Well... rolled a new vanilla world, and found a marvelous spot! A volcano, trees, and FLUX!
So I got a lucky roll and got some decent dwarves, so I bought their equipment and headed out.
When we arrived, I got the message 'A section of the cavern has collapsed'... but this seems to happen a lot near volcanoes, so I took my time with pause on, and checked the landscape out.
After finalizing my early embark plans, where to dig, what trees to chop, getting jobs set, etc... I hit the space bar to un-pause.
It didn't work.
After trying several times, I realized that it would not un-pause because the collapse was ongoing. So I sat there, and tapped the space bar, for about five minutes... and the collapse was STILL ongoing.
collapse1Notice how many collapses I am seeing here... this isn't a simply 'stone-out-of-place' problem... something is actively crumbling.
So, by this point, I want to see what is going on. By his point it has become pretty obvious that I will not be able to play the game at all until whatever is happening has finished.
This is the bottom of the collapse...
fortressObviously, this goes pretty deep... but it bothered me that I didn't actually see any magma... just a rock falling through multiple z-levels of emptiness to hit the floor of the world.
So I scrolled up to where I could begin to see the outline of the volcano, and found something a bit disturbing.
drainYes... that shows that a quarter of the lowest levels of the volcano has collapsed, and is spilling magma all over the underworld.
I simply show the top of the spill, rather than the multiple z-level magma waterfall that ensues, but the dark space in the image shows the outline of the magma spill.
The flames, by the way, are just an after-effect of the compiz effect on my linux.
As far as I can tell, a hole that big, dumping out into the emptiness, will 1) Completely drain the volcano and 2) probably take until Winter to do so... my sheep, and then my dwarves, will starve to death before I could actually play.
For the curious, here is a pic of the top of a volcano, as promised, flushing like a toilet.
flushThis looks like it will go on until the entire volcano has been completely emptied.
The GOOD news? Freely available obsidian.
The BAD news? No magma...at all.
oh.. and a highway to hell right at my embark point...
Not to mention the fact that since it is continually collapsing, the game pauses every frame, and zooms down to the bottom of the volcano.
This alone would make it pretty unplayable.... and given that it might go on until Winter sets in, my sheep (oh.. and my dwarves) would probably starve to death before I could get anything going.
The real disappointing part, here,is that it is so rare to find a vanilla site with a volcano sitting on a site containing flux... its just sad to have to reroll it.
I do think, however, that getting a snapshot of a volcano while flushing is pretty amusing, though... and may be enough to make me not feel so bad about having to reroll.