Bay 12 Games Forum

Despite being wildly inefficient compared to a player fort, I've always thought the worldgen forts were pretty neat. So I set out to reclaim one, and as it turns out the new features in v50 make them significantly more treacherous than before. The issue is those ubiquitous obsidian clusters of fun.

Recall that the worldgen dwarves use a standard scheme for their fortresses, centered around a hollow ramp spiral that runs vertically from the surface all the way down to the magma. Unless the fort connects to a subterranean highway, they often even had the sense to wall up the holes where the ramp shaft crosses the caverns. Unless the megabeast that ruined the place is still in residence, reclaiming one used to be generally pretty safe. However, as it turns out, the dwarves who built today's site delved the shaft straight through a substantial number of obsidian surprise packages. Unpausing gave me several "what devilry..." and "something evil emerges..." messages, not to mention both water and magma falling down the shaft.

That turned out to be easy to manage though, as the sudden guests went chasing after former inhabitants first , since some of them had spawned in the depths. A few forbidden doors and hasty walls later, they were contained in various corners of the old living quarters. No, the real annoyance is that, as it turns out, the surprises don't trigger when mined, but when *revealed*. Tonight's reclaim effort finally crumbled when a dwarf trying to bury someone's mangled skeleton got deep enough to trigger another six or seven at once, including a couple of clear glass monstrosities.

Looks like next time I take one of these on, I'm going to be meticulously building airlocks every few z-levels. Fun!

So my legendary clothier went moody on me, and is now standing in the clothier's workshop muttering about cloth.

I've established by process of elimination that the dude wants wool cloth. We have no possibility of access to sheep/alpaca/llamas anytime soon.

However, the goblins seem to use troll fur in industrial quantities, and in adventure mode goblin sites are full of "troll shearing pits." So if I can trap a wild troll in the caves before my clothier goes insane, is there any way to get my dwarves to shear it? I'm not averse to dropping PET_EXOTIC on trolls if that's what it takes.

Urist McAntigravEngineer has been found dead, badly crushed!

I thought I saw Toady mention a while back that he hadn't made any physics changes in this version, but lo and behold, it appears that the sky support bug has been fixed. I just tried "power mining" in an attempt to quickly create a world-gen style dwarven entrance shaft, but even going down through all the caves filling in gaps I couldn't get the central shaft to cave in.

So then I had some doomed fools pull out the stairs at ground level and yup, supports no longer glue stuff to the sky, either.

Can't find a corresponding report in the bug tracker, so no idea if the issue is known to be closed.

So 0.40 is out, hooray! Raise a pot of apple cider in celebration (seeing as apples are a thing now). Now I've been massively curious about the new sites, and since I mostly play Fort Mode I figured the best way to explore one was to reclaim it. Let me show you what I found...

First, a history lesson...

Can I just say, I LOVE the fact that you can now start with a fort with a storied and bloody history of its own!

Esteemeddye had a rough time of it back in the Age of Myth. Founded in 11 by the Ferocious Cloister, conflict beset the dwarves there almost immediately. Their parent civilization, the Dye of Owning, inhabited a densely settled strip of land between the Luxurious Axe Mountains and the Insightful Sea -- a temperate-to-chilly land of forests and grassland, swamps and rolling hills, until they vanished in the north under the perpetual snows of the Responsible Blizzard. Hemmed in by these geographic barriers, elves, dwarves, and goblins all crowded close, elbow to beard. West of the mountains lay a similar land filled to brimming with warlike humans and elves.

Today, tens of thousands of humans and goblins exist in fragile equilibrium. It is said that hundreds of elves still lurk in wild forest retreats, although most of the tame retreats under human administration host less than a dozen each. Few dwarves now inhabit the area.


In the early years of the world, war raged continually, and perhaps it was no great surprise to see death come swiftly to a promising new fort.


The war would far outlast Esteemeddye, as it turns out. In the year 66, the monstrous scorpion Storur returned to Esteemeddye. After killing the two dwarves living there at the time, it decided to settle and call those dark and bloodstained halls its home forevermore. To this day it lurks somewhere in the depths. We know it lives there still, for over a century later it killed a dwarf who ventured into the ruins.

Of course, all of this would be a no-more-remarkable-than-usual dive into the legends except that this is 0.40 -- this fortress exists as an actual, realized site, and dwarves can really go there. Let's go!

Next up ... what the dwarves found.

Okay, strictly speaking, the miasma is totally real, it's the rotting corpses that aren't quite there.

The story begins when a couple of squads out of a goblin siege find themselves in Cerolemal's finest drowning corridor, with predictable results. Now even through the fortress is nearing its 20th birthday, I've never gotten around to setting up power for the pumps that un-flood the corridor. For the same reason that there isn't power, it's a rather long walk from whatever dining hall my usually-idle pump operators are chilling in. (Normally their only job is periodically filling the basin under the magma piston.)

Anyway, since the victims weren't carrying enough iron to worry much about preserving it, I decided to use some bridges to atomsmash the water, and fluid flow naturally pushed some of the corpses under the bridges in the process. Totally expected. Several weeks pass, the floor is all blue 1s and 2s, and right on schedule I have miasma from the un-smashed bodies. (There's garbage compactors at work, of course I'm not going to let the haulers in yet!) Except then I notice it: I also have bright purple miasma tiles spawning on totally empty floor spaces as well!

So I'm thinking that here I have some further evidence for the popular theory that atomsmashing doesn't destroy objects quite as completely as advertised. I don't have an appropriately-timed save to compare to, but just eyeballing I wouldn't be surprised if those miasma spawning tiles correspond to the locations where the former owners of those obliterated corpses met their watery end.

As long as they also stop spewing miasma on schedule, this isn't actually a problem. But is this a phenomenon that anyone else has seen?

I was too busy at the time to try out the recent Single Pick Challenge (but many thanks for the fun ☼movies☼). But more recently, a sig link led me to the horror-show that is Edangzak Utharsanad Gedor...

Well, Thikut reasoned that this here embark may be swarming with horrible undead giant sparrows now, but with all this fluff and feather wood in the vicinity some less-fatal wildlife should be wandering along any time now. So the dwarves struck the earth, walled themselves in, and made rudimentary preparations while they waited for the nightmares to stop. And stop they did, although this land sure did seem to spawn rather a lot of flying zombies. Once Thikut's dwarven senses told him that naught walked the surface but a docile giant grasshopper or some such, the dwarves tore down the entrance wall, and ran out to chop and gather wood and plants. They even had the sense to do these things in small increments and only very close to the entrance ramp, but as none of them knew anything about woodcutting, herbalism, or carpentry, things proceeded rather slowly. Before long, a zombie giant owl was spotted coming from the east, and everyone hustled underground. Yield: two logs, one of which was used to replace the wall with a door to speed up the whole matter of getting in and out.

A second excursion a couple of months later yielded a little more wood and, prize of prizes, a prickle berry. Mouths watered at the prickle berry wine they would soon enjoy. Thanks to a hatch and an unsuccessful experiment with caving in trees, there was even a reasonably safe sunlit tile in which to plant the seed.

Even though the miner Kel was rapidly mastering the swing of the pick, she reported that she could not dig through the waterlogged layers of silt and sand on her own. Thikut dared not open a large skylight, and he knew that even the most conservative pump-based methods would require a good deal more wood. And who knows, maybe he hoped to find a sun berry.

The third foray onto the surface did not end well:

With only three dwarves left alive (and thankfully the battle took place in a serene setting, so their comrades at least stayed dead), Kel determined that they would not perish in this shallow hole like vermin.

*****

So that's the setting for the following. In the Single Pick thread there was much talk of aquifer breaching methods, and eventually Snaake demonstrated a cave-in method that didn't need any wood and didn't breach the surface. Here, Kel would like to present her approach, at most a slight refinement of the Snaake Chicken-run^TM. In particular, Kel achieved a 2x2 stairway through the aquifer while using a slightly smaller footprint of (in this case) scarce good biome soil.

Now this Overseer would like to admit that the starting jobs may not have been ideally assigned. Kel is downright clumsy, and cannot seem to move a tile in under 12 ticks. This meant that she had to dig her way clear up to Grand Master Miner before she could successfully manage a chicken-run shaft. Thus the grid of test shafts. In hindsight, those could have been done as part of the work area perimeter and saved more space. (Note: Z+0 is the lowest dry layer, Z+2 would be the zombie-blighted surface.)


The overseer would like to note that Kel needed a lot of handholding digging the perimeter stairs, as to her shock she kept revealing damp earth in her digging schedule. However, from her perspective it was quick and surprisingly dry work.

The remaining hard part was all on Z-1, and was decidedly not dry work. The next row inwards had to be first ramped up to clear the soil above, and then dug into downward stairs to drain more water. Snaake's method had an outer ring of ramps, but when I've tried that the miner kept getting swept into the flooded ramp and I worried the beard might drown and/or lose the pick. Here, Kel only ever stands on stairs, or mined out floor where she can only get swept back onto the dry-ish stairs. It helped to strategically designate just a few tiles at a time so she spent as much time as possible standing on a drained tile.


After that it was a bog-standard column collapse. Made sure she had somewhere else to be immediately after the final channel, so she and the pick walked directly away after the cave-in notice. I'm still looking for a geometry that keeps the miner properly safe, though.


And that's that. Quick work to make a 2-wide hallway on Z+0 to those stairs, a 2x2 stairwell, and set someone to work slabbing those ghosts. In-game, only six days elapsed between the first successful chicken-run and mining our first stone in the stairwell.

Final thoughts: I'm still puzzling over whether there's an easy way to extend this to deeper aquifers, though. With lots of floorspace you could probably make concentric rings. Although Kel got shoved around a lot digging out 4x4 of water producing tiles, and we're assuming no wood for pumps and no floors to support inner rings after the outer ones go. Has anyone tried chicken-running a 3+ deep aquifer?