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[Gabeux]

So, I'm pretty new to big projects and stuff that takes more than 100 Z-Levels.
But I'm learning a lot in my current game, and I'd like to know, what was the meanest "individual killing machine"/trap you ever built?
[When you cage a monster, and you can pit them somewhere, etc]

In my previous fortress (that didn't stand much), I made a 10 Z-Level Drop ending in a upward-spear-trap.
All I can experiment with was goblins. They survived the fall and the trap, tried to get to the edge of the map..and when they were really near: dead by blood loss. So tragic.

I'm thinking on building a maze that ends in some hatch-cover-trap, with magma below it.
Or a simple 50 Z-level (or more) pit.

[Shiv]

Not really a trap, but I did make a functioning magma dispenser that could drop, fill, and be drained from any bedroom I so chose, and then recycled back into the initial reservoir (and filled from the initial source to accommodate evaporation).

I guess that'd be my cruelest 'trap' to date.

Noble rooms had two dispensers each.

[Paul]

An obsidian trap. 3x12 enterance hall with two bridges on each end. 3x10 area above it is channeled out with a bridge covering it and a pump on the side to manually refill it with magma when needed. Lever 1 - the bridges on each end raise, sealing up the hallway. Lever 2 - the bridge above it retracts, dropping the magma onto the hallway below. Lever 3 - another bridge above that retracts, dropping water on the magma and solidifying it, instantly killing anything that wouldn't melt while also cleaning up the magma.

Miners come in, mine out the hallway. Engravers smooth the floor again. Pump operators refill the magma and water bridges. Trap is reset.

[Jetsquirrel]

Urist McSolo Cancels siege : Encased in obsidian by Darth Urist

[FreakyCheeseMan]

See, ya'll are just unambitious. Try making a glacial map with a bi-valved ice and magma "heart" to provide your water sources, draining it to 3/7, loosing your goblins into the water and releasing the magma to encase them in ice.

[Pickled Tink]

My meanest trap was a collapse trap.

A 50 tile long 3 wide corridor with a row of pressure plates half way along it. The next floor up was channeled away and above that I would cast 50x3 obsidian slabs (This trap took a very long time to reset). It would be held up by a support and the pressure plates linked to it. A lever did as well for manual activation.

I mainly used this trap on the hidden fun stuff, or as an elaborate kind of mass suicide. I have used smaller versions to crush elven caravans completely flat though. More humourously, when I was just starting and didn't realise a collapse would blow a hole through a floor, doing something like this to the goblins destroyed six stockpiles, half my bedrooms, and took a massive chunk out of the dining room, killing half my forts population. That was very embarrassing. I swept that one under the rug 

Edit: My Tsunami trap is still under construction, but promises to be awesome if I can get it to work.

[Vattic]

See, ya'll are just unambitious. Try making a glacial map with a bi-valved ice and magma "heart" to provide your water sources, draining it to 3/7, loosing your goblins into the water and releasing the magma to encase them in ice.

Indeed, I have done similar.


The smooth icy floor and the ramps at the end of the tunnel are the last things my foes saw.

A video of it in action.

A detailed explanation of it's workings and a refined, but untested, design.

[FreakyCheeseMan]

See, ya'll are just unambitious. Try making a glacial map with a bi-valved ice and magma "heart" to provide your water sources, draining it to 3/7, loosing your goblins into the water and releasing the magma to encase them in ice.

Indeed, I have done similar.


The smooth icy floor and the ramps at the end of the tunnel are the last things my foes saw.

A video of it in action.

A detailed explanation of it's workings and a refined, but untested, design.

Damn that's pretty. All I have to answer it with is the (possibly impossible) trap I envisioned, but never built.

A massive tower pumped full of ice and pumping water along side it, rising out of a glacier, with a crane extending from it to hang over the trench leading into my fortress- with the pull of a lever the water begins to flow, falling away from its warming magma to crash in a landfall-gun on the invading hordes.

[Gabeux]

Woa, great traps here. Lot's of inspiration 
I still need to understand better some game mechanics, so I can start engineering my own.

And that video was awesome, btw!

[JoystickHero]

My traps tend to be very simple. One of the first designs I ever built came up after I read and found out that bridges have a small delay in going up or down. I rarely use this trap any more, because it destroys vaulable goblinite, but it's still a quick and easy "kill damn-near-anything". I build a 4 or 6-wide, however-long tunnel or base entrance, and build two drawbridges inside of it, that retract towards each other. On the front door, I have a pressure plates that activate and deactivate both bridges. Intruder 1 steps on the plate, runs onto the bridge, his buddies follow, and a bunch of them get crushed by the awesome power of twin Dwarven Atom Smashers.

The downside is that having a bunch of goblins run over the plates at once tends to make them mess up, so that's why I have a lever a bit further back that I can put on Pull Lever R. Haven't tried it with caravans yet.

I call it the Large Goblon Collider.

[Neyvn]

The one that I dream to be able to build ISN'T really a Trap, more a Competition for the prisoners. The winner can exit the map and run to freedom (Or not... ke ke ke...)

Comp 1. Race.

Two or more separated lanes with of a good length, maybe 20-30tiles in length. The prisoner's are dropped into individual starting boxes, with a retracting bridge that will extend when the race starts (naturally tested to all extend at the same time). When the race starts they all sprint to a conjoined Staircase that allows and exit from the map, but at the end of the each racing lane is a pressure plate and a cage trap. The Contestants race one another to reach the end, first place triggering the plate causing a bridge to retract and seal the slowpokes in the lanes, the leader and whom ever else makes it gets caught in the cagetrap...

Next something 'FUN' gets released into the Lanes, killing the slowpokes. They lost the race, they lose their lives...

Next Challenge later...

[Ivefan]

I made a long 3 tiles wide corridor with as many grates that could be placed. Using a pump to pressurize the magma so that it fills up from below.
The amount of magma flooding can be adjusted between instakill 7/7 or running torch 1/7 for fun.

[Shadowlord]

A 8 or 10 tile long or so (6-wide) part of my entrance hall which was covered in checkerboard-patterned hatches over a 10-z-level drop directly above the processing department, where each color of the checkerboard was linked to a different output of a repeater, resulting in the two colors of hatches alternately closing and opening. At any given time there would APPEAR to be a path across the hatches for the invading goblins, only to have the hatches open (and the others close) while the goblins were trying to cross, dropping the goblins to their doom.

It was called the Hand of Armok, and it consumed massive amounts of goblins, delivering them infallibly to the processing department, where they shattered into their component parts. The metal items were melted down, the non-metal equipment and clothing were dumped in magma, and the body parts decayed miasmalessly in open air down to bones and skulls, which were then turned into bone bolts and totems by the craftsdwarves.

Not a single goblin dropped by it survived (although some that I manually pitted elsewhere did, interestingly, even though the Hand of Armok dropped a lot more - several hundred, probably, it killed something like 70% of the participants in every siege, before the rest retreated).

How did I keep the dwarves from running across it, you ask? Simple. I had channeled out the entire entrance hall's ceiling all the way back past the Hand of Armok, all the way to the trade depot, so that it was "outdoors", and when the goblins invaded, I set the "dwarves can't go outside" option, and they entrance-danced deep inside next to the trade depot, where they were quite safe inside the fort. Then I flipped the lever which turned on the Hand of Armok's repeater, and the mayhem began. To the goblins, there still appeared to be a path across it at any given time.

The one problem with it was that it used a primitive repeater design, one of the first (might have been the first, I don't remember - I seem to have originated the name, at any rate). It only had one pump, and the two pressure plates did not output signals that were precisely opposite in timing ( http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-281-repeaterinaction from Jan 3 2008 shows an early repeater of mine, although the Hand of Armok was completed by Dec 24 2007, and had a working - if unreliable - repeater by then).

[Rastaan]

You can't go wrong with a pressurised magma-cannon.

Unless you're fighting Fire-Imps.
....Then it can go very very very wrong.

[NFossil]

Replace the water in the mist generator design with magma, which slowly dips enemies in magma until they burn.