Year Two – Research, Bedrooms, and BloodsteelSpring16th SlateMore migrants have come to our home! 28 migrants, with the following guilds: 1 Jeweler, 2 Carpenter, 1 Legionnaire (Looks like Meph showed up!), 1 Fisherman, 2 Beastwarden, 1 Mason, 2 farmers, 1 Engineer, 1 Merchant, 2 Arcane. In addition we got a marksman.
With all the new bodies, I have my miners working overtime to try and get bedrooms and a dining hall dug out. I also drafted our militia, a five man melee squad. So the miners are digging out a barracks, and the carpenter is working on the armor racks and weapons stands. I really should have traded for a few mor picks. Instead I am going ot have the miners sort room for an ore processor, some smelters, and some wood ovens. Might as well use all this wood!
14th FelsiteMeph has been possessed. Oh dear. His highest moodable skill is craftsdwarf, so we shall see what happens.
15th FelsiteMeph grabbed a workshop, so that’s one bolt dodged. And the elves have come, just as I ordered some mass deforestation. This ought to be fun. It appears Meph grabbed three logs of wood.
19th FelsiteMeph made this:
I honestly have no idea what any of that means. But, good job Meph, you are now legendary in… nothing. Because you were possessed. Go back to leading the militia.
I traded with the elves. I got a lot off cloth, and not much else. All they had was piles of mithril decorations. As much as I would love some mithril, we need food, so I will save the mugs for the dwarves in autumn.
Summer10th HematiteThe Barracks is complete! Training Begins!
11th MalachiteOur fortress suffers our first death… from sparring. Etur Bibarobok threw his partner into a weapon rack and killed him.
17th MalachiteIn good news, our Ore Processor is built! The ore processor is the beginning of the new metalworking “tech tree” in Masterwork.
Unlike normal DF, where you just tell a furnace to smelt some ore, and off you go, Masterwork ups the challenge a bit. You can just smelt ore, but you get terrible efficiency. To quote Meph:
“The Ore Processor is very important. All mined mineral bearing rock has to be sorted here, into rock, ore and base-minerals.
Its very simple. You mine "gold bearing rock". You "Process gold bearing rock" and you get pure gold ore and some boulders or blocks. The gold ore can now be used in the smelter. You could even smelt the unprocessed ore, but it would result in little outcome and lots of slag.”So we build the Ore Processor, start sorting, and get to work on a Slag Pit. The Slag Pit needs two querns, so I have to build those first.
Wait, what’s slag? Glad you asked.
“Smelting ore also creates a waste product called Slag. These bars clutter up your smelter and should be destroyed in the slagpit or used up as buildmats.”Clutter is bad, so we need a slag pit. As a benefit, ore smelting will therefore produce stone blocks we can use to build stuff later. You can either dispose of slag by thworing it in the pit, or you can combine it with ash or lye to get concrete blocks. Ash gives 8, lye 20. That’s nice, in a round-about way. More work, but more results.
You remember when I talked about anthracite earlier? I called it super coal. This is because one unit of anthracite yields 10 units of coke! Since we are getting ready to start metalworking, I might as well start processing that anthracite in the smelters.
3rd GalenaWe had our first birth, Timeless Bobette!
I also missed the migrant wave due to the sparring accident. We got 12 dwarves, among them an alchemist, a smith, a mason, a carpenter, two more Arcane, and a priest.
18th GalenaThe humans have come.
AutumnWe traded for a lot of food and basics. I hope to expand into the caverns soon, and cease our need for food by trade, but a few things need to be sorted first.
Sazir Fokershomad (the subject of Meph’s possession!) has been taken by a mood.
16th LimestoneSazir finished his artifact, a gold bearing rock trinket, which our brokers tell me is worth 138000. That is one hell of necklace. It doubled the value of our fortress!
18th LimestoneMore migrants, 11 this time. Notable dwarves include another arcane, and another jeweler. And a forgotten beast! It was immediately swarmed by troglodytes and killed. That’s underwhelming.
27th SandstoneAlmost have 100 bedrooms cut out and smoother, with furniture to fit. We have 70 dwarves, so I hope 100 rooms will see us through the winter. Now it’s time to show some more new buildings!
First up is one of the key buildings to unlock the beginning of the madness of Masterwork: the Researcher’s Study.
Let’s go over the basics first. You will need 5 blocks, a journal, and abacus, and an hourglass to build the study. Each of those rather unfamiliar sounding items can be made at a Craftsdwarf’s workshop, and also at many of the new workshops found in the mod. Once you have the building, you will find a whole list of interesting reactions, some of which are shown in the shot above.
To quote Meph:
“The Researcher can conduct science. Science is awesome and needed for most buildings. Each field of science will resulst in one unlocked building, and the reactions chain up automatically. All you have to do is to "reserach in the field of...". Each reaction has a 20% chance to fail, so the longer the research chain, the higher the chance to fail. Failed research results will be sifted through, and then either destroyed or used for a 1% chance for a random success.
Once a research is finished, you will get an announcement about the unlocked building. You can even unlock magma-furnaces without the need to discover a volcano/magmalake first.
The Scriptorium can copy research results, enabling you to build more than just one building with each.”Err, I better build a Sciptorium too! I don’t want to have to re-research things.
We also have a pair of Breweries! These wonderful little puppies allow you to brew from specific plants, so no stockpile micromanagement needed! Actually, you can do this at the distillery too, but it is more efficient here. The downside is it takes a little bit longer and requires two pots. You can also see some of the other cool features, like extracting water from booze, making rum from boozebelly cheese, and making fuel.
Another new building is the Gemcutter, which as you can see below makes all sort of things out of gems, allows combining or splitting of gems to go between the sizes, and lets you reclaim some gems from crafted items. Not sure if I need it yet, but I’m laying out workshops, so I built one. I imagine I will start using this more once defenses and militia can cope with the staggering increases in wealth it might bring!
15th TimberThe dwarves are here again. Perhaps this trading season will result in our Village being upgraded! But what to trade… I’ll unload the last of the mugs and some gems, I think.
25th TimberGood news: Our first results from the Researcher’s study are in: We have discovered how to make weapons and armor from rocks!
Bad news: A berserking Orc sneak killed a trader, so now the rest are just hanging around doing nothing. I hope they get it together, we have mugs to trade, dammit!
26th TimberInstead of trading, the cowards are leaving. My damn dogs have more courage that those bastards. Oh well, they should get some better guards.
WinterI was going to build a forge, but it appears I was wrong, and did not actually bring an anvil. Normally this would present a grave problem, but in Masterwork the age old question of Anvil Origins is answered: The Stonecrafter’s Shop.
Here, you can make just about everything you might want, as long as just about everything you want is normally made of stone, and you have blocks instead of rocks.
1st OpalAnother new discovery – the Greatforge!
6th OpalNow we are talking, we just discovered the secrets of the Blast Furnace!
I’ll be looking at these two buildings more when I finish off the housing situation and get some armor made up. I’ll also take this opportunity to take about research a little more. When you complete a discovery, you get a (Research Supplies) Rare Science Discovery (NAME) item, that is listed under Tools.
These are blueprints, one-shot consumed materials when you build the workshop. To allow yourself the ability to keep making more, you can do one of two things: Research it again, or make copies of the blueprint in the Scriptorium. As you can see from the shot above, I made 3 copies of the Blast Furnace blueprint, because I will want a few of those.
To make copies, you’ll need to do a few things. First, make some jugs. This can be done at many vanilla and modded workshops. Then, make ink. You can make ink from dye, ash, blood, or graphite. You also need some paper. There are a lot of ways to make paper. You can use leather, wood, plants or cloth. I made mine at the Tailor’s Workshop.
Oh yeah, the Tailor’s workshop is a lot like the furniture workshop, but it makes sets of clothes! In can also unravel cloth, and make sets of leather armors too. Another nice little time saver!
Back to research, once I get my ink, my paper, and my blueprint, I use the Scriptorium to make copies. That’s not all it does, but we will talk about books and other stuff like libraries and skill training later.
13th ObsidianPossession! A mason has claimed a workshop.
16th ObsidianAnother drowavan comes. Let see what we can trade for.
21st ObsidianThe mason made a cabinet. Not bad.
We also finished trading. I got more food, more booze, cloth, and quite a few suits of Bloodsteel armor, mail shirts, helms and razorshields from the drow. That should help arm the militia for the time! Bloodsteel is a lot like steel, except that I just bought a whole bunch instead of crafting it. I also got a bunch of wolverines, predatory cats and drowspiders. Why not have a menagerie of highly dangerous and questionable animals?
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And that’s the year! Let’s take a tour of the fort again, from the top down.
The entrance looks much the same, although I am slowly moving things down into relevant stocks. As you can see I have expanded the farms significantly, in order to hopefully break free of the need to trade for food.
Here we have some basic stockpiles and puppy raising areas. Snooze.
Next is the stone and metal works. You can see the larger furniture shops, slag pit and ore processor.
This is the start of the research wing, which be expanded greatly as time goes on. So far it’s just the Researcher’s Study and the Scriptorium, and stocks to supply them.
Bedroom floor one! Rooms for one hundred dwarves. My room has the parrot cage, if you were wondering. Another floor is being carved out below, for more new residents.
Finally, the dining room, under construction. Four wings to start, and I may add more. I hope to have a table for every dwarf, and to fill the alcoves with artifacts and statues.
The year in review:
Dorfs are dorfed, I’ll put them up in the main page post.