Bay 12 Games Forum

I have a main shaft going down a couple levels (I usually leave at least one level completely undisturbed except for shafts, because I like to use collapses as defenses and don't want them punching through the floors). The main shaft enters into a small hallway that connects to another main shaft, this one generally going all the way to the lowest level.

That little disconnect between the shafts makes it easier to defend (by blocking the hallway there off with floodgates or bars, one can force an invading army to route to a much longer, more dangerous pathway).

After that, I connect to the main shaft with large, open rooms for stockpiles. Past those (or inside those), I build workshops to relate to the goods stored in the stockpile. (One stockpile holds certain items, like plants, fish, and thread, that need to be processed. It'll be surrounded by looms, farmer's workshops, and fisheries. Another stockpile holds meat, processed/cookable/brewable plants, and is surrounded by kitchens and stills.

The pantry is on its own level with nothing else there, and contains two large rooms (one booze stockpile and one prepared meal stockpile). It's generally a level below the workshops, and a level below the pantry, I have a dining room and the lever control chamber.

Basically, I sort everything vertically. On one level, I have farming and most food industry. On another level, valuable production industry (metals, cloth), and on another, bulk production industry (stone/wood/bonecrafting, masonry, carpentry, etc). Those are all clustered together on three or four z-levels. Below that is the pantry, and generally on an adjacent z-level, there's the dining room and the levers. The levers are on the same level as the dining room (just opposite) since that puts them in easy reach of the largest concentration of off-duty dwarves.

As for each level...

The structure I use a lot is thus.
Stockpiles connect to that hallway. Only one of those stairways leads out of the fort, but the fact that there's two means that a dwarf doesn't have to tramp all the way across a stockpile area to get some booze. It shortens everyone's paths and keeps congestion down.

As for the rest of the z-levels... I put the bedrooms one or two z-levels up from the bottom of the map, and mine out the very bottom whenever my miners are bored. I use flood traps and don't want to accidentally flood the fort; the open bottom level is a nice drain. The bedrooms are isolated from most noise, though i've been known to place workshops on the bottom level (to take advantage of the ready-to-hand stone piles).

Except instead of one of the chairs dumping its occupant into magma, the button dumps magma into the occupant's chair.

Set the naughty clowns to kill the squishies? Awesome.

(is thinking of that awesome thread where the word "clowns" was used to describe all HFS, which was easily the most epic method of censorship ever.)

Hum. I guess that if the fortress is a hundred years old you are pretty much invulnerable even to most forms of tantrum spiral due to the fortress being unassailable and your people being orgasmically happy every day, such that even the death-by-old-age of your entire starting population wouldn't do much...

Which is why, yes, people start on crazy stuff. When I get bored with a fortress, I usually just abandon unless the denizens managed to really tick me off somehow; for instance, one fortress ground to a halt via tantrums, so I sealed the doors and opened the floodgates, then stayed there watching for three hours as the place flooded in its entirety (minus one z-level... argh!)

Would that stop the colored blocks from being found naturally? That's my issue with adding them as stone... I don't know if it'll make them show up in the ground.

In any case, for my own purposes, having them be considered metal works just fine. It allows one to melt them down to make colored bars (for vertical/horizontal bars), and because of the strange ways I manage labor, it's actually easier to manage. I have a significant population of semi-unskilled workers, and masonry is one of their designated labors (so that they'll go and work on my constructions). I don't tend to seek out magma, so my metalworking is sporadic rather than constant, and it's easier to just use Dwarf Therapist and designate thirty laborers to take up metalsmithing than to do the same with masonry (since, while masonry jobs are nigh-constant, metalsmithing jobs are rather rare).

Anyone interested in a copy of this one?

Slapped it together and did some testing. It's easy beyond reason... Smelter tags accept "any stone" and turn it into "red paint bars." It's designated as a metal for testing purposes, but it can't be used for anything but making vertical/floor bars (it uses the [BRITTLE] tag that pig iron has).

Testing block versions now.

Works fine.

I made it a metal because I don't know how to make it into a stone that won't be actually used outside of the smelter reactions. In my experience, putting the [DEEP] tag on a metal ensures that nobody will use that metal, even if they can theoretically produce it, aside from the fortress. (I once created [DEEP] Magmatite, a metal with all the properties of bauxite that could be refined at a punishing ratio from iron bars and that could be used to make mechanisms, a la HFS).

You could probably melt the paint blocks, at which point you'd wind up with paint bars which would be utterly useless for anything aside from making floor/vertical bars...

Also, you have to start out by making "primed blocks," which basically was my way of ensuring that my smelter wouldn't always be clogged by fifteen different "MAKE PAINT BLOCKS" reactions. Primed blocks are made from any stone and paint blocks are made from primed blocks...

I'm going to finish this one up some other time, once I feel like adding enough colors, and then if anyone cares I'll put it up for you.

I was thinking of doing something whereby one could use the dwarven philosopher's stone (the smelter) to convert a raw material (generic stone blocks?) to specifically colored building materials.

Can the smelter accept "any block" or "any block made from stone" as acceptable inputs? If so, the reaction could go: "stone block"->"red block" (block with all of the properties of stone blocks, plus being colored red).

Might be cool. Any inputs?

The tendency of dwarven babies to suicide is tragic and hilarious.

For instance, in one of my forts I was working on a cistern to power a few flood traps, and I accidentally tunneled into the brook for part of the underground section. This caused a moderate flood (eventually controlled) which, in turn, caused a number of mothers to drop their babies upon being slammed with flowing water. My WTF moments started to come when I was getting death messages, and using the stocks menu I eventually found several dead babies in my reservoir. My best guess, of course, is that their widdle baby eyes couldn't tell the reservoir from the layers of water coverings on their actual mothers.

Urist McBaby: Mama? Is that yo-*burble burble blurp dead*