Bay 12 Games Forum

I had a fort, 0.34.11, for which I foolishly deleted the save, with a tame giant cave spider. I built a farm for it with a set of instructions similar to the ones currently in the wiki, but without the surrounding drawbridges; I figured I'd just drop the bait beast into a cage trap when I wanted to gather silk. The first thing I captured was a grasshopper man, so I dropped it in, and silk started spewing. But I had left the door open, and I found something very surprising.

My weaver just wandered in and started gathering webs like nobody's business! He wasn't scared of no damn grasshopper furry. I just left him to it. He occasionally got webbed, and every now and then someone would try to walk through with a bin and cause some cancel spam trying to get it back, but it just went on forever like that. Infinite silk, no muss no fuss.

So in my new fort I just did the same thing, but I used a goblin, and of course my weaver freaked. I had to set up the whole bridge deal to make it work, and eventually I gave up because it was just too big a pain. (I'll try again if I ever get a damn land animal, but no, everything I get in this stupid place either flies or is a goblin.)

So it seems like some animals aren't as scary as others? I can't find anything in the wiki. Is there !!science!! on this?

After three failed attempts, I finally got the pressure plate-in-the-path solution working. The plate is 19 steps away, so even my fastest dwarves shouldn't be able to reach the pile before it dumps. The only way anyone can get hurt, the way I see it, is if someone else triggers the plate while someone else is on the pile AND someone is dumping from above. That really, really shouldn't happen. And if it does, it's unlikely enough that it'll make a decent story, especially since stone dropped from 60z up is enough to cause dwarfsplosions. I mean, the first two deaths were before I knew that things-falling-on-your-head damage had been implemented, so rocks were landing in a narrow chamber between the workshops and the downstairs booze pile...

And yeah, the workshops have stockpiles that draw from the QS. I figured that out while I was working on making sure they don't haul the stone all the way back up to the upstairs ones.

link it to a hatch just above the landing zone and to an inverter[see wiki]

Um...I'm looking through the wiki, and I don't know what you're referring to. I don't see anything called an "inverter". There's a couple uses of the word in an article on building logic circuits, but it doesn't say what it is or how to build it, and it's described with sentences like "transmission gate logic can be accomplished by simply having an infinite water source in place of all +Vs, and infinite drainage for all grounds," which means absolutely nothing to me. Can you give me a more specific pointer?

Meet Besmar "Toledo" Zesugil. I've been training him for a long time, and gone through a whole lot of metal. He's a Legendary +4 Weaponsmith, with 28,424 out of 29,000 for Legendary +5. Just a tiny bit more to go and he'll finally be ready for the candy!


...really? Now?

Edit: Double facepalm time.

My cook, who started pumping out seriously expensive meals WAY faster than I could prepare for the sieges they drew. Fortunately, the ambush that got into the fort after my last soldier died killed him.

Ok, ok, I know it's undwarfy to think about safety, but I'd really like some ideas here.

So I've got a bunch of cool stuff--iron, coal, chalk, sand, fire clay--way up at the top of my fortress. And I've got a bunch of hot stuff--magma--60 levels down at the bottom. And what I've done so far is to build a straight 1x1 shaft all the way from the former to the latter, and set up simple guided minecarts to dump stuff down the shaft, and at the bottom is a quantum stockpile, from which my magma workshop stockpiles pull. So far so good.

Only problem is, twice so far, some dwarf has been down at the bottom picking up goodies when a load of stone comes down, and the results have been tragic, albeit spectacular and amusing. Right now I've got a manual safety system in place where there's a floor hatch one z-level up, walled off, with a lever to operate it, and every month or so I have to open and shut it manually. This is a pain, and if I forget to do it my industries shut down. Not optimal. This is the first version I've played where falling objects hurt, so I don't have any stock ideas for how to get objects from point A to point B without landing on point D.

I've come up with a few vague notions of what can be done, but they all seem, well, extremely dwarfy, involving burrows and water blasting from reservoirs and floor grates and probably flooding the workshop. I have to imagine there is a solution somewhere involving an airlock in the shaft, but my grasp of pressure plate logic is really, really shaky.

Any ideas how to drop things from a great height without squishing my dorfs?

Anything under 40. I'm depressed that I'm reaching that with 80 dwarves now. I thought it was having 200 that did it. I've smashed all my rocks and everything.

I refuse to turn off temperature, though. Magma must burn!