Part 6: Closing notes.Well, this year went side-ways, several times. The fort’s not that strong, imo; our military is tiny just 13 dudes, the tower (where all the military should be training so they don’t get cave-adapted) is unused, happiness is dropping, slowly but all across the board, and the clothing situation has somehow gone both better and worse, in the same time.
The tower. It’s fully sealed now; somebody had started building a door on the roof, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, and I built a cage trap before the hatch. Right now, that hatch is locked.
The archery floor is under deconstruction and reorganization. The ‘external’ hall-way should be extended with another vertical section off to the right; a wall should be moved, old archery targets should be deconstructed to allow for engravers to carve fortifications, and internal doors should be set up. This is some very low-priority work, because our military is kind of in the pits. We have three real squads, of which only the Ochre Bolts are marksdwarves; with 7 members, they constitute more than half of our military:
Below in the melee floor, some minor floor reorganization is done as well. But our melee squads have, respectively, 3, 3, and 0 members. At this point it’s pretty much not possible for them to train.
Below that, the outdoor farms were restarted; I dimly recall somebody complaining about the vast number of thread-producing plants that we have (or was that in SmallHands? I mix them up). But do keep in mind that clothing eats up multiple bolts of cloth, so when I see “1,000 cloth”, what I think is “almost enough clothing for ~70 dwarves”. I don’t have the accurate math for this, and I suppose I should make some. For my sake, if not everybody else’s
.
Level 144 is the start of the enemy dumping pit. So close, and yet so far…
All available hostiles were piled in one single dumping zone. There should be about 200 cages there, all with goblins, trolls, and the remaining four beak dogs that are not being tamed or slaughtered (despite tamers constantly trying; I think they killed dwarves, so the game marks them as enemies 4 eva). The truly bad news is on the bottom, to my one failed project for the year:
The spikes genuinely don’t work T_T. I tried dumping prisoners on top of them, and all survived; I had to wipe them out with military intervention. What in tarnation? The empty floor did more damage than the spikes, and all of them are full of masterwork- or excellent-quality spikes and spears!
I leave it to my successor to either move the enemies to the Temple of Armok, or attach a lever to the spikes then assign that lever to be pulled infinitely. That at least couldn’t possibly fail, retracting spikes are known for killing forgotten beasts and demons; naked goblins should stand no chance. I recommend against a marksdwarf tunnel in the walls, because the targets can climb...
And with that carefully deployed segue, there’s these two things:
Enemies can climb out of the pit, and have made it up these two ways out. Military dwarves had to hunt them down individually. I’ve sealed one of them, but I ran out of time on the other; wall tiles have to be placed one at a time, or dwarves won’t have where to stand, so yes this is a very frustrating thing to do.
143: I made a stockpile above the tavern for prepared meals, and I separated the animals from the goblins. With this occasion, I re-re-learned that we have a bunch of crow people in the cages, who can’t be dumped any drop chutes ‘cause they fly. Personally, I’d just release them outside, it’s not like they’ve done us any harm.
142. There are 10+ empty coffins, a giant booze pile that will last you the whole next year (I ordered more anyway), a tavern that needs lead flooring and furniture here and there, a pasture for future war dogs that will hopefully be superseded by WAR GRIZZLY BEARS, and the new underground farm - now with almost no risk of enemy goblins (the plots aren’t set to be planted all in all seasons; we’re neck deep in plants already).
Below that is the animal corpse pile, and our butchers are slowly making their way through crundles. Next to it, I put the people-corpses pile, because really where else do you expect it to be?
There’s another failure here - I tried to set up a minecart to take from the corpse pile in the right, and didn’t read the wiki article until the end; so I failed miserably to set this up. At this time, the garbage minecart also services the corpse pile too.
Frankly, I’m not so sure about auto-dumping these - animal corpses can usually be butchered, dwarven and pet corpses need to be buried properly, or you get ghosts, and tattered clothing doesn’t need to be dumped in an atom-smasher because it decays on its own, plus any masterworks that get smashed will make their creators pissed off. And it’s not like adding a minecart spares the dwarves from seeing corpses, because they’re still the ones loading them from stockpile to minecart...
139. Cloth and yarn derived from plants are all here. We have almost no leather, but luckily we also don’t need a lot of leather.
The clothing situation was addressed, but by no means resolved. There are some stockpiles of plant-based cloth in their proper place, and spider silk still sits uncollected in the cave. I did manage to, uh, confiscate some clothes from prisoners, and to make some of the clothes that goblins don’t bring - pants, gloves and caps primarily. In addition, plant processing was left on repeat for plants, and weaving was left on repeat for plant cloth. We now have ~1000 hemp thread, which seems like a lot, but is not going to be enough for even a fraction of our needs.
Related, we also have a giant cave spider sitting in a cage, which I have ignored, once again.
In
133, the crafting level, we already know what I did
The
New Temple of Armok, in all its convoluted glory, has been left untouched.
126. In the first cavern, Ib is acting very oddly: it’s been hanging off that rock face since early spring, if not sooner.
And speaking of the first cavern, why did you do this?
Why did you tear down. A. Perfectly. Unassailable. Cavern seal. And replaced it with a wall??? Now how am I supposed to lure the forgotten beast in a position where it can be shot to death, with no risk to our people? Do you WANT to go engage a horror beyond time in melee combat?
Because really, before this, all I had to do was to carve out a marksdwarves tunnel off to the north, then unlock a hatch long enough for the FB to path & travel here. Then I could lock the hatch again, and laugh while the stupid FB with the useless poisonous bite was getting pincushioned.
Now we’re gonna have to fight fair, and we all know that’s for suckers.
Actually. Between this and the door on the roof, I’m thinking somebody doesn’t know how hatches-above-stairs work: they’re impossible to tear down from below, because they never get included in pathing calculations. DF does paths in 2 stages: in stage 1, it calculates which tiles/blocks are available as path plocks. In stage 2 and based on the results of stage 1, it actually calcs a route. A ramp or stair is only a valid target for pathing if there is a block above where a potential creature can sit after going up; if you put a hatch on top of it, there won’t be one, and the stair is marked as unusable.
What’s not totally clear to me is why fliers still fall for this crap, they could in theory sit/fly on the stair, then attack the hatch from below.
That’s enough DF mechanics, back to your scheduled fortress tour.
110. This is the best place for a new risk-free marble quarry, so I already started one around the dump zone. One level below, we have the old quarry, and below that there’s the second cavern, so that’s my reasoning, basically.
Btw, before digging these out, we had 28 lumps of marble in the entire fort.
On level 97, I just noticed a stupid-ass fisher-dwarf walled outside; let the fool in, will ya?
He wasn’t supposed to be there, the cavern is outside the emergency burrow.
And lastly, level 96 with the smithy and the addie Spires. I feel justified in using the capital letter.
Of note here: I left lead blocks on repeat, in order to finish the tavern floor; I think we need about 50 more, so judging on previous performance the dorf should reach that number around the 15th of Granite. I rarely use manager orders, as opposed to workshop orders on repeat, because I always thought workshop orders are done a lot faster; I also had a 50-gold-blocks order put in through the manager interface, and it took nearly 2 months. Then I got 50+ lead blocks from the workshop, in about two WEEKS.
The addie spire was, as I said, completely sealed from the cavern. It wasn’t yet connected to the fort, largely because adamantine requires a lot of crafts-dwarves shops to process (or more accurately, extracting strands takes a lot of time; most people ‘fix’ that by using a lot of ‘shops); whoever starts exploiting this seriously is probably best served in carving a new room above the smithy, where the dedicated strand extractors can work in peace.
In older editions, adamantine threads / strands were a prime target for all sorts of stupid behavior, especially doctors using them for stitches (thus destroying them from wafer making).
Population-wise, there have been losses, let me put it that way. We also gained 3 new citizens via immigration, but even so numbers have gone down. We count 136 full citizens, 2 were-chameleons, 3 children, and 3 humans guests who’re loitering around. Two of them have elected to go loitering in the third cavern; those are too dumb to live, and they can do what they want until something eats them. Compared to the start of the year, we’re down 14 adults and one child, and somehow gained one guest.
Start of year:
[...] 158 inhabitants (including the two were-chameleons); Dwarf Therapist reports 147 adult citizens, 4 children, 2 were-chameleons because it’s a full moon, & the remaining 5 are ‘guests’ - not controlled directly, but still part of the fort.
What really cheeses me off is that happiness has been dropping across the board, and that the clothing situation appears to have gone worse, not better, looking just on the surface of it. I’ll see how a bout of ‘cleanowned X’ will go in the fort; I don’t think we can afford a full ‘cleanowned x’, because of time if not replacement clothes, and anyway only the badly tattered clothes cause bad thoughts.
(Update: "cleanowned X" works wonderfully; "cleanowned
scattered X" is evil, and doesn't care about wear levels at all; don't use it, just let the beards haul unclaimed crap to the refuse pile).
I haven’t used the mist generator because I had made some bad assumptions; I thought there was a hole in it, but no, I was just wrong about pumping direction. Ooops. The tank is completely dry at this moment, and it’s just waiting for a bunch of dwarves with Pump Operatin’ to get to it.
The named dwarves:
---
To my successor:
Plz buy grizzlies! You wouldn’t believe how much I wanted dwarves with war grizzly bears beating the snot out of goblins. Buy them when they come. PLEASE.
Plz force-dump very tattered clothing; dwarves are exactly stupid enough to never drop a piece of clothing, and then complain about wearing tattered clothes; just put a garbage dump area on top of a refuse pile, then let the rags decay naturally. You can even use the refuse pile in the animal pasture, so nobody has to see corpses!
The fort has no active manager orders. There are several jobs left on repeat in workshops: the lead blocks one, which should be shut down ~15th-20th; ‘melt metal object’ is best left alone, we have stupid-huge amounts of goblin crap. Plant processing and cloth weaving are self-explanatory; though actual clothing can wait after most dumping, so you know what to make...
I
thought I left no active dump zones, but I was wrong - there's a one-tile garbage dump, sending everything down the former magma chute, current ore & bars chute. The area is to the south of the hole, under the 3x3 area that I made. (if you don't know how to delete it, you can navigate between overlapping areas with {v}, then delete it with {x}-{X}).
This concludes my year, in which I wrote & posted ~9,500 words, including prologue & epilogue. I'm also signing up for another turn.
EDIT: the bracelet crap the mayor wanted? We have no active bone carvers, so nobody's going to make them. I recommend Cog Ulzest-something, who's a level 18 bonecarver and pretty unhappy; we can solve 2 problems in one action, and we should.
(edit, 25th Aug: fixed an image - the one with the first cavern entry. That one of you ruined).
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Topic: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04] (Read 63653 times)