And how do you intend to deal with the cavern lakes with their infinite refill?
Like all problems in life, this one can be solved with magma.
Exactly. I shall cast my way to victory, even though I have no experience with pump stacks or magma obsidian casting. (Really, though, what better way to learn?)
Brief status update. I'm too lazy to post pictures right now, that'll come later.
I arrived at the embark site with thirteen picks and seven dwarves, only two of which (the dwarves, not the picks) had no mining experience at all. (They're ground support, as it were.) My immediate goal was to get the channel started around the outer edge, so I ordered the five of them to get moving. After some burrow issues (dwarves don't like to channel in burrows...?), things got rolling and the two ground support guys fixed up a temporary shelter in the center of what will eventually be the world's largest hole in the ground. A good six months passed before we were totally safe from intruders, but nothing really catastrophic happened. After the first migrant wave, I'd already finished the trench, so I decided to start tearing down the mountains and leveling out the plain on which we had arrived. Less a plain, more a slope. Ah well. One cave-in accident occurred, smashing poor Urist - I mean Catten - I mean, oh, what was his name? into oblivion. Doesn't matter. We press on. The second migrant wave showed up and had to wait on the other side of the trench before a mason could build a bridge to them. Farms are getting going underground, the still is bubbling away happily, and all's going fine when suddenly a werebeast appeared. It massacred a piglet that the migrants had brought before transforming back into a dwarf, marveling at all the !!SCIENCE!!, and leaving. I'm pretty happy it didn't kill anyone. Getting migrants into the fort from here on out without goblins and the like coming along for the ride will be quite a chore. I'm thinking of giving up on the whole "caravan" thing... it's kind of overrated anyway, what with the wagons and depots and squishy bodies needing protection from marauding goblins. One final cave-in happened which never should have happened, but it was one square of floor above a spot I hadn't noticed, so give me a break. It didn't kill the miner anyhow. She fell a few floors and walked away with a bruised heart and lung. No biggie except she's pissed now for having received major injuries, and drinking the same old booze (plump helmet wine). She can suck my pick.
We're almost ready to collapse the mountains and level this plain down to nothing, but there is one issue to clear up first: all the valuable materials lying around. Mining out an entire mountain left something like three thousand stones behind, and I don't like to let all that go to waste. I hope to salvage it all but the operation is taking longer than my patience is likely to bear. Even at maximum speed, all eighteen or nineteen dwarves dumping stone, it's taking months to make even the slightest dent. Which makes sense, honestly. Eighteen dwarves divided by three thousand stones is a lot of weary Urists. Minus breaks, sleeping, eating, and drinking, and the dwarven child who arrived yesterday will die of old age before this is done. I suppose more migrants could make the process more efficient, but with migrants might come goblin raids, and a crossbow gobbo raid right now would finish me. Or any raid, for that matter, with the bridge down. We already saw one kobold thief show up around the same time as the caravan.
The main trench is only one z deep, but it's enough to keep out ninety per cent of what this world will throw at me for the first five or six years. I can ignore migrants and caravans safely, although I haven't decided for sure that I'll do it. Maybe the caverns will change things a bit. It would be nice to get caravans in through the caverns while sieges arrived up top. But securing caverns doesn't sound like much more fun than securing topside... hm. More suggestions are necessary for the ongoing ideafication of this embark!
And yes, I'll post pictures next time. Documentation shall proceed according to some semblance of reality and regularity. It's past three AM. I'm going to bed.
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Topic: Caving In the World (Read 1789 times)