Bay 12 Games Forum

Nightwings, period. Are scary. I don't know why they're not in the dfchallenge group, because I think they can pretty much demolish the jotuns, spider fiends, and the minotaurossi given that they don't let up until you hack them in half or cut off their head.

I've set a group of them on fire, and it didn't even slow them down. It's didn't even give them any injuries! You can't drown them in magma, in fact, unless they're confined into a tunnel, they're not going to die in magma. Most of the time they seem to be able to walk through the stuff unscathed.

Quote from: Flare on April 04, 2011, 03:51:40 pm

Sounds a lot like dwarven machine gun, except with a lot of maintenance that needs to be done after each shooting. Just dig a straight channel right into the magma sea and let loose the obsidian boulders. The dust will still have the same exploding effect around the hole, it will also blast up a lot of magma vapor for you too.

Thats the magma hammer.

The water source can be provided by vertically stacked pond zones and a bucket brigade, or via a system of pumps to trickle water onto the surface of the magma. So long as the target tile is not adjacent to the walkway it will instantly collapse, and the resulting explosion will kill anything within the blast radius.

Actually, I think the term dwarven machine gun might have come first:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I built this mainly to test the effects of cave-in dust.

Veshstal, "Dustbuster"

[spoiler]Floor 0

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Floor -1

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Floor -2

On Floor 0, those are 1x1 bridges to either side of the center gap, currently covered by 1/7 water or magma. The X's to the north and south are floodgates, made to float without a floor by constructing a wall on the z-level below to make a temporary floor. This allows the fluid to be funneled into the center tile of the shaft without providing a support for the obsidian block.

Both water and magma are pressurized, but have limited flow from their source. The diagonal choke may be unnecessary. If you have a lot of flow, it might risk pushing one of the fluids across the gap and jamming it.

Most of the time the block would form at level -1 (or at least that's where it zooms to). I never saw it form at level 0.

My shaft went around the magma sea, straight to the semi-molten rock. (expose the magma flow tiles by digging down staircases and then channeling them out.) For some reason it started filling with magma some time after I finished digging it out, possibly because it was in the same embark square as my magma pipe.

The results from my test chamber:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sometimes the horse wouldn't show up on "view". Going to the units list and zooming to its position showed it to be above the floor. So it would appear that cave-in dust causes injury by flinging units upwards, which I think even drawbridges can't do.


On using this against HFS, you could line the sides of the shaft with 1x1 raised drawbridges made to float by the wall-removal method. This will force them to fly up directly in the path of the block (unless they can destroy drawbridges, use magma-safe materials in case they can be ruined by superheated ones).

Since obsidian is technically a glass, maybe this could be called a glass cannon 

Toss them into the dwarven magma machine gun for a load of cruelty. You could also try recreating a shooting squad and have the goblin stand still by a wall or something. Have your marksdwarves stand behind the raised bridge and when all is ready, release the bridge and count the volleys.

Having pierced the aquifer and gotten my fort up and running, I decided to make a cistern of sorts so that the dwarves would have some sort of clean water when some of them inevitably become injured, and so I've run into my problem.

It would seem the wiki is mistaken on the subject of water desalination, or at least not complete as to all the mechanics at work when water becomes, or rather does not become, desalinated. I am aware of wells being able to desalinate water, but I'm also conducting another test to see if fish will appear in salt water underground ponds as well as fresh water underground ponds.

On the topic of the "fresh" water coming out of the screw pump from a salty source, it seems to be the case that it doesn't really matter if it touches natural ground and walls or not. I've built cisterns entirely out of normal building material, pumped water down into it, yet still the water is not desalinated. I've then built a small one, in the air, entirely out of blocks, and again the problem persists.

After delving into certain threads with posters therein trying to deal with said problem, I think I've hit upon the problem of what is the real cause of water becoming salted. It's not that the water is touching the ground, but rather whether it is salted or not depends on the z-level it is on. This seems to be evident in the pumping contraption that I've built to irrigate the surface. The water on the ground which the pump stack pumped through is desalinated, as is the water inside the pumpstack itself, even if it was touching natural walls and floors. Some constructed floors and walls in the pump stack were not made out of blocks either, which rules out the two hypothesis. What is important to note here, or in other words, what caused the water to desalinate is that the water was pumped upwards and not downwards.

One of the cisterns I've built is 15 z-levels deep. the water coming from the pump isn't in contact with any natural stone or wall, and yet it still somehow finds a way to be salt water. There was no dirt in the cistern to contaminate the water either. Blocks didn't seem like an issue then as some of the floors in the pump stack to the surface was made out of mined rock and the presence of fresh water on those tiles would indicate that this isn't a problem. In support of the theory that natural rock has nothing to do with it, the bath I dug into the earth near the entrance that had inadvertently filled during the mass irrigation process did become a water source when "i" was pressed even when the water had crawled along the rocky tiles and general wild life bushery.

I'm wondering whether or not anyone else has had this type of experience. I've read some posts about the topic but none of them addressed the fact of what the wiki purports to be the method of the desalination of water.

Maybe the dwarves need to invent springs first before they can make a hard metallic surface better for bedding then having to sleep on the floor.

The caverns usually have some sort of water flowing in from the edge of the map. Some maps have rivers and aquifers too which you can use, although the passage needed to move this water to the magma sea will probably be far longer , but in that case, it will probably be more run.

Alternatively, you could try pumping the magma out long enough for you to dig out the adamatine. If you have enough pumps working at it and a large enough exit tunnel it is possible. I've inadvertently drained the top layer of the magma sea with a single pump before. A couple of them ought to do it faster than the several years it took in my instance.

Suppose you have a line of disc traps all loaded stretched out in several consecutive columns from the entry way to the inside of the keep. Now suppose in challenge to this, several large waves of fully steel clad giants try to make their way into the keep through this passage. Now suppose once more, in the extremely unlikely event that one of them gets past all of the discs unscathed, walking through the vast majority of them with dodging, shield use, and general armor protection.

Would the skill of such an individual be improved to legendary status, as if he was given a very brief yet very intense stint in a very demanding danger room? Suppose on top of all that, the keep doesn't keep a full time military due to the effectiveness of the line traps. Wouldn't they be summarily slaughtered by this legendary warrior they've created?