Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarf Fortress: Battletoads ain't nothing compared to this.

Dwarf Fortress: where ASCII becomes Art, where Art becomes War... and where War becomes Hilarious.

Dwarf Fortress: if you aren't doing your best to create a trap that destroys the world with magma, you are not playing well.

Dwarf Fortress: where else can you find a place where magma can become the source of all your economy?

Well, this is the first facepalm I can report...

Situation: I had lost a legendary miner to drowning in the nearby river as I tried to transform it from a brook to an actual river. The idiot somehow managed to pull a cave-in in the brook. Seems that the brook floor acts exactly like the normal floor. I had built a couple of pumps in order to pull some water out and try to make a dam, as well as rescuing the miner I lost (or at least his things). Quite the beauty, 16 pumps, fed by three water-wheels and only using two gears.
Didn't work at all. Not sure if it was that the pumps weren't pulling the water fast enough, or if the draining system (a tunnel that drives into a small part in the north where there weren't many people) couldn't drain as fast as required. Anyway, Project Rescue went down the drain (pardon the pun).
Now, I have just found the magma sea, and am making plans to make an obsidian farm. Very easy, but somewhat slow, because I have to build a pump stack from level -62 to level -22 so that it isn't too far away from the rest of my fortress and building things fast isn't a forte of my dorfs. I plan to also use the Project Rescue thing to get enough water for the obsidian making. I have yet to know whether it will actually work, but water easily reaches its intended objective through a set of stairs (that I have to forbid so that the guys don't get drowned, though I could just erase the ramps in the higher part to prevent dorfs from taking that route at all).

Now, the facepalm: I see something walking over the outer bridge and decide to pull its lever to see it fly. I accidentally pull the level that engages the gear that activates Project Rescue, and suddenly I start getting messages of people not being able to bring something to the tomb.

Ending result: 4 dead guys. Not as impressive as some other things around here, but it's a first attempt .

I've been playing this game for a few months, and a few days ago I started a new fortress (my third, the other two went abysmally wrong). Now, I'm trying to find the magma pipe/pool/sea/whatever, but so far I have already found like 5-6 underground caverns, and no sign of magma anywhere. The only signal of volcanic eruptions in this place is the existence of granite (which, if I remember my high school geology lessons, is a rock that comes from volcanic activity) and I am going mad trying to encounter the magma so that I can install an obsidian farm and magma furnaces and kilns.

Any help? (Just so you know, I've already reached level -52).

It is a great idea. It would certainly help to upgrade the skill levels of the dwarves.

I know it would be quite complicated, but imagine it. You have a platform, and a big hole that goes from the highest to the lowest part of your fortress. You put a stockpile on the platform, put food/booze/rocks/whatever on it, then the dwarfs on the level that need all of those things just pull their lever and the elevator comes down (or up) to that level.

Would cut on a lot of time carrying things up and down, and would potentially aid in preventing HFS from invading the fortress.