Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Fishbulb]

I signed up specifically to tell you about what just happened.

After getting bored with my too-successful-to-be-fun fort, I flooded it with magma then finally abandoned when my last surviving blacksmith holed himself up in a warehouse room with a huge stockpile of prepared meals and wine and I didn't have the patience to wait for him to get bored and suicide or whatever.

I picked a new location basically at random, just to mess around a little. When I got there, I found it was a totally flat site with a few trees and a carp-laden river. Could be fun, thought I, so I set about doing the old cave-in-your-wagon trick. You channel out around your wagon, it caves in, dropping it to the first underground level, saving you the time of lugging all your supplies in. Put a ceiling on it later or whatever. Easy peasy.

I channeled out the last tile and suddenly the alert popped up: "You have discovered a magma pipe!"

Followed by:

Urist McPlanter has died in the heat.
Urist McMiner has died in the heat.
Urist McTrader has died in the heat.
Urist McBrewer has died in the heat.
Urist McGlassmaker has died in the heat.

And about a dozen "the stray whatever (tame) has died in the heat" messages.

That's right, I'd managed to drop my entire wagon, with all my supplies, pets and livestock, and five of my seven starting dwarves into a magma pipe. Within ten seconds of starting the game.

I'm currently debating whether to abandon now and try again, or wait for my two survivors (Urist McOtherminer and Urist McFurnaceoperator) to get thirsty, try the river and die by carp-to-the-face.

[CobaltKobold]

...actually, I'm having trouble seeing how you managed to cave in AND discover-

Oh, right, punched through one layer, since you needed to mine out from underneath to cavein.

[Fishbulb]

Right. Here I am at ground level, with seven happy dwarves full of excitement at making a fresh start out on the frontier. Level -1, as I discover when I dig my first ramp beside the wagon, is peat. Unbeknownst to me, level -2 immediately beneath by wagon is empty space; that's where the cavern at the top of the magma pipe is, and levels -3 through -whatever are magma 7/7. I dropped my wagon onto level -1, which (because it was unsupported from below) caved in. From there on down, it was all burning and screaming and then horrible, horrible silence.

Incidentally, I let my two survivors wander around for a little while before shamefully aborting the game and reloading my initial save to try again. The surviving miner was inconsolable at the loss of all his friends, big flashing down-arrow. The furnace operator was all "Huh? What are you talking about? There were other dwarves here?"

After a season of the miner being all "Complained lately" and the furnace operator being all "Got yelled at by an unhappy dwarf lately" and a complete failure on the part of the carp to solve my problem for me, I killed the game and started over. I suppose it would've been more dwarfly to take my last pick and dig out a hole and do some plant gathering to try to survive, but I didn't have the patience for it at the time. Instead I imagined my two surviving dwarves gazing down into the fiery pit into which their friends and their stuff plummeted, saying "Stuff this" and hoofing it to the nearest road to hitch a ride with a passing caravan.

[bluea]

If you have the "Right at embark" save, it might be interesting to see if you can catch all seven in the catastrophe, and exactly how long it takes.

[Fishbulb]

I think I'd have to dig out a bigger pit under my wagon. The wagon's three-by-three, and I dug out a five-by-five square under it. It was really lucky — if you can call it that — that I managed to kill ALL the livestock in one go. I had four cats, four war dogs, two cows and two pigs (I think it was; this was late last night), and they all were in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong moment.

[Quantum Toast]

If you have the "Right at embark" save, it might be interesting to see if you can catch all seven in the catastrophe, and exactly how long it takes.

I'm surprised it's taken me this long to see someone suggest savescumming to make an accident worse.

[zchris13]

If you have the "Right at embark" save, it might be interesting to see if you can catch all seven in the catastrophe, and exactly how long it takes.

I'm surprised it's taken me this long to see someone suggest savescumming to make an accident worse.

That is dwarven science.
Taking the accident apart a piece at a time thing, not the making it worse part.  Just to clarify.

[inteuniso]

Just had a facepalm moment.

I had been trying to channel the brook, maybe to channel it... but to no avail.

Anyways, I had decided to build a small wall around my fort, and I wanted to extend my farming, so I decided to dig a small pond. Once I channeled through, I went back to minding my business. However, I went down one z-level and saw water advancing up my corridor. I realized I had broken through to release the water of the brook upon me. If I had realized earlier, I might have been able to stop it, by pulling a lever and closing some floodgates. Unfotunately, that lever was entirely underwater. Watching most of my fort go underwater, I have decided to let loose all of my water, causing the forts death, along with any dorf stupid enough to stay in the lower levels. This is sad, because I just had fought back two goblin ambushes that occured simultaneously.

EDIT: Oh god they're drowning in their sleep! Not even knowing the end is coming for them! Noooo!

[Julien Brightside]

I am going to share a little story here because it is just so...dwarf.

Once upon a time, a bunch of dwarven merchants(caravan) came to my village of Roofhonor, whereas they traded. Then they left to sell more stuff at other places. For some reason, they left their elite guards behind (not that I mind, they killed off several goblin raids by themselves), but:

I no longer recieved dwarven immigrants.

This thing lasted for years, and I thought that the rest of dwarven society had collapsed and we were the only ones left.

Except, it was the other way around, dwarven society had believed that my village had collapsed, and thats why they never heard from us again. There had grown trees from when the caravan arrived until it was supposed to leave, so the caravan could not leave. That is until I built a road to the other end of the map. Suddenly, when I had cut the trees there, I could finally see the caravans move again, taking the elite guards with them.

I hope there will be some immigrants coming soon.

[100killer9]

Giant rats are deadly. Dwarves let creatures out of cages to bring them to other cages. My military is lazy. Massacres are bloody.

[Lord Dakoth]

RED LEVER means magma deathtrap. BLUE LEVER means room service. *facepalm*

[assimilateur]

RED LEVER means magma deathtrap. BLUE LEVER means room service. *facepalm*

Be advised that instead of simplistically color-coding your levers, which is demonstrably prone to lapses of memory, you could put notes on your map (I think the note menu is accessed via capital N). You don't even have to bother writing anything in them, just put the same kind of icon on each hatch/floodgate/door and the respective lever that links to it.

[sproingie]

I tend to lay out my levers in a lever room that's a very rough scale model of the areas where the levers are.  It's not exact, but I at least know a lever in the northeast of the room is a lever in the northeast of the map.  Water and Lava levers additionally get color-coded by the surrounding walls and floors.  The room itself has two separated approaches so if a tantruming dwarf gets near one, I can cut it off and still have access.

I did this layout business because I'd never learned about notes (:sigh:) but the color coding is still useful when I get lazy.  My last doomsday trap did require two separate levers to unleash tho.

[Danjen]

I made my first large death trap. When the first lever was pulled, it would seal the large entry hall off with floodgates. The second lever closed the drainage system, while the third and final lever controlled the water intake. The intake was hooked up to a river (though it had to travel quite a ways to get there), while the drain went down a long tunnel until it reached an automatic pump which was still under construction. It worked, sort of; I was able to drown elves and dwarves (for Fun, mostly). The flaw to the trap was that it took so long to fill with unpressurized water that the pack animals died of dehydration before they drowned, even as the water reached around 4/7. Then I found out the lever that controlled the intake was missing. Completely gone. So like ... I had a sealed room, ever filling with water, and a broken drainage system. Needless to say, I had to abandon eventually.

The second disaster fort I made started off incredibly; it had copious amounts of ore, coal, and gems, guaranteeing a good metal industry. Huge forests and a running stream. Skeletal giant eagles (which thankfully didn't notice me at all). Well, I added a cistern and it broke the fort; essentially, I died to water pressure. My main level was located 1 z-level under the river. The cistern was two 2 levels tall, and a few floors below the main. I built a small meeting area above the cistern, with a hole in the floor, acting as an elaborate well. Well, apparently water pressure can go down, over, and then UP. The room happened to be connected by ramps, and ended up flooding the entire fortress; workshops, stockpiles, bedrooms, everything. I managed to save my dorfs from the bedrooms by tunneling down from above and making stairs up, and mining out adjacent rooms, but I shortly abandoned afterwards.

[CobaltKobold]

Magma is good for cleaning up water accidents.
Water is good for cleaning up magma accidents.

Unfortunately, one may often have another 'accident' cleaning up...