Bay 12 Games Forum

There is no shame in locking your front door and waiting them out. Got underground farms? Got a well? Turtle up and wait. It's a valid tactic.

(If I sound a little insistent, it's because I'm presently freakin' turtled up and waiting for the freakin' forty orcs with their freakin' elite bowman to go away and leave me alone so I can finish building my above-ground magmaduct. Freakin' orcs.)

Wells are definitely fall-downable, because I recently had three suicides down the well during a tantrum spiral. Frustrating as heck, too, because the open magma pit was right there, but nooooo, the selfish twits had to do it in the well where their remains would rot and stink up the place. It was the middle of winter too, and I couldn't drain my plumbing to get them out because the release valve was iced over.

Stupid dorfs.

True story:

Back when I was a wee lad who'd just started playing the game (about a month ago) I learned from the wiki that an outdoor statue garden/meeting hall/whatever can cure and prevent cave adaptation. What luck! My then-current fort's dining room was on the first underground level, right below the surface. It would be a trivial matter to channel out the ground tiles above and open it to the sky! The days of my trade depot being coated in regurgitated plump helmet chunks were soon to be over!

Shortly thereafter, I learned about cave-ins.

Yes, that's right. I designated the whole roof area for channeling all at once. And the miners, bless 'em, decided to start at the perimeter and work their way in. I dropped nearly the whole ceiling of my dining room (and two surprised miners) onto nearly the whole population of my fort.

Of course I killed the game and went back to the previous season's auto-save. Didn't even un-pause after the cave-in; I just force-quit immediately and reloaded. But you know what? I regretted it deeply. Sure, my fort was whole again, but it was … boring. When you've got nothing to lose, there's nothing at stake.

Successfully stop a burning dwarf from going into a drink stockpile.

Fail to stop a burning dwarf from going into a drink stockpile.

Water pressure is awesome. Yes, magma is fine and all, but the way water moves under pressure makes for big fun. At least to me; I'm a nerd.

I've lately adopted a sort of standard habit for all my forts; not sure if it'll last or I'll get bored with it or what. But I've been embarking near streams or minor rivers (or in a couple cases, a major river), damming them, and digging out a fairly large pressure column just downstream of the dam. Say a 3x3 or 5x5 pipe going straight down from the riverbed to the bottom of the map. I do this by digging up stairs on the lowest z-level, then up/down stairs the rest of the way. The inside of the pipe gets smoothed and fitted, then I channel out the stairs. The miners stand on the z-level below to channel out the stairs above them. It works well.

On each level I'll install a door or four, and just leave them. Once the dam is opened again and the pipe is filled (which takes like two seconds), I can come back later and dig horizontal pipes up to those doors, rig them with levers elsewhere, and open them to bring water to wherever I want it. Since it's under the pressure of the whole column, it fills pipes really quickly, and water can be piped upwards without pumps. I've had a little problem lately remembering to install pressure baffles where they need to go, but there haven't been any fatalities yet. I'm wimpy enough to built a floodgate-valved emergency release at the bottom level; I have a pipe that runs horizontally from the bottom of my water column to the nearest map edge, closed off with floodgates. Smooth and carve the map edge, pull the floodgate lever and the whole plumbing system drops out the bottom. It can take quite a while (i.e., a season or more) for elaborate horizontal plumbing networks to fully drain, but the point is the pressure is released immediately, so overflows can be interrupted before they become catastrophic.

The natural extension, of course, is to use a pump stack and a constructed pipe to extend this idea to a water tower that reaches all the way up to the sky. Given that a 15-level subterranean water column creates dramatic results when tapped on the bottom, a column that rises 15 levels into the sky would presumably produce dramatic results when tapped at ground level.

Of course, due to the way water flows vertically (it teleports rather than actually moving from tile to tile) it wouldn't be possible to blast orcs away from the fort with tons of pressurized water. More's the pity. But still, it would let you deliver a large amount of water to an enclosed space in a short amount of time, for whatever fun or amusing uses you might have for it.

According to the raw file "matgloss_stone_gem_extended," it's a rare and valuable gem that's found in alluvial layers. It's got the same value as clear diamond.

Seems like ol' Trussed there has some pretty haughty tastes for a dorf.

Design and build your first megaconstruction (for loose definitions of "mega"), only to deconstruct the wrong piece of your scaffolding and cause a cave-in that punches through no less than three levels of your fortress, including at least one high-pressure magma or water pipe.

Bonus points if you do this in such a way that you don't notice the underground damage until the "Urist McDwarf has died in the heat/drowned" messages start pouring in.

I've heard the "lever room" idea before recently, and really liked it. But I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Instead, my forts usually have a bunch of levers right in the primary underground meeting area, be it the dining room or whatever. I try to use notes to keep track of them, but I'm not always as diligent as I should be. There have definitely been some whoops-wrong-lever moments, especially that time when the primary water drain lever was right next to the magma inlet valve lever.

There's probably a really good argument to be made for not putting all your levers in the meeting hall. (See above, re: they-were-right-next-to-each-other.) But on the other hand, putting critical levers next to where the dwarves are has its advantages. I might not remember which lever to pull to depressurize the plumbing system, but whichever lever I order pulled in a panic after a cave-in breaches the main high-pressure water pipe, that lever is gonna get pulled fast.