Bay 12 Games Forum

Doors set to tightly shut will bar your war dogs from getting out just as well as they will your kittens - which is somewhat less than 100%, as animals tend to sneak through when the door is opened by a dwarf.

If you don't care about the quality of the fortress, this is fairly easy.  I created a zero-intervention fortress recently and ran it for about a decade before shutting it down out of boredom.

What I did was build a sealed-off fortress with no trade, with the only connection to the outside world being an automated pressure plate - trapdoor retracting bridge mechanism to allow immigrants to get in while keeping sieges and ambushes out.  I had a large farm set to grow plump helmets year-round, a large stockpile for holding plump helmets, and a large stockpile for holding plump helmet spawn.  I had ten wells dug into an aquifer-fed reservoir, a large communal dining room, a large common bedroom with about 100 beds, and most importantly a small meeting room/statue garden continually full of waterfall-generated mist.  And that's it.  The secret to keeping this working was the waterfall meeting room, the stacking good feelings from standing in mist all the time offset the penalty for living off nothing but raw plump helmet and water and nobody having their own bedroom or anything.

The only interventions I needed to do to keep the fort running were unpausing it after birth announcements (which there were a lot of, what with all the dwarves having nothing to do) and sieges (which would stand around outside for a while, then get bored and leave).  Strange moods inevitably failed, of course, resulting in dead dwarves, but the super happy-making powers of mist kept anyone from tantruming.  Production mandates also failed, but with no fortress guard there was no repercussion other than bad feelings for the mayor.  The only external noble I had show up was the dungeon master, who seemed pretty cool with the arrangements.  Never had a hammerer, or duke/baron/whatever - I suspect with no trade depot I didn't the export requirements.

I abandoned that fortress after a decade when it was obvious nothing would ever change or happen.  Too boring.  No tantrum spirals, just a hundred happy wet dwarves breeding in a hole in the ground.

It has been my experience that if you arrange for a dwarf to spend a significant amount of time exposed to mist from falling water, he will live off plump helmet and water and still be ecstatic.  Literal brainwashing, I suppose.

I'm actually planning on making a giant field of coffins outside my fort >.> My fort's name is Agemourn after all, so why not make suitably EPIC Field of coffins and memorials ALL AROUND the place =3

For some reason coffins can't be placed outside, so you'll either have to make temporary roofs over each coffin to place it, or enclose them in some kind of mini-mausoleums.

I had a very strange similar bug on a recent fort.

I had on this fort an aboveground river which was frozen for part of the year.  To give my dwarves a reliable supply of water I dug out a large multi Z-level underground cistern.  On the bottom level of the cistern was an inlet channel closed off with floodgates leading to a staircase dug up to the river.  I made the final connection between the staircase and the river when the river was frozen.   When the river thawed in the spring water filled the staircase and the bottom-most level of the cistern, but wouldn't rise any further, despite the bottommost level of the cistern being at least ten Z-levels below the river level.

Later while working on additional fill lines I closed the floodgate connecting the bottom of the cistern to the river.  When I reopened the floodgate (but before I had connected any other fill lines) water began flowing from the river into the cistern, eventually completely filling it.

So there's something weird still with water movement and stairs.  It's as if stairs cancel pressure similar to how a diagonal passage does ... but only sometimes.

Cattendatan is the name of the artifact he's making.

I have a legendary gemcutter/gemsetter who has been cutting green glass for years.  Next to him is a stockpile full of green glass furniture.  I tell Urist McJeweler to "Encrust Furniture with Green Glass", but rather than grab one of the masterwork glass doors from the pile next to him, he walks halfway across the map to grab an empty tower-cap barrel to encrust.  Does the restriction that an object can't be encrusted with the same material twice also mean that an object can't be encrusted with the material it's made of?  That is, no green glass encrusted green glass furniture?  Or am I missing something here?