Bay 12 Games Forum

I believe I may have done Science. Since this is a question I've asked and no one knew the answer, I'll report my findings. How well do obsidian short swords (in weapon traps) protect against goblin attacks? ... not very.  I had two rows of 3X obsidian sword traps, and two 10X on either side of a corner. After a horde of goblins walked back and forth over them repeatedly, about 10-20% got killed, the rest seem to not even be injured. Sooo, while obsidian swords might make a decent thing for your Pit of Doom where something can wander around for a few days before eventually being sliced open, it's not going to stop a horde of goblins from running in and killing all your dwarves. Because that is literally what happened when I relied on them to do that.

Yeah, those wedge-mauls seem pretty dependable if you want to break something and don't know what. Stone, wood, flesh, plate mail...

Now that I've tamed me some magma, it's time to get some free green glass. So... what pile does sand go in, so it can go next to the magma glass furnaces? Also, do I need to make secondary furnaces to queue up the sand collecting, and do dwarves have to have "furnace operator" or something to gather sand? I want some good glassmakers but I don't want my sand-gatherers to get distracted.

If we're gonna have round chairs, maybe we should have roundish tables too?

Yeah, Slade reminds me of Nara from Myst... a Phazite/Tiberium/ect mutating/growing material would be cool too, but, um, separate.

I don't believe plant gatherers actually take the plants straight back; at least, woodcutters don't take the wood straight back, and it's always seemed to me those things work about the same.

To concentrate the force over the non-spike side you'd need a denser material. For that matter it wouldn't even need to be in the actual striking surface, maybe in the middle above the handle. We've already got obsidian short swords that need wood too, so multimaterial weapons are quite plausible. Plus, a gold warhammer is an artifact, so it's probably already covered by this and with spikes of that.

- And while that may be a real warhammer, the ones in DF seem to have a pretty dang big striking area.

Well warhammers don't have, you know, edges or whatnot. It's not a fragile design. It's a hunk of metal you smash things with. Heck, I've heard of lead hammers, and that's pretty soft. It doesn't have to stand up to hitting something a thousand times, just as many times as something will tend to be hit during combat. Then you take your slightly odd-shaped hunk of metal and hammer it back into a more aesthetically-pleasing hunk of metal.