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[ResMar]

We should compile a list of "best challenge accepted threads" and sticky it or something.

[Baffler]

We do have the Hall of Legends in the Community Games and Stories board.

[Ancre]

Wow, this is very impressive !

[itg]

The Colony is complete and the magma sea has been refilled. I'm going to use it as a retirement home for now, and whenever I decide to declare this fortress completed I'll finally allow the king to arrive and move everyone down there.

I'll probably upload an updated save once I get everyone moved in. Right now, here are some pictures:

Spoiler: Entrance (click to show/hide)

Here is the entrance to the colony. A dwarf who wants to enter must ride a minecart over the magma and through the fortification (the wall-like thing in the middle of the tunnel). The dark triangles are impulse ramps. It's not at all obvious how the admittedly convoluted dwarven system works from the picture, so let me explain it. The dwarf is propelled forward by these ramps, makes it one tile past the side track on the opposite side of the gap, the dwarf exits the cart as it has temporarily stopped moving, then the cart it propelled backward and onto the side track, which takes the cart to the intended stop.

You sharp-eyed readers may have caught a strange feature of this two-way cart system: it's not symmetrical. The side track is closer to the final destination on the south side than it is on the north side. This is not due to carelessness. It needs to be built this way because, having verified that the slightly off-center fortification has no effect on the minecart's path, I have discovered that the minecart travels faster going south than it does going north. I do not know whether this is a quirk of impulse ramp physics or it's a strange dwarven preference for south. Is this known behavior, or does Science need to be done?

Spoiler: Dining room, some bedrooms, and nearby buildings (click to show/hide)

In the lower left is the dining room, complete with steel tables and chairs and the following artifacts: an adamantine animal trap, an adamantine statue, two other statues, and a weapon trap including a mechanism and adamantine giant axe blade.

In the lower right is a farm with attendant workshops.

In the upper right are some of the bottom level bedrooms. Each room has a nether-cap bed (I figured it must get a little toasty under the magma, so a perma-chilled bed would be nice), a steel cabinet, and two clear glass coffins, because each bedroom doubles as a tomb for its occupants. Surprisingly, this generates a ton of happy thoughts.

In the upper left is the underside of the workshop level. The inner ring of magma powers the forges. The water is piped in from the aquifer. You can't muddy the magma flow, so it's always clean.

Spoiler: Forges, bedrooms, dining room level 2 (click to show/hide)

As you can probably tell, this is just one level above the previous picture. The magma forges and smelters are in the upper left, the bedrooms are on the upper right, and there are food and drink stockpiles in an alcove above the dining hall in the lower left.

Spoiler: Artifact storeroom and glitchy terrain (click to show/hide)

On the right you see a dome with two stockpiles. The right stockpile is just metal bars, but the one on the left is all artifact finished goods. Figurines, musical instruments, and the like. This my way of putting them on display. There are about ten more on the next level up, too.

The real point of interest is actually the dividing line between two stockpiles. See the crooked line of grey squares with white dots? That's "open space." But directly below is a cast obsidian wall. This weird little glitch occurred when I built stairs on the magma sea floor and cast obsidian on top of them.

Spoiler: Offices and jail (click to show/hide)

The two left "petals" of the clover-shaped building are the offices, currently unassigned, and right petal is a jail. They're all a little bare-bones at this point.

Spoiler: Necromantic arena (click to show/hide)

I stupidly forgot to implement an effective pitting system, so I'll have to release enemies with lever-linked cages. Marksdwarves can stand on a 2nd-floor walkway and shoot at resurrected enemies below.

Spoiler: Temple to Armok, roc hatchery (click to show/hide)

At the top are some of the rocs I'm trying to breed. I managed to get some hatchlings, but the whole process is extremely unreliable since most of the eggs never hatch.

On the lower left is the first level of the Temple to Armok, with a blood sacrifice of ~30 child animals in progress, plus a few dwarf children (Don't worry, I didn't let them die). The room is floored with steel spikes and the statues are of enemies dying in particularly nasty ways, such as being impaled on spikes.

Spoiler: Hospital, temple level 2 (click to show/hide)

The hospital is at the top. It's pretty mundane, except my dwarves went nuts and overshot the target cloth stock by several million units.

Bottom left is the second level of the Temple to Armok. It's filled with skulls. Totems, to be precise.

Spoiler: Some random Overseer screenshots of the colony (click to show/hide)

I got Overseer running with WINE, so I took a few pictures before releasing the magma. They're not terribly enlightening, but I think they look kinda cool.

Spoiler: Some totally unrelated Overseer screenshots (click to show/hide)

These are some pictures of another mega project I was working on while finishing up the colony entrance and refilling the magma sea. It's 55 tiles in diameter and 15 levels high. It's made almost entirely of copper (probably about 1500 bars), plus a few hundred bars of salvaged bismuth bronze and about 30 imported native platinum blocks. Not really related to the colony, but I wanted to share and wasn't sure it merited it's own thread.

In the background you can see two other major constructions. One is a cast obsidian lava cistern which extends all the way down to the magma sea. The other is the surface portion of the main fort, build around a 31-tile (I think) diameter pit which extends to just above the magma sea. Granted, the magma sea is only about 30 levels deep on this map.

[Halfling]

Let's recap: you have a breeding program for roc birds in a clear glass bubble under a sea of magma, where you live, below the crust of the earth and just above hell, next to a temple you've built for child and puppy sacrifices and a facility for reanimating the dead for military training purposes. You're growing crops on semi-molten rock.

If there's silence, I'm sure it's because most of us really don't know what to say anymore.

[edgefigaro]

Let's recap: you have a breeding program for roc birds in a clear glass bubble under a sea of magma, where you live, below the crust of the earth and just above hell, next to a temple you've built for child and puppy sacrifices and a facility for reanimating the dead for military training purposes. You're growing crops on semi-molten rock.

If there's silence, I'm sure it's because most of us really don't know what to say anymore.

...

[dresdor]

The magma storage in the last picture looks like pasta sauce in a corningware dish.

[AutomataKittay]

The magma storage in the last picture looks like pasta sauce in a corningware dish.

Yum magmaiffic

Those are some awesome pictures and great deeds, though

[kero42]

Oh my, how awesome. That's so amazing, I can't even convey how impressed I am. Bravo.

[itg]

Neat little detail I just noticed: a magma flow tile exposed to daylight is renamed a "lava flow" tile. At the same moment, I noticed for the first time that the magma itself is renamed lava once exposed to the surface. I can't believe I made it this far without noticing something like that.

[Crashmaster]

With your sunberry hell-farm it seems you were able to dig a 2x2 hole up through the SMR from below to connect to a normally mined shaft to the surface? I had thought that only a 1-tile shaft up from hell would be possible since it revealed the surrounding tiles.
Could you correct my understanding/ elaborate on your method for this please?

edit;

Ok, I think I realized what I didn't consider - the tubes man, the tubes.

[itg]

Hehe, nothing that clever. It's actually just four separate 1x1 shafts. It might be kinda hard to tell in the screenshot due to all the blood.

[Berossus]

The only way to make this even more beautiful would be to construct it all of crystal glass... 

[Crashmaster]

Ah, ok, I was misinterpreting the tileset then.

I wonder if dfhack's magic-shovel.lua could be used to simultaneously dig a large (say 10x10) area of stairs up into the SMR?

I've had an idea of using a cave-in repeater to knock undead into a walled shaft that leads straight to an eerie pit. It would probably be more trouble then dealing with them any other way so right up my alley. My original plan was to see if I could time multiple miners to finish their stairs in the same frame. I have used similar timing techniques to complete multiple adjacent volcano breaches within a few frames of each other (before the bridge method was widely known) but it was so tedious to orchestrate I didn't want to even attempt it on a larger scale and with single-frame precision.

Probably too cheaty with dfhack to be a satisfying project though. Bottomless pit, you are sorely missed.

[itg]

Digging 1x1 shafts every other tile would probably do the job well enough, though it would be less reliable.