Bay 12 Games Forum

I think it's more likely that you let worldgen run too long, and the civilization is dead. I had that happen when I generated my first DF2010 world, which ran up to the year 1050.

Are you sure that this would work on a 12 z-level deep ocean that occupies about 80% of the entire map?

I think that my inverted pyramid won't look too messy, because I'll put a casting form onto the ocean's top level and will only dump magma into the middle of it at the beginning. The undirected cave-ins should provide me with some obsidian pillars so that I have a bit less work to do later on, but because they will only occur in the center of the future construction, they should correlate with the base of the inverted pyramid quite well.

So, I tried DF 2010, but the lack of Dwarf Therapist support is killing me. u-*scrollscroll*-c-(v v v)-"err, where is it?"-*scrollscroll*-enter-space is just too much pain in comparison to "mouseclick into DTherapist, minimize children, point and click and submit". Also, there are giant cave spider webs in the cavern that I breached, and this is intimidating me.

This means that I am back at the obsidian tower of the deep sea.

Right now, a 6 or 8 level aquifer below the black sand beach smashed my plans to have a massive pump stack right there to save some rocks-in-magmaduct-construction. I can breach 1-2 levels of aquifer just fine, but 6-8 levels of completely soaked sandstone? Meep. Maybe I will have another go at that when I am bored though; Reveal did show some minerals more or less in perfect position just below that desired position for the pump stack in between the wet sandstone.

This means that I will probably have to go up to the surface through the glacier's ice, as in the experimental first attempt, and this held a whole lot of fun for the experimental pumping dwarves ("Can I pump magma below ice? Lets just try this with a pumping operateur instead of connecting the pump stack to the power generator!" *Urist McPumper has been encased in ice*). But I should be able to deal with that now. 

I try to avoid the mistake of getting too native below the glacier this time.. even though, who wouldn't want to live below some thousands of tons of vicious ice, trapped between a vicious ocean and a magma pipe, which looks like it's threatening to blow up, if it only could breach that 3 level obsidian cap?

Only underground farming needs irrigation. Surface farms work perfect without it, even though that yellow warning is shown (^_^;;

And people have pointed out correctly that you can also use naturally muddy soil underground, which is much more likely now, to say the least (have you checked how many z-levels your map has?).

Deathworks

Ah, that yellow message impressed me so much that I didn't even try to set up some farming plots.

There are something like 160 z-levels below the surface, I think, but I am sticking to the first 2 for now and try to get the basics going and to figure out how the dwarves got those yummy large roach brains that they sold as food on the embarking screen.

I would just set the population limit to 0 in the init.txt, but you will most likely have to kill off some immigrants who ignore this setting for some reasons.

Well, my liaison died, and I noticed it one year later. His death is sort of fatal, because I need him to order tower caps, so I will reload an earlier save anyway. But I used this chance for some tests.

You may be interested in the following:

- waves don't turn magma into obsidian. They also don't put out red magma 1s; they just peacefully flow across these.

- if you construct a floor over the ocean (at that z-level where the waves sweep over your construction), and pour magma onto this constructed floor, then you'll end up with a circular blob of obsidian around the drop-off. It  will be attached to the floor and won't drop down; but of course, there will be several cave-in messages while the blob shapes itself.

- this obsidian blob is inside of the first ocean z-level, not on top of it. No, I have no idea how it is attached to the constructed floor in this manner, but it is.

- the waves are a bit confused by this new obstacle and won't really move across it, which is helpful.

- I channeled out some tiles of the blob to check the water pressure hypothesis that beekay mentioned, and to my utmost surprise and pleasure I found an obsidian floor below my channel. This means that I can build ramps and staircases down in peace and without any hassle.

- if I channel my way through this obsidian floor, then the water doesn't seem to raise through this hole. It's difficult to check this with this sample obsidian floating island blob, because it's far away from the deep sea area, a sand ground is nearby, and my blob is perforated by channels by now like a swiss cheese. This might be different on the open sea.


So, if I cast an obsidian blob far away, I can just fortify its sides against the waves with some constructed temporary walls. And then I can channel my way down and cast another obsidian blob below this one.

The length of the intended catwalk through the waves and the length of the aqueduct are a bit disencouraging though. I should probably drop off some obsidian blobs on the way and put booze stockpiles inside.

I think I need to put some bridges into this mega-aqueduct and that I will replace the catwalk with cast obsidian to (hopefully) save some fps.

I don't know if I am just superstituous, but in a freezing map, I wouldn't let my dwarves out of the fortress without any clothes.