Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh god this is what happens when you swear off DF for the greater part of the academic year because you have essays and shit to write but you're depressed and vulnerable to timesinks and it is just being hell of enticing with its little smiley faces carrying various parts of goblins to garbage stockpiles and shit.

What happens, you ask?

You forget about little details. The little idiosyncrasies that make DF DF and not RL. Like the fact that bridges do not, in fact, support constructions.

Designated a huge stretch of wall between various free-standing parts of my railgun (I am still building that bad boy and I am doing it in 40d because hell if I'm going to do all that work again) after being very proud of the nice scaffolds I constructed. First section is completed and promptly plummets to the ground, which is several z-levels below; not such a problem except for the fact that it also creates a huge dust cloud which knocks several of my electricians unconscious. Unconscious is a bad thing for a dwarf to be when they are standing on a narrow scaffold many z-levels up.

Urist McElectrician has died from colliding with an obstacle.
Urist McOtherElectrician has died from colliding with an obstacle.

These were just the two bastards that got supremely unlucky and missed the upper levels of the generator housings, plummeting all the way down to smack into the top of the waterworks. The other five (including my legendary miner from the starting seven) had probably enough complete and working parts between them, after their fall, to make about three complete dwarves. (I am sorry, Mr. Pratchett, but that is just how it was.)

*facepalm*

So yeah, I exercised my powers as an incarnation of Armok; the ones that survived are back to full health. There was no need for that. Plus the potential destruction inherent in the railgun way outweighs the certain destruction suffered by the dorfs.

One does not simply embark into Mordor.






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It's also my experience that most people who build significant cast-obsidian structures fill the lower levels of mold and scaffolding as the upper levels are being built, while the method you've laid out would require building the whole mold before filling started anywhere.

Not that I've any experience building these things (although my next megaproject idea incorporates one) but I'd sort of assumed constructing the mold first was the default approach. It wouldn't feel much like a mold otherwise, or maybe I'm too protective of my dorfs and consequently don't want them around flowing magma =/

Just sink a 3x3 stairway into the ground and build rooms coming off of that.  Anything can go anywhere.  Shorter distances make things more efficient but winding little ant tunnels are sortof more fun to make. 

What he said. The wiki has some highly useful beginners' information; there are, so I've heard, tutorials on the forums; but part of the fun (I think) is learning what to do and what to really not do. Ever. In a million years. Unless you like dead dwarves (or 1FPS, which is a bigger threat for me at this point).

Some useful stuff to remember though:

Dwarves like to be happy. They generally get happy from eating, drinking, using or seeing really cool stuff. They also don't like being unhappy. They get that way when bad things happen to them or to things they care about.

You can't make beds out of stone, but you can make almost anything else. Except bins and barrels, which will become more important as you start producing more crap. (Make that stuff out of wood instead.)

Farmers (and farming) are important, in the sense that any animal your dwarves hunt for food is technically capable of ripping them limb-from-limb. However, the meat industry has useful by-products.

Finally, dwarves are (at this point) ridiculously stupid, and will happily wander into certain death, be it by falling, starvation, drowning, burning, or being violently separated into their component parts by large animals. If you've got them doing anything more complex than sitting around talking, watch them like a hawk until you get a feeling for what stupid things they're more likely to do.

Thanks a lot =) I've decided, however, to exercise my powers as an incarnation of Armok and revert to my last seasonal backup. I lose a little progress on my megaproject but whatever. When the gobs show up again I'm locating the elite crossbowgobs with DC and fucking terminating them in godly fashion.

Fucking ridiculously overpowered weapons. I'd expect an iron bolt to penetrate steel platemail and mangle both lungs and the heart if it were fucking rocket powered and fired from an ☼adamantine bolt thrower☼, not if some fucking elf-kissing carp-wanking upstart cowardly bitch goblin decides to hide behind a mob of wrestlers and lashers and snipe at my champions (who are more than capable of handling anything else the gobs could throw at them).

Rrrgh.

Fucking elite crossbowgoblins just wasted their second champion.

People actually gave a shit this time, as I had two minor tantrums. Both dorfs calmed down when they got back to their rooms, though.

I wasn't prepared to let her go, and revived her about three times with Dwarf Companion. She bled to death each time, almost instantly, despite having no injuries visible (but still flashing the "mortal wound" red + symbol). Someone wanna tell me what's up with that?

Not to mention the part where they flooded the coliseum and had sea battles. complete with sharks

I did say "all that and more"...

The aesthetic "you know it to be true" value is what I was going for on the bloodworks. I might make my arena be an open pit where I can build structures to have "mock" battles in. I might throw in an overhang so that I can make the soldiers spar in there. The grates would also allow me to have the "flood arena" lever, which would be awesome, quite honestly.

And secondly, I have no carp.

Hm.

Do captured gobs pick up and use weaponry you leave lying around?

I'm thinking an Unreal Tournament-style arena with structures and shit (major bonus points if you use drawbridges for walls and retracting ones for ceilings so you can alter the arena's configuration on-the-fly, but I'm not sure how well that'd work) where you dump a bunch of weapons (and armor if they'll use that too), put a gob at one end, a champ at the other (both wearing nothing) and let 'em at each other.