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[Teldin]

I have built a few glacier outposts, mainly because the framerate is sky-high thanks to it not having to keep track of tons of animals and stuff.  

Anyway, here's a few suggestions for those hardy enough souls to brave a glacier outpost:

Starting group:
* 3 masons (yes, 3)
* 1 mason/carpenter (so that's 4 masons)
* 1 craftsman (stone)
* 1 miner
* 1 miner/outpost leader (records keeping, appraising, etc)

Starting items:
* Drop the anvil. Don't need it.
* Drop all your steel axes, unless you want one or two to defend against goblins later on. Don't need them though.
* Don't need seeds unless you really want to cook them.
* Don't bring any animals except muskox and camels. Everything else will die of cold after a day or two. Damn cats.
* Spend all the rest of your points on: booze (40%), food (40%) and lumber (20%). Nothing else. Maybe a few cages or something or whatever else tickles your fancy. You'll have tons of leftover points.

Stuff to remember:

Farms: Forget about 'em. You will not find enough water or soil to grow anything anywhere in your fortress. So, how do you do things like eat or drink? You'll have to trade for them all, and buy as much booze as possible. Booze is what your dwarves will drink instead of water. It's a good idea to bring lots of plump helmets too so you can brew them if you start running low before the next caravan.

Wood, metal: Same. You probably won't find a lot of metal. Your wood will be used on beds and charcoal, and you can smelt whatever tidbits you find along the way. But don't expect to make this a big part of your fortress or anything. Conserve your precious metal supplies. You'll be buying all your stuff from caravans anyway.

Workshops: Make everything out of ice (or "water"). Bear in mind that if you build a workshop in the rock, underneath the glacier ice, it will melt. So use stone for that. Once you dig below the ice level you will find tons of stone anyway, so keep your workshops in the ice. Ice is useless except as building materials anyway, but stone can be built into precious trade goods.

Okay! So, how do you survive?

First off, you'll immediately find yourself on a glacier in the middle of nowhere. You'll want to burrow under the ice pretty fast; dig out a down stairway, then start digging out your tunnels. It'll probably take 3-4 levels before you hit rock, so get down there as soon as possible.

Why is it so important to hit rock? You'll want your craftsdwarf to start churning out as many rock crafts as possible. The higher his skill level, the better stuff you can sell and the more it's worth, so you'll want to get his skill level as high as possible. Use some of your lumber for bins to store all the crap in.

Dig out whatever workshops you want; carpenter, mason's, craftsdwarf are all the most important ones. Maybe a butcher to get rid of your muskox calves. Delicious steaks!

Also, an important thing is to built a meeting room that has some form of trap in it, like grates connected to a 3-floor-deep pit so you can lock your immigrants in and kill the first wave off. Seriously, until you start trading with the humans and elves you'll all starve to death. Too many mouths, not enough food.

Set your outpost leader with the social skills to start updating the stocks and he'll do that for ages until he's 1. legendary and 2. your stocks are all up-to-date. You may have to set the requirements lower so he will stop and go tend to the traders if they come and he's not finished yet. Build him a nice room with a table and throne.

Anyway, why do you have all these masons, you ask? Well, when using ice you can build walls, floors, and so forth with masonry. Therefore you can haul all your blocks of ice to the surface and get your masons to build you a fabulous outdoors castle made of ice. Best of all, building walls and floors automatically smooths them.

Eventually you'll want to trade for nothing but food and booze, and churn out craft after craft (disable your craftsman's hauling skills).

How long can you survive before your dwarves starve to death in the icy wastes?

[Wahnsinniger]

Is there any way to actually thaw the ice? or find fresh water deep down? I'd think that'd be the goal so that you could use that little bit of water to muddy some rock-squares to start farming.

Sounds challenging though.

[Arkan15]

quote:Originally posted by Wahnsinniger:
<STRONG>Is there any way to actually thaw the ice? or find fresh water deep down? I'd think that'd be the goal so that you could use that little bit of water to muddy some rock-squares to start farming.

Sounds challenging though.</STRONG>

I think if you forced a section of ice to cave in the falling ice would shatter and melt.

I'm not entirely sure though.

[SirAkbar]

I'm going to try this, but I'd like to know if there's anyway to deal with immigrants BESIDES killing them.

[Mephisto]

I disagree with this. I followed your guide, but didn't pay attention to my own common sense. I picked a frozen spot that's heavily forested, but I forgot an axe. Luckily, I did bring seeds. I've got sand on Z-1 and clay on Z-2, so I can farm. In fact, I've got a plot of plump helmets growing right now. The rest seems to be spot on, though. All sites are different.

[Solara]

From the Something Awful forums:

quote: Originally posted by pesty13480
Ahah!

I have figured out how to farm on a glacier! My little empire of ice is now well underway, after what, five or six false starts? Finally, they'll be able to snag food from the God damned Northernmost tiles in the game.

The Secret:

1. Be really, really patient because this just wont work otherwise.

2. Dig down in the ice until you hit the bedrock ground, as normal. Be warned that you can't use the combo up AND down stairs for this for some reason, so do it with single sets of up and down stairs.

3. Now that you've arrived on the very top of the stone (the floor should be stone, the walls should still be ice - if you see that, you're where you're needed).

4. Dig a 6x6 room full of downward staircases. You'll dig this through the stone, but it'll generate a loam so you're safe - in fact, your stairs will be made of loam. Now, build walls over every single bloody staircase. You'll have a lot of ice, use that.

5. Now remove all those damned new walls.

6. You'll notice your ground is loam, and since it has been trampled it's well furrowed.

7. Wait a long bloody time.

8. You're done!

[ November 01, 2007: Message edited by: Solara ]

[20,000leeks]

I tried a glacier fortress earlier, although admittedly the glacier was really a giant lake frozen into the side of a mountain. I got a huge load of red sand on the first lower level, so farming wasn't an issue. I also found a *lot* of good metal - copper, aluminium, magnetite.... I even had a little igloo-type structure over my entrance.

Unfortunately, for some reason the guy I assigned as manager never went near his office, and thus nobody did any work because he refused to validate jobs, so in the end I had to abandon. It was good while it lasted, though. Aluminium crafts are worth quite a lot to elves, apparently.

[Teldin]

quote:Originally posted by Mephisto:
<STRONG>I disagree with this. I followed your guide, but didn't pay attention to my own common sense. I picked a frozen spot that's heavily forested, but I forgot an axe. Luckily, I did bring seeds. I've got sand on Z-1 and clay on Z-2, so I can farm. In fact, I've got a plot of plump helmets growing right now. The rest seems to be spot on, though. All sites are different.</STRONG>

If you have trees, you're not on a glacier and are going to have soil and earth and rocks and all that pleasant stuff.

Real dwarves build their outposts on the CENTER of the glacier, not on an outskirt! Bah!

[Mephisto]

Ah, of course. It had to be a simple solution... Thanks for pointing that out.

I seem to have mistaken freezing for glacier for some odd reason.

[ November 01, 2007: Message edited by: Mephisto ]

[Dumbo]

You can create underground reservoirs on glacier maps by undermining the ice and letting it drop a few levels. I'm not sure exactly what causes the ice to melt. It might be the  drop, or a change in temperature at the lower levels. A layer of ice automatically forms on top of the water, so the reservoir seals itself.

[Kjoery]

You might also be able to create a dump point at a deep pit that you fabricated in the rock-portion of the glacier, and have your dwarves just drop boulders of ice down it, filling it with water.

[Arven]

Well I messed with the pit-dumping method!

It doesn't work. When the ice melts, it becomes a puddle which dwarves scramble to clean. After turning off the cleaning skill and letting it sit there... the puddle would eventually just disappear and not make the ground muddy. I put 10 ice on the pile (you can seemingly stack an infinite amount of ice on th same tile), and it just turned into a stack of 10 puddles which eventually evaporated and left no mud.

So! I tried the pit method at this point. I couldn't get them to throw the ice into the hole for whatever reason, so I put a stone grate on top. They would put the ice on top of the grate, but it didn't fall through when it melted. I tried floor bars, same thing. I then stacked 10 ice on top of the bars and then removed the bars- this finally caused them to fall into the channel... where they melted, turned into a stack of puddles, and evaporated.

I then tried to make a pond via the zoning menu, but the Dwarves don't seem to know to use the puddles or the ice as a water source.

Either the collective water from the melted ice isn't enough to form a water level, melted water isn't being treated as water, or I'm totally overlooking something.

I'm going to try the mass-collapse method as someone else said it works.

[Arven]

Ah-hah!

Did the collapse, it works. I now have a 2-story 10x10 sized 7/7 deep cube of water.

I did further experimentation from that- I dumped ice into my new water reservoir. The ice goes in and melts... but the water sits there inside the other water as an entirely operate entity, not effecting the water level.

SO! It seems that 1 ice wall = 1 7x7 cube of water, but 1 ice block doesn't equal water at all and is currently bugged.

The trick I've learned for making your reservoir is this- make the pit as deep as  however many levels you are trying to collapse. (so for 3 levels of ice have a pit 3 levels deep).

I haven't experimented with it yet, but I'm guessing the best way to farm with this system would be to build a pump that pumps that water out of the reservoir and into the farming area and then pump it right back into the reservoir once the ground is wet.