A 72 z-level 30+tile diameter obsidian tower sitting amidst a 42 z-level sea of magma (at least 30 tiles in RADIUS). The only way in or out being a hellish maze of bridges connected a to a few small pillars suspended in the magma sea, which can of course be made simple by a simple lever pull from within, but siegeing forces will find that each pillar is coated in pressure plates, each of which alters the pathing needed to get to the tower itself, but never actually cuts the tower off(be sure to keep in mind what happens when multiple pressure plates are activated at once.)
The dwarves shall live in the tower, confident in their power.
Challenges include:
- Getting enough obsidian. You shall need obsidian farms for this.
- Setting up the pit. This will probably take up the majority of the map, and you will need to channel it all out.
- The pillars (for which to string bridges from) You'll need to decide on a pattern for their distance from each other, and decide if it shall be straight pillars all the way from the base of the pit, or if it's a sub-surface net that has vertical offshoots. This is important. once the magma has flooded the area you won't be able to add anymore
- "Rescuing" all the metals and gems you'll uncover doing this. Not hard but it WILL take time.
- Setting up the pressure plates themselves. It's going to need charts and graphs to keep track of everything that happens
- As the very LAST thing you'll do, releasing the magma. This means the entire retaining wall will have to be destroyed. Preferably safely.
Let's un down the list:
Insanity:Look at all you have to do to pull this off. It will break you.
Mechanical Complexity: If you don't require adding a THIRD dimension to you're records to tell what a rogue goblin on the pressure plates will path himself as, then it's not complex enough. (Seriously. Say 5 gobbies. gobby 1 hits a pressure plate and alters himself to path A. The other 4 to Path B. Gobby 2 hits another pressure plate, and now Gobby1: Path A(or C) Gobby 2: Path B Gobbies 3-5:Path C (or D). EVERY goblin alters not only his own pathing, but every other gobbies pathing.)
Size:It's a cylinder of a minimum of r=60, h=72 Volume covered=813888 cubes involved (admittedly a bit of an overestimation of the size since that includes the air above the magma pit)
Coolness: It's an obsidian fortress tower rising out of a burning lake of lava, with the fell laughter of dwarves echoing through it's halls. For bonus points put the corpses/coffins of dwarves who died working on it into niches on the outer wall. This is going to make friggen Barad-Dur look like the tree-house of +2 to pansy-hood.
Possible use as as a weapon: It's a ridiculously huge amount of magma, with a very high place in the middle. If you can't think of a way to use that as an execution grounds, you are a failure of a dwarf.
For an actual weapon, pump-towers ringing the outer edge allows for a tidel wave of flame to engulf the nearby land.
Downsides: You may have to import you're wood after this.
You may ALSO wish to leave a z-level or two of the bottom unchanneled(so you can cause your water source to fall down a hole at it's source to the bottom most z-levels where it then flows under the tower, allowing you to have an undending water supply in your tower. May require precise use of floodgates to pull off.
Or you could you know. Build a lava tank somewhere and shower people with it Yeah. That's cool too. Totally. Yes.
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Topic: 42 Z-levels of Magma (Read 2392 times)