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[Dorftrottel]

While losing is fun, I like to wrestle with defeat for prolonged times until succumbing to it.
This is especially true for really good embarking locations, e.g. a location that provides iron, bituminous coal, flux, sand and clay all at once. Depending on the ultimate demise of a fortress, I often found it near to impossible to reclaim a once prosperous fortress.
They main reasons for this are stray insane former inhabitants, settled uninvited guests or violent ghosts that strangle your stone crafter before he even has a chance to memorialize them.

So i'm currently thinking about a design for a safe/panic room that aims to provide the following goals:
-provide safety for up to,say, 10 dwarves from tantrum spirals (together with all other possible dangers)
-keep them alive and happy for prolonged periods of time
-provide them with the means necesarry to memorialize those poor souls outside of the fortress
-help them deal with remaining invaders or berserk dwarves once the slaughter is over

secondary goals:
-double as a forward base for a reclaim in case of defeat in spite of the saferoom
-maybe provide the means to clean up the main fortress prior to leaving the shelter (with magma, if possible)
-if purging the outer fortress should be impossible, psychologically prepare them for the mess outside

I would like if anyone of you ever tried this approach to tantrum-spiral-countermeasure before and can give me some hints to come up with an efficient design. I don't want a secondary fortress, I want a saferoom with restricted dimensions. (say 15*15)
My current thoughts about the contents of the room include:

-A stockpile with enough high quality food and drink to feed 10 dwarves for 5 years.
-a stockpile of clothing
-minimalist legendary dining and bedrooms (maybe out of platinum, if available
-a good amount of slabs for memorializing and a craftdwarf's workshop
-a small dangerroom and some sets of steel armor and weapons
-a back entrance sealed by a wall for easy access after a reclaim
-maybe a dwarf-powered waterfall
-a long corridor to a room full of workshops. A wall of the corridor is a raiser drawbridige to atom smash moody dwarves on the way to their doomed workshop claim

I also would like to hear your estimations of the success chances of the concept. The crucial moments will be the moment a tantrum spiral is about to form, and the moment the dwarves leave the shelter and see the carnage outside. Is there a realistic chance to lock a score of dwarves in the underground Ark before the spiral of madness reaches them?

[Ringsea]

What I've always done, with some success, is to set aside a "sub-fortress" off from the main one.

  The sub-fort will be connected to the main fort with a long path and any sort of drawbridges or whatever else you desire to keep foes out, but will also have a connection to the outside word via locked doors/flood gates or whatever else you want, maybe just a wall to deconstruct later, so that your reclaimers can get inside the sub-fort. It'll have to have a farm, water and/or booze and food, a farm, workshops, stockpiles,bedrooms, dinning room, workshops, and if its REALLY bad, a graveyard.

  Now, keep in mind that this works fine in a siege or trip to the circus gone wrong, but it gets tricky in tantrum spirals. You'll have to find your "sane" dwarves and burrow them all in (You'll probably want to pre-set a burrow in the sub-fort with nobody in it) and position any sane members of your nobility and army there as well. If you enjoy !!FUN!! you could have a lever in the sub-fort that opens the floodgates of lava (( Or ~FUN~ water)) on the insane dwarves. However, if the insane dwarves get in, or the sane dwarves go insane already inside, there could be problems; so make the sub-fort super nice with statues and such.

 Again, this is just my idea, take it however you want.

[Itnetlolor]

With the sub-fort idea, as bad an idea it sounds, it's the most practical. Fill the sub-fort with new migrants. At least then, when the main fort collapses, the sub-fort will not, due to a psychic meltdown because someone they knew in the main one died when hell broke loose.

[CaptainArchmage]

Panic rooms should be designed like a fallout shelter; if something goes very wrong, you set up a burrow or draft your civilians, station them in there, lock them in, and have them stand down.

Minimal design could be an 11x11 room filled with food and a mining pick, surrounded by rooms sized up to 3x3, with a single entrance to either the fortress or surface or caverns. The entrance can be sealed off with a door, drawbridge, floodgate, floor hatch, or just walled off with a block from inside.

An advanced design would have a filtered water supply, farms, basic supply storage, hospital, minimal workshop setup, barracks, dining hall, lever room, and exits to other locations.

[chaosgear]

Why the dwarf-powered waterfall? Why not a perpetual motion generator? It would work just as well and free up dwarf labor. It could also power other things throughout the fortress, like the pumps that control the tantrum-purging lava.

[Mushroo]

Typically when I get a King, I build a palace for him down in the caverns or someplace that's an entire self-contained fortress. Whenever things get rough, I burrow everyone into the palace, where they can feast and splash around in the mist generators. The king himself has his own panic room where he can go (with a few friends/loved ones) if things get REALLY bad.

My current fortress has a vampire king (he arrived at my fort with over 6,000 kills!!!) so he's all walled in by himself. Instant perma-fort!

[Randy Gnoman]

You should stock the panic room with a small group of dwarves permanently assigned there, so that you have some seed laborers in case few or no dwarves are able to escape whatever tragedy befalls your main fort.

[Mushroo]

Better yet, burrow a small group of soldiers/hunters/herbalists/woodcutters/butchers/etc. in each of the caverns, and then seal the caverns. These three "splinter" societies will never participate in the main fortress' economy or politics, and their children (and their children's children...) will never know the light of day.

If the main fortress falls to invaders or tantrums, you'll still have 3 "do-overs."

[evictedSaint]

I have a panic room for my mayor/baron/etc.  It's packed with prepared foods and drinks and is connected to his room. 

like a true noble, when the shit hits the fan, he locks his door and opens up his food supply.

Then I let the game play out.  He runs out of food, goes crazy, and is the last to die.

[OcelotTango]

You know I feel like there is an untapped, and awesome recourse for panic rooms. The ability to automatically send a dwarf standing on a hatch into a minecart (by dropping them into it), automatically sending that minecart into a controlled jump over a chasm (no on foot access). The result is dwarves in emergency pods being shuttled over to the emergency room.

Totally unnecessary, and completely awesome.

[Tsuchigumo550]

This could be a really cool concept for a succession game:

Goals:
1. Set up the main fort as a center for commerce, learning, and agriculture. In the mindset of a great city of old, the idea is to "build Rome in a day", as it stands.

This is complete when:
There is a main palace in plain view for most dwarves. It should be a crowning achievement, that would attract immigrants and be a symbol of your city- possibly dedicated to a god?

There is at least 1 statue garden with at least 4 statues.

There is a wealth of "leisure" items such as toys and instruments, soap, and such, either owned by dwarves or stockpiled in their rooms/large treasuries

There is a "wonder", something that makes your city proud, or the beginning of one- such as an artificial river in your fort or waterfalls

The population is at least 30.

---

Goal 2 is preparing. The threats from outside have grown troublingly strong and countermeasures must be made.

This is complete when:
There is a standing military, at least 10 dwarves

There is a subfort or panic room set up, with everything needed to supply 7~10 dwarves with what they need for survival for extended periods of time that can be shut off from the main fort

There is some form of trap + siege setup for a "frontline" defense

... Not entirely fleshed out past that.


The mechanics would also be slightly different than a regular succession game:
All dwarves, upon being found, are named after players. Anyone on the waitlist to play is named as soon as possible regardless of when they signed up to be named, but anyone can still be named.

The player plays until one of three situations is reached:
The player's dwarf is dead. If this happens before they get a turn, they must create a new entry at the bottom of the list (peferrably, someone not related to the original, but can be).

The player has played a year's game time.

The player's dwarf goes mad or is, for some other reasons, unfit to rule (such as a long hospital visit or jailing).

These are for story purposes, as it's quite Roman. Power struggles and chaos are quite prevalent, and there might be a mod for special Roman-themed things, such as lead-brewed beer.

[Sutremaine]

-A stockpile with enough high quality food and drink to feed 10 dwarves for 5 years.
-a stockpile of clothing
-a long corridor to a room full of workshops. A wall of the corridor is a raiser drawbridige to atom smash moody dwarves on the way to their doomed workshop claim

Wouldn't it be easier to keep a supply of mood items within the panic room? If you're feeling cheaty, once the dwarf is working on the artifact, you can safely forbid anything but the mood's base item.

As for the first two items, I would have a sealed section of cavern handy. That'll give you raw plants, silk, plant thread, trees, and exposed gems. Also grazing space for sheep and their wool, but the logistics of that...

[Dorftrottel]

First of all, thanks for your suggestions!
My initial idea was to avoid a sub-fortress, mainly by maximizing the chances that dwarves still unconcerned by the tantrum spiral get there before the refuse hits the windmill. My vision was a room in the middle of the fortress, reachable from the main workshop & sleeping areas and the barracks by isolated paths, to avoid the centrail stairways and overall busy hallways.
But i think a staffed sub-fortress with a skeleton crew of 5 that can be expanded to 15 in case of emergencies might by the most pragmatic way to acchieve fortress endurance without walled-in vampires.

I'm also thinking about going all-out with the concept and design my next fortress as a sealed bio-dome, with the added quirk that unhappyness is punishable by instant and hygienic death.
I would like to run this either as a community or succession game.
The story would revolve about a religios cult that's lead by a maniac cult leader into "heaven", a place without tears and loneliness. While this might be a really boring premise as the whole idea of the fortress would be to be as safe from invaders and tantrums as possible, i think there is a potential for fun when you add the delusions of grandeur of the leader and his ways to deal with unhappiness and rebellous thoughts. The main focus of the game would be megaconstructions and creative ways to make dwarfs disappear, but i would love to see it derail catastrophically.

I'm currently a bit demotivated because I absent-mindedly hit "abandon fortress" instead of "save game" on a really nice fortress, but if anybody would like to either join this game or read about it and adopt dwarves, i might give it go soon.

[Togre]

If you are getting this elaborate, you should make sure you can access the most important resource of all--more dwarfs.  An air-lock to get migrants in and safe would be good.  Or you at least need to leave yourself some way to build an air lock (ie. don't bury your panic room 10 levels deep with no access to the surface.)

[Ruhn]

So it sounds like having some panic rooms spread around the fort would be good, with each one having an airlock to a passage to the sub-fort.  Give the sub-fort plenty of defences along these internal passages, and also a triple-fool-proof exit to the surface.

After a few months stable residents would be allowed to leave their panic room in favor of the fully stocked sub-fort, those who are in tantrum land not so much.  It might be too late for my current fort, but adding passages and rooms in the next one is something I must try.