Bay 12 Games Forum

Was going to give up Keyswamp early on, as the volcano was being difficult and it was in a serene environment.

Then TWO master jewellers arrived in the first immigration wave. I was able to buy the entire first caravan with a few encrusted buckets. Then my token sacrifice to the MAGMA gods managed to outrun the flowing goodness and I've got the magma forges firing.

The kobolds have been annoying enough, and some dark stranglers arrived before the wall was finished. A mason sneaked out and built the two extra walls just in time. Then I got tired of them hanging around and tried DF liquids to wash them away. Ended up washing them into the fort (oh, THOSE walls weren't finished either!). Cue Benny Hill music and the last ten dwarves arrived were conscripted and managed to kill all nine stranglers.

And it's the first volcanic embark in a longish time where I've had more than two metals total. My last fort had copper and aluminium, so I was reduced to melting down goblinite. No flux or coal, but I'll deal with that later. Gem-encrusted <#gold crafts#> ahoy!

So, in Dippedpully, we've had a lot of drownings, and despite my attempt to drain all the surface water into the caverns, there's a lot of bodies feeding the fishes.

And a lot of memorial slabs in the crypts.

I've finally had a read of them. Most say "Slayer of Elves", "Devoted Father & Husband", "Devoted Husband" - good stuff like that.

My old chief medical dwarf only got "Friend of Goats".

Thanks for the ideas - I don't usually use pumps, but in this case, I'll give it a go.

I had a disturbing experience while pumping magma a few forts ago and don't really want to back there any time soon...

If you're in cold biome, I would wait for the lake to freeze, then "mine" the ice

Ummm - I can mine it, but then I get ice and the body is gone. That was how I cleaned out the kobold bodies early on. I think I need to bury these guys esp as they are starting to haunt the chickens...

One of them has just come down with melancholy, too...

The world is only 58 years old, and I've only had the one fort - maybe a few survived? I'm not sure how, though...

The metalcrafter is now running around naked in the dining room... It's strange - the parents are starving themselves to death in an emo way, and superkid is happily churning out exceptional quality crafts next door.

I'll ready some coffins, I guess...

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the usefulness of stock as an ambush warning device, or the fun games they play with invading FBs...

Or am I the only one...?

The dwarven traders arrived at the same time as two goblin ambushes, headed by some human crossbowmen. Very multi-racial.  The traders were killed, and the goblins ran after the humans minced themselves in the traps.

Although after a season of looting the dead, we did find the the baby Thob, who had been noticed being rather thirsty in the dining room, and who had been missing for a week, or at least it's dehydrated body just outside the dining room. How anyone missed it is beyond me. Given that Thob's parents are the militia commander and Cog, the one-armed mayor, this should play out well.

And despite setting the fort population limit to 50, we just hit 84 and have been made a barony... Time to get a military trained...

Starting on a glacier, had issues working out you have to build rather than dig steps between the ice and rock, but things seem ok.

Despite the embark thingy saying no wood and me bringing along a small pre-milled forest, there's a thin line of trees near the map's edge.

And somehow I must have slipped or pushed the wrong key, as my 10 - 20 z-level exploratory stairway to find the top of the first caverns has ended up at -20 z (that's about 140 down) and there's warm rock below and beside, so I may just go to magma smelting.

Also managed to cut through the lowest caverns just above the magma layer, and before I could wall it off, nice, innocent cave blobs wandered in. McForester was running in panicked circles, trapped by two blobs, and then a random mason wandered by to pick up a rock for a chair (134 z-levels from the workshop?), and punched and killed a blob on it's way past. So I put McForester into the military by herself and got her attack the remaining blob. Somehow they ended up falling down quite a number of stairs and despite a broken arm, it looks like she landed on the cave blob, which, from the fluid everywhere, popped.

That excitement over, I've finally put Fortress Defence in, so i'm looking forward to an invasion, as these have been missing from 34.11 for a while for me...