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[Larix]

The two switch concepts work, although not quite as well as i had hoped.
No.1: the melting fuse - a switchable building that's not magmaproof holds back the flow. If it's constantly closed or only open for short amounts of time, it will stay intact. Only after lengthy exposure will it melt. Probably depends on melting point/ignition point, a rhyolite door secured with rhyolite mechanisms held out for quite a while. Basically, if it's open for a long time, it can no longer be closed. This _could_ be used for some kinds of traps.
No.2: Deconstruction-switching - a gear without linkages or an axle is suspended between two switchable gears. As long as one of the gears is switched on, the device in the middle is supported. If both are switched off, the middle item loses support. If you manage to make the game check supportedness (very unreliable, unfortunately), it deconstructs and the connection between the two switchable gears is removed. For demonstration purposes, i built it like this:

Code: [Select]

.B
.F
WAM
W-Gear holding a windmill
A, B - switchable gears
M - Millstone (power output)
F - Floating device (gearbox)

When both A and B are engaged, the whole contraption has a load of 31 power (gear B sits atop a vertical axle) and can't be moved by the 20 power windmill.
When A is off and B is on, no power is sent to the millstone, F is still supported by B. Only the gear below the windmill receives and consumes power.
When B is off and A is on, F is supported by A, the total power consumption is 25, once again everything stands still
When A and B are both off, no power will be transmitted, but once the game updates the gearbox, F deconstructs. When A is engaged again, the millstone will turn, because power consumption is down to 20.

The floating gear can take quite a while to deconstruct, it seems that the game is rather lazy about updating their stats. I ended up saving and restoring...
And of course, for the millstone switch, you could do without gear B - just switch A on, get F to deconstruct, switch back on again, switches through deconstruction. Suspending the floating gear between two (or more) switchable gears opens the possibility to irreversibly sever a power connection between two logical circuits.

[Eric Blank]

My friendly neighborhood necromancers decided to pay a surprise visit with some of their zombies friends. Not only that, but they arrived the same time as the Elven caravan. Needless to say, it turned into a massacre. So now I have 800 or something varied sorts of reanimated limbs, heads, elf carcasses, mutilated animal corpses and whatnot laying siege. Any wild animals entering the map are quickly assimilated into this gruesome menagerie.

Oh, and the Elven diplomat trapped inside my fortress went berserk and managed to rip the head off of one of my poor dorfs.

At least the necromancers are having fun. Maybe if I could lure them into cage traps somehow...?

I purposefully embarked between two necro towers in order to increase my zombie goodness.  Third year in, both of them showed up at the same time, in the same siege... with two zombies each.  Both necros were killed in moments. 

Feels a little disappointing.

Sometimes they'll only bring a handful of zombies and sometimes the necromancers themselves won't show up at all. Of course, the rest of the time they either bring upwards of 30 zombies, or they sneak in in ambush and raise hell, killing the entire population of your fortress and then raising them before being spotted.

[edit]

Today I started a new fort and after the liaison had come, had his meeting with my leader and began to walk away, he spotted a wild kestrel. Unbeknownst to me, he's an elemental mage, so he starts throwing fireballs and whatnot at the animal, and manages to set my lawn on fire. Which puts my dwarves in quarantine for the duration of the inferno. The flames also engulfed the depot and burned the supplies I was hoping to acquire. There's molten cheese and tin all over the place. Even killed a merchant and guard, so now the other merchant is packing up what's left. God damnit...

A kobold thief also showed up with the caravan and stole a quiver of bolts, according to the event log.

[k33n]

My very best fort yet was just made into clown haunted ruins when a pillar of candy was hollow all the way through. Damn.

[itg]

I just discovered how to build a "crash the game" lever: build a raising drawbridge on the top level of the map. Lowering the bridge crashes the game every time.

Lost an hour or so of work, but on the plus side, I've discovered a way to savescum without technically cheating. Call it a dwarven time machine.

[Lolfail0009]

I just discovered how to build a "crash the game" lever: build a raising drawbridge on the top level of the map. Lowering the bridge crashes the game every time.

Lost an hour or so of work, but on the plus side, I've discovered a way to savescum without technically cheating. Call it a dwarven time machine.

So that makes how many laws of thermodynamics broken by DF?

[KingBacon]

My very best fort yet was just made into clown haunted ruins when a pillar of candy was hollow all the way through. Damn.

Congrats, your mason's failed you.

-
Another day, another zombie siege. I send my axedorfs and hammers forth to slaughter the necromancer scum (my axes need training .) AN ELVEN AMBUSH? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS, I HAVE NEVER EVEN SLAIN YOU TREEHUGGERS, NEVER TRADED YOU WOOD, NEVER SEIZED YOUR GOODS, AND THIS IS WHAT I GET?

Well more corpses for the corpse pile.

[Akura]

Walldreams 2.0 keeps going. I have enough housing for every adult family in the city. I've finished the royal palace(except the basement) in preparation for bringing the king, and the sewer tunnels are well underway.

Spoiler: Screens of the palace (click to show/hide)

First floor. The dining area is a checkered silver and billon floor. The throne room is a gold floor. The west wing of the palace is quarters for the captain of the guard, while the Fortress Guard trains right outside. Between the throne room and dining room is a pantry storing food for the kitchen on the level below.


Second floor, with the barracks for the guards nearby.

The king will have a masterwork aluminum throne decorated with yellow diamonds, armadillo shell, goat hoof, and platinum. He was sit at his exceptional crystal glass table which is decorated with platinum, goat horn, and sapphire, upon a platinum chair, while any guests(hah) will have silver tables and chairs. He will sleep in an artifact galena bed.


Currently having issues with the royal kitchens. They keep loading it up with dwarven syrup, leaving no room for solid food. I have seperate stockpiles for meat, flour(+dwarven sugar), quarry bush leaves(spices), and cheese(which also includes dwarven syrup), all set to give to a seperate stockpile linked(and next to) the kitchen. The just keep moving the syrup, although this mostly may be because all the other stuff is in other stockpiles, I think. Time to buy out some caravans... which wouldn't be hard because I have pages and pages of bone crafts for some reason.

[Sutremaine]

Re: plumbing

Using up stairs in place of plain digging will stop trees from growing, and won't reveal the level above. You'll need bare floor in order to place floodgates and other things, but once placed they'll block tree growth themselves.

Lost an hour or so of work, but on the plus side, I've discovered a way to savescum without technically cheating.

Nope, it's still technically cheating, because you're deliberately closing the program to avoid having to save during your current situation.

[Skuggen]

I decided to try to get rid of the numerous forgotten beasts infesting all the cavern layers. Starting with the two in the first layer: a quadruped composed of amber with deadly dust and a fleshy beast with webs.

Set up two squads in ambush, one with legendary marksmen and one with legendary melee dwarves, easily capable of swatting goblin sieges without a scratch, and got a miner to crack open the wall.



...so I'm looking for a nice embark spot for my next fort.

[Akura]

Re: plumbing

Using up stairs in place of plain digging will stop trees from growing, and won't reveal the level above. You'll need bare floor in order to place floodgates and other things, but once placed they'll block tree growth themselves.

Was that directed at me? I'm flooring over all the sand in the tunnels with bricks.

...And I've run out of bricks.
So now, the dwarves are taking care of various other things, such as smoothing and channeling various sections as more bricks are made.

[itg]

Lost an hour or so of work, but on the plus side, I've discovered a way to savescum without technically cheating.

Nope, it's still technically cheating, because you're deliberately closing the program to avoid having to save during your current situation.

I was joking, for the record, and I definitely agree it's cheating in spirit. But arguably, anything you do from within the game is fair game. Just like danger rooms are technically not cheating, walling yourself in is technically not cheating, etc.

[Sutremaine]

If you dig out the plumbing using [ u] instead of [ d], you don't need any flooring.

I've been generating throwaway fortresses to try and fix a crash bug, and I decided to give voracious cave crawlers the [CAN_LEARN] token so they'd pick up some combat skills. Like pretty much everything else, they were set to be common domestic animals, which leaves me with many interesting trade options. I also gave dwarves the ability to go without eating, drinking, sleeping, or feeling emotion, so I could speed the test up by sitting and waiting for the caravan to potentially cause a crash.

Since I had nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs as the months screamed by, I decided to murder the dwarven caraven when it came. Several scuffles later, only two dwarves remained. One was a peasant who is currently an enemy of both civ and fortress, and the other was a child who had been wandering about on the hill while everyone else killed each other.

Neither of them is the expedition leader. That honour goes to Onul Rockwiped the Alliegance of Disappearing, the former pet of some anonymous dwarf. Despite lacking [CAN_SPEAK], she has picked up a complement of social skills. I can understand how an animal can be good at consoling, intimidating, and judging intent, but conversation is a little ridiculous. Additionally, despite having nothing in her inventory, she's picked up 54 points of Armour User skill.

I don't know whose side she's on, but she's been mauling everything to death. ...Except the aforementioned lone peasant, plus a gremlin child. They're just chilling. No second dwarven caravan has come, possibly because of the merchant yaks still hanging around the site. I'll go deal with that, especially since the first caravan's items are still listed as red in the stocks screen.

Okay, it's been about a year or so, and Onul's social skills are decaying even though she has nothing to do but hang around with Unib. She still "talks" to the outpost liaison, and doesn't maul the liaison or the traders. Neither does Unib, who is fully commandable except for being ineligible for any noble posts (hey game, what do you mean, 'there are no reasonable candidates'? I have an expedition leader. I have a living dwarf. What's the problem?). If I took her out of her squad she wouldn't be allowed back in, but while she's in it she'll pick up uniform and follow orders.

Migrants were too nervous to make the journey this season, but based on Onul's thoughts about imported animals and her own offspring they're right to be wary.

This is probably all technically cheating (especially healing up Unib using DFHack), but it's so fun.

[Larix]

Creatures get armour user skill when getting hit. The experience gain is extremely low (three points per hit taken), but it can add up. I managed to get novice armour user skill with a stark naked adventurer once. Yeah, she did get scarred up quite a bit in the process.

I have a few dogs with CAN_LEARN and CAN_SPEAK in one fort for laughs. They're not assignable for expedition leader, but i hope their amazing social skills will kick in and allow their election for mayor eventually.

My fort in the unreasonably hot biome is coming along nicely, although i've savescummed: first the troglodyte horde insisted on camping the cage traps and one got a lucky hit breaking a dwarf's hand, which proved fatal (i.e. caused the dwarf to fall unconscious, guaranteeing a deadly headshot); i was very, very annoyed but willing to play on when rain started to fall (in a desert world) and melted a mason. At seventeen adults, losing two dwarfs to freak bullshit deaths was a bit too stupid for me, so i wiped two months of messing around.

I don't know how hot exactly the biome is, but all walls built in "aboveground light" tiles are marked "warm" year-round.

- All zone designations warn me of "hot" status from mid-granite to mid-timber. The warning is displayed everywhere, aboveground, underground, on top of the magma sea. However, only aboveground zones really seem to be affected - citizens will not hang around in outdoor meeting zones during the hot seasons.

- All animals in cages brought by the caravans melt upon entering the map. Water buffalos and similarly large critters will survive with all fat molten. Building a troll cage in an aboveground but roofed-over plot didn't melt or otherwise harm the troll.

- There are no animals on the surface. All wildlife appears in the caverns. I'll go and turn on invaders, see if goblins will visit. And i'll see if goblins captured in cage traps melt in the heat.

- There's a freshwater lake and it shows no sign of evaporating, in spite of the insane heat.

- Cheese imported by caravans melts upon appearance on the map. The caravan will dutifully unload it in the depot, but the melting "processes" it, turning it into my fort's property. I can either sell the molten cheese to the caravan (in indivisible five-item stacks valued at five ☼ each) or pull it off the depot and get it moved to my stockpiles. It's displayed as an orange "glob" thing and will not be stored in barrels, but can still be used for cooking as a solid material. Other caravan goods appear to remain unharmed.

- See above: the infamous "melting dwarf; just add water" bug is still alive and well - dwarfs can walk around on the surface under the burning sun without damage, but if they get wet, they melt.

- Minor observation that i had never fully processed: platinum appears in olivine as cluster, i.e. with a 100% drop rate, but it can also appear in magnetite. And here, it shows up as a vein - with a significantly lower drop rate. At least it always leaves platinum floor, which can be smoothed and engraved for ridiculously valuable rooms for my prospective baroness - the only fully civilian adult in the fort. I have two miners, two woodcutters, two melee dwarfs (fully trained and extremely legendary by now), ten dwarfs in the crossbow-armed citizen militia and her, the broker (legendary tanner thanks to a mood, and she has only brokered the one time when the position was up for grabs).

[cyberTripping]

Off topic: I just joined the forums now, after a healthy dosage of being absoulutely overwhelmed, and mass-killing my fort through dehydration.

I made my first fort (well, first with the intention of playing for longer than half an hour). Things were going extremely slow, due to me just starting. I didn't know about the population cap (well, I did, but I didn't know how to change it / that it would be so absurd by default). doing all the work I could manage, still had 60+ Urist McFarmer/Potter/Potashmaker/Peasant doing nothing but stand around crowding the fort. I barely breached the second caverns, decided I'd fiddled around enough and had a good enough feel of the mechanics to start a semisuccessful fort after this one, closed the bridge and waited. The only survivor was the vampire dwarf mayor who was promptly pincushioned by a goblin after opening the bridge.

I tried revisiting with a demigod adventurer. I was murdered by a goblin halfway through exploring, as he caught me off guard and broke my leg.

I've since reduced the pop. cap to 80 to be more reasonable, since that's more than I'll ever need. I'm trying to stay away from using the quickstart guide on the wiki, I have glanced at it for pointers. I've been a long time wiki and forum lurker, but I've never applied my knowledge.

I had a good deal of FUN from that. Personally hoping next time is !!FUN!! instead, or some variant.

[peridot]

Apparently digging an up stairs under another up stairs converts the upper one into an up/down stairs. This removes the floor in the process, which was a little startling since I dig my pressurized aqueducts with up stairs to keep them free of foliage. I hope I put in enough shutoff valves and not too many reservoirs...