Bay 12 Games Forum

So, an unexpected zombie biome resulted in my starting 7 being reduced to two, who managed to wall themselves in, one had a tantrum, killed the other - went insane.

Thankfully, migrants have shown up before she died - the fort has prospered, albeit avoiding the surface world - but there's a minor problem.

It's been years and no one has elected a new Mayor, which means I can't assign anyone to any positions (no military, no record keeping / assigning tasks).

Is there any way to "force" an election / Mayor, be it ingame or via file editing, or will one turn up eventually? If this continues then it may end up being better to just reclaim the place, which would be a shame.

Traps work, as do locked doors provided it's not a zombie kobold.

Get one of those down before they get inside and you'll be safe. I've survived for years now with 100 undead for every 1 combat effective dwarf, but I found even that might be enough - in a save I had to save scum from I let them loose and one recruit with a silver battleaxe, some copper armor and mediocre combat skills was able to rack up over 100 kills before he was dragged down. The biggest problem is how unhappy being assaulted by the undead makes them.

Naked fighters will get dragged down very quickly by punches to the head though.

Quote from: Old Greg on March 07, 2012, 02:32:29 am

Oof. Very well might be aquifer.

You know what that means? You have to create an awesome cliffside scaffold to get around it. Or, you know, just take the opportunity to create a metropolis entirely out of buildings hewn into the cliffside and bridges and other structures spanning the chasm

Markarth is a dwemer (dwarven) city hewn into the cliffs of a valley in skyrim.
I say we try to remake it, df style.

But the dwemer were just dorfy-elves. That said, building a city into the side of a cliff / waterfall does sound pretty badass.

The first evil rain I found was some red slime that caused a fever, but nothing else.

The second one caused intense pain and bruising throughout the body, including internal organs, eventually death.

The current one I have to deal with causes flesh, bone, fat and muscle to rot. Hasn't resulted in a death yet, but it's not nice.

Best thing you can do is dig into the side of the mountain / down into the ground asap and never leave.

I like the addition, but I think it would be better if vampires had a "chance" to kill their victim. It makes no sense to wipe out your food supply.

I had the same situation, although it wasn't things dying in their bed, it was me dumping corpses in bedrooms because they made easy containment areas, they were then walled up and later opened with cage traps to catch the inhabitable after around 20 years of the other sleepers having to put up with moaning and groaning all night every night.

I know how you feel.

Getting traders in and out is practically effortless. Dig a tunnel to 6 squares before the map edge, make an up ramp on the 5th tile before the map edge, then seal off the area around the ramp with walls, raised drawbridges, and of course floors on the level above as a roof. You should have a 3x4 area on the map edge on the surface that is accessible only through your fort or that tunnel, and assuming you don't have any other caravan-accessible routes to the surface map edge, all the caravans will spawn in that spot in complete safety.

That only works if you can actually get outside, easier said than done in this kind of biome.

As was mentioned earlier, dig a tunnel under the anvil, build some upstairs and then channel the anvil into the tunnel. This can be used to get any materials on the surface that are required for fey moods too, just be careful that there aren't any zambabos in LOS of haulers to scare them off, placing a wall there to block the hole is worthwhile too.

Once you've breached the caverns, dig out huge tracts of sand / soil areas in your fort, tower caps will start growing in these and provide a meager amount of wood for the fort, make sure to save some for fey moods, try to use rock pots for storing food and booze etc.

Other than that, build airlocked trade depos at various parts of the map, lock the side to your fort and hope the traders can fight their way to said depo and then be locked in before the undead get them. Making meeting zones there / drafting all immigrants into a military squad and stationing them there sometimes gets some inside, but relying on children inside the fort is what I've ended up having to do.

Also, do NOT rely on doors to keep the undead out. It works on zombie dorfs and animals, but zombambo kobolds seem capable of opening them.