Bay 12 Games Forum

Why has nobody suggested magma yet?

Seriously, magma.

All unnecessary goblinite is melted away and deposited in the fall area. You no longer need to dig far at all. You no longer need a spike to kill the goblin. It's just... it's just perfect.


z=+1
wwwwwwwww
wHSshwwww
wwwwwwwww

z=0
wHwwwwwww
wPwwmSshw
wHwwwwwww

z=-1
wwwwwwwww
wGwwwwwww
wGwwhsSmw
wGwwwwwww
wdwwwwwww
z=-2
mmmmmmmmm
mmmmmmmmm
mmmmmmmmm
w = wall
H = hatch
S = dark, unpassable pump tile
s = light, passable pump tile
h = channeled tile
m = magma
G = floor grate
d = door

Bottom floor (z-2) is a magma reservoir. Z-1 is a floor grate to catch the goblin's stuff so it doesn't fall into the reservoir. Z-0 is the triggering floor with the hatches, z+1 has the magma spout above the pressure plate and the top of the three pump long pump stack.

There may be a need, for example if you want to move large amounts of fluid that isn't pressurised.

This is a case of general misunderstanding in the DF community; 'pressure' as you would describe it in real science does not exist in the game. No fluid is ever pressurized, not in that sense. Instead, 'pressure' in DF is essentially an action that liquids perform, and all liquids perform this action whenever possible, even magma. (Magma does indeed pressure, it simply cannot pressure UP z-levels like water can. Edit: Magma doesn't pressure, pumps just make it look like pressure. If you only use pumped magma and never let it actually flow it'll still act like it pressures, but magma's natural flow won't.) There is a thread that describes it fully (although I cannot for the LIFE OF ME find it; just spent twenty minutes searching for it and it just eludes me entirely) but, essentially speaking, what you refer to is not an actual issue at all. The use of a depressurizer will force the water to stop pressuring through it, but once beyond it the pressure mechanic will work just fine and you can return to a one tile wide hallway and still get full flow.

It dawned upon me this morning that, simply put, doors are better than floodgates in almost every way. With one small exception, doors have every ounce of functionality that floodgates have and then some.

Floodgates:
- Block passage of liquid and creatures.
- Can be linked up to levers and pressure plates.
- Activation via lever or pressure plate causes a 100 step delay before the floodgate opens.
- Can be placed anywhere
- Has no secondary use beyond controlling the flow of liquids.

Doors:
- Block passage of liquid while both linked an unlinked, does not block passage of creatures until linked or locked.
- Can be linked up to levers and pressure plates.
- Activation via lever or pressure plate occurs instantly.
- Must be placed adjacent to a wall.
- Frequently used all around the fortress, not just when dealing with liquids.

In short, if you use doors instead of floodgates, you have the following benefits:
- A dwarf will never be stuck behind a door waiting for the mechanic to link it to a lever. Dwarves love to stand inside a reservoir when placing floodgates, locking them in until rescued; if a dwarf does that with a door he merely walks through it. The floodgate issue can be solved with some tricks, such as designating walls to be constructed (and then suspending construction) near the floodgate where you do not want the dwarf to stand, but this isn't always possible and is a large hassle.
- Activating a door via lever or pressure plate is instantaneous, whereas activating a floodgate takes 100 steps. While not terribly significant in most civilian usages, when used in traps this is a massive advantage.
- If you overproduce floodgates, you have a lot of useless floodgates laying around. If you overproduce doors, you can bet they will eventually all get used elsewhere in the fortress. This is most notable when trying to create magma safe floodgates out of stone. Again it's solvable through careful micro, but with doors you don't even need that.
- If the intended purpose of the liquid blocker is to provide a service entrance to a reservoir that will only be used if the reservoir is empty, floodgates need to be linked to a lever and then activated while doors do not; simply lock them when the reservoir is full and unlock them when it is empty.

The only time I can ever really justify the use of a floodgate instead of a door is if trying to block off an area that is greater than two squares wide. However, due to pressure mechanics this is almost always overkill; the only time you need more than one tile width worth of passage is if you are making use of a de-pressurizer. (A large area with a row of diagonal walls crossing the center of it; the pressure mechanic cannot pass through diagonals, so only natural flow will occur from that point on. However, natural flow is slow compared to pressure so you must have many diagonal paths to make up for it, causing de-pressurizers to be fairly large in practice.)

To make a long post short, is it just me, or are floodgates made obsolete by doors?

Quote from: Trekkin on September 11, 2010, 07:02:43 am

Interestingly, most injuries seem to at least stop being life threatening once the dwarf is on a hospital bed. I've had dwarves with more than one limb missing and multiple cuts to the torso live for a couple months on a hospital bed before ever being treated, and there weren't pools of blood everywhere.

Dunno, I think bleeds just either stop on their own or don't.

Though i've never seen anyone go into the hospital bleeding before. Generally if it's that bad they just pass out.

My experience as well. I've seen a dwarf get completely disemboweled, make it to the hospital, get patched up and live just fine. I've also seen a dwarf get a finger chopped off, go to the hospital, get diagonosed, leave without treatment to go to archery practice (presumably the doc said "Dwarf up, you pussy. It's just a finger.") and then die of blood loss a month or so later.

That said, aside from the dwarf who lost a finger mentioned above I've only seen one other dwarf make it to the hospital and then die. Every other dwarf who made it to the hospital ended up living, including the mason who was horribly mangled by a goblin snatcher and then spent 6 years waiting on treatment. Generally speaking, if it's truly lethal the dwarf won't make it to the hospital, and nobody ever performs "Recover Wounded" on them even if standing around with their thumbs up their asses; if you want treatment, you gotta provide your own transportation.

If you want to save time you can channel a hole over top of your live firing range and designate the hole as a Pit using the zones menu. Then you go into the (P)it menu and tell your dwarves to pit the goblins in; they'll open the cages, drag the goblins to the hole, and toss them down into the arena.

Some things to note:
- Don't do this to goblin thieves. They will escape.
- Don't do this to large creatures. The bigger the creature the more likely it is to escape. In my experience trolls are fine, but horses are too big.
- Make sure to strip their weapons before trying this. I've never seen a goblin stab it's handler before, even if it still had it's weapon, but I've heard reports of it happening, so better safe than sorry. Use (d) - (b) - (d) on the cage stockpile containing the goblins, then go into the stocks screen and make sure to unforbid the goblin's weapons and also to remove the dump from the cages. (You want to dump the goblin's items, not the entire cage!) Your dwarves will then take the weapons and dump them in a dump zone, allowing for safe transport.

Dwarfly.

An adamantine scourge will probably be super ineffective, given that it's a blunt weapon and adamantine supposedly makes awful blunt weapons.

But do test it and get back with us. It could be serious fun.