Bay 12 Games Forum

During the last beast attack, 40 good military dwarves were brutally murdered by a bronze colossus because the a lever was pulled too late. The Bronze colossus is now safely trapped in a cage and could serve as an immortal target for Marksdwarves in the future. There are 56 survivors in the fortress, among them are two expert crossbowmen, 7 dabbling crossbowmen, and 20 dabbling melee fighters, mostly macedwarves.

I was working on a magma trap which would crush future sieges, I dug a staircase into the magma-forging heart of the fortress and I left it completely unprotected, opened for everyone to use. Now the magma trap is nowhere near done, fortress is opened and we have two marskdwarves and 27 recruits facing a siege (first squad, mostly melee invaders, entered the map). This is the second siege, so I don't expect anything too big.

What do  should I do? I figure I have three or four options.

1. Savescum. DFHack die, revert to last savegame, cover up the staircase into the fortress. Face the siege again and turtle up.
2. Draft everyone in the military (56 dwarves), let them put leather armor on, grab some weapons and fight. If it is only one or two dozens Goblins, we might even win, although the our losses would be great.
3. Try to quickly build two floor tiles over the staricase (2x1) before the goblins come, maybe send our livestock as bait, then try to hide. If we fail to construct the two floor tiles in time, we'd fight, although many of our dwarves will not have any armor on.
4. Release the Bronze colossus, let him fight the goblins, and try to trap him again afterwards.

I am about to build a minecart track but I have little experience with it. I have these questions:

1. Can a track stop be designated on a ramp?
2. Can a minecart be accessed, loaded, unloaded or pushed if it stops on a ramp?

I figure I will need to build several more or less evenly spaced track stops with a certain magnitude of friction on a long continuous downward ramp for a regulated cart descend. I have learned that a downward ramp adds 4890 (4900-10 for track friction) points of speed to a descending minecart.

3. When I designate a downward ramp as a track stop with high friction (diminishing the speed by 10000 points), how much will the minecart be actually affected? Will it be decelerated by 10000, 10010 (+10 for track friction), or by 5110 speed points (also taking into account the acceleration of the ramp and the track friction, 10000-4900+10)?

Or is this 4890 value only relevant for minecarts starting to accelerate in the middle of the ramp? This wiki article section suggests that a cart that rides a track ramp fully from one side to another will in fact be accelerated significantly more. I'm confused and don't know how to calculate this. Can you help me?

Update: Topic change: How to kill undead goblin husks and get their iron gear

I have just started a highly challenging fortress on a haunted glacier (with an aquifer). As if this alone wouldn't be enough, the site also lacks iron ores. So I really depend on Goblins bringing me some. Fighting or drowning them would be an option, but eventually they might walk through a syndrome cloud turning them into husks. That's when I would prefer to freeze them, because undead don't drown. Water source for the drowning/freezing chamber would be the aquifer water.

I fear freezing would immediately destroy all the valuable iron they'd bring, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make. How could I design a drowning chamber with the optional feature of freezing the trapped creatures? Would a drowning chamber covered by a retracting bridge do the job? Would the water freeze as soon as the bridge would be retracted?

I decided to haul in some used silver bolts scattered around my map. My furnace operators have melted several already, but as far as I've observed the melting process here and there, they never produced a silver bar. Does the melting of a single bolt produce anything at all? How many single bolts do I need to melt to get a bar of that metal?

I'll be giving a little talk about Dwarf Fortress in a couple of days and I want to give people a rough idea about the size of the DF community. Are there any "official" counts? What are your best guesses?

My guess is that we have around 50,000 members who play this game now and then (at least about once a year). I think so because the Reddit community is about that size, also this forum has about 32,000 members with at least 1 post. Their members mostly overlap (or do they?), I guess, and I figure there are some registered members who no longer play the game, as there are people who play the game but are not registered in any of these sites.

I'll be making a 5-minute short presentation about Dwarf Fortress for the general public. I decided to include a few sentences about the world generation. That's where I noticed that I don't exactly know what parts of it are procedural and what are random.

I usually don't fool around with the world gen parameters, but I think I saw people talking about world gen seeds on this forum, so I conclude that there is something procedural about world gen.

Are any parts of Dwarf Fortress world history random? Like names, historical figures, forgotten beasts, battles, maybe the whole course of history? Can it happen when you procedurally generate a world from the same seed, it will look geologically the same but the toponyms will be different, the civilizations and their diplomatic relationships will be different, maybe even the locations of cities or ruins are will be different?

A thing I noticed is that sieges, ambushes and were-beast attacks are somewhat random. I once suffered a game crash not long after such attack and when I recovered the last save from the season before I noticed another such attack happening at about the same time, but with slightly different creatures.

I just bought a cheetah and jaguar from the elves. Will I need some unprepared meat to feed them? Most of my raw food has been cooked already. How much do these large cats eat, roughly?

Never before have I been looking forward to a siege, but this time I felt really prepared. Four long retractable bridges spanning a 12 levels deep pit with upright spears. Goblins and Trolls tried to enter our fortress trampling across the bridge but at its end they triggered a trap, the bridges retracted and more than two dozen invaders fell to their horrible and long suffering. We dealt with the rest of the siege with ease, taking only two casualties and a couple of injuries.

https://youtu.be/Qh20TLp2xwc