Bay 12 Games Forum

That's going a little overboard, even for me. After all, where does the water come from in the first place? Either murky pools, which by definition are murky, or from streams and rivers meaning the water's so full of carp waste and offal you could probably burn it for fuel in your smelter.

Obviously we need to petition Toady to add water purification to the game.

I used a 10-level drop pit for a while, on goblins. When I first built it, I was pretty lazy with the excavation, so each level had a one-tile perimeter of floor around the open shaft. I think the open part was about five tiles across, maybe six. Goblins dropped ten levels to the bottom would fling chunks up to the perimeter floors on the third, fourth, fifth level up. So ten levels will definitely result in an energetic detonation at the bottom.

Then again, once I built an aboveground tower that went something like 16 levels up, and tested it by dropping a stray mule off the platform at the top. There were pieces, but they didn't go flying a great distance. Just a neat pile of gore, maybe three or four tiles across.

So either (a) it's pretty random, or (b) goblins and mules react differently to ballistic interludes, or (c) there was some other difference at play.

I guess the other thing to consider is whether you want an impact to result in complete dismemberment, or whether you just want at least one limb to fly off or something. The complete-dismemberment approach has a practical side to it, I believe. If I remember correctly, each severed body part will decay into its own stack of bones, so you can keep the archery ranges well stocked by ensuring terminal velocity.

This is … um … kind of disturbing, now that I think about it.

Or just increase the triggers for one or both entities. I think I read they range from 1 to 5, with 5 being "later," but I don't know any more specifics than that. Presumably they map to some defined values for population and wealth and such, so it should be possible to tune the gobs and orcs so they don't attack until you're worth their while. Or something.

That's my theory as well. Not that I don't believe you, Lav. It's a big game, and if you say you've seen it happen, then I believe it happened. But once I had a meeting area set up on the z-1 level, with the surface level channeled out to expose it to the sky. Cave-adaptation-prevention measure, y'see. Something bad happened and I have the stay-inside order, but several of my dwarves stayed in the outdoor meeting area instead, all crowded around the edge. I started seeing "Urist McConfusingDwarf cancels drink: forbidden area" messages and the like. Eventually I figured out that I'd failed to cut down all the trees on the surface, so when I designated the area for channeling, a few edge tiles had remained un-channeled. So they were "subterranean," technically, while the others were all "above ground." The dwarves there couldn't go into the fort proper, because getting there meant leaving a permitted tile to go into a forbidden tile.

Maybe something similar happened with your miasma? Maybe the actual remains that were generating the miasma were on subterranean tiles?

I happened to look at the Orc entity tags for Dig Deeper recently. I forget what the default setting was, but they can be set to be active in any or all of the seasons. I changed mine so they'd be inactive in autumn, because I was feeling wimpy and didn't want them interfering with Dwarf Christmas. Later, I changed my mind and set them to be inactive in spring, because I wanted to try to score a breeding pair of exotic animals from the elves.

I'm not sure if this is related to Dig Deeper or if this is a feature of unmodified DF, but one time I embarked on a blighted evil map and lost both cats in the initial fighting with the skeletal camels or whatever they were. So for the first year or two, my fort was cat-less.

Sometime during the cat-free period (sorry I can't be more specific; I'm doing this from memory) I ended up with a massive bat infestation. There were bats everywhere on the top level of my fort, which happened to be where the food stockpiles still were. I don't know whether they spawned outside and flew inside, or whether they spawned inside, or whether they had anything to do with the food stockpile or what. But since there were no cats to kill them, they just swarmed like mad for a while, then vanished of their own accord.

It was kind of neat, frankly. I wish I knew whether it was caused by something or whether it was just a random event.

Once a tile has been exposed to the sky, however briefly, it will always be above ground, forever and ever, even if you construct a floor over it. Even if you cast two levels of obsidian over it and mine out the bottom one, those bottom tiles will still be above ground.

In other words, each map starts off with a given number of subterranean tiles, and that number can never increase. It can decrease, if you dig channels or ramps from the surface, but it can never go back up again.