Bay 12 Games Forum

*miners hit damp stone underground!* "Hey, water! Now I don't have to worry about making my own water reservoirs to collect water from the murky pools on the map before it all evaporates each summer!"

*digs a one tile channel for a well* "Man, this underground water reservoir sure is nice. Strange that it doesn't seem to count as an underground pool or anything, but hey, it's water conveniently placed around the upper right corner of the map, where all my main buildings are."

*several years later* "Yep, having this built-in reservoir of water sure is handy, especally since I've got a couple permanent invalids now who will never drink booze again. Wonder why it's not running out of water at all? Anyway, since this is just a pool or something(although I'm not able to grow tower caps or anything, how strange), I might as well dig under it already. It's not like my miners have anything else to do anymore."

*minerdorfs dig a couple squares, water starts flooding out. I frantically dig a bunch of channels to temporarily contain the water followed by a bunch of walls(and "Wimpydorf cancels construct building:submerged in an inch of water" messages) to permanently contain it(didn't lose anything but a couple workshops...and two babies of channel digging/wall building dwarfs who somehow dropped them down said channels)), and go do some wiki-reading to figure out what happened* "...hm, so apparently you can have an aquifer only on PART of the map and not be warned about it on embark if it's in a different biome from the rest of the map."


It's probably for the best that I learned that(and how to deal with sudden flooding) on my first fortress instead of in future forts in more dangerous areas.

This is my first fortress, so I'm determined to hold out until I get the king, but there is almost nothing to do now. I have more of every resource than I could ever need, my military is so large and well-trained that sieges end in three minutes, I finished digging out enough tombs at the bottom z level so that every dwarf could have their own tomb, my generic inverted pyramid building project's lost steam, and now I'm just setting up several ways to end my fort once the king comes.

Areas channeled out so that channeling out one more thing will cause a cave-in? Check. Dwarf processing rooms so that noble and commondwarf alike can (P)ull the lever and be in awe of the iron spike that just shot through them? Check. Popular champions that can be locked in a room to starve to death? Check. Dwarves on Justice Row who will be very rapidly and violently punished once I start dwarven justice by appointing a sheriff? Check. An aquifer in one corner of the fort(which is just barely in a different biome from the rest) that I can tap into to flood 13 levels of fortress? Check. My own personal squad of caged goblins that can be set free in the middle of my fortess to murder civilians? Check. Elbowbread(thanks for the awesome fortress name to go along with the civ "The Barricaded Furnace" and the local government "The New Urns of Mortality", guys) will not go gently into that good night.

Nothing magma-related though, this fort doesn't have any. (although I do know one thing I'll be looking for in Fort #2! Managing the fuel chain for smelting got old after a while)

First megabeast I had was a hydra. It took out the poor woodcutter I drafted to keep it occupied while the proper army ran over, but it fell quickly once the guys with training got there. Pretty underwhelming. It did come to my fort missing an eye, but it never seemed too hampered by it(then again, when you have 14 eyes, losing one doesn't mean much).

Second megabeast was a dragon. Despite the hydra letting me know that yes, vanilla megabeasts are exactly as underwhelming as many complain they are, I was still worried since dragons have a habit of breathing fire at creatures, which run around and set fire to other things.....
Somehow, absolutely nothing caught on fire. Not even the war dog it breathed fire at when it first set foot on the hill my fort's dug into(it started on the end opposite the fort entrance, thankfully), or the champion it breathed fire at, or any of the trees in the area...actually, the dog/champion didn't get hurt by the fire at ALL(and I do have temperature on, so it's not like that would make a difference). The only sign that the dragon had done anything was two swathes of grass turned to ash. Rather bizarre, but I wasn't complaining. Once the dragon was done not setting things on fire, it tore the war dog to shreds. The champion arrived about a minute after the dog was killed, kept walking towards the dragon that was breathing fire at him, and singlehandedly took it down just as the rest of the military got there.

Total megabeast death toll:A woodcutter, a dog, and some grass. Any new megabeasts who decide to come to my fort before the king arrives(at which point I will put several "end fort hilariously" schemes into action and get started on my second fort) probably won't fare much better, since lots of dwarves who don't have much to do anymore means a very large military guarding the fort.

Way back when I started my current fortress, I got this as my first artifact:

And it was literally my first artifact, since this is my first fortress! It's worth an entire 2400 dorfbucks, so it really boosted my fortress' wealth when some dwarf hammered it out. Oh, and I'm pretty sure it was the result of a possession, so I didn't even get a legendary mason out of it. That's the exact instant I knew that DF and I were going to be best friends.

As for my best at not being underwhelming artifact?
Value-wise:
Most...interesting...:

Oh, and the war hammer depicted on said loincloth is this. My personal favorite in this fortress. Decorated with turtle bone/turtle shell, encircled with iron/pig iron, and has an image of itself on it? It's almost poetic.

EDIT:I forgot the absolute best thing about that war hammer. My first hammer was pretty awesome(although making sure that she never had the ability to pulverize criminals probably helped - no sheriff or fortress guard means no hammerjustice either) - a season or so after she came to my fortress, there were several goblin ambush parties that attacked at once. She took it upon herself to singlehandedly kill eight goblins, earning himself a title. My hammerer's full name now? Erush Atticsprays the Image of Evaporation. I gave her a nice big sand tomb with lots of green glass furniture(hey, she liked sand and the color dark green) for that. Atticsprays spent some free time evaporating a groundhog and two wolves when it was peaceful, but come the next goblin ambush she charged right back out to kill some more...except for the part where she was killed before she got to smash anything. A season or two after this? One of my smiths gets possessed, and the result is that iron war hammer. Clearly Ms. Atticsprays the Image of Evaporation wasn't quite done pounding gobbos with a hammer yet, so she made sure that a future hammerdwarf could keep on evaporating goblins in her place.

I got a STOP: 0x0000008E just now, and it looks like that involves my graphics driver, so yeah, it's probably my drivers. Time to update them!