Could easily be done horizontally as well. Not sure if there's an advantage, and you'd be more limited in where you could put a horizontal one - you'd have to put it into a hillside that goblins would be walking RIGHT past, or into a corridor or something. If you just put it any old cliff face, there's a really big chance that the goblins will path AROUND it (they'll path around large obstacles in a diamond shape, so they'd miss it entirely). So if you do it horizontally into a hillside, leave the ramps on I guess, but if they come from above there's a good chance that only the first one down the hillside onto the pressure plates might get melted, with the others safely on high ground.
So if you do it horizontally, it'd be best to build it into a cliff face that the goblins have to walk past to get to your fort. If you built it into a cliff face or hillside like I did, you could level out the rest of the hillside into a big, straight cliff with no ramps; then any goblins from that side of the map will walk RIGHT along the cliff face to get to you, meaning it's a great place for a horizontal trap.
And there's the distant possibility, perhaps, that instead of wasting magma pumping up an impressive several-z geyser, it will instead rush at high velocity horizontally, i.e. right into goblin ass? Testing is required. I might repurpose the entire aboveground into a maze of magma landmines of various builds.
If you do it horizontally, I recommend you put the door at the bottom of the trap, so that buildingdestroyers don't smash it and turn it on forever:
OOOOOOOO
O /=~~~O
O~=\ O~OOO
O /=~O~O~~!g!~
O~=\ O~O~OOOOO
OOOO~O~+~O
I'm working on a trap specifically for buildingdestroyers where you DO build the door at the top, so that trolls will path there, smash the door, and get a pressurized magma surprise. I'm working on making it automated and easily resettable - it would have to involve some sort of magma-triggered pressure plate that prevents magma from gouting out until you manually kill it, but in such a way that the magma flowing off or drying up doesn't activate the system again. Ideally the system could be reset by rebuilding the door and pulling a single lever, and I'm working on how to do that. Also, I might put a whole bunch of obsidian statues near the door to distract them so that the whole troll squad arrives by the time the door gets broken down.
ANYWAY. The advantage of pressurized magma is that you do NOT have to build screw pumps for each trap site; you just hook everything up to the same pressurized system. However, if multiple channels are open at once, the magma will NOT follow all of the paths but only the one CLOSEST to the pressurization site. So when I pull my all-doors lever, only the landmine with the shortest path to the pump stack starts erupting. No clue what would happen if you did some wizardry where every magma landmine was the same distance from the pump stack though.....
LASTLY. If this all is somehow NOT DWARFY enough for you....
Make a bunch of magma-safe chains. Put one next to each landmine. Chain up a puppy or kitten. When the goblins attack, they will path to the animals. Awesome.
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Topic: My fort has MAGMA LANDMINES (Read 36356 times)