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[Vercingetorix]

Between the abundant bit. coal/lignite and wood, it hasn't been too difficult.  It seems like there's some better task prioritization in DF 2010 that makes it easier to keep the production chain going; with a couple of good haulers and fairly thick forests it's no problem to keep plenty of wood on hand, not just for fuel but for potash/pearlash as well as furniture/barrels/bins (although there's so much iron on some of these maps that I can get by just smelting it to make them).

I also took advantage of digging in to the cavern to eke out a large amount of sand/soil on the surface level, so I've got a pretty nice mushroom forest/gatherable plant farm growing.  I'm not sure whether muddying it would make a difference in the growth rates but it's been moving fairly quickly as is.

[Squirrelloid]

I've been experimenting with Magma screw pumps, and I don't think glass or metal is necessary. My tower isn't complete, but I have tested with some of the screw pumps being pumped manually, and the wooden corkscrews and pipe sections seem to hold out. So long as it holds out for 120 z-levels, I'm fine.

Do you have temp turned off maybe? Well, in 40d the length of time wooden pumps held out was really variable- in locations that were already hot they would burn up before you could get magma ~20 tiles through a channel but in other places people could fill up a pool without any of them deconstructing.

In 40d non-magma safe materials only failed (as a pump) if you let magma get on the back half of the pump.  Ie, if you build it right, there will never be a problem.

[AtomicPaperclip]

Given the absolutely stupid amount of coal/lignite on maps, I didn't realize it was an issue. . .

It's either super-abundant or none. I'm playing a map right now that doesn't have any sedimentary stone, I don't even have sand.

[monk12]

When I embark on an area with sedimentary rock, coke is abundant. When I don't, the metal industry falters. I think that next version I'll try to wrap my head around worldgen and design some parameters for many volcanoes and thinner maps overall.

[Lmaoboat]

You can set the number of cavern layers to 1 or zero, and have lava a lot closer to the surface.

[Urist McDepravity]

I use 50-levels-total maps.
Plus there are magma pipes in the caverns, so its less than 20 levels to the magma.

[Shadowfury333]

I've been experimenting with Magma screw pumps, and I don't think glass or metal is necessary. My tower isn't complete, but I have tested with some of the screw pumps being pumped manually, and the wooden corkscrews and pipe sections seem to hold out. So long as it holds out for 120 z-levels, I'm fine.

Do you have temp turned off maybe? Well, in 40d the length of time wooden pumps held out was really variable- in locations that were already hot they would burn up before you could get magma ~20 tiles through a channel but in other places people could fill up a pool without any of them deconstructing.

In 40d non-magma safe materials only failed (as a pump) if you let magma get on the back half of the pump.  Ie, if you build it right, there will never be a problem.

I should clarify. The corkscrew and pipe components are wood, the block is stone, usally Dolomite or Quartzite (magma-safe), but a granite block one has lasted for two years. The pumps are set up like so

Code: [Select]

..OOO
_%%7O
..OOO
Alternating at each level.

Also, heat is on, if Arena and the [TEMPERATURE:YES] in the init file is anything to go by. I haven't tried frying any dwarves yet.

[Skippy]

In the old version I used to deforest the entire map to get enough fuel just for equipping  a dozen dwarves with suits of iron, nevermind steel. Luckily, now I'm sitting on a ton of bituminous coal so there's no problem now.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Well so far I cant mine out a vein of coal without bumping into a vein of something else.  On one level I dug a 1 wide path North, South, East and West to the map edge - West hit a bituminous coal and 2 lignite veins.  The coal vein led through a magnetite cluster ().  South hit a coal and I found another lignite following an ore vein that south also hit.  East hit some tetra and possibly a lignite, I forgot.  North was fail and all I hit was Spahlerite and gems. 

So I currently have a pretty solid supply of coal, so much so that I haven't cut down a tree in a year or two, just because elfwood and zinc bins and infinite barrels from the dwarves and humies has been plenty so far.  Its certainly way more work then just setting up a magma plumbing, but hey thats what dwarves are for. 

[Shoku]

I've been experimenting with Magma screw pumps, and I don't think glass or metal is necessary. My tower isn't complete, but I have tested with some of the screw pumps being pumped manually, and the wooden corkscrews and pipe sections seem to hold out. So long as it holds out for 120 z-levels, I'm fine.

Do you have temp turned off maybe? Well, in 40d the length of time wooden pumps held out was really variable- in locations that were already hot they would burn up before you could get magma ~20 tiles through a channel but in other places people could fill up a pool without any of them deconstructing.

In 40d non-magma safe materials only failed (as a pump) if you let magma get on the back half of the pump.  Ie, if you build it right, there will never be a problem.

No, as I said wood pumps would deconstruct at differing rates. Check it out on several maps and you will see the materials take damage from pumping magma.

Last time I tried wood pumps I had a typical pump stack with the final output being a 1 wide hall. The top one came apart and after that I lost all the other pumps to backflow but there was no magma creeping around to the front of that first one.

There have been videos of it on the map archive as well just to prove it to people.

There's something in that booze, I swear.
I mean, CRAFTING AN IMAGE OF A HIDDEN MOON IN GROUNDHOG BONE
That should have been a masterpiece.

It's probably not a masterpiece because he hid it with a pair of those glasses that have the big nose and mustache attached.

[Durahk]

You can set the number of cavern layers to 1 or zero, and have lava a lot closer to the surface.

I tried setting the cavern layers to 0 in worldgen, but that ended up removing all plants from the game, so I couldn't embark with plump helmets or even above-ground crops.

[Cerion]

I just dig deep asap, it's an interesting challenge - you can skirt around the upper caverns through pillars, wall them off or build traps to protect the main staircase

The next world I generate will probably have flatter caverns than default though to reduce the annoyance of scrolling through all those z-levels though (and reduce the number of fights that end up taking place on the stairs, which I hate)

[random51]

For many of us in 2.0 we reached a point were we wouldn't even CONSIDER playing on a map unless there was an esaily reached magma pipe.  So within the first year we would an inexhaustable supply of Smelters and Magma Forges  while All wood on the map could be turned over to the important and vital "Four Bs"
Beds
Barrels
Bins
Buckets

Now however... NOW We must dig down almost 50 to 60 Z levels, through 3 Underground worlds before reaching Magma.  And then, unless oyu are REALLY good with mgma pumps, you end up having to rebuild a fort down their so people don't die of thirst or hunger from the trip up and down.

SO I am curious, how is everyone coping at having to WORK for our magma now?

You make it sound much more difficult than it really is. Here is how I do it:

Step #1, find the middlemost point of the map on the 1st z-level down from the surface. Do a 2x2 up/down staircase for the first 8 levels.  This is where I put most of my fortress.  Centrally located so nothing is very far away, at least horizontally.  I play on 2x2 embarks, btw, so this 2x2 staircase puts a stairwell in each of the 4 tiles.

Step #2 next level down, dig 2x2 up staircase, then dig out 1 wall around that, making a 4x4 room with 4 up staircases in the middle.

Step #3 Dig 4 diagonal drifts, one in each corner, make them 4 or 5 units deep.

Step #4 put a door in the first tile of each diagonal drift. If something gets out of control at the bottom of one of the shafts all you have to do is close that door and build a wall on the fort side of it. The stone stockpile insures ready stone and situated where it is it shouldn't be more than 20-25 steps for an idle dwarf to get there and seal it up.  I've never had to do this, btw.  Every time I've breached a cave system with an up/down stairwell I've been able to seal off and work around at the dig face instead of up top.

Step #5 put a 4 tile stone stockpile in stair well room, on top of the up staircases.

Step #6 one at a time, dig a staircase to the bottom of the map at the end of each of your diagonal drifts. These drifts are to uncover the cavern systems, at least those parts of them near the center of the map.  If you break into one, go back up a layer, dig out to the side and build a floor over the staircase, immediately sealing it up.  If your miner is set to mason and you use a temp burrow you can have the miner who did the work seal it right back up.  Use the stone from the digging or the stone in the 4 stone stockpile back in the stairwell.

Step #7  The first shaft might uncover enough for you to find a nice, safe route to go top to bottom with your pump stack.  If not, repeat step #6 with each of the other drifts.  You'll uncover everything in the center of the map and be able to pick the best place to put your pumpstack.

Step #8  Once you pick the location for the stack, make a room at the very bottom with access to magma, use the usual channel methods to get magma through a fortification so that you can build a temporary forge/smelter down there.  Make a stockpile for your iron ore, build your smelter and forge, and start smelting ore, forging pipe sections and corkscrews.  You can stick a mason workshop down there too or use one up top and just cart your blocks down.

Step #9 While the forge area is getting setup have your miners dig out each layer of the pumpstack, your engravers smooth the stone, and your haulers remove the rubble.  Don't dig the channel tiles for a particular level until it is entirely smoothed or you might block access to one or more tiles for the engravers.

Step #10 Build your pumps from the bottom up once each level is complete.

While all this is going on you can have your carpenters/architects also building a windmill farm to power the stack.

[Psieye]

v0.31 makes you re-evaluate the reason why you got magma addicted in the first place. Do you simply not like having to setup a fuel production line (by trees or coal) and putting some dwarves on that work? Or is it because coal and metal used to be so scarce in the previous versions, that you needed the magma to save on all the resources you could and to make use of the 'renewable' source of iron (goblin equipment, metal items bought from traders)?

The abundance of ore and coal means you don't need to recycle metal so much until the endgame. Wood is also much more plentiful than before thanks to the caverns and since it's easy to get underground water with those caverns, growing your own wood (after you've got some metal-geared soldiers) is also a staple you can do on nearly every map (provided you didn't do something extreme in the worldgen). So for me, I don't need magma anymore to get started with my metal (and glass) industry - I'll eventually get down to the magma but it's not so urgent that I must rush for it.


Mind you, if you want magma for other purposes, like moats, obsidian production and mass-cleansing loose stones, you're still gonna need to build that pump tower. But if you wanted magma for all those reasons, chances are you'd have spent time getting to know how to move it around efficiently anyway.

[Zaranthan]

<snip>
All wood on the map could be turned over to the important and vital "Four Bs"
Beds
Barrels
Bins
Buckets

<snip>

SO I am curious, how is everyone coping at having to WORK for our magma now?

With the current supplies of coke and iron, my four Bs are Beds, Beds, Beds, and Beds. Anything that can be made from stone, is. Everything else is either iron or a bed. If I get a flux layer, then everything is STEEL. Because I CAN.

It's a bit ridiculous. I've started importing rock crystal for my noble quarters.