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[Larix]

I'm slightly disappointed by the limitations of unglitched minecarts (i.e. without abusing impulse ramps). I'm fairly certain that rollers don't accelerate but just set the speed to a fixed amount - not enough to force a derail. Going down ramps can give enough speed for derailing, but there's a speed limit for actually taking a ramp down - any higher and the cart will fly above it. A metal minecart reaches that speed after a mere four z-levels. Sending such a 'speeding' cart over an up ramp will at most send it another z-level up.

In better news, it seems that i stumbled over a really simple trick to avoid dwarfs dragging all the adamantine strands to the cloth stockpile: a 'take' link to a stockpile that won't accept thread. I just took a forbidden adamantine boulder and drew a 1x1 wood stockpile under it. I'm not entirely certain, what with the completely insane amounts of cloth flying around the fort and gumming up the stockpiles, but i think not a single strand has been moved from the workshop since then.

Edit: i set the dwarfs to carve a track on the frozen river and made it a route set to 'ride always'. One of my militia captains is now outside taking sled rides.

[fricy]

I'm slightly disappointed by the limitations of unglitched minecarts (i.e. without abusing impulse ramps). I'm fairly certain that rollers don't accelerate but just set the speed to a fixed amount - not enough to force a derail.

You're right: They just set the speed. This also means that there's no benefit from building 10 tile long rollers, because even a 1 tile roller will set it to max (roller) speed...

[henkalv]

After my gem cutter got a mood and made a table out of a solid block of rubbicelle, thus making my dining hall the stuff of legends, a group of dwarf mason necromancers (i kid yee not, they were all masons) attacks, promtly walks into the refuse pile and animates a whole army of kangaroo remains. Tried re-capturing the fort a few times but the fellow who actually did the animation seems to have left the scene and now it is filled to the brim with ghosts

[Larix]

Going down ramps can give enough speed for derailing, but there's a speed limit for actually taking a ramp down - any higher and the cart will fly above it. A metal minecart reaches that speed after a mere four z-levels.

I thought about it and it turns out i've been stupid again: the error was that i had flat track bits between the ramps. Those horizontal tracks made the cart move horizontally and thus allowed it to keep moving in that orientation instead of 'falling' down the ramp. A straight chain of ramps seems to add up properly - 9 z-levels down gave the cart enough momentum to climb seven levels back up. Time to build another ballistic ramp...

[Splint]

Obok finally named her blade. The Harshness of Apes shall serve this fortress for a good long time.



Only took 45 unlucky creatures not counting some giants and FBs.

EDIT: Got a fancy bone amulet from a possession. I think I'll start making a museum/statue garden to display the junk items in.

Death pit has been completely redone and my marksdwarves can now use the POWs from the last few battles as target practice. May just have my Swordlord kill the rest though as there's some minor supply issues for the marksdwarves at the moment.

[Bludulukus]

Finally set up my magma forges after much research on the matter and the death of 2 legendary miners, one melted in the magma sea and the other died under tons of rubble from a cave in.

Attacked by another FB, this time a tick with noxious secretions that kicked a legendary engraver to death and shortly after my military sent its chitinous ass back to Hell.

[Splint]

As the last prisoners were thrown to Obok, the second to last hadn't even hit the ground when a severed head and arm came flying out of the death pit.

I dunno why it made me laugh so much.

EDIT: Captured a herd of something called Inkhornes. Dug out a huge pasture for them and I plan on raising a herd beside my tuskoxen and horses. Just because I can.

A massive ambush of a number of goblin marksmen and their giant toad mounts along with a swarm of things called blight bats tried to ambush the caravan, and with the intervention of four swordsdwarves and the guards, they were beaten, but not without one of the Privates ending up with a broken arm and pelvis and a guard getting a busted leg. I tweakowned the poor fellow simply because I felt bad for him and he along with two others are awaiting full treatment.

And as I typed this a bunch of leprechauns were captured. Guess I'll pitch them into my now blood and vomit encrusted death pit with Obok.

Oh, ad we're a barony now. Didn't have a chance to stake out prospective noblemen so I panicked and made a gem setter Baron. Hopefully there won't be a torrent of stupid demands, but that's probably hoping for too much.

[malimbar04]

So, in the last week lots of stuff happened. it all of course started when I wasn't paying attention, and goblins/trolls in a siege got past my wide-open bridge. They slaughtered several dwarves, but ended up beign saved by two things: the large hoard of wolves and war-cheetahs in the back, and one legendary wounded captain of the guard who can hobble around and slaughter everyone. But alas, the damage had been done. My fort of 120+ has by now wittled itself down to 62 via tantrums, melancholy, and berserkedness.

Recently I had a dwarf get all dark and broody. He went off and promptly claimed the butchers shop and a couple of items, but never finished his object. He just now went berserk, but alas the butcher shop is in the middle of the courtyard, and there are a LOT of wolves and war dogs and war cheetahs in the courtyard. He was pretty ferocious when it came to swinging his masterful decorated steel pick, but shear numbers in the swarm destroyed him. It was quite a gory sight to skim the combat reports.

along with those tantrums, in the last year I've had to rebuild my trade depot 5 times, and I'm still finding random workshops destroyed here and there. Clothing, farming, wood furnaces, tables, it's all bene fair game. Hopefully all those weak-willed dwarves are going to die off soon and we can proceed with the stronger of heart.

Speaking of which, I have several new migrants to train up. Due to the more recently discovered children growth problem I place higher value on migrants than before. My champion is still pretty darn awesome, so he's training them up as fast as I can get him too (not fast enough for my taste, but oh well).

Also, I found that both steel floor hatches and steel mechanisms can be damaged. I had to replace one just recently, which resulted in the loss of some human caravan carts. Oh well.

[Frutjus]

I embarked by a volcano which opened up on the side of a hill, next to a valley; I noticed that there was only a one-tile-thick wall keeping the magma from spewing all over the countryside.

Result: one miner burned to a crisp, a lake of lava where the valley *used* to be, and a !!forest!!, leading to a woodcutter dying in the forest fire. I'm now building a fortress into the mountainside with the lava-lake-valley as a defensive barrier in front. But seeing as this is dorf fortress, nothing much is new.

[Urist Mcfortwrecker]

well, my attempt to channel a murky pool into my fort has resulted in a new trade corridor, then a yak went berserk down there and is blocking my dwarves from doing anything in my main entrance hall, which was where i put the well

[dig_for_!!sparklies!!]

That volcano fortress sounds awesome. I was trying to look for a volcano recently, but I got a lot of silver at least so I'm happy.

Sadly in the midst of several mega projects, my old fortress crashed. So now we are building on the side of a mountain, in a place named Singedtombs, which seems oddly appropriate. My first embark party got decimated by a blind cave ogre, and I thought I was about to see the "Your fortress has crumbled to its end" message, except migrants arrived!--so I enlisted them, and after littering the entryway with a few more corpses, the ogre fled down to the caverns. With the squad still chasing her. It was cartoonishly hilarious to see them racing over the cavern slopes, and then over the mountainside. None of these dwarves had any fighting training, might I add. (I fixed that in the reclaim party). Oddly, the ogre was finally killed by the last two migrants, but I decided it was far too depressing to continue with two dwarves and a bunch of miasma producing corpses, so I re-claimed.

[Eric Blank]

Having some fun with my new fort. It's in a tiny world, on a 4x4 embark featuring two sub-regions of tropical forest. There's no iron, but there's lots of gold, tetrahedrite, and garnierite, a little cassiterite, and some diamonds in kimberlite veins. There's also sand, clay, and a magma pipe in the second caverns which I procured a while back. Also in the caverns, are giant cave spiders, and regular cave spiders, and a mountain of cave spider silk for the picking, which I have been. I'm currently dividing out the second cavern with walls and cave traps, restricting the entry points as I can. There have been two fights with a troll and a elk bird, which were put down without any life-threatening injuries for the dwarves, and I've captured quite a bit of wildlife including a male and female GCS which I plan to breed.

All is going well so far, mostly because I opted to turn invaders off so I don't have to put up with their BS while I fiddle casually.

[Larix]

The gravity-powered minecart cannon has been a resounding success: i used my Mountain Of Madness embark - a flat valley hemmed in by 40-50z high mountains and backed by a 120z mountain. My dwarfs drilled the acceleration chute through the mountain, starting with a constructed ramp end a single tile away from the easternmost end of the map, 113z above the valley floor. At 85z Above Valley, we ran out of mountain to dig through, so that's where the up ramp was placed. At the same time, the ceiling beam was constructed somewhere up around z127 AV (to actually allocate minecart-viable sky across the map). After a few test shots before the beam was finished, resulting in the expected crashes against solid sky, in late winter of 162 the inaugurative shot was performed: the cart rose from the jump ramp (at 85) to an apex at 99, entered the third embark square around z90 and the fourth at 61, and finally smacked into the western map border at z2, after a nonstop flight of 158 tiles.

The second half of the following year saw the construction of a 'catcher' track at z99, complete with a second jump ramp. The first design was a failure - the ramp was placed before the apex of the cart's trajectory, so it just slammed into the wall and rolled back down - but after an extension, the cart accepted the track and went over the ramp correctly, rising another eight z-levels. It lost so much speed that it reached the western border at z4 above ground, the descent in the end was evidently much steeper than on the non-stop flight. The next step will be setting up some track stops so a dwarf can 'ride' the cart to the catcher track, a flight of ~40 tiles horizontally and fourteen vertically.

[VerdantSF]

The next step will be setting up some track stops so a dwarf can 'ride' the cart to the catcher track, a flight of ~40 tiles horizontally and fourteen vertically.

Niiiice!

[Oaktree]

Year 7 in Swordgleams has been declared "Year of the Minotaur". 

Minotaur #4 appeared in the spring, #5 in the autumn, and #6 in the winter.  All killed well outside the walls by marksdwarves.  The Captain of the Guard now has two to his credit.  Slabs have been put in the dining hall to memorialize their deaths - and these also indicate that all six were known dwarf-killers whose reigns of terror deserved ending.

An obscure forgotten beast (a giant civet with a single name) was put down by a spike trap in the caverns.

Considerable amusement in the autumn was provided by a kobold thief.  He somehow got past two watch animals at the gate without being detected.  However, he was noticed by a dwarf halfway across the central courtyard.  The kobold ran for the gate at that point - and the ground rumbled as six war rhinos left their pasture space in the courtyard in pursuit.  They didn't get the kill as a marksdwarf on the walls potted the kobold,  but it was an interesting chase to observe.  And as a result the south courtyard is getting some modifications to see of a semi-secure pasture can be put there for wall rhinos to react from when intruders are detected.

The goblin army finally put in an appearance in the winter.  Standard attack with a mix of cavalry and support war creatures such as rats, toads, or spiders.  The squads came in piecemeal and most of them broke and retreated well before they neared the gates.  Due to the first squad and war creatures getting slaughtered mainly.  The ponds east of the fort are currently more red than blue and unusable.  A quarter of a squad on aquatic mounts mired itself in them are were shot to bits by marksdwarves in the archery towers.

While the goblins were being mangled the CMD got a mood and made a cave spider silk short skirt.  Romantically decorated with an image of a goblin getting brained by a dwarf wielding a morningstar.

Swordgleams military is at full strength and fairly well-trained.  Four six-dwarf marksdwarf squads in bronze mail and five four-to-six-dwarf melee squads with steel armor.  Some reservist squads are active as well and training with either swords or crossbows.  Mainly for physical fitness and to keep the number of idlers reduced.