Print

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

[electromagneticpulse]

Okay I've finally mined around enough to find my first cavern, and it's 42 Z-levels. How dead am I? I'm in a serene area, but I haven't prepared my military yet so seriously, what are my chances? Should I be flooding the place, collapsing my tunnel or what?

[Shades]

The first one is generally safe enough. If your worried you can build walls to block it up till you get troops though.

[MagmaMcFry]

Build a wall, finished. Flooding also drowns your FPS and a cave-in that actually seals the cave is very hard to create. See the wiki on cave-ins.

[ungulateman]

Troglodytes can be a pain in the ass if they run up your staircases and beat half your dwarves to death with their BEAR HANDS. Have a military member or two stationed (if you can get stationing to work properly, my schedule fu is very weak) around the entrance at all times.

[candylord]

... Bear hands?
Oh shit, we really are screwed

[Drakeero]

I think I had a cave crocodile burst out of my first cavern and slaughter my fortress from 78 down to 23 dwarves before it crawled into a corner and got walled off.

[Diacritic]

Yeah, trogs are all

[Untelligent]

Be aware that you can find Giant Cave Spiders in the first cavern.

[Shoku]

Be mindful of what animals are around just like when you embark on savage tundras or evil swamps. Check the wildlife in the u screen periodically and when you see a new animal go over and v check it. z into it's description then judge how dangerous it is based on that and it's name.
"A tiny underground monster with large claws and horns." = Only about as dangerous as deer what with their large antlers (horns?) "In place of a head, it has an enormous toothy maw." probably gonna want a nice axe and set of armor or three.

Set up some burrows that cover your indoors space and create and alert for civilians to stay in that burrow.
*Alerts are handled through the (m)ilitary screen. The default two don't really mean much. You need to select one and hit enter to set civilians to it but this won't do anything if you haven't arrowed over to the burrows column and assigned that burrow to that alert.

You should have at least a year before you need to worry about anything that will actively try to get into your fort (you know, like kobolds and megabeasts do above ground) so other than that it's pretty much just like groundhogs and wolves down there- the groundhogs may annoy your workers enough to make them cancel jobs and the wolves you'll need to stay away from or send dudes with weapons off to kill.

[cog disso]

Naked Mole Dogs = underground Rhesus Macaques. God help you if they get INSIDE the fortress, I had to abandon due to an infestation.

[ISGC]

Instead of stationing dwarves, it's usually sufficient for me to place a war dog or two at the entrance (3 or 4 strays, I would guess)
they repel crundles and trogs well, though some of the larger game is harder to keep out, so a few cage traps never hurt.

[Diacritic]

I find it convenient to drop an armor stand in the caverns and make a barracks, so I've usually got some incidental military down there near the fortress entrance.

[Pukako]

Cage traps take care of most of the smaller first cavern beasts, and captured animals form an interesting addition to any fort.

I had this last fortress, and captured over a hundred crundles, trogs, and plump helmet men.  My downfall was trying to drown them all in magma, at the same time...

[ISGC]

I had this last fortress, and captured over a hundred crundles, trogs, and plump helmet men.

this gets me every time
I once had near a thousand captured cavern creatures (plus goblins) and I spent a few days building every single cage and attaching them to a single lever (I ended up with, like, 15 mechanic dwarves) and a floodgate that led to magma, but when I finished and pulled it, all the pathing dropped my fps to negatives and it crashed
EDIT: my god, that was a terrible typo; I need to start proof reading these things.

[GaxkangtheUnbound]

I had this last fortress, and captured over a hundred crundles, trogs, and plump helmet men.

this gets me every time
I once had near a thousand captured cabin creatures (plus goblins)

Cabin creatures? I didn't know furniture came to life.