My most recent fortress, Earthstrike (yes, the RNG gave me that name) was lost today when I had to format my hard drive, but it was the most engaged I've ever been in a fortress, mostly because its remarkable name obliged me to stay with the fort longer than I normally would. Also a lot of neat things happened. I was planning on making a whole thread for it once I had reached the point where I was ready to retire it, but alas...
The site was a haunted jungle with an aquifer, which turned out to be rich in iron ore, flux, and bituminous coal. I spent most of my embark points on ingredients for steel for my two metalsmiths to make into weapons, but they turned out to be superfluous, obviously. The first expedition had just pierced the aquifer via cave-in and had begun carving an entrance hall and some temporary dwellings (which would later become barracks for my huge force of axe lords) out of the virgin stone when an undead siege attacked in Autumn, killing everyone.
For the next expedition, I brought four trained axedwarves for protection, as well as a competent metalsmith that could hopefully arm and armor them with steel before the necromancers returned. Defence against the undead became my first priority, with long-term food production and other infrastructure coming later. That said, I did bring along a farmer who worked as a miner and toiled away digging out a large farm area with his unskilled hands. At one point, the earth struck back: I nearly flooded the fledgeling fortress by digging upwards into the aquifer from the entrance hall! The breach was fortunately walled off before anything was seriously flooded. As expected, one dwarf did nearly drown by walling himself off on the wrong side of the wall, but the wall was smashed and rebuilt just in time.
Soon into the second year of the reclaim, the smith declared himself the king of the civilization! This came as a complete surprise to me, and I'm still not quite sure what the cause was. It could be that the civilization was dead, but we still had plenty of barons living in other mountainhomes, and we never missed a migrant wave throughout the life of the fortress. I also don't think the smith was the heir to the throne, as he didn't have any relationships besides with the other denizens of Earthstrike (he was one of the original seven, after all). So yeah, I don't know. What I do know is that he was awesome. He continued to work the forge after his impromptu coronation, outfitting our ragtag militia with fine steel arms and armor, and he lugged coal and ore and wood across the fort and from the outside, drenching himself in the evil blood rain, working just as hard as his subjects (all six of them). Another awesome thing about him was that he worshipped two gods: the goddess of mercy and the god of revenge.
For the next year or so, the military trained tirelessly with their new steel axes, and I drafted almost all of the migrants who came in that time into the militia too, with the only civilians being the king, a mason, the farmer, and a stonecrafter who pumped out trade goods so that we could buy food and drink. Soon the farm was dug out, with a flooding mechanism in place that utilized the aquifer, and after that workshops and spacious bedrooms for all of the dwarves were dug. After the second or third migrant wave, our numbers were in the thirties, and the militia consisted of nearly two full squads of axedwarves, some of the founding members already becoming axelords through sparring. It was then that the fortress's first artifact was created: a turban of the highest craftsdwarfship made in a fey mood by a clothier, who proceeded to turn imported cloth into fabulous masterwork socks for all of Earthstrike's citizens. The turban was given to the militia commander, who managed to wear it underneath his steel helmet. I guess the Sikhs did (or still do) that too. It was around this time that the first undead siege of the reclaim hit, this one about twice the size of the one that had wiped out Earthstrike's first expedition. I normally don't use traps at all, but in desperation I had the mechanic set up stonefall traps in the hallway that connected the military barracks to the fortress proper. I honestly did not think we would survive the attack. Very tempted though I was to wall the fortress off from the surface and turtle, as I had grown very attached to the fortress, its bitchin name, and its king, I resisted, and when the zombie horde neared the fort's entrance, I sent the axedwarves out to engage. The traps never even got used. There were many casualties among the newer recruits, as well as some civilians who had gotten caught up in the slaughter, but the axelords made short work of all of the zombies, using their expert dodging and shield skills and heavy armor to avoid any damage at all. I imagined them backflipping around the entrance hall, lopping off zombie heads with their axes and chunking them with their shields. Anyway, the siege was quickly broken, leaving us safe, but with an entrance absolutely packed with the corpses of both our comrades and the undead invaders.
Catacombs were dug, as was a hospital, and my plans for a great public bath were set in motion. Also, this was when the second artifact of the fortress was constructed: a hematite bed! Obviously this 30,000 dwarf-buck treasure was reserved for the king, and all mining efforts were put towards digging out his long-overdue throne room, banquet hall, and bedroom.
After all of the fortress expansions were completed, I noticed that all of the dwarves were thirsty and that we had no booze, nor plants to brew into booze! I quickly set the miners to working on the plumbing for wells in both the hospital and the public dining hall, but the slow flow of water kept the wells dry until a couple dozen dwarves, including a few axelords, died of dehydration
. After the wells' reservoirs were full, however, everyone swarmed the two wells to quench their thirst, and their lives were saved... until the pressure in the reservoirs built up and both the hospital and the dining hall began flooding with water. Because people had been using the wells to wash themselves off, the water was tainted with blood and pus, which got spread all over the hospital and dining hall. I had the foresight to install a floodgate blocking the hospital's reservoir from the aquifer, and shut it immediately, but there was no such thing blocking that of the dining hall's well. An emergency drain was dug into the edge of the site map before the dining hall and the rest of the fort were completely flooded, and the water began draining back down the well shaft... taking several dwarves with it! The current dragged five dwarves and several pets to their doom, their corpses stuck right at the bottom of the well, tainting the water. That doesn't seem healthy, but the dwarves didn't appear to care. Anyway, one of those who was dragged down the well was an axelord fully clad in steel armor, so I was obliged to drain the pipes entirely to retrieve it. I also wanted to properly entomb all of those drowned dwarves, of course.
The hospital and dining hall coated in mud and dwarven bodily fluids and evil muck from the sky. Fortunately, the hospital had yet to be smoothed and furnished, so by smoothing it, it was quickly and magically purified. The dining hall remained disgusting for the rest of the fort's life, however, and its coating of grime soon became a breeding ground for fungus and wild subterranean plants. Its once-smooth stone floors even crumbled into fertile soil! The mayor's office, whose entrance was in the back of the hall, was similarly nasty.
The public bath was also a little gross once it was completed, but the dwarves did a surprisingly good job of keeping it clean. The mud disappointed me though. I still don't know if there's any way to have water flowing through an area without it depositing silt. But regardless, I was really proud of how it turned out: it was a large multilevel square bath with ramps descending down so that the dwarves could get into the water, which flowed from four sets of fortifications in each of the walls, down to a large drain at the bottom of the bath. I also left a tall pillar sticking up from the bottom of the bath and up out of its top, and placed a masterwork statue of the fortress's founding (the original expedition which failed horribly) atop it. I never got around to making soap for the bath, but at least it kept the dwarves from cleaning the muck and pus off of themselves from the same water sources they drank from. The mist also effected the dwarves like some kind of dwarven catnip, although unfortunately it didn't stop the epidemic of depression and tantrums that followed the undead siege and water shortage.
I should also mention the third artifact of the fortress: an iron shortsword. I never got around to using it for anything, as I don't like my dwarves to use any weapons that aren't axes (or sometimes hammers). I was planning on compromising and training up a dwarf to be a dual-wielding legendary swordsdwarf /and/ axelord who used the sword, but I never got around to it. I'll just mention the other artifacts that Earthstrike's dwarves produced now, because I can't really remember their chronological order. There was one or two artifact trinkets (an earring and a bracelet, I think), a turkey bone armor stand, which I put in the king's bedroom, and an artifact bucket made of a single gemstone somehow, which was used in the hospital's well.
The migrant who made the iron shortsword did so in a fey mood, and so he took over making steel battleaxes for the king, with the king still handling armor. I dug a wide, deep ramp from the entrance hall going deep into the earth to find adamantine so that I could outfit my axelords with shiny blue axes, but unfortunately the legendary weaponsmith died of dehydration during the drink shortage. Still, we dug down, connecting all three cavern layers to the surface, and began mining some adamantine, as well as some native gold and marble. I should note that the king loved marble, and that I was planning on carving a huge marble palace for him out of the living marble, but it never came to be. The cavern creatures served as a never-ending stream of live training dummies for my militia, which at this point number about fifty axedwarves, with ten to fifteen of them being axelords. Also, I want to note that I had all of the barracks engraved so that there were engravings above each of the soldiers' beds, and some of the engravings were of the most terrifying shit imaginable. The soldiers had to sleep with images above their heads of the dwarves of Earthstrike being slaughtered by zombies, dwarves screaming, and dwarves murdering elves. And those were just the first room I looked at.
Anyway, for some reason the third cavern layer was never populated with anything, which was a shame because the militia was able to kill most everything that came from the first two cavern layers (short of a GCS, which usually killed one or two unarmored dwarves before dying) without suffering any injuries. It would be really nice to spice things up with a cave dragon or something. Even the forgotten beasts were easily dispatched by my axelords. The subsequent zombie sieges were likewise crushed without difficulty. From the surface, the fortress was attacked by an ettin, a giant, and a werecritter (I can't remember exactly what it was exactly, as it failed to bite anyone before dying), all of which were crushed by the mighty Earthstrike military (except for the ettin, who was killed by zombies).
At the time when I last played the fortress, its population was around one hundred twenty, nearly half of those dwarves being part of the military. I planned on drafting even more of them as soon as the new barracks were finished being furnished. My ultimate plan was to build a huge force of one hundred fifty or so axedwarves clad in steel and adamantine with which to crush the clown car with sheer dwarf power. The king, who had become a legendary armorsmith, had only crafted one full set of adamantine armor for the militia commander, and was training up his weaponsmithing skills so as to make adamantine axes for all of the axelords. The food and drink problems had been solved, mostly by using the king's masterwork iron weapons and armor to buy out the caravans' food and drink stocks. The hospital was fully stocked with everything except soap, which I was working on at the time when I last played. It had an office for my new chief medical dwarf, a legendary surgeon who arrived as a migrant, as well as for a few other skill doctors. The housing situation was also a non-issue, with huge new districts constantly being dug out, and with the plentiful surface wood constantly being turned into exceptional beds. Despite all of this, depression and tantrums were rampant, with the dwarves constantly destroying furniture and getting into fist fights. Even the king seemed on the precipice of going stark raving mad. Everyone plagued the mayor, who himself was about to break, with complaints (even the king, which thoroughly amused me).
That about sums up the story of Earthstrike.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6110986 times)