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[MAurelius]

Subject says it all. I created a 9 z level drop mass pit and put some pandamen down it and they got pretty wrecked but were still alive and able to move. The ground was cluttered with 9 levels of mined stone.

I dropped fully armed gobbos down a 10z and they splattered all over the place so I assume the stones are somehow breaking the fall of the pandamen? Or do animals just require a longer drop than goblins to splat?

Also, if I create a succession of forts in the same world, will my newer forts engrave and make items referencing the older forts or only if they are the same civ?

Also, I usually get like 10 dwarven civs on embark, but only a few of them have blinking blue statues denoting where their area of influence is. Does that mean all the other civs are dead? And if so, why can I choose them?

As for worldgen, I mentioned this in a previous post but it was tangential to my main question so no one directly answered it. I created a custom world where I didn't change anything except 1) made caverns more open and less dense (open stat changed from 50-100 to 75-100 and density stat changes from 0-50 to 0-25).2) Increased levels of stone between surface and 1st cavern (10) and between each cavern (5). I did not change distance from last cavern to magma sea or ms to HFS.

Sooo when I played this world the caverns were certainly more open and I was happy with their shape, but they had muddy marble for the most part and no plants or trees were growing. SOME parts had the multicolored moss floor and growing things but for the most part it didn't. Every "standard" world I have made was all growing, there was never any exposed cavern floor that was just muddy stone with no flora. Did something I do cause this, because I liked my custom caves, but I want them to be growing stuff to be used for pasture. Is there some limit to z levels? What I mean is if I ask for more z levels between caves does that "smash" the caves so they take up less vertical space (this is actually desirable for me) or does it lead to bugs and errors (my fear with this world). Also, what is the numerical equivalent in advanced world gen to the "everywhere" mineral setting in the standard world gen. I lowered mineral rarity substantially from the default, but there were still hardly any ores anywhere.

Thank you!

[i2amroy]

No stones will not break a fall. The real reason that they survived is probably two things working together. One is that the 10z level mark is about the fatality mark, so dropping 10z=dead almost always, 9z=heavily wounded but still alive a lot of the time. The other thing that I think might be helping the panda men to survive is that I believe they are bigger then goblins. Bigger size= harder to kill = survive larger drops (IIRC, that is).

I believe that newer forts will only engrave thinks referencing older forts of the same civ, however there is always the chance you could get an engraving of an older one, sort of how sometimes you get engravings referencing random history events.

Try changing the "layer_water_min/max" range from 0:100 to 10:100. This should ensure that you always get some water that allows for things to grow in the caverns. I think you might have just gotten unlucky and drawn caverns that didn't have water for your embark.

[KingStrongbeard]

So many questions. I will answer a few of them.

1) I do not think that stones can break falls. Animals can, fall many z-levels and land on a kitten and you'll be fine. But stone not so much. Pandamen would likely be much larger critters than goblins, thus they can take more punishment before death.

2)Yes, it is possible to play as a dead civilization, (but I think all of the other civs have to die as well, I might be wrong about that). If you are the last of your kind, (all dwarves are dead.) then you will only get the first two migrant waves and then no more. Forever. I think the same applies if only your civ is dead (assuming you can embark as a dead civ when others still exist), but I'm not sure.

3) I don't know about engravings of old forts in the same world. But I believe that it would. Especially if you are the same civ.

[Sphalerite]

From tests of injury versus fall distance, it appears that 10 Z-levels is an abrupt cutoff for fatality.  At anything less than 10 Z-levels, falling creatures have a chance of survival, and the extent of injuries suffered is weakly related to the distance fallen.  At 10 Z-levels everything dies - unless landing on another creature.  Objects don't cushion falls, but if a falling creature lands on another creature both will be stunned but otherwise uninjured.

As for the engravings:  My dwarves engrave historical events from other civilizations all the time, so it's certainly possible that events from fortresses you've made and abandoned in the same world could show up in yours.

[MAurelius]

Thanks folks! So to summarize:

- As painful as it is, I need to expand my pit to 10z. I think what I will do is create a new pit, now that I know where the caverns are, that falls between the caverns so I have enough vertical space (I don't want to use the caverns for the pit as I would like to safely recover the leftover bones, armor, etc). An object cannot break a fall (but a being can).

- When a cavern ground is shown as "muddy" but nothing is growing on it it's because of a water level imbalance, and you can fix that in the worldgen parameters. (How is it then that certain areas in the same cavern level...more densely packed, do have flora?)

- You can possibly engrave/create items with previous history, but the jury is out on whether it can only be your own civ or any civ. Different folks have different experiences.

Follow-up questions:

So if a dwarven civ doesn't have any blue blinking statues when you tab to them in embark then that means they are dead? Or are they just inconsequential? Because I can freely choose them and there are still very active civs out there.

Anyone know what a z level is in real life? Like 8 feet? How about horizontally? What are the dimensions in feet (can be meters if you're European, I can convert) of a typical 4X4 embark?

Completely off topic, but does anyone know of a fort in the map archive that does pumpstacks that are powered by windmills/waterwheels really well? It seems like SO much work to generate enough power to get magma from the sea to about the 1st cavern layer. Doing that math, it seems like it would take 50 windmills, and that can't be the case...can it?

[NecroRebel]

The blue statues on the world map appear to correspond to areas that are pretty heavily inhabited by the dwarven civ, not just areas that have a colony there. At the very least, I have had dwarven civs that had no presence on the world map but still had extant settlements. I'm pretty sure that if you can select a civ, it's still alive, so dwarves aren't extinct in any world that has at least 2 dwarven civilizations.

A tile's dimensions are unclear. They're small enough that in order for two cats to squeeze by each other in a 1-tile hallway, one of the cats has to crawl, but big enough that 1000 dragons can fit in one as long as 999 of them are lying down. So, they're probably between 1x1x1 and 1000000x1000000x100 feet, making the 4x4 embark between 192 feet and several thousand miles on a side.

I don't browse the map archive much, unfortunately, but powering pump stacks with windmills is inefficient. Water wheels provide far more power per space, so they're better to use. Powering pump stacks is probably best done with a water reactor, even if it is something of an exploit; you can find the design for water reactors on the wiki.

[MAurelius]

Looking at the water reactor, I will file it along with the dwarven atom smasher and quantum stockpiles as something you actually need to be able to beat the game's more wonky mechanics. I don't consider anything an exploit or cheat that makes some ridiculous frustrating part of the game bearable.

On the other hand, many players murder the elven caravans and then get rich by taking all the stuff which in terms of game balance I find far more of an exploit than the aforementioned.

Also, Necrorebel, so I assume Toady has never actually stated or estimated the rough size of an embark square then? I just assume that a z level is equivalent to a "floor" of a building, which is like 8 or so feet typically, but yeah, that does beg the question why 2 dwarves need 16 feet of clearspace in a hallway to avoid bumping into each other. They seem to be hitting the ale a bit too hard.

[Azated]

I remember reading somewhere that bigger/heavier creatures don't have to fall as far to take damage, which may explain why your fully armed goblin died easier. I could be wrong though, judging by the other responses.

Long ago, before the days of yore, the dwarves converted their entire world into quantum mechanical tiles which re-size to fit whatever is standing on them. Unfortunately, this vaporized the fabled circle out of existence, but the circle was always a useless shape anyway.

[NecroRebel]

Also, Necrorebel, so I assume Toady has never actually stated or estimated the rough size of an embark square then? I just assume that a z level is equivalent to a "floor" of a building, which is like 8 or so feet typically, but yeah, that does beg the question why 2 dwarves need 16 feet of clearspace in a hallway to avoid bumping into each other. They seem to be hitting the ale a bit too hard.

He's explicitly stated that quite a bit rides on the indeterminate size of tiles, and that in order to make sense of most size-related things he'd have to redo a vast amount if/when a tile's size is actually set, so he's specifically avoided doing so. A transcript of at least one place where he said that is here.

Actually, the 1000 dragons thing is commonly used as an example of how big tiles would have to be, since that was Toady's own example, in that same interview. He specifically said,

What the traditional answer is [is] that they're not so big that a dwarf doesn't have to crawl under another dwarf to get through a corridor but at the same time they're big enough to hold a thousand dragons as long as nine hundred and ninety nine of them are lying down.

For the smaller estimates of how big a tile could be, people usually make their own examples up, but dragons are used for the large estimate often.

[MAurelius]

Long ago, before the days of yore, the dwarves converted their entire world into quantum mechanical tiles which re-size to fit whatever is standing on them. Unfortunately, this vaporized the fabled circle out of existence, but the circle was always a useless shape anyway.

If this could be incorporated into the actual game lore that would be pure win.