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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.