Year 02 (50)Which looks like this in my draft document:
Initially, this post was made with each individual section neatly wrapped in its own spoiler tag. However, all text inside spoiler tags is rendered
really tiny, so after straining my eyeballs to the point of pain during a re-read, I decided to ditch the spoilers in favor of horizontal lines.
Prologue(written around September 23rd and 24th)
First observation: That gulag award is well earned. First thing I see when starting the fort are two dead dwarves, a dead dog, and an angry Radipon brewing booze in an outdoor still. Very stereotypical Russian peasant, I gotta tell ya.
Second observation:
holy shit we have no defenses. And no food stockpiles. And no… anything that’s not a statue to Vesh, actually. At least gulags have walls and fences; granted, ones made to keep people in, not zombies out, but I suspect they work both ways.
Third observation: there’s not much of anything made, and of what is made, I have no real inventory, because our only dwarf with any points in Appraisal or Record Keeping got murdered last year.
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For this challenge, I suspect that raw plants are going to be the actual bottleneck, and not barrels, or stills, or dwarfpower. So I might play this on two ends, and indulge in creating a PROPA DWARFY fort. Failing that, I’ll settle for an actual viable fort.
Priorities (not written as an actual HTML list because frankly this forum software is from the fuckin’ 90s and it shows):
1.
Create a sealed airlock. With all the statues, we’re almost certainly above the 300k dwarfbucks limit that prompts sieges; my own attempt at year 49 definitely was, but then again, I had masterworks. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the surface is kept at bay by one door, which is going to end up rubble and splinters the first time a troll sets a toe on the map.
2.
Collect every little wild plant that we can see. I could probably handle this better and use getplant to pick only booze-producing plants, but even I am not that OCD. This is currently a top priority, because the surface is safe - we have a herd of yaks roaming around, and no undead at all.
3.
Create a small temporary plant+fruit stockpile; there are some picked plants visible on the floor; if I don’t do this pronto, they’re going to wither.
4.
Craft picks and weapons; Cerol isn’t doing anything at the moment, anyway. This one goal is hampered by the whole fort having 7 bars total, and none of them copper. Weapons can likely wait until we get better metals. Likely.
5.
Dig out a near-surface stockpile for booze. It will double as a limestone quarry, because I fully expect this fort to require massive amounts of steel at some point in its existence. And probably in the western evil biome. I don’t think it’s actually resurrecting, but then again, how would I know? (Hint: we have a dog skeleton).
6.
Cut wood, and see if I can set up a safe(ish)
fruit picking area.
7.
Bury our two dead. Somewhere, doesn’t matter where. Probably in a dug out vein, because this is NumberCurse.
On the long term:
A.
Dig out temple and tavern. ‘Cause if you have this much booze… might as well put a tavern next to it.
By the way, I don’t intend to limit my dwarves to water or such; since you’re counting barrels, regardless of content, the micro-managing isn’t worth it. Plus, the slow-down from lack of booze is likely going to offset any gains.
C.
Dig rooms. Also in the marble layer.
D.
Plan & build a PROPA DWARFY SMITHY, with a garbage stockpile to melt, um, all of last year’s challenge. Because screw that morbid bitch goddess and her great achievement of one (1) slab. Exceptions made for any incidental masterworks.
E.
Make metal furniture for the dwarven rooms. The fort’s only mason has a grand total of 2 levels, and that’s just not enough for PROPA DWARFY furniture. Might as well put that level 12 blacksmith to work. Decision subject to change if any legendary masons crop up.
Before the year even turns, I cancel the four 5x1 unbuilt farm plots in this small room, and set up the new office for ‘me’. There are 2 chairs and 1 table, all made of wood, and of low-quality; you already know they’re not going to be around for long. The rest of the room becomes our only plant & fruit stockpile.
Second action: set the jobs for dwarves. Most everybody will receive plant gathering, for reasons I already explained. All others get the hauling jobs, and one furnace operator will melt some copper statues; I need some copper bars first for picks, and I can probably get it from the old statues before I get it from smelting tetrahedrite.
Radipon is our only brewer with any skills; he’s also our only farmer and cook, and has two levels in plant gathering too. For now, he’s placed exclusively on plant gathering.
We have a lot of dwarves with military skills; not one of these resulted from the embark. Apparently, the early years of a world make for tough little beards…
Those bow-dwarves will have to be armed through trade, loot and plunder; we can’t make bows, and probably not arrows, either.
Woodcutting is planned in probably too much detail - every tree that is not a fruit tree is marked for chopping. This is one point where I used prospect and getplants. The breakdown of our available trees is between the boozers (date palm, lychee, and guava), and the loggers, aka all the others.
Aaaah... I was so hopeful back then... so ambitious... so foolish...
The First Apocryphal Spring14th Granite One of the children, Ducim, has become a peasant. I congratulate him on being less useless.
15th Granite. The elves have arrived. You know a fort is in dire straits when you rejoice for that. Now let’s see what I have… oh.
In completely unrelated news, a mica block trade depot looks extremely different when there are traders in it; gone is the boring lump of grey stone:
TIL: you cannot sell seeds that are not in a bag; there are some scattered seeds from above-ground crops, but they’re not available in the proper menu, nor accessible via search. We fall back on the tried and true dwarven way of selling the damaged clothes of the dead; in this manner, we scrounge 257 dorfbucks for sale (regrettably, bones aren’t worth anything in the depot).
(Post-submit edit: this iteration of elven trade was the only one where prices were visible; I guess one of the elves had some Appraisal, because none of the dwarves did)
In typical fashion, elves have brought nothing worthwhile. I did manage to get 25 fruits from them, but nothing else. In a shocking turn of events, our few rags have turned out to be overpriced.
Now get lost.
The real gain of my dalliance with the pointy ears was that some random dwarf got a point in Appraisal; I think his name was Deduk?
Yep. 450k+ in wealth will start attracting goblins and monsters.
22nd Granite. The evil biome is indeed resurrecting: the dog skeleton we dumped has gotten back up, and is harassing some child named Itol. I take this opportunity to make a squad from all the people who are not carrying picks or axes, and who are not close to becoming legendary. The dog is soon re-dead.
24th Granite. I finally have enough bars to craft more picks. Cerol does not disappoint, and swiftly makes 3 picks, 2 of which are masterworks.
26th Slate: Our burgeoning military has also exploded an undead bushmaster; not an important event, but kind of impressive - these are all snake teeth:
1st of Felsite. The third month has started; where in the fuck are the migrants?
3rd. Oh. There they are. Are you kidding me?
Over 1/3rd of the fort are children. I don’t count the baby, s/he was born to a woodcutter right as the migrants have arrived. Between the stupid-huge number of children and the extremely late arrival of migrants, I will perform the fort’s first reset. I’ll revert to Radipon’s save, and hope that the migrant arrival date is NOT set in the winter.
The Second Apocryphal Spring(September 26th , Saturday morning).
10th Granite. The elves have arrived.
27th. Trading with the elves did not result in us getting an appraiser after all; “I”, unlike probaby-Deduk, only received 60% of the needed XP to reach level 1, and I’m sure I actually traded more than last time. In unrelated news, the yaks have left and zombie parrots replaced them; the herbalists are not at risk, but woodcutters may be.
Seeds & future farm:
Two levels below, on 146, the objective of the game is taking shape:
The intent is to get wood indoors asap, and start making barrels while herbalists gather and miners dig. Then brewing will start, and when it advances enough, the old wood pile can be removed and used for stockpiling.
4th Slate. I’m reasonably sure this didn’t happen in the last playthrough. Or maybe it did, and I missed it.
I planned to bury those two anyway, this just accelerates my plans.
18th Slate. Some migrants have arrived. That’s better than last time, at least.
I regret to inform you that this migrant wave has the exact same ratio of adults to children as before. Fuck it, we’ll live with 22 useless grubs.
I’ll also direct your attention to the supposed 18 farmers. Who think this is some kind of reasonable fort:
I wonder why the migrant spread is as it is: either migrant waves don’t care about child caps (which contradicts previous experience), or the wave was decided between 1st and 10th of Granite when I set the child cap. This also contradicts previous experience. I am tempted to replay spring yet again, for scientific purposes. I want to see if going all the way back to Radipon’s save will result in a different batch of migrants, or if this wave was already decided at some point in the last year.
I’d also like to know just wtf is wrong with leveling appraisal, and why this time I got so few points in it. But I doubt I’ll get an answer.
This is the point when I asked about the child cap in the thread, and got to the conclusion that I
might get rid of the kids in the migration wave, if I set a child cap and revert all the way to Radipon's original save (which was made just slightly before the year turned), and I stopped playing until the next day.
The Actual Spring(September 27th, Sunday)
This time, I’m playing on two ends, so to speak - I am focusing both on the smithy and on the surface. Radipon left a vein of tetrahedrite marked at F3; I dig a portion of it, and will get it smelted. Some of the low-quality statues are also melted, though the products of these are minuscule in comparison. Cerol then crafts enough picks for the entire fort, and a few silver maces too.
Trade with the elves repeats itself, with little variation. I still don’t get the appraiser leveled up, but this time I notice the bow-dwarves, and also buy two bows & arrows.
4th Slate. Some migrants have arrived, much sooner in the year; on the basis of this alone, this playthrough would become the winning one.
Unfortunately, I once again get the exact same spread of population. There’s no need for any further experiments, no matter what I do I’m stuck on the same adult-to-child ratio. Also, once again a farmer guild is established as soon as migrants get in.
Right. Might as well pick up where I left off.
I appointed a spectacular 11 miners. Never in any fort did I ever have so many, but then again never in any fort did I want digging this fast. Three woodcutters will cover the surface.
The designated booze level, 146, gets hotkey F2 and a temporary wood stockpile in it. This wood will be carved into barrels, as soon as it’s full or when something nasty pops on the surface.
All potential military dwarves are candidates for plant gathering, in any of my forts; even moreso when sinister biomes are involved. Right now, I have near-complete squads of bowdwarves, speardwarves and swordsdwarves. No macedwarves, though, which makes my choice of melee weapons unfortunate. Anyway, the bowdwarves are the least likely to be useful, so they get to play at being herbalists. They now number 11, and 3 were already picked as miners. The other 8 can finish off every plant on the surface.
13th Slate. Some people have odd ideas about what exactly we do here:
2nd Felsite. A zombie cassowary scared the not-bowdwarves collecting plants, and prompted the creation of the second squad in the fort’s history. From bowdwarves. They beat the undead to re-death, but not before it killed a dog and injured a dwarf.
On the same day, Cerol the weaponsmith becomes mayor. I like to think these events have been related.
A few rooms are being excavated above the booze level. Their geometry is swiftly ruined by the veins of lignite and limonite going through them. All veins will be dug out, and hauled downstairs for weaponry.
Pictured: the mayoral rooms, and the first 15 peasant houses.
Apocrypha, 12th Felsite to the Start of Winter.12th Felsite. In the booze area, some management is being done:
The rooms off to the side are where the other food stockpiles will be made, and where all the booze making will happen. The room above is intended for meat, fat, lye and related, while the room below is for plants.
14th Felsite. On the surface, the outdoor farm is planned. It will come right next to the underground farm
19th. The first three industrial-production stills are built:
The fort only has two brewers of any skill: Radipon, and some speardwarf. Both are removed from all other jobs.
The next move is the fort’s long neglected stone management. Two temporary workshops for crafts and masonry are built in the future booze pile. Their primary job will be to clean it, by making crafts from microcline and blocks from chalk. The giant stockpile on top is a stone stockpile, which takes from nowhere and is only there to give to the workshops.
The real stone crafting area will eventually get built three levels below, after the above-ground farms are completed:
A craftsdwarf’s workshop cuts all the microcline, first into four nestboxes, and then crafts for trade. A mason’s cuts some of the chalk into blocks; I want to make a secure outdoor farm, which means roofing it.
15th Felsite. An armadillo boar corpse has appeared; the bowdwarves have proven they’re not useless, and swiftly two-shot the corpse. Across the next month, two more corpses follow. The bowdwarves are shockingly good at this.
Summer. It is the
20th of Hematite, and it’s quite certain the humans won’t arrive. Which is quite the bummer, seeing as they’re the game’s best trading partners, arguably one cut above the mountain home itself. I may have a personal bias, but the humans sell grizzlies and the mountainhome doesn’t.
Semi-jokes aside, the migrants have arrived, just in time for a new wood hauling session. They have nine adults and no children, putting the fort at 45 adults, 22 children and 1 baby, for a total of 68.
I must say, again, that the barely-armed herbalist bowdwarves are quite murderific:
The food producing area is shaping up; a coop with four nestboxes will house the turkeys, and the one goose we have. The undeground and above-ground farms are sitting next to one another; after the above-ground farm is roofed over, the dividing wall will be torn down.
With this done, I like to think I’ve bypassed my major bottleneck of plants. Now I still need to actually brew all those plants into alcohol.
16th Malachite. I am once again reminded trees are evil. This poor fool has been ‘collecting fruit’ for long enough to become hungry, thirsty, and tired.
I’m not sure how to unstuck her. I disabled the zone, removed her herbalist job, and dumped the ladder she’s on. If she doesn’t find a way out, she’ll die of thirst. (She eventually got out, dumping the ladder is the way to go; screw trees, if it weren’t for the challenge they'd all be lumber).
18th Galena. We struck a cavern; given the absence of blood thorns and nether caps, I presume it’s the second. It’s also all the way down on level 12, some 130 levels below the surface. And it’s got a lake, which will spare my dwarves from going on the evil biome whenever they need a bucket of water.
That stairway was marked with the lowest possible priority, so if it’s getting dug out, it’s time to suspend miners. All but the most-skilled, Deduk, a founding member of the fort, will be removed from mining. Quite a few of them will join the farmers, because the existing four are still not moving as fast as I wish.
Autumn.
10th Limestone
This is one of our bowdwarves, so I suspect infection.
23rd. Traded with the mountainhome, thus pushing ‘my’ Appraiser to level 5. Only Toady knows how this crap is calculated. We have silk thread and cloth, which I’m sure will save a fool in a strange mood sometime.
1st of Timber. With 4 months left, I have to say I’m not doing great:
Three brewers, no matter how skilled, are not competitive. I should probably roll back to someplace in the spring or summer, after the larger room was excavated, and focus more on farming than digging; that said, four months aren’t that long, and I’d like to see how this will roll when the fort is dedicated entirely to farming, plant gathering, making barrels, and brewing. The last non-challenge related actions will be to manually dump the last few stones on a zone in the center of the starirway, and the only one spared from this will be the miner, who needs to go dig a room extension off to the south.
Winter 
And the roof of the new farm has three missing tiles. I’m tempted to call it a day now - it’s not possible for me to win the challenge. I’m just letting the game progress to the point of revealing the siege.
The ‘siege’ consists of five idiots:
They’ll be countered by my own five idiots, currently unarmed and unarmored:
The poor idiots are very swiftly murdered, as expected, and I think I’m done with this.
Spring (contd) and Summer The Rest of the Year12th Felsite. The only spring save I have. Ugh, almost nothing is done. Alright, let’s go over this…
Any booze producing area will have to be final. It’s going to be too much of a hassle to move it afterward. In the last playthrough, it was seated right next to the booze pile, and I think that’s a good idea. I also think I’ll expand it, double it and then some, while greatly reducing the area for butchery products - there were almost none, after all. The crafting area was practically unused, so I’ll scrap it. I still want to clean all the stones from the booze pile, but this time I’ll use a combination of manual dumping and wheelbarrow-assisted hauling.
Up on the surface, little changes except for the outdoor farm starting out double in size. The future turkey coop is in the same place, and is at the bottom of the priority list.
(I also forbid all the logs near the edge of the map, because dwarves are stupid and will haul from there while ignoring what is right in front of their fucking door. I don’t have time for this crap.
Summer.
.. has arrived on the calendar; let’s see what I got done.
A large pit, 23x11 (I could have left a separator, but I didn’t think of it in time; 11 blocks wasted, I guess). The temporary plant stockpile was removed.
Below, the plots are being done, and the turkey coop is in progress.
The housing area was put on hold; my civic responsibilities can wait. The small room with priority 5 is a small catacomb; some of Vesh’s masterwork statues can be built here… eventually.
Below that, in the booze pile, 7 stills (later 9) and 1 farmer’s workshop have been planned. The fort’s only carpenter of any skill is cranking out barrels, and south of that a former miner will make microcline pots. Microcline is relatively low weight, at 256 per chunk; lower than chalk (271) but still not as low as lignite (125). I refuse to waste lignite by cutting it into pots; when we’ll get a challenge involving steel, you can thank me.
WinterNothing notable has happened, except that the 80-citizen limit has been hit in autumn. Only 52 of them are adults.
18th Opal. The planting in farms gets shut down - all farmland is left fallow. Farmers will only pick the remaining crops.
28th Obsidian. I’ll take a page from Radipon, and submit the fort just a smidge before the year turns.
The booze area is plentiful, though less compact than I desired. I tried to keep stockpiles in multiples of 10, to keep counts simple. I really hope that there aren’t any stray empty barrels; there shouldn’t be, because I have 23 idlers, and plenty of room in the ‘container (non-metal)’ stockpile.
I have 4 stockpiles total:
- 100 - the oldest (initially 110 but was then trimmed to re-calibrate the second one - which I foolishly cut to 19 :/ )
- 620 - the largest one by far.
- 300 - third one, topmost.
- 69 (I swear I didn’t plan this!) at the bottom, last and smallest. If I knew how few plants I had left, I wouldn’t have bothered dumping all the stone :/
Total: 1089*. Unless I failed basic addition (which is entirely possible, seeing as it’s 8PM** and I have a glass of wine onboard...
(* as we've seen, there are actually 1084 booze barrels; each stockpile keeps one empty barrel in it by design, and the last 'pile has a seed barrel in it).
(** it
was 8PM on Sunday when I finished playing and I wrote that sentence. Now it's 8PM on Tuesday, so either way you spin it, it's still a true statement!)
Savescum count:
4 (3 over spring, the fourth from 12th Felsite to end). I’ve also come to the conclusion that save scumming is an intensely frustrating and exhausting process, and have genuinely started disliking the concept. Just because it’s useful and possible, doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
Dead dwarves:
1 - a wood hauler who had the bright idea to go pick some wood from the resurrecting biome, and ran into a pack of zombie parrots. Thankfully, there were free coffins, and s/he was buried before rising. Then the shockingly good squad of bow-dwarves have proceeded to murder the parrots. Honestly, buy bows and arrows, I cannot stress this enough.
(Honorary mention:
3 dogs, torn apart by various undead; we still have 2 dogs, both arrived as pets in migrant waves, and some newborn puppies, who I trust need no further explanation).
DfHack commands / utilities used:
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cleanowned x - the spring trade with the elves was fueled by this, and by a handful of totems and hoof crafts
-
showmood. We’ve had two possessions in this fort, both successful (and undemanding). They resulted in a table made from alpaca bone, which is currently our mayor’s dining table, and a ring now decorating the planter’s guild room (which is, coincidentally, the western outdoor farm).
-
quicksave,
die. Self-explanatory.
-
prospect and
getplants <tree>. Resulting in the following trees being cut:
getplants CITRON
getplants CASHEW
getplants AVOCADO
getplants MACADAMIA
getplants COFFEE
getplants DESERT_LIME
getplants KAPOK
getplants WILLOW
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Workflow. A utility which I’ve never really used before, and I’m never shutting down again.
-
Stockpile Settings Management. Used it to save and load stockpile contents (go to stockpile, {q}-{l}). Another one I never used before, and which I love to bits!
I’ve made some steel and weapons - throughout this scrambling for booze, I’ve left aside 3 furnace operators, who’ve been smelting iron, coal, pig iron and ultimately steel, and then mayor Cerol went to craft spears, sword, and axes - but there are no squads, and there’s not a shred of armor. Or anyone who can make some.
I leave the fort with a truly ridiculous number of turkey poults. Note to my successor, if any: you might want to deconstruct the nestboxes. Or enable turkey eggs in some food stockpile.
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Topic: Numbercurse - Competitive - The Curse has been Lifted (Read 31980 times)