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The humans have found a way in....yet another breach. I've locked the doors, but I don't know how well that will work. Access to the power conduit has been compromised.....I'm preparing to fire the Self Destruct just in case.

Edit: 1 stray peasant killed. Outside the fort, somehow. I've successfully contained the breach, but yeah....this isn't a good situation. Preparing for final purge.
Edit2: Nevermind, they've broken through. Activating Self Destruct. Take that, human bastards! Our traps are slowing them down a little....but THIS should deal with them rather more effectively! AHAHAHAHA!
Edit3: Moltenchannels burns. I'll write up something nice in the next day or so, with screenshots. Udib chose to stay behind (I'm not kidding, he went down to the hospital to be with the crippled dude).
Edit4: 5FPS. Hoooboy. Reclaim might not be an option.
Edit5: And we have an ending. I'll write it up...later.

Alright folks. I have repaired the Shroud of Armok and primed the Self Destruct device! One pull of the right lever, and this fortress is going bye-bye.


I intend to continue using DFhack to clean things up a bit (make it possible to reclaim if anyone wants to, and let me move dwarves out before flooding it), then in mid autumn I will activate the self destruct and end the fort with an in-character update or two. It's been a fun turn, especially once I started using DFhack to clean up some outstanding bugs that were accumulating. Also: I've now learned how to do mechanics in DF, which was always something I wanted to try.

I think it's quite rational that no one would want to move to Moltenchannels, though it didn't stop so many people trying to invade the damn place.

Oh come on, we have a fantastic dining room, once you ignore all the blood and corpses and vomit and bones and stuff!


I've shut down the Self Destruct so I can build the new axle without killing the crew. I've also reactivated the second hospital. This takes out two dwarves who needed bedrest...but I'm hopeful that it'll pay off in a month or three.

Edit: Also I made myself chief medical dwarf, because Cutey's kinda dead for now.

Edit2: Diagnosing patients like a boss. Also, I just got the last breach patched I think. We're secure.....for now. The machinery isn't getting fixed though.

Edit3: We have 20 dwarves overall. 7 are children. One is a chained vampire. One is stuck on an "attend meeting" job and is useless as a result. And two are resting, with one attending to them. The remaining 8 are picking up random crap.

Edit4: Performing surgery. I have no idea if my patient will survive. I'd ask the nurse for a hammer, but we don't have any nurses. Ah well. What could possibly go wrong?

Edit5: Anyone know a DFhack command that forces a dwarf to cancel their current job? We could use that meeting attender.
....and the injured dwarves are very injured. Might get some function out of them, but eh....not a given.

My vote's for "unmodded". Anyone can pick it up that way, plus we've got enough fun new things in 0.4 without adding mods into the mix. Climbing in particular will force a change to defenses.

I *think* I can repair Reactor Alpha's connection to the Shroud. When that happens, the pump stack should start up again and repressurise the Shroud. Or I may need to reconnect some levers. If I shut off the Self Destruct it'll allow me to test it. If it works, I can reactivate the Self-Destruct and end the fort. If it doesn't, I can tunnel into the volcano and end the fort.

...Unless I run out of time. In which case...I'll probably end the fort with an abandon.

Ok. I've traced the locations of reactors Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Reactor Alpha is still running at full power, so that rules that out as a cause.

From what I can tell, it originally sent power to the surface via a shaft full of gears next to a starcase. Given the dead FB nearby and lack of gears in most of said shaft, I suspect this is the cause of the lost power.....two destroyed parts caused the section between them to fall down and be destroyed. I'll attempt a repair, although who knows how long it'd take. I'll also shut down the Self-Destruct in the meantime.

Self Destruct activated. I'm now trying to re-route magma to the device so it can actually operated. The goblins are killing everything they can find, but...well...

....you know how on my first three turns I covered this place in weapons traps to get rid of spare weapons, waste crap, and as a "just in case"?

Well, it's turned out rather well. Bits of goblin flying everywhere, and we've just got a few of the more elite ones left now (except the crippled ones, but those don't matter). Udib casually walked up to clean the traps, then shot the hell out of a pre-crippled goblin. Brutal.

We are now down to three goblins. Can't kill them myself, because of obvious reasons. Unfortunately all the traps around them are jammed with bits of their friends. It's going to take a few years to fix them at this rate, so hopefully the gobbos just walk a little down the corridor. This place must seem like the Tomb of Horrors on acid wielding an axe to them.

However we seem to have a bit of a problem overall in terms of ending the fort: the goblins can't kill us because I've filled the place with traps (and I've got several dwarves hidden away where they can't be killed). We can't kill the goblins, because there are almost no dwarves left and no immigrants. And we can't kill ourselves, because I still haven't gotten the dwarves to pull more than one lever at a time. Seriously. Even assigning burrows is broken now.


The ingame date is 18th Felsite. Let's see how this goes.

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Edit: 3 days later, the last surviving goblin, a macelord, escapes the fortress, leaving behind one crippled speargoblin, many piles of bodies, and multiple clouds of red mist that are now jamming our traps. Looks like we made it through this one, and I don't think we ever actually encountered the enemy.

Edit2: Restocking the McUrists' in the old tower is going reasonably well as well. A few plants were left in the tower and are being harvested. They've got a couple of barrels, a still and a kitchen as well. So I've got some safety margins in case of another siege. Knowing our luck, we'll be getting plenty.

Also: I've found why the Self Destruct is offline. The self-destruct seems to have been added onto the Shroud design later, and as a result the lever marked "cut off magma flow to the shroud" (or something like that) also shuts off the flow to the Self Destruct.

......if I can get the right lever pulled (why no, I don't know exactly which one it is), it should be a fairly quick job to get the system back online.

Edit3: Nope. I now suspect that in the commotion something has been damaged. I don't know if the pump-stack is still functional. I'll attempt the run the top pump manually and see what happens. If that fails, then I'll have someone sacrifice themselves and dig into the volcano.

Edit4: Yup. That whole section of machinery is offline. As is pretty much everything by the look of it. Looks like a troll managed to reach something important during the battle. It's probably relatively minor damage, but I've never touched this sort of stuff before. Still, I'll take a look at it and see if anything really obvious stands out. Worst comes to the worst, we have an extra turn while the next person figures it out. Right now I can't even work out where the power for this thing is coming from. Every piece of machinery is inactive, and I don't know where the reactor is to try and trace where levers are to shut things off.

......or I can dig into the volcano. Hmmmm. I think I'll try to fix it first.


Diagnostics are not aided by the fact that the surface around the pump stack looks like this:



That's not a small number of corpses on each tile either. Soon we'll be attracting mountaineers wanting to get first-ascents on them.

As an aside: I think we're now on our 3rd -possibly 5th- fight to the last dwarf at this point. We've been rather lucky with them, in an unlucky sort of way.

Diary of Urist McKiwi V, Date Unknown

I went through the papers left by McKiwi III. Interesting enough reading, but nothing I didn't suspect already. A good refresher though.

I was directing the preparations for our evacuation when I saw that child McDuck's driving around heading for the Shroud. Got up there just in time to see him start smashing the wall. "Try stopping me once I've destroyed your precious little device!" he screamed at me as the wall finally collapsed.....to reveal a gap in the floor underneath it, leading onto the magma track. McDuck ran past me, but I caught up to him a floor down, where he was staring at the magma flow from the breached part of the Shroud. Contrary to his (and indeed my own) expectations, it was resolutely refusing to flow any further than the track.

"I......um.....what?.....WHAT?!!"
"To be honest, I don't know either."
"But I saw...I...well........um.....I guess I lose this round. Have a child. I don't need him anymore."

Then the kid collapsed and a few minutes later was back to normal. We're patching the shroud now...but the important thing from this incident is what I've learned. As opposed to what Udib, McKiwi III, McDuck, and most of the others in the know might believe, McDuck is not entirely all-knowing. His ability to see possibilities and potential outcomes (and then interfere to change what actually happens) is what makes him so powerful (and so dangerous), but that ability relies on being able to assign probabilities to outcomes and so is interfered with by chaotic outcomes that bump "wildcards" into play when he doesn't expect them. As there are an infinite number of possible outcomes, but only a finite number can be examined......things that defy normal explanations may slip past him. In this case, the strange and frankly impossible behaviour of physics around our fortress managed to thwart what should have taken the Shroud out of action for good. I can only hope we can cycle it soon though....McDuck may well try again, and the reservoir is running dangerously low. Soon it's going to shut down, and at that point we won't be able to seal the gateway under the fortress.

However, this new knowledge suggests a possibility. If we can seal the gateway under this fortress, it might be possible to destroy McDuck entirely through another installation. Enough chaotic events around the installation should shroud the activity from McDuck's sight long enough to breach hell, and deal with him once and for all. Given how unpredictable this hellhole has been, this bodes well for the next stage. Assuming we survive this one, that is.


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Right, we're almost up to speed. Will continue playing soon....I've got a dwarf headed for the levers right now.....but I have to close the game for a while to get other stuff done. Let's just hope that the Shroud hasn't been actively damaged.