Bay 12 Games Forum

I've been fiddling around with trying to create a completely underground fort as of late, and lately I've been looking at underground tunnels (underground roads that link dwarf cities through mountain ranges).  From what I can tell, if you build a trade depot on these, you can actually get trade and everything without a link to the aboveground on your fortress's map.  They also tend to reveal much of the first cavern level as they pass in and out of it.  Anyways, I'm looking for a new site since the last awesome one I found (a magma vent that opened into the first cavern next to the tunnel) was a bit uncolonizable (I'm running Sarvesh Mossbeard's Underdark mod, and my dwarfs found a drow swordsmaster with an adamantium sword while trying to settle in the first cavern.  My militia of two miners and and two woodcutters turned axemen was slaughtered).  Eventually I came across this:



Apparently, this underground road traveled through an underground lake, causing it to spill over.  I'm going to watch this for now, as some of the water seems to be freezing as it splashes onto the road, but I thought I'd share this.  I love how the world freezes in a sort of perfect equilibrium until seven settler dwarfs arrive.

I've been having trouble with my dwarfs.  I've been bouncing between super-effective miners/militia and completely ineffective militia.  No happy, or at least grudgingly accepted, median.  Lately I've been trying to set up in the caverns, digging down until I've got me a nice, muddy, open space to start work, and then set up.  The problem with this?  The creatures in the first cave often upset my worker bee dwarfs.  I've figured out how to turn my wood cutters and miners into a make-shift militia, and it works...right up to the point that everyone forgets their weapons.

Latest fort: 
Start with Vultures harassing my wagon and I don't want them to steal my food, so I make my woodcutter/carpenter and woodcutter/engineer axemen (enlist and set weapon to "Battle axe" and set them to "KILL VULTURE", killing a couple with no trouble and scattering the rest.  My manager is set to butchering and my miners dig until they find the first cavern.  I find some trogs in the cavern, so add my two miners to the militia group (setting their weapon to picks).  The first of the two trogs I found is cut down in no time while the other gets away.  My dwarfs go and have a victory drink while I set up the farms.  They sit there, just drinking, while I set a kill order and one of my farmers runs around screaming.  Ignoring the nearby vultures while they're at it (luckily my cave pig, a modified tameable subterannean pig I've added that has a shell, the females are also trainable and milkable, is eating vulture for breakfast).

Anyways, Dwarfs go about their business, chug-a-lug, and finally go downstairs to deal with the Trogs...and forget their weapons.  What should have been an outright slaughter is now a wrestling match that my dwarfs are losing.  Why does this keep happening to me?  This has to be the third start-up fort I've lost due to military laying down their weapons and trying to suplex the enemies since 31.04 came out!  Forth fort in total if you include the mature fort that I lost to a goblin ambush when the militia wanted to go boxing!

So far, like most everyone else, I'm loving the underground areas (not counting the undead forts that kill my FPS from all the zombies trying to path their way to me), however something seems a bit off.  I understand that dwarfs are the "masters" of the underground, which is why they start out with a lot of underground plants at their disposal.  However, the dwarfs don't start out with any underground creatures unless you mod them in.  This made me think:  Why do the dwarfs start with all the underground plants available?  Shouldn't there be some plants that have to be harvested at least once underground to have available?  Some rare and valuable plants that can only be found after breaching the second or third cavern with special properties (like toxins for your weapons once someone gets that working, or a salve that can be used by doctors to drastically reduce the chance of infection), including some that can't be farmed like kobold bulb and valley herb on the surface.

EDIT:  Here are the plants I have created so far:  The weedlike Cave Vine.  It's cheep, it's nasty, and practically grows fast enough for you to watch with your naked eye, but it keeps your dwarfs fed and boozed up.  I honestly can't decide if this should be available to the dwarf civs, or limited to the lower caverns. The valuable Blood Boil, producing valuable bloodwine and lifeblood syrup.  Finally, the Mithril Cotton plant, able to make valuable threads that can be woven into cloth and then smelted into lightweight mithril wafers.  Right now, the plants all have glitched images (cave vine and blood boil are solid black blocks, mithril cotton is a solid white block) because I thought the color values are RGB.  If anyone has any suggestions for how they should look/be colored, feel free to speak up.


Here's the reaction to take a piece of cloth and turn it into a mithril wafer.  I tried using thread, but it never worked without the risk of turning the smelting process into a dwarf black hole where the smelting dwarf would take every nearby item (logs, barrels of booze, barrels of plants and fat, gems, other mithril bars, etc.) until he had 15000 thread (1 piece of thread, or 2 pieces of cloth) and one unit of fuel.  Now, remember to add the reaction to the dwarf civilization entity.

Finally, here's mithril itself.  It has amazingly high tensile strength, but melts at the same temperature as gold and is only slightly better in other ways than copper.  Right now it has a lovely dark blue color, a lot like kimberlite.


EDIT2:  More new plants!  Cave weed and sea grass, both are plants that can be baked into charcoal at a kiln.  Insipiration?  Maps that have no readily available source of magma or fuel and the real life use of drying out seaweed for fuel.  Also, cave weed cannot be eaten, while sea grass can be.  Sea grass can be found on the coasts and cave weed can be found in the second cave level down.  Right now they are visually exact clones of quarry bushes, so I'm still hoping someone will come by and give me some icon/color sets that work well in ASCII.

The plants:

And the reactions.  Remember to activate these in the entity files.

Allright, adding GRead's plants up here.  Added [GOOD], [EVIL] or [SAVAGE] tags to some so that you underground isn't the same all the time with all the same plants.

I've played a couple of forts so far, and they seem to whither and die to various food-related issues (i.e. not enough).  Normally, I stock up on food and drink whenever a trade caravan comes by, but so far I've had a fort go two years without a single elf, dwarf, or human delivery.

I thought it was odd, so I copied the file and then abandoned the fort in the copy and looked around for other civilizations, only to find there were none.  There were only Dwarfs, and even then I couldn't trade with them everywhere (mostly in wastelands which makes sense).

I've generated several maps, both island and non, and so far I haven't been able to create a map with non-dwarf civilizations.  I've even upped the number of starting civs there are.  Is anyone else having this problem?