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Author Topic: Buggy Embark, with cave-in and other oddities (contains spoilers)  (Read 1140 times)

unicode

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31.25, unmodded, default settings
I tried to embarked to sinister surrounding, I hoped to encounter some skeletal animals. First spot crashed the game between selecting stuff to bring and the starting text message. I tried 3 times and it always crashes. So I chose a nearby sinister spot, and successfully embarked. The location is rather disappointingly normal. Grass, river, a few trees, some normal animals. The only "evil" thing I got so far into the game are dark gnomes, who stole some booze before I got them locked up in a dry murky pool (from which they escaped after rain refilled the pool 1 year later).

The first abnormality occurred right on embark. It gave 14 cave-in messages in a row. I checked with reveal.exe and discovered that it was the bottom of the magma sea caving-in into HFS. Moreover, the last cavern is generated below the magma sea. The effect is that all the magma and the water are all gone, leaving only a few isolated pockets. The edge of the map has both cavern water and magma sea magma constantly generated, mixing, and falling down, continuously creating mist, and there are some obsidian walls on the very bottom level. All water and magma fall directly into the pit.

I embarked on level 144, the lowest level is -25. The intermediate levels of interest are shown below. See how messed up things are:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

All other games had 3 caverns, but here I can only count 2. Not only the bottom cavern is completely messed up, the first cavern is not completely normal either: it is full of normal grass. Subterranean trees and bushes but above ground grasses. The other cavern is normal with moss.
Not a bit of water in the first cavern.
Perhaps the entire 3rd cavern caved-into the pit the same way the magma sea somehow did.

In terms of minerals, fairly normal close to the surface, but no mineral is present below 84. Instead there's an unusual number of emeralds. Prospector gives:
Tetrahedrite: 24791
Emerald: 28006
Microcline: 132000
Slade: 567129

Making emerald the 2nd most abundant mineable rock deposits. (not counting layer fillers)


The actual game is fairly simple, there's ample iron ore on the surface alongside flux. Wild life is as docile as it can possibly be. I only nearly lost when the elves suddenly popup up not as merchants but as ambushers, riding a tiger and killed all my chickens and cats. I lost some dwarves, witnessed a tantrum train, and received an immigrant wave shortly after the elves gave up chasing cows and went away.
I then checked the civs and the elves are at war with the dwarves. So at least that was normal.
(one thing about elves, they never asked for tree cut limits in this version, in the ~5 games I played)

2 more years passed without any invasion or even a single hostile creature.
Actually, I just got my first goblin snatcher writing this sentence.

In an earlier game, a similar embark cave-in drained a very tall magma pipe and exposed the pit through it, as high as 10 levels below surface.
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Lectorog

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Re: Buggy Embark, with cave-in and other oddities (contains spoilers)
« Reply #1 on: May 21, 2011, 10:24:53 am »

This is simultaneously one of the best and worst embarks I have ever heard of.

Make it even better. Kill everything. Make magma rain from the sky. Bring hell to the surface, in as many ways as possible.
This is a perfectly dwarfy spot.
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unicode

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Re: Buggy Embark, with cave-in and other oddities (contains spoilers)
« Reply #2 on: May 21, 2011, 05:25:09 pm »

This is simultaneously one of the best and worst embarks I have ever heard of.

Make it even better. Kill everything. Make magma rain from the sky. Bring hell to the surface, in as many ways as possible.
This is a perfectly dwarfy spot.

There is barely any magma that can be used down there, I'm not sure if there are even enough to bring to surface.
No tree seems to grow anywhere, above or below ground. Maybe it's the biome, but I have had to rely on trade caravans for my fuel supply. And the elves won't trade with me.

Speaking of elves, I had 2 simultaneous ambushes from elves and goblins. 50 elves and 30 war animals (rhino, tiger, lion, elephant, leopard, giraffe, bear, moose?? bull and cow). 5 goblins plus 5 thieves. All dwarves are inside the fortress, and the elves and goblins joined forces chasing down my donkeys around the map. At the end no one dwarf died but my pasture lost 2 dozen animals. Elves, self-proclaimed nature lovers, right.

I always suspected the elves never truly loved nature, but they force other civs not to cut tree in order to monopolize wood trade. Same with animals.

edit: I forgot to put this episode, a visit by a giant:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: May 21, 2011, 06:39:11 pm by unicode »
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Bernard

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Re: Buggy Embark, with cave-in and other oddities (contains spoilers)
« Reply #3 on: May 21, 2011, 06:28:18 pm »

If the Magma is spawning down there you are just going to need to create a catchment system that feeds into a massive chamber from which you can then deploy your magma reserves as needed.
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celem

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Re: Buggy Embark, with cave-in and other oddities (contains spoilers)
« Reply #4 on: May 21, 2011, 07:27:03 pm »

Thats interesting.  I genned a world recently where I was trying to embark on the edge of terrifying biomes and got that crash between embark screen and embark text several times too.  Maybe I should take another look at the world and see if I can find any buggy underground :)
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Marksdwarf Pillboxes
I wish I had something cool to say about this.  Because it's really cool.

Manae

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Re: Buggy Embark, with cave-in and other oddities (contains spoilers)
« Reply #5 on: May 21, 2011, 10:17:46 pm »

Sounds a bit like my latest. Soon as I embarked I started getting cave-in messages. And then another. And another. And another... well, it continued about every ten seconds of un-paused time for the entire first month or more. After the first couple of minutes I got dfhack for reveal and found out I had a magma pipe pushing up to the second cavern. Right through the edge of one of the lakes. Luckily it wasn't a refilling one, but it still drained completely until it had not-quite capped the pipe. To further the oddness, a second magma pip was literally twelves tiles from the first, but only pushing up a few levels to the top of the third cavern. All three caverns are also linked due to the pipes, some ramp paths, and a chasm pipe between the first and second.

It also has some of the strangest cotton candy I've ever seen. One patch is only three levels to the tube. Another is one of the longest; over forty-five levels pre-tube. And over forty 'em are within the circus of the other biomes. For added fun, it's tube is a whole added twenty-five levels. It's just.... it's just beautiful.
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