Bay 12 Games Forum

I landed a world with a couple of dwarf civs, one of them apparently extinct. Its sites were next door to an extremely aggressive goblin civ led by a demon, so go figure. But, two of them were ruined by forgotten beasts instead of being taken over by the goblins, and were thus available for reclaiming. This led to the following set of actions:

Reclaim Esteemeddye. Spend a year attracting migrants, exploring the ruined fort, setting up basic industries, and failing to find the supposed monster scorpion. Retire fort.

Reclaim Roughlances. Spend a couple of months getting set up in the ruins, finding and walling in the "current resident," and exploring. Retire fort.

Go to un-retire Esteemeddye, but what's this? It's listed as a ruin again! Over to legends: a few weeks after retiring, the goblins came back and conquered it. Slaughtered all the dwarves in official positions in various gruesome ways, but seem to have left the commoners alone. Also, apparently a dwarf bandit gang formed there, like immediately after retiring.

But, since they didn't make it a goblin site, it's available to reclaim, which we do with a new expedition. Almost immediately, "An ambush!" I view the revealed unit, and the name rings a bell ... it's one of the dwarves from my previous embark! I find several of these, including an outpost liaison who was apparently still on-site when I retired the fort. Although hostile, none of them react to the new dwarves presence at all. Otherwise, everything is exactly where I left it. This includes the seeds in the farm plots, which apparently went into stasis for the duration.

After a few weeks, since we evidently aren't being attacked by a horde of goblins, I retire again to check the populations in legends. My previously dead civ now has a whole passel of royalty! Seems in the weeks since I left them, the dwarves at Roughlances decided to declare themselves nobility, and have become barons, ambassadors, generals, and a queen. Guess that means I resurrected the civilization.

Nearly two centuries passed. In the year 250, an expedition calling itself The Cavernous Canyons arrived at Esteemeddye. The seven dwarves claim to hail from The Dye of Owning, but anyone who remembers that name probably associates it with decades of ambitious hill-dwelling humans who were routinely slaughtered by the armies of the turtle fiend Ushmal Phantompukes.The fact that it had originally been a mighty dwarven civilization has receded into the age of myth. History provides no way to prove this, but I like to think that these seven are descendants of those dwarves, who have been living as outcasts scattered across human and goblin settlements.

They easily found the ruins. Indeed, the dwarves of old built their fortress entrances to stand out from the landscape, presumably to encourage trade with the surface peoples. Indeed, what else could this have been but a bazaar, considering the only entrance is 3 Urist wide, just wide enough for a wagon caravan? Most likely, then, this great warehouse is The Bulbous Straw, the great market that history says the dwarves established here all the way back in 11.


Oh yes, please don't mind the mess. The expedition dwarves, in their eagerness to recolonize their old realm, didn't bother sending back maps until autumn, by which time they had already set up shop on the surface. Since a legendary monster supposedly lives here, you can't really blame them for wanting to train for a bit before venturing into the long-silent halls in the depths. On the plus side, for the first time in almost 200 years, the trade depot is again accepting merchants!

So imagine the pristine ruin, a vast boxy construction two stories tall and quite some walk across, all built of polished gabbro. It was quite empty when they arrived, the only features inside being the pillars in the center, surrounding an unadorned ramp that plunges steeply into the earth. You'll also have to imagine the exterior somewhat less colorful. Those splotches are fruit, quite unusable for now, dropped by the many trees.



That ramp spirals around a straight shaft, boring deep into the earth. One who lost their footing here might die of boredom before exploding messily into gore on the bottom. Down, down, down it goes, mostly through alternating layers of granite and microcline. Mostly the stone is roughly hewn, but in places it has been polished to a fine sheen.

When they first arrived the dwarves simply built a hatch over the ramps. But come autumn they ventured down at last and finally set eyes on the primordial dwarven architecture of Esteemeddye.


At the level of the first cavern, natural stone is filled in with constructed walls until, at last, the ramp intersects a broad tunnel bored through the caves. They say it leads to another old fortress, long since conquered. Just below, a single narrow passage and a hatch control access to the bulk of the fortress. The blood is recent, left by a cave croc that had parked itself on the hatch cover.

Truly, the design is quite curious to the eye of a modern fortress overseer. The passages are narrow and twisty, designed without any apparent thought to how far dwarves must walk in going about their tasks. After being pillaged dozens of times, there's no telling which rooms were originally stockpiles and which were legendary dining halls. The output and wealth of Esteemeddye must have been enormous, though, judging by the sheer number of forges. Also, all those yellow veins running through the fortress? Native gold. If that multitude of little square rooms represents the old living quarters, they lived in opulence indeed!

Next up, we explore deeper, and take a closer look at some curious aspects of ancient dwarven construction.

So 0.40 is out, hooray! Raise a pot of apple cider in celebration (seeing as apples are a thing now). Now I've been massively curious about the new sites, and since I mostly play Fort Mode I figured the best way to explore one was to reclaim it. Let me show you what I found...

First, a history lesson...

Can I just say, I LOVE the fact that you can now start with a fort with a storied and bloody history of its own!

Esteemeddye had a rough time of it back in the Age of Myth. Founded in 11 by the Ferocious Cloister, conflict beset the dwarves there almost immediately. Their parent civilization, the Dye of Owning, inhabited a densely settled strip of land between the Luxurious Axe Mountains and the Insightful Sea -- a temperate-to-chilly land of forests and grassland, swamps and rolling hills, until they vanished in the north under the perpetual snows of the Responsible Blizzard. Hemmed in by these geographic barriers, elves, dwarves, and goblins all crowded close, elbow to beard. West of the mountains lay a similar land filled to brimming with warlike humans and elves.

Today, tens of thousands of humans and goblins exist in fragile equilibrium. It is said that hundreds of elves still lurk in wild forest retreats, although most of the tame retreats under human administration host less than a dozen each. Few dwarves now inhabit the area.


In the early years of the world, war raged continually, and perhaps it was no great surprise to see death come swiftly to a promising new fort.


The war would far outlast Esteemeddye, as it turns out. In the year 66, the monstrous scorpion Storur returned to Esteemeddye. After killing the two dwarves living there at the time, it decided to settle and call those dark and bloodstained halls its home forevermore. To this day it lurks somewhere in the depths. We know it lives there still, for over a century later it killed a dwarf who ventured into the ruins.

Of course, all of this would be a no-more-remarkable-than-usual dive into the legends except that this is 0.40 -- this fortress exists as an actual, realized site, and dwarves can really go there. Let's go!

Next up ... what the dwarves found.

So apparently now the caravan shows up in Early Autumn? And then there's this --

No outpost liaison?  How curious...
A caravan from Atir Sanreb has arrived.
Merchants have arrived and are unloading their goods.

Not as odd as the exploding buzzards, but like the announcement said, how curious...

There's a much easier way to do this - go into custom world generation and pick one of the "Region" templates (instead of the "Island" templates) and generate the world with the default parameters.

Are you just saying that because that way most of the map will be inland, or is there something else in those parameters that makes a difference? The cavern and layer thickness settings are the same between the Region and Island templates, I believe.

I really do wish I understood how the game uses those layer thickness settings, though. Sometimes you get a world that's barely any deeper than those layer settings would suggest. But I remember the very first world I genned in DF2012 -- a completely default medium region -- I ended up with 110 z-levels of diorite between the second and third caverns.

I have succeeded with vanilla dwarves at both pure -1000 and +1000. It didn't end up being all that fun IMO, because after the first 5 seconds of getting underground, it's like any other "seal off the surface" game, except possibly with higher FPS as the enemies die instead of wandering around above.

Oh, there's an easy solution to that temptation to seal off the surface -- pick an embark with no metals. Suddenly those piles of goblinite and caravans loaded with no-quality steel harps look pretty appealing. That goes double if you luck into an embark that also doesn't have sand, since then you need metals in some bulk for pumping magma around.

I don't remember if I posted this in this thread already, but incidentally, if you want caravans to come, you can get rid of the NOTRADE warning at embark and allow them to, if you make horses and draft animals temperature proof. That's all that's stopping them from coming. For example, I modded horses to be made out of nether cap, and made all civs use horses as their draft animals, and they will show up with their caravans (which will promptly catch on fire or shatter)

Maybe that's necessary for caravans to arrive at +1000, but they arrive just fine in a vanilla -1000 world. You want to make sure they have a really short path to get underground, though.

Yep, unuseable.

XXItemsXX are basically so ruiend they are held together only by good will and luck.

Not true, as it turns out!

Now I'm not entirely sure what triggered the "lost or destroyed" job cancellation -- maybe another dwarf stole the log to dump in the trash. However, once I got some mangled XXlogsXX into a stockpile near the carpenter's shop, the dwarves were perfectly happy to make beds and buckets out of them. The resulting furniture items don't even have a lower value than ones made from freshly chopped wood.

If it werent for all the paywalls everywhere for anything even remotely scientifically significant, i would happily start looking into statistical spreads on botanical morphologies as they relate to biome types.

Sadly, Elsevier and pals make that basically impossible. (and people wonder why our culture is gravitating toward anti-science biases. hah.)

Strike that, looks like there is a very comprehensive list of plant species that can be freely browsed.
However, the data is NOT in a big-data processing friendly format. Will require significant effort to process.

Will also require outside datasets to determine biome coverage statistics (how commonly found are the plants listed, etc.)

According to the docs, theplantlist.org provides CSV file downloads. They are per-family, but it wouldn't be too hard to crawl the site and fetch them all.

E.g.: http://www.theplantlist.org/1.1/browse/A/Posidoniaceae/Posidoniaceae.csv