Bay 12 Games Forum

I've tried destroying popped-out guts. Oh how I've tried. Fire, bridges, magma, weapon traps (knock them unconscious first!) and miasma. Nothing affects them. I can only assume they're just a graphical representation and not an actual object, as when you look at them you just see floor.

Incidentally, it might not be as fatal as one might think. I've had dwarves with various organs in the general area of the guts continue to function indefinitely, and if guts are the intestines I think they are they might starve, but otherwise be okay.

Trading them away and selectively dumping them are probably your only options. I'd recommend forbidding all wood barrels on the map, making a new food stockpile, making sure it has enough food and drink and seeds and so on, then dumping everything in the old stockpile. If you want a more gradual change, make a stockpile for only wood barrels (furniture, if i recall correctly) and forbid/dump the barrels as they come in; make sure you have a surplus of metal barrels so the dwarves will use those first.

Incidentally, i don't know if this is still a part of .31 but metal barrels used to be ten times as likely to resist rot as wooden ones: a 1% rather than 10% chance. I still use that as my justification for my massive burning of imported organic items around year 6 of my forts; they get dumped on a flaming lignite grate and turned into !!stuff that doesn't add to my Created Wealth!!.

It occurs to me that since DF is moving more toward magic and less toward tech, a system of portals could always be in place to allow passage between generated worlds. Walk onto tile, walk into next world, and so on. Perhaps forts could even build one as an artifact.

And actually, having some forts run by NPCs via the credit system would be awesome. I was just thinking how cool it would be to actually be one of the embark dwarves or something, carving out the mountain and building workshops and etc, adventuring around, finally dying, and seeing later character-players engrave your deeds. Or, on the other end, seeing all the weird social structures that crop up out of a game this open-ended and the need for people to have all the wonderful items forts provide; the community's certainly intelligent enough to keep the world from degenerating into barbarism.

And you just know the communal megaconstructions would be mindblowing.

One could play dwarf fortress as an MMO?

This isn't a serious suggestion AT ALL or it'd be in the suggestions thread, but what if we could all play in the same world in some strange hybrid of adventurer mode and dwarf mode; we could control a single dwarf who'd be able to attack/behead bronze colossi with bunnies a la Adventurer Mode and dig/do workshop things a la Dwarf Mode. You'd get whatever equivalent of guilds/corps running fortresses, I'd think, but i don't know how you'd go about refreshing resources. Either an infinite world or periodic volcanic eruptions dropping new minerals in.

And all in ASCII.

I just had a bizarre idea and wanted to share it. So...would it?

Infinite water and drains can be problematic for traps, especially ones with a short cycle time like yours. Pump circuits are much more reliable; if you're clever you can refill what gets lost to spillage automatically via a diagonal connection to a lake or similar, and you don't have to worry about flow mechanics slowing down your fluid input. If and when I build such a trap, my "capacitor" reservoirs to make sure i have enough water for constant operation in variable conditions are typically larger than the rest of the trap combined.

consider the following setup in a top view of the only real level on which it operates:
Walls--------------/--------Walls
XXDPPPPPPPPPPPPXX/XXLXUFp to fort
Walls--------------/--------Walls
                             
where L is the pressure plate that turns on pump stack p, causing it to flow water through fortification F, past upward staircase U leading to the rest of the fort, along a corridor of variable length -/- to reach the pit trap newly revealed by retracting bridge P, the bottom few z levels of which are filled with enough water to fill the corridor from F to the start of P. The entire siege will be either washed into the pit or drowned if flow mechanics refuse to move them, but they won't path through the water flow to staircase U. Once everyone is washed off of tile L, the pump shuts down and the bridge closes, and the goblins either flee or are already drowned. The water level in the pit below P is still what it was before the run, so next time L is triggered there is water ready to flood. Furthermore, the drain and flood machinery are linked, so if, for example, a goblin's pet giant olm smashes a pump, the trap is merely inoperative, not a danger to the fort. This is further assured by drain D, a simple floor grate in case something odd happens with the pressure plate and the bridge isn't open while the pumps are running.

Similar degrees of safety can be achieved by creating a constant drain away from your infinite source, but at the cost of a tunnel to the map edge; all local systems have a chance for catastropic, fort-flooding failure, particularly if the source is gravity fed and could teleport water up staircase U into the fort.

Incidentally, it's possible to make the above even more foolproof by having the pit trap be beyond a staircase arrangement similar to staircase U for entering the trap corridor:

                Walls--------------/--------Walls
              PPPXuXXXXXXXXXXXXX/XXLXUFp to fort
               Walls--------------/--------Walls

This is the setup at work in my own fort, albeit with a short circuit to pull water from the higher levels of pit P around the walls to pump p.

EDIT: both designs can have grates installed to shorten the drop but allow your trap catches to wander into other traps.

Hope this helps.

Try it with a long hallway that folds back under itself or otherwise lowers through stairs, with pressure plates at the end of the lower section and the pit just beyond a hopefully hatched exit corridor. You can catch an entire siege by building your resevoir/pump array to empty through the lower section at the fold-back point, and in a way that doesn't permit anyone to reenter the corridor until the trap auto-resets.

Using pumps gives you a zero-delay indefinitely resettable trap that can be alternately built to block the corridor until you want someone to go through or to wash the corridor as detailed above.

One final note: if you want to catch trapavoid creatures, you can build a siege engine facing the corridor, blocked off by fortifications, with a citizen-triggerable pressure plate in the corridor leading away from it; set the engine permanently to "prepare to fire". Kobold strolls into the corridor, civilian spots kobold via the Observer skill, civilian on duty flees over the plate, and the trap is set off. Add bait animal in the corridor to ensure spotting for low-observer dwarves. This also theoretically allows you to build a pit trap corridor with nothing but bridges.

I've been messing around with fire as a trap and can't seem to get animals to light on fire reliably. Lignite floor grates failed to ignite even a single kitten ambling across them, but animals pitted onto them melted but did not light on fire. A trader's camel did light on fire, but did not transfer it onto its cargo until it was unloaded.

So how does fire spread, short of immersion in magma? How can it be most easily spread onto invaders?

What IS fire in df, anyway?

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Gravity

logically, if a size 250,000 cave ogre requires a drop of 5 spaces, a size 3000 goblin would require a lot more, although this varies by creature size, how they land, and so on. Without knowing how acceleration due to gravity is actually handled in the game, I can only suggest you build more than a pit trap. Add upright spike traps at the bottom, or flood the bottom with magma.

It's most efficient to have the pressure plate open both bridges and hatchways to fluid flows that will knock those creatures on your bridge anchor spaces/pressure plates off into your pits.

Use of retracting bridges is better to keep your victims from flying around.