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[KenboCalrissian]

21st Malachite, 209, Mid-Summer
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Kyronea, you go-getter!  Training you up on cooking was an excellent plan - and a most profitable one, at that!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Our fortress shall want for nothing - well, except for a taste of those forbidden roasts.  Not quite masterwork quality yet, but getting there!  Now, we could substantially increase our profits by rotating the crops to increase production of sweet pods and whip vine flour, but... wait, but what?  Why shouldn't I do just that??  We already have a wide variety of foods, the profits from the roasts allow us to buy all the food we want from the caravans - not because we're starving, but for the sake of keeping variety in stock - and if the workers ever start to get unhappy, we can let slip a few roasts to get their spirits up.

Ugh, speaking of unhappy dwarves...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A cave spider died in the bestiary, disgusting most of the military and anyone else who sought the peace and comfort of a restrained grizzly bear lately.  A cat probably dragged it in there.  I honestly don't understand how a cave spider can cause that much stink!  It's just a little thing!  Well, if that cat's owner had done the right thing and accepted the cat's gift, this wouldn't happen!  Some people just don't appreciate cats for their aloofness... isn't that right, Astesh, Olin, and... hmm, didn't I have three cats?  Did one die of old age and I didn't notice?  No, of course not.  I'm sure it's perfectly alive somewhere and no harm whatsoever has come to it.  This is most assuredly the case.

I can tell Reg is going to be difficult.  Right now, her mandates include the banning of gold items, picks, and shields, all at the same time.  Picks and shields really don't cut into our market at all, but it's the fact of the matter!  Who does she think she is, waltzing in here and making all these restrictions on what we can and can't export?  The gold item mandate is the worst, but it still doesn't matter with the roasts... come to think of it, thost roasts may very well save our lives in the end... or at least put off our eventual demise.

Oh, and because Asob said so, we're also not allowed to export beds.  Just in case, you know, the fancy takes us.

"Hey, beds are important!  You've seen Somberswallows the Odorous Typhoons, haven't you?  I worked hard on that Garnierite bed..."

"Gah!  Don't do that, Asob!"

"Don't do what?"

"Sneak up on me!  Can't you just, you know, walk?"

"Ok, seriously?  This joke is getting old.  Everybody keeps saying I randomly appear and disappear, but that can't be.  I distinctly recall walking from the dining area all the way to your room several stories below."

"Uh huh.  How many steps did it take you?"

"Only two, no doubt because of my genius work regulating traffic in the tunnels!  I didn't even know I was such an architectural genius like you!"

"I thought you didn't like my architecture?"

"Oh, not at all!  Your magma trap turned out nice."

"'Turned out?  It's finished?!"

"Right on the first of Autumn, too!  Perfect timing!"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There it is!  The upper level of the tower, in all its glory - and look!  All of the vomit cleared away with the passing of the seasons! 

Regrettably, there are a large number of garish floors sticking out of the sides of the contraption.  This was the only way I could get the walls in place without letting the dwarves trap themselves.  I had once asked that the floors be removed after use, but guess where the dwarves wanted to stand to remove them?  That's right... on the side that the floors were meant to prevent them from getting stuck on!  On the other hand, they might actually promote the spreading of magma in a way, so maybe it's not all bad.  If they get annoying, we'll have to go to the trouble of building stairs up to them to remove them.

[The Architect]

Have you seen that recent magma trap posting? I can dig it up if you haven't; the gist of the thing is that the invaders are allowed to flood into the entrance and then closed in, where magma is instantly flooded and instantly removed with no standing pools and no waste. It's quite beautiful, and integrates in a 3-wide entrance.

[Quietust]

"Hey, beds are important!  You've seen Somberswallows the Odorous Typhoons, haven't you?  I worked hard on that Galena bed..."

I thought it was made of Garnierite, not Galena.

[KenboCalrissian]

Have you seen that recent magma trap posting? I can dig it up if you haven't; the gist of the thing is that the invaders are allowed to flood into the entrance and then closed in, where magma is instantly flooded and instantly removed with no standing pools and no waste. It's quite beautiful, and integrates in a 3-wide entrance.

Yeah, I saw that!  Incredibly jealous, I am.  I haven't toyed around with dwarven engineering nearly enough to come up with something like that on my own.  My magma trap's just going to make a smokey mess out of a quarter of the map for good times and pancakes.

"Hey, beds are important!  You've seen Somberswallows the Odorous Typhoons, haven't you?  I worked hard on that Galena bed..."

I thought it was made of Garnierite, not Galena.

Ugh, I was thinking of Garnierite while I typed Galena.  Must have been a brain odorous typhoon. 

[Pandarsenic]

Advice for deconstructing floors - designate a wall to be built on the square they're not to stand on and suspend it, then designate the deconstruction. They won't stand on the suspended construction spot.

[Thief^]

Advice for deconstructing floors - designate a wall to be built on the square they're not to stand on and suspend it, then designate the deconstruction. They won't stand on the suspended construction spot.

That doesn't work over constructed floors, unfortunately. You can't build walls on a constructed floor. For no apparent reason.

[Quietust]

Advice for deconstructing floors - designate a wall to be built on the square they're not to stand on and suspend it, then designate the deconstruction. They won't stand on the suspended construction spot.

That only works when building; it doesn't work at all when removing constructions or when digging.
One other possibility would be to build a door on the tile, lock it, then order the floor removed from beneath it, though this could end up with the door deconstructing (either upon removal of the floor, or afterwards during cleanup) onto the wrong side of the gap.

[The Architect]

This problem is the reason people use scaffolding in addition to careful planning.

[KenboCalrissian]

The weird part is, somewhere near the end of construction, my dwarves suddenly changed their mind - rather than the classic "West > North > South > East" (I might have South and East reversed), they randomly decided they preferred "East > South > North > West," even going as far as walking through the designated tile to be on the East side, hence the additional floor on the right side at the bottom.

[Quietust]

Looking at the picture of the magma trap, I'm not entirely certain what's supposed to happen when you turn it on.

Is the magma supposed to flow into the passages underneath and then bubble up through the holes visible in the picture? Because if it is, I'm fairly certain it won't, since pump pressure will never push a fluid above the pump itself.

[Grendus]

I ran into the same problem when I was building my obsidian farm. Between dwarves not deconstructing things from diagonals (or they will, but there has to be a pathable orthagonal place where they could have deconstructed it) and cave ins it's very hard to get rid of those. The only ways to get rid of it are to either build a secondary path for deconstruction (which then has to be deconstructed itself) or a scaffold (which also has to be deconstructed, but breaks down faster). What did you need the walls for in the first place though, just curious, and why would doors not have worked just as well for magma? Currently, if magma doesn't enter their square doors don't deconstruct.

Another, albeit dangerous, option would be to deconstruct the orthagonal walls holding the floors up. That will cave the floors in, then you can rebuild the wall and be done. You may lose a worker or two to science though, cave ins have a tendency to suck nearby dwarves in.

[KenboCalrissian]

Is the magma supposed to flow into the passages underneath and then bubble up through the holes visible in the picture? Because if it is, I'm fairly certain it won't, since pump pressure will never push a fluid above the pump itself.

Even when there's a lot of it and it has nowhere else to go?  Uh oh... Well, we'll see soon enough if it needs a bit of a redesign.  If you're right, then hopefully all I need to do is add a couple more pumps, possibly another windmill, and pressure the magma from above.  There's no other way for me to accomplish this since I don't have access to bauxite.

[The Architect]

"West > North > South > East"

This is a common misconception that is passed around on our forums way too much. Dwarves actually choose their positions based on reference points within a block (the big sections of your map) that happen to have this general effect. The general order is anything but a rule. You can't trust it to always start from the northwest, the bottom, or any other place, but once you have an understanding of the reference points on your map then you can generally predict its behavior. Your construction either spans multiple blocks or encompasses one of these reference points (judging from your description).

[Quietust]

Is the magma supposed to flow into the passages underneath and then bubble up through the holes visible in the picture? Because if it is, I'm fairly certain it won't, since pump pressure will never push a fluid above the pump itself.

Even when there's a lot of it and it has nowhere else to go?

Pumps only push liquids forward and downward, never upward. When you think about it, it makes sense - after all, a screw pump is just an Archimedes screw, so it doesn't really have the ability to impart that sort of pressure.

[KenboCalrissian]

Then I have no choice but to make a huge production out of what will most assuredly be a spectacular failure.