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[Lord Shonus]

In my experience, even superdwarvenly tough champions would bleed to death from that.

[JoystickHero]

Adam and Eve and Eve and Eve and Eve…

Urist McAdam: Adept Miner, Novice Conversationalist, Legendary Pimp.

It is the first of Limestone in the year 303. The trees have just started to turn their shades, and the village Graspedchannel, home to sixty-one carefreedwarves, is moving steadily through its fourth year of existence. Its average citizen is truly ecstatic, and, drawn by tales of a hill-side paradise, immigrants from every corner of the Cloister of Winters has traveled to this growing fortress, and all have been welcomed with open arms. Graspedchannel has no shortage of food or booze, its stocks filled be farms of plump helmets, sweet pods, strawberries, and sunberries, only to be further supplemented by imported drinks and meat nearly every season. Even its jail is lavish, expertly-carved statues adorn the large, empty room, six chains and six beds lined against the east wall.

The fortress is not without its enemies, of course; Kobold thieves come on at least a monthly basis, though they rarely get past the front gates before the cowardly beasts are spotted, and scared off. Of more concern however, several seasons ago, a party of a half-dozen goblins ambushed a woodsman, and killed two dogs, though the military made short work of them before they could so much as injure a dwarf. Even the woodcutter got off with no more than a bruised shoulder. Though the vile monsters were driven back, Ezum Leafpaged, leader and chief protector of the then-hamlet knew they would return, and began a project to build a mighty castle around the fortress, including an exercise yard and a trap-lined moat. Mebzuth Plaitedheaters, a quiet, sincere female who succeeded Ezum after he stepped down to serve as a champion full-time, has further scaled up this effort, and devotes all of her time and energy to making sure her fellow dwarves are safe, despite not knowing so much as the first name of some of them. She has more than doubled the size of the military, and ensured that all of its champions are equipped with the best weapons possible, though she considers armor little more than a waste of good steel, instead implementing mandatory wrestling and shield training. This seems to be an effective strategy so far, as there has yet to be a sparring injury of any serious concern, despite the lack of training weapons.

Great happiness has filled the halls of Graspedchannel recently, as its first two births have both come in the last year, one to two of the founding seven, the other to some of the fortress' earliest immigrants. It is only a matter of time until they are grown enough to walk and enjoy their utopian home. With a total worth above three hundred and fifty thousand dorfs, an ecstatic citizenry, a stockpile containing at least a year's worth of food and booze, prosperous indoor AND outdoor farms, a powerful military, and high, impenetrable walls keeping them safe from the savagery of the outside world, these children, as well as the rest of the fortress' inhabitants, can look forward to long, happy lives. At least until JoystickHero gets bored.

Screenshots and Visualizations

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The z0 level of the fortress. This view includes the exercise yard (statue garden), outer yard (for limited wood production in the event of a protracted siege) and under-construction outer walls. When re-completed, the outer four sniper towers will only be accessible from underground, yet connected to each other, and the upper wall.


My food/booze, wood, and stone stockpiles (brought upstairs from one of the dolomite quarry levels by haulers for easy mason access) as well as my barracks, and the bottom of my moat. I've been meaning to fill the rest of it with at least stone-fall traps, but I've just been too occupied with working on my castle, which is beginning to turn into a semi-megaconstruction at this point. The little open spot at the bottom leads to a set of stairs down to my well (and some puppy bait for goblin pathfinding if/when I close up shop) as well as a floodgate to a lake I'll use to either flood my moat or refill my well, should the need to do either ever arise.


My grand (yes, Grand, there's a platinum vein in there) hall, a former magnetite cluster (...which still contains the better part of its contents. I swear, I have literally too much iron. A rare problem if there ever was one.), which has undergone almost no work since the initial mining out. I may turn my attention to it once I've finished the castle. If I ever "finish" the castle, it's more likely it will simply keep being improved upon until the inevitable Fun.

P.S. Yes, I am quite aware that the room looks like a thumb if you've got a clean mind, and something else otherwise.


An aerial view of Graspedchannel via Visual Fortress.


The front gate. I'm going to put a couple of masterpiece statues on those extruding floor tiles soon. The drawbridge pulls inward, protected from bridge destroyers by the moat.


The exercise yard again. North is the top-left of the picture, so you can mentally place the farms in the top and bottom corners.


The dining room again. Not very exciting for us, but apparently it's made of dwarfhappy. It's probably all the valuable ore just lying on the ground. Also, the valuable ore that literally IS the ground.

That post took me the better part of an hour to put together, counting writing, screenshotting, and looking up names and facts.

[LostxInxThought]

  so far, I've lost 3 dwarves: 1 bonecrafter, due to a lack of shells.
and 2 metalsmiths, due to an abundance of fire imps.
I managed to survive my 1st Orc siege[my own orcs], by turtling up and stationing untrained recruits with crossbows on the walls, captured 3, killed one, the rest ran away unharmed despite going through over 120 bolts on the group.
managed to have one escape (details in the facepalm moments thread  ).
I finally have the 1st level, and floors for the second level of the wooden fortress finished now.

I'm not sure why, but the goblins are oddly quiet, only a couple snatchers and one ambush so far. Maybe the orcs are slowing them down somehow?

[Kidiri]

Oh, come on. Did nobody else have a "Wait, what?"-feeling when I said I had a polar bear and a flock of penguins on my map? try to llok at it on a more real-life scope, rather than a DF one. I literary laughed out loud the moment I saw it. Also, I'm digging down in some chalk, and have already discovered 2 clusters of magnetite, one vein of hematite, one vein of sphalerite, one vein of platinum, and two veins of lignite. This totals up to a total of 5090 pieces of flux, 119 bits of sphalerite, 113 platinum nuggets, 186 chunks of lignite and a whopping 1564 pieces of iron ore. I've also found some alunite and bauxite, both magma safe in Dig Deeper.

[JoystickHero]

Oh, come on. Did nobody else have a "Wait, what?"-feeling when I said I had a polar bear and a flock of penguins on my map?

We've played far too many games of DF for our first reaction to not be "Is there magma?".

[Mungrul]

18 years Crestedwhipped has been going now.
I've had about 6 dwarves be born and grow to adulthood, which is pretty cool. I'm hoping to get grandparents and further, inspired by Flarechannel.

But that ain't the fun stuff.

My military is now ridiculously large and overpowered. It consists of 39 legendary champions in the standing army, and 20 fortress guards, 6 of which again are legendary champions.
And I only need 2 of them; Parchedflames and her lover Teacherlessons. Between them they now have close to 300 kills.

What about sieges...

So I posted earlier that I'd killed the human guild representative because some uppity human soldier killed my pet giant toad.
Well initially, the humans sent a poxy siege force of 10 blokes and one horse. Parchedflames saw them off, letting 2 survive, screaming "Send more ya lanky bastards!".
So the next year, they did. 3 squads of 15 blokes, all on horseback.
Initially, I set one of my noob champions (trained up but with no kills) on the bridge waiting for them, intending to "blood" him and get him his champion name (yes, I'm still naming champions after their first or most prominent kill).
However, I'd also set Teacherlessons to guard the open staircase at the back of the fortress that was leading up to my magma exhaust system. At least I thought I had.
Turns out, I hadn't deleted his patrol route.
Next thing I know, I'm looking at the noob on the bridge when I see arrows spraying in all sorts of random directions from the west side of the map, a short distance away from the bridge.
Wondering what the hell was going on, I zipped over only to see Teacherlessons dodging arrows and lopping all and sundry apart. I tell ya, the guy's a BEAST. Okay, so his missus may have more kills, but Teacherlessons' stats in Dwarf Therapist, when each totalled (Strength, Toughness and Agility), total over 60. I haven't got the exact figures to hand, but he saw off the entire human siege single-handedly, without a scratch.

In the meantime, the elves are stubbornly still trying to trade to me after I had been incredibly generous (in other word, treating them like a garbage collection service and giving them loads of crap for free).
Why stubbornly?
Well, initially, I'd set my trade depot up as a drowner, but I realised this wouldn't help with getting rid of the mountains of crap my dorfs are producing, and would, in fact, only make things worse. And smelly.
So I re-made it as a bauxite depot with a quick-flooding magma pumping system. Initially, I just set a drain at the back of the depot. This worked well, with the elves melting in record time, but the depot was a little slow to clear of magma. So I started building a massive pump-tower-to-magmaduct thingy with the aim of dropping the magma used to flood the depot back in to the top of the magma pipe. I figured after burning their last caravan, and previously making their diplomat berserk then dead, they'd surely start sending ambushes. Oh, I also let one of their caravans get ambushed by gobbos.
Nope.
Instead they sent another caravan. Obviously the lure of potentially free crap is too strong for the bastards.
So I burned them too.

Hopefully by the time the next elves arrive, my tower thingy (with observation deck), should be complete.

By the way, does anyone know if Olmmen will attack captives dropped into their pond?
I've made a fishtank in the courtyard that I already have one Olmman in, and fully intend to feed it any captives that come my way.

[Fishbulb]

I had a carp pond in my last fort, a naturally occurring one that I walled in when I built my curtain wall. I dropped a puppy into it to test it; the carp tore it to pieces. I later pitted a caged goblin into it. The carp ignored it and it drowned.

Dunno if the same would happen with olmmen. I'm guessing probably, more's the pity.

[Sphalerite]

I dropped some caged goblins and orcs in a room full of wild crocodiles and olmmen.  They ignored each other.  Most wild animals don't seem to attack invaders.

[Mungrul]

Bugger.
Ah well, at least any dropees will drown.
Every cloud and all that

[Fishbulb]

On the other hand, I was just now playing a bit, and I had a goblin snatcher get too close to a pond full of tigerfish. I got the "snatcher, protect the blah blah" announcement, and then I unpaused. The fish pulled the goblin into the pond, then ripped him to pieces, before my very eyes.

In conclusion, I really have no idea how the relationship between wild animals, invaders, hostiles and prisoners works.

[Imp]

Smoothflames the Fortunate Forest is starting to really thrive as it begins its third year.  Things were especially tense last year when the elves came, but the eared brought a thoughtful and wise gift - a healthy young giant flying jellyfish in offer as a living symbol for our clan.  Makes a fine mascot, 'specially when it lingers near its kin in our carvings.  We toasted those elves with mead and they answered with sunshine.  Never thought I'd be glad to see an elf, but I meant it when I invited them to return safe next spring.

The orcs finally found us last winter, a small scouting party of hammerhands and wrestlers.  Our traps claimed them all and in another week or two we'll unseal the door they rot behind and see if their bones are clean enough for use yet.  Spitecaverns, the small cave we settled near has been cleansed of the few ratmen infesting it - a very dim shadow of the dangers it used to hold before a hero of our people slew the last of the line of minotaurs which infested it until about fifty years ago.

Our clan has made only two artifacts as yet, a millstone and a weapon rack, but the fifth wave of immigrants has swelled our numbers to seventy.  We have enough eager hands now to achieve great things and our explorations underground have just discovered hot stone.  We'll see what dangers swim in the magma beyond after we learn if the returning elves have brought back the respect they approached us with last year.

[Jack_Bread]

Chose wrong fort while loading, found fort that crashed and made me RAEG.
But everyone was mostly dead and the miner wasn't in the path of magma!
Right now, the entire first page of units are tame animals and Urist. I want to see what happens if I rack up a shit ton of wealth(he's craftin' like crazeh).

[Fishbulb]

Well, my overly complicated magma-drowning setup for dealing with the elves who've taken to bringing me nothing but cloth turned out to be an obsidian factory instead. I set up a small water reservoir overhead with just enough water to fill the depot to 1/7 everywhere, thinking that 1/7 water dropped onto 1/7 magma from one z-level above would result in steam. Instead, it turned into a solid wall of obsidian under the release valve. Creating a big pain in the neck involving having to wait for the leftover lava to cool, mining out the obsidian, building a scaffold, deconstructing the floor of the cistern so the water would drain out onto my dwarf's head, then getting inside the pipe to channel out the obsidian floor that was created when the magma and water met.

Ugh.

This time I'm going to try a different approach. Instead of putting the water directly above the depot, I've put it above and adjacent to it, blocked by a floodgate. Hopefully the water will run out horizontally into the empty space, and won't obsidian-clog the valve this time. And if it does harden into obsidian when it hits the lava, I'll be able to just channel it out and reset instead of having to do all that extra construction work again. Oy.

Stupid elves.

[caknuck]

New fort... I was waiting for the caravan to bring some bauxite prior to breaching the magma pipe, but then I stumbled on a sizable deposit on the same z-level where my magma furnaces will be set up. I've found plenty of coal and hematite, so a thriving steel industry is just around the corner.

Not bad for winter of year 1.

[Urist McOverlord]

I'm watching half a goblin siege chase a kitten, and am hoping that they just kill the damn thing already...