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After the events of all of the goblin sieges I've mentioned PLUS a whole bunch I haven't, my goblinite stores had reached epic proportions. Ignoring my dwarves' strange insistence on not melting what I tell them to, I have easily enough iron to begin outfitting my entire military with steel equipment. So, of course, like any self-respecting dwarf overseer, I do.

I also think its about time I take the fight to THEM. Those pointy eared goblin bastards.

On a quick check to the world map, I can see that, while I am near a goblin tower (!!yikes!!), I am also near a dozen or so goblin pits. Most of them have 60-80 goblins in them, supposedly, and I would imagine a group of axe lords equipped with full steel shouldn't have too hard of a time raiding one of the pits.

I did try and make a mission to retrieve the Roc Bone ring from the previous fort as well, but nothing happened. The inexperienced military I sent spent a few days frolicking in the woods like elves before coming back completely empty handed.

After they return, though, I immediately begin plans to embark on a raiding mission with my most experienced part of axe dwarves, assuming that though there might be trolls or other tamed creatures I couldn't see in the population count, that they would make easy work of any enemies that discovered them while they were stealing things, thanks to the one time an axe dwarf I had singlehandedly took down two trolls without any injury.

I was... really wrong. It took a bit, but when the team returned they were not in a good shape. The report mentioned some goblin nerd with a high tactics skill that managed to outmaneuver my group, which while he DID kill two of my axe dwarves and capture four, he also got his head smashed in by one of the survivors. That's just karma, really.

The only loot the dwarves managed to bring back was a barrel of wine. I assume that the fact that they brought anything at all meant that the raid was successful, but I can't be certain. I sent a group of inexperienced militia dwarves to rescue my militia commander, who was unfortunately taken prisoner by the goblin threat. Again, they walked around for a bit outside the fort (I gusss) and returned with literally nothing to show for it and no report. Not even a bruise.

Whatever, we've had tons of casualties in this fort. We need more men!

Armok hates me, I think.

While I was trying to set up a training regime for my dwarves (involving prisoners and multiple war crimes), the game just randomly crashes. Of course I hadn't saved at all today, so I had to just... start over from right before the raid on the goblin pit. Accidental cheating
   

Oh yeah, while this was happening, a fun fight happened against a giant cave spider. Normal affair, with civilians ganging up on it because it was an immediate threat in our home I somehow missed being able to stop with my drawbridge that leads underground, but at least one kid was demonstrating a true Dwarven fighting spirit during the skirmish.

children's show protagonists be like

I don't believe the child died during the procedure, or even got injured. Godspeed.

I issue some job orders and get the dwarves to work producing steel equipment and training my soldiers, splitting them into three squads plus my macedwarves. One is a hit squad, designed for raids and eliminating extremely dangerous enemies, while the other two are basic militia squads for defense. The militia squads were set up to train wrestling while the “elite squad” was given the task of training their axe skill in the meantime. I plan to equip the wrestling dwarves at a later point with weapons and allow them to train, but for now the addition of wrestling should give them an ability to cover their bases for when they’re disarmed later.

While I’m organizing my military, a dwarf named [dwarf name] has a mood and produces an artifact Golden bed. Unbelievably lucky- No longer shall I be confined by the ridiculous demands of mayors or guards.

AtŒstathtat, "Stakeplunges", a native gold bed   
This is a native gold bed.  All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality.  It is encrusted with round native gold  cabochons and encircled with bands of copper. 

I also set up a bathhouse, and butchered some beak dogs to turn into tallow. Soap bars were mass produced, and I forced an elf to create the lye from the ashes. A little immersion breaking that they took it in stride, but probably good because I wasn’t really thinking entirely level when I gave them the labor preference.

My fortress has reached a peak of power. An entire squad of legendary dwarves, two squads of elite wrestlers. Luxurious bedrooms, a trap hallway filled with death. Piles of fine meals, and a bathhouse with statues made of solid gold, and soap made from the flesh of my enemies. Nothing can stop me! Except dwarven suicidal tendencies.

A goblin siege approaches. I am prepared, and I have faced such a threat many times now. But today will be different- Today they will meet the fury of my soldier's axeblades!

I send in my legendary axedwarf squad, expecting them to tear through the enemies ranks like butter. Unsurpisingly, they do- But one by one, they fall, despite their proud stature in Dwarven society. I try to order the dwarves to retreat, but they kill goblins until their final breath, only to fall alongside their brothers, sisters, and dwarves that prefer not to ascribe themselves a part of the gender binary in arms.

To make matters worse, the high-quality armor they drop draws the attention of my other military dwarves. A squad of elite wrestlers, soon to be legendary axedwarves, rush headlong into enemy fire. They also put up a valiant fight-But their death was guaranteed. Only three or so dwarves of the first wrestler squad survive, and the trap hallway is covered in blood. Never before have I seen so much death in this world.

Imagine this, but 100 times worse.

So much death.

I unforbid the precious Goblinite, and my dwarves get to work becoming traumatized hauling the precious resources to my weapon and armor stockpiles. After drafting some peasants into my military, I feel even more powerless than before.

Can any overseer survive in this cruel world? I haven't yet fought the greatest threats, and still my soldiers die like flies to a electric bug zapper.

There is only one answer to this- Dwarven engineering.

After the last goblin wave, I began worrying. My dwarves were throwing tantrums and I didn't have a large enough military to withstand the inevitable next wave if any goblins got through my trap hallway (which they certainly would given the amount of enemies near my fort). To make matters worse, I didn't have any iron or metals that are useful in combat outside of silver, and there were trolls sitting just outside my fort.

Desperate, I begin digging around in the aquifer layer for iron. I didn't find any, and it's probably going to bite me in the ass later thanks to flooding.

I would have given up hope at this point if it weren't for, ironically, my enemies themselves. It turns out that I had gathered a ridiculous amount of weapons and armor from the captured goblins (after disarming them), and a lot of it was iron. Finally, steel AND iron equipment!

I immediately set up a squad of dwarves to wear some of the armor I gathered from the goblins, and melted down some of the excess equipment so I could make iron axes. I dig out another barracks and set them to train, hoping that the dwarves I chose for this new squad prove to be a kind of "giant-killer" group. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of dwarves that aren't happy and they aren't getting magically better. I start manufacture of a large quantity of lead chairs, because for some reason my metalsmiths are extremely skilled, and I dig, smooth, and engrave a room that I fill with the chairs, and designate it as a dining room. I also set my original meeting room as a tavern and put some more chairs. Hopefully that staves off the tantrum spiral (for now).

I unfortunately had to leave some of the goblin's iron scraps behind, because they were already in my corpse dump area with corpses nearby and I couldn't afford to expose any more dwarves then they had already to their dead friends. It's probably worth mentioning that the corpse area is actually a bunch of hatches connected to a lever that I can drop them down a pit with, as a small effort to prevent necromancer ambushes. So, I sacrifice some of the goblin equipment and drop it down the pit along with the corpses.

Here's a fun notification:



After some research, this message being the age of "the Goblin" instead of the age of "Goblins" seems to imply that the necromancer problem has gotten worse, because there's only ONE goblin civ. I may actually be the only dwarven settlement left on the planet, too.

I butcher a few beak dogs out of spite and for training my military. Free food! Actually, a lot of free food. I might be able to live off of these...

The first thing I did was change the tile set to Bitlands, because it seemed fun and I wanted an excuse to try it out (don’t judge me), and then went to the Dwarf Fortress mode, and then finally the embark screen.

How absolutely screwed the world is was immediately apparent the second I saw the map. There literally is not a single biome/region on the map that’s more than 40-50 tiles from a necromancer-controlled city.

I did the best I could for choosing an embark site, selecting an area with a small patch of mountains between me and the nearest necromancer tower. I have no idea if that actually does anything, but whatever. Hopefully it slows the zombies down.

I set up a Dwarven team consisting of a militia leader, an engineer, a woodcrafter/woodcutter, a doctor/blacksmith, a miner, a farmer, and a mason. I can’t really go into too much detail about them, because sadly I’m writing this a decent portion into the fortresses’ development (the end of this post is the point I’m at right now, as of writing), but I can safely say they had no idea what they were getting into.

I immediately began carving out a small encampment out of the nearby hill for my dwarves. In between the fort and the outside world, I slapped down a retracting bridge sitting over a 4-tile-deep pit and connected it to a lever. I think it retracts the wrong direction, but either way it should stop any early unfathomably large hordes of undead from eating these innocent dwarves alive.



Of course, nothing goes as planned, and as I meander about and set up basic defenses and amenities, a group of migrants almost immediately appears. It felt nearly immediate, and I’m not sure if that was just my brain playing tricks on me or if all the sapient beings in this world are just that desperate for shelter.

On closer inspection, all of the new dwarves seemed to have really strange and/or niche laboring skills as well as worryingly high fighting ones. Is it actually possible for civilians in Dwarf Fortress to develop military skills in hostile environments where the other skills are less useful? Does Dwarf Fortress actually simulate that?



Well, moving on, I set them to work creating furniture, gardeni- wait a moment.

It’s at this precise moment I realize I don’t have any kind of farm. I’m honestly terrible at managing farm animals, so I mostly just ignored them (bad idea I know) and construct a regular plot to feed my populace. But, uh, I forgot to this time.

Acting desperately, I try and coat a small room with a bit of mud to make a farm, but it was way too slow. The dwarves actually started starving and becoming dehydrated before I could do it.

I gave up on the irrigation and just made a large farm in the soil layer separated from the outside world, with the only entrance to the farms being from inside the fort. As of now it’s not very secure, being right next to the exit of the drawbridge, but hopefully it stops the dwarves from dying.

But, well, plants take time to grow, and the dwarves are starving *right now*. Uh oh.

Well, it turns out Herbalism is way 29:8;ing better than I knew. After setting up a bunch of my military dwarves (who weren’t that useful at this point) to go collect some plants, I had WAY more food than I know what to do with.

Fast forward a few more days, and at this point the plump helmet farm was complete. I was panicking because I didn’t think I had anything to turn into alcohol, and all of my plump helmet spawn had mysteriously disappeared. But it turns out I had *so much* stuff to turn into alcohol that I had never brewed the plump helmets. I have so many random vegetables that the dwarves haven’t been begun to eat the plump helmets. I still do.

I appoint a manager and set up two new constant condition-based jobs to brew alcohol and make barrels, because honestly I couldn’t be bothered with boring stuff like actually feeding my population.

After that !fun! time, I finally begin to actually improve the security of the fort. I move everything deeper underground and put it behind a long hallway.

While my dwarves might get outside sickness because of this, it’s better than being eaten by a horde of ravenous zombies. It’s also worth mentioning that I’ve almost entirely neglected the dwarves’ happiness until now, which was pretty terrible on my part, but (hopefully?) I make up for it later.



It appears I’ve drawn the… positive attention of other civilizations? By the time of writing this, I have (I believe) 4 different “visitors”/permanent resident monster slayers from other civilizations. I think this is a normal mechanic, but I can’t shake the feeling that some of these people might be necromancer spies. Yikes.

They’re nice to have around though, because almost every single one of these visitors is a monster slayer and as far as I can tell all of the run ins we’ve had with giant animals have been resolved quickly, possibly because of them? I’m not sure.

Also no, it did not escape my attention that one of them is a goblin. Don’t worry, I’m scared of that one too.

But none of that matters- I need to push aside these distractions, and work on my real project.

The Minecart Grinder.

So, assuming zombies operate on the you-have-to-destroy-the-head-to-kill-them logic in this game, I’m not sure how effective it’s going to be, but I would assume reducing them to a pulp will help.

Only time will tell…

It’s been a few months(?) and the minecart project is going along… kinda okay ish. I’m not great at designing these rooms or structures, so I’m sure there’s some sort of giant flaw, but hopefully it should still run over zombies.

I set up some windmills outside, and walled them off. I have no idea if it’s safe, but no one *should* be able to access it from the outside.

More importantly, some more pious dwarves seem to like this place. Seems sort of like a questionable decision for a place to set up a church, but I can’t blame them given… The rest of the planet’s condition.

I start expanding. I can’t actually keep up with the number of dwarves migrating, so obviously something’s wrong with the mountainhomes. I try my best to create more bedrooms for the new arrivals anyway, and set up a macro that lets me make large rows of bedrooms faster and easier.

By this point the minecart project is nearly done when it comes to the actual rail. But, uh, I’m not exactly what’s happening exactly. It sort of just stops at this corner.



I assume I need a roller to power the cart’s movement up the slope in said corner, and begin work on tha-

Oh, corpses of started walking. That's nice, announcement log.

WAIT WHAT THE F@:& HIDE

I set all the dwarves to hide underground, and try to finish the minecart track faster. I fail… but the siege just, stops.

False alarm? What the hell?

Oh well, some other poor sod’s problem. I get back to work and try to expand the minecart grinder and the living conditions of my… civilians. I can’t even say dwarves anymore, there’s so many people here.

Speaking of which, I sort of just made a tavern randomly. Everyone seems to like it, so it seemed to be a good idea, but wow it’s crowded


(ignore the blood)

Let’s stop at a high point here. I can already this is going to be fun.

I spent a solid 2-4 hours working on the minecart system. It took way f2948(&king longer than it should have, because for some reason the minecart kept getting stuck in a corner for literally no goddamn :@&,ing reason.

In the bright side, it now works. On the *dark* side, I know it works because it ran over a cat and a pig. Oops.

I actually had to set up a kill switch for the minecart track, because it appears that it actually constantly gains speed through the entire loop. Great for smashing zombies into a pulp, at least.

It’s at about this point I actually started making more rooms. I have about… 150-160 dwarves now? Is it normal to have this many?

I also have a ludicrous amount of performing troupes that have settled in my fort permanently. Either migrants and visitors are way more common than I thought, or something else is going on.

My civilians do start starving, which is bad. I would focus more on this, but it’s practically commonplace as of writing. I barely avoid it by setting some dwarves to gather more plants and highly expanding my plant production. I should probably get into livestock soon…
 

wait, is that a red bird? Cool. Wait.

I don’t know much about roc’s, so I had to look them up (leave me alone please I’m not an elf I swear).

They ARE mega beasts and they are terrifying, but at least it isn’t a titan or something. Whatever, it’s like halfway across the map from me.

I immediately go back on my previous thought and decide to test my minecart atomizer on this thing. I put all the dwarves on alert and send the small squad of enforcers up to bait it into the minecart loop. It’s big, so it must be slow, right?

WRONG. It immediately teleports 20 files and instakills one of my squad members like it’s name is Barry Allen. I desperately send the rest of my militia back down to the depths of the fort, still trying to fulfill my original plan, but the exact same thing happens to them.

I take a moment of silence for the lost lives, and then my attention drifts to the fact that it’s still heading towards the fort. Yes! Good luck flying underground you big chicken!

It walks across the bridge, and- Disappears?

I quickly look around, trying to find it, and then get dozens of notifications about the roc killing my dwarves. What the hell?

Panning down a couple Z layers, I notice it’s in the MIDDLE OF MY GOD DAMN :$$@KING FOOD STOCKPILE, HOW.

I pause the game to get my bearings, and immediately notice what happened. The pit under the bridge actually had two holes under the stairs I used to make sure my mining dwarves could get back up and walled off, and one of the holes was directly over my main food stockpile. I panic and assign a few random dwarves to a military and tell them to kill it. I resign myself to an early death.

Oh well, it was inevitable.

Wait.

There’s no more fighting notifications? I check the stockpile for corpses, and while the roc is still alive, it’s almost completely immobile. Every single one of it’s limbs is in the red and it’s unable to move. I take a deep breath and unpause the game to let the dwarves finish off the legendary beast.

I’m retrospect, I probably should have caged it, but I don’t have another roc to breed it with so I guess it wasn’t too bad to let it die.

The dwarves lay one final blow on the creature, and the body is moved to my refuse pile. It’s at this moment that I have the bright idea to butcher it, which after a couple minutes of searching for how to butcher nearby animal corpses, pays off. I get *hundreds* of meat, effectively solving my starving problem for the next couple days *at least*. Not to mention the piles of leather and bones.

PRAISE ARMOK! I can’t believe it went that well. A few dwarves died, but altogether it went way better than it should have. A true miracle, honestly.

Finally, some time to rest. Having completed the minecart system and killed all the most recent and pressing threats, I can actually work on making this place livable.

First off, production. I quadruple the amount of mason workshops, carpenter’s workshops, and stills, and triple the amount of kitchens. After that, I can actually see my drink (and food somehow) go into the green.

There’s a bit of lag, but I have no idea what I could do about that. Tips would be appreciated.

While playing around a bit, I get a notification that we’ve entered the Age of Heroes. After some research, it turns out that the number of mega beasts defines the Age, so there’s a nonzero chance my dwarves just dealt the finishing blow to the Age of Legends. Wow.

To top it off, one of my dwarves made a roc bone ring. Talk about badass!




We’re basically invincible! Nothing can go wrong.

Things went wrong.

It turns out I was WAAAAY too close to a goblin encampment, and they were coming right towards me.

I set all my dwarves to the underground burrow, expecting the goblins to go through the choke point I made.

Turns out I left a single corner hole in the outside pasture. The goblins just start flooding in behind literally all of my defenses, and I’m literally unable to do anything about it.

Yeah. Okay, well, I have a really good trap set up. There aren’t any big guys so realistically the cart should work still, I’ll just create a new burrow on the other side of the tr- Oh god they’re dismantling my windmills.

It was a massacre. Entire hallways were coated in blood. The dozens of innocent visitors, taking respite in likely one of the only safe places left on earth, are massacred along with my dwarves. Artist and soldier alike are torn asunder under the better-equipped enemy army.

A glimmer of hope shows itself.

I have a single dwarf left under my control. I might be able to construct a windmill- OF COURSE THERE’s A 029393ing ROCK. OF COURSE. BLOCKING THE WINDMILL.

After an hour of desperate micromanagement trying to get this dwarf to fix the single broken windmill that’s stopping my trap from working, they die from a goblin.

I suppose it was inevitable.

Should I try again? I’m not sure. I mean, I made a pretty obvious mistake there. Also I don’t think I’m going to be using windmills from now on.

I embark with a slightly modified set of dwarves. They’re not perfect but it should work, assuming nothing goes wrong.

Of course, this is Dwarf Fortress.

I try to embark farther away from goblin pits this time. I don’t think it has any effect but maybe it’ll take them more time to get to me and to prepare. Also of course I stayed away from necromancer towers.

I have the “bright” idea to cut out a large chunk of grass and use cave-ins to bring it deeper underground. While performing this absolutely useless task, one of my dwarves is literally frozen in place() and their corpse falls out of a block of ice after I dig them out. My other miner experiences the same fate, and now I have no pickaxes because their previous owner’s bodies are all frozen somehow.

I set up a little base above ground, but a bunch of monkeys keep stealing everything and it’s not a good time. Thankfully, eventually the ice thaws and I get a (single) pickaxe back from my dead dwarves.

I resumed work on the plug, which took a bit but went relatively easy from then on.

If anyone else is as new to this as I am, don’t do this. It’s not a great idea unless you’re willing to dig through hundreds of Z levels to do it. My original plan was to prevent enemies from getting down to my grazing animals, but a lot of enemies can just jump down without getting hurt, even with 5 or so levels of empty space. I have absolutely no idea how, though. Plus flying enemies can ruin your day. Thankfully I took this into account when designing the fort but it was still kinda a waste of time.

I would recommend just making a walled off spot for all of your animals, either entirely isolated from the fort (if you’re not worried about trolls) or connected to the fort and walled off if you’re confident enough in your designing capabilities.

Either way, I shouldn’t have done it. Plus, I had to dig through a light aquifer while doing this, so I had to wall everything off because water was just trickling out everywhere. My dwarves nearly starved, even ignoring the whole “aquifer-water-flash-freezed-my-dwarves” thing.

But, well, I managed to get underground, and that’s when things got a bit more interesting. I made a well(fueled by the aquifer), which thankfully didn’t end in too much death, and dug out a long choke point for the enemies to go through.

I designated a manufacturing and storage area to be dug out, and made a small residential area for my dwarves. I also spent a bit of time creating orders for stone slabs, because at this point more than a reasonable amount of dwarves had died and even though I had a good sized population still I didn’t want ghosts killing people.

I did have to rely on plant gathering for a bit again, and even though things stabilized it took me a long while to get food production to be normalized.


Mostly a boring start, but still not entirely normal, I think.

Realizing how terribly things went last time, I actually designated a military squad, equipping them all with leather armor and silver maces, which wasn’t a great choice in retrospect considering how hard it is to get 30-40 pieces of leather armor manufactured. However the maces have proven effective so far, so hopefully that part wasn’t too bad.

Zombies can multiply if you cut them, so I focused the squad on bludgeoning. Unfortunately, this does make them susceptible to most other enemies. Hopefully it doesn’t catch up with me? Knowing this game, though, it probably will.

I also take a decent chunk of time to set 50-60 cage traps to be made. I’ve heard they’re good, but I’ve yet to see them in action.

Whatever, it can’t be worse than last time.

An interesting quirk of this world’s generation, or maybe I’m just not used to this, is the amount of religious dwarves. Almost every dwarf I’ve met has spent their free time either praying, or meditating. They could be drinking or socializing in guild halls, but they choose to pray instead. I suppose a constant pervasive fear of death will do that to you, but as far as I know that’s normal in Dwarf Fortress worlds. I’ll have to investigate this further.

There’s been a few dwarves with strange moods, and most of them have gone well up to this point. I’m just leaving the artifacts in storage for now.

I left the armor stand in the main Dwarven meeting room. I’m actually not sure if dwarves become happy from being around fancy things anymore, but it’s worth a shot.

Right about here a goblin siege happens. I panic initially, but the goblins rush headfirst into the cage traps and one of them is caught. The rest run away immediately after seeing their comrade imprisoned, most likely out of fear of what horrifying thing I’m going to do to them.

I put the captive goblin in my basement. I still have no idea what to do with them. Suggestions would be welcome.

Things have been going… roughly, despite the resounding victory against the goblin scout party. More will probably come, and in the mean time the dwarves have been starving.

Oh yeah, also a titan showed up.

I activate my siege alert and all of the dwarves hide underground. I’m certain cages won’t work on this creature, so I send my military up in a list ditch effort to stave off the inevitable.

Hilariously, even though the creature slaughtered a few innocent dwarves, my militia leader dispatched it singlehandedly. Turns out the thing was made of water, and water isn’t very durable. They managed to cut it’s limbs off with a MACE, of all weapons.



All that’s left of the creature is a small puddle of water, completely mismatched to it’s implied size. The only reason I found out it was dead was by checking the deceased units screen.

Things do worsen, but not because of the titan. I accidentally mismanage a construction for a dump pit, and crush multiple dwarves under their fallen friends’ corpses and piles of rock. Unsurprisingly, despite having their own bedrooms and booze, lots of dwarves have been lost in the long run over this incident. I probably wouldn’t react well if the corpse of my dead best friend nearly killed me by landing on my head, either.

Oh yeah, also I get a notification about it becoming the Age of the Goblin. I panic again at first, but eventually realize this must mean all of the mega beasts in the world are dead. Anticlimactic and a little sad, really. I suppose it was inevitable.

The first thing I do after recovering from the mass graveyard collapse incident is to construct some large plump helmet farm plots in the soil layer. I connected it to the outside, which I realize in retrospect was not a great idea, but my food production is nearly tripled because of it. Whoo! Finally, no more “Urist cancelled Give Food: Out of Food” alerts.

Oh yeah, also, all my livestock are dead from that tiny goblin skirmish. Forgot to mention.

I begin making clothing and goblets to try and increase the dwarves’ happiness after the Great Corpse Rain Incident, but I don’t have much time to. I get another announcement about a goblin siege, and put the fort on lockdown.

The very first thing I notice is the absurd amount of goblins. Literally dozens of them, just streaming in. I didn’t think my cage traps could get them all. I had three weapon traps ready as well that I had constructed since last time, but only three. They weren’t going to stop much.

Plus, they brought trolls AND beak dogs. Beakdogs, sure, whatever. There’s a lot of them, but they’re basically just bigger wolves, statistically. But trolls? They can smash buildings. Can trolls even be trapped by cage traps? I don’t know.

I expect the goblins to take the smart route and all stream through only one side of my 1x2 hallway, and they definitely tried, but in reality about half of them still got caught in the other tile’s traps. Weird.

Thankfully, this means the goblins, in their blind rush for riches, have nearly their entire main force wiped out in seconds. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with these goblins, but this is a lot better than them getting through. The rest of the force does retreat, as well.

On the other hand, all the trolls they brought stayed around after the goblins left, no doubt attracted to the farm plots I have set up. Four of them are just sitting on the plots, which means I have to keep all my dwarves inside until they smash them all, because I only have ten military dwarves with subpar equipment for dealing with non-undead enemies. Ugggggh.

The first thing I did was change the tile set to Bitlands, because it seemed fun and I wanted an excuse to try it out (don’t judge me), and then went to the Dwarf Fortress mode, and then finally the embark screen.

How absolutely screwed the world is was immediately apparent the second I saw the map. There literally is not a single biome/region on the map that’s more than 40-50 tiles from a necromancer-controlled city.

I did the best I could for choosing an embark site, selecting an area with a small patch of mountains between me and the nearest necromancer tower. I have no idea if that actually does anything, but whatever. Hopefully it slows the zombies down.

I set up a Dwarven team consisting of a militia leader, an engineer, a woodcrafter/woodcutter, a doctor/blacksmith, a miner, a farmer, and a mason. I can’t really go into too much detail about them, because sadly I’m writing this a decent portion into the fortresses’ development (the end of this post is the point I’m at right now, as of writing), but I can safely say they had no idea what they were getting into.

I immediately began carving out a small encampment out of the nearby hill for my dwarves. In between the fort and the outside world, I slapped down a retracting bridge sitting over a 4-tile-deep pit and connected it to a lever. I think it retracts the wrong direction, but either way it should stop any early unfathomably large hordes of undead from eating these innocent dwarves alive.



Of course, nothing goes as planned, and as I meander about and set up basic defenses and amenities, a group of migrants almost immediately appears. It felt nearly immediate, and I’m not sure if that was just my brain playing tricks on me or if all the sapient beings in this world are just that desperate for shelter.

On closer inspection, all of the new dwarves seemed to have really strange and/or niche laboring skills as well as worryingly high fighting ones. Is it actually possible for civilians in Dwarf Fortress to develop military skills in hostile environments where the other skills are less useful? Does Dwarf Fortress actually simulate that?



Well, moving on, I set them to work creating furniture, gardeni- wait a moment.

It’s at this precise moment I realize I don’t have any kind of farm. I’m honestly terrible at managing farm animals, so I mostly just ignored them (bad idea I know) and construct a regular plot to feed my populace. But, uh, I forgot to this time.

Acting desperately, I try and coat a small room with a bit of mud to make a farm, but it was way too slow. The dwarves actually started starving and becoming dehydrated before I could do it.

I gave up on the irrigation and just made a large farm in the soil layer separated from the outside world, with the only entrance to the farms being from inside the fort. As of now it’s not very secure, being right next to the exit of the drawbridge, but hopefully it stops the dwarves from dying.

But, well, plants take time to grow, and the dwarves are starving *right now*. Uh oh.

Well, it turns out Herbalism is way 29:8;ing better than I knew. After setting up a bunch of my military dwarves (who weren’t that useful at this point) to go collect some plants, I had WAY more food than I know what to do with.

Fast forward a few more days, and at this point the plump helmet farm was complete. I was panicking because I didn’t think I had anything to turn into alcohol, and all of my plump helmet spawn had mysteriously disappeared. But it turns out I had *so much* stuff to turn into alcohol that I had never brewed the plump helmets. I have so many random vegetables that the dwarves haven’t been begun to eat the plump helmets. I still do.

I appoint a manager and set up two new constant condition-based jobs to brew alcohol and make barrels, because honestly I couldn’t be bothered with boring stuff like actually feeding my population.

After that !fun! time, I finally begin to actually improve the security of the fort. I move everything deeper underground and put it behind a long hallway.

While my dwarves might get outside sickness because of this, it’s better than being eaten by a horde of ravenous zombies. It’s also worth mentioning that I’ve almost entirely neglected the dwarves’ happiness until now, which was pretty terrible on my part, but (hopefully?) I make up for it later.



It appears I’ve drawn the… positive attention of other civilizations? By the time of writing this, I have (I believe) 4 different “visitors”/permanent resident monster slayers from other civilizations. I think this is a normal mechanic, but I can’t shake the feeling that some of these people might be necromancer spies. Yikes.

They’re nice to have around though, because almost every single one of these visitors is a monster slayer and as far as I can tell all of the run ins we’ve had with giant animals have been resolved quickly, possibly because of them? I’m not sure.

Also no, it did not escape my attention that one of them is a goblin. Don’t worry, I’m scared of that one too.

But none of that matters- I need to push aside these distractions, and work on my real project.

The Minecart Grinder.

So, assuming zombies operate on the you-have-to-destroy-the-head-to-kill-them logic in this game, I’m not sure how effective it’s going to be, but I would assume reducing them to a pulp will help.

Only time will tell…

It’s been a few months(?) and the minecart project is going along… kinda okay ish. I’m not great at designing these rooms or structures, so I’m sure there’s some sort of giant flaw, but hopefully it should still run over zombies.

I set up some windmills outside, and walled them off. I have no idea if it’s safe, but no one *should* be able to access it from the outside.

More importantly, some more pious dwarves seem to like this place. Seems sort of like a questionable decision for a place to set up a church, but I can’t blame them given… The rest of the planet’s condition.

I start expanding. I can’t actually keep up with the number of dwarves migrating, so obviously something’s wrong with the mountainhomes. I try my best to create more bedrooms for the new arrivals anyway, and set up a macro that lets me make large rows of bedrooms faster and easier.

By this point the minecart project is nearly done when it comes to the actual rail. But, uh, I’m not exactly what’s happening exactly. It sort of just stops at this corner.



I assume I need a roller to power the cart’s movement up the slope in said corner, and begin work on tha-

Oh, corpses of started walking. That's nice, announcement log.

WAIT WHAT THE F@:& HIDE

I set all the dwarves to hide underground, and try to finish the minecart track faster. I fail… but the siege just, stops.

False alarm? What the hell?

Oh well, some other poor sod’s problem. I get back to work and try to expand the minecart grinder and the living conditions of my… civilians. I can’t even say dwarves anymore, there’s so many people here.

Speaking of which, I sort of just made a tavern randomly. Everyone seems to like it, so it seemed to be a good idea, but wow it’s crowded


(ignore the blood)

Let’s stop at a high point here. I can already this is going to be fun.