Bay 12 Games Forum

My most recent DF2010 fortress sits on top of a giants' hoard. There were loads of meat and fishes all over the place (more if closer to their caves' entrance), and there are plenty of amulets and stuff. I don't know if this affected the wealth of my fortress though, because I've no one with the slightest appraisal skills and the dwarven civilization is dead and it's an island ( = no caravans and no appraisal skill level ups.)

I'm willing to bet that your fortress is sitting on top of something similar.

Set the population cap to 0 or 1. You will only get migrants in the first summer and in the first autumn, and these invasion waves should be bearably small.

Oh, that is awesome! I really can't stand dogs at all, and it annoyed me that I had to bring them with me if I wanted to have war or hunting animals for guard duty.

Some years later

This channeling process is painful. More than anything, it's annoying that the miner will always go to drink when he should hurry and channel that magma tile. I admit that I started to use Tweak's Tile Edit now at some points to add 1/7 magma onto a tile in question, because it was just too annoying.

With dwarves working themself into dehydration and starvation, this would be easier in DF2010. But I've gone so far now...

Also, I noticed that I need a bigger circle. If I go down one z-level, I need to reduce the circle by enough tiles to have a solid edge around the new one, and circles will have irregularities with the edges after a while... meaning that I would shrink the circle by 2 tiles every 2 z-levels later on.

Hard to explain in words, I guess, but I needed 2 more tiles on the outer edge of the circle - or to convert the circle into a square. A square tower would have been boring, and so I selected the choice of adding some more tiles to the edge. I got these now, and the ocean's bottom is covered in microcline now. Which isn't very nice.

I was so frustrated at times that I made a DF2010 fortress (volcano, ocean, and a giant hoard = interesting), but I returned to the obsidian tower project after a short vacation.

I also learned a trick that will make things easier in the further z-levels: leaving pockets of 7/7 magma on the z-level in progress. If I poke into these, I have 1/7 magma on 7 tiles, ready to be channeled down one z-level: no hassle with the levers and less opportunity for the miner to run off to drink.


Yeah well, and I had more visitors. First of, my defenses don't work against flying monsters, and dragons can fly. Secondly, I am using a (reduced) Dig Deeper mod: More flying megabeasts. Thirdly, for unknown reasons, my hole in the glacier has become an attraction for dragons, colossi and ancient vampires.

There was this one bronze colossus, who still sits in the cage. Then there was a dragon who demolished the screwpump setup where I had done my aquifer experiments (before I killed him with Dwarf Companion).

Then another dragon appeared. This one was friendly, and leader of a far away goblin tribe. He flew into my fortress and did hang around in the fishery then for a year or so. This was quite weird, but acceptable.

However, in next spring, just as I was adding the extra tiles to the circle's edge and phoning with my sister, an ancient vampire appeared.

The ancient vampire wasn't friendly, but did fly into the fortress in the same way that the dragon had taken. There, he met the dragon in the fishery.

The two of them battled it out. And sadly, the friendly dragon died.

And then, even though the corridor was littered with ancient vampire chunks, he proceeded to kill off some cats and to harass the dwarves in the nearby stockpile. When I checked him with Dwarf Companion, he wasn't hurt at all! So well, I killed him with Dwarf Companion too.

I got to say: in this case, gamer integrity without "cheating" < obsidian tower in the ooze.

So, anyway, I should have started this project without Dig Deeper. It's not as if I could plant flax and tomatoes on a glacier/ocean map anyway... and these extra plants were the reason why I went for that mod at all.


Megabeasts and frustration aside: the temporaty fortress is doing fine. There is a massive lack of work for everyone but the chosen miner, but this just means that they hang around in the meeting place and become legendary comedians. I try to rotate the jobs so that every single peasant becomes legendary something after a while, because I am playing with the economy active.

I also got my first couple of "criminals", because I ignored some obnoxious mandate by the obnoxious good-for-nothing-idiots... I already had to change Bismuth into something that could be crafted into some items earlier but I lost my patience now. The result of a free-roaming hammerer without hammer, no sheriff and no prisons is excellent: No punishments whatsoever where ever dealt. So, I'm going to ignore all the mandates from now on.

The baron turned into a count a while ago, and I have no clue at all  when or if the queen will ever travel into this icehole.

A whale... that is impressive, but at one point, I had a quantum cage and decided to place it somewhere else, so I had it deconstructed. A dwarf then carried it to the new animal stockpile, which was several z-levels down and further to the left.

The dwarf clearly suffered, as she needed about 10 seconds per tile.

I'm talking about a quantum cage with about 80 orcs. The weight of the quantum cage was over 50k weight units.

But it was so worth it. The archery range was there, and live target practice is so much more fun.

Plumbing system, when I read the thread about the new water system in DF2010.

So far, I would poke a hole into the subterranean river or the edge of the aquifer, make the water drop all the way down to the ground floor through a staircase or the like, and then build a massive pump stack from the bottom level all the way up to the top of the mountain - each z-level would take water from that pump stack, if I needed it on that z-level for something.

Now I realized that I wouldn't have needed to pump the water from the bottom back up to the z-level of the subterranean river at all... all I had to do would've been to poke diagonally into the vertical shaft.

This means that I could have saved a whole lot of FPS on the last-to-one fortress, given that the subterranean river was about 50 z-levels above the ground level.

So... it's the year 19 now (I started in the year 4), and there has been progress. I only need to complete the magma-duct planning and plumbing, and then the magma pouring will begin.

To celebrate the occasion of the closing of the casting form, I will post some screenshots.


The fps are still quite decent, but I think I need to prescribe the antibaby pill to some of the ladies. They are at 80 dwarves now, and I don't really want them to have 16+ babies each. Maybe I'll do some gender-bending with Dwarf Companion. If that works with cats, then it should also work with dwarves.

But to my horror I realized that two of the original breeding pairs worship a god named "Ostar Rakustostar" (aka "Ostar Tombsburial"). He is associated with death - this means that half of my fortress' population are essentially goths.


Year 24

The magma plumbing is done. It looks like a giant tri-dent with some extra spikes at the center one now; I went for extra door hatches to have full control over everything. Linking those 30ish doors and hatches drove me a bit nuts, but it works now. There is even an emergency lever system near the meeting hall.

Also, a bronze colossus made his way to my amazing fortress in this year. He spawned right inside of the caravan entrance; so the drawbridges wouldn't have helped even if I had remembered to keep them closed. I had no military at that point (or now), so I had to hope that there was no TRAPAVOID in his stats... which it wasn't. Quite anticlimactic. I don't really know what to do with him now, so I just keep him in the animal trap stockpile. Contrary to that lonely male polar bear, he can't be tamed or anything.

By the way, if I place his cage outside during mid-winter, he will become white instead of yellow. Nice!



Year 25

Half a year later, the first obsidian disk is done!

The cave-ins below the central, unsupported blob didn't behave as expected though. There is just one 1x1 wide pillar below the center of it, instead of a whole mess of obsidian pillars.

Instead of that, the other obsidian blobs did drop some junk, so that the bottom of the sea looks quite messy now... but that will have to do.

I also ramped my way down to the bottom floor of the blob, so that the access for the downward level will be easier. I realized that all of this ramping will provide me with more obsidian than I could ever wish for... but I won't recover all of it, simply because dumping all of it would take years per z-level.


Oh, in other news, the baron and his followers appeared several years ago. The baron is a bit whiny about Nish living in a bedroom just as good as his, I think, but he will have to cope with that. I also dumped a silver statue into his bedroom to shut him up.

This is my first time with the economy, the baron, and 100+ dwarves, by the way. Previous fortresses died earlier because I grew bored or because the fps bomb had hit them.

Also, it's the first fortress where "there are no criminals" at all (also never a sheriff was appointed), so I let the hammerer roam around freely. The nobles so far don't have the really insane mandates as on previous fortresses ("build 3 star metal items", indeed... grr.) Nish the mayor is in particular very easy to deal with. She usually forbids the export of high boots, which my civilization can't produce at all; and there are no human or elven caravans.

It is, after all, a very peaceful map with mammoths, penguins (I took their [CHILD] token away, because they stole FPS at an alarming rate), the occasional polar bear, and one bronze colossus. I can't have any annoying siege distractions while I pump the magma.

I find it unsettling that pests like the concubine of the baron or the tax collector can make mandates though.


Also, I've had 3 fathers-of-17 kids neutered by Dwarf Companion. Actually, they are female now, because I think that neutering them might not be the nicest thing ever or that DF will know what to do with a neutered dwarf at all. I went for the fathers because I don't know if there might be problems if I neuter the mothers while they're probably pregnant yet again. The 3 transsexuals still show up as "Husband" and "Father" in the relationship lists of their relatives, but know themselves that they are female now. This should keep the population explosion a bit at bay; and I am thinking of doing the same to the other fathers as well. Chinese style 1-baby-per-marriage policy might be coming up too.

It's sort of funny, actually. After the gender change surgery, they dropped unconcious and exhausted for a while (I had to set their exhaustion to lower levels so that they would get up again instead of lying around on the narrow catwalk.)