Bay 12 Games Forum

So my current fortress has been stalled for a few months because I painted myself into a corner. This is Inksacks:


The building in the top center is carved out of a 15z high block of obsidian, and you can see that the last layer of curtain wall that I planned is just about to finish pouring. I had originally planned on casting some slightly larger turrets on top of all the round guard towers and leave it at that. I thought I was almost done.

Then I remembered that climbing exists.

At the highest point of the ground, on the right, the wall is only 2z tall (though I dug it into the ground, so theoretically I could just remove the entire hill). It wouldn't be ridiculous to add another layer for a huge lip that runs all around the fort. On the other hand, I kind of hate the aesthetics of it, and I'd have to carve fortifications both under and over it to handle walkers and flyers, or make the top open, which allows for kamikaze archers. On this third, severed hand I found on the ground over there, I do intend to have patrols circling around the wall at all times, so I could just make it look good and trust in my military might, which is pretty OK by now.

What do you think? Put a lip on the wall, or leave it alone? Do I need to make it taller or not? Or are there other alternatives I haven't thought of?

I started out a new fort, Inksacks, a couple of days ago. Around 40 population, I carved out some quick spaces for temples--one no-particular-god one and one each for a couple of the more popular deities. Now it's a few years later, I've inherited a king and started a megaproject, so I figured it's time to fill out the Street of the Gods. In doing so, I made a list of the available gods, how many followers they had, and which ones already had temples.

Doing that, though, I discovered that I have a temple, The Mahogany Shrine, dedicated to Elifa Gorgecoast the Untamed Boulder. When I assign a new temple, though, it gives me a list of deities--and Elifa Gorgecoast the Untamed Boulder does not appear in the list. Where did Elifa go? It must have had a fair number of worshippers, or I would not have made a temple. And I haven't had enough dwarves get killed to have the entire congregation wiped out--and even if I did, I've got another god with 0 worshippers listed.

I've been getting lots of barons, so I imagine my civ is getting slaughtered. Can a god die?

I've generated a couple worlds looking for reanimation without evil weather, using dfhack's embark-assistant to search. I'm finding nothing. Is it impossible?

I just got an announcement that Domas Saziramost had been missing for a week, so I paused it and tracked him down in a bed in the bedroom complex. Guess I've got a vampire. Oh, hey, someone's there!


Wait, he's been missing a week, so Cerol can't be the vampire! What are you doing in that bed, then?


Oh. You're sleeping. Yeah, definitely not the vampire. Does that mean you're his wife, and about to get really upset when you wake up?


Uh.

Okay. So. Uh. You're in a bed ... that's not yours ... with this guy who isn't your husband ... and who has been sucked to death by a vampire while you both slept ... and you're about to wake up and ... gosh.

Did I just stumble into a deleted scene from season 7 of Buffy?

Picked up an old save today to while away Buy Nothing Day. A vampire promptly ate one of my hammer lords, so I built her a nice private lever to pull forever, set her to the task, and started following her to see when she finally decided to get to business.

While she was finishing up her last lye-making job, I noticed a little message at the bottom of the screen:

"A vile force of darkness has arrived!"

What? I didn't see a popup! I checked the Units menu...and there was nobody new there. I looked at the top; no SIEGE in red. I unpaused it for a bit, and got an announcement that Chop Suey had made yet another masterwork roast. Life goes on. But the announcement is still sitting there in the log, and I never got a popup notification.

Did I just get a siege with nobody in it?

I was trying my first single-pick challenge on a terrifying glacier (OK, my second--the first ended far too quickly to count). I was doing pretty well, too--I had an airlock that got 85% of most migration waves underground safely (if covered with pungent mucus and blisters), I had completely walled off a chunk of the third cavern, the trade depot was just about as secure as it gets, and I was just getting magma forges up and going, with a population of about 45. The surface was starting to get pretty hairy, especially after the first kobold ambush, and I hadn't gotten armed yet, but they were up there and we were down here, so what did it matter?

That's when I learned that kobold zombies can pick locks.

The zombie apocalypse didn't take long. Wrestlers are not much of a match for ice wolf corpses, and while I had a few marksdwarves, they weren't much use in the vertical tunnels. Soon I found myself checking the list of citizens to find two dwarves left. One was the mayor, resting in bed. A quick check confirmed that the zombies were slowly but surely converging on his room. So much for him.

The other was Tholtig Noramurist, who was blithely constructing a rock throne as if nothing had happened.

I have a vampire!

All kinds of plans started forming in my brain. I would make a suit of armor and a hammer, then kill every zombie one at a time and drag them to the atom smasher. No, I would make cage traps and reduce their numbers until a new wave could survive. Wait, first I need to take care of all these ghosts--even a vampire can get an arm ripped off, right?

Soon, however, I realized that there was a problem. Tholtig had never attacked a dwarf in Mirroreddawns. And she was suffering from booze withdrawal. Also, one of the ghosts (of  an unslabbable caravan guard) had been haunting her, and the miasma wasn't making her particularly happy either, so some work may need to be done to keep her sane. 

Maybe, I thought, I could dig a second shelter from the surface. Zombies won't follow her, so it would be a safe bolt-hole for migrants. But migrants would starve quickly there unless I got them to a cavern--and the one exposed cavern is now home to a rather grumpy forgotten beast.

So here I sit, staring at my one, painfully slow, not-very-secretly undead dwarf. And I wonder: can this situation be saved? If anything were left alive, there might be a chance to draw the zombies into some kind of trap, but there's nothing. I'm stumped. It's your turn, guys. With the tools available, can you save Mirroreddawns?

So I took a break from Dwarf Fortress for a while, but like all addicts, here I am back again, and this time I'm taking a crack at designing the perfect training facility. Here's what I've got so far.


I'm trying to address the following problems:

• Danger rooms of size > 1 are a waste of wood and mechanisms.
• Dwarves can stand on the furniture that defines the room and thus avoid the spikes.
• In a narrow room, a statue can block the access to the weapon rack, if it is built after the room is defined (if built before, it will block the room definition flow). However, a dodging dwarf can pass over a statue and get stuck.

In response, this room should behave as follows:

• The water in the room below is kept at a constant 3 or 4 by the action of the standard repeater.
• The pump is always on, but the floor hatch on Z+1 is linked to the repeater, causing intermittent water flow on the tile that contains the weapon rack. My theory is that if any acrobatic dwarves manage to jump over the .
• The spikes are operated separately from the repeater, so that I can turn them off without affecting the water level.

Things I'm not sure of yet:

• Ideal length of the swimming route, and ideal number of training spears. Too many spears and too long a route, and they'll spend all their time swimming.
• Whether pumping water that's not at 7 will actually knock dwarves off the edge.
• Whether the pump is going to move too much water, causing pathing problems or potential drowning. (I could fix that by making the pump manually controlled, but what fun would that be?)

This is not ‼SCIENCE‼, unfortunately. This is ‼THEORY‼ until I get off work. But, as it stands, how does it look? Anything I'm missing or dead wrong about?