Er, yeah, it's a floodgate so I'll probably stick it in some noble's bedroom.
You're kidding me, right? Artifact-quality floodgates are just about one of the
MOST USEFUL artifacts (aside from weapons and armor made out of high-quality metals) a fortress can obtain. We were
EXTREMELY lucky to have one of our Dwarves construct one... (first an artifact table, now a floodgate? Moldath must be smiling on this fortress...)
Please post the save
IMMEDIATELY so that, in case something happens to your copy (like it gets corrupted) we still have a copy of the save available with the artifact-quality floodgate...
Artifact floodgates are extremely useful as
*COMPLETELY INDESTRUCTIBLE* entrances/exits to a fortress. Unlike a bridge, they can't be destroyed by Dwarves throwing a tantrum. Unlike a door, they can't be destroyed by building destroyers (and in fact, such floodgates can be used to "filter out" building destroyers from an attacking force).
Even magma can't destroy an artifact floodgate- no matter what it is made of (even one made of wood will simply burn for all eternity without ever being destroyed- though I wouldn't recommend this for lag/FPS reasons...) The only weakness of such a floodgate is that,
like a door, it can't close with anything occupying its tile- even the remains of a simple sock or monarch butterfly will prevent it from closing.The floodgate should be great for a lever-operated entrance/exit to the caverns.I put some cage traps down where the cave crawler got in while I was ordering the stairs sealed up, but didn't take them back up again, so they caught a few crundles.
I see.
Keep the Crundles- they are superior egg producers to Turkeys once fully-tamed (taming will take multiple generations of Crundles). Despite their humanoid appearance, they are not sentient and quite butcherable, and though they yield less meat when butchered (and scales rather than tannable hides), they live up to twice as long (10-20 yrs instead of 7-10), and lay a potentially larger clutch of eggs (5-20 instead of 9-14). Their children are also smaller at birth (size 50 instead of size 85, and size 1000 by 1 year instead of size 2500), though their adults are larger (size 10,000 instead of size 5,000) reducing the chances of babies harming their parents when fighting due to overcrowding; and they are sexually mature at birth (making it less likely that the population will naturally die out than with birds). Finally they have the advantage of being native to the area- we're not going to capture any wild turkeys if our bird population dies off naturally or gets slaughtered during a siege.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Crundlehttp://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:TurkeyOnly the first cave was breached, it just feels weird writing it in the singular when talking about something as big as they are.
I didn't say "cave", I said "Cavern Level". Based on the presence of Crundles and Voracious Cave Crawlers (both level 2-3 creatures), it appears we skipped straight over Cavern Layer #1, and breached layer #2 or 3 instead:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Cavernshttp://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Voracious_cave_crawlerhttp://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:CrundleAlso,
was there any cave fungus/moss growing on the cavern level? If so, that would be
EXTREMELY important to the future of our fortress- since it affects our ability to create additional underground pastures for animals once we find a source of water (by the way,
have we found any water yet?)
I'm excited- it's been a *long* time since I've even had a fortress live long enough to breach the caverns (though I didn't get to do it myself). My observations on caverns generally being the doom of fortresses come from reading the stories of MANY, MANY succession fortresses- not so much from my own experiences (my forts generally fall to tantrum-spirals resulting from Goblin ambushes within the first year- strangely they always seem to arrive *extremely* early in my games, this fort being no exception...)
Regards,
Northstar