Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bearskie]

I was considering starting the fire using magma instead.  Line of flammables acting as a fuse?

[Galena]

I'd imagine an effective method would be trapping the goblins in a GCS sick farm setup, but instead of a GCS, use a trapped magma crab. The magma crab would launch globs of "magma", lighting the goblins on !!fire!!.

[Naryar]

If you want goblin clothes, a water drowning trap.

If you don't want clothes, the same exact trap but with magma, and magma-safe materials.

Safe, efficient. The only unefficient thing is getting rid of the goblin corpses after the drowning in water. A small magma pool next to the drowning trap works wonders for that.

Yeah copper smelts in magma, but you can melt the copper blobs on the floor.

[Melting Sky]

I think your only real hope to mine copper-based golbinite without Dwarven Drama issues is flash-freezing or Happy the Miner Dragon.

If the magma's melting the copper, then dragonfire is definitely going to melt the copper. Dragonfire is hotter than the sun (I think, it might just be close to as hot) and as such, far hotter than magma.

I'm not sure if dragon fire has been tweaked in the new versions or not but I have had quite a  bit of !!FUN!! weaponizing one in the past and the dragon fire has some really weird properties that make using it a bit unintuitive. Dragon fire uses some sort of reaction code to interact with enemies rather than actually raising the temperature of the air to 50k. One weird property of dragon fire is metal constructions are immune to it, even ones with melting points way below dragon fire temperatures. So you can use something like lead to make your draw bridge into dragon safe blast shutters yet obsidian will vaporize.

You will wind up with some really weird results using a dragon to kill goblins. You will get things like goblin loin cloths surviving in a tunnel that has literally been blow torched to oblivion by the dragon or you end up with half a dozen super elite shield using goblins surviving out of a large siege because they were lucky enough to block the fire every time and became godly skilled with their shield in the process. I highly recommend that anyone who is lucky enough to find a dragon weaponize it just for the shear hilarity that generally follows.

[Montieth]

I have, when below ground defenses are preferred, made a large entrance hall as a "guest entrance". There are usually a series of trenches that have switch backs in them so that any attackers have to run back and forth increasing exposure time before they reach the gates. Sometimes I leave some wall grates as a layer before the last gate so as to provide the building destroyers a target.  In order to speed use of the entrance hall, I'll buld a series of retracting bridges over the trneches so as to make a direct path which can be removed in time of need. Galleries are made on a second level inside the hall looking down on the entrance path for crossbow dwarves to work from. Do it right one has enough room to capture most of a goblin seige and then effect target practice at your leisure while then opening up another entrance for day to day work. The entrance to the hall has a gate that can be closed behind the goblins thus trapping most of their force in it. One fortess had such good defenses that I had so many bodies and items to clear that I had more goblin attacks before the hall was yet clear of refuse, skeletons and goblinite.

The hall is essentially three layers. Trench layer. Floor level and archer level. Run the trenches across the hall long enough so as to require far more back and forth movement to get to the end of the hall but not so far that wagons can not get past.

The advantage is that I still have a way to get Urist McSlowtowalkback into the fort long after the defenses are combining up instead of stranding him outside for troll food. Sometimes he makes it and sometimes he does not, but the traps RnD to catch the advance gobbling/troll guard.

Another passive defense is to have a series of traps at the end of the trenches on the entry level that attackers must go around when traversing the hall. Usually spiked ball traps so the gobbles are tossed into the trench where other traps are also set.

[LMeire]

I use an artifact wooden grate when I can.
Sideview:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

_ _ H _ _
+++  +++
+++G+++
+++  +++
+++_ _ _ _L

+ = Solid Walls
G = Artifact Wooden (or other flammable) Grate
_ = Floor
L = Lever

Hook the lever up to the floor grate in the middle of the pit, this should let you turn it into an empty space when you flip the switch. Then, light the grate on fire using magma, IIRC it should burn forever, even if you turn it off with the lever. The hatch on the top floor keeps smoke from confusing and killing your pit-worker, so they can quickly and efficiently dump all the raw goblinite into the refinery no matter how often you need to use it. To retrieve purified goblinite, flip the lever and it'll come tumbling down the shoot free of any dangerous hydrocarbon excesses.

[Button]

I use an artifact wooden grate when I can.
Sideview:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

_ _ H _ _
+++  +++
+++G+++
+++  +++
+++_ _ _ _L

+ = Solid Walls
G = Artifact Wooden (or other flammable) Grate
_ = Floor
L = Lever

Hook the lever up to the floor grate in the middle of the pit, this should let you turn it into an empty space when you flip the switch. Then, light the grate on fire using magma, IIRC it should burn forever, even if you turn it off with the lever. The hatch on the top floor keeps smoke from confusing and killing your pit-worker, so they can quickly and efficiently dump all the raw goblinite into the refinery no matter how often you need to use it. To retrieve purified goblinite, flip the lever and it'll come tumbling down the shoot free of any dangerous hydrocarbon excesses.

Quick note about this, do remember that the linking mechanism will need to be made of a fire-safe material. Not all stones are fire-safe so doublecheck on the wiki. You do not want to be in the position of needing to link an already-burning grate to a lever. !!FUN!! will be had.

[puke]

I'd go with water, the haulers should eventually become desensitized to the bodies?

If you really need to get rid of the bodies, you could try a magma mist generator.  Less hot than dragonfire.  easier and more reliable to build.  Not certain how the copper will fare, but you wont actually be immersing them in liquid magma so they might not melt.  You will be coating things in mist though, so you'll probably need some sort of washing / water flooding feature.

Another option might be dropping them (like from a retracting bridge) so far that they explode into indistinguishable gibs.  I'm not sure if that will cause horror for the haulers, but surely you owe it to Science to investigate.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

IIRC, globs of metal are 'cleaned' rather than melted, leaving nothing.  I'm not quite sure how metal can just disappear, but this is in the same game as aquifer turtles and atom smashers, so...

[Veylon]

Brief exposure to magma will cremate the goblins but leave their metal gear intact.

For this, you need a four level system:
1) A reservoir on top with lots of magma.
2) A bridge that goes into your fort.
3) A bunch of grates to catch the stuff.
4) A pit or room to hold the magma.

Goblins enter the trap and the room fills with lava. The lava inlet is then closed and they turn to smoke. The bridge under them is then opened, allowing the lava to flow away through the grates and the items to be immediately retrieved. The dwarves assigned to retrieval can do so without risk even while the next batch of goblins is awaiting their fate as a solid bridge is between them and their would-be killers.

[puke]

Mmm, magma showers.

I like the quick flush with rapid drain that you describe.  Very simple to build, though you eventually need to worry about how you're draining it or how you're refilling it.  Either you're dumping to the caverns and refilling from a caldera, or you're pumping to recycle it -- and moving a fairly large volume if you want to sluice it through you're entire kill-hall.

There was a mist generator someone posed a long time back, which was basically a closed circuit of pumps in the ceiling z+1 over your room.  it would drop water into the room below, and immediately suck it back out before it could splash or evaporate.  This would leave some mud and some mist behind.  With magma, you could use it to magma-coat anything in one square at a time.  It would not be 100%, but it should light some gobbers on fire for sure - probably breaking the seige and sending survivors running.

My current favorite is the magma mist generator, with impulse driven mine carts.  The design I'm futzing with now is the traditional "drop the cart into the magma" design, but I intend to try a "skip it across the surface" type next... as this requires fewer moving carts and less track space overall.  I'm not sure if this will work well though -- I have not experimented yet.

I kept trying the "cast an obsidian block and drop it" design, but it is just too damn fiddly when there are more efficient options available.  Which is a shame, because I really like the idea of obsidian foundry and the big plop.