My entry is
Undercastle, Mountainhome of the Dwarven people.
The inspiration for this fort was actually the outdoor cleaning bug. My previous outdoor forts always ended up as bloodbaths, so I decided to try my hand at a subterranean fort. However I also really like building castles, so I decided to combine the two goals and create a subterranean castle. The result was Undercastle, a below ground castle with walls mined out of solid rock. I don't think I ended up doing any construction at all for the castle walls - it's all natural terrain. The throne room came later, once I'd finished the main fort and built the infrastructure necessary to drain enough of the magma sea to construct a submerged throne room.
Further rambling about main fort:
All up, I mined out a solid 6-7 z-levels of stone for the indoor 'sky' and 'wall' levels, and the majority of several other levels for stockpiles, the moat, etc. Most of the stone excavated was atom smashed using localized atom smashers, except for about 20000 of it which went to pave the surface (yes, pave the surface... no more evil grass or trees).
Once the walls and the castle proper were complete, I flooded both the inside courtyard and the outside of the walls to muddy them. The result was a pleasant vomit colored forest springing up inside and around the fort. Originally I had some sand from a higher (mined out) surface level collapsed down to serve as a sand supply, but once trees and shrubs started to grow they left behind sand of their own so that proved unnecessary.
Early on, elephants and grizzly bears were used as the main source of food (mostly bears though - elephants are a pain to use for food for a number of reasons). Booze came from traders and a small farming industry. Later on, a large portion of food came from the 2nd caverns level (lots of crundles - military was having fun).
All pets were eventually purged from the fort using a variety of means (most of which were pointy). The majority of the pets went to a better place in the great pet purge of 1056, but a few pets lingered on and eventually died of old age. Around the same time I capped my population because it was getting excessive (my fps was averaging 10-20).
The plumbing for the fort is rather interesting and uses pump driven water pressure to push water upwards in many places. In fact, this is how the central courtyard was originally flooded (the central pond became a fountain), and how the central pond maintains its water level.
Workshops and storage room all exist under the castle itself, while the walls are devoted to training and bedrooms. The magma forges are powered by magma pumped up via pump tower from the magma sea. The obsidian factory on the workshop level went through several redesigns - mostly due to problems with the original bridge based design (you apparently can't dig out floor from under a bridge which was created as a result of obsidian creation - oops).
Artifacts were turned on until mid way through the life of the fort when I ran out of shells. I could theoretically have obtained shells from turtles from the surface pools, but I'd since floored them over and THE SURFACE IS EVIL AND MUST BE PAVED. *cough*. For a while I was obtaining shells via the frequent snail men which wandered around on the surface, but my military exhausted that supply in short order. 36 artifacts was enough either way (the large dug out areas meant many, many artifacts).
I ended up with a substantial amount of ore from the castle construction (see above), so used a chunk of it in the construction of my throne room (the entire throne room is constructed from gold and black bronze). I'd decided early on to submerge the throne room in the magma sea, but this first necessitated draining the sea sufficiently to begin construction.
Draining the sea was accomplished by digging down to the lowest levels of the sea and installing magma smashers in several locations. The magma smashers are powered by good ol' manual lever action - somewhat nerve racking at times given the dwarven propensity to attend parties (and thus stop pulling the "don't drown all my metalsmiths in magma" lever). I only lost 2 (or 3?) dwarves setting up the smashers, and that was mostly due to forgetting to lock some very unsafe doors (dwarves apparently think pathing through glowing red hot doors is an awesome idea).
I opted to use constructed supports to suspend the throne room as I planned to re-submerge the throne room once construction was finished. There was a magma man running (swimming?) around and it would have been a bit embarrassing to have the throne room supports destroyed unexpectedly (Magma men are building destroyers).
The throne room is only accessible while the sea is drained (via lever), and then only when the bridge to it is extended (via another lever). I considered connecting the throne room via sealed walkway, but having the throne room suspended from the side didn't seem in the spirit of the competition. The furniture materials were chosen to match with the color of the floor. The pattern used for the floor and ceiling should be obvious.
Huge screenshot of my throne room. This shows the inside (left) and ceiling/support levels (right):
Further image showing the ceiling/support level while the throne room is in the process of being reclaimed by the magma sea:
Link to DFMA map:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-23662-throneroomThe DFMA view shows the throne room before being submerged (while the magma draining infrastructure is in operation). Several over points of interest are listed in addition to the throne room.
No mods were used in the creation of this fort - it should be pure vanilla. Invaders were turned off, mainly because I didn't want to encounter an "all your limbs rot off because you stepped in blood" beast. This fort was started on version 31.03 and finished on version 31.04. Age of the fort when submitted: 1050-1088 (38 years). This translates into approximately "forever" when running at 10-20fps.
Bugs, problems, and unexpected game mechanics encountered.For the very bored, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
- Dwarves refusing to clean the surface, the inspiration for this fort.
- Surface mud and archery remains not being cleared away by rain. Ended up having to do the construct/de-construct trick to clean the surface up.
- Waterskins being created as flasks. I noticed this when setting up my military. The created flasks also did not seem to have an appropriate stockpile (they would never get hauled from the leatherworks).
- The job manager was assigning jobs to workshops which can't process them due to workshop profile restrictions.
- 'Take from pile' not working correctly. This made my original plans for small outpost forts at different cavern levels impossible (at least, without micro I wasn't willing to perform). /sadpanda
- Vermin not rotting and needing smashing (pre upgrading to 31.04). This was especially noticeable when I breached the caverns (31.03) and there were millions of dead vermin everywhere (from cobwebs).
- Elves bringing insane quantities of trade goods. This was eventually resolved by relocating the trade depot to a magma floodable locale. Did you know that elephants will die from *drowning* in magma?
- Dwarves refusing to clean bloodstains off walls.
- Cats seemingly too light to trigger pressure plates set to the lowest level. This one made me sad.
- Iron spike traps are described as 'spinning' when they attack. You can probably guess from this and the last point what I was doing at this stage .
- Dogs with fractured guts. "Her guts is fractured". Again, this ties in with the last two points.
- Melting objects -> hard crash
- Burrows not restricting job assignments and material pickup in all cases. Lots of cancelled jobs (forbidden area), and many cases where craftsdwarves restricted to certain material stockpiles would still pick the closest material (outside of their assigned burrow). This scuttled my plans for having different stone stockpiles and just adding masons to the type of stone I desired.
- Multiple mayors. I think I was up to 5 or 6?
- It's apparently impossible to mine out the floor under a retracting bridge, both with ramps and otherwise. However, it's still possible to create floor under a retracting bridge by creating obsidian (water + lava) on the floor below. This caused my initial obsidian factory some 'issues'.
- Waypoint routes bug... if you have duplicated points in a route, the dwarves will only execute a subset of the patrol. So you can't have a figure of 8 patrol route if you don't create additional duplicate points.
- Numerous problems with the king (or queen in the case of my fort). She showed up being 180 years of age and died instantly from old age (dwarves only live until 170 at most). No replacement to date so far .
- The human diplomat showed up shortly after the dead queen. It was a lemur demon. It destroyed stuff and then took up residence inside my central pond. I eventually managed to kill it by building a spike trap under it and pulling a lever. One shotted it with a spinning silver spike to its brain - yay.
Author
Topic: POST YOUR LAVA THRONE ROOM CHALLENGE SUBMISSION HERE! (Read 6715 times)