Ok,
here’s the save, and it’s also linked at the bottom of this post. If I keep doing “one more thing”, I’m going to end up playing until I conquer the entire world.
Year 210 (part 2)Firstly, the military.
Unfortunately, very few citizens have any pre-existing military skill; tactically, we have 2 armchair generals (one skilled leader and one novice tactician with no other military skills); they’re currently unused, but if this fort ever gets to raid its enemies, they might come in handy.
The only skilled hammerers are those that we already had; so, Kib who’s Legendary +5, and whining little Sibrek at level 8; Sibrek was only drafted in late autumn, after he had finally crafted enough masterworks to drop below 10k stress. I’m not counting poor Iden, because she’s no longer picking up a hammer, despite definitely having access to one.
A full hammer squad, made from these two alongside 8 complete n00bs, have been allowed to train since spring 210. Except they didn’t; they did sometimes do individual training, and have acquired a tiny bit of experience, but the desired cyan S never appeared. Most of the hammer-dwarf skill that exists was acquired by executing caged zombies.
In the ‘other weapons’ department, the fort has a level 5 axe-dwarf who I drafted in his own squad as emergency troubleshooter when I got the fort. Later on, he was left to train 2 months of the year just to keep up his skills. Besides him, we have three novice hammerers, one novice sword-dwarf, and one talented spear-dwarf (aka, level 6). All of them are unused, and live as civilians.
The crossbow squad is doing better, having gone up to 7 members with the addition of 3 new recruits. They used to have a problem, where they didn’t pick up quivers and bolts; the problem went away after deleting and recreating the squad (literally nothing else was changed). Then, they were stationed in cave 2, near specially-carved fortifications facing the zombies in trees. They really suck at hitting anything, but they manage to kill a crundle… eventually. At least they’re getting XP.
More concerningly, they’re not hitting the forgotten beast sitting up in a tree. I presume they can’t see it, with all the trunks and branches in the way.
The melee squads all have barracks prepared next to the fort’s main exit; only hammers and axe are assigned:
Some time in late 209, every dwarf was allowed weaving, the first cavern was mass-forbidden, then spammed with looms; since then, I’ve gradually unforbid the webs nearest to the looms:
As of spring 211, I considered I have enough silk; there are 1000+ silk bolts, and that’s with multiple ‘do silk x’ jobs firing occasionally. Only 2 weavers are now allowed in FriendlyTreason; they can just barely keep up with random web spawns. We’ve barely made a dent in the existing webs, and most of the cavern is still forbidden.
Part of the reason why I’m focusing on the cavern silk is that I’m trying to not massively increase the number of items in the fort. Growing pig tails would add new items (be it plant, thread, cloth, or finished clothing item), but the silk already exists. It will get transformed, not created.
We may still have a problem with all the webs suspended in trees, since they’re both unreachable and still count as items. There’s not much we can do about them, besides maybe clear-cutting trees and waiting for new trees to destroy them, by growing over the suspended webs. That, or build massive floors in the cave. Or, y’know, use autodump & atom-smash them, which is arguably cheating.
In related news, the number of items reported by cleanowned has gone from 38,000 to 40,000; which isn’t all that much for 2 years of play, and I’m willing to bet most of that increase is from blocks and bars.
Back up on the surface; when migrants arrived, I took the chance to do some cleanup. The depot finally got a bridge to close it off; its lever is by the tavern.
I don’t let dwarves walk outside unrestricted, due to pools of eerie mist. I’ve only found one of them, but that's about one too many. So, I made a new burrow, named ‘Outside Access’, and included a small area in front of the depot. Dwarves were allowed to access only the general underground burrow and that little outdoor area.
This is how the depot was reconstructed, the bridge built and linked, and a few of the nearer corpses moved to the third cavern for processing.
Whichever one of you dug out this massive room: firstly, I appreciate your dedication. Secondly, WHY?!? Thirdly, I'm going to wall out most of it. The only things of any use are the native copper chunks, and arguably the gems.
Autumn comes and goes, without any sign of the dwarven caravan. Well that’s unpleasant…
Well, might as well build more trap corridors; this is when the second trap corridor was built in the NE, and cleared that speck of land too. Then the third, near the second and planned to open above the zombies in the tree.
The levers to control it are in the tavern; they're properly labeled, so you'll know them when you see them. There's also a third unused lever there, by the way, if you need it.
Turns out the guys do indeed climb, and fast at that. This trap corridor might actually be underpowered, while the other two were overpowered. But it’s not all good news: as soon as a zombie dies, it’s replaced by one (or more) from the corpses existing in the cave.
Year 211There is no longer any doubt: the only solution to the second cavern is to obsidianize the entire place. Trying to reduce numbers with traps has proven to be outright counter-productive - for every zombie we cage or kill, at least one more takes its place, and usually several. The third trap corridor has run three times, and every time the population count has gone
up, not down.
I’m not saying trap corridors are completely useless: the land in cave 2 is mostly clear, and when we’ll build walls around the former lake, we could definitely use traps to clear the pockets of water and undead hiding under trees. But until then, the corridors are decommissioned: the outer bridge was raised, and all traps were deconstructed - the cage traps for being useless, and the weapon traps to free the weapons within. I’ve already killed off all the caged zombies, I’m not letting them pile up. Even so, we’re at 330 ‘others’ on the map, literally all of them zombies.
For the purposes of future obsidianization, I’ve set up mason’s and mechanic’s workshops in the giant dug-out space of level 159. Here, the existing stone will be used to craft mechanisms, floodgates, hatches, and blocks. Basalt and alunite are magma-safe; they’ll be the main materials for the above, and for a few grates just in case. Diorite and gneiss will be used exclusively for blocks, since they’re not magma-safe. I’ve also ordered 20 nether-cap corkscrews and pipe sections; this should be enough for any magma pumps we may need. The plan so far is to use level 120, right above C2, for all the magma works.
Also among my (mostly ineffectual) attempts to increase FPS, are restricting access, and reducing travel times. A whole bunch of walls, with doors in them just in case, were built in the wider spaces of the fort, including the massive open space by the fort’s main entry and in the caverns.
The tavern is really nice, but it’s also really far away. It’s about 100 tiles from the stairway, never mind any other places where a dwarf might need to go. To alleviate the problem, I’ve built a ‘subsidiary’ in the first cave - a room with food and drink, that’s also part of the tavern. Hopefully, dwarves will use it to fill their needs without going all the way to the main tavern.
And after all of that was completed, I’ve spent half of spring and summer doing one thing I said I’ll never do: letting dwarves roam outside unrestricted. With all the essential tasks accomplished and without any great hopes of completing any major projects, the only time waster I can approach is cleaning the surface. It’s also the kind of task I can leave running in the background while I’m actually doing my dayjob.
Then, when I can actually focus on this puppy, I embark on a last and very dangerous task: digging out the deadly feather’s tomb, and dumping it in magma (before it rises again to pester the fort).
Success!
Lastly: there is a new Forgotten Beast in the second cavern:
Curiously, it’s not engaging any of the neighboring zombies or the hidden FB that’s arrived in 209. It’s just sitting there, in its happy little tree.
I wanted to play until autumn, when the dwarven caravan may or may not arrive. Regrettably, it didn’t arrive; apparently, the mountainhome still likes us enough to send migrants, but the outpost liaison wrote us all off.
And that’s about it. I’m leaving you in the late autumn of 211, with decently usable dwarves. There are no active dump zones, clothing and booze industries run on their own, more or less. We even have a safe amount of wool thread & cloth; I’ve managed to shear our 4 wooly critters with some help from the military. Cooking and butchering still require micro-managing, but I left a sizable amount of lavish meals laying around. The mayor occasionally mandates figurines; that’s perfectly doable, we have a really nice bone stockpile on level 109.
Also, there are only 74 dwarves; one of these guys succumbed to infection in late spring. There’s a strange symmetry, where I lost one dwarf in every year: in 208 Iden got were’d, in 209 I locked the Beestmaster to die of thirst, in 210 I stupidly killed Minkot the miner, and now in 211 Stakud finally rolled a 1 on his ‘survive infection’ check.
Once again,
the save.
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Topic: The Fortress Of Friendlytreason | OVERSEERS WE NEED YOU (Read 39351 times)