Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hyndis]

A helpful thing you can do with an above ground fortress is first, embark on a flat region. As flat as possible. Its best if its completely flat.

Then around the entire edge of the map construct drawbridges. Leave a gap for the entrance. Link all drawbridges to a lever, and pull the lever to raise them. Then deconstruct the lever. This will limit access to your fortress via only a single path, allowing you to concentrate your defenses there. All visitors to your fortress, both friendly and hostile, will arrive at the only accessible tiles on the edge of the map.

While you could of course build a huge pile of weapon traps and fill them with giant discs, that is just unsporting. Go with a large dwarven military instead. Build a barracks at the entrance, and assign your military to be active/training in the barracks. No traps, no tricks, just dwarven steel to keep your fortress safe. Massed marksdwarves, as in 60+ marksdwarves all in a blob, can unleash enough firepower to kill almost anything. More dakka always works. If its not working, you need more dakka.

Then build a thriving city.

Clay or glass is probably ideal. If you have sand or clay then you can build infinite blocks from only a single source tile. Magma provides all of the energy needed. If you don't mind green buildings, glass is probably best, as you can make other things out of glass. By building tens of thousands of glass blocks you'll have a lot of legendary glassblowers, who then can make masterwork glass furniture, pots, doors, and even large weapons for weapon traps. Glass isn't nearly as sharp as steel, but a masterwork giant glass disc is dangerous enough.


If you want to build entirely out of wood then you'll almost certainly have to go underground for more wood. Build underground tree farms to supply the wood. Surface wood cutting will simply not provide enough wood. Consider that saplings will be trampled, and ground will be used up from the construction of buildings and walls. If you want a uniform color of the wood, set up a custom reaction to turn a wood log into a wood block of some type, so you can process all wood blocks via some form of lumber mill into uniform blocks for construction.

[Bartholomew The Pious]

Heh, I actually tried embarking on the intention of attempting one of these above ground forts. I got everything in plan but one problem: stone for mechanisms. I got some ore with me on embark, but no way of getting stone easily considering I had to make do with an aquifer. So I don't know if I can hold until I get enough stone from caravans.

[Funk]

take vast amounts of wood you will need 1500+ to get started, and that will just cover a small wall and a few huts.
id use re clames just for more wood.

[Graebeard]

One possible problem I can see coming of not doing any mining is what do you do when you get a strange mood that requires stone?  Are you planning on buying stone from caravans?

Nope. Skybreach will burn through wood and dwarfs both - like the infinitely replenishable resources we all know them to be.

Any dwarf that wants stone or metal bars obviously isn't cut out for life in the open air anyway, and them killing themselves off is probably for the best.
Wood and bone everything.

It's been several versions since I've checked, but I believe that in order to trigger strange moods you need to have a minimum number of tiles dug out.  No picks, no artifacts.

[nbp]

One possible problem I can see coming of not doing any mining is what do you do when you get a strange mood that requires stone?  Are you planning on buying stone from caravans?

Nope. Skybreach will burn through wood and dwarfs both - like the infinitely replenishable resources we all know them to be.

Any dwarf that wants stone or metal bars obviously isn't cut out for life in the open air anyway, and them killing themselves off is probably for the best.
Wood and bone everything.

It's been several versions since I've checked, but I believe that in order to trigger strange moods you need to have a minimum number of tiles dug out.  No picks, no artifacts.

I think you need to have tiles revealed, not necessarily dug out.  If you embark on a volcano, and drop a cat, child, or useless cheesemaker into the volcano, they'll discover the whole magma sea on their way down, which ought to be enough to let your other dwarves get moods.

[Lord_Phoenix]

One possible problem I can see coming of not doing any mining is what do you do when you get a strange mood that requires stone?  Are you planning on buying stone from caravans?

Nope. Skybreach will burn through wood and dwarfs both - like the infinitely replenishable resources we all know them to be.

Any dwarf that wants stone or metal bars obviously isn't cut out for life in the open air anyway, and them killing themselves off is probably for the best.
Wood and bone everything.

It's been several versions since I've checked, but I believe that in order to trigger strange moods you need to have a minimum number of tiles dug out.  No picks, no artifacts.

It's items created, not tiles revealed.  Including rock boulders/ore created by mining.  Or wood by chopping trees.

[Loud Whispers]

What about the good old fashioned hunting?  Train up a few marksdwarves and add bone crossbows/bolts to your army as needed.  One copper crossbow in the begining, or just make one wooden one.  Bring at most 50 copper bolts, and at least 0.

If you do this bring copper bars, logs (optional if you're feeling lucky) and magma safe stone. You get much more bolts and weapons if you forge them yourselves.

If you're going up, I suggest my sky bridge titan trap. Build pillars up into the air, and a couple of z below the top, use supports in two of them instead of blocks. Link those supports to a pressure plate and have it set so only creatures too heavy to operate the bridge will trigger it. The creature will hit the plate and be in the middle of the bridge when the towers deconstruct. Ensure there's no other support than those supports.

Titans do not trigger traps. It'd have to be lever operated.

In any case there is a much simpler design;

A door with water above. Titan/thief breaks down the door, water falls through, hits a pressure plate designated to trigger when said water falls on it and the Titan is sealed in with bridges linked to that pressure plate.

[Bartholomew The Pious]

I thought I should have the honors of posting the first imgures (get it, picture and imgur? wait, not funny? ok ill just leave) to stand this thread's ground. It inspired me to do something a tad bizzare for my taste, so I must repay two-folds.

Warning: Big pictures inbound.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Points of Interest: No major underground buildings basically

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

POI: The bottleneck I must protect

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Just some top parts.

The only problem here is that I cannot identify that mysterious vampire who has currently preyed on three unlucky receiving ends: luckier for me, they were disposable.

[Drazinononda]

-snip-

Your entire fort... is a giant wooden dong?

Sounds legit.

[CaptApollo12]

Embark on a clay layer. Use the clay as a building material. Or if you embark on a volcano and sand use glass blocks like I am currently doing. I miss the old 40d days where you could embark on a magma pipe on a flat plain. I never see these anymore.

EDIT

Make sure that you gen your world with enough above ground z levels for your building needs and you can also turn off a lot of the underground features if you are exclusivly contructing an above ground fortress.

[Spinning Fly]

Seems like a pretty cool idea, living like the elves....but I've seen flying creatures spawn above raised drawbridges. So if the goblins bring giant bats your fort may be fucked. Unless you build a big covered wooden structure for your civilians to go hide in.

Also how do you plan to get a working military fast enough? You'd need mechanisms (and therefore stone) for a danger room...

[Scott Cee]

I've never danger-roomed a single dwarf and have only lost one fort to siege, which was before I knew goblins laid sieges.... until then, obviously.

Rather than having hunters, send your militia out to fight wild animals.
Of course, all hunters in my regular fort are in non-active marksman squads anyway.

I'm having problems designating walls over doors, since they are furniture and not constructions. Sadly, this also means every level above the first has to follow the same floorplan, because you also cannot place walls on top of constructed floors.

Until somebody nice tell me how to get around this...

[Triaxx2]

Are you sure? I know they avoid traps, but pressure plates aren't traps. Even so, a pressure plate in an animal enclosure would do the trick, give them only the one window to see it from and it'll run back over the plate.

Don't build constructed floors, just the walls. What you need to do is have supporting walls to either side of the door so there's something for the wall to hang onto.

[Loud Whispers]

I've never danger-roomed a single dwarf and have only lost one fort to siege, which was before I knew goblins laid sieges.... until then, obviously.

Indeed. Never a problem that cannot be solved with gratuitous application of Dorf. Danger rooms take out the Fun of getting there!

I'm having problems designating walls over doors, since they are furniture and not constructions. Sadly, this also means every level above the first has to follow the same floorplan, because you also cannot place walls on top of constructed floors.

Just build the walls directly over the doors - don't place floors down.

Are you sure? I know they avoid traps, but pressure plates aren't traps. Even so, a pressure plate in an animal enclosure would do the trick, give them only the one window to see it from and it'll run back over the plate.

(b)
(t)raps

[Buttery_Mess]

Are you going to build all buildings with wood? If not, you can build a with clay boulders (not bricks, use the raw clay boulder), so you can get infinite amounts of boulders from a single clay floor.

This. I like this in desert maps with an aquifer under clay. Feels like an African village.