I wasn't too happy with adventuring of late (i find i either grind to invulnerability, which gets boring, or miss the proper point on the power comparison curve and end up in unwinnable fights, which gets boring), so just made yet another engineering experimentation fortress in the world.
Heh, it seems i set mineral scarcity to something obscenely big, most locales have nothing worth mentioning (apart from FLUX of course). I took one of the few "warm" places with "shallow metal", and it was limonite, embedded in a tasty dolomite matrix. Now if i played with military and had available magma, that'd be quite nifty. As it stands, it's just a fancy material for making goblets to buy stuff from the caravans. My main problem so far are giant wolverines. I lost five dwarfs to the damn things, three of them adults. Quite a bit of a problem considering i'm playing with very low population cap as per usual, so now i have thirteen adults to work with...
I hope i've sufficiently walled off the fort now to avoid further wolverine mishaps.
The first project was a smashing success: the heptal memory bank - a device which stores information in the form of water depth (values from zero to seven possible, only one to seven measured because you only get a constant depth if you deal in multiples of seven). It's quite simple, really - a small channel, 1x7, is flooded with water, then sealed off. 0-7 doors installed in the channel are closed, smashing a certain amount of water out of existence, then the remaining water is drained by a bank of seven screw pumps into another 1x7 'storage' channel, containing seven pressure plates reacting to 1;2;3...;7 water. To clear the memory, stored water is pumped off once again and either recycled or smashed. There's an obvious handling problem with this - one deep water cannot be pumped, so if you have one unit of water in the system, you need to add one or two extra units to storage to make the contained water pumpable. In principle, it should be possible to use this as an addition engine in base seven. And with some adjustments, it could be used as the core 'neighbour' measurer for Conway's Life. (Considering it's effectively just under three bits of memory, it's of course monstrously impractical for data storage.)
The other project is finally getting to its main stage - trying to see if i can get any data processing out of sending minecarts onto diagonal trajectories. It's fun, it's complicated and if i get anything to work it's guaranteed to be hilariously impractical. The main testing floor is built, the offset rollers are connected and linked to levers, and the main return loop works. The warm-up tests are mostly done.