Whoops! I dug the pit 78x93 instead of 93x78! But it's alright, I've got room to make it 93x93. I just have to carefully designate the channeling to prevent cave-ins.....in unrelated news, it appears that the local biome does not have flax, jute, hemp, cotton, ramie, kenaf, rope reed or papyrus. Unless I can get some seeds from an elven or human caravan, I'll be entirely dependent on pigtails for both my textile and my paper industries. There's also the matter of my militia; they have all made noteworthy gains in the Organization, Student and Teacher skills. Apparently, those skills are important for scholars, so I've decided that some time before my libraries are built all my best prospects for soldiers will go through a stint in the military to train those skills. Oh, and speaking of scholars, remember that great potential scholar from my previous fort? The one with Great Organizer, Great Optics Engineer, Great Fluids Engineer, Accomplished Student, Legendary Wordsmith, Legendary Writer, Legendary Reader, Legendary Mechanic and Legendary Pump Operator (though those last two are because of my own actions)? He's here! Also, I have over 800 large green glass serrated discs so I've decided to take down and 8x10 block of stonefall traps in preparation for replacing them with weapon traps. Let's hope I can make 80 more masterwork mechanisms and build those weapon traps before the gobbos show up again!
I have a single block of stone-fall traps that's 120x8. Experience tells me that's enough to break most sieges; the point of replacing them with weapon traps is to break the sieges faster.
Never actually used stone-fall traps myself, at least not intentionally. Always stuck with cage traps. I guess that's also why I felt like I need so many "layers" of traps. But hm, would love to have another 300+ siege again and see how the traps do against that many enemies.
Cage traps are simultaneously a headache and easymode. Sure, you need to build cages for them to be loaded in the first place, and in order to reload them you need to either make even more cages or empty out the occupied ones, but in the end neither the material nor the quality of the trap's components matter because you're always guaranteed to capture anything that steps on trap. That's why I only use cage traps in the caverns, where there are animals I want to capture alive.
Strange. The only reason I've missed a caravan is because of a siege. Are you sure your civilization is still kicking?
Not sure how to really check, I retired the fortress (in a copied save) and checked, but couldn't find anything really saying "the civ is dead!!!", no big attacks, nothing. Just the few sieges on my fortress. Only thing I think happened was that one of the caravan wagons got scuttled, which would explain the pile of stuff outside, which my dwarves won't put in the stockpiles. Overall the civ is a bit weird though, I mean, it is called "The Roughness of Murdering" - which doesn't really sound dwarfish. But its nobles (etc.) seem to just be dwarves. Didn't check on them specifically though. Going by legends the civ isn't very wide spread, but doesn't look dead either. The map overview was from 8 years ago though.
At one point back at the start of the fortress, it once said "No Outpost Liaison? How curious..." but the next time there was one again. The fortress also didn't attract migrants one year, even though it was doing quite well.
Just strange. Maybe it has to do with the location it resides in, being on a vulcano and all. I mean, there aren't any humans near either.
Perhaps they're just having trouble accessing your site because of something between you and the mountainhomes? Like, I dunno, goblins?
Another thing is that my dwarves lack the knowledge to produce High Boots ... but that seems to sadly be quite a regular thing, especially in the "short history" worlds I play (year 78 now).
Wait, so 'high boots' doesn't show up as an option in your leatherworker shops and forges?
I've got 9600 to make if I'm going to replace the entire trapline. Thankfully, I embarked on a volcano so the sand won't be far from the magma glass furnaces.
Well, I thought it wasn't that far to the sand either. Buuut...it's pretty much on the other side of the vulcano, since it is in a different biome. My 3x3 embark has 3 biomes, one to the north-west, one to the north-east and the slightly bigger part is to the south. Only the one in the north-west has sand, at first I thought there was no sand at all, but I got lucky. Even got an aquifer there. Anyway, the dwarves have to run across about one embark tile to get to the sand...for over 1000 green glass items (I build more than just the trap components) it took forever; I wouldn't even want to imagine building almost 10'000 of them. Then again, I highly doubt I'd ever need that many.
At first I considered making the invader entrance 5 wide, but upon seeing how many trap components that would need, I decided it would just take waaaay too long.[/quote]
My magma glass furnaces are 20 steps from my sand collecting areas, and my magma kilns are 15 steps from my fire clay collecting area. Shit's real cash, bro.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 5969452 times)