I thought I'd share some images and stories from my latest dwarven time-wasting project: Speakbolted.
I founded Speakbolted in the year 51 with the intention of making a fort that required absolutely NO human input to survive. I had a keyboard macro to hit space every few minutes to unpause, and things went okay for a while (which I eventually swapped for the unpause feature in Dtil). I eventually decided to try to make Speakbolted into the longest surviving Dwarf Fortress ever.
Earlier today, Speakbolted celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding. Unfortunately all seven founders were killed or died of old age before this glorious day, but one dwarf who immigrated within the first decade still remains alive. Three other dwarves who immigrated were allowed into the fort around year 90, and the other 6 are children of the founders and first immigrants. I wish I could tell you every exciting and engaging story about this epic fort, but the truth is that MAYBE 3 interesting things have happened in 100 years, and the best out of those is cleaning up a 130-animal petsplosion.
The game was 100% vanilla the entire time. I did tweak init to turn off invaders and I set the pop cap to 10. I also did some major FPS pimping to have the game run as fast as possible (peaking in the 700s during gameplay). The only utility I used was unpause from dtil.
Now some pictures:
The status screen on the day of the glorious centennial.
Pictures of the announcements that seven of my dwarves had died of old age. Maybe a bug since they should have each had at least 20 years left in their dwarven bodies. Also included are two snippets of the FPS I was hitting to age the fort so fast.
Some bones from dead-from-age dwarves on my meeting area floor.
Even if it's not the oldest for ever yet, I'm sure it will be soon. A year passes every 15-20 minutes with the current setup. Not bad for a fort I started yesterday morning, if I don't say so myself. I'll try my best to get a map up on the archive soon. Any fun comments on this monumental waste of CPU power?