Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Slakan]

Hi guys i'm making a "Let's play" series in youtube of DF. Many new players wonder how to settle in evil biomes so it can help some and entretain others.

If you have comments, suggestions or ideas please leave a comment, i hope you enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxQIobW18ULFYFdi8VAg8BQ

[vassock]

Unless we're talking about an aquifer that blocks you from digging down, surviving is pretty simple. You need food, water, and shelter to survive. To get food, you dig down until you hit a cavern with water. Dig a reservoir next to it, build a raised drawbridge with a lever somewhere, carve fortification and let the reservoir fill. Then seal the hole and build your dining hall above it with wells. Use the same tactic to irrigate and plant plump helmets. Now you have food and water. Now the only danger is invaders, so just build a small airtight "box" (with ceiling above the walls) above the surface access to your fort that you control with a raised drawbridge airlock. Fill the airlock with various traps. This seems to work all the time. Then you have as much time as you need to build a more complex self-cleaning trap. Wood may be a problem, and I'm actually on my first glacier, but I saw there was wood in the caverns.

[Slakan]

Well what you say wouldn't work. You need to take over the surface as soon as possible or the caravans and the inmigrants will start to die and fill your map with zombies. The objective in the video is very clear, is to take over the surface as soon as possible, and if you think that is easy task you can make another video in response i think that would be very intresting i might learn something!

[vassock]

I suppose my approach to migrants is: if they make it, they make it. If they don't, I build a slab for them. Caravans are generally not required to survive.

I would deal with the zombies using traps.

[Slakan]

It's true that caravans are not requiered to survive but the objective of the video is "Take over the surface" so if the surface is infested with 300 inmigrant and caravan warrior zombified it's gonna be an imposible task. And the supplies of wood from the caravan are pretty useful!!

[vassock]

It's true that caravans are not requiered to survive but the objective of the video is "Take over the surface" so if the surface is infested with 300 inmigrant and caravan warrior zombified it's gonna be an imposible task. And the supplies of wood from the caravan are pretty useful!!

Certainly. I usually loot my first caravan and use that wood to allow me to survive until I can secure a cavern for the source of underground wood.

[vanatteveldt]

A good trick to get at the caravanembark wagon without too much danger is to cave-in from below. Flyers can be a problem, so create a big locked room under the caravan. Build a support under the wagon and dig a ring of channels from below. Then, collapse the support and loot the goodies, keeping an eye out for flyers and pausing as needed. Even safer is to dig a second room in z-2 so the wagon punches through the floor of z-1, and then just build a bridge when the flyers aren't looking. That also stops hauling job cancellation from looking at zombies.

(Do bridges get destroyed if you cave-in through its tiles while it is retracted/raised? If not, you can build a bridge beforehand and just pull the lever)

[PatrikLundell]

Retracting bridges are smashed by a cave-in through the "open" space when they are withdrawn. I haven't tried with raising ones, but strongly suspect they behave in the same way. Also, extended drawbridges can be destroyed by building destroyers.

It seems vanatteveldt confuses the embark wagon with caravans. In principle, it would be possible to loot caravans using the wagon recovery method, but in practice it would require you to build a trade depot so the caravan actually goes somewhere (rather than just detect that you don't have an accessible depot and leave) and then undermine and engineer a cave-in under that. It's probably a lot easier to build a depot under ground and dig an access tunnel (suitably protected). If you then wanted to rob the caravan you could do it in relative safety.

I'd guess a protected trade depot would be part of a "secure the surface" action, since it would reduce the number of caravan members being zombiefied. To improve the odds of a caravan making it without mishaps I'd try to get them below ground as quickly as possible. IF the wiki is correct in that caravans enter the map at a location that is accessible from the depot [the wiki isn't 100% correct, as a stream can cut off access], you could dig the trade depot tunnel all the way to the map edge and then use bridges to hem it it completely, thus ensuring only caravans and critters from off the map can make it into the tunnel (apart from building destroyers, who can smash your access limiting bridges to get in).

[vanatteveldt]

It seems vanatteveldt confuses the embark wagon with caravans. In principle, it would be possible to loot caravans using the wagon recovery method, but in practice it would require you to build a trade depot so the caravan actually goes somewhere (rather than just detect that you don't have an accessible depot and leave) and then undermine and engineer a cave-in under that. It's probably a lot easier to build a depot under ground and dig an access tunnel (suitably protected). If you then wanted to rob the caravan you could do it in relative safety.

Oops, sorry. Yes I was thinking primarily about the embark wagon. I guess you can safely build a depot by first building it at z-1 and then digging three ramps, but it would be a lot of hassle and the loot will probably be distributed along a line of blood from the entry point to somewhere halfway to the depot...

Retracting bridges are smashed by a cave-in through the "open" space when they are withdrawn. I haven't tried with raising ones, but strongly suspect they behave in the same way. Also, extended drawbridges can be destroyed by building destroyers.

That's what I thought. I wouldn't be too afraid of building destroyers as they would need to be flying building destroyers, and there's not that many of them (and certainly not topside).

I'd guess a protected trade depot would be part of a "secure the surface" action, since it would reduce the number of caravan members being zombiefied. To improve the odds of a caravan making it without mishaps I'd try to get them below ground as quickly as possible. IF the wiki is correct in that caravans enter the map at a location that is accessible from the depot [the wiki isn't 100% correct, as a stream can cut off access], you could dig the trade depot tunnel all the way to the map edge and then use bridges to hem it it completely, thus ensuring only caravans and critters from off the map can make it into the tunnel (apart from building destroyers, who can smash your access limiting bridges to get in).

In my experience, the problem with truly evil biomes is that you need to get below immediately to avoid being slaughtered by zombie wildlife, and you can only venture up as soon as you have some sort of half-decent military. It is quite difficult to get them equipped and sufficiently trained in time for the first caravan, let alone the first migrant wave, as you also need to rescue your supplies, set up farming etc. By the end of the first year with a bit of bad luck you are facing wildlife but also the first two zombified migrant waves and merchant guards. So it's a race against the clock (which is not made easier if you embark pick-only and have an aquifer...)

[Larix]

Retracting bridges are smashed by a cave-in through the "open" space when they are withdrawn. I haven't tried with raising ones, but strongly suspect they behave in the same way. Also, extended drawbridges can be destroyed by building destroyers.

No, they can't. Bridges are never targetted by building destroyers. Ever.

Raising bridges will fall apart when operated under/over a creature that's too large (regardless of building destroyer token).

Bridges can also be destroyed by tantrumming dwarfs. That's because those don't use building destroyer tags but a special interaction that can destroy some structures completely safe from building destroyers - bridges, paved roads and traps.

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks for clearing that up, Larix. This means the only risk to static (i.e. non operated) bridges from critters are accidental destruction, such as when dragon fire destroyed my entrance bridge while it fried an elven caravan, or when my paved wooden road was set on fire by a fire breathing Titan.

I've never embarked on a glacier so I don't know how hard glacier ice is to dig in (i.e. like soil or like stone). Regardless, you should be able to dig a caravan entrance path to the edge before the second dwarven caravan is due. To manage this feat before the first elven caravan arrives is trickier, but probably possible if you give that task a high priority, but you may have to do the bridge and wall building for the seal in parallel with the digging (and thus expose the builders to the local horrors not only while building, but also while traveling to the building site on the surface) if you want that to be in place by then.

Also, I don't know if you can herd immigrants to the single (or one of two) path open to the fortress, or if they just appear on the map edge at a "random" location (it seem the following waves appear in roughly the same place, but you don't know where that will be before the first wave) and I haven't payed enough attention to know whether "roughly" is sufficiently precise for you to build an edge seal to let them in safely.
I know that the trade liaison isn't herded (I once had the bugger enter the map between two trees to the sides and a magma moat in front and had to send a wood cutter to rescue the bugger).

I also don't know if you can grow any overground crops in a glacier biome, although I suspect you can't.

[BadLeo]

Bridges can also be destroyed by tantrumming dwarfs. That's because those don't use building destroyer tags but a special interaction that can destroy some structures completely safe from building destroyers - bridges, paved roads and traps.

That can be unfortunate if the bridge happens to be in use by other dwarves while it's deconstructed. Happened to me when I didn't knew that could happen. It was awful fun because the bridge was over a chasm of some 30z-levels intended to drop invaders out of it.

[Slakan]

The strategies you ponder here are way more viable than mine,i know for a fact, i've done it. But i see it kind of as an exploit. The caravan that comes every year is a friendly dwarven caravan from your own civilization. The objective of my series is to take over the surface so i can make caravans and inmigrants live and come every year. If you have any suggestions or ideas on "how to kill 7 mammoth zombies without loosing dwarves or having to build a gigantic trap" please leave a reply.

[vanatteveldt]

The strategies you ponder here are way more viable than mine,i know for a fact, i've done it. But i see it kind of as an exploit. The caravan that comes every year is a friendly dwarven caravan from your own civilization. The objective of my series is to take over the surface so i can make caravans and inmigrants live and come every year. If you have any suggestions or ideas on "how to kill 7 mammoth zombies without loosing dwarves or having to build a gigantic trap" please leave a reply.

MAGMA!!!!


But seriously, I agree that dropping the wagon and looting the caravans are not really what you should strive for, and neither is walling off map edges and other constructs that exploit technical limitations (size of the map) to ease the burden. However, it will be very difficult to conquer the surface in the first year (or two), which means that it will be tough to let the migrants and traders survive (increasing your zombie problem). I would probably embark with some well trained hammerdorfs and archers and some metal + coal + 1 coke, that should allow you to have a decent military by summer - but a decent military might not be a match against whatever the biome throws at you. You can probably do two miner/smith dwarfs, who will first mine out minimal quarters and then produce arms+armor. The five other dwarfs can be military (or 4/5), and can set up food production while the miners+smiths are busy, after which they take over and the soldiers get training. Maybe you can re-use the map from the "single pick challenge" thread, it would be nice to have a direct comparison of how much easier bringing some stuff on embark makes things.

[Trappington]

I don't know how much help this might be, but there is an excellent ongoing account of a fortress called Roomcarnage that is in an evil glacier biome.  The first few years of the fortress may have some tricks that you could use to save migrants and deal with undead.  In addition, the undead did eventually take over the surface on this map, so you might be able to see some pitfalls that you can avoid while buiding your own fotress.  Just a suggestion.