Bay 12 Games Forum

Honestly, the part I found hardest to buy was the reason for the mining:  unobtainium.  It exists at normal pressures and temperatures, found in a normal planetary crust, and has a density comparable to normal rock, so we can rule out neutronium or strange quarks or other highly exotic material.  It's sufficiently homogeneous and fungible that it can be formed into wires and engineered products, so we can rule out anything having a non-reproducible, highly complex microscopic structure.  It's long-lived and not radioactive, so we can rule out exotic unstable isotopes and assume it's made from the 94 elements we already know of in some novel configuration.  The background material for the movie claims it was formed in a highly energetic planetary collision in an intense magnetic field, which sounds hard to reproduce until you realize we can create metallic hydrogen in the lab and reproduce temperatures not seen since just after the big bang in particle colliders.  The humans of Avatar have reasonable routine interstellar travel via antimatter-powered starships.  There should not be any mundane material they can't make artificially, once they have enough of a sample of it to work out it's composition.

It's a required conceit for the movie to work, but that doesn't stop it from being stupid.  It would have been hardly more stupid if they'd been mining for gold.  The real value of a planet like Pandora would have been in the genetic diversity as raw material for genetically engineered drugs, plants, and animals back on Earth, ecotourism as wealthy tourists make the trip to get away from the ecologically ruined earth, and the very rich elderly pushing to figure out how to reverse-engineer that soul transfer technology as a way to achieve immortality.  That would have made for a much more complex movie that would have been a lot less black and white and would have required the audience to think.  It's probably best that I'm not a movie writer.

I only have one at the moment.

One on every level.  For both magma and water, pumps only lift one level.

I've seen similar happen.  The problem is that grates don't count as support for other grates, or for floors or other constructions.  Dwarves don't recognize this when building, and will happily stand on a grate and build a floor or another grate in an adjacent spot that isn't actually supported by anything.  When constructed the unsupported grate or floor will immediately collapse, often pulling the dwarf who constructed it along with them.  I've never seen falling grates or creatures harm they fall on, but haven't tested this much.

I've learned the hard way when constructing a structure of mixed grates and floors to build all the floors first, then the grates, and to do the reverse when deconstructing them.

Quote from: MrWiggles on March 08, 2010, 05:00:57 pm

Quote from: Sphalerite on March 08, 2010, 04:54:58 pm

On the cow cow cheese is an image of a cow in cow cheese.

Balancing a block of cow cow cheese on its head.

The cow cheese cow is making a plaintive gesture.

The cheese is laughing.

Falling floors will punch through all floor below them, until they hit a natural or constructed wall, which will stop them.  Although you can rig up a multi-stage collapse where floors collapse and destroy other floors that then remove the support for the walls, causing them to collapse, possibly triggering additional collapses as they slice through floors.

I've never experienced a cave-in as an adventurer, but in fortress mode they seem to happen instantly, even faster than the normal rate of falling objects.

As for bringing the water up, you don't need to.  You can have a lever or pressure plate high in the tower linked to a floodgate deep underground, letting water gradually fill a chamber.  Pressure plates at different levels in the chamber can then be linked to supports up in the tower.  All you need is a source of water, and it's not like you're worried about the device working more than once.

Imps will since they can swim up and down in the magma pipe.  As far as I can tell Magma Men can't swim in magma, so you need to arrange a situation where they can walk out to get them out of the magma pipe.

Most wild animals will breed, if you keep them around long enough.  They won't breed in cages, so you need to capture them and then release them into an enclosed area they can't escape from.  You don't need to keep males and females together since impregnation happens via spores or something, and you don't need to worry about inbreeding - a single pregnant female animal can give rise to an entire population.

Some animals will breed, and some won't - it's determined by tags in the data files.  Usually any of the mundane wild animals - camels, goats, elephants, and such - will breed, while more exotic things like giant olms don't.  Intelligent creatures - goblins, kobolds, gnomes and such - usually won't breed, but I have heard of a few unusual cases.