Bay 12 Games Forum

I cannot stress how important shields are.

I lost two full squads of legendary axedwarves to a dragon once because I had removed their shields for weapons training and forgot to give them back before I ordered the charge.

I couldn't find any info about it on the wiki.

I had a full squad of legendary melee dwarves get wiped by a dragon. I couldn't figure out why they had done so poorly blocking the dragonfire when they were all legendary shield users.

...then I realized I had previously unequiped all of their shields for some weapons-focused danger room training.

FMF

Geartwinkles -- Yesterday's investigation by the Royal Guard uncovered a massive smuggling ring operating out of the city's market. Twenty-one dwarves were charged with conspiring to sell figurines; a direct violation of King Phrasehall's recent ban on figurine exports. The accused included the Manager and the newest member of the Royal Guard, as well as several craftsdwarves highly-regarded both in their fields and the community.

When informed of the violation of his Royal Mandate, King Phrasehall stripped the conspirators of all titles and holdings and ordered them detained to await his judgement and sentencing. Because a member of the Royal Guard was among the accused, the City Guard was selected to carry out the arrests. We spoke with Captain Weatherfountains this morning:

"We moved as soon as we got the list from the King's steward last night -- we were hoping if we caught them by surprise, we could make the arrests without any bloodshed. Unfortunately, all of them resisted arrest, and they had to be beat into submission."

When asked why unarmed, sleeping dwarves would resist the steel-clad City Guard, Weatherfountains had no comment.

The Chief Medical Dwarf confirmed that ten smugglers had been killed during the arrests, and an eleventh was not expected to live through the night. The remaining criminals are in the hospital in various conditions. The former Manager is predicted to recover, however he has fully lost the use of his legs.

King Phrasehalls will speak on these events this evening in Royal Hall. It is rumored that he will pardon the condemned, as their labor is needed on the upcoming Deep Road expansion project.

I've had three training room deaths: two children and a baby. My craftsdwarves have had a field day with the emotional impact.

Here's an alpaca wool left glove dedicated to one of the kids:

"This is a alpaca wool left glove. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest...

...On the item is an image of Lokum Parchedtomb the dwarf in mule leather. Lokum Parchedtomb is dead. The artwork relates to the killing of the dwarf Lokum Parchedtomb by a trap in Geartwinkles in the early winter of 260."

My current fort is actually a two-parter. I have 252 dwarves who live and work at the main surface fort, then a second fort down in the first cavern with another 25 dwarves. The first fort does all of the craftwork and most of the manufacturing, but the lower fort is completely self-sufficient too. I use burrows to keep the dwarves in their repective forts, with a small subset of "runners" with access to both.

I probably should have put my magmaworks down at the second fort (it would have meant a lot less digging), but at the time it only had 7 dwarves and no military, and I wasn't sure it wouldn't fall with the first Forgotten Beast.

Also, I had no idea the headaches associated with a 167-level magma-safe pump stack.

I've got a fairly large and developed fortress going on, but I'm still working on getting magma pumped up to a reasonable z-level. Digging out 167 z-levels of magma pump rooms and furnishing them with magma-safe pumps has taken me weeks of real time to complete.

I keep seeing posts from people who have magma forges before they even have an established military. How are you doing this so fast?! How do you guys build your magma forges? Are you pumping it up, or are you just building down close to the magma? Surely there must be an easier way than what I'm doing.

If this is the case, I have been REALLY lucky with the design of my pump stack. Are you all sure about this? Do yall have a ground tile to support the pump? If not I recommend you put one in.

It's a typical head-over-tail pump stack design. The bottom-most pump has a ground tile and the top-most pump is hanging off a gear assembly. All the other pumps must hang, because I channeled away the ground tiles to let power pass through. I'm following the instructions on the wiki, so I don't think that's the problem.

As Starver said, it probably lets me place and build completely unsupported pumps because they are "supported' by other placed (but not constructed) pumps. Once built, they collapse because of lack of support.

What has been frustrating is that the unsupported pumps don't collapse immediately after construction. They stick around until i've built other pumps that rely on them for support before collapsing, bringing down the whole chain. I can even add a support to a constructed pump in the form of a grounded gear assembly, and it still collapses, taking the gear assembly with it.