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[Slogo]

The food and animals on embark is unnecessary, there's plenty of food from your starting wagon animals and unless you are in some extreme conditions (i.e. no plant life and freezing or no water) you should be able to make do without any starting supplies. The game will be certainly much harder, especially because without starting booze you won't have barrels to make booze, but it's still a possibility.

Clay is inaccessible, there's no way to build the kiln needed to harvest it without metal, stone, or trading.

A big part that makes this very difficult is that you cannot train military without using one of your three logs to build a bed or having wildlife they can safely attack. You also need trees on your map to make valid tiles for the bed to be placed.

The other problem is your migrant wave rate will be very small because you have no accumulated wealth. You are also completely dependent on food and booze to provide happy thoughts for your dwarves.

I think pretty much the challenge will be boring more than anything unless you can get your hands on an axe from invaders.

[Aslandus]

It seems a bit frustrating, having absolutely no materials... Can't make even the most basic weapons without wood, which you can't cut if you disallow training axes. You might be able to make crossbows out of bone, leather shields, and bone bolts, but you would have to kill things with no weapons first then build a butchery workshop just to get the materials (plus a tanners workshop to make leather and a leatherworks to turn it into stuff, and a craftsdwarf workshop if you want to do anything with bone). Can't make furnaces without fire safe building material, which you can't get without embarking with it or trading for it if you don't bring a pick, so glass, clay/ceramic, charcoal, and ash are all out of the picture...

Assuming you haven't disallowed farms and gathering too you should be able to clothe your dwarves in a few layers of plant cloth to save leather for shields and quivers, but that means you need a farmer's workshop to process plants, plus a loom to weave cloth and a clothier's workshop to make clothes... So you would need four workshops at the very least (seven if you add the plant cloth insudry) but you only have three logs with which to make them... Yeah, this is definitely not a challenge I want to take...

[evictedSaint]

What if it was a no stone/no metal embark? Allow a wooden training axe and bring a bar of ash at the start.  This lets you gather clay and chop wood, make charcoal, and fire clay.  There will be no mechanisms or below-ground structures.  Just a dirty above ground sticks-and-mud fort.  Very primative, but still...you know, playable.

[Aslandus]

What if it was a no stone/no metal embark? Allow a wooden training axe and bring a bar of ash at the start.  This lets you gather clay and chop wood, make charcoal, and fire clay.  There will be no mechanisms or below-ground structures.  Just a dirty above ground sticks-and-mud fort.  Very primative, but still...you know, playable.

Indeed, and with the ash you can make a wood furnace to make more ash and get industry rolling in the furnace department (or just see how high you can make a glass block tower before the goblins eat your face)

[Badger Storm]

"Challenge" implies a chance of success and some agency on the challenger's part.

This is not a challenge.  This is "gather plants and drink from the river, helplessly awaiting the sweet embrace of death." 

[Sanctume]

There's a no anvil challenge that delays forges.
There's a 1 pick embark challenge that allows digging while waiting for caravans for the anvil.

>> 0) Embark with food, drinks and animals only.
Food, drinks, 1x of each: milk, fish, meat comes in barrels, so these can be re-cycled for the barrel needs.
Animals, Turkey for their meat, bones, and leather. 
So wood will be scarce.

>>1) No metals. That is you can't use metal items. To add more challenges, training axes are also banned.
So limited to wood and bone.  Maybe a bone battle axe artifact will be made so it can be used for wood cutting.

>>2) No trading. You also can't loot the caravans.
Does killing caravans considered looting?  What if caravans were killed by beasts or goblins, are the scattered items considered looting?

>>3) No mechanism. This also means no draw bridges.
No traps, no bridge, no levers. 
Hmm, I can't recall, does upright spear need mechanism? (edit: no mechanism needed, checked the wiki)

>>4) No stones. So you can't build furnaces.
So just wood, clay, sand, and glass furnitures.

>>5) ...?
Weapon: wood training spear, wood/bone crossbow wood/bone bolts. Weapon artifacts made of bone, wood
Armor: leather and bone and wood?

Traps: can't dig? so can't even make a collapsing tunnel.
However, you can walls using wood and glass blocks.  Built it high enough and have green glass block garbage dumped from above to kill.

You can make wood minecarts and create some kind of grinder using impulse ramps.
Maybe even minecart shotgun of green glass serrated disc through a wooden block fortification.
Can still use water traps using log walls, wood pump and screw, wood door for water cannons onto high cliff with upright spears (no mechanism is needed-wiki)

Also, can make an entrance safe using ramps and hatches, since hatches are invulnerable when breaching from the bottom.
Using blocks from wood, glass, or clay.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

z:1     _Ho     where H = hatch, o=wall
z:0  __/o\      where / and \ are ramps.


edit: code format, and wiki check

[Slogo]

"Challenge" implies a chance of success and some agency on the challenger's part.

This is not a challenge.  This is "gather plants and drink from the river, helplessly awaiting the sweet embrace of death."

Eh not really, I think you'd be surprised at how much you can accomplish with just a few basics. It's not like goblins are going to siege immediately or anything.

If you were allowed to use left behind weapons and armor (which violates rule #1) the challenge probably wouldn't be that bad since you could defeat the initial ambushes with bone and wood then gear up.

[Aslandus]

"Challenge" implies a chance of success and some agency on the challenger's part.

This is not a challenge.  This is "gather plants and drink from the river, helplessly awaiting the sweet embrace of death."

Eh not really, I think you'd be surprised at how much you can accomplish with just a few basics. It's not like goblins are going to siege immediately or anything.

If you were allowed to use left behind weapons and armor (which violates rule #1) the challenge probably wouldn't be that bad since you could defeat the initial ambushes with bone and wood then gear up.

Well if you find a way to equip troll fur loincloths as weapons maybe you could stick to the no metal thing...

[Badger Storm]

Well, you can't get wood or stone, therefore no clay, glass, or metal, since you need fire-safe material to build a wood burner, which would allow you charcoal and ash.  You have exactly three logs, and you can't get any more.  You can't even use one of them to make a training axe, a humble tool that would make all the difference.  The most you could do is keep taking apart and putting together different workshops, but leather and bone are no good for building materials.  And no pots or barrels means no booze, which will slow your dwarves to a crawl, hindering them even further.

[Loyal]

Yeah, training axe sounds like a bug.
Another reason I don't include stones is there's no stone weapons(except obsidian swords), since you can't mine, embark with stones sound like cheating.

Maybe I can limit populations to delay goblins sieges? I wonder how good legendary wrestlers are.

WrestlING is a great skill, arguably even overpowered in some circumstances. But it requires intelligent, directed action. WrestlERS do not make good decisions, rarely act to disable the enemy quickly, and often tire themselves out before accomplishing much.

It's amazing in Adventurer mode, but kinda lame in Fortress.

[Slogo]

Well, you can't get wood or stone, therefore no clay, glass, or metal, since you need fire-safe material to build a wood burner, which would allow you charcoal and ash.  You have exactly three logs, and you can't get any more.  You can't even use one of them to make a training axe, a humble tool that would make all the difference.  The most you could do is keep taking apart and putting together different workshops, but leather and bone are no good for building materials.  And no pots or barrels means no booze, which will slow your dwarves to a crawl, hindering them even further.

Yeah with no long term plan I think you would need to be able to spend your starting points on food and booze. That way you'd start with a cache of barrels which would be sufficient to keep your dwarves in a drunken stupor like they belong.

Weapons overall aren't a big deal. Bone Crossbows, bone bolts, and leather quivers are all obtainable.

[Skullsploder]

I think it would make this challenge much more interesting if you allowed an axe on embark, disallowed training axes and disallowed forbidding doors.

That way you can build and build and build but you can't turtle (easily), and you are still limited to primitive technologies.

[Aslandus]

Well, you can't get wood or stone, therefore no clay, glass, or metal, since you need fire-safe material to build a wood burner, which would allow you charcoal and ash.  You have exactly three logs, and you can't get any more.  You can't even use one of them to make a training axe, a humble tool that would make all the difference.  The most you could do is keep taking apart and putting together different workshops, but leather and bone are no good for building materials.  And no pots or barrels means no booze, which will slow your dwarves to a crawl, hindering them even further.

Also, with no floodgates, no digging, no constructions, and no pumps you can't make a secure cistern, so you would probably die in the first winter if you didn't have any barrels to make booze, which you won't have since all the barrels you start with will go toward storing the plants you harvest/gather and meat you collect. Fishing requires another workshop so that's out of the question. No soap and no cistern means your dwarves would die of infection from even the slightest injury.

Weapons overall aren't a big deal. Bone Crossbows, bone bolts, and leather quivers are all obtainable.

Don't forget, these guys won't be trained at all, you can't build archery targets because you don't have any materials for them so you're sending a bunch of fresh recruits who barely know which end of the crossbow shoots to fight whatever comes your way... you could make a bed (out of one of your three logs) to serve as a barracks, but bone crossbows are pretty poor bashing weapons...

[Badger Storm]

If you started in a warm climate you could have year-round water, but you might as well try to melt a bronze colossus with a flashlight.

[Slogo]

Well, you can't get wood or stone, therefore no clay, glass, or metal, since you need fire-safe material to build a wood burner, which would allow you charcoal and ash.  You have exactly three logs, and you can't get any more.  You can't even use one of them to make a training axe, a humble tool that would make all the difference.  The most you could do is keep taking apart and putting together different workshops, but leather and bone are no good for building materials.  And no pots or barrels means no booze, which will slow your dwarves to a crawl, hindering them even further.

Also, with no floodgates, no digging, no constructions, and no pumps you can't make a secure cistern, so you would probably die in the first winter if you didn't have any barrels to make booze, which you won't have since all the barrels you start with will go toward storing the plants you harvest/gather and meat you collect. Fishing requires another workshop so that's out of the question. No soap and no cistern means your dwarves would die of infection from even the slightest injury.

Weapons overall aren't a big deal. Bone Crossbows, bone bolts, and leather quivers are all obtainable.

Don't forget, these guys won't be trained at all, you can't build archery targets because you don't have any materials for them so you're sending a bunch of fresh recruits who barely know which end of the crossbow shoots to fight whatever comes your way... you could make a bed (out of one of your three logs) to serve as a barracks, but bone crossbows are pretty poor bashing weapons...

You don't need to keep the same buildings up for the whole time. There's also no need to store food or plants in barrels. If you embark with food barrels you would wait to gather food until your dwarves have emptied the barrels they embarked with so you'd have room for booze.

Archery targets are also safe to build because deconstructing them gives back the material (in this case a log). It depends a bit on if you can select starting skills, but if you can you can easily get a starting group of dwarves that are able to hold their own hunting animals which will help them train up.

Also you can define barracks from a bag (which I forgot about) so you can get a barracks going that way to help train wrestling and discipline if you can build furniture under the shade of trees (I forget the rules for this).