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[Valrandir]

Greetings, let's have a little text fortress.

In the place I am right now it is much wiser to type text rather than look at little moving colored squares.
Surely many of are also reading this from a similar context.

Therefore, let's play text DF.
- Virtualize the world in your head, and write down what you are doing, and what is happening.
- Once you have wrote to your satisfaction, post your reply and the next overseer can take over.
- You may also post in advance to notify that you are writing your text, and then once ready edit your post with the actual text. This may help avoid having two updates posted at the same time by different overseers.
- Try to stay as close as DF as you can according to your memory of it.

So I start with 7 dwarves, no skills assigned.
My starting items are
- 7 bronze picks
- 7 iron axe
- 25 of every underground seed
- the wooden wagon and two pack animals hauling it

We are stopping in a forest, there is no stream or any water in sight.
There are lots of trees, a mostly flat terrain and peaceful animals.

It is early spring.

What to do?

Well first we will need something to drink, to eat, and a safe place to sleep

Let's assign all jobs to all seven dwarves.

Channel an 1 x 5 entrance to the underground.
On the level below, leave a wall behind the ramps and make a rectangular 15 x 15 room

On the right of that room dig a 30 x 3 corridor, and on each side two 16 x 16 rooms to the top and two to the bottom.
Each room is connected to the corridor using a 2x2 entrance in the middle.

In bottom rooms designate one 256 squares stockpile of everything in each.

In the top left room, build two 8x8 farms on the left, and on the right of that room build two kitchen, two still, two farmer workshops, two butchers and two tanners.

In the top right room, designate a 16x16 meeting zone, two carpenter workshop, two craft workshops.

Back at the top level, designate a 21x21 zone centered on the channeled entrance for wood chopping and plant harvesting. Expand this area as needed when you need more wood and plants, but not too big at once as to let the dwarves do other jobs as well.

Once the trees and shrubs are down, make some wooden barrels and start brewing the harvested outside plants.
Also build beds until there are 10, place them in the meeting room and create a dormitory.

Butcher the two wagon animals for meat, and set your craft workshops to process the bones, skulls and horns into crafts.

It is now summer.

Start planting the embark seeds into the farms, go pig tail and plump helmets

By now we have a good startup underground shelter, we have some drinks and some food, and beds to sleep.

May the next overseer take over.

Good Luck!

[Valrandir]

Here is a quick screenshot of the situation

Code: [Select]

Ground Level

Lots of trees
. = Ground
V = Ramps
W = WALL

..........
...VVVVV..
..........

Ground - 1

                wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
                w................w....meeting.....w
                w.farm ..........w................w
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...........work.w.work...........w
w...............w...........shop.w.shop....beds...w
w...............w................w................w
w...............w................w................w
w...............w.farm...........w................w
w...............w................w................w
w...............wwwwwwww..wwwwwwwwwwwwwww..wwwwwwww
w...............w..............................w
w.....vvvvv.....w..............................w
w.....wwwww.....w..............................w
w...............wwwwwwww..wwwwwwwwwwwwwww..wwwwwwww
w...............w................w................w
w...............w................w................w
w...............w....storage.....w....storage.....w
w...............w................w................w
w...............w................w................w
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww................w................w
                w................w................w
                w................w................w
                wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww


[joeclark77]

I download the save and take the second turn.  As I am beginning the turn, a wave of migrants arrives.  Suddenly a cloud of vile dust appears on the horizon.  A migrant child and a Yak have transformed into vile dust thralls.  Within moments, the Yak has killed most of the migrants, and the child has infected four others with vile dust.  The migrant thralls waltz into the wide-open door of the fortress and hunt the living.  Death comes quickly.  The last three survivors in the meeting hall struggle in vain to construct walls to seal the meeting room doorway, but keep cancelling construction due to seeing thralls in the hallway.  Before they can finish the job, a stray vile dust thrall war dog comes in and bites their faces off.  "Your settlement has crumbled to its end."

[Valrandir]

And so Virtual Artifacts fell, to evil dust in the summer of the first year.

[thegoatgod_pan]

And so Virtual Artifacts fell, to evil dust in the summer of the first year.

Well that escalated quickly.

[joeclark77]

Come on, somebody do the reclaim!

[Valrandir]

Come on, somebody do the reclaim!

So that you can summon a giant subterranean tornado and kill it in a paragraph without actually playing the game? 
You do the reclaim man 

[Halfling]

There's a high chance of any reclaim losing immediately to the vile dust thralls now populating the fortress area. I know mine would.

[joeclark77]

OK, I promise I won't mess around with the fort anymore.  I think the reclaim could be interesting!

[Halfling]

Actually, I just realized trying to make a tamper-proof virtual fort you cannot kill is a hilarious idea. Some men may want to watch the world burn, but dammit we're going to play virtual dwarf fortress like champs regardless.

Okay. Downloading save... Done.

Reclaim setup:

7 dwarves. 1 weaponsmith-armorsmith, 1 herbalist-brewer, 1 axedwarf-teacher, 1 miner-carpenter, 1 miner-mason, 1 miner-cook, 1 slightly paranoid planter, flatterer, liar, organizer, consoler, conversationalist named Halfling.

Virtual Artifacts, reclaim year one.

We embark with 50 fungiwood wood, 1 copper pick, 10 tetrahedrite ore, 10 bituminous coal, 25 of every underground seed, and 10 chunks of gabbro.

It's really hell out here. We can hear dwarves turned into vile dust husks howling in the wind. Time to strike the earth.

We immediately dig a small underground shelter, designate it as a meeting area and once everyone is inside, use one wood to wall it off from the surface. One of the miners then caves in the wagon and our supplies. We again wall off all access to the surface. Not going to get eaten by thralls. 

Halfling is officially named expedition leader. She issues a general order: "My dear companions. Above the dead howl and prey, below the dust tornados roar and trolls claw at the cavern roof. The age of twilight is upon us. However, we dwarves of Virtual Artifacts will not fall. Wall off access to the surface. Do not dig below. We will live in simple chambers and wait for the darkness to pass."

So we dig, in the clay, in a simple cross shape, our future home. There are five 7x7 rooms, each connected by a door. The northmost one houses a smelter running on bituminous coal, a metalsmith's forge, a carpenter's shop and a mechanic's shop. The mechanic's shop is used to make two mechanisms, then dismantled and replaced with a mason's. Smelting the tetrahedrite yields 22 silver bars in addition to copper. The middle room is a dining room. It has 7 wooden tables, 7 wooden chairs and one weapon trap with 10 silver spiked balls for overall quality of legendary. The western room is a bedroom. It has 7 beds multidesignated as seven bedrooms and one weapon trap with 10 silver spiked balls for overall quality of 7 legendary bedrooms. The southern one is a farm. One 5x5 plot farms plump helmets all year round, the rest farms one seasonal crop all year round. The eastern room is a brewery/kitchen/food stockpile. We currently have 20 barrels.

All year, nothing else happens. Everyone is friends and ecstatic admiring their bedrooms, even if lack of variety in booze causes some bad thoughts. Some migrants and a caravan arrive and are promptly slaughtered. I decide to dwarf Joeclark77 as the miner-mason Urist Oramdeb. She gets married to the carpenter Oddom Lemlorul, whom I randomly rename "Fancypants". They soon have a baby, Sarvesh Eshonmaton. We now number 8.

Uploading save.

[joeclark77]

Year 2:
I download the save.

If my calculations are correct we've used 28 wood: 1 to wall off the entrance, 1 to wall off the second (caved-in) entrance, 21 for furniture, 4 for doors, and 1 to make a unit of charcoal to start the b-coal smeltering.  We started with 50 + 3 from the wagon, so we're now down to 25.  I assume that 8 gabbro remains after making 2 mechanisms, and most of it is currently tied up in the 6 workshops.

Since we cannot go to the surface, we must delve into the earth for stone, ore, and fuel.  In the southeast corner of the "cross" I delve a 4x4 room with a 2x2 down-stair in the center of it.  I dig the staircase downward through a level of fire clay but reach a point where if I try to dig any deeper, the holes fill up with water.  An aquifer!  On the one hand, we are happy to be able to wash ourselves, but on the other hand, we see no easy way to get to the stone underneath.  They never had this problem in the mountainhomes... why, oh why, did we dare to found a settlement on this wooded lowland?

I carve a staircase into the aquifer level and, using a trick known only to us in the miner's guild, ascertain that the aquifer is more than one layer deep.  My husband "Fancypants" has an idea, and uses five of our precious logs (i.e. three for the pump and two for the floor under it) to construct a machine he calls an "Archimedes screw" which he says will enable us to pump out the water and reach the stone underneath.  I am skeptical.

As I'm going over the plans, I'm informed that Halfling has detected (by means of vibrations in the soil) that a huge wave of migrants is approaching our territory.  Last autumn's vile dust thralls having wandered across the map in pursuit of wild animals, the migrants are not immediately set upon by the monstrosities.  In a daring plan, I suggest to one of the other miners (a miner-cook named "Valrandir") that he dig a kind of "escape tunnel" through the soil to the edge of the map, and a stair to the surface that migrants can enter through.  As he digs, I split a gabbro boulder into four neat blocks that can be used to wall up the long hallway, should it be necessary to seal the migrants (and Valrandir) off from the fort.

In the end, we saved Valrandir, and 23 migrants (of whom 11 are children), and some of their animals.  There are now 31 of us, and our quarters are feeling a little cramped.  On the upside, Valrandir (now back in the kitchen) has some great new flavors of meat for his stews.

I assign all of the new adult migrants to carpentry and pump operating, and begin the double-slit procedure for aquifer breaching.  12 logs are used to wall off the first layer.  We are down to 8 logs remaining.  I crack open a gabbro boulder for four stone blocks to build the 2x2 staircase on this now-dry layer.  Two elves arrived to trade but were thrallified by a passing dust cloud so we didn't let them in.  Now it is summer and we again try to smuggle in some migrants -- this time only 9 (2 are children) make it in before we are forced to replace the wall.  We are 40 dwarves now (14 children).  We have plenty of prepared meals now, but booze is becoming difficult as we have no way to make new barrels.  All we can hope to do is brew new booze as it is being drunk.  I have channeled a few holes in the top aquifer layer to serve as primitive wells.

Much to my dismay, probing of the second aquifer layer reveals that there is a third aquifer layer.  I consider our materials and what our options are.  I could dismantle three workshops (the smelter, carpenter's shop, and kitchen?) to make 12 stone blocks.  I could use some of the copper or silver bars, or even the coke we have smeltered (I believe 60 remain).  Instead, I assign some migrants to begin collecting fire clay, and I build a kiln from a gabbro block.  A potter is chosen, and ordered to begin manufacturing bricks.  We will brick off the aquifer.

The second aquifer layer is breached over a two-month period.  Some of our pump-operating migrants are starting to get some nice muscle tone... perhaps they will be good recruits for a militia when we need one.

Probing the third aquifer layer reveals a fourth aquifer layer... but it is in conglomerate stone rather than soil.  Breaching of the third aquifer layer proceeds apace.  Dwarves are becoming increasingly miserable with our cramped, damp, and dirty living conditions, and lack of variety in booze.  I have seen some of them drinking water from the aquifer, instead of booze, and this makes them feel even worse.  A human caravan and a third wave of migrants have been slaughtered and scattered on the surface, and we can do nothing for them.

The fourth aquifer layer appears to be the last one, but it proves to be tricky because I accidentally dug the holes in the wrong order.  But we have lots of dwarves here who are eager to start carving stone, and some of them know the dwarfen trick by which a smooth stone admits no passage of water.  As snow falls on the mindless thralls above (including the dwarf caravan, which came, was thrallified, and left), we finally smooth out the last aquifer layer and build a staircase.

Total cost: 12 wood (1st layer) + 4 stone (1st layer stairs) + 16 bricks (2nd layer walls+stairs) + 16 bricks (3nd layer walls+stairs) + 4 logs (last layer stairs, re-using the three wood blocks tied up in the pump).  Our stocks are now as follows: 7 logs, 28 coke, 6 gabbro boulders (tied up in workshops) and 3 gabbro blocks, 12 silver bars, and an unknown number of copper bars.  We have a couple hundred prepared meals but almost no booze because we lack the barrels to brew it.

I am a miner and mason at heart, and now, finally, I have stone I can dig into.  Spring is coming soon, and I relinquish my leadership so I can devote more time to my arts.

Uploading the save...

[Halfling]

That was mighty impressive. I kept mine simple assuming it would just get trolled, but instead you produced something really cool. _{Although I also thought killing off the fortress was funny in a very dickish way at the time.}

There would at this time be 40 bars of copper and 2 bars of silver, since 20 silver spiked balls were constructed. One charcoal would have been used to get the smelting started, producing 9 units of coke for one bituminous coal; then I processed the rest, producing 8 per unrefined coal, for a total of 81 coke. Then I used 10 coke to smelt the tetrahedrite, leaving 71. Then I used 20 coke to forge silver spiked balls, so there was 51 coke after my turn. Since you used 32 bricks, that leaves 19 coke. If you need stone you could re-make workshops out of coke ha, nevermind

[joeclark77]

Could this become an epic succession fort?  Time will tell...

[Valrandir]

Great updates 

We do have an undocumented anvil among us. Nobody registered it as embark supplies nor as trade transactions.

A dwarf probably hid it in his beard.

Now we have a safe shelter with perpetual food and drink.
We should dig ourselves a large bedroom area in the stone layers, and craft rock pots to store more booze.

Wood is going to be a problem, but why not collapse a large (64x64) platform of grass down a z-level or four, allowing us to harvest trees in total relative safety.

Once we have more space to live in the stone layers, a military could be of use.

[joeclark77]

Wood is going to be a problem, but why not collapse a large (64x64) platform of grass down a z-level or four, allowing us to harvest trees in total relative safety

Does that work?  Never tried it.  Myself I'm a fan of indoor tree farms growing cavern plants.