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It's been 20 years since I embarked at Saltcanyon. 10 years since the siege where I lost 50 dwarves to a single intelligent undead armed with a plain old copper mace. And for the first time in 10 years, I'm finally getting migrants again. I'm up to 28 dwarves! I'm so giddy I hardly know what to do with them all!

I've set up a crude minecart cannon to fire unwanted refuse at one of the necromancer experiment infestation clusters. Mostly skulls, with some menacing green glass spikes thrown in for good measure. I'd love to open up the second cavern layer (get some bloodthorn, nethercap, maybe magma if I'm lucky), but for the sake of framerate, I'd rather wait to do so until there aren't 500-600 rapidly-reproducing "friendly" creatures loitering on the surface at any given moment.

I decided to finally make unicorns war trainable. But in order to prevent them from being entirely useless in combat, I also had to remove the [BENIGN] token. And let me tell you, that has turned out to be a double edged sword if ever there was one! Now I have to be worried whenever a pack of unicorns (a herd? a troop? what do you call a group of unicorns?) show up, because even civilians will insist on picking a fight with 5-10 spear-tipped wild beasts 10 times their own size. And sometimes the unicorns wander into the haunted jungle and attack a swarm of experiments. Whereupon they will get themselves killed and subsequently reanimate. So now I've got zombie unicorns to deal with.

Edit: I've decided the proper term is a friendship of unicorns.

I exploited the vermin-hunting behaviors of cats to bait all the zombies milling about on the surface into my drowning pit trap. They won't drown, obviously, but now they're safely sealed away in the drainage tunnel. I took advantage of this reprieve to send out a messenger to nearby holdings. I recruited a couple of merchants (glad to see that the 'useless merchant' bug has been fixed), bringing the population up to a grand total of 14 working dwarves. I also took the opportunity to make as much charcoal as I could before a new threat cut off my access to the surface again.

Unfortunately, I got complacent. A yak corpse that I had completely forgotten about reanimated. Before I even noticed any interruptions, it killed my Chief Medical Dwarf, Zon "Sawbones" Ralsobir ("doesn't try to get things done perfectly," and "sees the pursuit of knowledge as a worthless endeavor," aren't traits I'd want in my physician, but he gets the job done). As well, a macedwarf died in the fight to put it down.

But!

I had a few tricks up my sleeve... See, the old Captain of the Guard - "Deadfoot" I called him, on account of the nerve damage in each of his feet - he was brutally efficient at his job. All these years later, even in these more lawless times, the prisons of Saltcanyon are still full of the undead would-be thieves and spies so prevalent in the vast haunted jungle that surrounds the small serene valley these dwarves call home. And a few of those prisoners are necromancers.

After a little fiddling around with pit zones, fortifications, floodgates, and coffins, I sent the military to attack a necromancer that they could see but not reach. The first attempt just reanimated a bunch of pet skeletons. The second attempt yielded no results at all. But on the third attempt, ol' Sawbones shuddered and rose back to life as a Pale Hunter!

Sadly, I couldn't get lightning to strike twice. The dead macedwarf remains dead. I'm revising my setup to what I hope will be a more effective configuration should I need to resort to this again. For now, I'm forcing the dwarves to get some R&R and hoping that they can actually start forming relationships and starting families. Haven't had a single migrant in years. Need to get the population up somehow. Might have to edit the raws to make unicorns trainable for war. Send the dwaves out to free prisoners from goblin sites.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Man, that's way more efficient than the minecart setup I was planning. I might have to incorporate something like this now that I've reclaimed my fort's waterwheels. Got any contingency schemes in case the minecart derails? Besides the water I mean. I've been thinking of a setup that uses hatch covers to drop a backup minecart onto the rollers from above. I'm down to a dozen dwarves with little chance of getting migrants, so I gotta keep things as remotely operated as possible.

I've got 17 dwarves in a fortress built for 75-100. Of those 17, 1 is a were-tortoise, 1 is a child, and 2 are chained-up mental patients I only keep around so the other dwarves can have good thoughts from bringing them food and water.

The surface is overrun by zombie sieges most of the year, and even in the few months when it isn't, there are too many stragglers loitering around for my dwarves to deal with (some of which are infectious). A few zombies have fallen into the river my fortress is built over, which means I can't access the water wheels because the dwarves cancel all tasks as soon as they get close.

The necromancer experiment infestation is completely unchecked with no one to cull the population and now there are no fewer than 3 varieties reproducing at an alarming rate on the surface. Catsplosions ain't got nothin' on these crimes against nature.

Between the undead on the surface and the web-spitting mudstone vulture Forgotten Beast in the caverns, I have no access to wood. Which means my fuel reserves are insufficient for the scale of mass production I'll need to properly render these invaders into a fine paste.

I've come up with a solution that may be able to kill 2 birds with one stone. Or rather, with one stone bird. I'm digging a tunnel connecting the surface to the caverns in hopes that the forgotten beast and the zombies will kill each other. Regardless of who kills who, the winner will be me.

Speaking of intelligent undead, I just got hit by a full-scale undead siege. My minecart trap only managed to take out one of them before it derailed. I toggled some drawbridges to keep the rest out so I could reset the cart, but there was one intelligent one left in the area I needed to access. So I decided to unlock the doors and let it blunder into the cage traps at the end of the trap hall.


This was a mistake.


Somehow, it just ignored the cage trap. I double checked, the trap was loaded. But it just waltzed right past it. So I figured, alright it's just one revenant. I've got three squads. What they lack in skill, they can make up for in numbers.


They could not.


It was a massacre. Damned thing was crushing dwarves left and right with just a copper mace, all the while launching icicles at the errant stray cat or chicken. The dwarves couldn't lay a finger on it.

Now, this fortress was never in any danger of crumbling per se; I've got a were-tortoise Cask-of-Amontillado'd down in the living quarters. But so help me, if that thing had gotten into my unicorn ranch... I don't know what I'd do. Luckily (insofar as anything in this situation can be considered 'lucky'), the cage traps in the entrance to the unicorn ranch did work. So the immediate threat has passed.

But now the number of dead to be buried outnumber the living left to bury them by 2:1. The ghost of a child who went berserk when the siege interrupted her artifact has already decapitated a dwarf. I just hope the dwarves can retain their sanity long enough to bury them.

So, yeah. Needless to say, this is going to put the minecart canyon jump project on hold for a bit.

It's not so much blasting them with buckshot. More like running them over with an SUV. Repeatedly. Although now that you mention it, I do like the idea of storm of glass flechettes flying through the air, slicing them to shreds... I may just have to work something out.


But all this talk of minecarts and canyons has made me realize something I absolutely must do:

Before this fortress falls, a dwarf will jump a minecart across the canyon, Evel Knievel style.

Oh, I know. I've got them outfitted with silver warhammers now, and I buy armor from the merchants at every opportunity. But necromancer experiments are [TRAPAVOID], so weapon traps aren't an option.

My fortress is built right at the bottom of a canyon at a major fork in the river, which gives me access to a lot of power from water wheels, so I'm giving minecarts a try. A lead minecart filled to the brim with lead bars packs quite a punch when the rollers launch it at the highest speed setting. I have green glass spikes hooked up to a lever as well. Easier to mass produce than silver, and honestly it probably makes a better piercing weapon. I've also worked out a pit/drowning trap, since experiments can't swim at all in 0.47.04. I'm pretty sure that when Toady removed forgotten beast traits from necromancer experiments, he didn't replace [SWIMS_INNATE] with [SWIMS_LEARNED].

Still working out all the kinks, but I've managed to break one siege.