Bay 12 Games Forum

A giant Jay with a shell and a poison sting flew out of the depths and engaged a single marksdwarf that was just going down to the water purification plant for a drink. The Jay got a broken wing and shell, and tried to slowly crawl up the stairs towards my catacombs. My dwarf dodged off a cliff and landed in the reservoir with just a few bruises and tried to chase it... but died a few dozen steps later from the poison sting. He now has his own memorial slab for singlehandedly crippling a forgotten beast and really slowing it down.

It managed to land a couple of more fatal stings on my military but was cut to pieces without much difficulty. More or less the same thing happened with the next forgotten beast despite it being a much-cooler-sounding ceratopsid with eight legs, exposed ribs and poison spittle. The critters themselves are pushovers. It's their syndromes.

Still trying to picture a bluejay with a shell.

Forgive the dwarves. Their mothers always drink while pregnant. Strange moods are caused by the damaged and repressed parts of their brains reactivating, revealing some of their real potential.

Truth is, even after momma lifted a lead wine barrel over her head and chugged it while pregnant and then went to wrestling practice downwind of a copper smelter, dwarves are still smarter than you. Maybe your average dwarf is not as emotionally well balanced as the average human, but hey, these guys can build a still out of anything and make retractable bridges by instinct.

Elves... it's not clear what their problem is. As far as I know they don't drink much, but I know they try to make every weapon of war out of wood and then throw nervous fits over someone trying to sell their own wood back to them. They also eat the dead. At a guess, they all have some kind of crippling genetic issue that makes most of them as neurotic as an overbred dog.

An ant queen just destroyed my entire military.

I knew there were bad things in the cavern layers. However, I expected the antmen to be relatively pissant enemies. Three squads went in to destroy a small group of antmen. It looked like they'd won; all that survived the first two seconds was a single ant queen with every bodypart showing broken, cut open or smashed.

I figured it would bleed to death eventually. I was wrong. I thought it was a different ant when it came back a second later to gnaw on a soldier with a broken foot because now none of it's limbs were broken. A single hammerdwarf decided to break most of them again, but I ordered all three squads back down the stairs to look for any anthills that were producing these things.

I was wrong. It was the same ant queen I'd let go before, not a new ant. A swarm of dwarves chased her around the caverns, breaking and cutting open bodypart after bodypart - but all the damage just healed up. Her description showed as an unusually long and rapidly expanding list of scars and healed injuries on her black chitin.

Most of my military hit Elite status before dying or becoming too tired to continue fighting. However, they reached their limits eventually and with the regenerated Queen below and a goblin siege at my gates I decided that the fortress was lost.

.... excuse me, but what the heck was this? The wiki doesn't mention that they regenerate so fast that 30 dwarves (mostly silver warhammers and steel spears, plus an axe and some crossbows) pounding on them at once for a few minutes won't do them any lasting harm. Did I experience a weird bug (pun intended), or are all queens this incredibly resilient? If they are all invincible I am going to go back and have fun inventing ways to abuse this property as a training aid and goblin torture technique.

I *hate* trees. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

I refuse to settle in areas that have neither coal nor a volcano, because that means I have to deal with trees and constant logging. Now, I'd be all for just cutting them all down but the stupid things keep growing back. The only solution is to embark in a wasteland and make all your furniture out of metal and rocks.

The only exception is beds. I grudgingly accept that I need them, and the skinny drug dealers come by every once in a while so I can get my fix of wood.

Is your site near the ocean?  Aquifers near the ocean can be salty, and therefore unusable as a water source without a well or desalination system.  You can however build a desalination system completely out of wood if you need to.

That could have been it, but I wouldn't have expected salt to have affected their ability to fill a bucket and dump it somewhere else to help me get through the aquifer (tundra biome). I also began to notice other strange issues with dwarfy behavior like engineers sitting idle forever instead of building mechanisms (thought to bring stone for them) or medical dwarves not picking up wounded dwarves while craftsdwarves still made barrels and farmers kept farming. Strange stuff. I must have screwed up their ability to do things in general.

I got a really disturbing one. I accidentally killed a miner by having it channel down into a main hallway. I was a bit slow about burying him and one of the dwarfs who witnessed this became possessed and carved a statue of the deceased miner as he struck an obstacle.