Bay 12 Games Forum

Haven't used the magma yet; I'm now digging out a number of near-concentric tiers in the area, and have been dropping dirt from the top down to the bottom.

Six craftdwarf stations are churning out rock crafts full time.

WHile digging out quarters in preparation for the arrival of the king, I discovered Bauxite (not so useful, since I'm using the Dig Deeper Mod), and iron. With the huge number of trees and the presence of white marble, I can make my own steel!!.... Except that orcs are my primary source of it, and my legendary armorer has been making masterwork plate mail for the troops.

I should've lowered the population cap, as my FPSs are going downhill quickly.


I also discovered the means to quickly copy symmetric patterns through z-levels with perfect alignment, so I'm quite happy about that.

In Rockhome the Great Fortress of Blood, the big drop has been completed, placing a ring of dirt from the surface down around the pond I've made at the z-2 level.
The cistern is ready to be filled, but I've yet to dig the sewers.

Up next: determining how best to arrange workshops and living quarters, creating the permanent magma foundries, debating the overall aesthetic design, as incorporating the magma pipe will necessarily mean asymmetry, unless ....

Hmm... an artificial magma pipe on the opposite side.

After all, it's only the bottom and top that matter, right?


You could carefully mine out a pipe, building a cylinder to contain the magma, starting from the bottom and going up... Especially if it was mirrored on the other side to provide a drainage channel... and the transverse channels would be perfect for creating a magma curtain defense! 

Hm. Research is in order!

It's an experiment to see if they can be made even as fractionally awesome as the great king.

It starts to fall apart when they choke to death on bones and start tantrum spirals. Which, being elves, I call 'Huffs' or 'Snitfits'.

I'll try to make it. It's just a busride away, after all.

Especially if I'm doing a megaproject that'll take time and will eventually house the whole fort, I have  to agree with the earlier suggestion for just digging tunnels underneath near to the magma, and then having a fortification to filter out !!surprises!!.

What I do, once the magma pipe has been found, is:
1. Scan the entire z-span of the pipe, looking for sections where a higher level is smaller than the one below.

2. dig the main feed channel below all the way to the second-to-last obsidian wall. Smooth & carve fortifications in that wall.
3. Dig branch channels. Suggest the already mentioned Tunnel, blank,blank, tunnel for smelters, and if you want to put in walls around your forges and glass furnaces, a bit more spacing as appropriate.
 
4. breach the final wall (between the fortification & magma) by channeling from the workshop floor.
5. Quickly put floors over the open tiles, to keep out !!mobile toasters!!


If you need to transport magma a long distance or more quickly fill a reservoir, you can use a shunt, where you tap the magma feed from above, place a screw pump, and dig out a tunnel to another part of the desired fill area. If you just keep track of the magma level, you can stop using the pump once the whole area is 2/7 magma, and let the rest diffuse in. Then remove the shunt. Perfectly safe, fills fast, and you can expand it if you need to without too much trouble.

For extra security, putting a bend in the main magma feed will keep !!marshmellows!! from being thrown at your metalworkers.

That gives me an idea.

*adds [DEEP] to Microcline*

No, I'm fully intending to fill practically every z-level with magma, using a pipe and a freshwater lake. (Terrifying biome, Dig Deeper mod). It's very likely I'll get bored before this project comes to fruition, and Toady will have put out the next arc by then.

I really should have used a smaller embark area. The regular size is far too large to do this task efficiently.


Really, starting over with a smaller (say, 3x3 or 2x2) map would be a far better place to make an obsidian city. Pity, it's a nice map, with lots of trees to restrict where the traders can appear.