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[Gentlefish]

I'm curious as to how you all do it, I've only ever dabbled in magma-ing, or pumpstacks for that matter. How do you guys transport sand or minerals down, and how do you usually get the finished product back up? I'm sure minecarts are a wonderful boon for this, and I'm also sure that many of you have other ingenious ideas.

[blue emu]

Here's how I utilize Magma:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=76108.0

To get sand and ores down to the furnace-level, you can just drop them down a hole.

[wierd]

*is a total sucker for volcanoes.


I will go through great lengths on a custom worldgen to produce lots of volcanoes to embark on, just because I love easy magma access, adjacent to sand and clay. 

[Dented Lamp]

I prefer to pour my magma in my water. It gives it a nice flavour, almost like... scalded tissue, perhaps.

[Oaktree]

I find it ASAP (don't use volcano embarks, but tend to world gen with magma being fairly shallow, usually <50 levels down).  A few furnaces and forges down below for initial metal work.  But then I move magma upward (pump stack, but now use mine carts) in order to establish a Foundry area in close relation to the rest of the fort.

This is often opted for since in recent forts my main mineral resources have been high up in the sedimentary layers - iron ore, flux stone, etc.  So moving the metal working nearer the surface saves extensively on hauling work, especially not having to haul finished products back up.  Now if the main ore supplies were closer to the Magma Sea than dumping some supplies down, burrowing the metalworkers in the depths, and just moving finished products up might be more efficient. 

(The decision between a shallow fortress and a "deep" fortress hinges a lot on how much hauling you expect to do and where the resources are coming from.  If you are surface farming, surface woodcutting, soil level sub-surface farming and tree farming and doing a lot of hauling there than that favors a shallow fortress.  A deep fortress may be exploiting the caverns for that, or irrigating to produce plots on a stone surface.)

With pump stacks I've had enough magma in reservoirs to add magma based traps here and there.  Sort of fun to melt the invaders.  Have not gotten mine cart movement of magma working efficiently enough yet for having an extensive reservoir of magma.  (Working on it though!)

[Scootagoose]

I only use magma for furnaces >.>

[Sutremaine]

Since minecarts I prefer bringing magma up because most of the other resources are nearer the top of the map, but there's something satisfying about settling amongst the magma layers.

[wierd]

I tend to create megalithic structures more often than not, and digging into the cavern layers makes my i7 shit its pants after producing massively elaborate fortresses.

This is another reason I love volcano embarks; I can chisel a very fantastic surface fortress right from the go, and just need water pipes to make corrections to the magma tube geometry. Water is infinately easier to deal with than plumbed magma, or at least I think so, especially when pumps are involved.  I like as little fluid calcs per frame as possible, since so much eventually gets eaten up by processing the fortress itself.  That's one of the big reasons I avoid breaching the cavern layer.

All my fortresses die from FPS death anymore, before I can complete the masterpiece designs, even with fastdwarf turned on.

I am very enthusiastic about the "retire fortress" option in the current development logs. Hopefully, a retired superfort will purge a lot of no longer necessary item data when it leaves the fortress mode simulation and enters adv mode friendly mode. That way "retire"/"reclaim" would possibly allow continued work on such fortresses.

(Things like bricks, stones, etc.. plugging up the item registration vector, long after said items are destroyed, or leave the site. (Such as via trade.) This murders my fortresses by inches. Using retirement as a purging cycle would be a godsend.)

[Sutremaine]

Have you considered using the Modest Mod?

[wierd]

It's a personal challenge I have set for myself to work as "vanilla" as possible when building superforts.

Most of my fortresses end up covering 2/3 or more of a 4x6 embark rectangle. (Sometimes larger, if the volcano is being obtuse about its elevation changes, and proximity to water sources.)

This makes them, by and large, far bigger per zlevel than most player's fortresses. (Usually have provisions for well over 1000 dwarves by the time it starts having FPS death fully set in, but still not complete yet.)

It would be fantastic if Toady One would include multicore support, and offload item enumeration, and liquid flows into seperate worker threads. That would make one hell of an FPS improvement.

What's so special about Modest Mod that I should consider breaking with the "pure vanilla" personal challenge?

[Veylon]

Modest cuts down on the bazillion different kinds of meats and leathers you get as well as having a smaller clothing set. It doesn't do anything all that wacky, just cuts down on the sheer processing having so many different materials causes.

[wierd]

I see!

I might give it a try.

[Veylon]

I see!

I might give it a try.

Erp! Actually I'm wrong on that. It's a whole series of patches and bufixes. It doesn't cut down on materials after all. Still good to get, though.

[Triaxx2]

Badly at this point in time. Honestly, it's taken me this long to figure out glass, but I tend to rely on sub-surface farming and cavern avoidance to reach the magma. The problem this creates is getting enough things down there so the dwarves do more than one task before racing back to the surface. I find myself using elaborate pump rigs to pump water down so I can keep them down there. Then once I get there, I find myself driving hilariously long mine cart tracks to haul ore and sandbags, and then the finished stuff back up.

And it just ends up as a logistical nightmare. It's easier just to clear cut the surface and make huge piles of charcoal.

[Sutremaine]

Which one am I thinking of then?

Aaaanyway, it's something that you can do yourself for the most part. The major offenders are the items that are brought onto the map, especially by traders. Sooner or later they'll bring every combination of animal, leather, meat, and clothing onto your site, and they're not removed fully from memory when the items leave.

My raw-fu is a little weak these days, but I think the following would make for a minimum of typing and fewer things appearing:

Leather: change the 'tan a hide' reaction to use a specific material instead of the material of the animal it came from. For this I would use the leather of a dummy creature (ie. one that doesn't exist and has only the bare minimum of raws for the tanning reaction to be able to call its leather. I used this once for alchemical substances I didn't want turning up in preference lists). You'll end up with every creature in the game producing the same type of leather, but you don't need to go through every creature and make changes.
Clothes: remove clothing from the raws until you have one item each for the head, upper body, lower body, feet, and hands. For the upper body I'd recommend keeping cloaks as well as whatever you choose, because they cover a whole bunch of areas beyond the upper body they're 'attached' to.
Crafts: trash these.
Prepared fly brains and god knows what else: remove [MEAT] from any material you don't want the traders bringing as food. This will mean a lot of gizzards and sweetbreads going to waste, but animals generally produce enough muscle for a fortress to live on. At least, I always seem to end up swimming in offal roasts after a while. With a search and replace, you could maybe make the organ meats edible only when cooked, which will allow you to use them but stop traders from turning up with them.
Armour: there are fewer of these than there are types of clothing, but you may wish to remove anything you don't use in your own uniforms.
Stone and gems: this is more of a hit to the vanilla-ness of the game, but you can get rid of most gem types and a lot of the small clusters of stone that have no particular use or unusual colour.
Other food and food-like items: You can remove redundant plants (two of the berry species spring to mind). I don't think there's any way of stopping traders from bringing barrels of blood. There are probably more varieties of fish than you care about, and on a related note there are probably a lot of vermin you don't care about either.