My one-tile fort is going pretty well! I'm almost 8 years in. I always do a lot of animal training (which doesn't help my fps...) and this fort is no exception. However, this fort I'm trying to keep the populations down a little more proactively... which actually leaves me with more bones and meat than I can possibly handle. I've thrown away thousands of meat just to keep the stockpiles down, and I sell all my prepared food and drink to every caravan that stops by. I realized that I have two problems that can solve each other:
- What do I do with all these animals, besides butchering them?
- How am I going to conquer hell?
That's right, I have an adamantine spire in this fort. Which is very good, since I only have copper, silver, and gold. I also happen to have a necromancer. He decided to move here from his tower in order to advance his art. I made him captain of the guard, but we've had no crime in the entire 8 years due to my no-visitor policy.
So, combining these three things, I built a drowning and reanimation chamber. Add some military, and it also makes necrobacon. If I mess up too badly, it'll even end my fort! The perfect dwarven project. It doesn't work all that well, and I have some improvements for the next time. But it works well enough with some manual input.
This is the upper reservoir, cage trap snake, and control room. Animals can be dumped into the lower chamber through either of the two locked hatches in the center. The corner hatches MUST be closed when animals are drowning, or they will swim out and escape! To the right is where Ingiz can reanimate zombies from. Those animals in the corner are cages where I'm stacking all the zombies together for relocation later.
This is the drowning chamber. Central stairs included for spacial reference. You can't see with the water inside, but there are fortifications in front of the outer windows to stop building destroyers. This chamber must be drained with the manual pump in order for zombies to path out of the chamber. Water evaporates with each cycle, so the upper chamber must be topped off from a cavern lake (connection not shown) each time. The bridge between the gem windows is there so that the trap can be used with a captive necromancer, but I haven't needed it because Ingiz is so accommodating.
As each animal species reaches expert level training, I toss them all into the drowning chamber. Here's what I have so far:
Next, I'm going to try my captive trolls and blind cave ogres! The chamber should handle building destroyers, but I guess we'll see!
EDIT: Success. I'm not sure when I'm going to decide I'm ready for hell, but as long as I have more things to drown, I'll keep going.