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I know you said one-week turns, but I played for one year.
If you would prefer, you can ignore my timeline and Otto can start from Sal's last turn. I am not sure the fort is salvageable at this point.

Noted! I'll read your report and then i'll take my pick of the two saves. I'll edit this message until i have something big to report

I should have plenty time to play during the 1 week time (starting now?), even though i'll be pretty busy until weekend

Edit: Okay, so everybody's mad, lots of dead dwarves, and my dwarf went missing? Sorry but I think i'll take your offer and play Salmeuk's save instead

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Image 1: That's me

I see horrible visions of strange armies rampaging through the mesa, dwarves dying in scores to infection and savage brawls, as depression and madness spreads unmitigated through Gateheaven. I see myself vanishing from the pages of history, even my body disappearing never to be found.

I, Nish OttoK Lancerbridged, wake up in the hospital. I decide that this was just a bad dream. I've dreamt one of the countless potential futures. Father, the sleeper has awakened! LONG LIVE THE FIGHT-- Where was I? My neck hurts, my already scarred limbs have been banged up even more... But I feel more clear, I have new ideas about this fort's future...

A dwarf with a mournful look comes to me. "Salmeuk the Overseer is dead! You are called upon to take the lead", he tells me. Overseer, huh? I thought my days of leadership were done when I retired from the position of expedition leader. But, duty must be honored...

Image 2: City of the dead

I walk the halls like I'm seeing them for the first time. On impulse, I walk downstairs and follow the corridor. I'm shocked to find myself in a long hallway littered with countless coffins, maybe half of them full. I stagger back in shock, passing through a door. Turning around, I see a sea of bones and body parts. Trogdolyte corpses, elves, all rotting as one, covering the large room's entire floor.

In a moment of disorientation, a thought comes to me. Am I in hell?

• from the diary of Nish OttoK Lancerbridged

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Okay, let's get to it then. Where should I begin? Farms are inaccessible so I make a shortcut from the tunnel at the back of the hospital. We have alarmingly little livestock, mainly geese. All eggs are now banned from cooking and stockpiles, to get more birds on our plates instead. I like waterworks so let's see if I can divert some water from the river into some internal misty waterfalls. Ah, to feel some mist on your face...

The Metalsmith Guild requests a guildhall. And Furrnox Sprayedmanor has... WHAT?? You're laying claim to monarchy? Now? On my turn? Nar the Bloated save me... Well, just try to survive for a while without lavish quarters, okay. This is a great moment for the Standard of Control, of course. In the 9th of Malachite, Midsummer, we have become the seat of monarchy of this dying empire. A new dawn dor dwarfkind and all that... Yes, yes, write it all down. Now back to work!



Image 3, 4: Hail the queen!

Forums are back! praise the servers!

and my writeup might be shorter. because of my lack of patience lately with that aspect.

My thoughts: i think full RP-style story time is pure extra, and not needed. Fort tour is also not so important, bc interested people can load the save and tour themselves. But i think it's nice to have some notes of what was achieved, what was lost, and roughly how this all happened. Bit annoying to see something happened and you have no idea why

We're back baby!
Can't we blame that evil hydra and not me 

No

(Sorry  )

Image 1: Fortress now open to the safe walled-off cavern

Image 2: Drink & Industry time


Bardumiseth, Fightquests
Year 116, OttoK
Posted in Discord 20.02.2024


At the start of the year, some kobold thieves showed up, followed by agitated ogress corpses, first of many beasts to come. The biome had grown very agitated with us. Underground, an artefact from last year was being made: Watchseas, a microcline mug. Up in the keep, dwarves and visitors celebrated drink and industry with dance and song.

After half a month, I started a project in the topmost cavern layer, sparking a long period of chaos and unrest. Elite squads went into the cavern first, clashing with ant people swarming into the map. Then every squad was stationed in various parts of the map: the caverns, the access tunnel, and the surface keep, where a lot of fighting took place due to all the agitated creatures.

In the keep, an infestation of hostile wools sheared by gullible farmers was jumping at dwarves. Even after they were punched to death, seeing the mangled wools caused distress to the dwarves, and the wools were thrown in lava. At the keep, the elven merchants and their guards were killed by their precious undead wildlife, but could this still be seen as a breach of trust on our part? Curse all friends of nature, indeed…

I secured one cave area in the middle of the fort, then expanded to the area connecting to our old western enclosure. Construction on especially the second area went flawlessly. However, we still lost multiple dwarves who wandered into the caverns. I’m starting to get the hang of operating within caverns. The list of actions I had to turn off to stop dwarves from perpetually wandering into the caves was: hauling, bonecrafting, web collecting, cleaning, burial, recover patient. Maybe more. AND if you want to build doors, you must activate Furniture Hauling despite rest of hauling being off. Wild stuff. I also started using civilian alert a lot this turn.

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Image 3: Keeping the construction crew safe, slaying ant people (click for full size)


Image 4: Chaos broke loose in the surface keep (click for full size)

Image 5: Visitors trapped on the roof

I destroyed the fort's mood so I went in lockdown to recover from injuries and trauma, only occasionally letting visitors in and out. I added more defenses on the second floor of the keep. The keep’s exposed top floor was set up as the visitor zone, the leftover stairs of the pumpstack granting them access. Welcome to Ravenholm! Nah, come in from the roof, before the undead harpies come. I can't watch a constant bloodbath of killed visitors.

Babysitting visiting nobles and bards is a lot of work. In the end many of them died when I tried taking a zombie siege and the visitors all walked into the trap room. I still had to send military to end the fight, those traps just weren’t enough. The entrance tunnel and its trap array was out of use as I was convinced there were agitated birds there.

I tamed our caught giraffes and put the giant wrens into the cave enclosure in the west. Turned off cooking but the eggs still got carried to the stockpile, damn it. We also got some very interesting pets from the dead elven merchants.
I continued steel production, and also discovered veins of silver and bronze down in the granite layers, so produced those, as well as platinum. I built a new magma forging area, leeching from the lava moat’s intake. There’s now a circuit of magma tubes that can be drained into the cave in case of overflow. That should work for our smelting and forging needs, the non-magma workshops can be removed.

ONE THING: there’s still a lot of magma in the tunnel from topside, so you may have to drain more into the cavern to prevent overflow and crispy dwarves

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Image 6: Magma forges being built, with magma tunnel beneath


Image 7: Artefacts of the year

Image 1, 2: Danman Vuthil, the Heaviness of Flight.

Bardumiseth, Fightquests
Year 114, Caram3lNuke
Posted in Discord 14.02.2024


After so much time and countless boulders, our miners finally requested a guild. "The Guild of Fishes" was founded, it is a rangers guild...

Things are calm. Just the regular gobbo wanna be siege: Military never gets them... they run after most die to the traps. It seems also that our best tactician is only adequate. I will try to raze some goblins sites around to train them a little more

There is a certain forest retreat that was overtaken by goblins... 1000 goblins, to be exact, 2 days travel from us.

A single pump in the stack is unable to be built. The DFHack planner detects our stock of screws down in the magma level. The orders manager screen detects we have more than 10 screws. However, somehow, the manual, vanilla selector acts like there is nothing

Manually tasking a workshop to produce a screw fixed it... Pump stack is almost complete, all that is left are the soil layers. Be aware that level 27 of the pump stack lacks walls (I was trying to mine around to see if that would fix the pump not being built)


From chat:

GeeFin — 10.02.2024
Wow, they're really fond of the adamantine figurines. Maybe the rhyme is too alluring?

Otto_K — 10.02.2024
I love candy artefacts. That thing is worth more than a small fortress

Albreo — 11.02.2024
You should start poking a few more towers for excitement. Be sure to screen out the book of life and death. Put it on a pedestal.



Image 3: Pumpstack in year 116

It takes years for entertainers to get full citizenship so they can be properly employed...

I only recently learned this, but you can cancel the occupation of performers, monster slayers etc. By removing the performer tag here

Turning non-dwarves into a labor force is the hilarious dark efficiency I’m here for. Are we gonna call them “workers” or just skip the pleasantries?

Idk i think they would still be workers, not slaves. Hmm, i won't try to debate it, bc there's probably history nerds here and i would get all the definitions wrong. But i generally see all fort citizens as just workers.

Though i suppose they would still be the lowest class. In this fort, by necessity your skillset defines your worth. Performers are usually bad at everything except (sometimes) performing

Nice first turn! I like the human bandit warlord. Also you made my dwarf expedition leader? I'm honored! Let's see. Nish Otto Lancerbridged.

Physically he's a powerhouse. He has a long pumpkin beard and pale skin. He eschews practical issues for philosophy, riddles and the world of ideas. Obsessed with his appearance, abilities and personal affairs. He is lustful and foolhardy, and has lately become more rude and thoughtless. Clearly he was being thoughtless when he let slip info about that artefact

Okay couple of things. Probably need to grow a fungus pasture for those elephants to get them safe undergound. Also i noticed Otto doesn't have an office, meaning he'll conduct meetings wherever, including outside. Could he get an office?

Image 1: Habitation layer


Bardumiseth, Fightquests
Year 112, Salvadaddy
Posted in Discord 28.01.2024

As I started my turn, one of the first things I noticed was that not every bedroom had a statue. Well, this is Fightquests, and in Fightquests, everyone gets a statue in their room, so I quickly fixed the issue. I also saw the pump stack, which I thought I would complete, but really I only advanced it a little bit because dwarfs aren't too keen on building screw pumps, especially like this.

At one point I saw some blind cave ogres fighting a hungry head corpse next to the magma pit we dump our garbage in. Well one of the ogres dodged into the magma, and I noticed that they were drowning in addition to burning, which made sense. The ogre took quite a while to die though. The other cave ogre was splashed by the magma mist, and spent it's remaining time just climbing around for some reason? I'm unsure what it's thought process was with that but whatever.

In other news, the elves came and dared to request we limit our trees to 5, with a maximum of 10! I accepted, because we always could just break it, but still the audacity here. We have people to take care of and make beds for, which reminds me: we started this year with a population of 79, and after a few migrant waves and visitors throughout the year, we ended with 126 dwarfs!

So I spent a good bit of my turn carving out bedrooms. Also, because of the tree limit, and the dwarfs reluctance to actually make the fucking beds, I was unable to put a bed in each room, but they all have doors, cabinets, and statues.

Also, I got quite a few petitions this year. Firstly, The Order of Youth (worshippers of Kirar, god(dess?) of rebirth, creation, birth, and youth) requested a temple complex, so I made one with silver walls down in the temple area, and I also made the space across from it have silver walls, which came in handy later for The Gilded Order, who only wanted a temple.

As for the other petitions, The Hall of Crystals, a metalsmith guild, was founded, and later requested a guildhall. And the farmer's guild requested a grand guildhall (I think that's what it's called), which I did by replacing the copper bars with the far more valuable steel bars, seeing as we had a surplus.

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Image 2: Elven nonsense!


Image 3: Religions on the rise


Image 4: Great wealth!


Now, I get to talk about various events that happened. Fairly early on, I got a migrant wave, as well as an "Intruders! Drive them away!" alert immediately after, which centered on a dwarf necromancer, who immediately left the map. Perhaps they were following the migrants in hope of joining us after their tower got destroyed, and finally realized it may be a bad idea to go visit the place you sent your forces to raid and left? (I later looked at the map and it showed that the human tower to our south was at peace, so I assume the necromancer got kicked out).

Other than that, we got 4 goblin snatchers (and 2 kobold thieves), and 1 of the snatchers actually grabbed a child! This is the first time in my 545 hours of playing that this has ever happened to me. Fortunately, I locked down the fortress and slaughtered them all.

And finally, for the worst piece of news: an artifact was stolen. I got the alert that "a thief was seen stealing an artifact!" but when I went to look, I couldn't find anyone with an artifact in their possession. I checked the entire main fort, as well as everyone in the tavern but couldn't find it. I decided to lock some doors so tat there would only be 1 way out of the fort, where I searched everyone who passed by for artifacts, and found nothing (except for some bastard with adamantine strands woven into them). I sat there for quite a while before having to accept the loss.

I still have no clue how I got the alert that a thief was seen stealing it and yet noone did anything and there wasn't any thief around; and this artifact was in the smithing area, which is always busy, so I've no clue how someone could've successfully stolen it. Anyways, I don't know how we're going to recover the artifact, but I really want to find a way

Finally, we get to the last little bits of my report. The hillocks of Mazeshoot, Tourbean, Steelcutters, and Inchstakes have all been founded nearby and incorporated into our holdings. We got 2 artifacts; an obsidian bracelet worth 70k and a native gold crown worth 77k. My turn ended with a glassmaker getting a mood, so I made sure the workshop had a door to it for if they go insane we can lock them in

Btw the artifact stolen was Uloldallith Kacothnabreth, or Lastriddle the Confining Spirit. Also I finished the duchess's room

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Image : Main floor in year 114


EDIT: OttoK here. Sorry, I put a pointless chat exerpt about debugging artefacts in bins here, just to pad the post's visual length on the page. But then I realized that it was pointless, so I removed it. A bit of reality check to not use the chat exerpts when they're clearly unnecessary and don't add to the post