Bay 12 Games Forum

That method Silf tried is almost exactly the same as the one I am working on ATM. However, I don't mind if I have holes/pillars, that will just add to the architecture of my wonderful underwater fort! Although unlike your plan, I will by using big plates of lava being dropped in at once (as in 50x50 or so, maybe bigger).
I modded orthoclase and microcline to be magma proof, so I can build enough hatches for it.

The problem was not that the pillars were ugly, they made the drydock leak, and as a result it wouldn't work. At all. 

I've been building sometething, namely an underwater fortress, that has made me question the common view of how walls collapse.

This is the situation:

I was planning on building a "drydock" for for the fortress to be built in. To do this I build a magma channel above the sea, with the intent to drop a "wall" of lava into the ocean, which would then become obsidian and collapse down to the bottom forming a wall. The plan was to do this three times, to get a wall high enough to shut out the ocean. When I did drop the lava, though, it yielded some strange results.

What I had was this:
MMMMMMMM
       
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~

What I wanted was this:

MMMMMMMM
       
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
OOOOOOOO

then:

MMMMMMMM
       
~~~~~~~~
OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO

and finally:

________

OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOO

What I actually got, was this:
first:

MMMMMMMM
       
~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~
OOOOOO~O

Then:

MMMMMMMM
       
~~~~~~~~
~O~~~O~~
OOOOOO~O

And finally:

________
       
~O~OO~OO
~O~~~O~~
OOOOOO~O

~ = Seawater
O = Obsidian wall
M = Magma
_ = Empty magma channel
  = Empty space

The first z-level of obsidian went kinda well, with the exception of a couple of unexplainable holes, there were three or four holes showing up randomly across the wall. When I savescummed and tried again, the showed up in different places, but they were about as many. The missing tiles of obsidian wall was nowhere to be found.

The second z-level was utter crap, only a few pillars, with the majority of the would-be-obsidian-wall tiles left as water.

The last z-level was a bit better, but still had a lot of holes in it.


And this stayed consistant duting several tries with savescumming. I do not understand why the obsidian won't for a solid wall when it collapses. It also seems like different "blocks" of 7 deep lava falls at different speeds, which is odd, and causes the different tiles in the wall to form separately, but according to what I've read about collapses, the should fall into the right place anyway...

During my trials trying to build an underwater fortress (as can be seen here: http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/map-5961-silverhall) I have built a three tile wide magma channel to cast an obsidian "drydock" to build the fortress in.

But I ran into a bit of a problem when i was going to fill the channel. Apparantly, bridges that are not linked to levers, even ones built out of non-magma-safe materials, can handle magma on them just fine, but bridges linked to a lever with non-magma safe mechanisms will de deconstructed when magma passes on top of them. This is a problem, because it makes the drydock wall not-solid, and as such it is useless for it's intended purpose.

Is there anyone out there with more knowledge of bridges than me that has any advice for what to do?

I considered altering the melting temperatures of the stones my mechanisms are made of (since I suspect the mechanisms are the culprits here), but, I couldn't find information on how to do so. It might not even be possible, as I seem to recall that altering stone values requires a regen of the world. Anyone knows for certain?

I have a human caravan stuck in my tade depot.

You might wonder how this happened, and so do I. Last summer, the human caravan arrived as they usually do, and ran into a goblin ambush. some merchant with a donkey or something was killed by the goblins before my champions arrived and killed off the goblins. The rest of the caravan made it to the depot fine, but the depot didn't recognise them as being there, it said "there's no merchants trading right now". I thought that they would just leave as usual, but no, they are still here, and it's mid-autumn. The dwarven caravan came, and left, since they couldn't get into the depot, they were in the unloading state the whole time.

What should I do to get them out of there? will they starve to death sooner or later?

Edit: Deconstructing the depot got rid of the non-wagon merchants, but the wagons are still here.   

I don't really have an obsidian cap, what I have is magma in a channel that goes above the ocean. It's designed to make a one tile wall to cut off a part of the map to the edges of the ocean.

The water under my obsidian IS connected to the rest of the ocean, for the record 

More dwarven classics:

The Old Dwarf and the Mountain A story about an old miner struggling for days against the rough basalt walls to find the platinum vein of his life.
Crime and Hammering The story of Urist Raskolnikov and his double murder, his near melancholy, and the hammerings he was sentanced to.
1084 A bleak vision of the future of Dwarfkind.

So I had a huge amount of clothes made since everyone in the fortress were walking around with only mud and/or vomit splattering for clothes. All the excess assorted tunics, coats and dresses are now horribly cluttering up my clothiers' workshops, so I built a couple of rooms for clothing storage.

Now the dwarves won't store anything in them, and IO can't for the life of me figure out why. I have four stockpiles, one for upper body clothing one for leg clothing, one for gloves and such, and one for shoes and socks. None of them are used.

Anyone have any idea why?