Print

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

Meticulously dig out stone, cut it into blocks, build scaffolding, and have an army of dwarvs assemble it block by block

14 (31.1%)

Build a water/magma pump stack, construct/dig out a form and cast the structure in obsidian one level at a time, smoothing and engraving the result

9 (20%)

Find the nearest mountain/underground area and go Michelangelo on it until it fits your vision

22 (48.9%)

Total Members Voted: 45

[RocheLimit]

Getting ready to start my own mega project and, while my project is almost assured to be cast due to FPS issues, I became curious what others thought of the various methods. 

[Fleeting Frames]

The "Carve down" option. If you have the stone formation, it's the quickest to do, and mining is pretty dwarven.

The second one is the hardest though there's some advantages to casting workshops.

[Quarque]

Cutting stuff into blocks before building has the most authentic feel to it. The obsidian casting shenanigans are what a gamer does, not what real dwarves would do. 

[Eater of Vermin]

I tend to use a combination of all three...  but not all the time.  It depends on the project and what's available to hand.

The caverns can make for a safe(ish) construction start but there are things that still need to be built, whether it be block by block or cast.

Casting is great for quick walls or areas to dig out but can be very, very inappropriate if you need to change an existing, inhabited section.  There is much !fun! to be had there.

[Urist McVoyager]

Cutting stuff into blocks before building has the most authentic feel to it. The obsidian casting shenanigans are what a gamer does, not what real dwarves would do. 

Yes and no. For the record, I do things block by block so I can make changes if needed (plus I don't deal in pumps very often), but if magma/lava worked like it does in the game, in real life, I can't see any reason they wouldn't look into obsidian casting.

ETA: I might eventually try my hand at ice casting.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Meticulously dig out stone, cut it into blocks, build scaffolding, and have an army of dwarvs assemble it block by block

Well, not that hard if you do it from the bottom layer.

But why do you need to assemble it, it would be cool if you remove as many tiles as possible all the way down to the magma, atom-smash them and retire. Maybe eventually you will turn the whole world into hell.

[gchristopher]

Real dwarves launch the magma and water on a ballistic parabola towards the sky, timing it so the materials strike the top of the world and form obsidian mid-air, which then comes crashing down to build up their structure, which is located far, far, far below.

C'mon. Get it right.

Whoever said that magma casting isn't dwarfy is a filthy elf.

(For the record, my last megaproject was built of carved ice bricks and then covered in magma flooding a valley. It was a temple that launched clowns in upward parabolas to strike a target above a large grassy temple area built above the magma, which would then horrify the worshippers as exploded clown parts rained down from the impact onto them. There. Does that cover enough dwarfy bases?)

[Fleeting Frames]

It seems like bit of a waste to use parabolic casting just to have it crash down on the earth to build a column. I've considered it, but mostly for using it to to seal up stairways into SMR from below so that they can't be deconstructed, as well as side note on obsidian arcs.

Still, you could use it to make a small safety improvement to your clown parts rain, at the cost of leather - if you send along a water and magma boulder along the same arc as the clown, they'll hit your target at once, resulting in instant Han Solo'd clown, without needing mid-air repeating adamantine spikes to kill clowns who don't die from a simple collision with a wall.
Though I'd like to see that megaproject even as-is

[gchristopher]

It was for the Temple Contest thread, but I didn't get it done in time for their deadline, and the thread kinda died out before judging.

It's a frozen river source valley that has been dammed on one end and filled with magma after construction was complete. The corner towers are made from ice blocks, the center tower is from cast obsidian, so I could muddy up the green area at the base and have a grassy temple courtyard over the magma lake. The little rectangle at the surface of the lake is a retracting bridge over a hole.

Underneath that hole is a track arrangement to sequentially launch several minecarts, each containing a cage with a clown inside. They launch up towards the big obsidian shield-thingey on the top of the tower, and probably 70-80% of them will hit it and explode and rain body parts down. The body part rain is pretty spread out, so sadly a lot of it falls into the magma lake. The clowns that miss the target either impact on the top of the world or else on the far map border, so that map edge tends to be littered with clown parts and occasionally a very injured surviving clown.

The original river is still under there, with a glass block tunnel over it so you can walk on the frozen river crust with the magma overhead. The guest rooms for the temple are built into the hill along the source of the river. Magma flowing one z-level underneath the river thaw it out so you've got running water under the ice crust you're walking on.

The whole design is an FPS nightmare, though.

[Fleeting Frames]

...

Well, while the temple contest thread may have died, colour me impressed. I thought that was sarcasm you used in your post, partly due tone of the last flippant line and partly due the sheer difficulty and clowns' toughness not guaranteeing their death with collision with a wall, but no.

You actually built a an ice-magma-obsidian temple with grassy plain and horrifying clown rain.

Well played. GG. Setting a target of "top that" where your target is the highest sky z-level.

[gchristopher]

Haha, thanks. I apologize for the flippant tone. Having done a project like that, mostly i remember how much time and tedium was involved, and didn't think it was difficult so much as long and involving a lot of details.

Anyway, my point was... actually I didn't have a point, really. Dwarfy stuff is good? Maybe that was the point?

Sky level really is a problem for projects like this, though. Forget to set it high enough and your whole space program just impacts the invisible ceiling instead of going where you want them.

Sadly, the obsidian parts were not made by parabolic ballistic casting. I wish. It's a traditional level-by-level casting with walls as the form and a pump stack up the middle. For a project of this type, when a collapse happens, it's often unrecoverable. Randomized falling obsidian tiles probably wouldn't have mixed well. Maybe next time?

[Fleeting Frames]

Dwarfy stuff tradition.

I meant the sky level more as a metaphor - in-game, there's infintesky command in dfhack. Though iirc non-supersonic minecarts maxed out at 26z height. Albeit colliding with the sky can give some exotic chained injuries in my experience.

Parabolic casting seems more interesting with water and ice to me. Easier, and has that "stilled motion" feel.

[Jazz Cat]

You forgot the dwarfiest method of all: Jump onto a siege full of unsuspecting elves goblins and beat them to death with crossbows until their dead bodies pile up in the shape you want.

[gchristopher]

You forgot the dwarfiest method of all: Jump onto a siege full of unsuspecting elves goblins and beat them to death with crossbows until their dead bodies pile up in the shape you want.

Oookay, so that method only exists in your imagination right now, but you could (after modding dwarven ethics) process the bodies for their fat, use the fat to make blocks of soap, and construct your project out of invader soap blocks?

[Jazz Cat]

You forgot the dwarfiest method of all: Jump onto a siege full of unsuspecting elves goblins and beat them to death with crossbows until their dead bodies pile up in the shape you want.

Oookay, so that method only exists in your imagination right now...

I mean, yeah. I'm just joking around.