Print

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

[Halceon]

Wait... i miasma becomes radiation, then every living thing in the area subsits on pitchblende as its main ood source?

[darkflagrance]

Dwarven metropolis. 

I'd reached somewhere around 9,000 blocks before I stopped. 


It still haunts me.

You should just use it as is: a city built on dreams and ideals foundered against the rocks of reality. The elite have fled, and the half-finished skeleton of the city has been given over to the scum of the masses, such as the peasant workers too poor to leave, and the mobs that have sprung up both to survive in the lawless world and to prey off the weak while protecting themselves from the strong.

In the unplanned, sprawling, maze-like, and filthy underlevels of this premature freak of a city live most of its populace, sighing and wondering about what the city might look like if the upper levels had not been surrendered to apathy.

You might want to atom smash excess items and turn off temp and weather in the process.

[Jake]

Two in the same fortress, both of them sadly never completed: A swimming pool and a fallout shelter.

The Swimming Pool:
This was actually the end result of another unsuccessful project, an experiment to see if dropping a whole cluster of magnetite down a z-level would break it up into bitesize, ready-to-smelt chunks without wastage. One z-level didn't do the trick, and trying again with another cluster and a few more levels would have taken so much digging that I'd have had all my miners up to Legendary anyway, so I dropped the idea. (Anyone know how far I'd have to drop it to pull it off, if it's possible at all?)
Anyway, I now found myself with an exceptionally large hole at the base of a vertical cliff. After experimenting with using it as a holding tank for my horde of dogs and puppies (cages as they currently work are a bit of an immersion-breaker for me) and finding it only made the FPS even worse, I turned my attention to the thought of turning it into an artificial lake.
Then I looked at the cliff, and thought to myself, "that would be a seriously badass way to train swimming in adventure mode, if only I could get right out over the water..."
It all kind of snowballed from there. First I cleared the bottom of stone and dug out a deep end, then I added a 'filtration system'; two pumps keeping a constant flow of water to and from the brook to stop it getting stagnant, with provision to drain it completely if something sank to the bottom. A couple of diving boards -two wooden floor tiles- were built into the side of the cliff face, with steps leading up beside them next to a 'pool ladder'. I would have built a junior diving platform over the shallow end, but circumstances intervened.

The Bunker: This one also came about by pure happenstance. I'd dug in from the top of a hill and started working my way down, and I pondered the best means of building a well inside the fortress, given my relative inexperience, for about five minutes before I said "screw pumps". *rimshot*
Instead, I sank a staircase down to the level of the brook before excavating a cistern. As an afterthought I dug a long corridor out the side of the hill to provide my fisherdwarves with a shortcut... and hit a magnetite cluster.
So now I have this huge empty cavern in the basement that's too far from everywhere else to be worth using as a stockpile, and every other mineral seam is already being turned into an art gallery so why not try something new?
It started out as a mere panic room, a place to have everyone congregate during sieges; a few beds, a dining area and a food/booze stockpile behind some reassuringly solid iron floodgates. But the fortress stayed small but prosperous (I set the population cap at sixty and got lucky with a couple of strange moods early on) and I found myself with nothing much else that needed doing, so I ended up with plans for nothing less than a self-sufficient fortress within a fortress. Its own farms, an indoor fishing area, a selection of workshops and stored raw materials for moods... I'd just got to the point of wondering if I could import enough lead for complete radiation shielding when a fatal flaw in my planning became obvious.
This bunker was what I'd been doing instead of training a proper military, and all I had was the six marksdwarves of the Fortress Guard. On the other hand, I had mining enabled for every single dwarf except woodcutters and a couple whose skills I needed round the clock, so I should have weathered the first siege without major trouble... if my weaponsmith hadn't withdrawn from society for a few weeks whilst he worked on a war hammer forged from solid gold, which could have bought out that year's dwarven caravan all by itself. Its creator was among the many, many casualties of the first invasion, at which point I lost heart and abandoned the moment he was decently buried.

[Sysice]

This thread is made of so much win, my stories cannot be shared. They are pitiful.

To the drawing board! Away!

[Lord Dakoth]

This is the chronicles of "Beergut," my ridiculous "F*** The World" fort. In comic form.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Gergination]

Well...I definitely bit off more than I could chew with this megaproject.

I have a volcano, sand, trees, and an aquifer.

I had 53 (I think) levels of mountain to work with.  Here's the plan:

1.  Dig out and collapse 20 z-levels simultaneously.
2.  Flood the bottom level with magma, then turn it all into obsidian
3.  Do this for all 20 z-levels so I have a massive hunk of obsidian
4.  Carve out an entire dwarven city with these features
A castle made entirely of steel with magma falling down/over the walls
A natural looking river that winds along an edge of the city with organic looking farmlands edging it.
Stalagmites, Stalactites, and columns that are fully engraved both inside and outside that feel organic and serve as many dwarves homes.
All other many of fantastic things.
5.  Next, level off the top levels of the map so that I have approximately 30 z levels to work with.
6.  Flood the first couple z levels of the world with magma so that I have a massive lake of magma
7.  Build a frame about 5 levels above this lake
8.  Fill the frame up with magma and make a couple layers of obsidian.
9.  Construct a massive above ground city with these features
A massive clear glass tower surrounded by a water moat with 4 waterfalls from the top into the moat coming out of each side.
A temple made of engraved obsidian with flying buttresses and magmafalls between each buttresses
A natural winding river with a gigantic waterfall.
A system that pumps magma into the chunk of obsidian all this rests on that would dump magma out of holes periodically into the magma lake.

Essentially any visitors would enter the map and see a gigantic block with magma pouring out everywhere.  They would cross the lake along a bridge and enter through a carved mouth with magma pouring out of the eyes.  It would look hellish but the fortress would have extravagant things.

I worked on this project for 31 dwarf years.  My population was 393 dwarves.  I dug out 5 full z-levels on a 6x6 map.  I would have took it to completion had the next update not been so close to being released.  I'm going to do this still, on the next release.

[random51]

This wasn't massive, but it was pretty stupid.

Long ago when I first tried out siege engineering I learned the trick of putting a wall a few units away from the training catapults and putting a channel in front of the wall. This prevents most of the ammo(stone) from getting destroyed.

So a year later I'm building the same sorts of siege training areas and I forget that ammo destroys itself without that channel.  I decide that this is a good way to get rid of the stone otherwise.  I take that channel down about 20 layers and pull magma all the way across the map so that the stone falls down 20 layers into the magma and melts. The end result being that training everybody in siege operation slowly clears the map of stone but does so without interfering with refuse dumping of miasma creating items.

I could have just filled in that first channel instead, lol.

[darthbob88]

Tried my hand at obsidian casting once, making a 10x10x5 pyramid outside my fortress.  Lost more dwarves just on that project than I did on most goblin sieges. Now I'll stick with constructions for my megaprojects, like the large steel pyramid, built from steel melted from the armour of invading foes and topped with a masterwork statue, same material and source.

[denito]

I could have just filled in that first channel instead, lol.

Sure but would it totally rock as much as the way you did it?  Magma is somehow even more awesome when it's completely gratuitous.

[atomicthumbs]

Not really a "mega" project, but I tried to pump out my brook so I could install floodgates in it, in case I needed to flood the valley my fortress is in the side of.

The pumps turned on before my mechanic was finished connecting the gear assemblies to a lever, and I ended up with a muddy brook and lots of muddy trees. Also tower caps grow outside now for some reason.

[ungulateman]

All of them.

I'm building a completely pointless tower around my entrance. 5 or 6 dwarves are already stuck on the second Z-level.

Fun!

[The Mad Engineer]

Once I embarked on a flat map to create a moving avatar of death, thereby cementing my name in the collective memory of DF players:

A tank forged out of drawbridges.

The plan was simple.  Pave the surface level of the map with drawbridges.  Mine out a z level directly below the surface (You probably already did this in order to get the stone for the drawbridges).  Pave that level with pressure plates.  Link the pressure plates to the drawbridges directly above them.

Finally, when a siege comes, draft one of your guys as a "driver", and order him to patrol an area of pressure plates below the invading army.

The result would theoretically be what appears to be a moving wall of bridges coming to crush anything that stands in its way, while its controller takes a nice stroll through the safe underground.

Unfortunately, I realized that it would take an ungodly amount of stone, the linking menu is designed so that I would have to force myself into carpal tunnel syndrome paging through all the drawbridges until I got to the one I wanted, and (brace yourself for undwarfly thoughts) it would be easier to just link all the drawbridges up to one lever and purge the map in one go.

Also, 1x1 drawbridges look the same whether raised or lowered.  A better visual effect would have been with floodgates, which would have been on a whole other level of linking hell and can't crush invaders under their advancing wheels. 
Still, animation in DF is possible, which can lead to cool siege door effects and moving gears or analog clock displays.  But a tank is infeasable...

[kyazr]

My least necessary project were my *color* towers. Through which I sacrificed to the various gods different things. All the towers went from top Z to bottom Z, something around 30 floors. The crimson tower was dedicated to evil forces. In this fortress I had every entrance to my fortress surrounded by 30+ cage traps, seiges were easy to defeat. Any captured forces were thrown down the crimson tower. Extra animals were thrown down the green tower, dedicated to nature. Water was thrown down the cyan tower, dedicated to water and air. And finally stone was thrown down the white tower dedicated to the purity of the mountain I dug into. After the construction of the green tower I never used a butcher shop again.

P.S. I'm pretty sure the king's bed was accidentally placed on the crimson tower too, but I lost my save-file pretty soon after that, so I don't remember if the king had "fallen" down the shaft.

[NRN_R_Sumo1]

Building a fortress entirely out of water. (Yes Water)

It's possible to make the walls via massive floodgate useage and mechanisms.

I actually ran out of stone at one point, was really weird.

No... how I did it was I filled up the stacks then hooked them to a lever, then pulled the lever.
Its a bug in the way water logic works, I found out about it in an interview some game company did with tarn a while back.

Wow, I bet that was a nightmare when the tantrums hit...

"ANGRY!!!!!!!" *grabs floodgate* "Nebol! NOOOOOO!!!!!!"

The solution to this would be to put separate floodgates every few tiles (10-20, depending on how lucky you're feeling, punks). And also, this isn't really a fortress made of water, but a fortress with water in the walls (radiation shielding). Maybe someone should mod miasma to be called radiation and have only certain types of walls block radiation. Someone do this please. Maybe figure out a way to have it make you grow extra limbs. That would be so epic. Imagine fighting elves with your strange mutant dwarves.

it Was actually walls made of water, it's a bug in the way water logic works.
You Can effectively make a column of water by using large ammounts of flood gates.

[immibis]

<quotes removed>

The solution to this would be to put separate floodgates every few tiles (10-20, depending on how lucky you're feeling, punks). And also, this isn't really a fortress made of water, but a fortress with water in the walls (radiation shielding). Maybe someone should mod miasma to be called radiation and have only certain types of walls block radiation. Someone do this please. Maybe figure out a way to have it make you grow extra limbs. That would be so epic. Imagine fighting elves with your strange mutant dwarves.

it Was actually walls made of water, it's a bug in the way water logic works.
You Can effectively make a column of water by using large ammounts of flood gates.

Wouldn't that be two layers of walls made of floodgates, with water in between, though?