And all this epicness started just because of game generated little more dangerous FB than normally. Hell, I love this game.
kicked through the fortifications
... so you can throw creatures through fortifications? We have to weaponize this.
I told you about the stairs
I see what you did there...
It's a funny thing. Beforehand, I thought I don't have anything to do other than ending the fort somehow so it doesn't suffer an FPS death. Now, I'm developing new projects at a higher rate than the fort's dwarfpower can reasonably allow.
I believe that kicking through fortifications was discovered before by Loud Whispers in Silentthunders. Though in that case it was a creature flying over them after being shot with a crossbow bolt. It works the same way, I think.
I feel like the name of this thread should be changed to whatever the name of this fortress is, because it isn't so much about random FB's anymore, It's more about crazy stories and adventures in this fort, I'm loving it! Oh and: Greetings from Iceland!
I was considering a topic name change ever since Radavi was killed, but I've never really had any idea which seemed good enough. And there was always an uninvited guest or two lurking behind a corner. I'm not even sure how would I do it... change the subject of the original post?
Alas, my country isn't dorfy enough to have volcanoes under glaciers and the like. However, it's not lacking in terms of general mess, things that don't
make sense appear to have ever been intended to make sense and crazy overseers.
I really want a Stasno picture.
All right, I swear I'll make a backup save, look up the Legends Mode and post the FB descriptions in the art contest thread this weekend.
Okay, where did we end? Oh yes, the pterosaur. Sluste, if anybody cares about the name.
With a creak of gears and a clang of chains, the bridge was opened. The soldiers rushed out into the cold darkness of the cavern and headed towards the place where the beast was last seen. Indeed, the rustle of its mighty wings could soon be heard, and some of the more sharp-sighted dwarves swore they saw a flicker of fire in the distance. Without a second thought, the dwarves turned in its direction.
But the beast was more cunning than they expected; exploiting the cramped space of the caverns, the lack of light, and its own ability to fly over the walls it misled the soldiers following it by appearing here and there until the warriors were scattered and isolated... and vulnerable.
Ast Tradetown, a marksdwarf, was searching the underground forest like his comrades. At least he supposed that was what they were doing - he had lost track of the last of them some time ago. Suddenly he was hit by a wave of hot air, combined with the sound of igniting air somewhere disturbingly close. After taking a turn behind an orthoclase pillar, he was confronted by a horrifying scene.
The beast was there, sitting upon a spore tree, which was bent under its weight. Below lied a charred corpse vaguely identifiable as a dingo. The nearby walls were blackened by fire. But Ast didn't have much time to assess the surroundings, since dodging the fireballs flying in his direction quite obviously had a higher priority. He yelled for his companions, but could anyone hear him?
Ast wasn't going to take his chances. He raised his crossbow and pressed the trigger. The bolt impaled a joint in Sluste's right wing, and while it seemed it only made the beast more angry, it did force it to stop wildly thrashing around in the air, allowing the marksdwarf to aim with greater ease. He was running on instinct alone, deeply etched into his mind after years of practice.
Take a bolt out of the quiver. Slide it into the crossbow. Aim. Pull the trigger. There is no beast, there is only a target you have to destroy. The second missile pierced Sluste's throat, and the monster let out a garbled roar. Blood and smoke escaped its mouth.
Ast paid it no attention. Soon another bolt flew through the air and buried itself deep in the beast's chest. The blood gouting out of its wounds was beginning to form a growing pool beneath it, and its attempts of attack were noticeably becoming weaker and weaker. If both its throat and heart were opened, it was a matter of time until it succumbed to blood loss, but if the heart was intact, it might still have a slight chance of escaping and hiding in some inaccessible corner of the cavern to recover.
Ast tried to take a deep breath, but intense cough stopped it halfway through. Only then did he notice the smoke growing thicker and thicker, its acrid stench increasing in intensity. He looked around. The cavern vegetation around him was burning, leaving him no apparent way of retreat. His legs were growing weaker, and his vision blurry. He realised he had no way of making it out of there alive.
He slid another bolt into his crossbow.I hope my attempt at inserting a little story into the narrative isn't too painful to read. Yes, I had a marksdwarf kill an FB with three well-aimed bolts. For some reason, he died shortly after the FB did, to blood loss, even though I thought he didn't catch on fire. Maybe it was some other FB's goo in an unfortunate location. I floored over the site of the battle with nearby stone just in case.
Just when I was thinking things were getting quiet and normal (well, as normal as DF can be) - a welcome break from neutralising yet another threat to the fortress - I found this.
Over 100 z-levels beneath the surface, in a place never touched by sunlight, grass. Not dallisgrass, not dropseed grass, not dog's tooth grass or whatever else grows here, just a random tile of generic grass. I don't understand how is that possible.
Also, I know that the fireclowns rampaging near the cage traps might have lefts some of the cages molten, but no, the resulting glob of metal doesn't count as a cage any more. Somebody go clean this up.
WEAPONSMITH GOES MOODY
YES YES MAKE ME SOMETHING SEXY OUT OF THIS ADAMA-
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
Wait, what?
Now that's more li-
third mood?
So when it comes to of weapon artifacts I have two adamantine maces, three bone shields and two adamantine spears. It's getting kind of repetitive. Well, I guess I can't complain about three new legendary weaponsmiths and two extremely powerful polearms. Their names translate respectively to "The Ray of Circumstance" and "Dullaching". I assigned them to the
two best speardwarves only dwarves in the fortress who had any kind of experience with using spears.
Both saw combat rather quickly. The Ray of Circumstance was used against an ash humanoid, Zebu, but the killing blow was struck by Ber Hammerbearded with the pommel of the same ☼adamantine short sword☼ with which Sakzul Riddlegirder the Clean Call slew 6 Forgotten Beasts, and which was forged by the duke Kogsak Eyeringed himself. In the fight against Sanene, a red tarantula with a poisonous bite (do all spider FBs have poisonous bite?) it proved that a dwarf wielding it turns into walking, pointy death. Dullaching was apparently used to kill a magma crab, but I have no recollection of such an event.
Sanene also helped test the new safety measures in the first caverns. The road to the staircase leading to the forges is being walled off, with drawbridges providing access to the rest of the cavern. The staircase also has a retractable bridge on the top, allowing me to shut off the access to anything below with a pull of the lever. Or rather, it would, but the safeguards in the minecart route are still under construction.
That sacrificial platform didn't exactly work as designed. Not enough elevation. The donkey thrown in there simply walked out of the water with only a few bruises. I tried to make a new one in the second caverns, using the contaminated lake and a few more z-levels. As a result, I now have two dingos happily sitting in the middle of the FB goo. They're too far away from the shore to consider climbing out of there.
I received enough migrants with military experience (including a talented hammerdwarf, who also happens to be a high master wound dresser and diagnostician) to reestablish the fourth squad. The Inky Entries, formerly containing civilians for the purpose of equipping them with shields and crossbows, were redesignated as a regular military squad. The military has now 22 members. Estrur, another dinosauroid FB, provided me with the perfect opportunity to put it to a test.
Considering the fact that the upper little 2 is its entire lower body, I have to say they did quite well. The only casualty was a dwarf unlucky enough to stand on a drawbridge while it was being closed. He was launched straight into a weapon trap.
I got rid of the demon in the magma chute by putting a huge amount of giant sloth bears, dingos and war dogs into the room used to stockpile furniture to be disposed of, and then deconstructing the wall separating it from the chute. The demon only killed or injured one or two animals before being ripped to shreds by the rest of them. The dwarves were quick to clean up the remains, but the demon's snow melted in their hands and they ended up carrying globs of water.
The minecart with the large serrated discs was finally filled and launched. Since a picture supposedly says more than a thousand words, here's one instead of an experiment log. Eleven victims, mostly due to severed limbs.
The artifact/upright spear trap saved me from a clear glass web-spinning FB. It would've probably slaughtered my military with ease. Even though the spears kept glancing off, they eventually broke it in half. Its total mass was circa 25000. It's a real pity the inorganic FBs can't be processed. I had one made of star ruby...
I was going to put some Stonesense screenshots here, but they don't look right. Electrum is an alloy of equal parts gold and silver, shouldn't it be more light-coloured than gold itself instead of that brownish hue? Is anyone aware of any alternate colour schemes for Stonesense? My own search yielded nothing.
Oh, and here's one thing from long ago. I had a tantruming marksdwarf do something that I'd like to nominate for the most absurd combat event at least in the long history of the fort:
And the single most important thing in this update is me finally figuring out how to properly stockpile worn out clothing thanks to a thread here. It's now all going to a special stockpile set to be a refuse pile with no types of actual refuse allowed. It's vanishing at a positively surprising rate. Selling it all to caravans was quite tedious. I used to give out hundreds of thousands ☼ of used garments. Now I have a chance of getting rid of all the totems and crafts that have accumulated over the course of the past few decades.
* * *
I kept putting this update off, since it seemed nothing particularly exciting has been happening. Things have been much more under control lately. It clearly means something terrible is going to happen. It's the only possible explanation.
If anyone has ideas regarding the thread name change, I'm open to suggestions.
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Topic: [0.34.11] [SPOILERS] The Tale of Wirejade (Read 94512 times)