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[Fossaman]

Fairly simple idea based on walls creating a floor above them.

First off, you have the vault area. Construct this by channeling out a space one tile larger than the interior vault dimensions desired. Add constructed walls on the outer tiles. Dig out the tiles near them, so that there's easy access to important areas of your fort.

Now, flood the area on top of the vault. If the vault's walls are deconstructed, the vault and the fort will flood. Pressurize the water for maximum fun. The only way to get at the vault now is to drain the water over it. Add enough water and that should be pretty tough. Maybe use a hidden atom smasher as the 'vault key'... You could hide/booby trap the lever for it by replacing one of the vault walls with a floodgate. Or a floodgate linked to a single use pressure plate set to trigger when water hits it. That in turn would be controlled by another floodgate linked to your booby trap levers; that way it's impossible to close the floodgate again once it opens.

You'll also need the level immediately beneath the vault flooded or otherwise made inaccessible. The whole setup is useless if your friend can just dig an up staircase.

[Orborde]

Someone in this thread claimed that pressure plates' settings can be modified after the plate is initially constructed; I checked a bit ago, and I don't think this is possible. As such, I came up with the following (I noticed a similar idea involving magma earlier in the thread; I have fleshed this version out a little more with some of my own experimentation.)

Build a vault at the bottom of the map. Dig a 1-tile space out around and above it. Add pressure plates all around the sides and top of the vault, and set them to trigger on any water level drop below 7/7. The plates should trigger a device (a nice reservoir of magma, perhaps?) that immediately destroys the contents of the vault. Leave the other guy a note warning him that tampering with the vault will result in its contents being destroyed, and, for good measure, stash some of his valued possessions in there as "hostages".

So much for keeping your stuff out of his hands. Now, what about getting it back into your hands? I don't think there is any way for you to externally open the vault that is impervious to a committed save-scummer. I suggest building a clock within the vault that disarms the destruction device after one year. I was experimenting with various forms of dwarfputering today, and I got good results using a repeater and several counters from these designs (I didn't write that page, by the way.)

To build a clock, take a repeater and use it to tick a counter; then use that counter to tick a second counter. It will take some experimentation and perhaps a little math to tune your design to take a year to run, but you can do all your testing with savescums/alternate worlds. If you have a well-tested design all planned out, I think you could get the whole thing built in the game year you have. With all the machinery involved in the defense contained within the vault, it would be tamper-proof (assuming that he doesn't want to destroy whatever you have in there, of course!).

Before you go to all that bother, though, make sure to check that he can't use ice or magma to defeat this. I haven't tested either effect on this trap; someone really ought to do that and report back.

More details hiding under the spoiler tag:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The page linked above suggests using this repeater design:

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X = wall, d = Door, N = plate tied to north door, S = plate tied to south door.
XdX
XSX
XNX
XdXI think this repeater is a little too fast for the counters to handle; the next repeater tick often comes in before the animal in the counter advances onto the next hatch, making it skip ticks. This would be fine if it skipped a fairly consistent average number of ticks long-term, but, while I haven't tested this, it looks like the number of ticks skipped is pretty random, depending on the mood the pathfinder is in. Also, the repeater cited might not even work if the animal skedaddles out the door fast enough. I lengthened the hall to slow down the count and added pet-blocked doors, as follows:

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D1 D2 P4 + + + + + + + + + P1 D3 D4Ds are doors. D2 and D3 are pet-impassable (but not forbidden; this takes advantage of a pathfinder quick). P1 and P4 are plates triggering their corresponding doors. The ends of the hall are both open to the rest of the fort so the animal will run back and forth as the outer doors actuate. You want to make sure the animal has somewhere it wishes to be; I'm not sure whether a meeting hall is good enough or whether a master/trainer/parent works better. Also, if the repeater gets too long, the animal won't hit both ends.

Some math:

I think that chaining either a 4- or 5-hatch version of the counter is the most efficient way to make your clock last as long as possible. This is based on the following equation:

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(clock overflow ticks) = n ^ (c/(n+2)) = e ^ ( (ln(n)/(n+2)) * c )n is the number of hatches in a single counter, and c is the number of total levels you have to build from Bidok's designs, which I figured was a decent measure of the overall effort you have to put into building the thing. If you want to maximize your clock's tick count for minimal effort, you wish to maximize the quantity (ln(n)/(n+2)). The best value is n=4, with n=5 not far behind. This may interfere with efforts to arrange your counter sizes to come up with a clock period close to a year, though.

Summary of above: 4 hatches per counter seems to be the way to make your clock period last longest with the least effort.

Even with the slow repeater, the first counter in the chain still seems to (mostly consistently) miss a tick when the animal is on the return leg to the top of the counter. You might get around this by simply making the first counter one hatch smaller than your design calls for.

To get the right period for your clock, you may have to do some interesting factoring instead of sticking solely to the 4-counters, as they will probably require extra logic to "decode" the count to find out when it hits the correct point. I think it is a better idea to deviate somewhat from the 4-counters-only design and make it so your final counter in the chain emits a single output tick at the one-year mark. Build about 3 of the 4-counters in a chain, figure out how many days it takes the chain to overflow, and then choose C1, C2, C3, etc. for the hatch numbers of the counters in the chain so that:

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360 days ~= C1 * C2 * ... * Cx * (overflow time in days)/(4*4*4)

[Strife26]

I've got a plan. You'll need magma and water. A major river would be best here.

We're going to mine the outline of a cube. Three tiles thick. Basicly, a big artifical wall completely surrounding the vault. Inside of the cube will be another room with the stuff in it. We're going to feed the cube with four seperate channels of water from the river head (the very start, so it can't be damned). The channels will all be a minimum of 2x2 wide at all times and will dump into the corners. Fill the entire thing up. The more waterflow the better. We want enough water flowing through the thing to make draining it faster then it flows in nearly impossible (for uber hardcoreness, carefully mineout every tile on the map to prevent any cave ins from making an artificial chasm on the bottom level). The only way in will be to drop magma on the highest level. They'll be a preset channel for this, with a nice clear lever controlling the final drop. However, the pipe is far enough away so that the Magma will take a year to get there. Once it's your turn, drop the magma on the top layer, turn off, mine, repeat until you're in. Include a system for draining the magma channel.

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            ~~~~
            ~~               
            ~~  MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
            ~~  M
          ~~~~~~~~~
          ~~~---~~~
          ~~~-$-~~~






[Shoku]

If flood gates don't support things above them and you can't deconstruct a closed floor hatch standing on the stairs below it we can add another impassible barrier to the list.

[Slinkyfest]

build a bauxite hatch with a bauxite mechanism above the booze stockpile. Link it to the bridge outside the trasure room. when he pulls the innocuous switch the bridge comes down and his booze explodes, likely killing a good percentage of the fortress. Depending if its teatime or not. (many of my dwarves seem to be on a single schedule for booze. Recomend savescumming before this juuuust in case