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[John Johnston]

I'm on a new fort in a nasty nasty place.  Skeletal beasties all over.

Dastot the fisherdwarf survived all that though and was fishing outside the entrance when he spotted a kobold thief.

The fight was short but before the kobold died it stabbed poor Dastot in the eye with its dagger and took his eye out.  He staggered into the fortress entrance, collapsed in agony and was carried to safety.

When he eventually got out of bed it became apparent he couldn't fish any more (or even haul) as he'd pass out from the pain all the time.  I set him to "cleaning" duties only.

It still didn't work, he kept collapsing.  Then a vacancy "appeared" in the Royal Guard.  Dastot became their new mascot.

Ten years later, he got a strange mood, claimed a workshop, and collapsed in seconds.  He recovered, walked a little further in quest of that needed turtle shell... and collapsed again.  He kept doing this... ingredient after ingredient, he hunted them down, staggering through the corridors, fighting the phantom pain from his missing eye... until at last...

...he made it!  Nine ingredients, collected with immense suffering, and he worked and worked and actually made the damn thing in time despite all the collapsing.  Not sure why he bothered (a rock bracelet, decorated with all sorts of junk, not very inspiring) but once he'd finished it, he was a new dwarf!  He became so tough and strong that he no longer collapsed all the time, and became in truth a halfway decent Royal Guard (well, he still didn't train with his crossbow, except for shooting the odd kobold).

Seriously, I was touched.  I was so pleased for him, and I was sure he wasn't going to make it when he was trying to get all the bits together.   

[krumlink]

Quite an inspiring story. Too bad my dwarves are retarded

[Jude]

1. I have a volcano in my fort.
2. Lye Maker goes into a fey mood, screams for metal bars.
3. I scramble to get a magma smelter set up to smelt all the native gold or platinum I had lying around.
4. I get it set up, FINALLY.
5. I struggle to get any dwarf to actually smelt the goddam gold. After a LOT of this, including multiple dwarves getting on the job and then going to eat or sleep halfway, one of them finally drags the gold to the forge (incidentally he went and got it from one of my distant mines, not the nearby stockpile, and lugged it extremely slowly halfway across the map and dozens of z-levels. Anyway, he finally sits down and starts smelting.
6. "Udib McAsshole, Blacksmith, cancels smelt native gold nuggets: Interrupted by zombie fire imp."
The fuck? OK, I check the vicinity and don't see any fire imp...he goes back to work after a bit.
7. Same message again! This time I draft his ass and sure enough the imp popped right out of the hole in the floor. He seemed to punch it backwards back into the magma...but then out it popped again and he charged at it...straight into the magma. Died instantly and the imp retreated.
8. Just as the message of "died in the heat" came up, the Lye Maker snapped and went berserk - and was killed almost instantly, I'm not sure how.
9. The two jerks are interred in adjacent rank-and-file coffins and AFAIK my magma industry is still going nowhere until I figure out a way to stop fire imps from flying up out of holes.
10.
11. Profit!

Anyway...IS there a way to stop imps from flying up a z-level into my forge? Should I just station soldiers right next to the forge at all times, or is there a way to build that'll avoid this?

Incidentally I'm trying to build all of my major rooms ringed around the magma pipe so that if I ever decide the fort needs to be purged, I can mine a few key squares for a very nice doomsday device.

[brainfire]

Vertical steel bars, or more commonly, a fortification, in the pipe of magma heading to your forge.

[Lord Dullard]

Yeah.. you're a bit too late to add bars to block creature progress now, obviously.

Best solution in your situation: put marksdwarves all around the magma pipe's surface area and let them kill anything that pops out.

[krumlink]

I lowered their ignite point to 0 so they spontaneously combust

[Jude]

my smelter is actually built over the original magma pipe - one z-level is a lot wider than the one above it, so I built and channeled down into the lower level, from adjacent to the upper level.

Could I dig a channel for some magma, install the bars and then build floor over the channel?

I once tried a similar thing with an obsidian grate, but the magma melted the grate...and here I thought obsidian was fire-safe.

Edit again: Yikes, according to the wiki, the only magma safe stones are bauxite and adamantine! Guess I'll have to find some iron ore, fire up a wood forge and THEN move on to magma...I've never seen magma and bauxite on the same map.

Final edit: wait...I had channeled out 3 tiles and set one whole side of the smelter on top of them. I could have just channeled one and then put a non-passable section of the forge over that. Heck I still can - just floor over the other ones.

[Muz]

When my fortress was being flooded last night, a mother and her baby were sleeping in the bedroom while the bed was being flooded. The baby 'woke up' and was crawling through 2/7 water to get out, but seemed to be stuck in the same place.

After about 20 mins (real time), the mother woke up and "Cancelled (something): Looking for Baby". Good thing they got out safely. It was a pretty "WTF, why aren't they doing anything?" moment when you see a baby crawling around in water.

Also, I found it funny that the tax collector was trapped in someone's bedroom and the Royal Guards had a "Cancelled Tax Collector: Dangerous Terrain" thing. Unfortunately, the tax collector also survived the flood.

[Axe27]

Yeah, wood forages end up burning through wood stockpiles fast.

Very fast actually. In order to sustain a large scale wood burning steel operation, you need at least three or four dwarves chopping wood, and a few haulers in order to sustain it. Magma is so much better, simply because there is no more need for an ignition source.

Unfortunately, steel is the only magma safe material that you can break out without mining it. You might want to take any steel items you might have an melt them down, and replace them with copper items (Such as chains or trade goods. Armor the next best thing, but I wouldn't recommend it.)

Get cooking buddy.

[LegacyCWAL]

Just to add some numbers to the "forges use up lots of wood" stuff:

If you have no magma and smelt the steel from scratch, a single full set of plate armor (chainmail, platemail, cap, helm, boots, gauntlets, greaves, and shield) requires a grand total of 32 trees.  That means that to fully armor a 30-dwarf military, you have to burn nearly a thousand trees.

[Wolfius]

A mason stumbled across a gobbo baby snatcher. She proceeded to throw her child - or so it apeared - at the gobbo and they both ran away.

The child landed in the mud and asphyiated befor the mother, on her way back and by then only a few tiles away, could reclaim it.




Also, when filling my first magma moat, I locked the access doors and had a kitten tossed into a then-dry area to pass the time(and bless the new moat with a blood sacrifice), what with magma being rather slow.

But I don't think that counts.




Also, if you can't take raw bauxite from the starting screen, or import it, you can start with a steel grate, iirc.

[Jude]

My caravans don't seem to have any bauxite available for request, but I think the new system I'm going to set up will work fine.

[iskurthi]

My caravans don't seem to have any bauxite available for request, but I think the new system I'm going to set up will work fine.

If you make a map that's small enough, or get just the wrong set of conditions, it's possible for there to be no bauxite anywhere in the world (or at least nowhere that the dwarven civ can get at it).

[BurnedToast]

Just to add some numbers to the "forges use up lots of wood" stuff:

If you have no magma and smelt the steel from scratch, a single full set of plate armor (chainmail, platemail, cap, helm, boots, gauntlets, greaves, and shield) requires a grand total of 32 trees.  That means that to fully armor a 30-dwarf military, you have to burn nearly a thousand trees.

Which is not as bad as it sounds, really. If the elves bring wood (which seems to be semi-random) and you max order it from the humans and dwarves you can pull in over 100 logs per year from trade alone.

[Lord Dullard]

Just to add some numbers to the "forges use up lots of wood" stuff:

If you have no magma and smelt the steel from scratch, a single full set of plate armor (chainmail, platemail, cap, helm, boots, gauntlets, greaves, and shield) requires a grand total of 32 trees.  That means that to fully armor a 30-dwarf military, you have to burn nearly a thousand trees.

This actually isn't so bad as long as you don't think you're going to do it all at once.

Usually what I do is equip my dorfs with leather/chainmail as soon as I can produce or get a hold of it. Then, when I have a steel-working industry set up, I start making steel plate for the squad leaders. When the leaders are decked out in uber-gear I start producing steel plate for each squad one by one. My squads tend to be anywhere from 5-10 dorfs, so it's usually anywhere from 150-300 logs to outfit a squad.

Between the human caravan and my map I can usually produce enough plate for an entire squad in a few seasons quite easily. Outfitting my entire military (currently around 50 dwarves) took maybe five years. Not too bad.