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[Larix]

Ho hum. Seems that only _standing_ minecarts can take on water. I built a trench full of forward ramps, and carts moved through it at a decent clip, but if they just go through without stopping, they'll acquire only a "water covering", no "water [833]". Roller-less fillers (depending on ramps) tend to work, but as far as i can tell, a sufficiently slow cart can climb out on a 1-6/7 ramp, but not on a 7/7 ramp (both water and magma). So if the filling trench is very full, it can take very long for the cart to climb out, and if the trench is somewhat depleted (6/7 on most tiles, technically still enough to fill a cart), carts will pass through without picking up water, because they don't stop.

Ah well. Seems like getting water into one of my supersonic carts won't happen.

[BenLubar]

So I just started a fortress. It's the third day of the first month. The fisherdwarf jumps into the river to attack an eel and instantly dies.

Code: [Select]

[DFHack]# deathcause
The dwarf reg timnärilral died in year 2015 (cause: struck_down), killed by the sea lamprey nakuththak.
And here I thought this Calm embark location would be remotely safe.

[Lelouch]

So I just started a fortress. It's the third day of the first month. The fisherdwarf jumps into the river to attack an eel and instantly dies.

I unassigned all fishing designation and only get fish by trading... it's simple too unreliable with a low yield and high danger.
Also have you ever had craps near your wagon with the 2fisher embark set up?

[doublestrafe]

The inevitable has happened. After two years of building and another year of filling, as soon as my magma tank filled up, the pressurized magma did me the favor of pointing out the one lower magma conduit that I had neglected to put a lid on. Magma has spilled back down onto the surface, down the pump stack access shaft, and a little ways into the fort. Happily, I've been the fussy type who paves over everything in pretty white stone, so with any luck I might not light any dwarves on fire.

The spill did have the convenient consequence of burning through the drive shaft, so at least the pump's not still going.

Edit: Oops. The drive shaft powering my millstone acted as a fuse and brought the fire into the food stockpiles, which are on soil.  This comprises, for starters, 42,603 prepared meals, mostly masterwork. I foresee some unhappy cooks.

The scope of the problem:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Skuggen]

Flood the fort with water, then dig it out again!

I had a slightly weird ambush yesterday; Four or five groups appearing at different ends of the map, riding either cave crawlers or giant bats. Which made me expect doom as my military wasn't ready and I had no way of shutting out flying creatures.
But then I started getting constant ambush spam, and invaders constantly disappearing and reappearing in the unit list. Checked the combat logs and saw that the goblin mounts were attacking each other. Some weirdness causing the creatures to be partially 'mine', I'm guessing, since I had no one close by to actually detect the ambush to begin with.
This went on for a while, with a lot of them killing each other, before the rest just left, leaving behind a few injured enemies I easily finished off, such as one of the two goblins that fell quite a ways when another goblin shot his bat mount (the other one fell directly into the lava moat).

[doublestrafe]

This is just weird. That magma spill hit the surface on top of a low hill:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see, the magma immediately set fire to the grass, and all was laid to burnination.

It then flowed down the hill:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Same magma, flowing over dense dry dropseed and satintail. But this time, no fire. It's just sitting there.

Edit:
And another weird thing. As far as I can tell, the magma spill happened when pressurized magma rose up through a quartzite block bridge. There was no magma exposed to the surface. Do bridges fail to block rising liquid? If so, that's a one-way gate and sounds like something someone could use somewhere.

[Orange Wizard]

Woah, weird.

[Iamblichos]

Finally seem to have the military figured out.  Fort has laughed at whatever the greenies brought, with the occasional 30-40 goblin/troll siege wiped out by a single Axe Lord while the rest played cribbage in the barracks.

Now, on to Engineering and !!SCIENCE!!.

[Bludulukus]

Geshud Lovelyfigure, Mayor for 21 years has finally shriveled up and died.

RIP Geshud, builder of the great gold pyramid and destroyer of clowns.

[Larix]

I've been fiddling with concepts of minecart computing again, seeing that collisions show much promise. Unfortunately, they also have restrictions - a cart colliding into another one will stop on the spot before the point of collision, so if you try to "read" minecarts as data this way, the debris from one operation tends to impend following operations. Combining collisions with ramps works, but is fairly complicated. I still managed to build an actual "queue" of minecarts where sending a new one in will put it last in line, shifts all present carts one position forward and outputs the first-in-line cart.

Movie: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-2658-powerlessminecartqueue

Problems: cart weights must be very similar, or speed loss can lead to misfunctions. The status of the standing carts cannot be examined easily - they have to stand on non-track floor in this version, and pressure plates will only react to carts when built on track. Could be circumvented by running the whole thing at derail speed, so having the "saved locations" as track would still work. Lengthening or shortening the queue promises to be quite tricky, and it'll need a different mechanism to "seed" (i just had carts placed by hand initially).

The benefits are that it needs no power and no signals to advance the queue itself and could be used to shift a block of data by one position _without needing to read the data_, in ~40 steps fixed, adding only three per "bit": exchanging a single cart would take about 40 steps, but advancing a ten-cart queue would take no more than 70.

Each "advancable" location consists of a tile of ordinary floor, surrounded by three track ramps:

Code: [Select]

#..#     
#x▼#     ##╗#
#▼▼#     #═╚#
#+##     Ramps, below

x marks the spot.
Incoming carts come from south, jump over the ramp directly south (because they come from normal floor or go too fast and thus ignore the downward ramp), push the current cart off north (also jumping because speed is still high enough or x itself is once again ordinary floor and not track) and then fall onto the EW ramp, accelerate east, encounter the NE ramp there, accelerate north on it and eventually climb out over the SW ramp onto spot x. The former occupant does the same to the next cart in line, to the north.

[Iceflame]

Appearently, my marksdwarf squad is super effective against goblin archers. They are pretty much untrained dwarfs, who were lucky enough to have at least one point in archer skill, so i put them to my squad. Completely unarmored, only armed with the crossbows they brought with them, they managed to one-shot three goblins with their bone bolts.

Nobody of them got wounded either, even though they were standing in open field on a bridge, at the same level as the attackers, which shot a bunch of arrows on them.

Lucky bastards.

Further, I assumed they got that much luck by elven witchcraft. So I put them in my volcano.

[smjjames]

So I just started a fortress. It's the third day of the first month. The fisherdwarf jumps into the river to attack an eel and instantly dies.

I unassigned all fishing designation and only get fish by trading... it's simple too unreliable with a low yield and high danger.
Also have you ever had craps near your wagon with the 2fisher embark set up?

Um, 'craps'? XD lol

Also, a calm embark just generally means that it doesn't have much in the way of dangerous wildlife, it still doesn't mean that you are safe from dwarven idiodicy.

[Larix]

Had to go and do some proper spaghetti track design. Behold, the four-bit decoder:

   

Uses a ramp-driven minecart, switched via bridges.

Takes four binary inputs, each of which operates a bridge, and turns that input into one of sixteen output branches. Left just the paths, right all the bridges needed. At the last split, we have eight different input paths, and each must be bifurcated into one of a pair of specific output branches. How big a bridge do you need for that? Correct, a 7x1 bridge, because it has sixteen "borders", exactly as many as we need outputs. Operation speed must be fairly high, because in the most convoluted branches, a cart can take about fifteen turns, which soaks up a fair bit of speed. Theoretically, the biggest single-bridge bifurcation would be twenty inputs into forty outputs, with a 10x10 bridge; a 1x10 can already split eleven into 22.

I tried out all sixteen branches, works perfectly.

[AustralianWinter]

Had to go and do some proper spaghetti track design. Behold, the four-bit decoder:

   

Uses a ramp-driven minecart, switched via bridges.

Takes four binary inputs, each of which operates a bridge, and turns that input into one of sixteen output branches. Left just the paths, right all the bridges needed. At the last split, we have eight different input paths, and each must be bifurcated into one of a pair of specific output branches. How big a bridge do you need for that? Correct, a 7x1 bridge, because it has sixteen "borders", exactly as many as we need outputs. Operation speed must be fairly high, because in the most convoluted branches, a cart can take about fifteen turns, which soaks up a fair bit of speed. Theoretically, the biggest single-bridge bifurcation would be twenty inputs into forty outputs, with a 10x10 bridge; a 1x10 can already split eleven into 22.

I tried out all sixteen branches, works perfectly.

So, what can you make it do?

[Larix]

So, what can you make it do?

What i said, decode a four-bit input into one of sixteen single-path outputs. It could be used to send a cart to one of sixteen grinders/waterguns/shotguns/dump stations, it could be used to adress one of sixteen memory cells, it could be used to convert binary to hexadecimal. And it only takes four bridges (1x1, 1x1, 3x1 and 7x1), meaning eight linkage mechanisms and five building material to construct.