Bay 12 Games Forum

Its very easy to avoid stagnant water.

You just need a pump and a mason.

First build a bunch of rock blocks. Then build parts for a pump.

Dig out the area under the well for a cistern. Line the cistern entirely with rock blocks. Do not have any natural stone at all. None. Rock block walls and floor. Even the tiles the pump is sitting on. Even the pump room in case of leaks. Everything lined with constructed walls and floors. This is very important.

Then build a pump, so its pumping water from your water source into the cistern.

Any water drawn out of that lined cistern filled by a pump will be always fresh and clean.




As an aside, this is the same way you purify salt water to make it drinkable. It also makes murky or stagnant water clean and pure.

The idea was to use a dodge trap over a pit. Its a very shallow pit, and the weapon trap is full of wooden training weapons so it won't harm anything. All it does is cause the invader to dodge off the ledge and into the pit. Its not the weapon traps or the fall that will kill anyone.

The pit is full of zombies. Even goblins with crossbows are useless against the zombie hordes. While they will stand up on top and shoot down into the pit, killing many zombies, they will run out of ammo and the zombies will simply stand up again. Then the goblin will attempt to cross the bridge, dodge the wooden training spears, and fall into the pit where OMNOMNOMNOMNOMNOM.

Its a very hands-off defense. Even babysnatchers and ambushes end up in the pit entirely without me noticing that they're even on the map.

I was hoping for some system to sift through the zombies and dropped items, preferably done entirely with levers, but a heavily armored vampire hauler is brilliant. So simple. Being a civilian he will try to avoid fighting, but is wearing heavy armor so even if he is cornered he'll be okay. The zombies will continually mob the goblins and eat them. Once everyone is undead, the vampire hauler can then at his leisure dump all of the goblinite down a garbage chute, where it will be recovered and melted down.

The only things it will not work against are titans and kobolds. Kobolds are laughably harmless, and titans can be dropped through sufficient quantity of crossbow bolts.

The easy way is to simply seal off the fortress. Close the drawbridge and seal off the surface.

Its easy to be self sufficient underground. All you need is water or mud, and seeds.

Allow caravans or sieges of goblins to clear out the surface. Or simply hide down underground and allow the surface to be a zombie filled wasteland.

Its also good to have multiple lines of defense.

First would be outside traps or marksdwarves which make up the gauntlet invaders have to wade through before they reach your main drawbridge. Then would be your barracks full of on-duty, sparring dwarves. After that you want a door you can close if need be. Then a long corridor, preferably full of traps, with another door at the end. Then your meeting hall. In your meeting hall have a large number of dogs just hanging out. They will automatically attack anything hostile they see. This is your last line of defense.


Using this system I can seal off the outside at any point up until the meeting hall filled with the dogs.

Vampire haulers. Nuf said.

 

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BRILLIANT!

I have a single vampire in my fortress. He also happens to the king of the dwarven civilization with over 2,200 kills to his name. All dwarves. Yes, he's killed over 2,200 dwarves. Thats obscene even for a dwarven noble. As a result he's been put into containment and giving artifact clothing that will never, ever rot away.

But I could toughen him up in a danger room, give him some high quality armor, shield, and weapon so he's safe should a goblin somehow get through the zombie horde. Then rig up an airlock type system with a stockpile that accepts everything, including bins but no other furniture, so its always stocked full of bins.

The occasional zombie might escape through the airlock system, but that would be only a small handful of zombies, which can be easily contained and then dropped back into the zombie pit.

There is an annoyance factor though. The king is legendary at using swords, so every time military mode is activated all jobs get wiped. If he's armed but not on active duty he'll flee combat, but at least should be able to win if cornered.

So I've been building a mighty zombie pit for fortress defense. All undesirables are tossed into the zombie pit. Its not the fall that kills them, its the hundreds of endlessly reanimating zombies.

This leads to a massive accumulation of zombies, partial zombies, and precious scrap metal at the bottom of the pit. Getting the undesirables into the pit is trivially easy. Cleaning out the entire pit is also trivial.

But I don't want to clean out the entire pit.

What I want to do is:

A) Extract valuable iron from the pit.
B) Do NOT destroy the zombies, they need to be recycled for the next sieges.
C) Do not let the zombies escape the pit.

I considered using a combination of bridges and water, to cause creatures to flee to dry ground if possible. The iron would sink to the bottom, and I can use bridges to cover the top of the pool while dropping out the bottom of the pool. This works fine for living creatures, but zombies just don't care because they don't need to breath.

While I can just brute force it and barge in with my military to murder all of the zombies, this inevitably leads to a massive mess, as hauling away the iron is continually interrupted by zombies, and zombies end up leaking out of the containment pit, body parts, panicking dwarves, and legendary soldiers with axes chopping zombies everywhere. I've tried this, and it causes the entire fortress to grind to a halt and descend into mayhem. Its not dangerous, its just not productive at all.

Slaying all zombies with spike traps does work, but they reanimate so fast no hauling can be done. If the spikes are not continually moving, there will be zombies up. If the spikes are moving, haulers cannot enter.


Any thoughts on anything I've missed that may allow for the sifting of zombies, keeping the zombies contained and safe, while allowing the valuable metal to be recovered?

Dabbling marksdwarf and wooden bolts. Your "ftfy" is invalid.

They can murder anything with enough dakka.