlier than expected, but I guess that it's hard not to grow food on that little land. On the mainland, the main biome was this savage forest; humans went extinct fast, but elves thrived, goblins survived in one tower once they summoned a demon (a Blind Beast, like a bat-headed fish twisted into humanoid form, but with no eyes and lime green scales) to protect them. The middle of the "continent" had some rocky hills and a volcano, which the dwarves filled fast. The islanders lived in bands of only a few dozen to a hundred each and spent most of their non-survival time on warfare, so they didn't get past basic stone tools. The biggest superpowers were the mainland elves, who had stationary hunter/gatherer settlements, and the mainland dwarves, who farmed sugar cane in the highlands and  were the only civilization with metalworking. They discovered picks about 600 years in (the worldgen was set for 1,249 years), the caverns in 750, and bronze around 1,100. At this point, dwarves had farming settlements all along the caverns and sugar cane was a crop the househusbands in the rich households grew mainly for recreation. Queen Bombek IV ordered many bronze spears made and started a war of conquest, but it wasn't easy, as the elves and their advanced magic had already conquered all nearby islands without a megabeast guardian and made an alliance with the goblins. The forests of the island were burned in 1,221, which just strengthened the resolve of the elves and let the goblins come back stronger than ever, having summoned many Skinless Imps (finned rats with firey breath) en masse in the early 1230's.
Oh, and there are kobolds--a small empire formed in a warm northern archipelago in 832-847 when the local reef titan (a winged fox, beware its hypnotic gaze) enthralled the chief of the biggest clan and lead him on a war of conquest, and smaller groups dot the world, but they're not big players.

Advice? What should I do?

How advanced is the elven magic?
If it's high enough to let them control (or at least affect) time and space fabric, you could just try to bring in some creatures from another world, but given my unfortunate adventure...Yea.

[Mel_Vixen]

You could undermine the Elves quite literally in the heartland. The groundwater rewrite in 2030 made it possible to increase the drainage of region with a few well set tunnels and pumps. Just hope they dont have a waterbased power.

[drilltooth]

any other interesting deities? sometimes RNG will toss you a sect that can be useful. and do look beyond the obvious smithing and battle. I swear the adherents of this one goddess of light were carrying booze-powered laser rifles.

[rex mortis]

So I decided to start a marathon game a while back. So far, I have ran Dwarf Fortress constantly for the past 3 months, pausing only for necessary maintenance or expansion. The fortress I have played all this time is now 2713 years old and going strong. Though I am afraid I might suffer a FPS death soon. If it does happen, it will be my first FPS death since the dark ages of pre-2032.

The plan was to see technological advancement in slow motion. That is, I started a fortress at a pseudo-medieval technology level to play at least till nuclear weapons are created. Reading about science and technology in legends mode is rather boring, I wanted to see it in action. The world was generated with no procedural fantasy elements to avoid magic that somehow makes advanced technology impossible. More often than not, my worlds seem to end up with magic that interferes with electricity or radioactivity. But I digress... I did keep the stock dwarves though. Their bad sense of self preservation seemed ideal to facilitate rapid research and development.

So I created a fortress far away from any other civilisation. The initial journey of my embark party, as well as all trade with my parent civilisation was conducted via a secret underground tunnel. I figured that since this was to be a long term game, with long periods of leaving the game running without any oversight on my part, it might be better to avoid knowledge of my fortress spreading too wide. While it is possible to build a defense to repel nearly any siege automatically, diplomatic negotiations seem to pause the game constantly. In any case, my attempts at automating diplomacy have resulted in failure so far.

Creating the infrastructure to make my fortress run smoothly for decades on its own was an interesting challenge. Usually, it was a new mayor being elected or an administrator dying of old age that forced me to interfere. I am still waiting for the option to assign a room to positions rather than individual dwarves. I suffered nasty setbacks when my new mayor threw a fit due to not having appropriate office.

At first, technological advancement was rather slow. Perhaps a handful of new innovations every century, most of them minor improvements to old equipment or methods. But when Ogist Berrylanced created the first printing press, I could finally afford to educate more than 1 dwarf out of 100. Predictably, the pace of progress picked up as well. I enjoyed good 3 centuries of rapid, though gradually slowing improvement in theoretical and applied science. I expected my technology to plateau near the level of modern real life technology. I had incorrectly assumed the game could not simulate technology more advanced than ours.

Roughly 30 years ago, a research team of mine created the first ever super-intelligent AI in my world. The AI then designed new hardware and wrote the software for a more advance AI, which in turn developed another AI even more advanced. No doubt you have figured where this is going. My current AI is of the 19th generation. Each generation of AI designs their successor significantly faster than the previous. I think I may have hit technological singularity.

The problem is that by next month I will have a new AI every single frame and that might be too much for my desktop to handle. The silver lining is, that the time it takes to build the new hardware might limit the AI cycling rate.

Notes:

• Careful examination of the AI software indicates they are incapable of harming dwarves or creating an AI that could harm dwarves.
• Furthermore, the AI has no way to directly act on the universe, all the hardware construction and installation of next generation AI software has to be done by manual dwarf labour.
• The AIs seem to come up with all sorts of inventions after completing plans for their successors. However, so far every AI has self-terminated after a relatively short time. Maybe they are bored.
• If you are interested in the full R&D logs of my fortress, please contact me via PM. I am warning you though, their size is several exabytes.

[Doodooist]

Oh guys, did you read the news?

Some man in Europe just  killied a pidgeon with a crosbow! The investigation is still going on, but reporters say, he made it on a NanoTech 3dPrinter. 3dPrinters always have some sort of antigun-DRM, but he  played DF when one of his dwarves got a mood and created an artifact elf-bone crossbow, so he extracted 3d-data from save, and antigun filters didn't expected that sort of gun.

At first he just fired bolts at walls and heavily damaged one plastic bottle, and he swears the bird was an accident, but pidgeons are endangered species, so he will get, like, twelve years in prison.

I think they are planning to ban DF now, as an cruel game, hacking software, DRM-circumvention tool and unlicensed weapon collection! What should we do? They maybe even arrest Toady for that!

[My Name is Immaterial]

This will be the only time I say this... thank you, you communist-nuking, European-hating southerns. Thank you for breaking our extraction treaty with every single European country. I just hope they don't ban DF here too... First it was books, then movies, then radio (luckily/sadily it was dead by then), then the internet... where will it end?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Okay, seriously, stop. DF will not pass 1400. Stop giving dwarves futuristic tech.

*shrug* Modded game. But yeah, whole "AI gets out of DF and takes over real world" crap gets old quickly. Any story of this kind automatically destroys my suspension of disbelief. Someone would thought that if 2050 average computer would be capable of maintaining AI created from code that was not specifically programmed to create AI (this in itself is another kind of impossible), then today's supercomputers in research centers in USA and all around world would already create it, here and now. While they are not 40 years in future compared to today desktops, sciencists certainly try their best to create code that is capable of being something more than set of instructions.

Ah well, Sturgeon's law and all of that. I will read this again to feel better and pretend that rest of this thread does not exist.

DF's plans for the AI come close to artificial intelligence.
But yeah, taking over the world is interesting once and stupid the hundredth time.

-----

My newest world looks interesting. I set the number of continents low and the number of islands high on a Miniature world (9×9), so there was one "continent" a dozen miles wide and several dozen islands ranging from little atolls and outcroppings of rock maybe 100 feet across to rocky ones smaller than Anuta. I also set civilizations to max and starting technology to low and variable. There were inhabitants on every islet, all fisher/gatherers. Agriculture developed earlier than expected, but I guess that it's hard not to grow food on that little land. On the mainland, the main biome was this savage forest; humans went extinct fast, but elves thrived, goblins survived in one tower once they summoned a demon (a Blind Beast, like a bat-headed fish twisted into humanoid form, but with no eyes and lime green scales) to protect them. The middle of the "continent" had some rocky hills and a volcano, which the dwarves filled fast. The islanders lived in bands of only a few dozen to a hundred each and spent most of their non-survival time on warfare, so they didn't get past basic stone tools. The biggest superpowers were the mainland elves, who had stationary hunter/gatherer settlements, and the mainland dwarves, who farmed sugar cane in the highlands and  were the only civilization with metalworking. They discovered picks about 600 years in (the worldgen was set for 1,249 years), the caverns in 750, and bronze around 1,100. At this point, dwarves had farming settlements all along the caverns and sugar cane was a crop the househusbands in the rich households grew mainly for recreation. Queen Bombek IV ordered many bronze spears made and started a war of conquest, but it wasn't easy, as the elves and their advanced magic had already conquered all nearby islands without a megabeast guardian and made an alliance with the goblins. The forests of the island were burned in 1,221, which just strengthened the resolve of the elves and let the goblins come back stronger than ever, having summoned many Skinless Imps (finned rats with firey breath) en masse in the early 1230's.
Oh, and there are kobolds--a small empire formed in a warm northern archipelago in 832-847 when the local reef titan (a winged fox, beware its hypnotic gaze) enthralled the chief of the biggest clan and lead him on a war of conquest, and smaller groups dot the world, but they're not big players.

Advice? What should I do?

How advanced is the elven magic?
If it's high enough to let them control (or at least affect) time and space fabric, you could just try to bring in some creatures from another world, but given my unfortunate adventure...Yea.

I don't think it's that advanced. Even if so, isn't temporal magic typically restricted to non-adventurers?
Anyways, the high druids lost their power when their holy trees burned. They're making new holy trees, but the islands have smaller trees and less history of holiness, so less power and less magic.

You could undermine the Elves quite literally in the heartland. The groundwater rewrite in 2030 made it possible to increase the drainage of region with a few well set tunnels and pumps. Just hope they dont have a waterbased power.

Problem is, the elves kinda got beaten to a pulp after the forests burned. Most left to the outlying areas, leaving the dwarves (who, being stuck inland, never invented boats) stuck with the goblins and periodic elven raids.

any other interesting deities? sometimes RNG will toss you a sect that can be useful. and do look beyond the obvious smithing and battle. I swear the adherents of this one goddess of light were carrying booze-powered laser rifles.

Heh.
Well, there's a dwarven goddess of fire and war who takes the form of the volcano the dwarves settled on. Sadly, it's more of a wrathful god...the volcano overflowed and flooded the dwarves' villages with magma back in 475, when a priest defiled a temple. Aside from that, there's a sky god who takes the form of a winged elf, but he's kinda shunned due to the war with the elves. He gives flight to his followers, from the looks of it, but a bunch of them turn into Holy Gulls after using their flight a while. There's half a dozen other gods in the pantheon without the interesting interactions with mortals, should I list them?

-----

Oh, and pigeons are about the single least likely bird to be endangered in 38 years.

[Mel_Vixen]

I have seen a fox the other day but noone believed me. Its the largest remaining predator in Germany

-----

GreatWyrmGold: I remember the time when we got the first volcano floods, at that time it was a bug. 40 years ago when i was 23 or so. Glorious times when trees where single-tile. Back then we invented Tower-casting with Obsidian which today is much harder with the internal material stresses and and advanced thermodynamics.

Anyway you could go and raid a harbor for ships and knowledge how to use them in form of slaves.

[Robosaur]

So I messed around with world generation.
A lot. I set up a universe with starting values as close to reality as I could possibly manage, including a re-modded quantum physics engine and a quasi-dimensional timeline that required some help from mes from other timelines (thank you, Pesterchum.)

I generated a world... and it went and denied it. Over and over and over again. Even though I set it to not care that magic isn't a thing. So I went and disabled that.

Much to my surprise, I got Earth in all its glory. Started in the year 2050, and made a Human Adventurer. Ran around my home-city. That's when things got weird.

I found a restaurant, one "Madras Masala" that's just down the block from my house. All the architecture was the same, too. Even found an NPC that shares the name of my best friend.

So I made the adventurer go to my house.
And she opened the door.

Things got really weird at that point.

[ChokingVictim]

>2050ad
>dorf fort goes beta