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Topics - Kanddak

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1
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Extreme Aquifer Piercing
« on: July 13, 2010, 12:34:40 am »
One time just for laughs I punched through a nine-level aquifer using the concentric collapse method. I had two dry levels to work with, white sand and some forgettable yellow soil, above a black sand aquifer, a red sand aquifer, and seven levels of sandstone aquifer.

Here is the map at the completion of the collapse preparations, the middle of the project, and the completion of the whole project:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-9136-glazerooted
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-9137-glazerooted
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-9138-glazerooted

As you can see viewing the first map, the first part of the method is digging out as many concentric rings of floors as there are aquifer levels you need to pierce. You do this by designating alternating rings of dig designations and ramp designations on level -2, and matching rings of channel designations at surface level. Obviously you need to establish support for the rings before you sever them from natural support or you're just going to irreversibly ruin your dig site. The rings have to be supported from above because everything below them is going to gradually become a huge open pit. In this example I had stone available for supports linked to mechanisms, but you could do this by having a dwarf deconstruct the floor (perhaps using a long "fuse" for each ring to allow the deconstructing dwarf to stand far from the pit).
If you go down a couple levels from the default point of interest on the first map, you can see that the first channel-ring has been dug into the first aquifer level and is ready to receive the first ring of walls.
The most labor-consuming part of this method is digging out the next level. Once the walls are dropped, the enclosed area is separated from the rest of the aquifer, but the walls inside that area are still active aquifer walls, and as you channel them all out, the resulting pit will be flooded. Miners are hopelessly stupid about this and will constantly spam "cancelled: dangerous terrain" messages, though by the end of the project they will develop reasonable swimming skills. After a level is dug out, it is necessary to pump out all the water to secure a dry area. Again consulting level 13 of the first map, you can see four positions around the perimeter of the work area ready to have three pumps built in each one. The pumped water is simply dumped back into channels in the same aquifer level, disconnected from the dig area. Luckily, a water wheel in a drainage channel will run forever and power the pumps. Its middle tile does block the output of the middle pump, which serves only to block backflow and transmit power to the other pumps. This system allows pumps to be powered without having stone for gear assemblies to transfer power from another area.
This is seen in action on the fourth level of the aquifer in the second map. The pumps and their waterwheels have been left operating for illustration purposes, since the level below has already been drained and excavated. Going down a level you can see the digging pattern to prepare for the next wall ring collapse. There is a ring of up stairs (this was done in 40d when channeling did not produce ramps) surrounding a ring of channels surrounding a ring of down stairs, with 3-wide openings at points in each ring, and the area inside the ring of down stairs has already been channeled out and flooded. After the wall ring is dropped into the ring of channels, the openings in the outer ring will become drainage channels, and the openings in the inner ring will be floored over to support the intake tiles of the pumps. The middle pumps and containment walls are built first, then the water wheels supported by the middle pumps, then the outer pumps to drain the next level. It is sometimes necessary to have a dwarf manually pump the pumps for a moment to start things up, but usually water splashed by the collapsing walls falls into the drainage channels and causes them to permanently "have flow" for waterwheel purposes. Then everything can be disassembled and moved down to the next level, reusing the same pump components for each level.
The third map shows my resulting triumph.

And that is how you make quick work of even completely ridiculous numbers of aquifers.
Recommended subsequent steps include extending the stairwell upward to surface level, building an imposing tower around it, and flooding the pit to use as a moat. You just need to channel out some walls at the top aquifer level; don't open anything up further down or it will serve as a drain and limit the level of the moat.

2
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Coming soon to a fort near you...
« on: December 06, 2009, 10:24:29 pm »
Code: [Select]
Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Feb 22 2008, 07:57:53)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5363)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import libdf
>>> libdf.designate_maze(20,20)
>>>
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1866-mazegeneration

3
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Walrus Trapping
« on: November 23, 2009, 11:49:09 pm »
This will be of practical interest to anyone who is stuck watching aquatic wildlife sitting in one spot on the ocean floor, of theoretical interest to those interested in the details of fluid behavior, and entertaining to those who like to hear about oceans being drained.

So I was recently trying to get a walrus breeding program going, because seriously, what's cooler than walruses?
After a bunch of fiddling around with worldgen to make a map with a lot of arctic oceans, I managed to get a site with some walruses.

The walruses immediately marched into the ocean and found a nice spot on the ocean floor to sit and breed for a year. They just all sat on their tile and didn't move. Meanwhile, no other wildlife entered the map while the group of walruses was there.

I determined to capture the walruses by any means necessary.

I mined beneath the ocean, put an up staircase in the tile directly beneath the unsuspecting odobenidae, and then dug DIAGONALLY to make a hall full of cage traps leading to a drain into an aquifer. The plan was that I would send a miner to breach the ocean floor by channeling the floor out from beneath the walruses, causing them to fall into the hole and then be washed by the local water flow into the cages.
Unfortunately, it didn't work. Walruses can swim. They stayed in the same tile even with no floor beneath them.

So I raised the stakes. I dug out the corners in the walrus trap to allow water to flow through it orthogonally. This time I imagined that the entire ocean would drain into the aquifer, and then the last bit of flow on the ocean floor would wash the walruses into the hole and thence into the cage traps.
Well, you have not lived until you have drained an ocean into an aquifer. I have drained an ocean using the fire bin method, but it's totally different.
When you drain an ocean using a fire bin, only a few tiles full of water can be destroyed in a given frame. In each frame, the bin destroys all the water near it, and a finite amount of other water teleports to the now-vacant space, ready to be destroyed on the next frame. The ocean drains gradually, and demonstrates the order in which tiles are evaluated for water motion, since it's always the first few remaining tiles that end up moving on each pass.
When you drop an ocean into an aquifer, you learn something else about the way water movement is evaluated: the water tiles take turns, and only certain ones are evaluated on each frame. You learn this because the aquifer can destroy arbitrarily many tiles of water per frame; tiles can pressure-path into the aquifer and vanish without occupying any space to prevent the entry of more water. And it takes a few frames for the ocean to vanish; they don't all go on the first frame, and you can see the order they go in. You can see it very clearly because each individual frame takes about 30 seconds to happen, as thousands of water tiles path to their demise.
Anyway, it still didn't work. After the ocean finally drained, the water entering the map from the exposed map edges kept the entire ocean floor level, as well as the trap hallway, filled to 7/7. Any further water landing on top of that would of course find its way into the aquifer and vanish, but any vacancies were immediately filled. And this, of course, does not cause any flow that would push walruses into my trap. No good.

For my third attempt, I dug a tunnel around the map edges. I actually went two levels below the ocean and dug a lot of ramps to remove the walls above so I could avoid the endless damp stone messages. I then built drains from this tunnel into the aquifer. Then I went up a few levels and built a ring of suspended floors exactly over the tunnels, themselves separated from the ocean only by floors.
I pulled the collapse lever and again waited for the ocean to drain, and oh how it drained. With the continuous drain wrapping around all of the oceanic map edges, newly-entering water would always find its way into the drain instead of refilling the middle of the map. Finally I reopened the walrus trap. With no pressurized water to instantly refill vacant tiles, the walruses immediately fell into the hole, and were swiftly washed into the cage traps by the water's diffusion.

I had captured the entire herd of walruses.

When I had done this, other wildlife finally began to enter the map. My breeding program now has large herds of elk and muskoxen as well as walruses, and a few wolves. I also have two female polar bears.

Eventually, however, another group of walruses entered the map and settled into place on the ocean floor, thereby blocking all other wildlife activity.

4
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / The Perfect Magma Trap
« on: November 11, 2009, 08:45:53 pm »
I'm pushing the boundaries of trap design and logic systems once again.

I'll just show rather than tell:

Movie: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1808
Map: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7408-toolconfuse
Trap design: http://i576.photobucket.com/albums/ss208/kanddak/magmatrap.png

And quote from the description I wrote for the movie instead of rewriting it:
Quote
This design has the following desirable properties:
- Instantly seals and fills after slightly more than a floodgate toggle delay, minimizing escape opportunities and doing away with lengthy waits for magma to flow.
- Instantly drains clean when finished, allowing immediate retrieval of valuable armor or admittance of another group to trap.
- Conserves magma, never permitting it to evaporate.
- Does not require use of magma-safe mechanisms.
- Equipped with an automated trigger/safety logic system, allowing the trap to be actuated without having to pull several levers (opportunities for the lever puller to fall asleep, or for the player to pull levers in the wrong order and cause a magma flood).

Its only requirements are magma-safe pumps and grates/floor bars (have sand or iron/nickel), a substantial amount of mechanical power (and therefore wood), and enough water volume to operate the logic system.

This proof-of-concept is a 10x1 tile hallway, but two copies of the trap could be placed face-to-face to make a 2-wide hallway, and it can be extended to any length desired.

Using this design with reversed logic would serve as a good freezing/thawing control for an ice trap.

I would be very pleased to witness a production version of this trap in someone's fort devouring a siege.

Postscript: Setting the lever to pull on repeat cannot cause any odd conditions or magma accidents, only get the trap stuck closed because the trigger door is destroying water before it can get to plates to advance the trap state. However, resetting the trigger lever and then immediately pulling it again before the trigger drawbridge has lowered will place the trap into an automatic infinite repeating state... which I'm going to consider a feature.

5
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Three prelimary discoveries
« on: October 30, 2009, 10:06:37 pm »
I just discovered three interesting things. I haven't put together a rigorous experiment on either of them yet.

Firstly, flammable stones can be used as semi-magma-safe materials. I passed magma through a green glass floodgate that was linked with a graphite mechanism. The mechanism caught fire, but the floodgate stayed constructed and could be reclosed.
This isn't suitable for a permanent magma system, because burning stone objects do eventually disappear, after about a year. But in certain applications it may be good enough to simply be able to reclose whatever you opened. It might be possible to put out the fire with buckets, I haven't really tried yet.

Secondly, roads made of charcoal don't seem to catch on fire when immersed in magma. It would have been really cool if they did, but I tried and it didn't work.

Oh, and thirdly, I found a way to debug perpetual motion power plants. Mine was a "channel in the aquifer" design that wasn't generating power. I ponded a bucket of water into the channel from two levels above (at one level up, the pond zone registered as full and dwarves wouldn't fill it) and it apparently reset the "static" flag and the plant immediately began running at full power.
I don't even understand why certain power plant designs do or don't work in the first place, so I don't know how I'd even begin to design an experiment to show the exact circumstances when you can fix them with a bucket, but this seemed so useful that I was compelled to share it at once so others could try it.

6
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Tunnel allows civilizations across barriers
« on: October 02, 2009, 10:44:59 pm »
I just found a site that touched two different continents (on a map I'd designed to have a lot of islands). Besides dwarves, one continent only had a goblin civ as neighbors and one only had elves. The site with an edge on each continent had both goblins and elves as neighbors.
I embarked there and dug a tunnel under the ocean. I put in a drainage system with pumps for good measure, since abandoned ocean sites have everything below sea level flooded.

It was just for laughs (or adventurers, I guess) but after I abandoned, I discovered that all parts of both continents now showed both goblins and elves as neighbors.

I wasn't sure whether this was because the game knew I made a tunnel, or just because the existence of the site itself connected the two continents. I found an area where a valley surrounded by mountains had no neighbors but dwarves, and found an area where the mountains were narrow and went across the middle of a region tile; I laid down a long, narrow site across the region tile and then abandoned. The valley now has access to all civs.

7
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / A couple notes on Dwarven Fire (blocks in a bin)
« on: September 22, 2009, 07:43:03 pm »
Back in February I discovered ( http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31244 ) that a flammable object in a magma-safe bin can be submerged in magma to ignite the object, which is then shielded by the bin from any extinguishment by water. This has become famous because it was quickly recognized as an easy way to drain an ocean and is a cool trick in general.

It has become immortalized in popular imagination as the "lignite block in an iron bin" trick, and I'm posting just to clarify that although I happened to be playing around with a lignite block at the time (it was an experiment to see if you could melt blocks and then cool them into usable stones, which would make the blocks caravans bring useful, but it didn't work), any long-burning object will do. (Wood and cloth catch fire, but burn away too quickly to be useful)

If your caravan brings lignite or b-coal blocks, by all means use them, since they're no good for anything else.
But if you have lignite (or b-coal), please don't think it's the only thing you can do this with and carve it into blocks; you can smelt it to get two (or three) blocks of coke, each of which is just as good for your pyromaniacal schemes. Charcoal works too, so you can piss off the mer-people and the elves.
Graphite should be even better for this, if you happen to have it, because it doesn't have any economic use (steelmaking) -- though I haven't tried.

Today I had the revelation that there's no reason this should even need to be done with a block. It could probably be any item made out of a long-burning material that can be stockpiled in a bin.
I hypothesize that if you really wanted to drain the ocean in style, you could probably use a diamond.
But the main point of this realization is that you ought to be able to do it with finished goods, too. Since you get three mugs for every one unit of stone, the most efficient way to fuel burning bins might be to make graphite mugs. You could also, if pressed into wasting lignite, carve that into mugs (no point with b-coal, since it makes three cokes).

I haven't tried that, but someone should; if it works, then this really ought to be thought of as the "graphite mug in a bin trick", with lignite recognized as a last-resort substitute -- unless, of course, you get the otherwise-useless blocks from a caravan.

8
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Two Experiments with a Major River
« on: August 23, 2009, 01:15:00 pm »
Just a little hydrodynamics research I carried out today.
For reference, here's my current theory of water: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=32453.0

Experiment 1: Relative speeds of different methods of water movement

Abstract:
I wanted to provide a demonstration of different ways of moving water for the benefit of a forums poster who was questioning the best way to fill a cistern. (http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=40774.0)
The poster originally questioned the merits of simply connecting a river to an aqueduct to a cistern, versus pumping water from the river into the aqueduct and cistern, versus connecting the aqueduct to the river and then pumping it from the aqueduct into the cistern at the cistern end.
I designed an experiment intended to demonstrate the relative speeds of pumped water, water under pressure, and water flowing horizontally. However, failure to account for the effects of the sourced water of a major river caused the various cisterns to fill in an order other than what was predicted, with pipes closer to the source of the river receiving water first.
As a result, I was lead to the hypothesis that rivers place new water onto the map using a shortest-path algorithm, similar but not identical to that used by screw pumps and water pressure effects.

Video: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1618-riverexperiment1cisternfillcomparison

Details:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Experiment 2: Pathfinding algorithm for river water

Abstract:
After the failure of Experiment 1 I wanted to test the behavior of river flow more precisely. I hypothesized that it would not be able to pathfind through diagonal openings.
I designed an experiment using three pairs of channels. One pair was a control where water could enter both channels orthogonally. In the other two pairs, one channel had a diagonal opening at its entrance.
Consistent with my hypothesis, water flowed more slowly through the diagonal openings.

Video: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1619-riverexperiment2pathfindingofriverwater

Details:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Experiment 1B:

With the information gained from Experiment 2, Experiment 1 was repeated with a diagonal opening preventing river flow from flooding the pipes. This modification caused the experiment to behave as originally predicted.

Video: http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1620-riverexperiment1b

Details:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

9
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Hydrodynamics Education
« on: March 17, 2009, 10:57:09 pm »
I get the impression that a lot of people don't understand how fluids work, and when I read the wiki articles about water and pressure, it's not hard to see why. The water pressure article still lists buggy behaviors from older versions. The "current best pressure model" is overly complex, and can be replaced by one simple rule which I am about to present.
A couple times I posted in threads explaining fluid behavior to people, but it seems like if there were better documentation of this behavior in the first place, a lot of these questions might be avoided.
Therefore I am writing this post, with the intention of linking to it from water-questions threads, and the hope that some of this material makes its way to the wiki.

This is my current understanding of water:

For each frame, a loop runs through every tile with water in it, and determines, one at a time, what each tile of water is going to do, according to the following three rules:
1. If water is in open space above a tile which is not full of water, it falls into the space until the space is full or there is no water left to fall. This sometimes generates mist.
2. If water is in open space above a tile which is full of water to 7/7, it finds a path through tiles of 7/7 water to the nearest non-full space on a lower z-level, and then teleports there until the space is full or there is no water left to teleport. It only pathfinds north, east, south, west, up, and down; not diagonally. It does not move creatures or objects. This one rule is "pressure".
3. If water is unable to fall or move under pressure, because it is resting on a floor or because it is on top of more water but all connected spaces on lower z-levels are full, it will spread out to adjacent tiles (including diagonally) which have a lower level of water in them. This may move creatures and objects. (I don't know exact rules for where it will go if there are multiple tiles to spread into, though observation of partly-full reservoirs suggests there is some pattern. I also don't know whether objects' masses affects whether they will move.)

This is illustrated by the following flow flowchart:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Magma is exactly the same as water with the omission of rule 2. It can fall, or spread out, but not move under pressure. If magma is in a 1x1 chute over a mostly-full reservoir, it has to wait for a 6 in the reservoir to line up under it so that it can fall in.

Pumps are the last thing that need explanation.
When there is a fluid in the tile from which a pump pumps, the pump tries to pump the fluid as follows:
1. If there is space in the pump's output tile (the one next to the solid tile of the pump, in the line of the pump), it puts fluid there.
2. If the output tile is full, the pump attempts to find a path through 7/7 fluids to the nearest empty space on the same or a lower z-level, and puts fluid there. As with water-pressure pathing, pump output cannot path through diagonals.
3. If there is no available connected output space on the pump's z-level or lower, nothing happens.

This applies equally for water or magma, which explains all magma-pressure phenomena. Pumps do not "give magma pressure"; the pump moves the magma according to the rules of pumping, which can span z-levels, but after it has been placed by the pump, the magma moves only according to its own rules, which do not include pressure.

A couple relevant posts I've made:
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31425.msg439298#msg439298
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31312.msg438288#msg438288

See also Akhler's application of the inextinguishable-flaming-lignite-blocks-in-a-bin trick:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-1124-itwinssohard

Things I still don't know:
Suppose a pump is merrily pumping magma, and someone pulls a lever that closes the door allowing magma under the pump intake, then opens a source of water. Will the pump path through the magma to find a place to put the water?
What's up with that one flood-the-world pump experiment? I tried unsuccessfully to recreate that once but it was a pretty casual attempt. Does that work in 40d, and if so, how exactly do you do it? I do have one power plant that drains into the same cave river it pumps out of (drain is downstream of intake), and that river flooded nicely.
How do waterwheels really work? I've heard "it has to be less than 7/7 water" but that's definitely an oversimplification, because I've designed power plants that were constantly at 7/7 water and ran fine. I was about to conclude that "when water at 4/7 or above spreads-out under a waterwheel, or a pump (and possibly water pressure) paths through a tile under a waterwheel, the waterwheel runs" when I built a power plant that should have worked if that were true, but only generated 500 power instead of 3000. I'll have to take the thing apart to figure out which five of the thirty wheels are running, and see if I can figure out why.

10
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Effective Child Killing
« on: February 24, 2009, 08:03:24 pm »
So, I have this nice fort where I've been micromanaging labors to make sure that all my farmers and crap like that have made a single weapon or piece of armor to get dabbling weaponsmith or armorer, so that when there are moods I don't get bullshit alder idols and other such lame crap.
Unfortunately, as often happens, I've gotten to a point where a large proportion of the fort's population consists of children. One of the little bastards got moody and made a goddamn scepter, becoming legendary in stonecrafting but still too young to be used as a stonecrafter. So I decided to kill them off to increase my odds of getting artifact weapons (especially since I'm all set up with my forge accessed through an airlock so I can make sure they only use steel).
A lot of them aren't even anyone important's kids. To keep my population down, I've been drafting almost all migrants and ordering them to stand on a retracting bridge directly over my magma vent. This produces a lot of orphans, easily identifiable by checking their relationships screen and seeing that their parents are two recruits on fire.

I build a child-and-pet trap on the next z-level above my main dumping bridge. There is a 1x10 retracting bridge with doors on each end, one being to get in and one leading to a room with a lever. My original plan was to use workshop profiles to try to get children to pull the lever, but they wouldn't do it, so I came up with an even better plan. I dug out a large room behind the lever and covered it with constructed floors. To catch children, I mass-designate stone for dumping to give all idle adults jobs, then designate all the construction to be removed and the children swarm out to do it.
Once a bunch of them are on the bridge, I lock the doors and pull the lever to drop them onto the main dumping bridge. Then I could reset the thing and catch more children. I designed it that way when I thought I'd be catching one at a time with the lever, but I just caught five on my first try and I'm going to dump them into the magma and then wait a while for their families and friends to calm down. I also caught two pets belonging to one of the dwarves that was building the floors.

Edit: Ok, I couldn't resist. I went for it again, and this time I perfectly captured the other eight children in the fort (besides the legendary stone crafter, who gets to live just because, having already had a useless mood, he can't have another). All of them went into the magma and all of the parents are still "happy lately" at worst; some dwarves are still ecstatic after losing four or five friends to tragedy (since children tend to hang around and make friends with everyone).
My fort has eight babies right now, so in a year I'll be doing it again.
There was just a little tricky micromanagement in drafting the few adult dwarves who picked up remove-construction jobs and keeping them from getting dumped.
It's probably helpful that in this fort, I'm working on giving every dwarf their own personal suite of dining room/office/bedroom/tomb, carving the rooms out of dolomite before turning my legendary engraver loose on them, and my meeting room has a gold statue studded and encrusted with everything I had when I made it and worth 4500.
This should work great for nobles, too; I had to do some fancy management to keep my dungeon master from ending up in the middle of the crowd of children. This is definitely the most effective migrant/pet/child control system I've ever made.

11
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Stupid coal tricks
« on: February 20, 2009, 03:49:27 pm »
Summary: Lignite blocks put in an iron bin and submerged in magma ignite and can't be extinguished, bin thenceforth sets fire to dwarves and instantly vaporizes water.

So I heard that you could turn blocks back into stones by putting them in a magma-safe bin; submerging said bin in magma, thereby melting the blocks; then recovering the bin and its contents and allowing the molten blocks to cool into stones.
I set out to test this today. It didn't seem to work.
It turns out there's a difference between a "dolomite" , which shows "Uses: Make steel bars, Make pig iron bars" and is a stone, and a "Dolomite", which has no uses and shows up in "globs" on the stock menu.

When I tried this, I put two Lignite blocks in my bin with some other stuff. Rather than melting, they caught on fire inside the iron bin and began emitting smoke.
As soon as I opened the test chamber to try to recover the bin and see whether I could persuade my smelter to take a big-S Sphalerite, the first dwarf to set foot in the chamber caught fire and died. I poured buckets on it for a while, but that didn't seem to change anything. The bin shielded the burning blocks from being extinguished by water.

I built a system to pump water into the chamber to see what would happen.
It instantly drained my reservoir, so I activated my fill pump from the cave river and started pushing more water in. The bin of doom is still instantly vaporizing all the water I pump towards it from a tile away. (Bin tile: Dry. Next tile: Dry. Second tile: Water [6/7].)
I just pitted a rhesus macaque child onto it, and it died in the heat, then quickly became bones.

I can't move the thing, but I could sure have some fun with it.
I'd like to see what happens if you make one on a retracting bridge and then drop it into a lake, or if you put it in a 1-wide passage that's the only entry to your fort during a siege or elf caravan. It could potentially have magma's advantages of burning goblins to death and destroying their narrow clothes, without the trouble of draining the magma when you want to collect the iron stuff, due to the flaming goblins running past the bin before dying.

12
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Failed Moods and Stupid Players
« on: February 19, 2009, 04:24:24 pm »
It seems like every time I read the forum, someone has a sob story about losing important dwarves to failed moods, and people reply with their clever techniques of locking them in their workshops, assigning dogs to them to take them out if they berserk, and other such silliness.

I've had two failed moods ever. One was in my first fort, and one was a glassmaker on a sandless map. What the hell is wrong with people?
I've had a couple of close calls, but the time you get is more than generous.

I present my quick guide to never, ever failing a mood, unless you have someone wanting glass on a sandless map:

Bring a couple turtles, or set a dwarf to fish just for five minutes (make a fishing zone on a safe pond if there are carpful places to fish), or buy a turtle or cave lobster from your first caravan. This way you won't be caught without shells. If you're in a desert you need to do your fishing right away before the ponds dry up. If you're on a glacier you might be screwed.

Plant pig tails in your first summer. This way you won't be caught without plant cloth, and if someone needs glass, you won't be caught without bags to gather sand in. I've tried playing with no farmer and without bringing any plants or seeds, but I started gathering plants and pulled some rope reed almost right away. If you're playing that way on a glacier you might be screwed.

Buy one or two pieces of giant cave spider silk cloth from your first caravan. This way you won't be caught without silk cloth. Even if you have a chasm, GCS cloth will make a better artifact, and in the beginning of the game when you're most vulnerable to failed moods your chasm is probably still full of nasty things.

Buy a leather bin from your first caravan, or butcher one of your initial pack animals. This way you won't be caught without leather. As long as you've got stuff for a butcher and tanner shop, you've always got those two starting pack animals, so there's almost no way to screw this up without going to great lengths to be stupid.

If you're building an aboveground fort, go dig enough to find at least one metal vein and gem cluster. This way you won't be caught without stone, metal or gems. If you have an aquifer, learn how to get through or around it; I recommend making a pump out of wood if you really have no stone at all (to make 3 mechanisms for the cave-in method) and can't use a map feature to get by.
If you brought neither a pick nor an anvil, or have an aquifer but no axe, then you might be screwed.

Have access to at least three logs. This way you won't be caught without wood, because you have logs; metal, because you can turn a log into charcoal and use it for smelting; green glass, because you can turn a log into charcoal and use it for glassmaking; or clear glass, because you can turn one log into charcoal for glassmaking, a second into ash and then potash, and the third to make pearlash. If you have a moody smith they might want several metal bars, in which case you turn all the logs into charcoal. I once had a smithing mood where I'm pretty sure the actual forging didn't use any fuel (just the burning passion of that dwarf's inspiration, I guess); if that's really how it works, you should be fine using all your logs for smelting.
If you embarked on a treeless map or without an axe, without bringing any logs, turned your wagon into beds, and are dropping caravans into magma or don't get any logs from your first, then you're probably screwed, but that's the kind of thing that happens when you live on the edge like that.
You can also buy a bar of something cheap like tin or copper from your first caravan to use in mood emergencies.

I do all these things just about automatically with every new fort. It only takes a tiny bit of planning to make sure you have every type of material around for moody dwarves.
Exercise a little foresight, and you too can move on from telling "my armorer failed a mood and died" stories to "I got this lovely artifact steel chain mail worth 384,000... but it was from a goddamn possession so I didn't get a legendary armorer."

13
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Numberabbey: 8-bit ripple-carry adder
« on: February 01, 2009, 04:51:52 pm »
I built this over the weekend:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-4523-numberabbey

I've seen a couple theoretical plans and proofs of concept for this kind of thing on the wiki, but never anything on this scale.
It runs beautifully, and some time I'll put up a video of it in operation and write a little about the problems I ran into trying to design it.

14
DF Bug Reports / [40d] Pumps run on overloaded power system
« on: January 26, 2009, 05:06:41 pm »
I turned on my gigantic magma pump tower for the first time and filled my magma plumbing.
Then I turned that off, because it maxes out my power system when it's running.
Then I turned on the power to fill my brand new magma-based goblin execution room.
It didn't fill all the way, because I drained a lot of magma out of my plumbing system, and the magma was flowing as slowly as magma does from the extreme ends of said plumbing towards the intake for the execution room.
So I ordered the main pump tower switched on, and the execution system power switched off.
I expected that if the main pump power lever was pulled first, the power system would be overloaded, the execution room pumps would stop, and the main pump tower would not activate until the execution power was turned off, bringing the power system's load below its maximum.
Instead, after the pump power lever was pulled, my millstone became unpowered and announced that it had removed its jobs, but all pumps connected to the now-overloaded power system briefly ran, including the newly-activated main magma pumps.
Result: Plumbing is immediately pressurized with 7s of magma. Execution pump continues operating, now with a pressurized intake that keeps it from having to wait for more magma to flow under it. The execution pit is quickly pressurized with magma which then overflows into the anteroom where caged goblins are waiting to be thrown into the magma. After a few moments and a shitload of magma, everything on the power system actually stops.

No dwarves were in the room when this happened, the entire area is behind nickel doors in case of just such an unforeseen emergency, the system never leaked magma into my power distribution system (as designed), it was actually pretty great when smoke started coming out of my iron cages, followed by XX{goblin bones[6]}XX shooting across the room following the magma flow before disappearing, and I learned a valuable lesson about performing operations with my magma system one step at a time.
But pumps probably shouldn't do that.

Edit:
Just to be clear about how  I know that it really happened just the way I describe, I paused in the middle of the magma flood, looked at all of the pumps involved as well as distant parts of the power network and saw inactive, 1600 total power and 1647 power needed, then one-stepped a few times and observed that magma was, indeed, being sucked out of the bottom of the magma vent and continuing to flood the area I didn't intend to put so much magma in, despite the pumps reading inactive.

15
DF Bug Reports / [40d] Creatures appearing at strange places in middle of the map
« on: October 30, 2008, 09:33:38 pm »
I have a fort where things tend to appear in strange places.
I started noticing this in the fall of the second year, when I noticed some wild camels running around inside my wall, with no traps triggered, and caught a wave of migrants popping out of a spot in the sand outside.
Throughout the history of the fort there have been a series of camel invasions, where wild camels would show up, climb to the top of the walls, and proceed to relentlessly terrorize the masons (I'm working on building a huge ziggurat).
I was willing to tolerate this, especially when I thought I had narrowed down the mystical camel-materialization nexus to an area in the north of the fort and started digging a ditch around it. Then a goblin ambush spawned in that area, and killed the miner digging the ditch, as well as a few other important dwarves before being subdued.
I finished the ditch, thought I had things under control, and soldiered on. (Interestingly, I've received no more camel invasions since digging the ditch.)
Now I've received a wave of migrants who are appearing at a point in the southwest of the fort, and I've saved while they're in the middle of spawning.
The only thing I can think of that might be related is that I embarked on a particularly wide (east/west-wise) site in order to encompass a stream and a magma vent, and the observed spawning locations are consistent with the possibility that they're all along some invisible line, perhaps a biome boundary, or what would be the edge of the site if it was a square. I've observed things -- like caravans -- appearing from the north and south, but never from the east or west. (I haven't had a caravan spawn inside the fort yet, but that would be fun...)

Save is here: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=627

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