Bay 12 Games Forum

I will be keeping on eye on this, only to see how long it lasts and how truly practical it is.

I found it quite practical to run. With six smelters and two forges about 20 tiles from the 'archery range', it has, so far, taken me a season or two to turn a single tile of raw adamantine into 35 adamantine wafers and about 1200 adamantine bolts (which are destined to become about 100 wafers, and the cycle repeats.) I don't seem to be losing goblins, either - the current one has lasted a very long time.

Building an adamantine tower seems kind of blah now - four wafers per block means that even with 200 wafers, it'll be a pretty dinky tower - and pointless (I could make a watchtower over my front entrance, but I'd rather let goblins walk into the cage traps.) I should do something more dramatic with it. Pity you can't engrave it.

For the advanced student of Dwarven Physics.

The wiki makes it sound like no one's done this before, which seems kind of odd, since it seems like generating free adamantine would be an incredibly attractive prospect. The basic design of the main part of the generator is this:
∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙
∙++++@∙+++++++++
∙+∙∙∙┼∙+++++++++++++++
∙+∙g∙┼∙++++++++++++++@
∙+∙∙∙┼∙+++++++++++++++
∙+++++∙+++++++++
∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙
The @ at the right is a stack of Marksdwarves (all in different squads so that they'll stand on the same tile) with adamantine bolts. The @ at the left is a single Perfectly Agile soldier with orders to patrol up and down, with little delays at the top and bottom. The "g" at the left is a goblin standing on a pillar (I pitted it from the z-level above.)

When the dwarf at the left runs up or down the line of doors, it opens all of them, and some of the marksdwarves shoot their bolts. By the time the bolts get there, the doors have closed, so they hit the doors and fall into the channel, where they can be collected and melted separately. (That distance is exact, by the way. Any less and they sometimes get shots through the doors, which kills your goblin. Also, with less-skilled marksdwarves, some of the bolts will stray and land on the floors, but that isn't enough to worry about even with mere dabblers.) Naturally, this is also an excellent way to train marksdwarves.

Due to a well-known theoretical model of Dwarven physics, a stack of 25 bolts can be forged from a single wafer, but 25 individual bolts can be melted down into 2.5 wafers.

I'm thinking of building some adamantine block towers to celebrate this achievement.

Aww crap, I hit the adamantine. Not terrible, but I wasn't planning on it.

Does anyone know how many wafers it takes to forge a stack of adamantine bolts, and how many bolts that gets you? If not, I guess I'll soon find out

So elves DO have beards! They just hide them!

Forumites, I offer to you a challenge:  Create a fortress dedicated to the purest and most vile atrocities imaginable!

If it helps any, I'm considering casting a giant lava-breathing obsidian gargoyle above my fort entrance. If only I could power it with the labor of captured goblins.

Dumping all invaders into a pit full of tentacle demons would also be swell.

SOF have [NOSTUN].  They can't be knocked out by cave-ins.

Hmm. How irritating. That makes it much harder to put them exactly where you want them.

The wooden-supports trick seems like the most promising. I'm imagining a situation where the SoF stepping on a certain tile would immediately cause a cave-in that drops solid rock (or fortifications) on all sides of it. Then you'd have a trapped SoF. Might be awkward to construct around it.

It would be the ultimate water drain, though.

You could also build a long bridge for it to destroy that would release water or magma onto a pressure plate that triggers the cave-in.

I believe that cave-ins are unconditional complete destruction. You wouldn't even need to drop your whole fort - just one tile. I'm imagining something like this (side view, # = natural wall)

#####
# I ###
# #   (Your fort down this tunnel)
#   ###
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
## ##
(The pit down this tunnel)
Lure a bunch of them up into the tunnel, and make sure you have a fast and reliable way to break the support. Heck, you might even be able to just build the support out of wood, and have them collapse it on themselves. (Hint: USE A SAFETY MECHANISM if you're going to experiment with that.)