Thanks for following! Great questions.
- However I wonder how you survived this long fort, even updating to newer versions without any bugs/corruption or crashes ?
(Most of my forts have ended due to crashes or bugs in the long run)
I read you started without dfhack but you are running it now in the background ? Or do you keep everything vanilla (except phoebus)
Surviving this long mostly just takes patience and eventually you can understand the threats that the game throws at you. Forgotten Beast made of Fire? Lead him to your Cave Dragons who are immune to fire. Titan made of glass that webs? Use an animal as bait to lure him to a room surrounded by fortifications with your archers behind them. It took a few failed forts to make sense of the threats, but once you do you can manage them. It also helped that I ran the fortress in the stress free environment that was pre-44.10 for most of it. By the time the stress update and its later version of 44.12 hit, I had enough creature comforts to keep them in line. Plus a very active and deadly Fortress Guard:
I ran DFhack for the first 200 years actually but didn't use it, and then for like the next hundred I tried vanilla plus phoebus. The only crashes I found were with TWBT running so I've always disabled that. Otherwise the game never crashes on me. I do run DFhack now because I need autodump and clean all to keep the fps reasonable.
- I am also curious, you did let the first migrant wave in, correct ? And from there you started a pure bloodline ?
I played once with only the 7 starting dwarves and assigned the first migrant wave to a burrow with its own fort to keep the bloodline pure. However i got spammed by job cancellations which resulted in massive fps drop. So I figured that the first migrant wave you have to let in, since the first wave ignores the population cap and you cant separate them either.
I let the first 3 migrant waves in and from that I got 2 married couples, so I was able to set up pre-honeymoon suites for their kids and then used the same technique when I married them to their cousins. Then just repeated down the generations. The family tree is fun to look at. I'll post it sometime.
- last thing i wonder is how you micromanage that none of your dwarves come in contact with the wicked soot or even some deadly dust from all the FB’s you have encountered.
I read and see that all your dwarves are drafted in to the military to wear armor etc. But how do you deal with clothing replacement, children(not wearing armor), hauling dead or even a moody dwarf that decides to strip naked.
That must cause a threat if they come in contact with the stuff and affect the rest of your dwarves.
Oh it still happens occasionally:
With all of the adults in a military squad they are usually trained enough to put down someone who has become husked. You just find the nearest dwarves and command their squads to attack. Or I use the regular military if they were caught outside. The most annoying is when a dwarven caravan gets caught in a wicked soot cloud because then I have to bury all of them after they get put down.
I make enough clothes for the children, wood cutters, miners etc. so they aren't naked around the stuff. They will mostly clean themselves at the wells, but the weapons will get coated sometimes and stab a goblin causing him to husk. Still the military is more than a match for them.
The only dwarf that has stripped naked is Fath funnily enough.
There's something about dwarven necromancers in fortress mode that gets them stuck in a single job, so his clothes rotted away and all he does is study and write books in his library completely naked covered in his own sweat clutching a large Bandfire Opal. I write him differently for narrative purposes, but since he doesn't need to eat, drink, or sleep, he just makes discoveries over and over, which is fine by me.
For the gas cloud FB's, back in the day, I would just lure them with animal bait to a Fortified room and elite marksdwarves stationed well behind them and they would just shoot them to death with impunity.