Bay 12 Games Forum

The magma is 130 z-levels deep.  I've put an outpost down there to smelt metal and try to get a steel industry going on the sparse wood that I have.  The military is training but they'll have no gear until the metal industry works.

Aquifers prevent me from creating pit traps for the siege, and I definitely don't have enough metal to create trap corridors.

I just wish my vampire would mine the caverns.  Then I could build down there, instead of just clearcutting the place.

For me it's going to be the cleanup following the first major siege. Man, with 100 dwarves that used to take a full season, at which point I'd just get sieged again. I'm really looking forward to seeing that take days instead of months.

I've found that the new hauling behavior is very bad when cleaning up after sieges.  Instead of going outside to pick up a discarded gauntlet, a dwarf brings the ammo bin outside...then he gets ambushed, drops the bin and runs.  As a result not only is one piece of trash stuck outside, the ambushers are now holding hostage a bin containing all my adamantium shields.

It's about par for the course for dwarf intelligence, mind you.  I just think it's more frustrating than the old method.

Sure.  My first and probably only sig-worthy fort. 

Quote from: RemusShepherd on March 30, 2011, 06:40:02 pm

Quote from: bobhayes on March 30, 2011, 03:59:05 pm

Quote from: RemusShepherd on March 30, 2011, 03:54:00 pm

Or maybe if I had made some soap...but screw that, it's too much work.

j-m-q-soap-1 is too much work?

I should check myself, but is there still a bug where you have to forbid every bar of soap when not in use to prevent infinite soap spam?  I've never bothered with soap because of that.

That bug was fixed with the most recent version. So, if you've got a bit of lye and some tallow kicking around its easy to stock your hospital and give dwarves happy thoughts from soapy baths.

Ah, I'm not playing the most recent version, I'm still using 0.22.  No soap for you, dwarves!

Maybe I should start a new fortress with 0.25.  Between the trap corridors, the six-bridge trap over a 14 z level pit, and the two squads decked out in full bluemetal gear, I don't think this fort is going to be challenged by anything anymore.

The militia leader 'Lucky' is dead.

Lucky was a clothier who wandered outside the fort during a siege (I still don't know how) to clean one of the blood-soaked traps on the bridge over the river.  When the goblins saw him, he evaded two squads worth of lashers and speargobs, leading them into the trapped back entrance of the fort.  He didn't have a scratch on him.  That's when I put him into the military.

Then I noticed that he got married to a dwarf lass named 'Bodicesecrets'.  Then my weaponsmith had a mood and made a blue metal battle axe, and guess which dwarf grabbed hold of it first.  That's when I named him 'Lucky'.

The very next siege, when I told the military to wait behind the traps in the entrance, Lucky decided to charge four squads of goblins and trolls by himself.  He was a new recruit with almost no combat skills, but he had a shiny suit of blue metal armor, and that saved his life.  The goblins and trolls broke every limb in multiple places and tore out four of his back teeth (I assume dwarves only *have* four back teeth), but they couldn't kill him.  I eventually realized he might survive, and so I sent the military in to save him and they routed the siege.  Lucky walked back to the hospital and lay down for what I thought might be forever.

After 14 stitches (3 of them blue metal strands), four splints, and less than a season's rest, Lucky stood up and walked out of the hospital, although his wounds were all still red.  That's when I made him militia leader.

Lucky survived for about three years after that.  He would occasionally pass out while walking the halls, but he and his squad routed two more sieges without taking any more injuries.  But on that last siege, Lucky's luck ran out; he succumbed to infection from a wound he recieved years ago.  If he had stayed in the hospital and gotten more stitches and bandages he might have survived.  Or maybe if I had made some soap...but screw that, it's too much work.

Lucky is survived by his wife Bodicesecrets and two unruly children.  His blue metal coffin, I'm sorry to say, is only of good quality and I ain't wasting more ore to get a better one.

I had a fort that had gotten established -- a hospital with a well, we were making steel armor for the military, etc.  I only nickname dwarfs once they are masters in their jobs, or for military once they do something worthy.  My dwarfs have to earn their nicknames.  So I didn't have many dwarves of distinction yet, but things were going well.

Then I get a ton of messages about civilians falling over dead.  I had screwed up when constructing my well, leaving a diagonal passageway into the caverns.  One of the worst possible Forgotten Beasts -- a blob, with 'deadly dust' emanating from it, had crawled up into my hospital, massacred the staff and was headed for the civilian bedrooms.

I throw my military down there, hoping they would be able to stop the thing.

Almost all of the military die on contact with the beast.  They do, however, manage to shift the combat back to the hospital.  Then one axedwarf does something that's either terrifically stupid or boneheaded bravery -- he falls down the well, and somehow takes the forgotten beast with him.

This buys my fort some time.  I pave over the well.  I let the civilians out of the panic burrow and they start cleaning up the carnage.  The axedwarf in the well is unconscious, underwater and being clubbed nonstop by the beast, but *he stays alive*.  (This has to be a bug.)  He distracts the beast long enough that one of my miners is able to dig a rockfall that drops a block of stone down the well to kill the beast.

The dwarf in the well dies also, of course.  I name him 'Aquadwarf', and give him a tomb of steel.

The deadly dust causes some problems, but after a while I wash the halls and everything's fine.  Only a few minor tantrums; I keep my dwarves happy.  The main problem is the military.  They all die on their hospital beds, except for one dwarf who has rot on *every* body part.  I should have saved a screenshot -- it went on for a screen and a half with, 'His cheeks are rotting.  His lower lip is rotting.  His upper lip is rotting.' and so on.  I have no surviving doctors, so all I can do for him is give him water and ready his tomb.

But he *survives*.  Every body part that used to have rot on it now has a wicked scar.  When he walks out of the hospital I name him 'Zombo', and make him the captain of the militia.  Every dwarf in the next migrant wave is handed a weapon and told to report to a dwarf literally *covered* in scars, with some horrifying stories to tell.

And the fort went on. 

(I quit it about 8 years later due to lag.  Zombo survived to the end, with two more Forgotten beast kills to his squad's credit.)

I'm not crazy about mines, but I love mining equipment.  You have to admit that Bagger 288 looks like it was made by insane dwarves.