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[ImagoDeo]

How the hell do I get my dwarves to fight this mountain titan? It's breathing fire all over the inside of my base, and none of them will engage it in combat for some reason. One good lash hit would be all it would take, since the thing's made of fire and would collapse immediately. But no one will go after the damn beast! It's ruining my !!fortress!!

[Lordhermitcrab]

How the hell do I get my dwarves to fight this mountain titan? It's breathing fire all over the inside of my base, and none of them will engage it in combat for some reason. One good lash hit would be all it would take, since the thing's made of fire and would collapse immediately. But no one will go after the damn beast! It's ruining my !!fortress!!

But that's what dwarf fortress is about!

[Yoink]

I'm currently contemplating whether to rob the dwarven caravan using my 'drop the entire trade depot several z-levels into a pit and see what happens' technique. What do you guys think? My dwarves don't seem like the sorts to contain a whole lot of moral fiber, and it should be rather amusing as well as profitable.

Edit: Oh dear... I'd neglected to set up any prisons when I appointed a captain of the guard, so my bookkeeper (who the mayor was pissy at due to none of the quivers he mandated being made) had his sentence 'reduced' to a beating. I have the game paused with the captain a few steps away from where the poor bookkeeper is sleeping.

The captain of the guard has already been canceling jobs lately due to being horrified by the death of a dwarf who died somehow long ago, so it will be interesting to see how this affects her psyche. >.>

[falcn]

I'm designing automatic "trap it or kill it" entrance.
The idea is very simple:
(view from the top)

Code: [Select]

__________________________________________________________________________________________
1) -->              cage traps                Oh, TRAPAVOID? Okay.                       |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   |
2) [<-bridge]     [pressure plate][kitten][pressure plate]                  [bridge->]   |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) can we trap it in corridor 1?
2) if we can't trap it, let's kill it.
Kitten is sitting in 1x1 pasture between two single-use pressure plates. If she'll see something
terrifying, she will trigger pressure plate, which seals the corridor and opens two drawbridges above,
first layer with magma, second with water. According to wiki, no creature can survive
casting into obsidian.

If all will go according to plan, it will consume 1 kitten and one mechanism per kill,
producing some obsidian in return.

[Larix]

^ You might want to evaluate animals for use first - as far as i know, cats (of any age) are too light to trigger pressure plates. EDIT: and you can't make citizen-triggered single-use pressure plates: your mechanics will trigger and thus destroy them while trying to link them up.

For the first time ever, i received an undead siege - 43 undead and three necromancers. On my side were six weaponmasters, a random marksdwarf, 48 civilians and two sturdy doors. No traps, no moat, no wall, no bridge airlock. All workshops and farms on the completely unprotected outside.

First order of business was getting everyone into the panic room (communal dining room and individualised dormitory), via the already-established civilian burrows. The room is only accessible through a pair of doors, which were locked once all civilians were inside. Soldiers were stationed outside, to see how badly they'd be massacred and to hopefully intercept the necromancers.

Surprisingly, once the necromancers caught sight of the military, they ran away and left the site. The soldiers put up a somewhat decent fight but stood no chance - overrun by over forty undead, they were quickly surrounded and killed, although they took 16 walking corpses along with them. And since the necros had left early, those sixteen cadavres stayed down.

So, how to get back into control of the place? All we had were a bunch of civilians who were for the moment safe but without provisions and with no earthly hope to take care of more than one zombie - while we were facing 27. The provision problem could be solved by digging - the well-house is shut off with doors, so digging an access tunnel from the side could be done without opening a path for the undead. The siegers were also busy hunting down some yaks for a while, so opening and quickly securing an access to the food stockpile was possible as well. Digging produced a decent amount of loose stone, so the solution pretty much presented itself - a quick-and-dirty atomsmasher, hand-operated. Undead invaders path to your dwarfs, so they're pretty easy to direct, you just have to have your traps/installations in place before you open a path.

The result was satisfying, if not very glorious. I simply hadn't expected an incursion of undead, so was extremely unprepared. I guess taking on undead with military takes a larger force and defensive architecture that separates and channels the invaders a bit - being surrounded is troublesome against goblins, but utterly fatal against undead.

[Yoink]

After years of nothing whatsoever happening (apart from robbing caravans), my dingy little makeshift beachfort had a titan show up.
I figured, "Oh, well, we're screwed! Should be exciting seeing my poorly-equipped but skilled military try to take this down!"

I ordered everyone into burrows and told the marksdwarves to man the guard towers whilst the rest of the troops formed up just inside the entrance.
But then I noticed a group of gatherers out picking plants. They seemed to be ignoring the burrow order... I couldn't cancel their jobs.
I got ready to watch them all die, but then as the titan came near they all jumped up, dropped what they were doing and ran at it. After a few moments of frantic fisticuffs a herbalist smashed the titan into gore with a swing of his fist. He and another herbalist were the only ones bitten- both lost limbs and are quite likely to die to the beast's poison, but they are expendable. 
I have given Asol (the one who got the kill) a tomb in preparation for his death. Have to honour such an unexpected hero, after all!

[Raikaria]

You know making a Forgotten Beast deathtrap for invaders loses a lot of appeal when no invaders ever come because apparently the local Goblins cannot reach your location. I don't even get Human or Hippy caravans :/

Abandoning this fort; starting a new project. Probobly on some sort of plain. I'm gonna make an actually FORTRESS. Complete with most things being above-ground except some industries and 'The Underfort' where mining goes on.

[davesoft]

When my fortress gets out of this temporary booze shortage im gonna hollow out a nice 40x40x40 space underground and go full luxury on the dwarves.

I seem to be in a region with no goblins, and the war with the elves sadly ended between fortresses... so aside from kobold scum and digging too deep these spoilt dwarves have nothing to fear.

C'mon Armok, it's only the age of legends, there's gotta be some more wacky creatures out there to fight

[ImagoDeo]

Well, Riddledfences fell to the demonic hordes after its two remaining legendary military dwarves managed to kill five of them. I retired the fort instead of abandoning it, and apparently it's still going strong judging by the fact that it has a Duke now (according to my civilization page).

I have established Picksling in a terrifying swamp. Aside from the bitter mucus rain, which apparently causes light bleeding that can kill smaller creatures, there's not much to worry about. I pierced a two-layer aquifer with the double-slit method for the first time, and since I restricted the pop cap pretty heavily, my FPS is still in the 150-200 range. Things get done fast and I don't have to wait a million years for all the hauling to happen when I buy 2400 various bits of meat from the dwarven caravan.

(Also: so that's what happens when you set the priority of all meats to the max...)

A forgotten beast made of yellow spessartine showed up after I opened the caverns and walled off the entrance. I'm preparing a multi-cage Forgotten Beast Trap to collect and curate specimens while it rampages around massacring crundles and trolls. My steel industry is only missing flux stone - once we find a layer of that, we'll be all set and I can start accepting migrant waves again. Picksling shall become the Mountainhome! In a swamp! Yeah.

[Staalo]

I'm starting to question my decision to build this fort in a tropical rainforest biome. There's a constant drizzle of boiling water that randomly kills or horribly disfigures dwarves that dare to show their faces outside. Even the first caravan arrived in a half-boiled state, barely alive. Luckily the trading still happened and the fort now has essential tools and seeds to build an underground fort.

Adding to the mystery of semi-naked dwarves it seems that even the caravan guards are clothed somewhat lighter than I've used to see with dwarves: only shoes and some pieces of armor. Maybe it's cultural; I'll have to check out whether pants are "foreign" in this civilization.

[Larix]

Restricted equipment is a feature of exceedingly hot biomes. If people wear nothing but shoes and caps, the area is so insanely hot that the surface cannot be safely visited (as you found out). Did you fiddle with the "temperature" settings in world generation? I've only ever seen such extreme heat when i ramped up maximum temperature quite a bit.

***
 After my entire military bravely laid down their lives, i drafted a replacement squad. Since there were no dwarfs with weapon skills available, i just drafted whoever had civilian skills that weren't particularly interesting (fish dissector, tanner, milker...). Since they had to train themselves up from scratch, it took a while, but after a year and a half, all six are weaponmasters. The only incursions in the meantime were a few kobolds trying to pick up sieger junk and failing, and a were-chameleon, which mauled a child before succumbing to fort and caravan military. The child lost a lot of blood but didn't get infected.

I played with minecart logic again and finally managed to build a "toggle" memory cell _using only one switchable building_. There are two separate holding coils, and an on-off signal cycle switches a cart between coils. Since this requires two switch layouts that are stable while signal is "off" (and change when signal turns "on") and two that are stable while signal is "on" (and change when signal turns "off"), i had to use all four "faces" of the switching door. Thus, the design gets a bit crazy, but it works flawlessly.



While the signal is off and the door closed, the cart is in one of the 2x5 circuits, checking the door state at the end of the flat track, bent around at the closed door, over the pressure plate and through the impulse ramps. When the door opens, the cart blasts through the corner (since it's extremely fast), rushes through to the "path inverter" hook and returns over the flat track, going in the opposite direction now and therefore taking the longer circuit; until the door closes again, forcing the cart to take the corner and sending it into the _other_ holding coil.

This is a device which holds one of two possible information states and switches to the opposite state whenever a signal cycle is received. It could be used as basic component of a binary counter, but mainly demonstrates how different DF logic is from real-world electronics.

[Max™]

I dunno, I like to think of the gf's smartphone as containing billions of tiny minecart arrays.

[VerdantSF]

Slowly inching my way up to 80 dwarves. Not sure if I'll get sieges, but goblins were listed as neighbors before embark, so my fingers are crossed. Also, I LOVE the new child behavior mechanics. I even have a meeting area aboveground to keep cave adaptation at bay, and none of the kids scamper off past the walls like before.

[Chagen46]

Half of my fort died of thirst. Fuck.

Humans came and I got some plants to brew more booze but I lost so many good dwarves. There's no water on the map too whatsoever so they can't even drink that.

[ImagoDeo]

I have grown accustomed to pressing 's' in order to initiate a search query on a long list, thanks to DFHack.

This does not help when I am attempting to trade with humans and elves.