Bay 12 Games Forum

Having fun in my terrifying jungle/untamed swamp.  I'm limiting myself to 50 dwarves, and had planned out a mini-fortress below ground in the shape of an 11x11x11 cube.  I hit the first cavern seven levels down, so I decided it was time to learn how to build towers as well.  After 1.5 years I had 40 dwarves, with 8 of them in bronze armor, and two floors of bedrooms above ground.  Building was slowed by the periodic appearance of herds of skeletal elephants, frightening the masons as they tried to add more levels to the tower.  I decided I wasn't going to challenge them until my militia had trained for another year.

Then I get my first-ever forgotten beast - a giant 3-eyed monitor lizard with a taste for blood.  No problem, it's safely walled off in the first cavern, with my fortress sitting off to one side above a massive lake.  I mentally add it to the "list of things to kill in a year", and go back to building the next bedroom level.  Suddenly I see the little red "C" combat indicator. The forgotten beast is sitting on the lowest level of my fortress, kicking a dog!  This is when I learn that up/down stairs penetrate to the level below, and if that level is open air above an underground lake, then anything flying can get in.

The forgotten beast proceeds to scream up my central staircase, going past stockpiles, workshops, dining hall, barracks, hospital, the lot. It finally stops on my construction level, interrupting a lye-maker as she churns out rock blocks.  My militia scrambles to catch up, and after some confused hacking and slashing my best axedwarf settles things by taking off its head.  The lye-maker escapes with a torn cheek (she was shaken around BY HER CHEEK), and a novice cook hastily prepares 198 forgotten beast lung biscuits and 46 forgotten beast intestine biscuits - tasty!  His boss is still trying to render 104 units of fat in the other kitchen, and the 136 bones get used in a gold throne that menaces with spikes of forgotten beast bone and snailman shell.  That's a LOT of spikes.

Roll on to two years, and my first goblin ambush party appears.  Good, my militia are ready to be tested!  Only... why are the goblins out there on the edge of the map... where the... SKELETAL ELEPHANTS ARE.  Oh, this could be GOOD.   Six goblins take on seven skeletal elephants in a battle to see who's baddest.   The goblins soon learn that while maces and hammers are great at shattering bones, that doesn't do you any good when the owners of said bones don't feel pain and can still stomp you to death with four broken limbs.  Reading the combat reports, the lesson when fighting elephants is NEVER FALL OVER.  Once you're down, you're basically dead meat.  One goblin gets its head caved in by a flying elephant drop-kick, five are put on the ground and then kicked to death in various brutal and unpleasant ways, but one seems set to survive.  She's only bruised, dodging like crazy, shattering skeletal limbs left and right.  Then she dodges once too often and finds herself at the bottom of a muddy pool.  Two elephants jump in to kick her some more while she drowns.

Then a second goblin ambush party pops up, with six axemen led a crossbowman.  This should be a fairer fight.  Things are touch and go for a while, as one axeman is quickly kicked unconscious.  Then his squad-mates decapitate two elephants, and the tables are turned.  There's a flurry of elephant-parts, and three more go down.  But just as the last two elephants are being brutalized, the goblins suddenly turn and run!  Their crossbowman-leader has been kicked unconscious, and they've lost hope.  He comes around and starts limping towards the map edge, but the last two skeletal elephants are remorseless.  Pausing briefly to finish off the unconscious axeman, they lurch after the crossbowman.  They're both missing a foot and their trunk, they have red wounds all over, and one has lost both its tusks - it's basically two cripples chasing an invalid.  Whenever the crossbowman gives in to pain and falls over, the elephants catch up and kick him some more, so he gets up and staggers a little further.  At last a kick to the chest bruises his heart, and its all over, five tiles from the map edge.  Final score: skeletal elephants 8, goblins 5.

tl;dr version: organic forgotten beasts are hell on kitchen staff, skeletal elephants > goblins, and DON'T GO OUTSIDE

I wanted a challenge embark, so I chose a 2x2 site that's a mix of terrifying tropical jungle and untamed tropical swamp. With an aquifer. My dwarves had been digging and chopping trees for all of 30 seconds when a herd of skeletal elephants wandered onto the map. You can imagine the mad scramble to get a few supplies underground, throw together a quick carpenter's shop, and then wall off the surface world with logs.  Luckily the elephants seem content to slowly circle the map, checking out all the murky ponds around the edges. 

Taking stock down below, my seven dwarves have managed to retrieve 4 full barrels of booze, 7 nearly-empty barrels of meat, 3 logs, and 3 bags of seed.  So obviously I make a bucket, channel out the aquifer beneath their feet, and get a farm going.  Then figure out what to make with the other logs - two beds, or a chair and a table?  My dwarves could be in for a long wait here...

Edit: Spoke too soon.  Left a wooden door in the wall, and the skeletal elephants came straight through it.  Could be my shortest embark ever

Edit^2: Yup, that ended in a good old-fashioned stomping.  I thought I had a chance when only a single elephant came down the ramp, especially when he charged a dwarf, missed, and fell down an irrigation pit and into my farm.  Sadly my civilians freaked out and ran for the surface... where the other four elephants were milling around.  So I save-scummed and tried again. This time I managed to get nine logs and my anvil below before walling everything off from those same five skeletal elephants. Revenge shall be mine!

You could do something similar with a bunch of dwarven computing frequency dividers*. Start off with your basic oscillator (e.g. the water-based one from the wiki). That ticks every (say) 100 units, and feeds into the first frequency divider, which ticks every 200 units, and feeds into the second frequency divider, which ticks every 400 units, and feeds into the third frequency divider, etc etc.  Then count how many ticks you get in a game day/month/year, and hence how many dividers you need to count to 500 game years.

Basically, you'd be building a Dwarf Fortress version of the Clock of the Long Now  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now)

And of course when the final divider ticks over, it triggers the doomsday device.

*I'm assuming these are possible.  If not, time to invent them!

A possessed crafter wants shells. I can't seem to find any.

Are there any cheats to add shells? I've had about as much fun as I can stand between the bugs and issues.

The wiki suggests suggests either making cows yield shells, or making hooves equivalent to shells.  http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Shell

If you've save-scummed back to before your soldier died... is he a procrastinator?  Because dorfs with that characteristic will never pick up a weapon or do individual combat training, making them useless as soldiers.

That's a fun map - it even has a 2x2 embark site with a volcano and a brook in a temperate marsh.  I did a "play now!" scout of the site, since in my experience it's rare to fit a volcano and brook into a 3x3 site, let alone 2x2. 

Turns out the volcano was actually a magma sink hole (and looking at the rest of the local map, you can see the old caldera a little distance away). Then I got three simultaneous events at startup, before my dwarves had even taken a single step away from the cart:

• A section of the cavern has collapsed! (two muddy ponds collapsed into the sink hole, causing steam and insta-obsidian)
• You've found a magma sea! (many z-levels down, where the magma pipe opened up)
• Praise the miners! You've found adamantine! (I assume ditto, although I didn't look too hard for it)

I wonder if this means the first migrant would be the king

I'm pretty sure that one of the causes of "party at the armor bins!" is that every dwarf always wants to wear the best quality armor he can get.  I saw this very graphically earlier today when an armorsmith went legendary, and started churning out masterpieces.  I already had one squad equipped, and was making new armor to give to a future second squad.  I'd get the "masterpiece!" announcement, a hauler would bring an awesome helmet up to the armor bins in the barracks where my first squad was peaceably doing individual combat drills, and... they'd all go nuts.  I should watch it again in slow-mo and do lots of inventory checks, but it looked like a pecking-order of dwarves, with the first guy there getting the masterpiece helmet, and discarding his slightly-worse helmet.  Some other dwarf then grabs that helmet, and in turn discards his even-crappier helmet.  Continue down the line.   End result, the second squad will get a bunch of cast-offs

About to start Yet Another Embark.  I gen'd ten medium regions, dumped out their world map .bmps, and then eyeballed each one looking for dark-blue rivers in hilly or mountainous terrain.  In my seventh region I found a broad river that has carved a long canyon through ~10 z-levels of savanna/grassland/shrubland country.  It has waterfalls along its entire length, as brooks drain into it.  Then I re-ran world generation with different history seeds until I got a good mix of civilizations (the dwarves tended to cluster in some southern mountains, leaving the elves to wipe out all local goblins).

The site I chose has an 11-z waterfall, lots of ores and some flux (marble), but no sedimentary layer and probably no lignite or coal.  I figure I'll learn to use waterwheels to pump magma up to my forges.  I also finally get to play with fisher-dwarves, since I've spotted longnose gar, carp, and sea lamprey in the river.