Back in 40d I had a rather long-lived fort that was built upon a glacier, and had a volcano. I don't know if it would appear differently now, but back then it came all the way to the surface of the glacier, and was capped with obsidian.
Ah, yes, I remember that fort well. I carved the entire fortress out of the ice, then dug a chasm around it, with a moat of water, kept liquid by a magma reservoir underneath. I had hoped that this would provide a supply of liquid water for injured or imprisoned dwarves, but in practice, the water froze in the hauler's bucket long before it could be delivered. In this way, a stubbed toe or failure to meet a noble's mandate was essentially a death sentence by dehydration.
Despite this, the fort eventually surpassed any challenge the game could throw at it, so I just let the thing run, occasionally sabotaging it by breaching the magma vent. Really interesting things happen with ice and magma, I wish I still had the save so I could upload pics. Regardless, it was pretty spectacular by the end. For almost 20 years, orc and goblin sieges swept through the fort, killing most of the dwarves, except for a handful of legendary warriors who had never had a single injury, ever.
At the bitter end, when the food stockpiles were finally empty, a handful of survivors, following the same pathfinding, walked from room to room, hunting for vermin (and finding none: glacier fort), huddled together in their last moments by some trick of the program. One would starve, and the others would look at him for a moment before moving, together, to the next hall. The last dwarf, the philosopher, walked outside to the graveyard and looked up through the blizzard at a well-crafted statue. I remember checking his profile - he was "quite content," despite having watched the slow collapse of such a massive and long-lived fort. Then he died.
So, uh, tl;dr: go for it, there's plenty of FUN to be had.
Author
Topic: A glacier volcano (Read 2109 times)