Bay 12 Games Forum

The most interesting for me; above ground fort. EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING has to happen in an outdoor tile. Have fun with storage.

I tried this before but with a twist.  I embarked in a marshland next to a river and built a stilt town.  Every building/room had to be off the ground, in case of floods, and there had to be a path between any two buildings/rooms that did not touch the ground.  After shooting myself in the foot thusly, I dug my other heel into the wound by making everything but the defensive wall out of wood.  A marsh quarry?  That's unsightly, illogical, and would definitely become infested with virulent mosquitoes.

An easy way to determine if something is magma safe is to build a magma smelter up until the point you have to designate what materials you'll use in its construction.  The list shown to you for your choices of materials contains only magma safe items.

"A grand water slide made of aluminum straddling a mirthful temperate freshwater pool and a sinister temperate brackish pool!"


Also, it would be great if you could please observe the following additional requirements:
accessory: no picks on embark and no mining until the first caravan shows up
megabeasts: 5 Bronze Colossi
megabeasts: 20 Titans
relations_with_other_civs: yearly gifts to your civilisat
restriction: All rooms must be \'circular\'
restriction: no trading
restriction: no floodgates

I can see it now!  A curved and thin walkway snaking its way across a chasm being the only access to my fort.  Dodge-Me traps cover its surface, forcing goblins to be rendered to shreds or jump into the watery pit below.  This sunken pool will not be stagnant: oh no.  It will be constantly flowing, forcing whatever poor creatures enter into a downward hole.  This is how my "water slide" will swallow offerings, down its spiraling esophagus into the horrifying depths of its cavernous stomach.

Yes...

When describing to my friend how I wanted to create landmines from barrels of booze, I mentioned my experiment room.  Saying that the few creatures I caught in the caverns wouldn't be able to keep my scientists in supply for too long, I remembered that I cage puppies when they're born (to wait until they mature and can become war dogs).  I shared my plan to use the dozen or so puppies to test explosives.

I would've eventually caught onto the gravity of what I just suggested, but my friend's surprised look made it dawn on me sooner.

To spool:

Wow, that's pretty.  And neat.  And pretty neat.  I only want to suggest a few things, which you may already have planned.

1) First and foremost, your last defense gate next to the trade depot has a flaw.  I consider this the most important fix to make, as the only thing more dangerous than no security is a false sense of security.  The bridge raises toward the depot, so a building destroyer need only smash the depot to be able to reach and destroy the bridge.  Dismantle the bridge, maybe smooth the floor beneath it if you're as aesthetically demanding as I am, dig a 2x3 trench across the hallway, and build the bridge so that when raised a building destroyer can't stand next to it on the same Z level.

2) Do you plan on chaining animals at choke points near your entrance?  They're pretty good at spotting kobolds and ambushes.

3) Do you have magma or regular forges and smelters?  Because if you're trying for a larger population, which requires a larger military, you will find that using trees as fuel will limit you greatly.  Consider either making a metal industry above the magma sea (or a lava tube if you're lucky), or pumping magma up under your metal workshops block.

But I'm curious, did you give your dwarves any temporary quarters while digging out this massive place, or did they simply sleep on rough ground until the job was done?

I don't think this will work.  Pretty sure that, in one of the QA threads, Toady himself gave a brief overview of how moods occur.  Apparently, every so often the game goes through each dwarf, sees if that dwarf is capable of entering a mood (e.g., hasn't already made an artifact, and now isn't handling an animal), and then the game randomly decides if that dwarf enters a mood or not.  So the game doesn't decide that "some dwarf is going to enter a mood," only "this dwarf enters a mood."

So if all your bad-mood-skilled dwarves are constantly hauling animals, you can cut down on the number of bad artifacts.  But it shouldn't affect when any other dwarves enter a mood.

I'm pretty sure that moods are random, as in every turn the game goes through each dwarf to determine if he/she will be taken by a mood.  The chance is small, but with enough dwarves and enough time, it'll happen.  So it's just a nice coincidence that dwarves were possessed around the same time and making wooden artifacts both times in two different time lines of your fort.