Bay 12 Games Forum

Ah, that is good to know.

usually I turn the music off. Toady's guitar solo is a little too earwormy for me.

Adding on to this idea: intelligent undead. The older an undead is, the more intelligent it becomes, until it reaches 100 years of age, at which point it regains the intelligence it had when it was alive.

Lich tombs: Necromancers seal themselves in a tomb for 100 years for their bones to turn in to high quality ghost silver, then emerge as a lich to make a lich tower.

Ancient Intelligent Unicorns ally themselves with elves or men to slay the demon at the heart of a goblin civ.

Heroic Unicorns, Unicorns that go on quests to slay evil.

Unicorns that get angry when their young is threatened.

Ancient Intelligent Unicorns that seek out dwarven fortresses where their kind is captured and bread for their horns, and when the unicorn gets there, they basically become like a forgotten beast or titan who is there to kill the fortress.

you know, things like that.

We all know that adamantine is the best metal so far, usually because of it's ease of access and high qualities.

But what if there was there was an even higher quality of metal that was rare and hard to get without going to extra lengths to get it?

The idea I present to you is rainbow gold, and ghost silver.

In this idea, Unicorn horns are made of rainbow gold. A single horn, when melted down, yields a varying amount of bars.

The quality of the metal depends on how old the unicorn is. 100 year old unicorns should yield metal that is maybe half as good as adamantine, while 200 year old unicorns should yield metal that is just as good, with older unicorns yielding the best quality.

Ghost silver comes from the bones of undead that have been around for a while. when an Undead has been around for at least 10 years, their bones start hardening into ghost silver.

Like with Unicorns, the older the undead, the higher quality the bones are.

What do you guys think?

Edit: obviously, Unicorns would have to be altered to make this an actually rare thing. Ideally, once a unicorn reaches 10 years of age they become legendary in all combat skills, and are untamable from birth, have a preternatural ability to dodge arrows, and become hostile to dwarves when their young are threatened.

Just throwing some ideas out there.   

Yeah there's a lot of exciting features coming.

Another thing i'm looking forward to is that we're finally leaving the df2014 version behind, and the wiki will need a lot of updating for the new version.

I hope to have some influence over the tutorial there. Was waiting for the steam version to get in on that action.

Cause it only shows you the relationships for one individual dwarf. I want something that lets me see a relationship tree of all dwarves.

There's a DFHack for that, deep-embark - if the surface is that bad, it makes sense that they would travel through the caverns. (You wouldn't hav to use DFHack all the time, just until after a successful cavern embark.)

Herbivores can graze in the caverns, though that is a bit more area to defend - and you'll get two with the wagon anyway, though you could just slaughter them after maybe milking them.

Turkeys don't need plants to graze, give lots of eggs, and grow to full size in 2 years - similarly peafowl grow to max in 1 year but produce fewer eggs.

6 picks and 1 axe (or 5&2) so everyone can hav a weapon to start, and faster digging of a defensible position.

I'm planning to bring non grazer animals, so turkeys, dogs, cats, and pigs. Any mule animals will be pitted to keep the fortress safe from reanimating grazers. 

I'll also bring all miners with the picks and an axe for underground trees.

Question: cats kill vermin, do I need to worry about vermin reanimating? Or is that just for larger beasts?

"Terrifying" can mean different things, so plan ahead for deadly infections, deadly rains, deadly fog, deadly undead, etc..

Be sure to note if any area of the embark mentions an aquifer, because the caverns can have a limited and finite amount of water and it is possible to run out of water on a small embark. Bring several lye, and if you can afford it, a bar of soap.

Bring some materials for building magma-proof gates, mechanisms, and pumps (nickel or iron-bearing ore, some bags of sand...)

Bring enough logs so in the first week of your embark, you can put 4 or 5 of the dwarfs into a squad equipped with wood shields and a wood axe. In the first months, get them better equipped (bone armors, mail shirt, and metal weapon) so these guys can survive longer if ambushed and can rescue each other.

The other thing you need to bring to the embark is your absolute and total belief that anything can go wrong and that doors should be everywhere.

I'm not sure why soap is important. is it because of evil weather?

Why advise bringing magma safe stuff? I'm not really planning to do anything with magma other than setting up the initial magma forges and smelters.

I'll see about making some mail armor. is it cheaper than plate?

Cave-in traps work on even the deadliest forgotten beast. (falling objects are one-hit kills)

if you find forgotten beasts constantly roaming, just fill the outer caverns with a hundred statues.

As long as there are no critters in range, they'll spend months destroying buildings.
It's the perfect safety net, if you don't mind the red text from toppling a hundred statues.

Some caverns have water cutting across the edge, making a defensible area.
It's also possible to find isolated embarks, where a cavern layer is cut off from the rest of the caverns by water.
That makes it far less likely a forgotten beast will infiltrate.

Can't forgotten beasts swim?

if you are building (as I do) amongst the various caverns, fitting your fortress rooms in whatever rock there is to build with, I highly suggest picking a "1st Floor" for your logistics. So, instead of having a hundred different pathways between each section of the fortress, you instead send all traffic towards this main floor, and back to the remaining sections of the fortress.

If the cavern is full of water, look for a 4x4 stalactite and build your staircases there.

Of course you can simply build above the open spaces if you want to avoid the hassle of squeezing a fortress into that mess.

When interacting with cavern trees that you cannot cut down, either due to lack of access, or sometimes the trunk is drowned in water, you can build new constructions on top of the upper branches without an issue. Also, a ballista shot will immediately destroy any tree regardless of where it hits, so that can be used to clear specific inaccessible trees.

Troglodytes are annoying AF.

if you can find marble caverns, with vegetation present, they are some of the most beautiful natural features in the game. The contrast between the white stone and the various gems, metals, inclusions, and formations, these caverns are a sort of aesthetic paradise.

I actually prefer to have more natural, winding fortresses. Having everything centered upon a single staircase is kind of boring. Part of the reason why I want to build my fort in the caves is that the natural topography will inform the shape of the fortress.

But thanks for your advice, regardless.

Also I use phoebus graphics.