Real life kept my away from DF for months. When I came back, I had a new 4Ghz computer, so I decided to try the windows version instead of playing whatever was on my mac. For my world gen, I took the easy route, and made a short history with most of the sliders all the way to the right. Lots of savagery, minerals, and stuff. I looked for an embark with lots of minerals, a river, and no aquifer, because as far as I can tell, aquifers are impenetrable. There were a handful of choices. The first one was haunted, so I skipped it. The second one, however, was calm, heavily forested, and when I looked at the preview of the site I was completely baffled by what I was seeing. Not understanding the site meant it must be interesting, so I embarked.
It turns out I was on a bluff overlooking a steep canyon with a river flowing through the bottom. A second river cut across my bluff and dumped down into the canyon. There was a hippo down there. Lots of trees, natural defenses, this looked like home. I cut a ramp down into the rock, and cut a chamber off the ramp at the end of the soil. I set up a farm plot, a still, a carpenters shop, and a crafts shop in with the farm. I made a 20x30 stockpile for food. I told the crafts shop to make pots and jugs and bolts out of wood on repeat. A side room, with no door, was made to hold a textile industry. Eventually (a few years in) it had querns, a loom, a clothiers, a farmers workshop, and probably some other stuff. On the other side, I made an identical room with a stone door. That room got a food stockpile that fed to the giant stockpile, a butchery, a tanner, and a kitchen.
Down at the first stone I built a trading depot, a stairway down, a mason, and a mechanic. I told the mason to make stone blocks, and the mechanic to make mechanisms. A hallway led away to a staircase back up to the farm level, but separate (I eventually planned to move the farm and put in a drawbridge). At the top of the staircase I mined out a massive frat house that exposed the waterfall. I added wall grates because dwarves are really dumb. The hippopotamus had somehow died, and the skeleton was down in the water.
Remember that stairway down? I'd marked it for ten levels. Usually safe. It hit the caverns. But it punched through in the middle of a ceiling. Perfectly safe, unless something can fly, so I ignored it.
Elves showed up. I had lots of mechanisms, and they had a male and a female tiger. I bought them, and built a tiger preserve. It was walled off, on my bluff, and the tigers were trained up enough that the dwarves let them out of their cage. Over the first two years of the fort I made sure I had plenty of meat on hand to keep them tame. Meanwhile, wooden jugs and pots are being made, as well as stone blocks. My frat house, about 40x40, had tables and chair set up along the grate so everyone could enjoy the waterfall, and I installed a lot of beds so everyone could sleep in the same room. My production of bolts and mechanisms meant I did really well with the traders. I couldn't buy them out, but I bought well. And with my massive wealth, migrants came. I built that wall I needed. Four z-levels high, with an overhang and a drawbridge to let the traders in.
At some point during the first two years a bat flew up from the caverns. My dwarves punched it for at least a year before I got annoyed. I bought weapons from the traders, and built a barracks up on the surface. By the time I was ready with a barracks more traders had arrived, dwarven this time (I'd got the weapons from the humans). I told my squad to start training, and assigned them a kill order. They were going to kill that bat.
The dragon arrived just moments before the first dwarf announced he was becoming a recruit. I didn't bother to close to drawbridge. I had 196 dwarves, and I assumed it would be over soon. I redirected my squad from the bat to the dragon. The first thing the dragon did was breath fire. That was the second thing too. And maybe the third. My heavily forested embark was on fire. I had to save and edit the announcements to stop pausing every time a tree collapsed. And many trees collapsed.
Many dwarves died right away. But about a hundred of them were hanging out in the waterfall room, oblivious. The dragon descended into the fortress, breathing fire. Things were on fire. Many dwarves were dead. But then the dragon went into the doorless textile room and started to break things. I noticed she had a dent on her forehead. I ordered the dwarves to construct a wall in the doorway. And one did. Suddenly, my dragon was locked in a room with no exits, and this seemed suddenly survivable.
But everything was on fire. EVERYTHING. I had apparently made a massive stockpile of flamable blocks in the only hallway. My 20x30 food stockpile was on fire, as was the massive pile of wooden jugs and wooden pots built up in the crafts station. My two tigers were gone, I never even found a corpse.
But, the dragon was stopped, there were about 100 people safe in the frat room. I still had about half of my animal stocks as well.
Over the next year almost everything died. The burning blocks in the hallway meant the dwarves in the frat house couldn't get to food or water. The weapons were all gone. The pile of blocks eventually went out, but there were only 6 dwarves left. SIX. One less than a new embark, and I already had a fortress sort of built. I could pull through!
Then all my food animals died of starvation, because the fires had burned the surface down and there was no grass. All my food had burned as well. And the alcohol. And the pile of jugs and pots was still burning, rendering most of the food production area unpathable because of smoke and fire.
Then the forgotton beast arrived.
It was down in the caverns, and a giant snail with deadly spittle, so I ignored it. The opening was in the middle a ceiling, it couldn't get to me.
Suddenly, seven migrants arrived!
It didn't work out. There were dead bodies everywhere. The meeting hall, that they immediately headed too, had about 100 corpses in it. I now had 13 dwarves who were so depressed that they were incapable of drinking alcohol. Those were the last migrants for quite a while too. My dwarves were slowly starving and dehydrating to death because they were incapable of doing anything. I was unable to build a new farm, or coffins, because no dwarf would do anything. Trading ground to a halt because they destroyed the trading post and I couldn't rebuild it. Eventually, despite the danger, dwarven migrants started to arrive. They didn't do so well either, because the corpses were everywhere. They got depressed and died, because I had no food, no beer, and no one would do any work. On the plus side, they were too depressed to be scared by the dozens of ghosts.
Slowly but surely, however, year 11 perked up. I managed to build and install about 160 coffins and about 60 engraved slabs. That covered all the merchants, all the pets, and all the dead dwarves I'd accumulated. I got a hospital built as well. Not that anyone was hurt. There isn't much middle ground between killed-by-dragon and never-seen-by-dragon. But once things started to move, my woodcutter lost a hand, and the hospital helped him.
Down the in caverns, that forgotten beast has been fighting something. It's lost it's shell, and is badly injured. And bats kept flying up, so I finally walled off that breach I made.
So what's going on in my fort? I'm hoping to buy a fire-safe cage from a merchant soon.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6211354 times)