Bay 12 Games Forum

If you get lucky enough to have a vampire in your fort, a necro or especially a reanimating biome can be put to good use. Station the vampire outside with good armor and train him up on the undead. He'll become unstoppable very quickly. Then when caravans invaders arrive, let the undead horde devour them and set urist mctwilight to scooping up the trade goods goblinite and depositing it inside your airlock. Send him back outside, cycle the lock, repeat as desired. I did this with a reanimating biome with good results. The difficult part was the eventual need to permanently kill some of the growing undead horde due to fps creep as it swelled to over 300 slavering undying abominations.

Would it be possible to place a single tile refuse pile under the corpse, just long enough to generate the work order at the butcher's shop?

Or does the corpse not count as really being in the pile if  you do that...?

In curious instance of delayed ignition, both puppies finally ignited almost a half year after they were attacked.

A fire broke out in a stockpile and I couldn't figure out why (though I later noticed a puppy was missing).  Then I caught another one early as it broke out in the statue garden, and the only thing nearby was a !!xstray puppy corpsex!! {This object is showing some wear}.

I recently had a giant fire breathing eyeless tick make its way up through a hole to the caverns that I missed plugging up in my shaft down to the magma forges.  Luckily, it only toasted one mason but made its way outside, where I locked it outside my airlock until I could get my meager defense force together.

The outside of the fort is now a field of scorched earth and feather trees (which seem to survive fire quite nicely).  Two puppies are permanently flashing red but don't seem to have suffered any wounds (a bug I'm assuming).  I'm hoping they grow up to be flashing red helldogs, which I will train for war and leave at my gates.  The tick died from one crossbow bolt but took out 3 marksdwarves with it.

The interesting part though, is that during it's initial assault, it set a good chunk of my furniture stockpile on fire, as well as my crafts.  The fire seems to have gone out, but smoke continues to billow from two areas, then subside to nothing and billow out again.

I noticed a few tiles of stone were flashing as hot, so I bulldozed those down but the smoke continues to billow out.  As far as I can tell, both smoke clouds are centered on artifacts that were in storage.

Currently I'm trying to confirm that this is what's happening (by assigning a stockpile to take the artifacts away and see if the smoke is centered on the new tile).

If it is, the question is: how do I weaponize/use/do science/create !fun! with my new eversmoking artifacts?

My first thought was to create a goblinite collection area, drop the artifacts in, then drop the raw goblinite in and wait for them to pass out and let my melee dwarves in for easy practice.  But there must be something more interesting to do with an unlimited source of smoke...

I've read many times, both here and on the wiki, for as long as I've played df, that sometimes a dwarf in a strange mood will need not just a type of raw material (say, wood), but a specific type favored by the dwarf (like goblin cap wood). The thing is though, in scores of games and hundreds of strange moods, I've never seen this happen. If my mooded dwarf is stuck in the workshop requesting something, any material of the right class I free up has always satisfied him.

I took a couple year break from df a while back, so my memory of very old times is somehwat hazy, but I've played a lot in the last couple versions and can say with certainty i haven't seen this happen lately.

Have I just gotten lucky, or is this feature no longer present (or was it ever)?

Ive found sometimes if you cancel the wall and rebuild with the same material, it will continue to fail, but designate a new construction material and youre back in business.

If all else fails, you can construct a fortification instead.

I really liked the cave-in idea until I did some hard looking and realized some of the cavern borders are close to 70 z levels high, and the room between them and the surface is only between 10 and 20 z levels, so not nearly enough to actually seal the place in.  I'm guessing that perhaps cavern levels 1 and 2 are more or less merged on this map, accounting for the abnormally high cavern ceilings.

At this point, I'm planning to just put a 1 z level wall around the place and deal with flyers as they come.  At least non flyers will just get stuck on top of the wall and give my marksdwarves some easy practice.

My alternate idea is to see if there are a couple points in the cavern where the ceiling is lower and I can wall in the fort from there, instead of at the map edges.

Thanks for all the help!

Newb here, but I did this last week, and when I showed up with my embark caravan, the zombie horde was still there.  And now I don't even have the benefit of a halfway set up fort.  Help?

Id suggest abandoning and reclaiming with a custom caravan with some stone blocks and 4 or 5 masons. Confine everyone to a tight burrow and erect a 5x5 wall around your wagon. Remember to do the corners first.

If you really want to try without abandoning first, id say dig straight down and seal yourself in with a constructed wall.  Forget the wagon to save time and plant some plump helmets asap.