This game depressed the hell out of me tonight.
I've heard tell, here and there, of people visiting old forts in adventure mode. I've never been much for adventure mode, but I thought what the heck, it might be fun. So I made a copy of my fort's region folder, loaded it up, abandoned the fortress, then started a new game in adventure mode.
The first thing I learned is that finding your way around the world is hard. I happened on the trick of asking random people about the surroundings, because they'll tell you about random towns and crap which you can then plot on your "sites" map and sort of roughly navigate to. I did this for about two hours before finally getting a human to tell me "Relicstorm is far to the northwest."
And it was, too. Especially the part where I had to cross two mountain ranges to get to it. You can't fast-travel over those; you have to drop out and hold down the arrow key while you read a book or something.
But eventually I made it and … yeah.
First thing I noticed was random junk lying around the bignormous wooded field out front of my fort. Like random logs, and here and there a kobold or goblin corpse. I'm pretty fastidious, so that made things seem really weird. But then I saw my windmills, and my greenhouses, and I got all excited. Just to the southwest … yup! There it is! The bridge leading up to the low hill where my gate was!
I climbed up, and saw the cage where I had all those random animals my fort had collected. The cage was empty.
Right about then, night started to fall or something, because the little visible-circle part began to shrink. So I headed for the fort entrance, and …
Christ.
Cold, dark, silent. Empty. Crap strewn everywhere. A clay boulder sitting in my trade depot. Why? I don't know. Empty bins laying around, empty bags. I went down two floors to the apartments and checked a few out, fumbling around in the dark. All the cabinets were mysteriously gone. The beds were still there, but the cabinets were gone.
It was a hell of a thing. I could almost hear the echoing drip-drip coming up through the darkness and the silence from the cistern under the main fortress square.
It was abandoned. My fort was abandoned. Which shouldn't have surprised me, since, you know, I hit the "abandon the fortress" button myself. But I just didn't think it'd be so … you know. Literal.
I looked around about as much as I felt like, until there was just one set of double doors left. Just east of the main square, north and a bit west of the overseer's office with its big clear-glass window overlooking the well. I walked my adventurer right up to it … but I didn't go through. I decided I was happier not seeing what was on the other side. Cause those are the doors that led to the Hall of Heroes. My burial room, with its staggered rows of shining marble coffins. Still mostly empty, like they'd been when I abandoned the fort? Or had the game filled them up with randomly generated dwarves about which I knew nothing? Or was it like the rest of the fort, just … sacked? And if it were … what of the remains of the fallen?
I decided I didn't want to know.
I quit the game then. Didn't even quit it, actually; killed it outright from the task manager.
I won't be doing that again.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6215794 times)