Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh, I know how they work, I was just trying to find some way to use one to fill the chamber more dramatically.

Thinking about it, I did make a drop-away wall around a chamber full of magma, with the wall itself being a piston, and it produced a pretty dramatic flood.

None were quite as crazy as the onacloV though:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's an inside out Volcano, hence onacloV.

Perhaps if you built a pressurized cistern around a drowning chamber, with the wall directly around the chamber itself being a hollow piston, though it would be a pain to set back up if you weren't careful about how you linked up some magma tubes or just felt like playing with liquids and tiletypes as I did for the onacloV.

That actually sounds like fun. Nobody said the piston couldn't be hollow, the drowning chamber in the inside of it. Basically piston-pumping the water in from the sides (all at once) and then draining through a sieve in the bottom. I like that. Build a tube in the centre, the drowning chambre at the top level, with fortifications. The top level can be closed with a retracting bridge so that the water can accumulate and drown everything. Then you open the bridge and flush, using the fact that most stuff can be pushed through fortifications if the water levels are high (and the pressure). The stuff accumulates in the bottom (close to the smelters and an incineration device), where the goblinite is refined by removing the impurities (goblins) that are dumped into magma. This reduces hauling quite a lot. Catastrophic failure if you get a enemies that do not drown, but for that make the bottom of the drain so it can be opened into the magma sea. You will lose that vein of goblinite, but hopefully the next one will be delivered soon enough.

Water piston?

If you dig out the bottom underneath the drowning chamber and have grates to allow the water to teleport in, dropping a block which is say, 5 z tall by however wide x/y into a 3 z deep chamber of water will give 1 z on top of the level where the block was and 1 z in the level above.

I've not done it with water which may behave differently due to pressure being a thing, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it blasts all of the grates into the air or something crazy like that.

But the piston needs to move down, where it displaces the water (gets teleported to the top), and the maximum of water "levels" you are getting on top is the number of z-levels you dropped the piston (there is some spill, the water needs to be caught with bridges on the sides, ...). If you have the drowning chamber at z=0, then you need empty space at z=-1. The piston drops, say, 2z levels into a full cistern. The piston top is now at z=-3. There is water all the way up to z=-1, but it won't be pushed up into z=0.

So unless you drop the piston through the drowning chamber... (so cave in + drowning)

Edit: well, that is just what you suggested (on a second read...). Remark: Water teleports, there is no need for grates. There have to be bridges at some z-level below to retain the water... sadly this is a non-repeatable design (but could be made repeatable by pumping magma up and obsidianizing the top of the piston again).

Edit2: Looking at the maze: the hallways need to be 3 tiles wide at least in order to have the piton walls completely detached, so it can cave in properly ('cause the piston top needs to be the same level as teh drowning chamber). In the end this will just be a cave in trap, though - but with added drowning, and then magma do make it repeatable, which sounds quite dwarven to me.

So, it finally happened.

It's Spring 555, I'm carving out a new entrance to my fortress, and all of a sudden, a dragon appears, complete with legendary nickname. I sound the alarms to get everyone indoors, mobilize the militia, and watch in anticipation as he traverses the southern mountain, where my new entry is being built, hops down into my old pastureage area, walled off between the northern and southern mountains, and proceeds to torch every single one of my reindeers and dogs
[...]
A. Is it safe to let him out of his cage? If I set him to a pasture adjacent to the training area, will he respect the pasture?

To my knowledge if an animal has ever fought dorfs (or "members" of your civ, like pets) it will continue to do so even when tamed... so the answer would be:
no, it is not safe to do so.
It might have changed in the new version, but somehow I doubt it.

The last one he posted... if anybody wants to try their hands on the Thornbill we can keep that for the next few days. Let's say deadline is end of the month?

The most useful tool in DFhack is probably the sticky cursor. If you loo(k) at something and then [ESC] and subsequently (q)uery the tasks you are _at the same building_, very nice to have. The (advanced) Units interface (u-l) is also very nice, especially I can now just let the lazy immigrants enter the map and then look at what they are good at and assign labours, squads, ...
I also wonder why the dorfs cannot age cheese. in the fortress one could have really good conditions for that, in France and Switzerladn there are huge caverns filled with cheese being aged, turned into formidable fromage like Comté, Gruyère, Carnotzet d'Aletsch, ... (great, now I'm hungry, fortunately there is some really close to being overly ripe sour milk cheese in my fridge that I have marinated yesterday, should be perfect tonight)

That is an amazing overview! I have only started playing with mine carts, they take a long time to set up to do the stuff I am interested in, so I never got that far. Thanks for putting that list together.

Also: The results re: length of a ramp mean that tiles are cubes (as high as wide). Don't know if it has been suggested elsewhere (I believe it has...) but more evidence to support it is always welcome.

Vampires, ghosts, toxic blood from forgotten beasts, getting drowsy and accidentally falling into a goblin-slicer, dangerous creatures entering the fort through the water supply

I would count these as "natural deaths", along with "incinerated, being dumped into magma for demanding slate beds"...

I used to do it in v0.34.x and it still works: make shaped rooms above magma, put some shallow water in it, and mine (channel) exactly these tiles where you want obsidian to form one level below. There is no need to use more than 1/7 of water to create obsidian, so the shallow 2-3/7 pool allow miners to wade and create obsidian with pinpoint precision without bridges. The holes plug themselves so the water is conserved. This works best if the magma is directly below - the obsidian cubes cling to the level the miners are.

However, obsidian also clings to adamantine you are surrounding, and you can almost always create an obsidian bridge from the "shore" of magma pipe if there is need, that is when there is open space between magma surface and the miner's level floor.

This is not possible over the magma sea, at least for me it did not work at all. The water seems to need to drop an additional z level, as far as I understood the "draining teh magma sea" howto.