Bay 12 Games Forum

Holy christ, so this is what happens when you leave the Cave Spiders to do as they please with cavern layer 2.

As it happens, fires in coal mines, coal seams, and other underground sources of carbon-bearing rock are extremely widespread. It makes me wonder just how much Carbon is being paired up with Oxygen and shot off into the atmosphere through these cracks and crevices, to say the least of any toxins borne in the coal such as Benzene (a liquid, thankfully) and lead. It's been a while since I studied up on coal fires, so I headed to Wikipedia. I started with what was, to me, the most obvious starting-point article "Coal Seam Fire":: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire

"A coal seam fire or mine fire is the underground smouldering of a coal deposit, often in a coal mine. Such fires have economic, social and ecological impacts. They are often started by lightning, grass, or forest fires, and are particularly insidious because they continue to smoulder underground after surface fires have been extinguished, sometimes for many years, before flaring up and restarting forest and brush fires nearby. They propagate in a creeping fashion along mine shafts and cracks in geologic structures."

Aside from being written by a Canadian or some other type with the affinity for those precious extra "U"s (I'm partial to "colour" myself, but mostly to irk fellow Americans), this article related very closely to my recent DF experiences. Having embarked at a flat desert with a thick, healthy, 4-z layer of Limestone just racing with seams of coal and lignite, I could probably have gotten by without ever using magma. Nonetheless, I wanted to bring magma to the surface and at one point there was coal in the path of the pump stack. As far as I know, walls and floors presently NEVER ignite under any circumstances, even if they're made of soap or silver they can hold in magma for all eternity. Despite this, I imagine the worst-case scenario where magma ignites a coal vein or a coal flooring and gradually burns through from the magma source into my fort's dining hall, so I ended up flooring it all over with Bauxite and replacing coal walls with Bauxite Blocks. Wasn't necessary, but half of DF is pretending, right?

This leaves me wondering if a percentage of natural caverns weren't once coal veins that burned away over the course of tens or scores or hundreds of years, leaving an extremely organically-fertile cavern behind which nourishes all manner of underground life. I wouldn't be surprised if such a cave needed a few decades of bioremediation through natural microbes to "clean up" the cavern a bit before it stopped being a toxic environment. Then again, there's a host of adapted lifeforms for most any niche you can imagine...

Now, to the !!Fun!! part of the thread. They mention Lightning, Grass Fires, and Forest Fires as sources of ignition of these veins. While coal is a valuable natural resource in DF, it's presently not very dangerous like say, magma or a running underground river might be. Natural resources must be protected if they are to be harnessed completely and safely. I'd really like to see these veins serve as a source of significant danger at some point, with ignited veins burning away amidst an unreasonable volume of smoke at a rate of 1 tile of exposed surface area per 9 months or something in that... ... ...vein. >_> *dodges pun-seeking missiles* I imagine that in order to extinguish a coal vein, the entire tunnel would require flooding. Extinguishing it with mining picks, well, suffice to say I imagine it would be a disaster, assuming one could not get into an oxygen-deprived cave and manage the endurance to swing a pick for enough time to break down all of the burning rock face without igniting the newly-exposed faces with the existing burning material. I'd definitely like to see veins have a chance to ignite in proximity to fire or magma. Lightning doesn't currently exist but it surely could, even if it had to be done in a cheesy fashion with a pause-recenter event if anything meaningful was struck by lightning. How to render lightning in 2D ASCII, however...? With lightning, we could have natural grass fires, and more reasons to fear the overworld prison reserved for the races rejected by the stone.

All of this makes me wonder at the structural role in organic substances that fill a layer or reservoir or vein like this. Once removed, do these voids left over from oil drilling, coal mining, etc. provide an opportunity for underground collapses or geologic instability? Could all those drained oil reservoirs simply collapse, on a massive (many many acres) scale, causing depression of the land above? Could a burned-out coal seam effectively behave as a faultline?

Another bit scares me just slightly, from the same wiki article:

Global coal fire emission are estimated to include 40 tons of mercury going into the atmosphere annually, and three percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions.

Oh, methyl mercury poisoning. Why must I be a fish-lover? Personally, I don't believe that CO2 is a "greenhouse gas"; CO2 is the main or only means by which plants obtain carbon with which to grow and build their bodies. If you increase the supply they will eat more. In the study of horticulture I learned to burn a tea candle periodically when growing indoor plants as a "snack." Please no off-color jokes here, I don't grow marijuana. I do have a selection of Spider Plants and whatever these are called, however. Any amount of mercury is pretty much a horrible thing for the ecosystem since it is a biomagnifying toxin which works its way up the food chain to humans.

I wonder what, if anything, we could hope to do to put out these RL coal fires. The existing one which I had studied previously:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania#Mine_fire has been burning for 45 years and acknowledged as a lost cause. The city of Centralia was abandoned and a scant 5 or 10 residents remain, the government has even revoked Centralia's ZIP code despite that a few residents refuse to leave their homes. In response, they put up a park bench bearing their stolen ZIP code. True dwarves, here. Burning coal seam? Magma leaking out of the rock above sea-level? Physical gateway to HELL spewing demons? It's fine, this is our home. However, apparently::

"In 2009, Ed Rendell began the formal eviction of Centralia residents. He is facing criticism from some for this move."

To have already lost their hometown in this fashion can leave some people dejected with a feeling that it was all pointless. The last thing they have is the freedom of choice to remain in their homes for better or worse. I'm not sure how I feel about someone else choosing for them that they may no longer do so.



(Attempt #2. This time we have a bit meatier of an OP. Let's remain civil and focused on the topic. Peace, my dwarven brethren! Forget about the previous thread.)

Many of you seem to think of immortal FBS as a bug. Personally, they are the only thing making DF somewhat scary right now. If not for them, I'd cage trap everything and use 1-tile-collapse bombs to trap things that are immune. And of course, for those that absolutely refuse caging, there's always the Axe... Immortal beasts, ones that just won't get killed by weapons, force forethought and punish indolence and greedy underground expansion. I had my first Flying FBS last night--a giant scaled swallow--and upon realizing he had flown over my fortress walls in the underground, I nearly shit. It's thankful this one was not of the immortal variety, though he took a piece of my expedition leader's shoulder with him to hell.

Allow me to take this time in this thread to say that I think DF is in a really sweet place right now. There's enough going on that you will be kept on your toes once you breech the underground, particularly layer 2 and 3. The surface world, by contrast, is fairly predictable and nonthreatening due to its easy-to-manage geography. I haven't seen any flying surface Titans yet (I believe they don't show up until population 80, which I modded down to 75 because that's my population cap, but my fort is still young) so for the pre-100-dwarf players the underground is really the ☼Place☼ to be. My challenge for the first 3-5 years seems to be getting a surface moat dug out and trapped, followed by setting up airlocks and other entryways in the underground.

Long-term I want to end up with a fort that has upright spoilers, and I want to pressurize those spoilers with magma injection. I haven't found a reasonable means of finding spoilers pre-embark yet, and the condition of the surface world is more important to me for FPS and first-year reasons.

Underground content spoilers herein.

http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/map-8181-moonsyrups

Some of ya'll might remember back in September I was working on a fortress that promised to be an infinite labor sink. My goal was to relocate the entire volcano into the fortress walls with an intricate, safe, and adaptable magma storage system which I came to call The Magmazine.

It's now finished, after some 15 years of work. The goal of collecting enough Iron, which would normally be met by abusing the traders and goblins for over a decade, was supplemented and sped up by transmuting rocks and dimple cups into Iron. Two dwarves worked their way to become Legendary Metalsmiths in the process of creating, melting, and recreating iron furniture to produce Exceptional and Masterwork pieces. No metal object in the fort is below this quality, as I sat there and removed it all as I had better-quality stuff to replace it with.

In any case, take a look around and enjoy this complicated and active fortress. My next set of goals revolve around the cave river and cave pond, as I intend to get a reservoir working.

I'm noticing in 40d17 (and the same problem does not exist in 40d16) that when the fort is very busy, it's accepting inputs and processing screen movement that the player cannot see. What am I talking about? In 40d16 if your fort lags really hard due to pathfinding, you can press movement keys and the screen won't really go anywhere until it's done thinking. When it finishes, the screen will move as many times as you asked it to and no more, and you can see this happen even if each level only shows for a few frames. As of 40d17, it seems to both read and process these types of keypresses when it's too busy to show them to the player or accurately count the keypresses. The result is that if I'm trying to move my camera down several z-levels, e.g. 2-3, if the fort lags, when it unlags i'll just suddenly have my screen jump down 4-6 levels instead. I had one epic case where I was looking at level 1 of my workshop complex and trying to go down a level to see level 2, but my view jumped back and forth between 1 and 3--never showing me 2 or stopping on 2--all off a single keypress each time. The game is counting keypresses multiple times when it's busy thinking because apparently it doesn't acknowledge that the key was released but does acknowledge that it was pressed down and held down.

This seems to me, to be related to the recent interface\key binding changes, please don't chalk this up as a minor quirk, it has made navigating around my fort significantly more annoying when the dwarves are dumping stone and the like, as each time a dwarf asks for a path my 1 press of ctrl-5 sends my view down 5+ z-levels or pressing shift-leftarrow pushes my view 2 whole screens to the left.

When adding a task at a lever, "Link up a Bridge" and "Link up Floor Bars" have the same hotkey (b). Interestingly, the second entry--link up bars--is chosen rather than the first. I was able to find this problem in the hotkey interface, but while I am able to add an additional hotkey to change one of them to Alt-b, I can't delete the existing hotkey for "b" so the problem persists. There is no text onscreen in the hotkey interface describing what to do to remove a hotkey and the old method (pressing enter) doesn't do it.

:|

Updated: You can delete an existing hotkey by pressing Backspace. I was able to fix the problem and link my bridges to levers by doing this. The default hotkeys in the game files will need to be fixed up so that floor bars are referenced to alt-b(sdl)