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[Doppel]

What about some kind of countdown triggered by caravans?

Build a trade depot which forces traders through a path with two plate. One plate is set to be triggered by only elves the other by humans. When humans show up they hits the human plate, opening a river up to a small water tank. After a couple of steps the floodgates will isolate the tank again. When elf show up they trigger the elf plate, emptying water from the tank into a deep reservois. Have a trigger at the top of the reservois triggered by 1/7 water. As long as the traders keep coming and you are careful about evaporation you have a yearly countdown. Bonus is that when the fortress is destroyed it will take the elves with it.

I love this idea, never heard it before.

I already planned out the count mechanism though which will reliably count indefinately, and my worlds don't have elves because of the near infinite crap they bring bug (unless thats fixed?).

Dunno if i should dig for magma to incorporate it into my doomsday device, as i can imagine opening up the caverns to negatively affect my FPS (can be wrong about this though). I also changed 1 digit taking 3000 steps as my counting room can look like this then:

Code: [Select]

#############
#+++++++++++#
#+9+9+9+9+9+#
#+8+8+8+8+8+#
#+7+7+7+7+7+#
#+6+6+6+6+6+#
#+5+5+5+5+5+#
#+4+4+4+4+4+#
#+3+3+3+3+3+#
#+2+2+2+2+2+#
#+1+1+1+1+1+#
#+++++++++++#
#############
edit: bridge or floodgate takes 100 steps instead of 300 steps to react to an on/off signal (really have no idea why i thought it took 300 steps) so thats 1000 steps per digit and 99.999.999 (plus 1) steps before the doomsday device is activated.

[Kidiri]

If you want a reliable clock, I suggest this design. It takes a while before it's completely set up, but when it's completed (and isolated from buildingdestroyers) it will run forever without the need for maintenance. It can be used to tell time with an in-game margin of two hours (100 ticks). If you add in some more cycles, you can count not just the years, but also the decades, centuries, millennia and so on. By using logic gates (fluid or mechanical) linked to various plates you can have bridges opening and closing for as short as 2 hours to as long as you want with intervals ranging from days to millennia.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Ahhhh, thankyou. That clock thread is full of awesome

[Doppel]

Thanks for that link. Now that i know a day takes 1200 steps i'll have to change 1 digit in making it take 1200 steps then. So, that'll be 99.999 (plus 1) days before the doomsday device is activated. Nice. Thats 280.9 years. Sounds doable.

Or i could make it a day, week, month, year, millenium, century counter. But then i don't get the nice room i drew earlier and the nice 99.999 (plus 1) figure when it activates. Hmmhmm.

[Satarus]

Do a nanofort, just a 1x1 embark. Remove max age on dwarves. Disable all pause notifications. Have your original 7 be farmers and make sure there is water to drink. Turn off invaders as well.

Then just let it run. You can make it run much faster than usual by increasing your FPS cap from the default 100 to something much higher. You probably won't have the fortress be very productive, but it should be an eternally self sufficient hippy commune with dwarves standing around in a forest chatting and eating sunberries.

Most fortresses are eventually abandoned due to FPS issues. This would get around that problem. No digging, no building, no fighting, just hippy farmers.

Just set Elves as CIV_CONTROLLABLE.  They are immortal hippy commune tree huggers. 

[Kidiri]

Thanks for that link. Now that i know a day takes 1200 steps i'll have to change 1 digit in making it take 1200 steps then. So, that'll be 99.999 (plus 1) days before the doomsday device is activated. Nice. Thats 280.9 years. Sounds doable.

Or i could make it a day, week, month, year, millenium, century counter. But then i don't get the nice room i drew earlier and the nice 99.999 (plus 1) figure when it activates. Hmmhmm.

For the number you could use a couple of 7-segment displays. I tried in the clock thread and I discovered that it's not as straightforward as it seems. I tried hooking up the segments directly to the plates, but discovered that it didn't quite worked as I hope it would. I haven't tried since, but my guess is that it's better to think from the segments to the plates: see which segments should be active at which time and hook them up to the plates accordingly. This could also make for a countdown from 99.999 to 0. For your means it would be a lot easier to set up a 100.000-step repeater next to the day-cycle. Or four 12-step repeaters (10+2) where each is linked to the previous one and the first to the day cycle. If you then link all of the plates corresponding with 9*10^x via AND-gates to the needed event, stuff should happen. Do note that a clock takes a massive amount of time and resources to set up and test. And then there's the event that should happen.

[Djohaal]

Actually, what if you calculated time in a more elegant magmatastic solution? First dig out a huge (and measured) reservoir. By huge I mean, really really huge, like big and huge and enormous and giantic and great and garganturan. Have it be fed by unpressurized magma, so it'll fill slowly (not so slow as to stall the filling due to evaporation though).

When it eventually fills up it'll trigger a system of pumps that'll flush it entirely to the surface, extra awesome points if it also flushes the whole magma ocean nonstop forever and after.

[Doppel]

For the number you could use a couple of 7-segment displays. I tried in the clock thread and I discovered that it's not as straightforward as it seems. I tried hooking up the segments directly to the plates, but discovered that it didn't quite worked as I hope it would. I haven't tried since, but my guess is that it's better to think from the segments to the plates: see which segments should be active at which time and hook them up to the plates accordingly. This could also make for a countdown from 99.999 to 0. For your means it would be a lot easier to set up a 100.000-step repeater next to the day-cycle. Or four 12-step repeaters (10+2) where each is linked to the previous one and the first to the day cycle. If you then link all of the plates corresponding with 9*10^x via AND-gates to the needed event, stuff should happen. Do note that a clock takes a massive amount of time and resources to set up and test. And then there's the event that should happen.

I first wanted such a numerical display but i came to the conclusion that it would need to be rather big and complicated to look relatively good (and the off-signals when going from 1 to 2 for example gave me a headache, lol) so i decided on making the display as simple and compact as possible, but still aesthetically pleasing (if something moves i'm pleased). I actually planned 5 10-step repeaters where the first is linked to the day 12-step repeater, i guess its the same difference. I already made a small test setting up 1 10-step repeater to a 12-step repeater as a proof of concept (wasn't aware of the other threads yet), and it went fairly smoothly apart from one very bothersome thing, namely you can't name for example mechanisms so that its easier to identify them when lining them up, and in the current version when linking something up to for example a mechanism the screen sometimes doesn't zoom to the mechanism you selected which is highly annoying. I guess i can overcome that though with the use of different stones and not build everything before i start to link stuff.

[Alkaios]

Those ideas for the clock sound immeasurably more dwarfy than mine, well played, sirs.

As for the function of the clock, i think a doomsday device may be a little bit lame.I personally would set up a foyer of some kind, with caged bait and such to lure in invaders and siegers. every 100/200/whatever years, a drawbridge would open, letting the mass of enemies collide with a dwarven army given hundreds of years to prepare.

Also, if anyone here has read the book "Anathem" one could design a more domestic system based around those ideals. The fortress would be divided into 3 sections, one section would be opened for 1 month every year, allowing outside resource gathering. The next section would open for 1 month every 10 years, and would be much more dwarfy, doing mining or crafting or something, and the third would open one month every hundred years, for the dwarfiest of the dwarfs, master adamantine crafters and mechanics. If you wanted to follow the book all the way, one would build a completely seperate, self sufficient fortress on top of the mountain the rest is built in to, linked to the clock mechanism, triggered to open every thousand years. Personally, i would militarize this fort and at 1k i would have an organized extermination of the other three sections.

Oh, and the clock must be visible from all three, without allowing the three to mingle outside of gate-open time

[alfie275]

If we had moving fortress segments I would make a fortress that bursts out of the ground every century for one year before dropping back down and having magma cover the top, followed by water to make it solid, then sewage to make grass grow.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

On that note, just drain a section of the ocean, build your fortress there, fill it back up, and then drain the ocean again every X years.

Of course any fortress like this must be named R'lyeh.