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[Sp00ky]

I started a new fort, it has the ominous name of Mortalboat.
Tale of the previous fort, Nourishtongs is here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=117819.0


The following is a series of emails from me, to a couple of friends in which i describe what's happening in my fort. its kind of a journal, but not in character or anything. I've included some of their replies to show how the conversation went


"i'm thinking about playing dwarf fortress again. if i do, it will be with full arsenal of as much assistance as i can get, the game is too much of a pain in the ass to do it 'properly' and i will do things like use DFhack to edit the game's memory to remove bloodstains on my fortress, because blood just multiplies everywhere as its badly programmed."

[Sp00ky]

i'm using all kinds of aids to make DF less painful:

1) accelerated DF modest mod
this deletes lots of unnecessary crap in the game, for example all leather types become just 'leather' instead of 'yak leather' 'toad leather', etc

Changes:
 - Standardized grass
 - Pandas eat grass instead of bamboo
 - Standardized wood
 - Less stones types
 - Several stone types leave only dust, no solid stone
 - Only one type of sand, soil and two clays (one earthenware, a second one for stoneware)
 - Aquifers removed
 - Reduntant domestic animals removed
 - Reduntant gems removes, about 70% less
 - Less clothing types
 - Less clothing worn by traders and invaders
 - Standardized toys and instruments
 - Standardized animal materials, including bones, leather and meat
 - All adv worldgens produce wide, open caverns to help pathfinding (no more mazelike caverns)
 - Removed billon, electrum, and the 3 pewters versions
 - Init tweaks for more FPS
 - Initial FPS cap set to 150
 - Weather and Temperature OFF by default
 - Embark rectangle reduced to 3x3


2) i edited the raws so my dwarfs will never have skill decay

- i also tried using modified raws so that clothes last forever, because dwarves wear stuff until it rots off their bodies (which gives them unhappy thoughts) and then you have to make them new clothes because nakedness also gives them unhappy thoughts

however, this mod for 'eternal fashion' means all clothes count as armor, and dwarves don't start with armor. so your initial 7 starting dwarves, and any subsequent immigrants, all are naked.
i couldn't be bothered to try and get a clothing industry up right at the start of the fort, i was busy carving out my pre-planned fortress layout, and they got so unhappy i got tantrums right away


3) i'm playing on a premade world called gardens of gaia, from the world_gen included with masterwork DF mod. its got every type of biome, climate, metal, ore, and everything possible, its paradise.
i still picked a really easy embark zone though, its not even slightly 'terrifying' or 'haunted', its just 'wilderness'.

one of the big pain-in-the-ass things from last time was not having any flux stone so i couldn't turn iron into steel myself. i had to trade for flux, or buy steel items and melt them down, which made making steel items really fiddly and far too many steps.

4) splintermind therapist
it's a updated fork of dwarf therapist which has loads more features and gives you more info about your guys

5) dfhack
lets you edit the game's memory, while its running. used it briefly to reveal every tile in the map, to check if the map had flux and coal and iron ores. i then un-revealed to hide it again once i'd checked. will probably also use it later to delete splattered blood from messing up my fort

6) SPEED:100
the biggest cheat of the lot. dwarves now move about 9x faster than normal. this means everything happens super fast,
also it means that a dwarf will be able to get 9x the things done before he needs a break, or that he will be able to do tasks 9x as far away before he turns back for a break

one of the other pains from my previous fort was its sheer size, and the convoluted paths that lead to the very bottom layers. i think my magma level was on layer -170 or so, but it was a ~500 tile walk to get there from the top of the fort, so work down there took forever to get done

because dwarves are so fast now, i don't have to dig spaces out as i need them, which leads to a patchwork of rooms. instead, i can just designate them to dig out a 20x20x20 cube and place buildings in a nice orderly (but sterile) layout
it also means there's no point in getting them to follow a mineral vein, i can just dig out vast areas.



all of this, plus my previous experience, plus the wiki, means the game is loads easier for me now
i am a bit worried i have taken a lot of the mystery out of the game, and made the monsters too easy, but if i want more dangerous sieges i can just produce more wealth

i need a mega-project to make it interesting, and i think fuel is going to be the one.
i have lots and lots of ore, and loads of sand, so i could make a big glass metal industries but both use fuel.
furnaces have 3 options for energy: coal, wood, magma.

coal: i have loads but will eventually run out

wood: i could pierce the caverns in the deeps and that then makes fungal cave-trees grow anywhere underground with muddy stone floors (so if i flood some areas i can make a tree farm)

magma: i could dig really far down to the bottom of the map and build a pump-stack to lift magma up, to power magma forges

pumps require energy though, so i would need lots of waterwheels. i could tap the river and dump the water into the cavern and put waterwheels on the resulting flow...

[Sp00ky]

The Tundra Titan "Mogem Setoini Shace Mogem" (Mogem Beanstraps the Glacier of Dens) has come!
A gigantic theropod with external ribs. It has a pair of long antennae and it undulates rhythmically. Its aqua feathers are long and narrow. Beware its poisonous sting!

theropods are dinosaurs like trex... and poison is usually fatal

ohh crap.
this happened just after i'd got my 3rd immigrant wave, taking my population from 19 to 43. i have no military at all but was just about to start assigning some of the new guys to an axe squad. unfortunately i also have no armor or base defenses at all apart from 1 gate.
Gonna have to activate 'burrow' mode and hide inside, hopefully the immigrants will make it inside before the titan gets to my gate, then make armor and weapons as quick as possible. i have enough farming and industry set up to survive but will have to turn all my wood stockpile into charcoal to fire the forges, as i dont have any coal about

last time in my fortress, at roughly this stage i had a were-iguana attack. which is a normal iguana that, due to a supernatural curse, transforms in the full moon into a slightly stronger iguana. now i have a poisonous trex on my doorstep


ok so i started trying to make orders but it's all happening super fast
the titan charged a yak calf in pasture, then chased a fisherdwarf around outside. the wardogs have all piled out of the entrance and rushed it, while a hunter i forgot had a crossbow has been peppering it with the copper bolts that i was making to train weaponsmith skill,

unfortunately the titan is really tough and all the attacks are just bruising it, tearing its fat layers, and damaging its tendons. i need it to have its limbs flying off in bloody arcs like proper steel axe wielding dwarves would manage :/

fortunately the titan doesn't seem to be that dangerous, it punched  a dog in the guts and the dog survived

the hunter ran out of ammo, or ran away... and now its just 10 wardogs. they're getting bruised and scratched but they seem to be doing well. they latch on with bites, but the titan has too much strength so he immediately breaks their grip. i think they're having an effect because it's now 'enraged'

2 dogs have died, 8 remain. the titan has a huge list of very minor wounds "... its tongue is torn open, its third toe right foot is bruised, its right eyelid is dented, its guts is dented, its right lung is dented..."  and so on for maybe 30 things. i hope it can bleed out, because this would take a long time otherwise

hmm not going well. i have forged several axes now, but more dogs have died, some have run off, and only 3 remain in the fight. they're surrounded by blood and gore
no sign of that hunter, i will have to see if they went for more bolts or just a snooze (probably a snooze)

found the hunter, was asleep. unfortunately she's a female and has a baby... so if i send her into battle the baby is quite likely to die, and that gives big unhappy thoughts to the whole family. rough chuckles!

ok so she's going in
also got some axes made so going to send a squad of plebs (fish cleaners, herbalists, glassmakers) in. i'd allocated 10 males for this job but one of them dodges the draft by having a Strange Mood and commandeering a workshop to start a mysterious construction. (he made Nakistaron, a wooden crown. fairly useless and didn't give any skill gain)

ok so i'd just been getting the axe squad ready, they need some time to go get equipment before sending them 'kill' orders. however, the hunter went in,... with a ≡Steel Battle Axe≡ instead of replenishing ammo, probably my fault.
the titan died somehow, not sure. but she died herself. the titan bit her in the leg and ripped it off. the baby also died in a similar way, the titan bit its foot off and it bled to death immediately.
only survivors were 3 badly broken wardogs

hunter had no axe skill, but was successful just because of sheer attack speed from the speedhack i put in. will need to sort this all out better. need to make a couple of coffins now :/

[Sp00ky]

you'll all be pleased to know that my new fortress is now well established, with a well trained military, all equipped with exceptional or masterwork steel armor and weapons.
I've had a couple more titans turn up, a dragon, a roc (dragon-size bird) a couple of werepigs, several squads of goblin ambushers, various kobold snatchers and thieves, and 1 minor goblin siege.

all of these threats were butchered into high-velocity chunks by axelords, because i've still got the [SPEED:100] cheat active that means they are 9x faster than standard.
i wanted it just to boost their movement speed, but it also affects attack speed, so fighting against my axe squad is probably like trying to kiss a industrial woodchipper.

the dragon was quite impressive, i'd not seen one in action before. my surface level is a sandy floored woodland, mostly deforested around my entrance, but the dragon breath set everything on fire. all grass turned to ash instantly in a big cone in front of him, and everything else (plants, corpses, dwarves) set on fire. some of it still burning, months later.

i sort of doubt another dragon will turn up, i have a sad feeling they might be unique.
however, i might build a flame bunker to try and trap one in... muahah.
so it'd be a small room on level -1 lined with fortifications on one side. the other side of the fortification would be a large underground blast-chamber to roast attackers, who would be lured in by a tethered bait-dog positioned out of sight.
i think i'll build this and connect up the required gates anyway, on the offchance another dragon will come.


unfortunately the speedhack seems to have had unexpected an side-effect, on the dwarvern birthrate. my population has exploded to over 220 without me even noticing how.
i'm building bedrooms 30x at a time, and constantly get notices about someone has given birth, and a quarter of the population is useless children and babies

(Monday morning challenge: try not to imagine these bearded subterranean sexual encounters happening 9x as fast, and 9x as frequently, as you'd though possible)

another result of the super-speed dwarves, all tasks are happening super-fast. so i have typically half my population just idling in the dining room. fortunately i had the experience from previous forts to make this dining room huge, full of gold tables and platinum statues to keep the bearded folk happy.

because of this, i've got a large amount of spare manual labour available. so if i want to do a magma pumpstack to lift lava from the bottom of the map to the fortress levels (for use in magma forges, as i keep running out of coal) i potentially can asign 100 dwarves to 'pump operating' labour to do it, rather than the normal method of using waterwheels to power it.

a pump uses 10 power, a waterwheel provides 170. because of how this game is 'uniquely' programmed, a pump propells enough water to turn a waterwheel. so you can make a self contained 'Dwarven Water Reactor' which generates big excess of power, despite this making no sense. i'd need a battery of maybe 10 of these to lift the magma.

a magma pump is my next big project then, and my biggest, dwarfiest one to date.
 

other things i did recently which i am pleased with, is make a well by tapping the river and sending water into a small cistern, accessible from next to my hospital.
it went smoothly, only 1 minor flooding accident due to forgetting to channel out some of the flooring.


I made a skylight too, it's a 10x10 square on the outside ground level that i channeled out, and then roofed over. cutting the ceiling off the first subterranean level exposes it to sunlight, and then if you roof it over, it still counts as being above ground despite being now sealed back in.
i cut it down 3 levels, and roofed it over with green glass blocks. the game treats glass and stone exactly the same for this purpose, but it felt less exploity to use sheets of glass to illuminate and seal my fort in.

So now a 10x10 square of my dining hall, at the top of my fort (but 3 levels below ground) now counts as being 'Light' and 'Above Ground', which will stop my dwarves getting too cave-adapted, which would have caused them to vomit when they go outside.

it went smoothly, with only 1 cave-in accident:
a miner dug a tile of floor that was supporting the one he was standing on, so fell into the dining hall, smashed through the floor, fell into a food stockpile and broke through the floor again, dismantling the food stockpile (this could have been fatal for the fort if i'd not noticed, as food outside of a food stockpile will rot)

he kept falling, crashing through floors, wrecking buildings, for 10 levels, until he ended up in the lowest part that wasn't excavated, someone's bedroom.
he'd broken most of his major bones but still survived, i guess mining is good for gaining toughness. the miner is still in traction in the hospital for his arm and shoulder, half a year after the accident. his 'treatment received' list is 5-6 pages long, but he looks like he might recover fully

[Sp00ky]

From SA:
Go invincible miner! I'll try to focus on the thought of him in traction and not the thought of your 9x sex dungeon, which is what you've managed to turn DF into.

From DA:
More dwarf fortress stories. More. I super Texas-style love these.
It makes me want to play, though I know I will hate it. However, after playing at least two hours of Supreme Commander 2 I now believe my new strategy-fu technique to be unstoppable and am as ready as I will ever be. That said, vanilla dwarf fortress looks like having ground-up typewriters rubbed in your eyes. I want pretty. If I can't have bump-mapped, phong-shaded dwarves with anti-aliased DX11 tessellated beards then I will settle for it having at least some graphics, and not being a horrible ascii nightmare like that bit in the Matrix. Come correct, and hook a brother up with teh modz.

this game has got me bad, again. i woke up in the middle of the night, mind whirring about the intrictacies of pumping magma.

basic plan is going to  be like this:

1) sink a staircase down to magma level (level -85)

2) have a break in the staircase half way down with a horizontal lobby that can be trapped and has a gate, so access to the depths can be shut off from my fort in case of badness

3) open out a workshop area on the floor above the magma, channel out some floor tiles to let the forges and furnaces have access to their new energy source

4) build magma glass workshops at -85

5) build a staircase that goes up from the magma workshop level up, to the sand level just below the surface, and designate a sand collection zone.
keep this staircase isolated from the rest of the fort

with sand and magma power, can churn out endless amounts of glass products, limited only by the 85-level hauling distance

6) components for 1 screw pump are: 1 block, 1 pipe, 1 enormous corkscrew
pipes made of glass are called tubes
glass is magma safe, that is it will not melt or catch fire. some stone is magma safe but most of my map is rock-salt which isn't magma safe

so i could make blocks from stone, but i'd have to filter out the non safe ones. i have gabbro and dolomite on the map that're safe, maybe a good way to do this actually would be to set up a new mason workshop in the middle of a gabbro stone area...

could make pipe and corkscrew from metal, but it'd use up most of my iron and coal.

so i'm gonna get my guys to haul hundreds of bags of sand down 85 sets of stairs to make 80 green glass screwpumps.

i could get them to use the glassworks in my main fort, but they're powered by coal which i keep running out of - the whole point of this is to get magma up so i can use it in my fort

ore and stone are limited by the amount of the map you dig, but sand from a collection zone never runs out, heat from magma never runs out.
bags are resusable once they're emptied of sand, so once this is set up i could build unlimited amounts of green glass products and constructions


7) build elaborate screwpump stack
a screwpump is a 2x1 tile building, that takes liquid from a level below it on the narrow end, and moves it to the same level on the other narrow end.
each pump then will move liquid up 1 level, and along by 3 tiles

so you put them top-to-tail above each other, so that the one above pulls its input from the output of the one below it and so on upwards
i need to also dodge the stack around the cavern layers, but this should be fairly easy if i am careful

pump magma upward into a tank / cistern inside my fort

9) channel some access holes over the magma cistern, and enjoy the benefits of unlimited energy for my forges, workshops, smelters and kilns


i'm currently in the middle of step 6, building the glass components in the workshop at the bottom of the map.
quite uncertain how exactly step 7 is going to go, it will be complicated and tricky.


in other news, my dwarves have been getting various Strange Moods and making artifacts. one of them couldn't get the components he wanted, went mental and died. most of them have been possession moods which don't grant a skillup.
3-4 of them have been useless, like a wooden earring, a wooden cup.
3 of them have been buildable so i can deploy them in the dining room to be admired, have had a wooden hatchcover, a bauxite cabinet, and some kind of mechanism that i used to make a lever

anyway finally someone made something of military value, a gold warhammer. gold is a pretty good material for blunt weapons as its very dense, it's a close 2nd behind platinum, though i don't know if its softness is an issue.
this artifact is also insanely valuable, at least 1800x the value of a basic tin warhammer and probably a significant fraction of the worth of my total fortress

oh just found out why there's no info about the softness of gold for weapons, its because normally you can never make weapons or armor out of certain metals. so gold warhammer can *only* be made by a Strange Mood, wooo that makes it even more special. its nearly twice the density of silver, which is what i normally use for hammers.

[Sp00ky]

progress on the magma pump stack continues apace. its getting close, so close

i decided against caution, and settled for ambition
its going to be a complete run of 80 levels, instead of broken into sections
its going to be powered by waterwheels, instead of a manual labour

this means even after i've got enough magma up to fort-level to make smithing easy, i can also still have the machinery in place to get as much more magma as i want for later endeavours

so i built a powerstation on the river, which is 4 tiles wide. i put 4 rows of 4 wheels there, producing 1600 units of power. only gonna need about 800 for the pumps and maybe 200-300 for transmission losses, so i've got extra capacity, again for any later endeavours

the entire wheel array is enclosed in a secure building, 4 walls and a roof and no door, means nothing should be able to destroy it (apart from an amphibious titan). power is routed through axles underground, though it doesn't yet start its descent downward through my fort to meet up with the pumps.

the wheels are connected to gear assemblies, and axles lead off the gears to a master-gear which combines them all. this gear is linked to a lever in my main fort so i can deactivate power transmission if something goes fruity. i used the lever made from a bauxite artifact mechanism for this, seems appropriate.


the pumpstack itself is mostly complete from level -85 to my security lobby floor at about level -40

here's schematic of a sample level, of the style i'm using


==a===
==a===
==D=m=
=.pPM=
====m=
======


='s are walls
D is a door
a is access route, to stairs or whatever

. is a channelled tile, giving access to magma in the level below

p and P is the pump itself
lower-case p is the input side, which draws from the level below via the '.' channelled tile
upper-case P is the output side
underneath this tile is channelled out to give access for power transmission from pump to pump, so they count as touching. this also means each pump partially is supported by the one below (so if the bottom one gets destroyed, all of them will collapse)

m and M and m are magma on the outlet side
uppercase M is where the magma is sent to by this pump, and then drawn from by the inlet of the pump above
lowercase m is a pair of magma tiles which flank the middle one, there's some technical reason but basically it eliminates massive FPS drain caused by tempurature calculations- the 'm' tiles keep all tiles surrounding 'M' at high temp.

alternating layers are a mirror of this, or exactly this (lefthand, righthand, lefthand, righthand, etc, as the inlet must always be over the outlet of the one below, the pumps sit top-to-tail above each other)

this means that the door and access route need to flip side to side, as well. unfortunately the first thing i dug was a column of access routes all vertically aligned, but they need to be offset by 1 tile in like a zigzag pattern vertically. had to build a lot of wall to fix that.



a few things i learnt about pumping last night
-pumps don't have enough pressure to raise liquid above their own level, so you can contain the output chamber with walls, you don't need to also contain it with a roof on top

-making pump stack requires RSI-amounts of keystrokes
you have to dig out 4x1 tiles then 1x3 to make a T shape then 1x2 to make an access route, channel 2 single tiles, place a door, finally place and rotate the pump
you can't do multi-level designations for any of this apart from the original 4x1 because it zigzags back and forth

fortunately at work i've been using autohotkey a lot so can get it to run simple macro scripts to press keys for me in loops


-i have loads of bauxite on the map which is magma safe, and used it to make blocks for the pumps, and 80 doors for the access routes.
one thing i never realised before is in the stocks screen, you can forbid stuff by material type. so i forbid every stone type but bauxite, to ensure the blocks and doors were made from it instead of rock salt or whatever

unfortunately this also means all the various rocks that were laying about in the way of where i wanted to place doors or pumps, were now un-movable so had to unforbid those and dump them

i also forbid all the nonbauxite doors on the map so i didn't accidentally build with non magma-safe doors, but i need to check and revert this setting because i think it may have affected all the doors which are placed, which would cut off access to all my bedrooms, which would cause multiple fatalities....

population is levelling off about 250. i think once i passed pop cap (200) i stop getting migrants, and females stop getting pregnant. this means there must have been ~50 pregnant dwarf women in the fort at the time when i passed 200, that'd have been the majority of all adult females. horny feckers.
remarkably, 200+ of my 250 population is at maximum happiness, woooo

[Sp00ky]

From SA:
"A few things I learnt about pumping last night"

I think we've all had nights like that.
When the fleet's in.

yes... yes. i walked into that.

[Sp00ky]

forbidding all doors doesn't lock them so my dwarves weren't trapped in their bedrooms. it just means when i try to build a door, it only gives me the choice of the door types that're unforbidden, so i'm using this to filter for magma-safe types.

there's been more births, so maybe my population growth hasn't levelled off. i guess i was just spending more time with the game paused while doing fiddly construction stuff. i've stopped getting migrants though.

speaking of the pump stack, its reached level -22 or so, and is now starting to push upwards through the interior of my fort. still not connected to power to see if i missed anything, or started pumping to see if i made any fatal mistakes
this is more complicated as most of my levels are differently laid out, its not just a matter of digging now, instead if a level has already been strip-mined at that location i have to build containment walls around the stack

normally i'm just using each pump to support the one below it, so if the bottom one is destroyed, all of them will collapse.
so as a safety feature, at levels -65, -45 and -25 i've to put in a side-branch of gear assembly, its like a power-take-off which leeches 5 power for each one (but there's plenty of excess power) but importantly, each gear assembly can support the rest of the stack. so if i get damage, at most i should lose 19 pumps instead of all of them

 

for some unknown reason my farms had stopped working and i very nearly ran out of food.
that miner who collapsed caverns and fell 10 levels through my fort, is still on a traction bench in hospital after a couple of years. don't know what it requires to fix this, the hospital is stocked with everything it needs. she was brutally injured though, so maybe will never recover.

anyway, if someone is hospitalised they require food brought to their bed. so i was getting cancellation spam about no food available to bring to the miner, which made me notice.

i also wanted to try and get a LOAD of plant-thread produced so i can start weaving cloth and ultimately making clothes. but without farming working, i wasn't getting any crops.

so i turned a load of useless peasants into farmers and designated more fields, and now they're over producing. i think i should turn farming off on the unskilled ones as a highly skilled planter results in more crops in each stack

[Sp00ky]

From SA:
That's all well and good.
But in my game [warframe] when I press 4 I release an expanding shockwave of electricity that causes the weapons and gear of enemies to EXPLODE.

But you know, them dwarfs need their pants to. Weave faster!

they DO need their pants, its true!


my fort qualifies as a County now, so i have a Countess who is the highest ranked nobility, and also the most unhappy dwarf in the fort.

She's unhappy because her clothes are worn out. also because her quarters aren't lavish enough, and she was jealous of the quarters of my major.
she actually threw a tantrum, which is the first bad behaviour i've had from any of the dwarves in this fort so far. she's subdued a bit now that i put a load of silver statues in her rooms to boost their value

she has a bit of an apartment actually, its 4-5 rooms, each several times bigger than a standard dwarf bedroom (which is a meagre 3 tiles)

she has a coffin in 1 room as a personal tomb, which is elaborate enough to count as a mausoleaum
she has a table and chair in another room which is splendid enough to count as a grand dining room
she has another table in a study room which is stately enough to count as a throne room



ultimately in a mature fort, everything has stablised and is secure, and built. food and booze production is balanced against consumption because you can't harvest more than your stockpiles will hold.

to maintain stability, one of the only real things the player needs to do, is keep the dwarves in clothes. it becomes a super-elaborate pants crafting game

that's probably why people embark on megaprojects, because a stable fortress is a dull fortress, and no one wants to be the player who is working just to keep their dwarves in pants.

[Sp00ky]

From SA:
New this Christmas
The game everyone's talking about
It's finally here

Pants Craft Manager 2070


The endless hordes - only one thing stands between them and their shame, You are Pants Craft Manager.

p.s that bloody dwarf best be happy now! Throne room, Dinning estates, Death Palace. I think this is the first time i've been jealous of a software Dwarf.
p.p.s KILL HER!

she is now happy, however i was thinking about killing her actually, yea. i think if i do, then someone else gets promoted to the position though.

any requests on how she should die?

i have lots of options, because almost everything in the game can be weaponized, even pants
(the game doesn't model air resistance, so everything falls without air-drag. given a long enough flight time, a falling sock can be a deadly projectile)

[Sp00ky]

From SA:
Weaponized Pants.
Deadly, but stylish
I still remember my early day of WoW, when you turned up and crafted me magic pants for a few levels ahead.

I think, if she must die, it must be pants related.

death by pants, it is then

[Sp00ky]

do u want  me to kill the noble or not?

From SA:
............
............
I am vengence!

I am the LORD!

Tantrums will not be tolatated!

..........
no..........she can live. I am a fairy lord.

From OM:
KILL HER!!!

Ideal method: Meatillery (Trebuchet, Cow, a keen eye for distance and windspeed, then BLAMO!!)

[Sp00ky]

unsure if SA meant 'fairy' or 'fair', haha
i think i will leave the final decision up to him, but here's some thoughts in the meantime:

can build catapults and ballistas but they only fire rocks and ballista bolts.

apparently you can fling objects / creatures with a long drawbridge, as it raises
instantly. items thus flung will follow parabolic arcs within the constraints of the space around them

could maybe use pressurised water, if you have a tall container of water and open a hole at the bottom, it rushes out in a pressure jet enough to wash things away.
with enough pressure the jet itself can kill.

do you want me to fire the noble, or fire cows at the noble?

i've not seen any cows but i can probably buy more yaks off traders, i've already butchered the original yaks that hauled my starting wagon. worst case, i can kill some human traders and steal their yaks, don't really need much trade anymore...

would have to conduct firing tests to see where a meat projectile would land, and therefore where the noble's new bedroom will be placed... probably have to do this outside so that it doesn't hit any ceilings


one thing i am keen to try is a magma trap: build a retracting bridge, pump magma out over it, pull the lever and dump magma onto whatever's below

[Sp00ky]

From OM:
Build an incredibly lavish throne room, with a huge ornate throne....sitting on a trapdoor...above a shark tank.

...and don't you dare tell me there are no sharks in DF!

there are sharks and I could do all of that but there's no sea on my map sadly.

you can capture sea creatures by digging a bay on the side of the sea with a gate to let water in, having tiled the floor with cage traps. when they are in the cages, shut the gate and pump water out

someone discovered that mermaid bones have an incredibly high material value so they developed a mermaid farm with leeshed mermaids in 4/7 depth water, deep enough so they dont airdrown, but also shallow enough that it could still be periodically flooded to sluice any newborn merbabies into a pit to be harvested. I love this game.

[Sp00ky]

morning

had a fairly quiet weekend, a few casual pints but generally not busy. lots of dwarf fortress instead


biggest news is i finished the pump stack. but first, 3 screenshots
these are from using DFhack to export the save, and then using fortress overseer to load it in as a 3D model you can fly around and look at



first picture with red at the bottom is the bottom half of the map, with magma layers shown.
the column rising from it is my pump stack

not shown, is any of the cavern layers (i cheated to avoid them)
also any stone that i've not dug out is invisible

the top right of the image shows my main staircase going down, but then stopping and going horizontally to join with the pump stack. that horizontal corridor is the only access to the pumpstack, which is otherwise sealed despite spearing upwards through the middle of my fort




this picture shows the pump stack going upwards into the bottom of my fort, which is above the camera in this shot. its hard to see what's going on inside the fort but its roughly a cube shape dug out underground, but with some extra slice layer type things sticking out from my strip mining




this final picture shows the outside, you can see some of the treetops but it doesn't render too far into the distance, so i can't show the entire of the outside. it stops showing trees in the top of the image


ok so i finished the pump stack, powered by waterwheels it lifts magma from level -85 up to level -8, to power my forges on level -7
i checked everything so carefully, and it all worked first time. much relief when i saw magma flowing nicely into containment
then afterwards, the game immediately became less exciting. after this major project was completed, that i'd worked towards for so long, i am left with the feeling that this fort doesn't really need anything more done for it. its now stable and mature, and also runs slowly now.


however, there's always more things you can do, i guess its like lego. once you do the model that the box set gives instructions for, the lego doesn't become useless, you can instead make other things with it according to your imagination.


so since then, i've crafted 30x full sets of masterwork steel armor, and melted all the other stuff. once it was made, i drafted another 10 guys into a hammer squad, and gave the artifact gold hammer to its captain. a masterwork silver warhammer is already devastating, the artifact gold one should be approx 5x as powerful.

i finally got a textile industry running properly and made 10 years worth of pants, cloaks, and shoes and bags

i finally got that miner out of hospital. there was nothing wrong with her anymore, she was just lingering on the traction bench. the game has a bug where no action happens to get people out of traction when they're recovered.
i desconstructed the bench out from under her, and she immediately jogged out the hospital.
looking at her medical records, the injury was in the year 104, and now its 112. she'd spent EIGHT YEARS on the traction bench for no reason. this is long enough for her clothes to rot off her body years ago, so presumably she was jogging to the finished goods stockpile to get some fresh pants.


i embarked on a massive glass-block production endeavour, with the intention of enclosing ground level of the entire map.
my map is 144x144 tiles square, with -85 levels below ground and 16 'air' levels above ground

first step was to build a wall around the entire perimeter, 5 tiles away from the map-edge (you can't build walls closer)
this also gives the 3x3 trader's wagons space to route around the map edge

half way along the 4 map edges, built a 4-wide road for access to the center of map

this means i've kind of divided the map into 4, each quarter is a big 70x70 field with access only via doors at the center of the map.

wagons can be blocked by trees, so to stop trees growing i've laid paved roads over all of these roads, and also over 5 tiles wide around the external edge of the map


my axe and hammer squads are set to patrol the perimeter roads around the map, i expected them to move in a group but they're spread out so i guess that means no kobold thieves are gonna sneak through.



the step after that was to build a roof over the entire map, above my 4 fields, to stop flyers getting in. this required approx 19000 blocks. its almost complete, ~300 to go.
you can kinda see this at an earlier stage, on the external above ground screenshot from above (trees are shown poking through the ceiling layer unfortunately)

glass flooring can be done in 10x10 chunks at a time, and block production can be left on 'r'epeat, but i had supply chain problems that limited the output.
basically, for every magma glass furnace that i had a legendary glassworker in producing glass blocks, i needed several regular glass furnaces with 'collect sand' jobs set to repeat to supply him.
any dwarf can collect sand, but it's 6 z-levels away to the sand layer so they don't do it fast enough before the glassworker turns it all into glass, runs out of sand, and cancels production.
no matter how many 'collect sand' workshops i have, my population will only collect sand fast enough to keep up with 3 legendary glassworkers.

anyway, this massive landgrab is now pretty much complete, and i've built a literal glass ceiling over my dwarves. it means i've secured the outdoors and can do pasture farming of cattle, can cut down as many trees as i want without risk to civilians.

next step will be to extend the pumpstack above ground, to collect in a magma cistern, in order to dump it over my enemies. hopefully automated with pressure plates and such, but i need to figure out how this would work



ohh, speaking of premeditated murder, experiments have been conducted with a raising drawbridge to execute the noble.
i got couple of caged animals off traders, built a 1x10 long narrow bridge and pitted a capybara onto the bridge from above, with the lever being pulled on repeat.
i guess the lever was retracted when it fell though as it just landed on the ground, and rather than put it back in a cage for another go, i butchered it

next up was a bilou, pitted it, then pulled the lever. it splattered into red paste but didn't fly anywhere, i think it hit the underside of the platform i was pitting from?

so deconstructed the pitting platform, and pastured a dog in a 1-tile pasture zone at the end of the bridge, set the camera tracking to follow the dog, and pulled the lever. not sure exactly what happened but it didn't fly anywhere, it didn't seem to fall directly either. anyway it just landed on the ground with a bruised lung, and got sent to the butcher as well.

unless i was doing something wrong, we might need a different plan for the duchess's demise.