Bay 12 Games Forum

So, same old story, locked up a vampire, they made him mayor. I got to thinking about this, and I realized that, now that I have a baron to talk to the liaison for me, I should just let him continue to be mayor and ignore him--he'll make mandates, nobody will do them, they'll get charged with violation of production orders, and, since I refuse to create a justice system (justice is not dwarfy!), they'll get happy thoughts about not being punished. The only consequence I can see for this is that the vampire will go insane. Then I realized--will he stop being mayor if he's nuts?

I guess the question is twofold: do I need to keep Mayor Fangface sane, and if so, will installing a water torture feature in his locked room be enough?

A door. Huh. Well, that simplifies things a lot, considering it can be marked interior and doesn't have the squeeze-past problem.

I think you're misreading why there's a water pump there--it's only for dwarves who dodge past the statue and land on top of the weapon rack. With an impassible door instead of a statue, there's no need for the pump at all. I don't even have to channel out the northern loop of the waterway. I can narrow the room to 1z wide at the door, and just let the loop stay underground. There'll just be holes channeled on either side of the trap. I think that works.

So I took a break from Dwarf Fortress for a while, but like all addicts, here I am back again, and this time I'm taking a crack at designing the perfect training facility. Here's what I've got so far.


I'm trying to address the following problems:

• Danger rooms of size > 1 are a waste of wood and mechanisms.
• Dwarves can stand on the furniture that defines the room and thus avoid the spikes.
• In a narrow room, a statue can block the access to the weapon rack, if it is built after the room is defined (if built before, it will block the room definition flow). However, a dodging dwarf can pass over a statue and get stuck.

In response, this room should behave as follows:

• The water in the room below is kept at a constant 3 or 4 by the action of the standard repeater.
• The pump is always on, but the floor hatch on Z+1 is linked to the repeater, causing intermittent water flow on the tile that contains the weapon rack. My theory is that if any acrobatic dwarves manage to jump over the .
• The spikes are operated separately from the repeater, so that I can turn them off without affecting the water level.

Things I'm not sure of yet:

• Ideal length of the swimming route, and ideal number of training spears. Too many spears and too long a route, and they'll spend all their time swimming.
• Whether pumping water that's not at 7 will actually knock dwarves off the edge.
• Whether the pump is going to move too much water, causing pathing problems or potential drowning. (I could fix that by making the pump manually controlled, but what fun would that be?)

This is not ‼SCIENCE‼, unfortunately. This is ‼THEORY‼ until I get off work. But, as it stands, how does it look? Anything I'm missing or dead wrong about?

It can be really helpful to imagine the water not as water but as, oh, maybe that green slime they used to have on Nickelodeon. It doesn't so much flow as ooze, and it dries up around the edges. If you need water to get from point A to point B 50 tiles away, and you've only got maybe a 10x10 murky pool, you're probably better off designating a pond or setting up minecarts than expecting it to flow down a channel. You can push water anywhere if there's enough of it to fill a channel with a pump behind it, but with smaller amounts your options are really limited.

Quote from: Dwarfotaur on October 31, 2012, 09:38:40 am

Has anyone tried this?

Oh and if you run out of wood, make wooden blocks.

One log still only makes one block, so I'm not sure why you'd recommend this. Though it does make for much more graceful and less deadly reconstruction.

I came up with the same one-trap arrangement, but mine was much simpler:

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+┼|Ω√║
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Just build the statue after you designate the room and it won't count as a wall.

You don't need wood for barrels, you can make stone pots instead.

You need at least one piece of wood for charcoal or you've got no metal.

All my magma handling equipment--floodgates, hatches, screw pump parts, doors--is typically green glass, which makes it very easy to recognize that I'm using the right parts. The only thing I've ever had melt on me was a mechanism, because I was dumb. It made a fantastic flood, though.