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Oh yes, do tell!

29 (59.2%)

No. You're boring.

3 (6.1%)

I want to tell you EXACTLY how I feel! By replying! So that's what I did!

1 (2%)

Silence is golden; I shall remain silent

4 (8.2%)

I just like picking "other"

12 (24.5%)

Total Members Voted: 49

[ironsnake345]

Well, I'd say that my little dorfs are doing quite fine!
I don't remember them being this low maintenance...

Everything seems to be fine, although the dorfs are going to be needing a bit of time to finish digging out the bedrooms and making furniture.
I swear, this was more chaotic in my last fortress...

Well, nothing for me to do at a moment. Not a single beard sitting idly, might as well go read up on iron men and reachers. What could possibly go wrong?

...

...

Why is my common room flooded?



So, what do you think? should I continue this epic tale of how most of my fort pushed through and survived average life in the fortress? Should I tell of how things suddenly took a turn for the worst, dwarves died, and a hero was born? Should I just shut up?

[Sardeed]

Good day sir, lovely time to post something, indeed, please tell your tale to us so that i can fell even better about myself, oh jolly time i took the first time of this thread, what a great day, indeed.

[cochramd]

You hit an aquifer, didn't you?

[Pseudo]

Yes, yes, and no.

(Also, reminds me of my recent question of "why is there a GCS in my common room?".)

[ironsnake345]

Sorry to have taken so long, you guys!

Well, anyway, I might as well get around to the story now.

So, it started after a bit of wiki-fueled updating and base construction. Being better at the game than I was previously, I quickly began constructing a base in a great place I'd found. Shallow AND deep metals, flux stone, a brook, clay, no sand though. After a lot of digging out, I was creating an enormous main area to serve as the base. About five or ten Z-levels down, before the chalk ended, I carved out numerous locations. A hospital, a barracks, the mayor's and broker's offices, the office for the future captain of the guard, a dining hall, and an enormous set of storage rooms with their own enormous workshop. Gotta hold all that chalk somewhere! The last thing I needed to complete my base was a cistern, so I got to work making a well and hollowing out a reservoir beneath it. Floodgates were constructed, levers placed in the common room where the well was, and a backup emergency release valve was created so I could drain it all into the caverns if anything went horribly wrong.

A few issues I had with that were that the emergency levers were all located in the room that the well goes to, and the cistern is fed by the brook.

The funny thing is, for quite some time (I was watching actively) water pressure didn't kick in, and the cistern only filled up to the point which the channel leading into it was located, and above that there was little or no water.

I, thinking that pressure would be nothing to worry about, decided to hop onto the wiki for a while and read about some interesting topics.

Some amount of minutes later, my dwarves were drowning, and an enormous flood threatened to kill off my fortress.

!!Fun!! times!

[ironsnake345]

Well, after that happened, I immediately took quick action to try and contain the damage. I ordered everyone who wasn't trapped by the flood to enter a burrow in the upper parts of the fortress, and then I had to figure something out for the ones who were stuck down there. The dwarves in my storage room were about to be overtaken by the flood slowly creeping in on them, but I had an idea: The dining hall, hospital, barracks and offices were full of survivors. Why? They had doors separating them from the common rooms! Quickly, I had my dwarves place the doors they'd been constructing for the bedrooms at the various chokepoints in the storage rooms, thus sealing off the flow. I quickly had the use of these doors forbidden, so that no dwarves would accidentally open up a flood, and I did the same to all the other doors holding back water. That being done, I had the non-sealed dwarves take what little they had and seal off the access passage down to the flooded commons so that the water wouldn't flow any higher. The flood was contained!

But so were most of my dwarves.

I had to figure out a way to get them out of their prisons, but if I approached, there would just be drowning. So, after a bit of noobish brainstorming, I immediately had a secondary access tunnel dug with a narrow staircase leading down into the non-flooded storage rooms, and from there more tunnels would be dug without touching the common room to connect the dining hall, hospital, offices, and barracks. Nobody starved to death, yay!

Now, I just had to figure out a way to deal with all this water.

[ironsnake345]

After much brainstorming, I decided that the best way to deal with the water was the very dwarfiest I could think of. My first design choice was a screw pump which would be used to drain the river, leading into a long area sealed off by a series of walls built as close to the barrier as they could go. This way, the water would just drain off-map, without hurting anyone. Unfortunately, it takes more than dwarf power to drain a river, so that idea was scrapped.

Then, I came up with an even DWARFIER idea.

I would build floors covering the ridge which the brook flowed from, all the way out to the closest to the edge of the map that I could build windmills. On the underside, I built a series of floors forcing the water drained from the brook not to reenter the brook, and instead flow off-map through the pipeline of an artificial cave I'd created. From here, I constructed a series of windmill-powered screw pumps taking from every space that the brook flowed through, meaning it was only a matter of time until the screw pumps had taken so much out of the brook that the bed was dry or damned-near to dry!

With this method, I could eventually drain the river to the point that my access point leading down the channel to the cistern would be dry at the top layer, allowing me to build a secondary floodgate controlled from a location OUTSIDE of the flood zone.

That being done, I promptly began constructing a pump stack to drain out the fortress once the secondary floodgate was finally in place. What's more is that I was able to create a channel of walls to direct the water towards the front walls of my fortress, where it will finally fill the moat. Everything is coming up roses!

Well, looks like the !!fun!! is over...

Or not. There's a werepanda killing my workers.

Wait, no, it turned back human. I'll just have my militia dispatch it.

Oop, spoke too soon. There's a titan killing everyone. Better hit the drawbridge, and... There we go, it's walled out of my fortress, and MOST of my dwarves are safe inside.

...But now I can't work on unflooding the fort.

Well, I can always just carve some fortifications and shoot it.

...It can crawl through fortifications. It's in the fort.

FUN TIMES!!!

[martinuzz]

Someone dwarfy enough to drain an entire brook to unflood the fort surely should be able to handle that titan.
Here's how to prevent disasters like that happening next time, cheap and easy:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The water drops in from the south, the diagonal flow depressurizes it.
If I want to toy with pressurized water later I pre-installed two pairs of floodgates to branch off

[ironsnake345]

Ah. Diagonal flow. good idea. I should be able to implement that once I can fully hook up the draining valve.

But no, I am not dwarfy enough to deal with that titan. The best idea I can think of is just to train up my military and find some bits of armor for them. Traps don't work on titans, right? So yeah, I don't know how to deal with a titan other than with a severely underdwarfed and overly cave-adapted military.

I'm kinda new to DF, I'll be honest. Do you have any ideas?

[ironsnake345]

Oh my Armok, I just realized that I forgot to tell one of the best parts of the story. When I ordered the shaft be dug, exactly one miner did all the digging, and he was promptly named "fluidorf," and his job title changed to big damn hero.

[Magnus]

Oh my Armok, I just realized that I forgot to tell one of the best parts of the story. When I ordered the shaft be dug, exactly one miner did all the digging, and he was promptly named "fluidorf," and his job title changed to big damn hero.

Fluidorf the wet-soaked rain-beard
Had a very shiny pick
And if you let him wield it
Why he would dig a hole each tick

[fluffymormegil]

But no, I am not dwarfy enough to deal with that titan. The best idea I can think of is just to train up my military and find some bits of armor for them. Traps don't work on titans, right? So yeah, I don't know how to deal with a titan other than with a severely underdwarfed and overly cave-adapted military.

I shall do you the honour of assuming that you've considered magma but either (a) the titan is made of a magma-safe substance or (b) there is a substantive barrier to you bringing any to the surface

[ironsnake345]

A: probably not

B: So many Z-levels of stone, my main mining shaft being blocked, and a so-far lack of magma safe materials. Plus, no luck finding coal, so steel won't work.
Also, I haven't found magma yet. Any other ideas?

[Skorpion]

Dig down. Find a cave, and route the water into that. Iron is magma-safe, so you should find that easily enough if you have chalk, so make some iron minecarts for damming the river.

[ironsnake345]

What would that accomplish? I'd still be trapped underground, one of my miners would die to the flooding water, and the beast might've destroyed my windmills powering the river-drainer anyway. Also, what would minecarts accomplish? I'm new, you have to extrapolate. Sorry!