So here goes. I'm new on the forum, whatever, and I wanted to share my dwarf fortress story with people who might appreciate understand what I'm talking about.
So I've been building forts for a good bit now. I've wrecked at least 120 fortresses so far, not counting the ones where I wrecked the fort 20 minutes after embarking (dig straight down, stockpile, dig out some rooms, trees, carpenter's, mason's, furniture, defenses: moat seems to work: except when you flood your only source of food and seeds).
I'm finally starting to get into the swing of things, or so I thought. My leader, Dodok, had been legndary for a few years; skilled at mechanics, proficient at stonecrafting, Legendary bookkeeper: he updated the records so well my next appointee doesn't spend ANY time updating records and all my counts are perfectly accurate. After Dodok dies, even.
Magic hasn't been implemented yet, but from the sounds of things, maybe this should be considered when it is: it's not flashy, it's productive. Psychic bookkeeping.
Well, as most fort death spirals often do, it all comes down to one dwarf. A slow dwarf, a foreign dwarf, an immigrant dwarf with a funny accent and a crooked beard. He was new, and got possessed by a secretive mood.
Not having terribly much to make my dwarves happy, I decided to comply with his requests. He wanted cloth, and bones. Except: he wanted SILK cloth. Totally unavailable: I have no cave spiders. I didn't want to suffer from a tantrum spiral (Got my wish; even with no dwarves coming to my death trap this past season, no one's tantrummed yet about all the ones who died. Including their spouses. ) so I did what anyone would do in that situation: attempt to play God--Armok.
Turns out, though, that crossbreeding cats with cave spiders to produce silk is harder than I thought it would be. Took me nearly half my supply of kittens, I didn't get anything except some skulls and bones, and I didn't even have any cave spiders to start with (note: raw edits are easy to do; tags are the hard part!). In the future, however, I WILL continue my experiments to make eight-legged, eight-eyed furry chitinous felines who can spin webs to make silk from for my dwarves. If there's a single thing dwarf fortress history has lacked, so far, it's probably a thermonuclear spidercatsplosion.
Option 2: be forgetful! Yes, I'll just forget that I didn't have an item via the convenient magic of memory editing. Except: it's dangerous, can harm your computer, isn't foolproof, and can't produce finished cloth. Apparently, unless I'm willing to randomly guess, all I can do so far is change starting point values and terrain squares.
Option 3: Despairing for the life of my dwarf, and nearing my self-imposed deadline for stopping DF to go do something else, I started closing tabs to the wiki -- when I saw a blasé little mention in a cheat page on the wiki about "free gems" from a smelter. I noticed it used the same item tags I'd learned and (unsuccessfully) tried to use to make a kitten leave behind kitten silk when it died, instead of a corpse. Pop in a little information, and suddenly steel bars can just be pulled out of magma, with thin air and cave spider silk the only byproducts.
Of course, cheaters never prosper...
So now I have this endless supply of steel. Rather than turn it off, I get to thinking: I don't really have a military yet, and that's going to hurt me. Lines of traps only go so far, after all: Maybe next time I'll have 1 WIDE fortress entrance and 4 narrow, trap-lined ones. Instead of 4 entrances all big enough for a wagon, each covered in traps in front of a drawbridge... turns out that even though glass doesn't do much damage, 10 or so glass serrated blades in a trap will mangle most goblins who step into it. But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
So I've been learning, and now I can make the fortress I want. Designwise. Th new immigrant wave comes, I draft everyone and set them to sparring. Everyone becomes a Wrestler -- then the human caravan shows up. That usually means trouble, so I set the 7 wrestlers to patrol around the fort. I've since decided that seven is the unluckiest possible number of dwarves to have set out to try and do something.
I'd started a breeding program for war dogs; unfortunately, my previous sheriff had been the only member of the military and had a good few assigned to him, that went with to the grave along with the magma man that interrupted his eating job. My starting woodcutter also had a few assigned to him, and the rest were staked near the central stairs leading down into the fort proper. I tend to build forts like ants build anthills. Anyways. No dogs with the wrestlers; the goblins did kill some of the old sheriff's dogs that didn't die with him.
6 Goblins show up. 6 on seven? With steel armor and 7 dwarves who each have 2 ability modifiers? Easy odds! These guys only have one each. Even if they do have 1... 2... 3 crossbowgobs.
So two of my wrestlers go to investigate. Two. I need to figure out a way to make the squad travel at roughly the same speed; maybe linked doors. They get torn up. I start drafting dwarves with military experience... and who better to lead this new raid than the Mayor, who previously killed 2 of 3 kobold thieves - none of whom stole a thing?
And he gets there, Dodok arrives to save the day, and wrestles a couple of them till they're dead. By now 3 other dwarves have shown up to fight - and they managed to kill a goblin before they get turned into pincushions.
Y'know, 6 goblins isn't terribly much, considering all my engraving and statues have pushed the value of my fortress over a million, was what went through my mind - just as the invaders message came again, and ANOTHER 6 stood up. AMBUSHERS. I didn't know goblins could do that! They punch the mayor so had he goes flying -- and lives long enough to wake up and drown in the bottom of a lake.
So all things considered, my steel exploit didn't help me win. I was using it solely for armor and weapons I wasn't planning on using in traps. Had I gone all-out mining, mechanics, glassmaking, I could've had enough traps to shut everyone inside without a single recruit and just watch the goblins die on my traps.
I might revert to an earlier save -- perhaps one before I cheated, even -- but probably, I'll keep playing this one to see where it goes. I've got plans to create a system of four lookout towers hooked into a massive lavaduqt (ducts need qs to hold liQuid; this ought to be the hotkey if ever long-chain ducts get their own construction class built from tubes), so I can hose off approaching war parties with lava at need. Once I'm walled in below AND above them, there's nowhere they can run!
Levers, after all, are easier to control than squads. I mean, hey, one of mine dumped one of my woodcutters in the moat with no escape, so at least I know it's lethal.
Alright, so, for people who skipped the wall of text, here's what I learned:
*Immigrant dwarves have funny accents.
*Spiderkittens for silk is tough to do right, and also kind of hilariously cute.
*Spidercatsplosions are going to be worth the effort to do, and do right.
*Building a tower to repeatedly throw kittens off to find out the itemcorpse tag doesn't change anything if added after worldgen sucks and all I got were these lousy kitten skull totems.
*Hot and cold spigots for approaching parties is probably an easier solution than a military.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress is HARD. :D (Read 6258 times)