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[megahelmet]

So as I understand the applications of this:

I can't use this to make a shortcut straight to hell, since I would need to be able to build walls/stairs up to the SMR from the slade and pinching the SMR with the stairs/walls column up to the sky.

After doing the above, I could have a pit that goes straight the world and drops off into the bottomless erie pits?

I have an immense desire to send things into a falling oblivion where there shall be no release until they die from starvation.

[itg]

ITG, I think you should get the nickname Dr Strangelove.

Seriously, complete elimination of the entire embark down to the slade floors of hell itself is basically the quintessential doomsday machine.

However, supporting a dangly chunk of SMR above the world on a tiny thread and then building a massive colony on that support is interesting. Does that mean that spawning a single obsidian wall at the topmost portion of the map, putting a single "wall" of SMR directly undearneath it, and then normal constructed wall underneat that, that you could build an entire colony off from it like a wasp nest?

Mein Führer! I can WA--

Uhh, I mean, That's pretty much what I would have guessed a few days ago, but right now it appears it's actually the top of the SMR tile that is the critical source of support. For example, I tested exactly what you described, and the SMR behaved no differently than a normal wall. If you attach a floor adjacent to the "lava flow" tile on the top of the SMR wall, though, it stays up, even if the SMR is floating freely in space.

I guess what I'm saying is, in essence you CAN do a wasp's nest fort, but you need to hang it on the lava flow on top of an SMR wall. I'm still pinning down the details of these bizarre physics, so there might be other ways out there.

So as I understand the applications of this:

I can't use this to make a shortcut straight to hell, since I would need to be able to build walls/stairs up to the SMR from the slade and pinching the SMR with the stairs/walls column up to the sky.

After doing the above, I could have a pit that goes straight the world and drops off into the bottomless erie pits?

I have an immense desire to send things into a falling oblivion where there shall be no release until they die from starvation.

That was certainly my hope, but now it seems that if you drop natural tiles into the eerie pits, they crush the eerie glowing pit, sitting on the bottom of the map rather than getting swallowed up. This is the same thing they ran into in the old SMR mining thread, now that I think of it.

So, the bad news is, at this point, there's no way to get any more than a set of 1x1 eerie glowing pits at the surface level (You can do this by digging stairs upward through the SMR. It's not really related to the cave-in physics of this thread). The good news is, you can utterly destroy Hell, encasing the whole thing in indestructible semi-molten rock.

That's my current take on things, at any rate. This is all subject to change as I do more experiments.

By the way, you're correct that you can't use this to make a shortcut to Hell, as far as I'm aware at this point.

Oh wow. This is truly dwarvenly.

Can these methods be used to create a moat? I'd love to try making the worlds deepest magma moat using this kind of trick....

Definitely. I'd say it's a doable project if you stop at SMR level, but with enough dedication, you theoretically go even lower...

[wierd]

A shame about the eerie glowing pit problem.

I really like the idea of a floating tetrahedron of obsidian, hovering menacingly over a massive crater with eerie glowing and the screams of the damned eminating from the abyssal depths below.

Accessibly only (ONLY!) Via a single, deployable drawbridge over the gaping cavernous maw of hell.


Style points bonus:

Place 5 tiles of SMR at the edge of the map at the level you want to have caravans spawn on, and permit the magma flow tiles to create a permanent magma fall underneath the bridge, cascading into the errie glowing pits, and on the sides, put masterwork obsidian statues of demons and FBs.

(If we imagine the bridge entering from the west:  5 wide vertical strip of SMR, with the 2 terminal ends having support poles reaching up to the sky. This is carried out another 5 tiles toward the east. Constructed/cast flooring on top of the magma source tiles. Another 2 columns leading up to the sky on the east-facing terminal edge. Along the N/S borders you put 6 horible statues. That leaves a 3x5 landing area for merchants and migrants (and invaders) to spawn on. After that, the floating tetrahedron of dispair is a "wasp nest" type construction, with an extendable bridge leading to the landing. The SMR support at the top is designed to allow the magma flow tile to flow, and the magma is channeled through the fortress, and "bleeds" out the bottom. Magma likewise bleeds out of the bridge landing.)

I see it in my head, and it is beautiful... a shame I will have to make flagrant use of DFHack to make it...

[itg]

As promised, here are pictures and instructions for caving in SMR. I did it on the map's edge, too, for extra difficulty points. Casting obsidian up there is a real bitch, but some savescumming trial runs, I got it to work.

Why mess with obsidian casting? Turns out you can't build supports withing 5 tiles of the map's edge, and as you probably knew, you can't build walls or fortifications there, either. Making things even more awkward, you can't build track stops on the top level (so using minecarts to move magma is virtually impossible), and you can't really use buckets of water (since dwarves won't empty a bucket onto the level they are standing on). Basically, your only option is to pump both magma and water up to the top level, then somehow control the flow so you only cast obsidian where you want it, since casting anywhere else will probably block you from casting on the intended tiles.

Spoiler: Obsidian casting rig (click to show/hide)

In the above picture, you see my casting rig just after successfully casting on all necessary tiles. It's a bit of a mess. The pump stacks were located in the lower right corner of the picture. Water went through the long pipe to the left side, magma took the short pipe to the right side.

The plan was to cast the right wall first by flooding the middle area with water to about 2/7 (using a bridge to block the water from entering the magma shaft), then "disabling" that bridge (see this thread), causing the magma to spill onto the water, casting a line of obsidian just to the left of the bridge. To do the left wall, I carved fortifications in the right wall to let the magma through, then did the same thing, except this time the magma filled up the middle area.

As you might guess from the picture, there was a lot of spillover in the middle area, and it did set a lot of the map on fire. It's not necessary to do it that way.

Spoiler: Cavern Preparations (click to show/hide)

In each cavern, you need to build a structure to extend the sky support downward. Stairs are easiest. The structure shown extends upward to the cavern ceiling, and I built similar structures in all three caverns.

Spoiler: HFS Preparations (click to show/hide)

I built stairs underneath all SMR tiles I wanted to cave in. After building these stairs, removing any last support should be enough to bring down the whole column, SMR included.

Spoiler: Aftermath (click to show/hide)

In the first shot, you can clearly see that the edge of the map, normally unminable, has collapsed. That edge has been permanently lowered by 5-10 z-levels. Unfortunately, it cannot be further collapsed, because the edge is unminable and it has caved in as far as it can go. An edge created over the magma sea could be totally destroyed, because the magma flow tiles would still swallow the cave-in.

The column is not swallowed by the eerie glowing pit. Instead, it sits on the bottom of the map. Since the bottom of the map is at two different levels in my site, and the column fell on the border between the two areas, the column was split slightly.

At this point, if you did not have too many layers of SMR, you can clear out the natural stone above it to create a large skylight in Hell.

Spoiler: Skylight (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: A Cold Day in Hell (click to show/hide)

Ok, I had to use dfhack to make it snow, but that's not the point. If you have a cold map, you can literally make Hell freeze over.

[Ravendarksky]

i just tried this out and found it to be very fiddly when punching through caverns. You also need to line yourself up so that you enter the SMR nicely... if you are half in some magma then it won't work.

Also I just tried it again over a full SMR and it STILL didn't work. I had to go down to the bottom layer and channel out the floor above the SMR and then close off that floor before collapsing. Then it worked as intended.

Please tell me what I'm doing wrong!

[itg]

Could you upload a save or take some pictures? It would be easier for me to figure out what's going wrong if I could see it.

It sounds like you figured it out yourself, though. If you're trying to make the SMR swallow a huge column of rock, you do need to channel out the floor above the SMR, then complete the sky support ring. The magma flow tiles (top of the SMR) swallow all the rock that falls on them in a cave-in, but they actually provide support to anything attached to them.

Alternatively, you could build the sky tube fully over the magma sea, since it's all magma flow tiles at the bottom.

[Just Some Guy]

I just confirmed my hypothesis that SMR is the primary source of support by using dfhack to spawn SMR floating inside a sky support ring. That SMR supports constructed floors, while anything built inside the ring but not attached to the SMR collapses instantly.

How do you spawn SMR, out of curiosity?

Can you get it's Raws?

[itg]

I just used dfhack's tiletypes command. Once you're in tiletypes, the commands to place a single wall of SMR at your cursor are "paint shape wall" -> "paint mat magma" -> Enter. Note that this does not automatically place a floor on top of the wall, so you'll have to add it manually.

As far as I know, SMR is hardcoded. There aren't any raws on the wiki, at any rate. If anyone can shed any more light on the situation than that, I'd appreciate it.

[itg]

I just made an interesting discovery. Did I mention that if you cave-in SMR onto the lowest revealed layer of the map, then dig downward into the unrevealed layer below, it will create sand below the SMR? Well, if not, it's related to the material duplication glitch and triggered in the same way. What's really interesting is that that sand can be smoothed and engraved.

Is this useful? Not really. But at a certain point, mere wealth is not enough to display the power and prestige of dwarven civilization. Sure, it sounds great to say the streets are paved with gold, but once the novelty wears off, gold has become just another building material, and now your streets are all cold and slippery. No, the right way to display your power is to warp reality itself wherever possible. Invading Hell just to fill in a bottomless pit with unminable material, dig beneath the bottomless pit, then engrave the history of your fort on a material that can never be engraved? That's a display of dwarven power.

Edit: I say sand because that's what I got on my map, but if the soil layers are different on your map, you may get a different kind of soil.

Spoiler: After I talked it up like that, this screenshot's probably a bit disappointing (click to show/hide)

[vanatteveldt]

Is this useful? Not really. But at a certain point, mere wealth is not enough to display the power and prestige of dwarven civilization. Sure, it sounds great to say the streets are paved with gold, but once the novelty wears off, gold has become just another building material, and now your streets are all cold and slippery. No, the right way to display your power is to warp reality itself wherever possible. Invading Hell just to fill in a bottomless pit with unminable material, dig beneath the bottomless pit, then engrave the history of your fort on a material that can never be engraved? That's a display of dwarven power.

Dwarf fortress, where the "end game" is really just the beginning. After all, what use is defeating the demons of hell and paving the roads in pure Mammon, when you can't use a succession of obscure bugs scientific discoveries to engrave your tale on eerie glowing beaches?

[Timeless Bob]

What does this do on ocean embarks?  I wonder if this technology could produce a new way to drain the ocean, not off the edge of the map, but into a glowing pit somewhere in the middle.  It would be interesting to see the waterfalls produced by such a phenomenon.

[itg]

There is no reason this wouldn't work. The best way to do it would be to drop in a cast obsidian pillar, I think. I forget whether fortifications are lost during a cave-in, but if not, you could carve fortifications in the outer wall before dropping it to facilitate draining. Draining the ocean would probably be hell on your fps though (hehe).

[Urist Da Vinci]

Poking around some disassembly, I found some of the support logic:

The game divides the map up into 3D column-like elements that can be several tiles in each dimension. Each of the elements keeps track of which of its neighbours it is touching.

When you need to check support:
1. A list of "things that can provide support" is created, including all SMR and perhaps also elements that have not recently been modified.
2. Every element on the list is marked as supported.
3. Every element that each element on the list is touching, which has not yet been marked as supported, is marked as supported AND added to the list. This causes a flood-fill of support. Eventually you run out of things to check or add.
4. Any elements on the map that are not marked as supported trigger a cave-in.

Now, I found that columns which touch the top of the map are not recognized as elements - they appear as empty air to the support code. I presume this is because the element-creating code glitches out when it attempts to check the (non-existent) tile just above the top of the map. It appears to fail to create the entire element, effectively creating a "blind spot" in the gravity field. The tiles in the column that touches the top of the map are not checked for support, but they "don't exist" from the perspective of adjacent tiles.

EDIT: I used DFHack's infiniteSky command to raise the top of the map one z-level, and the "blind spots" went back to normal. There was no floor on top of the cast obsidian wall that was previously stuck to the sky. Floating columns promptly collapsed.

[itg]

Nice work! This whole thing makes a lot more sense, now. There's still one thing I'm not quite clear on, and that's why SMR caves in if it's inside a "power mining" tube and you construct something on the underside. Maybe the support checking algorithm checks from the SMR upward (so the SMR is considered supported but the stuff below isn't), but the cave-in algorithm just grabs the whole contiguous element?

[abculatter_2]

Has anyone brought this thread to Toady One's attention?

I feel that that would be a rather interesting reaction.