This fortress is absolutely amazing. I thought my magnum opus fort, Bastiongate, was amazing, but you've outdone me and then some. I only captured about 30 beasts and killed the rest. I only made it to 60 years. I absolutely respect the amount of effort you've put into this fortress. Can we see some more of the fortress?
EDIT: I forgot to mention that Bastiongate, too, was terrorized for years by a web-spitting crocodile.
Thank you! I'm sure Bastiongate had some awesome stories to tell as well. If you have any you'd like to share, I'd love to hear.
I'm afraid to say that you might be quite disappointed by Casotoxa, lol. I made it with self-sufficiency in mind (and even messed that up, because at this point, I'd do everything differently for pathing optimization) so it's not the prettiest. I've made far nicer forts. But it keeps my dwarves stable and happy, so it works.
I think when this is all said and done I might upload the save, just for fun. But in the meantime here's some places I don't think I've shown.
Little fortress tour!
This is my big main hall. It's a mess. But you can see all the microcline pedestals holding bodies of forgotten beasts - that's where all my dead web-shooters are stored. There's about 93 there, I think? A couple random artifacts too.
Also, notice all the levers to the left. This is the control room for most of my fortress. It's organized, I swear. Although... I have had to stop playing whenever I indulge in a bit of the devil's lettuce, because I start losing my ability to actually navigate my organized chaos.
This is my king's quarters, dining room, tomb, etc. I've had several kings/queens for ~150 years by now. You can see where I sort of gave up on trying to make it look nice, lol. The far right is the fortress's collective tomb, which is a mess, but you can see how many dead I have. I mentioned it before, but I am playing with a modded race (which is why you might see h's and S's around instead of dwarves. They have a slightly shorter lifespan, so I get dwarves dying of old age aaaaaall the time). Again I should emphasize this has no impact on beast trapping, though. I just like messing with raws
Also, notice all the slabs outside of the tomb area. Those are all slabs that contain the secrets of life and death, which get brought here by megabeasts. I dunno. You'd think one would be plenty, but I have like 8. Dwarves can't read those though.
Here's a different place where I store non-forgotten beasts - dragons, those werebeast and commander cyclopes, hydras, titans, etc. And is also where I display the bodies of semi-megabeasts. You might see a few ones that you don't recognize, and that's just because I've modded in a couple new megabeasts. Mostly just different types of dragons, because I thought dragons weren't hard enough, lol. Give them wings!
Casotoxa also is sort of a test fortress while I'm waiting for beasts to show up. Here's an (abandoned) sea creature breeding pit. It didn't work out so well, and I think it's no fault of my own - sea creatures tend to hold still and refuse to move after a while, and stop breeding. I had a pod of giant orcas show up and captured them all, but couldn't get much use out of them (which is a shame, because orcas are some of my favorite animals). In the end, I didn't need it. I have a ridiculous amount of food and bones anyways. Notice the rocs chained around the walls... they're my emergency food supplies, instead of orcas.
A view from the surface. I have a wall around the main area and a bit of a moat around the entrance. It's built next to a volcano and ocean, so that's why you see a magma chute in view at all times. The ocean is less apparent but it's there. And it is remarkably empty. I have caught a total of 4 different aquatic creatures throughout the whole 175 years. We're in a white sand desert, though, which is my favorite biome.
You can see the wall extends into the ocean. That's because below it, I made a sea creature trapping area. You can't see them, but this is full of cage traps, and has bridges on each side. So something swims in, gets captured, I close the bridges along each side, I open the door at the top to drain out all the water, I collect the cages, and repeat. Simple but unfortunately I haven't been able to put it to much use at all. I might do a more ocean-centric fortress next time, because I think this would've been cooler if I actually had anything show up.
And a view from the caverns...
Level 1 (notice how I put floors right above the spaces in the cage trap to prevent trees from growing there / me cutting them down to leave holes - beasts will climb/fly out):
Level 2:
Level 3:
Yeah, my caverns are pretty boring. Level 1 and level 2 seem to have had all their wildlife go (mostly) extinct. I only really get creatures from level 3 anymore. I usually direct web-shooters down into level 3 so they can hopefully go get themselves killed by a jabberer or cave dragon.
Level 1 is my tallest cavern by z-level, 2 is probably my nicest looking one, and 3 is my flattest (you can't see the majority of it from the screenshot I took, but I wanted to show off the tunnels around the side). As you can see... I made those tunnels. I was hoping to be able to direct beasts and creatures a bit more easily by using those tunnels, but this was mostly a resounding failure. I just abandoned the idea and left it like that. You can see all the dead bodies laying around from all the web-shooters that get shoved down here. However, I don't get much cool wildlife anymore, it's a lot of flesh balls and cave blobs. And I mean a lot. So a web-shooter usually just has a field day down there for a couple years.