Bay 12 Games Forum

In the meantime, have you tried mouse keys?

I have not, but I will look into it, this might be useful more generally for me even outside of making DF playable.

Our military wasn't quite as kitted out as I'd have liked, but, the 100-goblin siege that came after a full year without a goblin sighting didn't manage to kill anyone... which is surprising, as they arrived on the opposite side of the map from their normal direction of attack, so they were on the less well defended side of the river. We raised the drawbridges to block the gates, and managed to keep the trolls from the doors of our back entrance, thanks largely to a couple weapon traps keeping them stalled until someone finally got around to pulling the lever. Unfortunately. a couple trees had grown near the walls, and the siege came in the time between them being designated to be cut down, and the woodcutters actually getting around to it, so the goblins still had a climbing path into the fort. It was only able to fit one goblin through at a time, though, so what it turned into was more like a meatgrinder, with the melee dwarves stationed to hit them as son as they got in range, and the marksdwarves harassing them and their allies who got close to the trees with bolts. 7 fortifications needed to be torn down and rebuilt, to remove the bits of goblin stuck inside them. One soldier got wounded, and two seem to be traumatized from all the corpses piled up, but, oh well, I was planning to retire the fort at the end of the season anyway. We managed to clean up, and remove the bodies (permanently, by way of an atom smasher) and I left them to take care of themselves once cleanup was done and we finished dealing with the merchants.

The new embark, Zoluthsazir "Combatbridge" looks promising. I'm sticking with the same civillization still, this map is on the far side of the world, nowhere near any of our other forts, in the borderlands of a scorching white sand desert and equally hot savanna. The map is split in half by an east-west running stream. We have some trees, but not a lot of them. More importantly, though, we have cassrite, and tetrahedrite.... so we can make bronze! this is a very welcome change of pace, after being stuck with copper and imports in the last fort.
Our neighbors include goblins, and a tower with as of yet unknown inhabitants (but the embark screen had the red line next to it that seems to indicate hostility.) We also have humans nearby, and we're not at war with them (now, anyway) so maybe I'll finally have a fort on this world who can trade with another civilization.

No goblins this Autumn, so the caravan made it to the depot... missing it last year means we have a massive pile of things to sell, and everyone is currently hauling bins of crafts, toys, mugs, armour, weapons, and clothes to the depot. Even the military was given some time away from their duties to help haul it all. I imagine most of it will end up being offered, rather than traded, since there weren't that many wagons this time, but, we'll see what they have for us... I think any iron, bronze, or steel they brought -- either as bars, or finished items -- we'll buy to melt and reuse for the military. We desperately need armour that can hold up to the goblin's weapons. The last siege broke easily, but, it was fairly small. a big offensive would still be a major concern right now.

I retired Gaterider, the fortress on the evil volcano "The Tower of Immortality" shortly after completing the weaponized volcano. Things stabilized, but, I am in the process of trying to drag this dwarven civilization (The evicerated bolts) back from the edge of extinction, and having 80% of my migrants die almost as soon as they spawn on the map was.... somewhat counterproductive.
Efforts to breathe life into this civ have gone fairly well, though. Unfortunately, we're at war with 2 elven civilizations, and with the other dwarven civilization in this world, so, there is no safe place to embark, really. Regardless, our population is slowly climbing. The old capital has a population of 75, up from 40 or so a few years ago. The only other sites we have are fortresses I've retired. Of them, stakeplunged seems to be doing well for itself, with a listed population on the civ map of ~400 (retired at 200 or so, and many of the migrants to the last 2 forts have been from there.) Even the evil volcano site has shown a general upwards trend, being listed now at ~100 (retired at 30.)

Our new fortress, Berrash "Earthendeaths" has grown rapidly to 124 dwarves over the last 2 years, 46 of which are children, some of whom I hope to raise to adulthood here, and train to be useful to the civilization's survival. We embarked in a swamp in the south-west, far from the elves and opposing dwarves. Our only neighbors seem to be the goblins of "The Hex of Mucus" who sent a "siege" consisting of... 9 goblins. Not very impressive, as far as threats go, but this map only has copper, platinum, and silver, so, our military isn't as well protected from their weapons as I would like. We'll be importing as much iron and steel as we can to remedy this. We're on good terms with the humans, but, our civilization exists only in places well outside their merchant's range of travel, so, we've yet to meet any of them in any of these forts.
This fortress is in The Swamps of Wishing, The site is bisected by a small 4-tile-wide stream, which freezes in autumn, and thaws in mid-spring. This area has a 7 Z-level deep light aquifer in the sandstone layers (which we've taken advantage of to create a near-constant pleasant mist at our main entrance in the cavern layer. Above the aquifer is 2 layers of clay and one of soil, so we've had a fairly easy go at farming here. The influx of legendary metalcrafters, metalsmiths, armourers, and weaponsmiths from previous forts has helped our wealth grow rapidly in a very short time, and while the copper may not make for the best armour, at least it's of the best quality a dwarf could hope for.

I think our next major project will be to try to do some exploratory mining in the layers of aquifer-stone, we've seen some platinum in the sandstone walls, where the aquifer overlaps with the caverns, and I think that alone is enough to motivate the miners to agree too getting a little wet. If we establish proper drainage, it shouldn't be too difficult, it is only a light aquifer afterall. Maybe we'll get lucky and find some iron ore as well, which would certainly help our military out quite a bit, The presence of platinum has me hopeful that we may have some magnetite hidden above our heads...

The volcano has been weaponized successfully! initial testing is underway, and there appears to be no leaks into the fortress. it's not particularly fast, but, I suppose it doesn't have any reason to be, it is magma/lava afterall. Any would-be invaders will certainly have trouble making it through to our gates, at any rate.
This doesn't help with the freakish weather, and we did have to sacrifice a dwarf to finish this project (she was tantruming every season anyway, and far too traumatized by the death of her child to the toxic rain to ever hope to recover anyway... dieing in the magma while breaching the volcano is, likely, the most she could do for us at this point. Her slab is already engraved and placed.)

You can dig tunnels from the far edge to some central corridor or defensive area - I'd recommend figuring out a way to seal these, as the weather should kill basically any invaders who come by. You might get lucky with a migrant wave spawning right near a tunnel and dodging into it instead of taking any of the rain. Obviously decontamination will also be necessary.

Traders are more likely to do this - as they will only take the path which is accessible by your depot. unfortunately they still need to be on the surface (but dwarven caravans sometimes leave through caverns, if accessible.) Meaning, if you dig a tunnel from the surface to a depot, they should appear right at the edge of the map near the tunnel and go right in.

Yeah, controlling the spawn point for the caravan, at least, shouldn't be too hard. I have no idea how I'm going to deal with the migrants issue, will just have to survive until I get lucky and a few make it through I guess.

Progress has been made! The last migranr wave brought us 20 new dwarves! more importantly, some of them made it to the gates without being killed by the blue mucous raining from the skies!
I don't know how they managed it, exactly, but I feel it's notable that all the survivors were from a previous fort, and are at least "Adequate" level dodgers.
Of course, the ever-expanding pile of corpses they have to wade through to get to the gates left the less hardened of them pretty... unwell... Most of the fort seems to be holding together, but, several red arrows have already appeared. Understandable, really. We've only now got enough labourers to be able to make and engrave slabs for all the dead, and the combination of ghosts and corpses in the quarantine area (where I check migrants for lethal goo before I approve them into the fort proper) certainly isn't helping... hopefully, once I get more set up and can rig water and magma cleaning rigs for the area, it will get a bit better. (water to rinse the goo and such away, magma to deal with the bodies, and misc. items we have to leave behind)

The dwarfs may have run out because the wagon is a default meeting area.
Did you make a meeting area zone inside the room?

yeah, meeting area, pen, dump zone  were all crammed into the room. (Dump zone was to try to get items inside fast, but didn't have much chance to try that, because I forbid everything before much made it in to prevent hauling attempts.)

It's spring again, which means I have like 80 elves wandering around trying to kill my herbalists. Once they were seen I sent the civilians inside, and the 56 soldiers we've got (26 marksdwarves, 10 hammerdwarves, 10 macedwarves, 10 speardwarves) were sent to meet them at the gates. Since we've gotten enough metal armour for the hammer, mace, and spear dwarves the elf weapons have become a non-threat. Even arrows bounce harmlessly off bronze breastplaes and steel helms. Our only injury was a hammerlord who was wrestled to the ground and beaten by 5 of them until another of her squad bashed their way through the horde to help.

Unfortunately, there's now a lot of bodies to try to clean up. This... might take a while.

Edit/update: Cleanup looks like it will take most of the spring. We have the bodies gone at least, so no more horrified dwarves sobbing about dead elves, but they left a lot of pretty much worthless wooden armour and weapons that need to be cleaned up still.
The one injured dwarf ended up dieing in the hospital, before even being diagnosed, so we lost one hammerdwarf in the exchange. Shouldn't be too hard to train up a new one to take up her Masterwork silver hammer, but, it's always sad to see a dwarf die to elves.

Edit/update 2: Cleanup took until nearly the start of summer, as anticipated. In the meantime, the engravers finished engraving the arena, and all of the bedrooms, dining halls, meeting areas, temples, etc. We built some archer's nests in front of the gate into the fortress, to keep them away from the melee when the elves inevitably return, and our best armoursmith was tasked with taking what was left of that strange blue metal into a suit of armour for the militia commander, the only pieces not masterworks were a boot and the gauntlets. I doubt there is a better protected dwarf anywhere else in the world right now.
Unfortunately, with our civilization on the verge of collapse, we're not able to advance to a barony, or county -- no sites have been founded nearby, despite our obscene wealth, and the hundreds of elven invaders our legendary militia has bludgeoned the teeth out of, and so, Atistathtat "Stakeplunged" has been retired, at least for the time being. Perhaps this shining beacon of dwarven opulence will be enough to hold back the elven onslaught and breathe new life into Egstakalath "The Evicerated Bolts", our parent civilization. Time will tell, I suppose.