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[Sp00ky]

Hey all

This is the story of my first major fortress. Its not written like a journal or in character. I've been reading the wiki and forums alongside playing the game, so there's not many surprises discovered that I didn't already research before or as they came up.
It also includes things from the wiki that I wouldn't have thought of myself, danger room mainly.

To me, this fort is dwarf fortress, I have 99% of my DF time sunk into this one fort, and if it finally runs into the ground I am not that likely to continue playing the game. Due to my shameless savescummery, the primary threat to its existence is FPS death (or loss of interest)

You may find some/all of this distasteful, but I suspect it is actually just representative of how most people probably play the game.

What follows is mainly extracts of emails sent to a couple buddies to whom I'm discussing the game and describing my unfolding adventure and discovery of DF. I guess if anyone finds it useful, it will be those who're not completely familiar with the game already

Oh and, most of the stuff I say 'i've not figured out how to...' - has later been figured out



Here's a few teaser samples:

It imploded under the weight of my inept management into a spiral of madness, dehydration, nudity, and dwarf-on-dwarf violence.

I don't know how my squads would handle this in a fair fight. so, i was in the process of total-warfare mobilisation.

Near the end, he'd lost his steel axe (well, he'd lost his whole hand) and the bear was shaking him around by the arm, but he still managed to kick the bear in the lungs before bleeding out. hardcore.

My archers opened up on the crowd. lots of bolts flying all over my main civilian area. archers nailing my civilians, basically a riot broke out, and 20 dwarves died

It turns out peacocks can't fly, so it fell 50 levels and exploded on the cavern floor like a meat grenade.

[Sp00ky]

i started a fortress in dwarf fortress. i played it for an hour or so, you get 7 dwarves at the start. managed to dig a tunnel into a cliff, dig down, excavate out a storage area, and unload my supplies wagon into the storage area. sounds basic, it is because most of the time i was trying to figure out how to operate the game.

its like minecraft / sim city / tolkien's mines of moria / lego, with horrendous graphics and interface. i've not played a single player game with so much depth*

*a mining joke, hah!

[Sp00ky]

my fortress is established at a basic level now i guess? i've had 2nd wave of immigrants and now my population is 13

Winter Is Coming though and i don't know if i have enough food. but im in a temperate climate so maybe it doesn't matter. i have loads of underground soil with farms on so probably alright once my crops come through.

i think i screwed myself up a bit nearly, almost ran out of booze. i was cooking mushrooms called plump helmets (does blue means cook them, red means don't cook them?) so i was running out of their seeds and wasn't brewing them.
my only guy with brewing skill had higher skill in fishing, so while he was gone fishing, my brewery was sitting idle.

(running out of booze in dwarf fortress is catastrophic, dwarves need it and they consume 2 units of booze for every 1 unit of food)

I've cancelled every task on my fisher/brewer apart from brewing now, he won't lift a finger to haul anything, to help wounded comrades, to defend himself if goblins come and try and bite his legs off. he will just brew "plump helmet mushroom wine" (yum) until goblins take his arms off as well



speaking of goblins, i've not been attacked yet but i've got a drawbridge connected to a lever ! not yet tested it. it might be set to open the wrong way, or the wrong type of gate.
i need to make a load of traps so that monsters outside my gate can die on spikes when i pull the lever. and some sort of alert so my dwarves come inside when there's monsters around.
also need to put my dogs by the entrance. at the minute they wander about everywhere. my cats are ruthless murderers of small creatures, my entrance is covered with bodies of insects and birds. startling how much they can kill, they're outpacing the rate that my guys haul the bodies to the garbage

also need to:
make stone fall traps at entrance
make cages for cage traps at entrance
put guard dogs in 1-tile pastures after the traps
test drawbridge
with this 'security', survive first goblin attack
ensure my frickin brewery is making booze

make a stonecraft workshop and get turn some of my endless piles of junk stone into junk stonecraft that i can offload onto elf traders
 
make crossbows and bolts train marksdwarfs.
make battle axes from iron or steel, make warhammers from silver. train melee troops
make a twisty 1-tile wide path approach that enemies must take when my main 3-wide path is shut, that's filled with traps and fortifications for marksdwarfs to shoot at enemies
from
cut a skylight and then roof it, over stairwell and dining hall to allow light in to reduce cave adaptation
sink another airvent shaft so i can have garbage zones in the bottom of my fort, if they're open to the sky then ventilation stops the rotting bodies turning into dreaded miasma
make a ballista and a 1-wide, really long corridor for it to shoot down, and bridges to force enemies to go down it (then into the twisty path)
Dig Deeply And Greedily

[Sp00ky]

the world i picked is deliberately super easy, low Savagery and low Evil, loads of minerals, soil, no aquifer, temperate, loads of trees. some ponds but not noticed a river yet.
so at the start fishing is safe-ish. but i've switched it off now as i want the guy brewing

i think i had ran out of plump helmet seeds because i was cooking them. i stopped that and now when my crops mature i'll get seeds again, so probably OK there. i'm farming underground, i've got 2-3 layers of soil, ez-mode

ah a farmer workshop. i wanted some plant-products, and had set to gather from 15-ish tile radius around my entrance but should get a farmer workshop


at the minute my garbage dump is just a area outside. i should make it closer to my stairs and wall it in so its safe.

[Sp00ky]

my fortress got quite big and quite successful, i fended off my first goblin siege (mostly via traps and wardogs)
but then it imploded under the weight of my inept management into a spiral of madness, dehydration, nudity, and dwarf-on-dwarf violence. about a quarter of my population died, a quarter are in tantrums / berserk rages / insane. the other half of them are miserable, productivity is rock bottom.

i spent a couple hours trying to fix it. i think i basically figured out what went wrong, but that made me realise also that it's probably not fixable.


-after a battle dwarves can be injured. when injured they need medical treatment, and change from drinking booze to drink water from a bucket instead.
-during winter, the ponds outside froze over.
-i also let my booze stocks get low and run out a couple times (a berserk dwarf smashed up one of the stills and the other ran out of barrels)
so no one could drink, many dwarves dying/died of dehydration

-if untreated, injured dwarves bleed out and die painfully. this is very traumatic for their family and friends, who get very unhappy.
-insane or berserk dwarves rampage around and leave their clothes all over the floor, and critically they interrupt the tasks of other dwarves around them.
-i managed to put a stockpile over one of my lower stair levels, which cut off access to the lower floors. i accidentally starved several miners to death like this.
-the self-appointed mayor dwarf demands offices and elaborate chambers, and tantrumed until she got them.

once dwarves start dying, their family and friend-dwarves get upset. if they get annoyed enough, they'll start fights with each other, which causes more injuries and stress, and it escalates until the fortress is totally screwed.


i didn't have any hospital zone, or internal water supply, or medical supplies, or jail. so although in autumn my fortress was chugging along nicely at ~175 population plus like 50 children, by the end of winter it was a irredeemable bloodsoaked mad house. i could try and fix it or could revert to an older save, but i want to redesign anyway so i can actually find my workshops and stuff

[Sp00ky]

I've started a new fortress, will be much better designed.

also reading the wiki now about how to make a hospital to cope with injuries. its probably more in-depth than the healing system in any other game (including theme hospital, from what i remember)

[Sp00ky]

here's some more DF stuff that happened
i think i made my new fortress embark location too easy again, as i've got well established now and self sustainable. i've got to the population cap of 200, enough beds for them all, etc.

i've figured enough of the interface out to know how to find dwarves that are unhappy and see how to fix them
the only thing my embark location doesn't have is flux stone, so i can't turn iron into steel. i can trade for limited amounts of flux and steel tho
i've not found magma or underground caverns yet but have only dug down ~30 levels. its tedious doing 1 stair level at a time and i haven't figured out how to sink a deep staircase easily

2-3 game-years ago, i got some migrants arrive and thought 'i need some more food' so i butchered a yak. but i didn't have the kitchen process it, so the meat rotted in my food level, which is at the top of my main staircase, just under the surface so its still in soil-layer.
miasma started to spread, and i thought 'i know, i'll take the roof off so fresh air can ventilate the miasma away' but then stupid dwarves dug the squares out in the wrong order and the roof collapsed.
falling rubble injured my farmers, knocked out the staircase, dust was everywhere choking them, and the game crashed

crash meant i had to revert to older save, but i probably woulda done that anyway as fixing the stairs would have been a pain in the ass
so i tried again more carefully to strip the roof this time, did it one row at a time. then built an artificial roof over the top of my farm level, which keeps creatures out but lets sunlight in (i guess it counts as a grating?) this means my farm level can also grow outdoor crops, so my dwarves get more variety in their food and booze (yes, the game tracks diet)


i also stripped the roof away from above my main meeting+dining room, tho this was 3-4 levels deep. being exposed to sunlight when dwarves are eating and idle, stops them getting too cave-adapted, so it stops them from vomiting when they go outside.
when digging a deep shaft its really easy to get a dwarf trapped or fall down... this happened to one miner who had her baby with her, i left them trapped as i'd already roofed over the hole before i noticed them. they both died, and i didn't bury the bodies. the baby came back as a ghost to haunt the fortress
i engraved a slab as a memorial which laid the ghost to rest though.




once i'd sealed the roof, there was only 1 route into the fortress so i was pretty sure it was safe, wardogs can detect thieves that otherwise can get past the traps. so i'd know if anything came in. my military was 10 guys with axes and hammers, and they'd been able to see off the goblins i'd had attack so far, and there was a hospital to patch them up.
but then later i had a body discovered in a bedroom, completely drained of blood. i thought there must be some sneaky monster or he'd bled out from injuries or something.
then later, it happened again.

so:

vampire suspected!

i found out which guy it was likely to be, and drafted him in to a military squad (called "vampires argh") and stationed the squad outside. he wasn't bothered by the sun though. i was building a watchtower outside to trap him in and lock the door, to see if he got thirsty/hungry (vampires don't need food or drink) and also to act as a lookout, but then i noticed he'd left his station. i went and found him and he was in someone else's bedroom, sucking her blood, while her husband slept on unknowing!

so now squad "vampires argh" is stationed in a locked annex with airlock entry and separate cells. i had 3 vampires, not sure if they all were immigrants or if i had 1 arrive and convert the others by biting. one was the captain of the guard, which is actually good because now i don't have to provide the post with fancy chambers as vampires don't get unhappy.
in the vampire annex, is a row of levers. their only duty now, is to forever pull a lever on repeat which operates the spike trap in my danger room


i eventually managed to build a danger room, which is a room with an weapon rack inside which is designated as a barracks for my melee squads, behind a locked door. so the troops can't get in to reach their barracks. they que up outside the door, all standing on the same tile.
that tile coincidentally has a upright-spike trap, equipped with 10x wooden training spears. the trap is linked to the lever that the vampire pulls, so that it extends and retracts repeatedly to train my troops very fast in dodging, and also all their other fighting skills.
the spear trap sometimes kills people's pets, they seem to occasionally sneak past both 'pets forbidden' doors to follow their masters into danger room. (my military is currently male-only, so babies don't get taken in there and speared....)

the menus are hard to figure out but i eventually managed to have 10-man squads permanently active & training, because you can tell it that only 8 of them need to be on duty at a time. so 2 of them at a time can be eating drinking etc, so my guys don't get unhappy at the duration they're on duty

once a soldier reaches legendary, i think they stop doing other tasks. i need to check this, and if they can still do other work i will put all my dwarves through danger-training to militarise the lot of them. would need a load of armor though, but i've got SO much ore


now that my melee troops are all super legendary, goblins just get splattered to bits and i don't take damage. its kinda removed any danger my fortress is facing.

the only thing i need from outside now is fresh water for the hospital, and traders to buy steel bars and flux to make steel. i have a small well inside the hospital but its filled by buckets from outside and gets stagnant and muddy, which causes infections.

the map i'm on now has a small brook next to my entrance, which flows away to the south east, then goes over a 8-level waterfall.
current project is going to be cut a channel into the river bed, then down and out to the level of the waterfall's pool. i'm gonna route it under my hospital, so i can draw fresh water from it.
will have to be careful about how i regulate flow and pressure, as it's probably going to be quite easy for me to flood the hospital if it goes wrong. (yes, the game tracks fluid pressure)

other projects:
-make tons of armor, assign every adult dwarf to a squad briefly so they equip it and keep it on after they're discharged
-once internal water supply is secure, can retreat all my guys inside permanently and really fortify the entrance. long corridors with a ballista at the end, death pits, floodable drowning pool, ooooh
-i've got 40+ idlers so recruit lots of them to be extra miners and excavate intensely
-dig deeply and greedily, in search of treasures and hidden fun stuff
-maybe start a war on the elves? not sure how, i guess i could kill their traders

[Sp00ky]

i've done a load of development on this fortress now. it counts as a metropolis and a county, so i have a countess. my mayor is a baron. they've both got demands for fancy chambers, basically means bigger with more statues and more engravings

progress:
1- a dwarf can get a 'strange mood' where they cancel what they're doing, go and claim a workshop, collect a list of materials that they will only mutter about what they need, and then start working on something. if they can't get what they want, they go berserk, so i assign them some wardogs as 'pets', whose real job is to kill them if they start smashing up the place.
if they do get what they want, they produce an artifact and might gain legendary skill in the task they were doing

so far i've had about half a dozen moods. one went crazy at the early on, but the others have all made stuff like a yak bone door, or a metal bed, or a pine earring. (its the best door made of yak bones you've ever seen, its named "Gusgashlumash Anzish User, Stokefrenzy the Alchemy of Spoils", and: "All the craftdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is decorated with cow bone. On the item is an image of squares in yak bone")

but anyway finally someone made something useful, an artifact steel spear. i'm lucky i had steel available at the time, i think i was melting down some steel trinkets i bought off traders, otherwise he woulda gone insane. its easily the best weapon i've got, and worth 10% of my entire fortress's created wealth. i assigned it to the captain of the guard and am hoping for great things


2- i finished my river diversion project, so i have a channel that goes from the stream outside, down a shaft that my well is on top of, and then out to the waterfall pool. both in and out are protected by metal bars, i dont think anything can get in through bars, and if they do they'll have to be capable of swimming and flying as well.
i'm quite pleased with the system, there's floodgates so i can turn it off, i didn't flood anywhere, didn't get anyone drowned...

3- dwarves still occasionally get stuck in the stairs i made for construction-access to dig the sky-light above the dining room. the stairs aren't connected at the top or bottom, so they can't get out and they die. no idea how they get in, i think i will have to dig the whole lot out and block it off again

4- i figured out how to dig vertical stairs many floors at a time. so promptly sank a shaft down to level -80.
but at -42 i hit UNDERGROUND CAVERNS. not sure what to do about this, not sure if its the first level of caverns or if there's others above it. i started a project to criss-cross exploratory tunnels across the whole map every 4-5 levels in search of higher levels of caverns or anything else, before i go in to explore these ones.

5- i am about third of the way through making 200 full suits of iron armor

6- my military is now 10 marksdwarves, 30 with axes and hammers. the melee ones are all multi-legendary, the marksdwarves are not training properly for some reason
whenever i get goblins attack its been 5-6 in a squad, maybe 2 squads at a time or 2 waves. the axes send the limbs spinning off in bloody arcs, and the hammers punt the entire goblin across the screen like they're playing golf. a minotaur attacked, i missed the fight but it was over fast

however

A VILE FORCE OF DARKNESS arrived. GOBLIN SIEGE.
i saw siege come up and the game pauses automatically. so i looked at units screen and saw it was ~50 goblins at a time. and there's elite ones mixed in. and they're all mounted on fricking war-bears. and they have a cave-dragon. who fortunately can't fly or breathe fire, but can break down doors.
oh actually its 8x cave dragons.


whyyyy didn't i make any significant security at the entrance? complacent! i shoulda made a drawbridge over a channel, building-destroyers can't smash them. i shoulda made a long corridor full of hundreds of traps that i can route enemies down. i shoulda weaponized the stupid river channel and made it so i could flood the entrance. i shoulda put another danger room in the vampire annex and trained and equipped them.

i don't know how my squads would handle this in a fair fight. so, i was in the process (i went to the pub before finishing) of total-warfare mobilisation.

entrance doors are locked and everyone is inside. everything outside is abandoned. all garbage and item collection is switched off. all tasks cancelled. meeting room zone that was in the dining hall is removed, and a new bomb-shelter style one for civilians placed down the end of a really long tunnel. statue garden and dining hall decommissioned, so dwarves should go to the new meeting area instead of hanging round in the central area

i'm going to make a stand inside in the central dining room area next to the stairs. first line is all squads activated and stationed next to it, plus 50ish wardogs and every other animal. i think the mayor might be upset if her pet guinea fowl is eaten by a bear, but i still want all pets in the line of battle as meat-shield

i've got some cages knocking about, i'm scrambling to make cage traps next to the stairs

all adult civilians, starting with the ones who have any level of fighting skills, are being immediately press ganged into squads so they'll equip whatever armor and weapons they can find, to form a second line.
third line is the 3x unarmored vampires and puppies and cats and children and babies


i feel like Gary Oldman in Leon screaming "Bring me every one" / "what do you mean everyone" / "EVVVVVVVVERRRY ONNNNNEE" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyfbRz4ObFY

[Sp00ky]

the goblins all arrived and stood around outside, with the doors locked they couldn't path into the fort
the cave dragons went into the entry tunnel first and knocked down a door
but i had a row of 6 cage traps just outside the doors, and 5 dragons got caught in them! phew
dwarves never always go exactly where you tell them, and i had some stupid ones go up to where the dragons are. so to protect the stupid ones, i moved my legendary warriors forward. they butchered the remaining 3 dragons and then the goblins fled. i killed 5-6 of them and their bears but the rest ran off

i now have 6 dwarves very unhappy, probably due to their friends dying. i took 6 casualties, 5 conscripts and an axelord. captain of the guard fella with the artifact spear got no kills, muppet.
the axelord was fighting a dragon when he was charged by a goblin axelord on a bear, who knocked his shield out of his hand and tumbled him to the floor. then went at him with a copper great axe, opening lots of arteries
near the end, he'd lost his steel axe (well, he'd lost his whole hand) and the bear was shaking him around by the arm, but he still managed to kick the bear in the lungs before bleeding out. hardcore.


screenshots of when contact was made:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A) ground level shows the 2 groups of goblins riding cave bears, one on the left and one central. you can also see the tops of some of my constructions, cave dragons have knocked the doors off 2 of them. the river is on the right
my entrance is predictably in the centre of the pools of blood and skulls, its not easy to see as it is just 3 red down-arrow triangles showing the ramp down. also shown is some of the pools of water around. on the far left is ramps up to hilly higher level

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

B) level minus one. the ground here is pale red to indicate clay soil that my farms (on the left) are growing crops in
the long strip of blue 7's is the water channel i cut. just above that is the 3-tile wide entrance tunnel, it leads to the 5x5 trade depot that wagons arrive at, there's some chests and gems there.
to the immediate left of the depot is a row of traps indicated by ^ symbols. the green ones are cages, 4 are red cage icons as they have dragons in, woop
the grey ^ icons are stonefall traps. 3 of them have been triggered and dropped 2 blue stones and a brown one (slightly bruising the dragons)
there's 1 dragon shown here, between the door and the cages

just on the left past the doors there's a military dwarf in the wrong place, then the stairs down

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

C) minus two. my 'security' level. there's another dragon on the stairs on the right, 5 more traps, and another dwarf in the wrong place
in the grey stone corridor,
the stairs on the right lead up, to level minus one
the stairs on the left lead up to farming level, and down to the rest of the fort

the idea of this was i'd shut off the grey corridor during attack, and have a much longer, trap filled route available that enemies would go around. its basically unprotected though
also shown is the hospital (X's are the medical stockpile) and well (blue tile next to a bucket) and the archer's barracks and training archery range ( '/'s are ammo stockpiles)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

D) minus three
shows a part of my extensive stockpiles of bars and blocks and food barrels. the main staircase is 3 brown X's surrounded by some grey '^' traps, surrounded by military dwarves.
to the left of the main stair is a secondary stair, to the left of that is wardogs and pets


now, i've got to re-configure everything that i changed, de-mobilise, restart industry, and properly develop my woeful security. and see if i can tame these caged cave dragons.

[Sp00ky]

i think the axelord might not have had any gauntlets, all the injuries he got were in the arms. its really fiddly to go and check what each guy is equipped with... kinda sad that i let him down with poor equipment.

i'm gonna check all my legendary guys, retire the injured ones out of active service and replace with new guys to train up. and make sure all the active ones have a full suit of iron, iron breastplate over chainmail shirt over leather vest, plus cloak, shield and weapon. i've told them to do equip this stuff already, but its possible they're wearing other stuff i found on a goblin or whatever

incidentally, almost any type of animal can be skinned for its hide and made into leather. i've been buying leather by the bin-full from traders as i can't figure out how to skin animals, but leather is cheap. anyway i found one of my dwarves was wearing a toad-leather dress. he must have got it from a goblin's body. eww.


dwarves get an unhappy thought from their friends getting injured and killed, but don't get a happy thought from victory, (apart from a few of them who're bloodthirsty and 'enjoyed slaughter recently')
so after an attack the fort can struggle at a real low ebb, if they get too unhappy they throw tantrums which make other dwarves unhappy. i think i'll avoid that and pull through ok, generally my guys are cheerful. i think i might place my artifact yak bone door in the middle of the dining room, not leading to anything, but just so they can admire it and be cheered up


i've got a big long list of stuff i need to sort out, some of it is demobilising and setting things back to how they were, some of it is things i should have sorted out already like a drawbridge and security and traps, massively expand my mining and my food production so i've got big stockpiles.
some of it is new, i want to experiment with catapults and siegecraft, i am keen to see if i can train these caged cave dragons. its apparently possible but difficult, and they will be dangerous to have around, as if they revert to their wild nature they will run around killing and breaking doors, so they'll need to be in a chamber accessed only by bridge, with a pit they can't get over, assigned a dedicated training dwarf-soldier each.

i need meat to train them, but don't have any. i'd butchered all my grazing animals once i had internal water supply as i didn't want traffic going outside to the (blood-slicked) grassy pasture zone.
well,... the meat i do have already is the bodies of the fallen, i think i can use that perhaps.
the dwarven bodies will get carried to coffins in the crypt (not tenderly or anything, they will be stripped of armor and hauled like any other sack of bricks) but the attackers might be viable. hmm
i think not actually, you only get meat when you butcher and you can only butcher animals you own, otherwise i'd already have been serving up goblin rump steak to my population- there'll be some traders along soon and i can buy some meat off them

[Sp00ky]

here's a random fact i found on the DF wiki

at the start you only have a rough idea of your level of stocks and food and so on
but you can appoint a book keeper, give him an office to give you accurate reports on your stock. so you can tell you've got 4 iron crossbows and 3 copper picks and 3 steel axes, instead of just '10 weapons'

the game tracks injuries on every body part in massive detail for every dwarf, so if you get nerve damage in your arms it impairs your ability to grasp, so weapons and shields are more likely to get knocked out of your hands when hit with blunt force during combat


now, dwarves count on their fingers, so if your book keeper gets injured hands, the accuracy of the stock-taking suffers.

there's no real reason for the game to need to model this, but it does. i keep finding out all kinds of crazy stuff like this that amazes me as to the level of detail it has.



unfortunately there's some things that the game is shitty at, which i'm starting to bump up against and don't have a solution.
firstly the population cap doesn't work. when you approach the limit, it stops pregnancies and immigration, but if you had any current pregnancies at the time then when the birth comes it will push you over the cap, and after that the cap doesn't do anything. my cap is 200 but i'm at about 240-250 population now.

also the game is slowing down as my fortress gets bigger, the amount of items and dwarves pathing around is getting a bit much. i've sent all my animals either to the butcher or to a cage so they don't try and pathfind which helps a bit. the cats still have free reign though as they kill vermin.



anyway, so last you'd heard i'd vanquished a large goblin siege, the cave dragons luckily walked into my cage traps and my melee troops killed a few of the goblins including the leader, and the rest broke and fled

however, my defences were lacking so i took half a dozen fatalities. and during the cleanup of bodies and armor, i'd left some bodies inside my fortress for too long and they started rotting and god damn miasma spread. i was cleaning all this up, demobilising as well which was a chore.  got some tantrums but looking like it'd stabilise, trying to build a load of armor for my troops to ensure they all had a full suit, i was also stripping the roof off my trade depot to ventilate it, it was taking ages to rebuild the roof, when another siege arrived

i defeated this second siege too but it was messy, bodies all over the inside of the fort. i wasn't prepared and still was suffering from the first siege, and it wrecked the stability of the fort.

basically, it killed me.

so i reverted to a previous save.


i've now built a load of security features in, and connected up a load of bridges with levers so i can re-route the entry to my fort to make attackers walk past all my defences, and keep my dwarves inside almost all the time.


i have an entrance tunnel which leads to my trade depot, this can be shut off and force attackers down a much longer tunnel.
along this long tunnel is a set of dead end corridors, each with a bit of furniture at the end, and lined with cage traps. this is a cheap design to catch 'building destroyers' like cave dragons
at the indoors-end of the tunnel is a wall of arrow-slit fortifications for marksdwarves to shoot out, behind which is a big ammo stockpile of copper bolts for their crossbows

on the next level down, i can route the path into a extensive set of wiggly paths where attackers would have to march back and forth down long corridors under the gaze of my archers, who're standing on another ammo stockpile and looking out through fortifcations

then, attackers get routed to a ballista shooting gallery. its 3-tiles wide, so 3 ballistas can look down it. attackers have to march about 110 tiles down this corridor, to the edge of the map, and then turn and walk 110 tiles back down another 3-tile corridor facing 3 more ballistas.

the last part is an open room about 12x20 were i can station my melee troops in wait.

ballistas fire ballista arrows, which is a wooden log, optionally tipped with a metal arrowhead
catapults just fire basic stone though, so i've got a 6 dedicated siege operators continuously firing a row of 6 catapults at a wall, the stones drop down into a channel to the next floor down, they walk down the stairs and collect the stones and keep firing, to train their siege engine skills for use on ballistas.



so all this sounds great in theory, all carefully planned and dug out and bridges connected to levers and levers labelled so i know which one is which, and civilian alert set up so i can order them to a burrow to hide... but plans and practice don't always match


the next time i got a siege, my vampires just refused to pull the levers. i don't know if he had other orders that superseded them but i don't think so. i think he was just being lazy.
the cave dragons all obediently followed their building destroyer trait and walked onto cage traps and got captured, the goblins all obediently ignored the furniture-bait and didn't clog up my cage traps.

i eventually managed to send the vampire into a cell in his annex and sent a normal dwarf in to pull the levers. shut a bridge but in the confusion the goblins were just stuck in my trade depot.

i next pulled the lever marked 'DOGBOMB' which unleashed 40-ish wardogs from cages in the trade depot, sadly the dogs got massacred by elite goblins, dog-parts flying everywhere.

then pulled the lever to allow goblins in to the lower level so they can get routed down my long corridors and get shot at.

however, marksdwarves stationed behind the fortifications seemed reluctant to shoot goblins much, they mostly have higher skill with hammer (which is what you get with melee'ing with a crossbow) so when i told them to attack they scampered out of their bunker and into the corridors. gah

anyway so i then sent in my melee troops and they cleaned up.
then i found that i can select all corpses and body parts to be dumped at once in the stocks screen, and ignore stuff outside in the orders screen. so my dwarves can clean up the bodies to prevent miasma quite effectively.


i didn't get to use the ballistas during the siege as goblins never made it that far, but later in testing i found that a 110-tile-long corridor is laughably optimistic, ballista arrows can fly that far but they're hardly ever going to do it in a 3-tile-wide beam of accuracy. they go all over the place, sometimes they will immediately crash into the sidewall and stop. i suppose forcing goblins on a really long march will buy me more time though.



before this siege struck, i was in the process of making a drowning trap.

from the perspective of a goblin, you go underground down a ramp, and see a long corridor ahead of you. at the end of it is a turn, but you smell a dog just around the corner. you eagerly scamper forward, but the floor of the corridor falls away from under you and you land in a pit. the pit is the same shape as the corridor you were in, the walls are smooth and without purchase. you look up and see the floor you were standing on, now is shut again making a ceiling over your ugly head.
at one end of the pit is a stone drawbridge but is closed tight. the other end has iron bars you can't get through, and beyond the bars is a smooth stone surface.
as you're examining this, the ceiling above you slams open and then closed, dropping a fellow goblin in to join your predicament.

later, the sounds of battle outside have died away, but your pit now contains many of your fellow goblins, shoving and desperate. you notice some iron bars set high on one of the walls just under the ceiling level, and suddenly there's a creak followed by a rush of water through the bars, falling on panicked goblins. the level rises, you can't swim, you die in cold wet darkness.


the idea is a 10-tile long retracting bridge linked to a lever pulled on repeat. the lever doesn't repeat very quickly though, i think goblins might move too fast and make it get across the bridge and kill the bait-dog.
i could do it with a pressure plate perhaps, might be more responsive

there's a lever which controls a floodgate to let water in from the river, and another to lever let the water drain out.
a 3rd lever opens access at the bottom so i can collect items off the goblin bodies.


the outlet connects to the same outlet as my hospital's well, i'd shut off the water into the well and was digging this out from the bottom upwards, to avoid having an unsecured access point to the surface until it was all ready.

however.... to start at the bottom i'd cut a construction access route into the bottom of the well, and then cleverly not installed any way of closing this off.

so during the siege i got some guys hospitalised, which means they need water. and i had no access to the outside. so i had to cancel the digging of this new water trap, and re-establish waterflow to the well, which meant water was spilling into my fort. i decided flooding my lower levels was worth being able to heal my guys, water evaporates if it spreads out over a large enough area.

it's now all installed correctly and water is only where i want it, but i think i might need to check better if it works ok or remake it



earlier in the week i'd had the bright idea of making a vampire into all my administrative positions. just need to give him a table and chair then he can do the jobs of chief medical dwarf, bookkeeper, hammerer, milita commander, manager.

Hammerer particularly, as the job involves beating/jailing/executing dwarves as punishments for various crimes they might commit, if i give the job to a soldier he might kill the guy. if i give the job to someone locked in a room, he can never injure my dwarves
but then after the screwup of the failed lever pulling during the siege i've given manager role to someone else as my vampires are so lazy




after the sieges had passed and the water problems were all fixed, i built a taming facility to see if i could train the blind cave bears the goblins were mounted on, and the cave dragons. i'd trapped 5 bears and 8 dragons, put them each in a cell, all the cells can be blocked off with a bridge.

i started on the bears - all the dragons are female but the bears are a mix so there's a possibility of a breeding program

taming starts by feeding the animal when its still in a cage, i got a couple bears tamed to the level of 'semi-wild' which is 1 level away from 'about to rip your head off', the next part is to move them to a pasture and continue taming. eventually they might become 'tame', after that any offspring a tame female has are automatically tame.

however, when moving to the pasture, my dwarves are still scared of them. so the civilians ran away, lots of job cancellations. i moved my archer squad in position in case the bear went wild, but the archers just shot the bear immediately.

whatever happened next i am really unsure but someone went berserk (maybe the tamer whose bear had just died? maybe someone whose family had been killed by a bear?) but my archers opened up on the crowd. lots of bolts flying all over my main civilian area. archers nailing my civilians, basically a riot broke out, and 20 dwarves died
i don't think bolts do hit friendlies, it might have been one guy goes berserk, the military puts him down, his family go berserk, etc...


this wrecked my fortress, again, so i reverted to a previous save, fortunately didn't lose much time
i'm going to try again with the taming, but this time have the pasture area inside the taming facility, so that no one is exposed to scary bears apart from the tamer

[Sp00ky]

my fort is pretty established now, and moves pretty slowly now. so there's periods where i can assign a huge chunk of land to be mined out, walk off and leave it for ages. and i know that if i get attacked, it will autopause anyway

unfortunately last night i think i left it too much too often, and i got a tantrum spiral. its really frustrating because its hard to tell whats going on. but people start tantrumming and then going berserk and hitting other people, then the military take them down, and their friends get upset, etc

i think it was partly my dining room was too small for the population, some fights broke out
and the well wasn't working properly, i think it became 'dry' and inactive when i turned the water off to route plumbing for my drowning trap, but after i turned water back on the well stayed 'dry' so there was no water access for my hospital. so people injured in the canteen fights didn't get healed properly
i probably need to remove the well and build a new one that will fix it

[Sp00ky]

i'm struggling to make it past the point where i get my 2nd major siege, in approx the fort's 8th year. i've probably reverted away about as much game-time as i have played it. the motto of the game is 'losing is fun' and people on forum refer to reverting to an old save as to 'savescum' but i feel too attached to this particular fort to rebuild elsewhere.

each time i fail and revert i fix the mistakes and it becomes stronger. there's no fix for me pulling the wrong levers though (they're even labelled! tho it is still confusing having 15+ levers)



i've currently building a goblin-pit to train archers, and an access complex on level -41, just above the first cavern layer. its eventually planned to be:
1 stair that goes up, into my fort. its simply the bottom of my main staircase
1 stair that goes up, all the way to the surface
3 stairs that each go down to each cavern layer
1 stair that goes down as far as it can

each of the stairs have their own drawbridge to block them off.
so if i find something nasty in one of the layers, i can shut access into the bottom of my fort, routing it to climb all the way to the surface, so that it has to then go in through my front door and face my main defences there, rather than needing to build a duplicate set of defences at level -41







history of my forts mainly for self reference

fort 1, barely got started, i installed a different graphics pack then couldn't find the save

fort 2, got quite big, 175 population. but then tantrums + no well + frozen water outside meant that no injuries got healed which killed it.

fort 3, better designed, has trapped vampires and a waterfall. however:

-stripped the roof of farm layer due to miasma, the rubble collapsed into the stairwell and injured the farmers, game crashed, forced to revert to older save

-survived a big goblin siege with cavedragons but then a 2nd siege turned up before i'd cleaned up from the first, it all went wrong, had to revert

-tried taming blind cave bears, was moving one to pasture when it went wild, dwarves berserk, riot in the dining room, had to revert

-had somewhat flooded myself, shut off the well, didn't re-establish it, no patients getting healed without water, tantrum spiral had to revert

-had a too small dining room, miasma, tantrum spiral, game crash had to revert

-had a big siege turn up whilst my archers were spread out outside shooting wildlife, they wouldn't come back inside so i sent out my melee troops and closed the gate. but closed the wrong gate so the melee guys had to go down my long, long defensive tunnels leaving the archers to take the siege alone, with some civilians also outside for some reason. the archers did well but took casualties, civilians died, tantrum, revert...

lessons learnt: don't let them get too unhappy. a flashing red downarrow icon on the dwarf is unhappy. don't forget a hospital and a well. you don't need waterflow, just a large cistern will do with a well on top so long as it isn't stagnant or muddy
don't let them get killed (!)

[Sp00ky]

i've been exploring caverns. the cavern starts about level -42 and goes down to about -55. its pretty extensive, covers a lot of the total map. its big and spawling and windy and twists around in all kinds of directions.
its confusing to look at in a 2D, one-layer-at-a-time way, but fortunately i don't have to do the pathfinding for the dwarves, they know how to get around themselves.

there wasn't really anything dangerous in there though, there's spiderwebs that dwarves can get stuck in if you tell them to do a job which means they'll stand in it,
the cavern is open to the map-edge on several locations though, so creatures can wander in from off-map. this includes trollls, troglodytes, giant cave spiders, and some other cave dwelling type creatures. they're not an issue for my military but they can kill civilians

the caverns are rich in gems and crystals so i was mining them out, lots of civilians wandering around, so i had to keep a squad in there to kill stuff that wandered in. i was also attempting to build walls to block off access to the map-edges to stop creatures coming in. its pretty fiddly building multilevel walls though, so i just did the ground level at each point so non-flyers should be blocked

by the time i'd built all the walls though, (it also meant doing some mining next to the places i wanted walls, so i had ready stone available), all the creatures were dead and new ones had already stopped appearing. i guess there's only a limited population in the surrounding area of each type of creature



in a spot where i could sink a vertical stair down past this first cavern, i searched deeper to find another cavern
i found it at level -60ish, opened its roof and looked down into a cavern with a 50-level drop directly beneath the bottom of my staircase. i sealed it shut- i'll need to find another way to get in that doesn't involve a huge drop and i don't want to leave access open to potential flyers, the deeper levels have more dangerous inhabitants.
i probably should pit a tame bird through a floor-hatch in there, so it can explore for me.


however, this cavern has got underground plants growing in it, including tower-caps and fungiwood, which are so big you can chop them down for lumber
so these plants produce by magic by 'spores', which means now, anywhere in my fort which is underground and has soil or mud, will now potentially have these plants starting to grow


in the past, whenever i didn't have any tasks for my miners, i'd set them to strip out large sections of the top left corner of my fort. so i've got maybe 5000 tiles of unused space in the first 3-4 levels, next to the river.
i've walled this all off, connected it with its own set of stairs, dug towards the river, installed bars and floodgates connected to a lever, and have dug out the other side of the floodgates from above ground, to connect it to the river.
all that remains is to get the last few stupid civilians out, pull the lever, and flood a huge area in my fort. after the water has evaporated, it will have changed all the stone floor into muddy stone floor, and i'll eventually have a huge underground tree farm.


with an excess of wood, i could set my siege engineer to make siege engine parts on repeat, so i can replace my ballistas with masterwork ones. the siege operators are legendary now after a couple years catapulting rocks at a wall, so masterwork ballistas should be pretty fierce
or make a load of waterwheels to power elaborate contraptions
or have to go outside less and trade less with the stupid elves, with soil and trees and water available underground i am completely self-sufficient now

i am looking forward to pulling this lever, way more than is rational


what else happened.
small goblin squads turn up quite frequently now, often at the same time as traders. so if they kill the traders, i can then kill the goblins and loot everything from the traders wagon, muahah.
i had an elven trader get stuck in a pond, his wagon never left my trade depot. after half a year of them lingering like a bad smell, i killed them all and stole their stuff.

trapped creatures now get dumped into a shooting gallery as training for my archers. i got rid of all the cave bears and cave dragons i'd trapped, it didn't seem worth the effort of trying to tame them.

my marksdwarves have figured out how to use a archery target and fired all the bone bolts i had available, i've run out of bones, mainly because all the bodies on the surface are forbidden. they're not allowed to use metal bolts for training, but i might change that as i've got so much copper and iron

gonna have to also check that there's not towercaps starting to grow in places i don't want them which might block access or something. there's a number of areas of my fort that are muddy, due to minor historical flooding incidents...

[Sp00ky]

i had a Forgotten Beast turn up in my first-level caverns. my first proper megabeast. i'd walled off all the ground level entry points, so he's currently stuck behind a wall. he fires webs, so i'm in the middle of building a silk-farm that i can lure him into.

the theory i'm hoping will work:
step 1 is build a access corridor to the wall he's behind, fill it with doors
step 2 is build a farm area for him to get sent into, filled with doors, shut in with bridges, and lined with fortifications
step 3 is send a dwarf to knock down the wall and run away into my fort. the FB then smashes his way through the doors in the access tunnel, taking enough time for my dwarf to escape into my fort and shut a bridge behind him.
the only targets then for the FB is the doors inside the farm area, he goes to smash up those, i shut him in with bridges.
step 4 is then position a target-dog on the other side of fortifications. he'll shoot web at it through the fortifications, that i can collect to make silk clothes.
there'll actually be 2 sets of bridge/fortification/dog/collection areas, one on either side of his play-pen, so i can shut one side down and collect the webs whilst the FB is spraying the other side.

i guess it shows the state my fort (and the wiki) is at, where instead of crapping my pants like i did with the first major siege i got, i now instead think how to utilise this terror from the depths for profit.



i'm still in the process of exploring the second level of caverns
i bought a couple of tame birds from traders, and dumped them into the top of cavern
It turns out peacocks can't fly, so it fell 50 levels and exploded on the cavern floor like a meat grenade.

next up was a goose, they can fly - he immediately flew back in to the access tunnel.
so i built an access hatch over the hole, made it pet-forbidden, and dumped the goose through the hole again. now the goose is just beneath the hatch, refusing to go explore. he clearly does not fancy investigating the deep perils of the cavern.

i feel sad about it, he's just hovering under the hatch, forlornly honking* to get let back in, but i've walled off the access tunnel now and my masons have got bigger things do deal with, like my underground tree farm irrigation project, (preferably without flooding my fort again). not sure how long he can stay there in mid-air, i don't think they get tired but they do need food

*presumably so, i don't have the sound on

the second caverns are bigger than i'd thought, they're at least 100 levels deep. there's settings for this in world-generation, if i make another fortress it will have much smaller caverns. i like that they're epic but it just takes so long for dwarves to move around, and if i eventually want to get to magma, it will be hundreds of levels down.
anyway i dumped a couple of cats down a 1-level drop to explore, you can set a meeting area anywhere you can see, and cats will path to meeting areas. its a pretty slow process but it doesn't risk my dwarves