Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm working on a "mansion" on my current map. I noticed my embark name was "Soarmansions," so I sketched a rough drawing of what I thought a front gate to one would look like and went from there.

When finished it will have 5 towers, 4 outer ones at the cardinal points and a larger center one rising from the roof. The outer ones will have arched bridges connecting to the center tower.

Currently I have the main entrance mostly done, with a little tweaking to get it looking right. The main building is 3 z-levels high so far and I'm working on the scaffolding to the highest level. The main part will be 9 z-levels, and the towers will go 15 or 20 up, I haven't really worked it out yet.

Unfortunately I got off to a rocky start, an early death from an alligator led to being shorthanded immediatly, and after kobolds stole the dead guys stuff they ambushed and killed more. Luckily a few immigrant waves brought in more dwarves just in time.

*edit* Well I hit a snag, I made a noob mistake and forgot to check how many Z-levels I had to play with, and it was less than I thought. I'll have to change the design or deconstruct the front gate to change the dimensions 

My most recent fort has two things that while maybe not surprising struck me as "odd" or, "wow these dwarves are idiots."

One of my original seven managed to get injured in a Kobold ambush and spent awhile with a broken leg and currently still has a mangled lung. The problem is his lung means he can't breathe well, and he isn't tough enough to keep powering through being winded, so he passes out. A lot. I got spammed with "Urist mcwinded cancels job, unconcious" forever, so I turned off all of his jobs. However, some of my dwarves keep throwing parties, and since he never has any jobs he's friends with a lot of people. So now I get spammed with "Urist mcwinded cancels attend party, unconcious." I guess the parties are to intense for him.

The next thing that happened was near the top of my magma pipe. A Fire imp popped out, and the marksdwarf that had been taking care of them dodged right into the lava. Then the other marksdwarf started to run, apparently he had run out of bolts and didn't get more. He also had a pet Mule, which would follow him everywhere. Well, the fire imp chased the marksdwarf who was running, and the Mule kept chasing after the marksdwarf and running from the imp. So they kept following each other around and around the magma pipe over and over, they went around in a circle at least two dozen times before they stopped. I kept waiting to hear Benny Hill's Wackaty Sax start playing.

Hmm I knew they were restricted to region tiles, I was just to busy not having my original seven die to alligators and ambushes to really figure out how to search.

I'll try the shaft idea, It shouldn't take to long. I'm betting I'll find out I screwed up the map finder, cause I'm such a noob 

After abandoning my fortress when the lag monster reared it's ugly head, (220+ dwarves, 120 animals and a world flooding project) I decided to find a location with a magma pipe to see what this "magma" stuff is all about (I'm new to DF, and I've never seen magma). I used the whole site finder, and embarked to what could be the most BORING location possible. It's almost completely flat, except for one area of terrain that's one z-level above the rest. It doesn't have much in the way of wild animals, except for one alligator that managed to kill a moron in the first few minutes after embarking >.< The only real difficulty came when a kobold ambush came after they managed to steal enough stuff from the dead body, and in that I lost one dwarf and was close to the brink before about 30 migrants showed up.

I was considering abandoning, as the magma pipe seems to be non-existant or at least to much of a pain for me to find, until I noticed the name my fort had gotten.

Soarmansions.

Soooo I'm going to build a Mansion. I'm planning on making it nothing to huge, about 25 tiles long and 30 or so deep. The front is going to have columns that all tilt inwards toward a common center, to form a large dome like area. Each of the four sides will have a large tower extending upward, and the center will have a 15x15 tower that's several z-levels higher than the rest. I plan on connecting the four outer towers to the center one with arcing bridges, and each outer tower will connect to the two adjacent with the same sort of arcing bridge. I want to try and live up to the "Soarmansion" name by making it have lots of soaring towers, I may add on to the building if I don't like where it's going. I'm also going to try and make the main room have a large hanging "chandelier" like structure.

I still haven't really designed the whole thing out yet, I just have a few rough sketches of the main entrance to use as a starting point. But I was wondering, what's a good way to design the whole thing out in advance, so I know where to build all this stuff?

Maybe flooding the world wasn't such a good idea....

My FPS is sitting right around 2 or 3, when it was a decent rate before. As soon as my pumps started chugging (after I FINALLY figured out how to use them  ) and the water started to spread a lot, the fortress ground to a halt.

I'm pitting every stray animal I can to hopefully increase FPS, but if it doesn't soon I'll have to abandon 

I've been trying to set up a pumping system for awhile, but I have no idea how to get the damn things to work. I know the lighter colored tile is the "input" and the darker is the "output," but if I try and put the lighter colored tile over open space, it says "no access."

So how the hell do I get the damn thing to pump anything? The wiki doesn't seem to help much...

Yeah I had a bit of a flooding oopsy moment. Luckily that area wasn't being used for much at the time, so only four dwarves died.

My fortress does look pretty flat, it took me awhile to really figure out the whole z-level thing. By the time I realized I could make things more compact by going up and down instead of spreading out, I had already built most of the fortress.

Now that the whole thing is built, I'm adding some more roads. And I think I'm going to flood the entire lower part on the western edge, for kicks.