Angelcrux Updates:
Update 1Update 2Update 3Update 4Update 5Angelcrux grows more glorious with each passing year. It has been four years since the main fortress has been reclaimed, and there have been both major victories and major losses along the way.
Soon after the reconquest of the fortress proper, I made a foolish attempt at destroying some denizens of the vault for their precious metal equipment. It failed miserably, resulting in the deaths of both of the fortress' remaining soldiers. However, the vault gave something I was in desperate need of: inspiration.
Slade was gathered from its walls, and the entire fort went to work devising a trap to aim at the caverns, whose undead situation threatened to cause significant temporal warping if left unchecked. After two years of hard work, it was finished.
It's overkill in spectacular fashion. Enemies rarely reach the eight minecart crusher, with the weaker ones (all the crundle and troglodyte bits) being impaled to death on the spikes and the stronger ones getting lured in by the artifact door and then impaled to death. Anything unlucky enough to reach the crushers gets greeted by a giant unstoppable pile of slade hurtling at them at high speed.
Unfortunately, not every undead is drawn into it. Some seem too distant to care about the bait animal and pathway into the fort, and others flat out can't reach it: I cut the caverns in two long ago to hopefully make reclaiming them a bit easier. Seeing as the minecarts work quite well, I made a smaller variant, this time with only two minecarts and the bait.
This one, after a minor project to drain a lake that was preventing some undead from pathing into it, was able to fully clear the small chunk of the caverns to the southeast of the fort, which are now (barring a crundle hand stuck in a tree) completely devoid of life. Wildlife can still enter and the fort has no military, so I have chosen to not begin cleaning up the mess and walling that area off just yet.
However, there have been some minor internal losses. Due to my own negligence, two children have died to failed strange moods, which is a great tragedy, seeing as they're literally the only hope for dwarvenkind as a whole. The majority of the fortress has remained in high spirits despite our casualties, since I've been giving everybody significant off-time to increase the population. The only thing they've needed to do in the past two years is occasional work on the two new mini versions of the minecart trap and brewing of booze. Farming has been stopped due to a huge excess of meat, and will be partially resumed when I run low on brewables, but that day is a long ways away. Back to the topic of strange moods, my earliest intrusion into the vault has finally paid off.
A slade warhammer of artifact quality, at long last! There is nobody around to wield it yet, but in time it will be my most formidable weapon against the undead. Well, maybe the hurtling piles of slade that are my minecart crushers are more formidable, so... ah, whatever, they're both hunks of slade. Point is:
Slade Fucking Warhammer. Cool, am I right or am I right?
As soon as I have a dwarf capable of using this monstrous weapon skillfully I will be able to set forth with taking the caverns for the benefit of the dwarves. When they are finally walled off, I will then be able to look upwards and downwards, to the spire of the vault, the ruins of the surface, and, in the opposite direction, the depths of the world.
Population stands at 22, this time hopefully actually growing.
Long live fortress Angelcrux!
Author
Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6212699 times)