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[JerDGold]

Not magma caverns,the first level of caverns.  I have a siege going on that I can't deal with, and I need wood.  I haven't broken into the caverns yet,  but I have created a two tile wide pathway towards them, blocked off with 1 fortification to shoot arrows through and one locked door.  What do you guys do when you want to start clearing out the caverns to make them safe for farming and wood cutting?

[GavJ]

Advancing under some phalanx of fortifications or whatever sounds a little overly paranoid. Unless you know for sure that there's a big old dangerous looking FB right there, or GCS's, any sort of reasonably trained military dwarves should usually hold their own.

You want to have some way of sealing your fort off in the event a crazy steel dust producing FB does show up, but aside from such a failsafe bridge or whatever, you can usually just mill around with little risk, long enough to wall off chokepoints and such. As long as those military are in the vicinity as a mostly-escort.



Or, if you don't mind the occasional difficult-to-justify gameplay mechanics, just breach the cavern, immediately wall it off, then go dig tree farms yourself in soil layers.

[Sadrice]

Always make sure that each cavern access is individually sealable.  Do NOT seal it such that you seal yourself off from the rest of the downstairs and allow whatever you were locking out full access to the stairwell below.


The easiest and most effective way to do it is with hatch covers.  Put a hatch on the stairs going into the cavern, making sure that the continuing downward stairwell to the next cavern is above the hatch.  Hatch covers can not be destroyed from underneath, so forbidding passage will stop anything in the game, and can be done instantly without waiting for a dwarf to pull a lever. You may consider this a bit of an exploit, and frankly it is.  If you prefer, you can link the hatch to a lever, or us a bridge instead, to do the same thing but with a slower, somewhat unreliable response time.


Once you have breached the cavern in a sealable way, look for a good spot to secure.  You want a wide flat area with trees and plants, ideally without too many pillars blocking things, because those would have to be muddied with water to grow anything after they are mined out.  Ideally, the area will only have map edge access at a few easily walled off choke points.  Wall all of those off, potentially leaving a drawbridge or something else if you want through later.  Don't forget to extend the walls up to the ceiling to block flyer access at some point, although that can be left until after you've started chopping wood if you want.  Water can be hazardous, since giant olms, cave crocodiles, and assorted other nasties can come out of it.  Seal it off unless you can completely enclose it.


Generally, I'm much less cautios than this, and if I want wood NOW, I just charge straight in and cut some, keeping a close eye on the (u)nit screen in case anything wanders by, and worry about walls and sometimes even the initial hatch later, once my dwarves have beds and wheelbarrows.  This usually works, but sometimes ends in disaster.  I would recommend at a bare minimum putting a hatch or bridge to seal off the cavern before making connection with the cavern floor.  It helps to have the hatch built before you start looking for the cavern (I usually don't).

[PDF urist master]

the most dangerous threat in the lst cavern are thusfold:

Forgotten beast, Giant cave spider, cave crocodile, trogledyte. out of them, troglodytes are the most dangerous for forts with a small army as they spawn in the groups.

You'll probably need more than a locked door to stop FBs. you have sieges already, which means you should have FBs, and those can break down doors. upgrade to a raised drawbridge.

[Arcvasti]

Magma. But seriously. They burn really well. It should clear out the caverns of creatures and then your dwarves can build on the burnt places behind the wall of fire with way less risk. Traffic restrictions help. Also, setting the caverns on fire is fun. Have some hatch covers on the stairs up to your fort, as nothing can destroy hatch covers from beneath.

Actually, a good melee military squad can beat anything the caverns throw at you. Except maybe FBs with some specific deadly syndromes. Those need archery to kill. After butchering 3-5 waves of creatures, you'll end up with some harmless ones in a far off corner and your dwarves can build in peace.

[FrankMcFuzz]

I usually have a barracks IN the caverns for a lesser trained military squad for small scale wildlife purges. This will make most cavern operations reduce losses (Though I'm running a cavern fort at the moment and everyone got eaten by a GCS in the first year, shutup). The close quarters and corners of the caverns makes marksdwarves a bad idea, except for parts that may be particularly open.

Remember: Always, ALWAYS have a 3 deep water bath at the entrance. FB blood will kill your fortress. However, strangely enough, I forgot this once but my military dwarves wore no CLOTHES, only ARMOUR, and it didn't appear to track back to the fortress. Science is required.

[MDFification]

troglodytes are the most dangerous for forts with a small army as they spawn in the groups.

I really don't find them that dangerous at all. A decently equipped military or a single weapons trap generally takes care of them for me. Of course, unless I'm walling something off, nobody really goes into my caverns except woodcutters, and they tend to go a little axe-crazy when unable to run away from the troglodyte mob...

[slothen]

troglodytes are scary for your web-gatherer or lone mason/mechanic.  I suppose a woodcutter might get outnumbered, but it doesn't seem like anything to be too worried about.

If no forgotten beasts have spawned yet, then you should be able to just get in, do some designations, and get the caverns sealed off quickly.  It takes a bit more work to seal them against flying beasts. 

If there are forgotten beasts about, its pretty much the same, just have your military on hand or send them in first entirely.  With no beasts I'll often colonize the caverns without any military at all.

[Quietust]

Remember: Always, ALWAYS have a 3 deep water bath at the entrance. FB blood will kill your fortress. However, strangely enough, I forgot this once but my military dwarves wore no CLOTHES, only ARMOUR, and it didn't appear to track back to the fortress. Science is required.

From what I recall, doing that will wash contaminants off of your dwarves (and prevent them from spreading to wells), but any unclothed creature (including animals) that walks through a "dirty" bath will still be infected by any syndrome-laden materials lying at the bottom.

[GavJ]

Why doesn't it infect everybody, since most dwarves don't wear hats, and even if they do, their mouths are always exposed, etc?

[Arcvasti]

Its just shoes that are needed to protect you. Armour boots work fine too, but you can be naked and still go unharmed through FB contaminated pools as long as you have shoes.

[GavJ]

So does dwarf mode function differently than adventurers getting liquid coverings on every body part, then? Or do they still, but you for whatever reason can only absorb contact poisons through your feet skin?

[Arcvasti]

I'm not sure about this, never having experienced it PERSONALLY, but you can find more info on it here

[Roach]

Long post is long, spoilered.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm no pro, but here's my 101 for clearing caverns:
1. Install axes on your military, nothing down there has armour anyway
2. Breach and clear the immediate area at once. Probably just giant olms or cave crocs, which an axedwarf or two should have no problems with.
3. Get a miner on the nearest upward ramps in your newly cleared area, and more specifically removing them. With all ramps removed, fearsome beasties of the non-flying nature (uncommon on 1st layer) won't be able to get at your dwarves, and ramp removal is a fast labour.

Obviously, always try and set up camp in the lowest point in the cavern level, ideally near water. This has two advantages: you get fresh water, and there's less stuff that can kill you in the ocean blue, as a rule. If you get trouble from the water, build floors over the ramps that lead out of it onto your underground shore. Even if you hit the lowest point in your cavern and it doesn't have water, you'll be much more easily defensible at the bottom of a cavern valley than at the top simply because of how easy it is to remove upramps.

Once you've got those three steps out of the way, you can afford to relax in the short term. Feel free to set up some farms (if your biome isn't soil-friendly, like a glacier) and chop down the trees in your local area. The same principle applies whenever you want to expand further into the caverns: just remove upramps as you go, and you'll be alright.

The only real problems that can come from this (as far as beasties go) is that you can end up with either flying beasties or annoying monsters that insistently hang about by your removed upramp areas.

The flying beasties are annoying, but fortunately they tend to be pretty tame in the first cavern layer, limited to bugbats and the like, which axedwarves should have no trouble clearing out. Just make a habit out of hitting U-Right-Right and taking a look at units->other, seeing if there's any hordes coming your way.

Insistent baddies who hang out near your removed ramps are technically "harmless", but the problem is dwarves don't get the damn things can't hurt them, so they run in fear from Ogre McWon'tMove at the top of his unreachable ridge despite the fact that he's incapable of hurting them. The best solution for this is, obviously, marksdwarves. If you don't have that available, just build a quick ramp with your military stationed nearby, take the offending beastie down a peg, and then zip back down and get rid of the ramp.

Forgotten beasts, of course, are another risk of hanging out in caverns, and there's not much you can do to circumvent them short of totally walling off every cavern edge (which is not unfeasible at all, just annoyingly labour-intensive). Most flying beasts tend to be landlubbers anyway, but if you come across a flying one, your only real port of call is to retreat until you have a force competent enough to deal with the thing. Or set up a cave-in trap, which takes a bit of doing, but is cheap and effective.

If you do eventually decide to go for totally walling off caverns, do keep in mind you'll have to watch the water as well, otherwise Froggy McGasSpewing will make your underground farmers have a very bad day when he swims out of nowhere. You can always try and floor off every ramp out of the water, but in my experience I always miss one that I can't track down, so they get in eventually. Maybe you'll do better.

One way or another, best of luck dood.

[Dirac]

troglodytes are scary for your web-gatherer or lone mason/mechanic.  I suppose a woodcutter might get outnumbered, but it doesn't seem like anything to be too worried about.

Strangely enough, I don't believe I've ever had a single dwarf killed by a troglodyte.  I get plenty of messages saying this or that has been interrupted by one, but none of my dwarves were ever killed.  Either I'm very lucky or there's a tad too much hype for the trogs.

In response to the thread: I usually start out with two military dwarves who do nothing but spar year-round, so most cavern-dwelling creatures can be taken down by them alone, including blind cave ogres.  I would recommend getting a squad of marksdwarves together to take care of GCS's, as those are the only real threat that the dynamic duo can't handle alone.  I do build a drawbridge just in case, though I never really have to use it.  And I build cage traps at the one-tile-wide entrance to the caverns so bugbats, elk birds or other wandering animals can be butchered or used for military practice.

I also continually add migrants to my militia (if they have any skill in a weapon, they get put into a squad) and train them in pairs so they're sparring, with at least two dwarves free to do their daily tasks.  That way, by the time FB's show up, I have a squad or two of decently-trained yet expendable melee troops to dogpile on the uninvited guests, saving both my marksdwarves and my two elite fighters from deadly blood or extract.

TL/DR: The first step to clearing out the caverns, assuming you don't want to use weapon traps, is getting a decent military set up.  Have some expendable fighters nearby to get in close to the syndrome-bearing FB's, some marksdwarves to hit them from afar and take care of GCS's, and a two-dwarf elite squad for everything else (troglodytes, goblin sieges, non-syndrome-bearing FB's, and all other cavern fauna).