Bay 12 Games Forum

This might be an old idea, but I've never seen it before.  so, pressure is transmitted orthogonally.  water can flow diagonally, but it wont teleport from a higher location through a diagonal gap to a lower location.  this means that if you want to drop water from, say, the surface to the magma sea, so long as the pipe ends in a diagonal exit below the rim of your cistern, it will never overflow, despite the immense pressure.  It actually wont flow very fast, so you might need a sort of diagonal grating to fill a large cistern in a reasonable amount of time. 


You can also use a barrier of columns in a checkerboard pattern to slow flowing water to almost a halt.  the water will build up against it like a wall, and if there are more than five or so diagonal steps that it has to take, almost none will come through.  the water behind it won't "push" it through, it has to slowly trickle.  these sorts of barriers barely slow dwarves down, are much easier to trap than an open space, and block crossbow fire until the goblin is all the through, and conveniently adjacent to  your chained up war crocodiles.

EDIT:  so I look at the forum and just down the page someone has a brilliant idea for using diagonal flow, for water reactors instead of cisterns. 

Wouldn't a chained untamed animal just scare your civilians?

Perhaps the kobolds, being sneaky little underground beasties, place high cultural significance on using their natural sneakiness to creep in and harvest webs, which they weave into garments that they wear as kind of a trophy.  doesn't explain why all the goblins and such have so much of it, though.  Maybe they raid the kobolds.

I can't think of any specific flaws, though it seems likely that you'll accidentally set the spider loose in the middle of your fortress eventually. 

How are you planning on getting it into the room?  Cage it maybe?

Also, do you know if they will make new large webs, or is that produced when the map is generated?  If they do, you might have trouble with your dwarves getting stuck, but you'll also have a lot more silk.

With 40d I've been having a recurring problem with my miners across severall fortresses...

At first they will be fine, but after a while (usually about midway through first summer) all but one of them stop working.  They just stand around the meeting area with "No Job" while the remaining miner does all of the mining.  I have enough picks, tons of accesible ming jobs,  and I tried turning off all of their other jobs, draft/undrafting them, saving and reloading etc... But still only one will work at a time.  Maybe they lost their picks somehow.  I had enough picks to start with...

I put them on millitary duty for a little while before I had the problem, maybe the picks got embedded in some zombie mountain goats and I just didn't notice?