Bay 12 Games Forum

Hey I have a quick question if you guys mind answering, I'm new to this version and just found out something interesting in my current embark.

It's literally a new embark, haven't even spend 5 minutes in it, but I plan on habitating the caverns below so I dug my way down below to start making the place dwarf worthy, when I am given the information that I struck 'blue metal'.
This is no deeper then say two dozen stone layers deep, is it normal to find the stuff this high up this version? Seems kind of odd to me, but I'm not complaining. Kind of strange that the first metal I would mine this embark is 'blue metal'.
I forgot to add, this is probably the first cavern layer, although it could be the second aswell.

Oh does a single bag of sand have multiple uses then? I thought it used up all the sand in one bag like one unit of sandbag and one unit of fuel and one unit of pearlash.

Hey dwarvenfolk, I've decided to delve back into this game with a brand new fortress. I wasn't sure what to make but a little bit of improvisation and short term planning gave me an idea what to do.

My embark is one of the more interesting ones I've seen, mostly because of the unique landscape, and the fact that I haven't embarked in such warm climates before. I'm at the foot of a big mauntain, and there's is this monstrously high cliff of about 25 z levels high and nearly fully vertical. At the bottom of the cliff is a small plateau of grassland and beyond that a shoreline in the shape of a bay.

My plans so far are the following:
-Build a harbor at the bay, forcing seawater a little deeper into land once I've finished the masonry of the docks. After that ofcourse I'll make a ship or two.
-Make some sort of cliff city where the houses have a glass window vieuw of the outside, houses luxuriously large and stacked ontop one another.
-Build a freaking huge aquarium filled with wichever maritime life I can capture.
-Capture and domestic the local wild elephants.

What I need help with is the third. This is my first embark at the sea so I'm not sure how to handle this. So far I've noticed my fortress can survive soly on fish as far as food is concerned, wich is nice considering the theme of the fortress. What I want to do now is, not capture the fish for eating but capture them alive.
I know there's an option to capture live sea animal in the fishery works, and I assume that, like the capture live land animal task it'll capture and cage roden sized fish. I want bigger fish aswell.

So my question is, how do I capture these big fish (big as in sharks and other huge fish) and then release them in my aquarium. Land animals I know  how to capture with cage traps, but setting up cage traps underwater doesn't seem very practical. The only way I would be able to do this if I could flood and drain a part, and place traps when it's dry then let the fish in but I've no idea if this would work.
So wise dwarves how do I go about doing this?


P.S Im thinking of building a castle at the bottom of the aquarium where a royal throne room and luxurious dining room will be located.

P.S.S. Just a funny thing that happened just now I thought I'd share. One of my miners clumsy as she is dug the soil underneath her where she was working on the harbor. When she crawled back out the water she was holding a ray in her hands. I asume she fell ontop of it and took it with her for food 

I keep getting put off the game for the same reason every time.

Let me elaborate. My first real succesful fotress was quite enjoyable, and promised to become a marvel of a city. Sadly though it died less then halfway in construction due to fps.
Now fps death isn't the problem I want to point out right now. I have a quad core so naturally it's not that good at running DF. Anyway after the fps death I gave the game a break for a while until I have inspiration for a new fort.

And I did try a few new forts. I've got a nice design in mind wich will surely make for an epic fortress. Yet everytime the same problem: Immigrants.
They just come to quickly to many. You have a fort of 6 dwarves then suddenly there's 50 of the buggers.
Managing all those new dwarves is such a pain esepcially if your fortress is still young and the industry is still starting up. There's to many freaking dwarves! 

So I don't know I thought I'd throw a suggestion out there on the whole immigrant problem. Well for me atleast it's a problem I don't know about the rest of you guys.
What if the amount of immigrants in an immigrant wave was related to the amount of dwarves you already have? Let's for example have an immigrant wave bring 1/5 rounded up of your current population as immigrants.
The population of your fortress would then go up exponentialy instead of the crazy linear increase right now.
P=P0*1.2^w Where P is population P0 starting population (7 right?) and W the number if immigrant waves passed.

I think an increase like this would be far easier to manage, especially in the start of your fortress. That and it doesn't make much sense that a band of 7 dwarves would encourage the whole 10 immigrants to migrate. Lots of people go to big cities, only some carve out a home in an outpost far away from home right?

P.S. thought I'd do a bit of calculating, after a year of every season an immigrant wave your population would be twice as much as you started with. Sounds reasonable no? That would make it 4 to 5 years or so to get a population of 200 I'd say roughly. For me a number like that could work, I'd go for even slower maybe!

It pays off to have a temporary housing block for early game to house say 50 dwarves. Before that though I usually have a design in mind, and once I'm set to handle more immigrants I start constructing the real deal.

So nope I manage to keep everything tidy. I usually abandon because of FPS issues.

So I did a little tinkering with the worldgen option for my new fortress. Was my first time I didn't use a standard worldgen, and the results were quite interesting.

Now it may be because the map was awfully small (pocket region) and I doubled the amount of megabeasts to keep things interesting that caused this map to be not quite as interesting as I hoped.

See every civ has been whiped out but one, the stout dwarves. They stand alone against the tide of titans and forgotten beasts.

So question to you guys: What do I do? Do I leave the map because no other civ might be boring, or do I work hard to construct a fortress that will herald the age of dwarf!

Also if you convince me to do the latter give me some inspiration for a fortress design. I currently have a rough idea what I want to do but I need more ideas.
Currently I have a 4 z level high channeled space in mind with a grand hallways elevated one z level, and with a path of magma coming out of the nearby volcano.

Inspire me, go!

My recent fort is constructed in a similar way, I dug out three z levels and constructed everything out of obsidian blocks.

I should warn you though hauling all those stones, constructing them into blocks, hauling them to the construction and ultimately constructing them is labor intensive. I had about 60 masons.

I used mine as an arena combatant. It died. Then I caught another stronger one, wich also went to the arena. It now only has five working heads.

I don't think it's useful for anything. Atleast dragons have the [MOUNT] tag last I checked. I guess you could allow it to be adopted just to see who would want it as pet.
Alternatively you could sell it.
No idea wether you can breed them if you have both sex of them, might be fun to have a squad of hydra gaurds instead of gaurd dog.

Whatever you do, have fun with it. And if it dies make hydra leather boots out of it. And hydra soap, filthy hydra soap