Bay 12 Games Forum

You can designate as big an area as you like for channeling, with as many miners as you like as long as there are no existing open spaces in the layer you're channeling into.
DO NOT channel more than one z-layer in depth with one designation.
Remembering these points, you'll be flattening mountains in no time

Boltssaved persists.
At last count, I'm up to 256 dwarves.
Nothing really tests the fortress now, with a curtain wall and heavily trapped entrance stopping all but the most persistent enemy. And even if something does get inside, the elite squad "The Helms of God" is set to eternal training just inside. Every one of them is a teenage Axe Lord equipped with the finest steel the fortress can manufacture.

As the dwarves want for nothing now, and I have no desire to damage FPS further by breaching the caverns, the decision was made to provoke every one of the neighbours. The goblins prove interesting sport, as does the occasional wandering minotaur, but I really want the attention of the elves and humans.

To that end, I relocated the trade depot and turned it into an obsidian farm. Unfortunately, initial testing resulted in a burning human fleeing and setting fire to the surface during his maddened flailing.

Fortunately not a single dwarf perished, while a substantial number of animals were killed in the ensuing firestorm. I'd been slowly whittling down their numbers through butchery anyway, so this was a welcome side effect.
I have now fireproofed the trap and just in the nick of time, as the elves have just arrived.
I'll buy all of their wood and then fricassee the lot.

I love the smell of burning elf in the morning.

I'm also seriously considering re-sizing the curtain wall and adding additional entrances, as things are a little too comfortable the way they are at the moment. It's also decidedly... flat now that I've leveled off the local hills (all but one in the south-east corner). Advantageous at first, but proving boring in the long run.
I think I'm going to have to start manufacturing something crazy and magma related. Of course, this probably means re-opening the volcano we've capped.

Hmmm, shrink the curtain wall radius and something else to do with magma?
I wonder...
I'm assuming that obsidian casting on the map edge works?

You know how it goes; you start a fortress, manage to hold on a couple of years and then get buried in immigrants.
My current fortress, Boltssaved, is 6 years old and has a population of 228. A good hundred or so dwarves have died trying to make this place work, and it's finally hitting its stride. So yeah, my dwarves have become just an expendable resource to me.
By chance, I just now inspected one of my hunters to see what she was bringing back from outside the curtain wall. Turns out it was just one of the many silver warhammers that got lost during preliminary skirmishes.
That's not what caught my eye though.
To get to the object being carried, I had to scroll through a ridiculously long list of animal bone jewelry, but not just any animal jewelry.

Elelphant bone jewelry.

Uvash Endoktost owns two hundred and ninety four objects, most of which are elephant bone jewelry pieces.
Checking her kill list reveals that little old Uvash killed two hundred and seventy nine elephants in "The Dune of Filling".
Oh, and one jaguar.

What the hell do I do with a dwarf bent on elephant genocide?

Ironically, she's paid no mind to the frequent herds of elephants that pass through this neck of the woods.

How much danger does it take exactly for the little bastards to stop coming?
I have over 200 shortarses already in occupation! I NEED NO MORE! Yet on they come, "Despite the danger".
I preferred the old 40d migration waves, where you had to work hard to attract migrants, especially after your fortress had become a dangerous location.

Is it me, or is this new version significantly more difficult? Not that I'm complaining; it just makes "Interesting" events more frequent

My current fortress, which has also been my most successful this version is great fun.
Things are slightly more forgiving now I've lowered vampire causes in world gen, but the constant flood of migrants adds a desperate urgency to things.
I got lucky with this 4x4 site; flat apart from TWO volcanoes (one open mouthed, the other covered with a small hill), a river source, wooded, flux, hematite, tetrahedrite, galena, gold and a smattering of platinum.
So I dig in fully intending to exploit the magma and hematite in order to get a proper working military. Things start okay, but the migrant waves just won't. Let. UP.
It's not that I can't cope with migrants; it's that I set them to work so efficiently, well, they generate a lot of wealth very quickly :E

The first visitor was a minotaur. Thankfully, my dodge trap over magma worked to sterling effect, and only a couple of stragglers got caught. But then the Snatchers came in force. Literally one every 10 seconds for about ten minutes until BAM, ambushed by marks-goblins. I must have lost 15 children to snatchers, resulting in widespread dwarf misery. The arragobs made short work of another 10 or so dwarves, and a flaw in my dodge trap became evident: the end opened up in to my main fortress, providing no cover for the hapless dwarves inside.
I dug in and weathered it out until the gobboes got bored and wandered off.
I still hadn't managed to exploit the riches of my fortress beyond carving out the magma channels and churning out a stream of crappy rock crafts.
Tentatively, I let the dwarves back out of the fort to bury the dead and gather socks.
However, I was periodically being raided by more and more ambushes, resulting in frequent retreats to the underground burrow. On the bright side, this reminded me that children should be confined to the burrow AT ALL TIMES.

A Weretapir appeared and proved to be possibly the most ineffectual enemy ever. He came snarling to the fortress (do Tapirs snarl?), and just as I sent my battered and beaten military to what I expected was their doom, he transformed back into an elf and scarpered.
"RAAAAAAR! YOU SHALL KNOW WHY YOU FEAR THE..." *SPLORT* "Whoops! Bye!".

It was at this point I resorted to a somewhat cheap but effective tactic. I decided that damn it all to hell, if I'm going to be constantly attacked, IMMA BUILD A WALL.

Halfway through, a giantess appeared, chased a mason around the map, then tried to follow him into the fort and fell prey to the dodge trap.
Well at least SOMETHING works in this hellhole.

Things calmed down for a bit, and I started levelling off the hillock covering the second volcano. Don't ask why. I think it breaks the uniformity of the map or something.
With children confined to the burrow and the dodge trap catching those more sneaky assailants, I had a bit of room to breathe. To grow complacent.

A human caravan appeared, lead by a Fox Fiend diplomat who they swore was a god. He seemed friendly enough, although I was wary of his deadly gas. He chatted to my mayor, complimented our achievements, and then a vile force of darkness arrived.
"Oho!", thinks I, "We have a GOD on our side!".
Yeah, but he was a bit shit.
The gobboes got to the end of the dodge trap, and Mr. Fox Fiend charged at them, but somehow ended up in the magma. He then proceeded to sit in the magma, angrily and continuously trying to kill the gobboes with his gas attack, which actually proved to be not that deadly at all really.
So in resignation, I sent some dwarves to attack the gobboes, which with a rare stroke of luck actually drew them into the fortress and into the dodge trap, breaking the siege!
YAY!
Or not.
See, the Fox Fiend decided he'd been in our crappy fortress far too long at that point and decided to go berserk.
Now while he proved to be a bit crap in combat, his hardiness and persistence, combined with a military consisting of raw recruits meant he wreaked havoc for a good few weeks, disrupting dwarves going for a drink and killing any military sent at him purely through dint of being a hard bastard to kill. While his deadly gas wasn't really that deadly, he'd stay alive so long that he was bound to get in some lucky hits.
Red down arrows flashed throughout the fortress as friends and family died to this rampaging not-really-a-deity.
But Lady Luck must be smiling on me. The ongoing fight spilled into an already exploited galena vein, and some hasty masonry allowed my dwarves to wall the crazed diplomat in. He sits there to this day raging at nothing in particular.

Things are getting back to a reasonable semblance of normality; dwarves distraught at the deaths of those near and dear have either gone crazy and died or gone berserk and been killed. The necropolis housing my fortress dead continues to grow into a thing of glory; restless spirits are restless no more. We have completed the curtain wall and are working on replicating the dodge trap as the only entrance to the compound. Steel production is in full swing, and we're beginning to see the beginnings of a professional military (finally!).
Even our latest "Unwelcome Guest" seems rather tame, being an Elf. I'm not sure if it's the return of the Weretapir or just an angry treehugger come to berate us for letting his comrades die in our hellhole. He's just wandering around outside the wall at the moment. I think I'll leave him there for the time being.
Now I think would be a good time to start a danger room

How about defining a burrow that includes everywhere in your fort apart from sleeping quarters and then adding the vampires to that burrow?

So I'd bought a bunch of animals from traders with the sole intention of using them as walking leather factories.
It just so happens that amidst the hordes, I'd managed to lay my hands on some Rhesus Macaques.
Previously the bane of many a fortress thanks to their inherent kleptomania, it turns out they are utterly fearless and will attack anything they see.
Okay, they're a bit shit, but it doesn't matter.
I can say that I have ATTACK MACAQUES!