Print

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

[Martin]

I'm doing some testing on an idea that may be useful for the next version when gremlins make their mischevious return. I needed to develop a failsafe airlock system - not one that can protect against water, just against pathing.

The setup uses doors and hatch covers. These were selected because both have an instant reaction time to levers, so the dwarf pulling the lever has no ability to leave the lever tile before the door or hatch trigger. And hatches and doors have inverse effects on a lever - when the lever is off, doors block passage, but hatch covers allow passage across an open tile. When the lever is on, doors open allowing passage, but hatch covers open blocking passage across an open tile.

Consider a room that only one dwarf should enter:

+ wall
H hatch
D door
L lever

    +        +
+++++        +++++
 HLDH        HDLH
+++++        +++++
    +        +


The red lever on the left hooks to the red features, the white lever on the right to the white features. Both levers hook to the brown features.

When a dwarf approaches from the left and pulls the red lever, the brown hatches open blocking all access to the white lever but allowing the same dwarf to pull the red one. The red door opens and the dwarf can enter the room. On the way out, he pulls the red lever again, closing access to the room to him, allowing passage back out to where he started, and opening access to the white lever. Even if another dwarf is standing on the white lever, he can't get to the room, even if he pulls the white lever after the red one is pulled.

If a fortress wanted to protect against a mischievous gremlin, this idea can be expanded to require two lever pulls to gain access to a lever room, or to keep a dwarf sealed inside the room to pull levers with no risk of harm from the outside. It is also useful for certain dangerous contraptions when lever order is critical. Obsidian farms, for instance, when pumps are powered shouldn't allow the lever to release magma into the chamber to be pullable when the dwarf mining access is open.

The arrangement scales up so that you could have 3, 4, more approaches to the same room, each one connecting to the same pattern of doors and hatches so that only one dwarf can enter and blocking access to all others. This could allow for some interesting arrangements for adventurers.

[Viprince]

I'm not familiar with gremlins but I know they pull levers. I don;t see what's stopping a gremlin using the system as a dwarf would and get out the other way fine. I can even see em take over the air lock and just mill around the airlock, blocking access to your dwarves. Am I misunderstanding how gremlin's interact with levers?

[Martin]

The thinking with gremlins is that you make access to a lever room a variant of what I describe here such that one lever gets pulled trapping that individual but opening access to a 2nd lever for a different dwarf to pull that would release the first dwarf. That lever then opens access to the room and you then reverse the process for the 2nd dwarf to get out. Unless you had two gremlins coordinating, they'd never get to the lever room, and if a gremlin got to the first lever and got trapped they'd be an easy target for a marksdwarf to shoot over the open tile.

[Viprince]

Righto my bad I was misunderstanding the process. I had 1 individual unit in my head operating this system. This does pose the problem of keeping a dwarf on both sides of the airlock at all times but fortress design can easily get around that.

Clever

[Sysice]

Nice. You could combine it with suicide levers for extra protection.

Both can concievably be gotten around, but together they are pretty good.

[Itnetlolor]

That will work great for puzzle ruins anyone would be willing to put their adventurers though.

[The Architect]

It would work very well as a puzzle. It seems like a great addition to an adventurer labyrinth.

I have to say that I see it as a very inefficient method of airlocking gremlins and other creatures out of your important areas. You should simply have a single lever room with a bridge/hatch entrance (anything but a locked door) and a hole in the roof. House a couple of official dwarf lever pullers inside with whatever they may need (including alternate workshops to keep them busy when you don't need levers pulled), and station guards at the door when its airlock needs to be opened to install new levers.

It would be much better to remotely control all of your airlocks centrally this way than have any levers at all accessible at your actual airlocks. Cages should be stored similarly in their own secure area with input and output in the form of dwarf dumping elevators (to put cages into storage or remove them).

I plan to set up a centralized lever control area, with my usual system of airlocks segmenting the fortress. With the new burrows system, I'll have outdoor workers separate from the fortress and inputting through dwarf dumping elevators (holes in the floor). When a new area is explored and conquered, a new airlock and corresponding lever will be installed in the central control room.

Alternately if you prefer on-the-site levers for your airlocks, you can have lots of Fun with the gremlins.

[Khym Chanur]

How about this:

+: wall
D: door
L: lever
C: channeled open space
B: single square bolt stockpile, accepting no bins
X: single square crossbow stockpile, accepting no bins
G: single square floor grate stockpile
S: station point for crossbowman

   ++++++
++++LLLL+
.DLDLLLL+
.+C+LLLL+
..S++++++
.BXG+
+++++

Entering from the left and heading for the control room on the right, the gremlin pulls the leftmost lever and gets trapped between the two doors and the open space.  Draft the nearest dwarf into being a crossbowman, who'll go pick up the nearby crossbow and ammo.  Take potshots at the gremlin until it dies, then place the nearby floor grate onto the open space so you can cross it and pull the lever to open the doors again.

Of course, this both assumes that level-pullers pull the first lever they come across, and that there are no level-pulling monsters which can either fly or use distance attacks.

[The Architect]

Pretty neat trap. You could install similar things to catch gremlins out where you expect them to spawn/inhabit, but given the uncertainty of what we know about them I would definitely use an airtight entrance on the main lever room. We will probably all make extensive use of the new guard rotation to protect our vital areas.

Bars are not arrow-proof, or a fortification could work. Safer than a channel if we do have flying creatures with the [MISCHEVIOUS] tag.

[wagawaga]

The problem concerning [MISCHIEVOUS] enemies using ranged attacks does not exists, because fireballs and webs will only be shot if the creature can path to the crossbowdwarf.

The true proble is that nothing forbids the gremlin to pull that lever a second time, allowing free access to the lever room and causing the end of the world.

One possible workaround could be the resettable plate idea from the wiki, which when linked to a lever "disables" the said lever until a second one is pulled.

[The Architect]

I thought there were pathing updates in the new version, but maybe I pulled that out of my arse.

[alway]

You could always construct a moderate number of gremlin traps around your entrance.

_____
  L|        _=floor |=support L=lever

[Khym Chanur]

The true proble is that nothing forbids the gremlin to pull that lever a second time, allowing free access to the lever room and causing the end of the world.

Oh, right.  Darn.

[NRN_R_Sumo1]

Are they capturable in cage traps? I think I might need to capture some and make a maze with levers involved.

[The Architect]

They will set off your cage traps without being caught, according to the development log.

It seems there are all kinds of ways you can stop gremlins, if you could depend on them to go after certain levers. My trap would probably include a lever and support (for a cave-in dust cloud) surrounded by a channel dropping the creature onto cage traps that are otherwise inaccessible.

Unconscious and stunned creatures trigger traps, after all.