Print

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

[smjjames]

Okay well, I'm in the proccess of flattening out my current map, the layers I want flattened are sand/soil, so no issues there. I planned my fort from the start to be at least one layer below the last one I want to collapse to minimize catastrophic caveins. Not sure how to deal with the stairwell, but when the time comes, I'll deal with it.

Anyhow, my idea is to make a sphinx, maybe two if I feel like it. I'm thinking maybe making it out of gold blocks (not sure how much gold my map actually has) and using glass and other colored blocks for the head. Honestly though, I'm not sure how I'll do the head, may or may not do the egyotain headdress thing. I know it's not exactly origional, but hey, its my first megaproject I'm thinking of actually doing. So, any tips on how to do it?

Bonus points if I make the nose and get it to fall off, lol.

[cerapa]

Design it in paint first.

[smjjames]

I was actually thinking of using flooring to get the birds eye view of the body and to get a hold of the scale first, then work from there. Building the body shouldn't be too hard once I get scaffolding up.

What is the definition of scaffolding in the DF universe anyway?

[Starver]

Anyhow, my idea is to make a sphinx, maybe two if I feel like it. I'm thinking maybe making it out of gold blocks (not sure how much gold my map actually has) and using glass and other colored blocks for the head. Honestly though, I'm not sure how I'll do the head, may or may not do the egyotain headdress thing. I know it's not exactly origional, but hey, its my first megaproject I'm thinking of actually doing. So, any tips on how to do it?

Bonus points if I make the nose and get it to fall off, lol.

Oooh, incredibly close to my current megaproject, in a way.

A sunken Egyptian landmark.  Making a huge square hole in the landscape (<calculates>...  125 or so units on a side; somewhere around 10 Z-levels of rock deep in total, but I may double that) drilling down below soil level (on a not quite flat plane, which means at least three layers for about 25% of the area) and leaving native rock in the shape of a central pyramid and 28 strategically placed outyling obelisks containing stairwells and bridges (pairs of meeting bridges) between them giving an upper-level walkway feature within the hole and accorss to the tunnels within the rim of the hole.  Appropriate access points being in all features (I might make the pyramid extend below new-ground-level), the floor of the construct delineated by long decorative ponds (if the water doesn't evaporate too readily/I can tap the underground river that I've got elsewhere on this map, but yet to dig into), all rock being smoothed, maybe even decorated.  All hopefully missing both the underground magma and other promised surprise until I'm happy to tap into it.

I'm currently putting all my workshops into the rim (accessible from steps from the rim top that I will later remove for a more elegant solution, ditto the current placement of the depot), in areas that may remain as workshops, be re-used as plebian accomodation as and when the economy starts, forgotten about or modified into non-royal noble accomodation (I forsee the royals taking up at least some of the pyramid internals), depending on what requirements arise.

My only concession to sticking to the native rock (smoothed, of course) is to hopefully be able to cap the pyramid and the obelisks with electrum tips (though I suppose I could remove the natural ramp sides and replace with limestone ones, for an additional historic synchronicity and de-stripe the pyramid's outer face).  I wouldn't have considered doing the tip for the obelisks, except that I already accidentally ruined the originally intended rock tip of one them, while removing the surrounding rock.  I immediately rebuilt that cell as a block of the same type of rock it was hewn from, but without going back to the prior season's backups I've decided to extend the electrum tip idea instead of just making do with that cheat.


Of course, I've got to keep my fortress socially operational at the same time, and though I've usually managed (these days) to avoid starving my dwarfs, the current internal and external field layout isn't as efficient as it could be, due to various practical restraints (for food I've actually got some captured elephants, but the raw plants needed for drink isn't being produced as fast as I'd like and external pools keep evaporating where they aren't already dripping into my foundations where I've sliced them with my project, whenever it deigns to rain, then evaporating), and I've got a Fey Mooded guy who has just started desiring shells that I don't have (and can't seem to aquire any fish from the open-air watersources, never mind shellfish), so I'm eagerly awaiting a trading delegation before both situations get too much out of hand.

[smjjames]

Yea, it's only rained once in the 4 years of this current fort, and it's a tropical savannah. I'm a bit surprised it's not a desert, but I guess the trees and plants get what little water they can from the fog or whatever.

Anyways, yours sounds much more complex to do. I'm going to need an army of metalworkers (I just recently got a legendary metalsmith from a mood) since I am making it out of metal. Well, I may use some stone here and there to put some color into it, I think I've got olivine around here somewhere, as well as the ever present microcline and orthoclase.

[aklyatne]

Scaffolding in the DF universe = up/down stairs.  When building huge walls, you can just build a nice big tall wall made of up/down stairs, build the wall, and then remove the stairs one layer at a time starting from the top.

[smjjames]

Scaffolding in the DF universe = up/down stairs.  When building huge walls, you can just build a nice big tall wall made of up/down stairs, build the wall, and then remove the stairs one layer at a time starting from the top.

I see, thanks.

[dragon0421]

I wouldn't make any plans on specific material type until you've exhausted your mining efforts. Instead of gold, you might find a lot of platinum or silver, or most likely a combination of precious metals. I recommend that you be flexible.

[smjjames]

Yea, I did have a thought of making the shell in gold and make the interior some cheaper more common material.

I've also thought of using silver. Still, one thing that will be in plentiful supply is glass.

I'll start doing some exploratory mining as soon as I collapse the second level I want to collapse. With 15 miners (and 3 or 4 of them are still training up to legendary), it shouldn't take too long.

[Starver]

I'll start doing some exploratory mining as soon as I collapse the second level I want to collapse. With 15 miners (and 3 or 4 of them are still training up to legendary), it shouldn't take too long.

Ah, now, you have an advantage over me.  For reasons I haven't quite worked out[1] one of my two legendary miners was heavily injured in an otherwise trivial collapse and is resting, so my megaproject is now being dug by the other one while the obligatory Resting occurs.

(I had just uncovered a small amount of copper, in the top layer of rock below the soil, but due to being at the wrong stage in the critical path analysis, and not yet had any picks [edit: <= from trading] (only spring of the second year), I don't realistically have more miners.)

Actually, work on the quarrying is at a standstill while the accomodation area is single-handedly expanded for the recent immigrants (helped by the westerly bias for targetted digging locations), but I only got half an hour punctuated[2] Fortressing in last night, just long enough to find some turtles.


[1] I was cutting a single-width swathe of ramps along an edge of soil I was removing, there shouldn't have been any hanging floors on the level above, and I checked for trees (which I sometimes suspect cause a mess when tunneled/ramped under), yet a cave-in occured.  I probably made a n00b error without noticing.

[2] Reinventing the wheel (egg shaped), I've been writing a Perl script to capture and interpret various screen captures of DF, then store the info.  This is so that I can keep an eye on various bits of (non-privilidged) data that I can't trivially get through the usual memory-hacking tools and usually spend ages reading and retyping by hand, but mostly because I like working on esoteric problems like this.

[smjjames]

Anyways, I do have a few subsurface tunnels, namely my unbuilt freshwater reservoir (I do have a channel for the seawater), which I probably should build, even though I can easily make over a thousand booze if I wanted to, and the magma pipe roof access (which I use for dumping and pitting), but it's a limited area, so as long as I'm careful.

I have thought of importing some of the gold or whatever, (as long as they aren't in native gold blocks ), but as dragon mentioned, I should do the exploratory mining first.