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[StrikaAmaru]

They've sent some, especially early on. The plague zombies have the best odds, but they seem to be surprisingly rare; especially when you factor in they're the only ones who can make more of themselves.

[StrikaAmaru]

Year 12 (136)

Military operations continue. Spring saw us attacking the former fortress of SwallowedShoot; I accidentally left mission parameters on raid, not raze, and a significant number of issues have popped up from it.


Firstly, the clothing issues have returned in full force. Secondly, the squads themselves are in some sort of faulted state:


Luckily, the squads restore themselves after a save and restart. They also all pick up their armor right back up, and are more or less back to normal by mid-summer.

The middle of summer saw the full conquest of SwallowedShoot. As a former fortress, this site wasn’t merely razed; it was properly occupied, by the ten dwarves of the Creative Slings. Completely incidentally, these ten dwarves were among the least happy with their stay in HopeWorks:



They are successful in their conquest, as expected; the current leader is one Tholtig WallScale, member of the Creative Slings, former chief medical dwarf of HopeWork, and decent mace-dwarf in his own right.



Somehow, the settlement quickly bubbles up; first to 20 inhabitants, then to 60 by the end of the season.



Next on the list of engagements is the dark pit of WanderMaligned, owned by the tower. Three squads are sent, and are quickly victorious.



That victory is somewhat spoiled by the tossers, who rush in to occupy the newly released free real estate.


Their inevitable demise has to wait a bit, as it’s now autumn and the tower wishes to file a complaint:


We file some of our own right back. Well, we fire not file, and they’re crossbow bolts not complaints, but it’s close enough. The eastern tower sees use, and serves as an excellent perch for the two marksdwarf squads. Meanwhile, the melee squads are assembled before the bridge; the bridge drops, my FPS drops to slideshow mode, and the tower loses another chunk of its people:

Spoiler: 1 minute video of dwarves steamrolling tower forces (click to show/hide)

 This thing mysteriously converted to mp4 during upload, and isn't embedded; at least not with the img tag. It can be seen at https://i.imgur.com/lvPF0BU.mp4

This business ultimately costs HopeWork four dwarves: two were killed on the battlefield, one bled to death en route to the hospital, and the fourth succumbed to infection towards the end of the year. On the other side though, the tower looks ripe for conquest:


Our own civilization, however, looks to be on the mend; we have 200 citizens in the old tomb, 60 in SwallowedShoot, and nearly 150 in HopeWork.



In late autumn, the situation in WanderMaligned gets rectified. The dark pit is successfully razed, and remains uninhabited. Unfortunately, the equipment bug raises its ugly head once again. The troops are allowed all winter to pick up equipment, and the old armorer goes to consume the newly-smithed stockpile of steel. If they won’t pick up armor, I’ll apply the tried and true method of disbanding all squads and reforming them.

Meanwhile, the naked dwarves are washing up in the cavern lake, and prove once and for all that CeilingBend’s folly does indeed carry a syndrome:

The afflicted dwarves go to rest in the hospital, and the offending puddle is removed from the water source. Someone will clean it up eventually.



The same syndrome is likely responsible for an unconscious cat that’s been lying in the farming area since at least spring:


Without any sign of improvement in his state, I decided to slaughter the poor fuzzball.

Year 13 (137)

Spring sees me reorganizing the military squads; you can guess why. This time, HopeWork will have 60 dwarves under arms, all equipped with masterworks; a quarter of them are unskilled, but that’s the kind of problem that time and training solves. There’s a small shortage of backpacks, but that can be dealt with swiftly; we have plenty of leather.

The occupying force in SwallowedShoot seems to have lost two members; it’s tempting to suspect casualties, but at least one member (the doctor) has received a civilian position, so I’m not so sure. The inevitable Legends export should reveal more info.


Autumn. Goblins too wish to file a complaint. They arrive from the South, and have brought beak dogs and trolls; this marks them as inhabitants of BadDabbled itself.

Spoiler: goblins and beak dogs and trolls, oh my. (click to show/hide)

Seeing as the northern bridge was never raised, the entire siege moves East and North, towards it. Our new military is waiting for them. The bolt barrage doesn’t cause any direct casualties, but may have forced the siege to spread out a bit as the goblins under attack have to stop and parry the bolts.

All melee squads are stationed before the opened bridge. Some goblins run ahead of the siege, and gradually lure the troops outside the walls; no matter, they’d have ended up there anyway. Then the main mass arrives, the melee dwarves are ordered to kill all they can see, and my FPS drops to slideshow mode:

Spoiler: killing goblins, the beginning.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fully armed and armored, the 40 melee dwarves of HopeWork travel on the outside of the defensive wall, killing everything in their path.



Seriously, until the main body of the siege got killed, I had 2-3 FPS. Then it went up, to a spectacular 7. Pathing, ugh.

By the 10th, the siege had ended; only one dwarf was killed in the fighting. Interestingly, the siege did not break after half the members had been killed, as is the norm on goblin sieges. While some of them had run away, the siege lasted until the last two members were killed, all the way on the other side of the map.

Spoiler:  the aftermath: (click to show/hide)

BadDabbled has now suffered enough casualties that their population dropped below 3,000 (their other holding, TaxDoomed, is unchanged at 100 inhabitants):


Still, I hesitate to attack it, both because 2,000 goblins are still a lot, and because I know there’s a demon in there.

The dwarven caravan arrives soon after; they’ll receive some binned crafts, as the fort is too busy sorting invader corpses and cleaning after the siege to go hunting for worn clothes.

A few temporary butcheries are set up in the corner, close to all those dead beak dogs; everybody gets butchery and tanning, and we manage to process decent amounts of beak dogs until the corpses finally start to rot. Then we can focus on destroying the goblin and troll corpses.

Spoiler: Top view of the surface (click to show/hide)

In the last year, the third cavern saw the beginnings of adamantine exploitation. The cavern has two spires, both of which quickly drop into the magma sea and will require obsidianizing.

The NW spire:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The SW spire was less developed, as it suffered from a bit of flooding early on. Note to self: don’t expect a single channel to magically flood two separate areas, especially if one area is significantly closer. The pump will both resolve that difficulty, and serve to get some water for the north-west spire:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It’s probably obvious, but I’ll mention anyway: the digging markings are not for any actual digging, they denote possible locations for the hollow core. Seeing as each level has to have at least one vertical connection to the level below, this gives a way to estimate where the core might be, and where it cannot be.

Strand extraction is done in a sealed-off area; this is to keep any enterprising doctor from picking adamantine thread for sutures. Initially planned for 4 craft shops, it was expanded to 7 after some of the adjacent personeel found itself unoccupied:


The whole place was manned by a special squad, creatively named The Strand Extractors. It holds 5 dedicated strand extractors, and 2 furnace operators. They were stationed in the extraction room, and the hatch on the level below was locked. In typical dwarven fashion, a few stragglers were locked in as well; initially having arrived to eat and drink, they provided the hauling that was initially planned for whoever was unoccupied.

The remaining season is spent with cleanup and careful channeling above the magma sea. Here's an overview of the fort at the end of the year:

[tonnot98]

I've noticed that in The Museum game, demons will start to form their own groups and travel about when other adventurers are near enough to see them on the fast travel map. I've seen one fortress in particular with about 20 different traveling demons visible on that map. How do you plan on seeing if they've traveled, anyway?

[StrikaAmaru]

Was wondering if I should start up adventurer mode; when I initially planned this thing, I wanted to check in Fortress mode only -- so basically play a fort and see if any demons ever pop up on my map. This probably isn't going to happen... but HopeWork has yet to hit 20 years, so maybe it's just too early to tell.

another plan I've got is to go reclaim ClanWork, after HopeWork settles in the routine of day-to-day life. My working hypothesis right now is that demons are acting like any other kind of mega-beast that caused a fortress to become a ruin -- they stay put in the conquered fortress, and don't really act until somebody runs into them. If nothing else, that would make for an interesting reclaim.

[StrikaAmaru]

Year 14 (138)
This year begins with a missed mandate that drops our king’s mood to very unhappy, and a small tantrum spiral that decreases the population to 144. Um, oops?

Then in the summer the king himself throws a tantrum, but chooses a military dwarf as his punching bag; he’s swiftly cut down. Oops again.

The kingslayer herself hasn’t suffered any ill effects from this incident. Apparently, when an irate tantruming dwarf comes flailing at you, it’s considered acceptable to kill him with an axe, regardless of social status.

After a polite discussion with local rivals, a legendary axedwarf is chosen as the sixth king of dwarves. Until now, the guy has killed 48 creatures; I’d really want to be a fly on the wall to such ‘polite discussions’...



Interestingly, the previous king, Tholtig, was one of his friends:


Other than that, the fort is primarily occupied with unremarkable fort maintenance. The great project for the year was adamantine exploitation, which occupied a small minority of the population (a single miner since I don’t want any channeling related accidents, a couple of pump operators, and of course the strand extractors plus one furnace operator). What was already dug out from previous years was turned to wafers, and I have obsidianized and excavated as much as I dared.

The one legendary weaponsmith in the fort has crafted some adamantine axes, spears, and swords. Predictably, the military has picked them up as soon as they were made, and dropped their old masterwork steel weapons. No adamantine armor is planned; the cost is prohibitive, and the improvement over steel is minimal.

With weapons upgraded, the next year looks like a time for war. Let’s look at the world once more; TaxDoomed is still at 100 individuals, and the tower at 20; these will be my next targets.

BadDabbled has somehow dropped at ~1000 inhabitants, and… I’m sorry, did we lose SwallowedShoot?


This calls for a Legend export; and yes, it turns out poor SwallowedShoot was conquered by the tossers, who then moved about half their population in it.

SwallowedShoot has lived an interesting life: it’s been under constant siege since we reconquered it. For the next year and a bit, six different attacks were launched by the tossers (not counting the first of them; that one was launched by us). And yes, this means there have been multiple sieges in a single season -- specifically, in the autumn of 136.


It was lost in the same autumn that HopeWork was attacked; while our attack was repulsed with near-total goblin casualties at the start of the season, SwallowedShoot was attacked in late autumn, with vastly more troops; all members of our civilization have been killed in that battle.


A number of unlikely heroes have been noted:


Can I just say “the Executioner of Champions” is the best title ever created by the RNG? And then it handed it to a yak, of all things. Damn thing seems to have earned it, too:


A mare has an equally glorious battle record:


These guys get statues; I got plenty of silver.

The tossers have acquired new territory… or so Legends says, at least; the game’s civ screen disagrees.


The westernmost location is supposed to be JoyousGloomy, reclaimed in 135; it’s now occupied by 3 goblins, 1 troll, and spectacular amounts of wildlife. But no such site is shown in-game, it’s just a normal unoccupied peak. After a closer reading of Legends, JoyousGloomy turns out to be a cave… what can the tossers do in it? Besides die to cave swallows and whatnot? I think I’ll drop an adventurer to find out.


The war against the tossers is named The Conflict of Scorching. It started in the winter of 126, and it is still ongoing. Do you remember, in the winter of 126, when HopeWork had a one-tick siege? That was the first ‘battle’ in the Conflict of Scorching.

For some reason, this war does not include the raids we have initiated, those seem to be regarded as stand-alone battles which are not part of a war. Which annoys me, ‘cause it means I have no conquerings whatsoever, and the kill count is lower than what it really is.



Year 15 (139)
Military operations begin with the weakest holding of the tossers: TaxDoomed receives the full might of dwarven military, and is truly doomed:



As the troops returned with (most of) their gear still on, they’re allowed two weeks’ rest, then sent against SwallowedShoot. To my surprise, they destroy the place without any casualties:


Summer has started in peace for HopeWork, so all 60 military dwarves are sent against the tower. It’s holding steady at 20 inhabitants, they have no other holdings, and the worst that can happen is that someone brings back a book with the secrets of life and death.


Despite some blunders here and there, the tower has been broken, and Morul HeatedDikes has finally met his end, killed by his former kin:


We’ve suffered one casualty -- even the finest of dwarves will have a bad time when going against vastly superior numbers:


No necromantic books have been brought back, only some normal tomes, and a few artifacts that were gifted to Morul by his various minions and aspiring apprentices. AshenBury, the slab created by the death goddess Vesh, was left in SoothedPaints. Perhaps someone should do something about it… encase it in lava or somesuch. Most definitely not take up the life of an adventurer for the sole goal of reading the slab and rekindle the plague of necromancy upon Sil Kodor. Nope, definitely not that.



Among other things, the expedition brought back three artifact copper weapons; a mace, and two others that were stolen by keas so quickly, that I didn’t even see what they were. The mace was nabbed soon after too. Did I mention I hate keas?

To the best of my knowledge, the greatest concentration of tower denizens left in Sil Kodor is in HopeWork itself -- trapped prisoners, who’ve been loitering in cages for years, even a full decade for some.


A person of interest emerges:


Inod UrgeFence, a former primordial dwarf and Vesh worshipper obsessed with maintaining his social status, has attacked HopeWork twice: in the winters of 133, and 135.



In the latter, he was one of only 6 trapped enemies. Remember this pic?


He, or rather it, as any notion of gender was erased in the transformation, has been sitting in a cage ever since. It’s been killed without issue, and its corpse disposed of via atom smasher.

Towards the end of summer, HopeWork receives a visitor:


I decide to trap it, even if I have no idea what I’ll do with it. All civilians are ordered underground… and all the outdoor military barracks are of course unaffected by such an order:


The six squads are ordered indoors; most rush to obey, though some return to their barracks for dropped equipment; this costs the lives of two dwarves -- an axelord and a marksdwarf. The cyclops has been trapped, though, and doesn’t seem damaged:


The only enemy left to dwarvenkind is BadDabbled itself. Home of now 1,000 sentients, and one demon. At the start of winter, we attack it.


At first, all seems to go well:


Until the demon gets involved:

Spoiler: Death is all around (click to show/hide)

Numerical superiority plays a part as well, but the kills still go to the demon:


At the end of the raid, BadDabbled seems untouched. And we have lost 8 dwarves:



Our performance seems a bit better in Legends -- 170 tossers died to bring down those 8 dwarves:

[StrikaAmaru]

In this interlude, I’m mostly going to cover a bunch of details, events, and tid-bits which are interesting enough, but didn’t fit in the main narrative (usually because they extend over multiple years and they’d get splattered into illegibility if presented chronologically). I’ll also take this opportunity to compare the effects of the last year on the world, via Legends.

BadDabbled has an oddity: most of its population is listed as ‘outcasts’, not proper citizens. Even so, it started the year with 962 goblins, 637 trolls, 547 beak dogs, 7 dwarves, and 6 humans. And one skink demon, of course. It ended the year with 933 goblins, 526 trolls, 547 beak dogs, no dwarves, 1 human, and the same demon.


BadDabbled also started the year with 13 human prisoners, and 5 dwarf prisoners. It ended the year with 4 human prisoners; there was no mention of prisoners in the raid log or in the events list shown in legends, so I can’t tell if they have been killed or released.

The artifact cat bone pickaxe, PungentDank the Sacrifice of Enchanting? The one coveted by Morul HeatedDikes? It’s now in the tower of SoothedPaints, and I’m still not sure what happened.

Firstly, as soon as it was created, all manner of weirdos have claimed it from afar; nobody did anything about it until 131, when the empty butcher Anu RiseFlier infiltrated our fortress, and somehow claimed it, even though the artifact itself was never removed from HopeWork:


Then in 134, Anu returned, stole the pickaxe, and was killed by our military without taking the artifact out of HopeWork. Despite this, the artifact was somehow still offered to Morul, and not much happened until 139. Then Morul was killed, and the four artifacts he had in possession were declared lost. Three of them were picked up and carried to HopeWork, but of course PungentDank was not among them.


The other 3 artifacts are listed as stored in HopeWork, even though keas have snatched them as soon as they were brought, and the artifacts themselves are listed as owned by unnamed keas.

After the fall of SoothedPaints, the artifact pick was claimed by a conscripted glassmaker, a dwarf named BoatAnguish; he has never picked it up, though. This is likely a good thing, because even as an artifact PungentDank has only 5% the cutting ability of iron; it’s a terrible weapon. I can’t tell if BoatAnguish ever picked another weapon to wield, but anyway he was one of the eight dwarves killed in BadDabbled.


Speaking of Anu RiseFlier, her description is lying: she did not die of old age, she died of an axe to the nervous system. She did, however, die of old age -- in 43. Ol’ Morul made sure she didn’t get much rest, though.


Morul HeatedDikes died by crossbow bolt; his killer, Alath PointPaddle, has otherwise lived a thoroughly uninteresting life, and was soon killed herself -- she was one of two dwarves who got in the way of the bronze colossus.

---------

There were two other lines of necromancers that died in the crib:

From the Strapping Hame, a dwarven civ centered on AdmireFortresses, we have the dwarfette Erith VisionStandard; she lived all her life in SwallowedShoot, and was a necromancer for all of one year before she was struck down by a goblin in 31. Her slab was created by their dwarven god of death and rebirth, Lenod the Early (no jokes please). It was named StartDawns, and was moved around quite a bit after its owner died -- first in BadDabbled, then in 53 it was stolen by a dragon and stored in… JoyousGloomy. The cave which the tossers are ‘occupying’. Fuuuuuck. The dragon himself was killed in 72, so he’s not going to be an issue.

The other dwarven civ, The Inks of Morality, had a necromancer named Zon FierceCrafts from 9 to 33, in OpenBooks. The slab was named PlagueCurse, and was created by Rakust SinfulPhantoms, goddess of death and murder. After the necro’s death, it was taken by the demon who leads the Disgusting Dungeons, and stored in PresentDoomed, where it still is.


The three Vaults present in the world.

First on the list is the demon controlling the tossers, Thocit HaleReigned the Storm of Ferocity.


I’m somewhat surprised the demon is worshipping three gods; in order, a goddess of murder, a god of boundaries, and a goddess of of wealth and trade:


Its slab is stored in the vault of SearchWard; nobody has ever gotten near it since it was created:


The Disgusting Dungeons, that civilization which has half the sapients in Sil Kodor, are led by a male demon:



The third and last goblin civ, The Ivory Monster.



Lastly, I’ve opened the 140 save to explore the world via the embark screen.

The tower is sitting abandoned in the middle of tainted land; it has no inhabitants, not even animals:


Before it fell, at the start of 139, this was its population:


SwallowedShoot still has a few necromantic experiments squatting in it, in addition to some feral animals:


Come to think of it, other ‘abandoned’ locations have population that should, by all rights, mark them as active sites; AllyCurse, for instance, has 33 goblin residents:


JoyousGloomy is nowhere to be found -- it’s definitely somewhere around here, but the embark screen doesn’t reveal it. Apropos of nothing, this is the tiniest mountain I’ve ever seen in uncustomized generation:


Our home sweet tomb, ButtonAmazed - it’s the 3x3 tomb on the north, and unsettlingly close to BadDabbled itself (the border on the left; the right-side one is from a human castle):


AdmireFortresses still sounds awesome, but looks underwhelming:


Sil Kodor also has a good biome - not much, just a little mirthful marsh, neighboring the ever-present Disgusting Dungeons:


Incidentally, it’s at this point I also found out the other dwarven civ is no longer available for embark; it’s the Fountain of Quickness, or nothing:


Lastly, some StoneSense pictures of a snow-covered HopeWork. Since I have no idea how to change the view to cover the entire surface, this is only the north-eastern portion, covering the depot entry, the two main archery towers, and the roof of the apiary complex, where the five beekeepers of HopeWork store and process honeycombs (royal jelly is hauled downstairs for cooking).


The caverns under the mountain may be useless for dwarves, but they sure look impressive:

[Garfunkel]

Great story! I've unleashed clowns in my current world as well so I'm looking forward to knowing through this thread whether I should expect demonic invasions overland at my other fort.

[StrikaAmaru]

Great story! I've unleashed clowns in my current world as well so I'm looking forward to knowing through this thread whether I should expect demonic invasions overland at my other fort.

As a tentative answer, almost certainly not. Afaict, demons released in a fortress get the same behavior as forgotten beasts that cause a fort to crumble during worldgen: they stay in the site. If a reclaim is done, they'll only show up when a dwarf almost literally bumps into them, and turn hostile only after that.

From what others implied, sending adventurers may change this behavior, and cause demons to start travelling. That's the next step in Sil Kodor, once HopeWork hits 20 years (and if I don't have any standing obligations with community forts). Never did any serious adventuring before, that should be... FUN.

By which I mean I'll die. A lot. And visit the wiki every other step, 'cause I have no idea what I'm doing.

[Garfunkel]

I used PerfectWorld to custom build a, well, perfect world. Long term goal is to 'purify' it of evil. Good to know that as long as I don't bother the site, the clowns won't bother me. Need to wreck all the towers first, probably, and then start cleaning HFS up.

[StrikaAmaru]

Year 16 (140)
In the wake of last year’s excitement, HopeWork has to spend some time recovering from the attack. The squads are filled back to 60, and reorganized -- the skilled military dwarves are placed in the first three squads (two melee and one marksdwarf); the less skilled ones and the new recruits get to fill the next triad of squads. And because Hope Work seems to have multiple unskilled dwarfettes, they’re assembled in a seventh marksdwarf squad.

All melee squads are placed in barracks, and ordered to train. For the ranged troops, only the two new squads get two rooms in the archery tower. The experienced squad was removed from training, and more or less left to roam around; beyond a certain point training is just wasting bolts.

After in-game years of pondering the matter, I finally decide to use a straight-up cheat -- the "exterminate it" command is used to kill off a flesh ball. The damn thing has been stuck in the third cave for almost the entire history of HopeWork; in retrospect, it’s probably the reason why sealing the third cavern could comfortably take multiple years.


Immediately, a bunch of crundles spawn.


Almost simultaneously, an ettin arrives on the surface. It spawned close to the northern bridge, and was killed by the squad of axelords in the tower.


Autumn


It’s routed to the West, because I wanted to test out our resident colossus. Its cage had been built into a nook on the side of the South-West tower, and connected to a lever; after the siege arrived, that lever was pulled, and the colossus cheerily charged into the goblin vanguard.


Unfortunately for my aspirations of an improvised coliseum, the bronze colossus falls in a pond, and spends the rest of its life pelted by arrows, attacked from above, and failing to kill even one creature.


It’s destroyed in short order, and leaves behind this statue:


Later, this statue was built in the farming level, where everyone is going to see it:


The siege is swiftly cut down by the military; by the 10th, no living enemies remain in HopeWork. Then the usual beak dog butchering ensues, and our food stores are covered for another year. No wonder all my farms are left fallow.


We have had two casualties, both as a result of drowning; three soldiers got pushed into a three-tile pond, and only one managed to get out.


This finally convinces me to floor over the damn ponds; I pick microcline blocks, both because of the color and because we have an excess of that stone. Some of them have items (or corpses) at the bottom, so they’re also emptied via pumps.

Oh, and the dwarven caravan has arrived too; they received a handful of crafts and some random rags that were already in the depot; the entire fort, including the military, is busy butchering and hauling the resulting meat.

Mid-autumn: we’re still butchering. Yes there are barrels available; they're just not used yet, for some reason.


In the winter, a giant arrives on the eastern edge; once again, the axe lords take the kill.





The rest of the year is occupied with cleanup from the invasion; there were that many. And to my annoyance, BadDabbled seems untouched, with ~1000 inhabitants in the civilization view.

Year 17 (141)

The age of myth has ended; the world has passed into the age of Legends!


Mid-spring, more arguable cheating from the command line -- I run “clean all”, for the first time in the history of HopeWork, and FPS immediately jumps from 32 to 36.

Besides this, not much interesting happens -- I cave in and make a quantum stockpile for melting items, and then two more for bones and shells. The entire fort is then occupied with hauling crap.

In the third cavern, the water source seems far less useful nowadays, after the adamantine spires got obsidianized and exploited. The easternmost lake was already completely destroyed.




For the western lake, the initial plan was to have a two-part edge access: below lake level, as a water source, held back by a lever-controlled floodgate. Above lake level, a heavily-trapped airlock was supposed to catch me some interesting cavern critters. Unfortunately, the critters in question are perfectly fine spawning below-ground in the water too… and then they don’t leave, thus blocking any more spawns.

So the plan is to get rid of the lake, then rebuild the airlock.

Year 18 (142)

The seventh squad should perhaps be dismissed; after two tears, their accumulated skill can be summed up as bugger all (and yes, they do have bolts). So it’s time to disband this squad.


At the end of summer, a minotaur arrives on the southern edge. It doesn’t make it very far:

Spoiler: Death of a Minotaur (click to show/hide)

In autumn, a new siege arrives; this one’s notable because it spawned on the north-east corner, where the tower used to pop up too.




I hastily look in the civilization screen, to see if BadDabbled has spawned another site, but there doesn’t seem to be any changes. Between that and the lack of trolls or beak dogs, I have to conclude this was a party of bandits. (I shouldn’t have to mention that they were all wiped out near-instantaneously).

[StrikaAmaru]

Year 19 (143)


Spring opens with a large attack from BadDabbled. It’s slaughtered with the loss of 5 dwarves, the highest casualties so far, and I learn the wisdom of keeping the south gate closed -- both to allow my troops to properly assemble, and to force these suckers to spread out a bit.

On the plus side, BadDabbled finally seems to have some reported losses.


With the rest of the season assumed to be safe, I go ahead and do something I didn’t know I could do until a few days ago(*): I retrieve AshenBury, the slab with the secrets of life and death, from the tower. The operation succeeds without incident, and the slab turns out to be made from glowing metal:





(*) “a few days ago” at the time of writing; so nearly 2 months ago IRL, when Recon retrieved a slab in SmallHands.

After some internal deliberation, I go back on one of my previous decisions: that of never making a temple to the goddess of death, Vesh. Since she was the one who made Morul HeatedDikes a necromancer, she’s indirectly responsible for the collapse of our civilization, and the near-demise of dwarves as a species in Sil Kodor.

She now gets a dark and gloomy temple off to the side, away from normal traffic routes, and the slab is constructed directly in the center:


I’m curious how many dwarves will bother to read it; I’ve seen other playthroughs where a single book turns half the fort into necromancers, but none where slabs are involved. Should probably mention that HopeWork has exactly 2 dwarves who’ve got any points in Reading; both are scribes in the library, and have spent the years quietly copying books in the background.

In autumn, a new bug plagues Hope Work: a strange mood begins, but despite meeting all prerequisites, it doesn’t start. For some reason.

The metalsmith keeps bouncing around between the entrances to magma forges, but chooses none of them. To investigate, I first turn to DFhack; it tells me only that the dwarf really, really wants a forge, and really, really wants two wafers of adamantine.



My first attempt at a solution was to make a non-magma forge; for that, I first had to deconstruct one of the magma forges, to get an anvil. It was completely ignored; he never even got near it.

My second attempt was to save and reload; this got me out of many bugs before, but not this time.

My third attempt was to deconstruct all but one of the magma forges. Success! Turns out, even dwarves are subject to analysis paralysis.



… Aaaaaaand he made a shitty scepter.

Moving on.



It immediately kills a woodcutter, while the military only just starts to assemble. Then it moves towards our king, who… kept an adamantine axe on his person, despite being neither military nor a woodcutter; a few slashes later, the titan kill goes to him:



Winter. Unexpected difficulties when sealing the last cave -- magma refuses to flow fast enough to where it needs to go:


My next move is to dig out a full room and hope that will work. That’s for next year, because I have to wait for magma to evaporate.

Lastly, towards the end of winter I see a message I’ve never seen before: one of our weakest dwarves gets uproariously drunk, and starts a fight:


Kolducim has assaulted 5 different dwarves, and gets 90 days in prison as a result. The amusement then evaporates, because a potter dies from his injuries. Weak dwarf Kolducim may be, but everyone can get a lucky shot.

[StrikaAmaru]

Year 20 (144)


OH REALLY?!?

My first instinct was to go pick another fight in BadDabbled, but that’s not really the problem. The Age of the Goblin isn’t upheld by the ever-diminishing raiders of the Taut-Omen Seductions, or the cowardly Ivory Monsters who spent half of history cowering in the south, outside of tower range. No, it’s held by our nominal allies in The Disgusting Dungeons. And picking a fight with the Disgusting Dungeons means picking a fight with half the world… while also having to watch our backs from BadDabbled.

And maybe more importantly, it means picking a fight with the world’s hyperpower right before several enterprising adventurers go on a world tour; a tour that will take them to many corners of Sil Kodor, including the holdings of those very same goblin civilization.


So attacking the Disgusting Dungeons will have to wait a year.

Meanwhile, this year is more or less dedicated to preparing the fort to be retired.

The final seal of cave 3 is still not going as intended; even with a large room that holds magma from the pump, evaporation is fairly aggressive in the channel, and the famous blood of the earth keeps vanishing before it can touch water.


To solve the problem, the level above gets involved; a new pump will move magma from the large room to a narrow channel that will end at about the middle of the area which needs sealing; the expectation is that, even with magma’s slow spread, it will end up covering all the water tiles.



It almost works, too; all but a single water tile gets covered (rip rutherer). Oh, and a blind cave ogre spawns immediately. Anyway, the problem gets resolved with channeling from above (ok, those were actually stairs not a channel; but close enough).



And the ogre immediately hauls himself up the newly opened path, despite it being above water. Agile little bugger. The army gets called to solve the problem, and I put it out of mind.



Meanwhile, two pump operators are called to fill the lower reservoir channels; which turns out to be unneeded, because while they’re pumping, the existing magma in the upper channel drains in the stairway of its own volition, and destroys the last surviving edge of cavern lake. Finally…

Now, all that’s left is to wait for magma to evaporate and rebuild the bridge. Fauna is popping up, and getting trapped; more rutherers, elk birds, one troll, and a cave crawler sit neatly in cages. I’m not even counting the frankly ridiculous numbers of crundles, who’ll be slaughtered asap.


More minor stuff is happening: a child born in the fort has become an adult, at about the same time when the imprisoned law-dwarf goes mad; he got a strange mood while still imprisoned, and his sanity expired before his sentence.

We’re dismantling ye olde cage corridor. It served us well, but we don’t need prisoners, and the military is strong enough to annihilate any enemies we might get on the map.


That space will be walled again, and turned into a training area for any beasts worth breeding; I’m almost tempted to push HopeWork’s retirement by another 5 years, but ultimately decide not to. I can always return to the fort.

We’re also dismantling the completely useless water engine; firstly because it was never exploited, and secondly because it was built slightly wrong -- the water input was off to the right side, not in the center of the reservoir; so when started, the right half accaparated all the water, and the left didn’t get any to run. My mistake, live and learn, I suppose.


Only one enemy remains: the forgotten beast Daslut, the huge gila monster. It has ruled the mountain cave for decades, killing everything that spawned in front of it; it has sustained multiple injuries, and is absolutely covered in scars (three pages of scars, in fact) but is still going strong.



It’s still going to get ruined by our axelords, though; of that I have no doubt. And indeed, it barely take one step outside of the airlock, before it gets annihilated:




The plan for the mountain cave is to set up another trapped airlock, like the third cave has. This one will never be exploited, but it’s the thought that counts, or something to that effect.

Summer arrived, and the human caravan with it. Trade is predictably abysmal, but it hits me that this is the last time HopeWork trades with our human allies. I find an artifact wooden ring misplaced in one of the jewelry bins (another problem that won’t be fixed because there’s no point), and notice something about it: it’s engraved with an image of the fourth dwarven king, Anthil Grandlock. Who was the lover of the dwarven Law Giver of humans…


I offer it to the caravan; they’re suitably impressed, and promise to deliver it to their leader; a last gift to a widow. Pay no attention to the fact that I’m the one who accidentally murdered her husband.


In the mountain cave, the airlock is approaching completion. I should mention the cavern isn’t sealed yet, just the little bit over here that’s relatively flat. There are multiple other spots where cavern animals can spawn.


Autumn is spent with cleanup and culling the animals; not because we have too little meat, but because we have too many beasts. Incidentally, this annihilates our store of rutherers; they were all various kinds of wimpy, and thus have gone to the butcher’s workshop. Of the weaponizable beasts, only the voracious cave crawler has remained. He was left chained in the former cage corridor, though I have no doubt he’ll be loose after the reclaim.

Oh yes: on the brink of retiring the fort, I can confirm the slab has failed to necromancify any dwarves whatsoever, despite everyone having had free access to the slab. Maybe there wasn’t enough time, maybe I should have set a ‘time off month’ or two, or maybe it only works in adventure mode.

Over time, various persons of interest have had multiple silver statues created in HopeWork. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything spectacular about any of them. They merely reiterate tidbits we already know from Legends. Though I’m quite fond of the statues made for the heroic yak cow and horse which fought and died in 137 to defend SwallowedShoot.

Spoiler: FlagStrapped the Executioner of Champions, the yak cow: (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: WhipDanger the Cobalt Glitter of Alchemy, the horse: (click to show/hide)

And another one to commemorate the sheer horror of a necromantic transformation:


Yikes.

One last lesson of HopeWork: just how good obsidian swords are. Personally, I always ignored them, and it seems like a terrible mistake. Their stats are identical to a steel sword, except for being twice as light and twice as choppy.


There’s no matching an adamantine sword, though. A masterwork addie sword has ten times the choppiness (ok, fine; sharpness) of a masterwork steel sword; and the ratio preserves itself for all bladed weapons.


The last act of the day is to drop all bridges, and to dismantle the three cage traps that have sat at the entrance of the fort since time immemorial. Or, you know, since 125. And with that done, all nicknames are removed, and HopeWork settles in the rhythm of day-to-day life, away from my meticulous concern.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next up: Legends Interlude which doubles as travel planning.

Next next up: an adventurous dwarf will leave on a cross-country adventure. Probably the first of many, because I’ve never played Adventure before, so I expect to die. A lot.

The plan is to retire the fort come winter, putz about with the adventurer(s), then embark again in spring.

(Impatient as I am, I already rolled a random peasant starting in the tomb of Buttonamazed, and died immediately to hidden cage traps and human skeletons, completely failing to spot even a shadow of the supposed 150 dwarves living there. Then I also found out that adventurers can be started only once per civilization, so I can’t even start a ‘real’ one from HopeWork; this one goes in the apocrypha pile).

[King Zultan]

Excited to see what kind of things adventure mode holds in the future of this.

[StrikaAmaru]

Legends Interlude: 20-Year Anniversary.
Fuck it, Let’s Just Go Adventuring!

Well. The world changed quite a bit in 20 years. Civilized species are on the rise, and goblin numbers are dropping, though this is mitigated by the fact that goblin numbers have plenty of population to drop, and civilized species didn’t rise all that much (specifically, dwarves went from 392 to 445; humans 659 -> 800; goblins 11,064 -> 8,638). This only cements my decision to reclaim HopeWork and attack all goblins with our nigh-unstoppable military. Presuming it’s still there when I get back.

Given the relatively low increase in the number of dwarves, I have to wonder if our migrants didn’t come from our civilization, but from neighboring ones; either that, or my ~200 migrants did indeed spawn from thin air, but the other two civilizations suffered enough casualties to compensate…

A look at old and new exports points more toward a mix of spontaneous generation, and non-affiliated dwarves, though:
- in 125, there were 392 dorfs total; 252 dorfs with civ allegiance, and 140 stragglers.
- in 126, total dwarven numbers abruptly went up to 440 with civ numbers increasing only for HopeWork.
- in 144, there were 445 dorfs, only 49 of them unaffiliated, and 396 in civilizations.

So it’s plausible that nearly 100 have knelt before the king, and only some 50-60 are ‘new’. This neatly lines up with the population growth too. Except it doesn't account for the ~30 dwarves who died in HopeWork, and ~60 who died in the reclaim and loss of SwallowedShoot, so it's not a perfect hypothesis.

(In what’s presumably good news, the dying dwarven civ, The Inks of Morality, has gone from 2 to 5 dwarven members. Congratulations! Now move from that dirty old dark pit already)...

Besides that, we got visited by several semi-megabeasts, who left their bones in our fort and their lairs undefended, almost inviting an enterprising adventurer to loot and plunder…

Somewhat annoyingly, they’re spread out all over the place; the minotaur’s labyrinth next to the tower, the colossus’ lair right next to BadDabbled, the ettin used to lair in the tall, craggy and inaccessible mountains, and the titan who got killed by our king was next to another goblin location, this one friendly to us. Legends revealed another kill, that I completely forgot about -- a cyclops who used to live in JoyousGloomy, the cave where one of the three demon-controlling slabs is supposed to be. More reason to visit, I suppose.


I’ve marked down all vaults, lairs, and caves; I only want to enter in the empty lairs, and will avoid getting into BadDabbled unless the dwarf will die and I can start a goblin from there.

Speaking of BadDabbled, the place is quite crowded:


While looking through the list of attacks on HopeWork, an interesting detail stood out: there are multiple forgotten beasts listed as killed by demons:






The demons themselves have no activity besides this one interaction, so I immediately doubt they’re from ClanWork. But it’s still possible they would be, if they travelled in via the yet-unrevealed second cavern layer. Since I still have the non-abandoned save, I briefly load it up, reveal hell, and manage to locate one of the corpses in the stock menu. Then a single z navigation points me… to hell.


Are forgotten beasts supposed to spawn in hell? Does this happen in worlds where nobody was dumb enough to open up the circus? Do I still have a save of SmallHands?

I do, in fact, have a save of SmallHands from 177; by this point, that community fort is pushing 30. It was also started in 47.04 in a small world, then upgraded to .05, so it’s as close an equivalent to HopeWork as can be managed. If forgotten beasts naturally spawn in Hell, it’s bound to have a couple.

And it doesn’t. The floor of Hell in SmallHands is as pristine as can be; not even webs or extract or ichor mar it. Extrapolating from my grand total of 2 data points, I’m tempted to say that opening Hell doesn’t cause demons to move on the overworld, but may cause forgotten beasts to wander through the underworld. To their detriment, because demons chew them up and make it look easy.

Well, this extremely thin Legends interlude wasn’t a total loss...

[StrikaAmaru]

Adventurer Apocrypha

Wherein I kill a bunch of sentients trying to figure out controls

(going to ? > Key Bindings is an absolute godsend)

So this all happened a coupla days ago, real life, before any sort of planning was done in Legends. There was never any intent of keeping this save, I just wanted to get the hang of DF Adventure Mode. But this episode also persuaded me to never set foot in a tomb again, so it’s the only way to showcase anything about ButtonedAmazed.

It should go without saying that I failed to find any dwarf whatsoever; just a handful of humans, who were also poking around in the chambers of the tomb…



I picked a fairly default adventurer; gave her reading, a copper mace, a shield, and a pet horse, and away we go.

ButtonedAmazed (which my brain keeps auto-correcting to ButtonAmazed for some reason) has at a minimum 3 towers, each topped with 4 smaller towers. There’s a joke in here somewhere.


I descend to the base, where I’m faced with a locked electrum door; I pick the lock and enter the complex, which may turn out to be a mistake in the long run.

Inside, I find a slab and a few uninteresting statues; also a weapon trap that I spot from a distance and successfully avoid, and another one that I don’t. Luckily, it’s old and doesn’t do damage.




This tower doesn’t have anything worthwhile. I move on to another one, and I’m joined by some humans. there are much better traps here:




Didn’t even last a day. I should probably mention that I didn’t know how to jump yet, and some of these traps were placed in such a way that I couldn’t go around them. Oh well; I press on. The up-stairs go into the small towers; there’s nothing there but statues and empty bags, so I didn’t take a screenshot.


The sarcophagus held the remains of another human law-maker; I peek but don’t disturb them (I think).



But it’s all for nothing, since somebody managed to wake up the ambulatory skeletons anyway; they caught up with me outside, while I was trying to move to the east. It’s over pretty fast after that, especially since I had no idea how to attack at this point.


Frankly, I don’t know what to think about the auto-generated tombs; where did all those skeletons even come from? Were there other rooms filled wall-to-wall with coffins that I haven’t found? And where exactly were 150 dwarves supposed to be living? In a handful of trap-filled rooms? Out in the open, in a freezing biome, while being neighbors with 6,000 goblins, a colossus, and a demon?


The next one is a peasant from AdmireFortresses. Not my first choice, but I just found out I can’t pick ‘my’ civilization again.



This one spawns me in an empty room, in an empty house. A single book is laying on the floor; I haven’t read it before now, and I won’t read it now either. Instead, I walk outside, and find myself near the defensive wall:


AdmireFortresses has a tavern with lots of furniture, and not a shred of food or drink. I’m beginning to think my guy is going to die of thirst; the three units of water in the waterskin are frozen solid. So I prioritize getting out of AdmireFortresses, and making my way to HopeWork, where at least I know there’s booze.


It’s somewhat amusing that the walls of HopeWork are so similar to the ones created by world gen; I’ve never gone around in adventure mode, nor did I watch others doing so, so it’s interesting that I reinvented the same basic design.

Back to our adventurer: I finally figured out how to jump. I leap out of a gap in the fortifications; there’s only one z-level down, so I make it without incident. Then I head in the general direction of the south, south-east. HopeWork is directly east-ward, but so are a bunch of mountains, and even I know you can’t fast-travel across mountains. So a slight detour is needed.

I find my way into the human hamlet of LeapedStirs (after running into a tomb to which I give a wide berth). Still no food or drink to be found. I’d go and talk to the people, but… booze. It’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.



Fast travel takes me through the dense forests south-east of ClanWork & HopeWork. There I ran into a pack of wolves, and died because I can’t run, and I still didn’t know how to attack.


RIP… whatever your name was. You didn’t travel far.



The last dwarf I can play, the one who is part of The Inks of Morality and is starting from CoiledMaligned, got rolled as a weaponsmith. Neat. He too makes a beeline for HopeWork, for the same reasons as the last guy. It’s at this point I decide that the ‘real’ adventurer is going to start in HopeWork, and the first thing s/he’ll do is stuff their backpack with as much booze and food as they can carry.


Fast travel stops, as my guy suddenly feels uneasy. But nothing looks wrong… until I abruptly die.



The little views for other z-levels reveal my killer: a demon sitting in a tree. It would be funny, if I weren’t dead.