Bay 12 Games Forum

yes, any creature dropped 30+ z levels explode on contact with the ground if you pit them, just make sure to make some sort of safety hatch you so you can seal it off for maintenance.

Completely ineffective against well equipped bandits. It need not matter that your companions disappear every now and then, there are always plenty within travelling distance of a town.

hmm well i never expect my companions to ever kill anyone, they just need to be able to take a few hits without dieing so i can get behind the enemy and bite their ankle or wrist and tear it off.

But i guess you might have a point, you want well-armed companions near the start because if you give in to pain they need to be able to fight on their own until you can recover.

I see no one mentioned anything about using minecarts. How about a fort that uses minecarts exclusively for hauling?

hmm...this might actually be a very VERY good idea, it may be slow for smaller populations this way, but if you have massive numbers and most things tend to get produced in bulk this might seem like a challenge at first, but may also make your fortress very efficient once established, with efficiency increasing at least proportionally to increasing population.

i guess another challenge then, is to not use any minecarts at all. That would certainly put a dent in my current fort as i use minecart to haul up finished goods and splattered goblin body parts from down in my magma forges/when i clean out my death-drop pit.

FTFY. Please don't make this thread yet another no-go area.

what? well im sorry sir i cannot let the children infestation of parasitic mini-nobles spread in my fortresses without control, and my advice of making child smashers is genuine advice. Atm there is no child limit and children take 12 years to mature which is more than the life time of any fort i've had yet (my current and most successful fort is in it's 7-8th year).

There is no practical use at all for children except to replace fallen dwarves where immigration is scarce; and they do NOT fullfill this purpose very well in most forts because dwarves breed so prolifically but grow up so slowly so you end up with a un-controlled childsplosion thats just a large tantrum waiting to happen.

even when there is limited immigration (like in my case, my civ has no capital or ruler to begin with, i wonder why this civ was even available to play at the start, "The Blue Tours" is a dead civ and even though i had minimal casualties in dead dwarves i still only have a population of 150 in my 7th year...) and with a 20% adult population child-cap in place. The replacement or addition to dwarven population using children comes at a costly price.

This price is that no matter what labors you have to keep everyone busy, children end up making friends in their childhood, and you will slowly but surely have many dwarves with relationships to each other despite your best efforts to keep them apart. All it takes now is a single goblin ambush, a single forgotten beast run loose if even for a few frames, to send your fortress into a spiral of dumbness cuz you didnt have enough child smashers to take care of the children problem in its infancy.

oh and 1 more thing, your experiment was in a non-dangerous "test" situation, try it in a terrifying biome with 4 towers and if you are successful for idk, 12 years? then you might just have a point...

6- Never-breach aquifer. Self explanitory, get a map where all tiles have aquifer, and never breach it. Resources are limited, you never get magma, and usually you need to build above ground to have enough room for a full (100+ Dwarf) population.

this one should be fun, you wont have stone for construction either, you only get 1 block per unit of wood so that runs out quite fast. You also cant farm trees below ground since the caverns are never breached.

11- Pacifist. If invaders break in, it's pretty much all over. No military training, or weapons (other than picks and axes, for job completion), or traps, no violent defenses whatsoever. Fun, but tends to end at the first siege in a torrent of blood.

this ones quite easy, just wall off; and it depends on how "flexible" violent defenses and traps mean. just build cave-in traps for all the goblins if your excluding simple traps only. Or secret passages that lure forgotten beasts and goblin sieges into a contained area that also lead to a arena where they duel and your dwarves watch.

caverns are the safest places you can be on some embark locations, just make sure you have a entrance with some cage traps and a bridge that can seal it off completely if a forgotten beast shows up. Also chain a animal or pen one near the end of the traps for the occasional gremlin.

since there is caverns and hell, and sometimes players build mega projects so far up that they cannot build any farther up into the sky. I was thinking of this: making a "cloud" layer above the sky that is mine-able and about as easy to mine as soil. There will be a couple of cloud layers with the third most significant one being heaven.

Various creatures spawn in the cloud layers just like in the caverns, but most of them being good, like winged unicorns, giant fluffy wamblers, etc... with trees and plants being good-aligned trees like feather tree and sunberry in addition to some new ones exclusive to heaven and the cloud layers. Plants from the skies wont grow on the ground, but will grow on muddied floor tiles that are a certain number of Z levels above the ground.

Once heaven itself is breached (which will be for no reason at all, except for fun, as hell is breached from greed for adamantium) your fort will be besieged occasionally from the sky by flying war-angels, heavily armored crusaders of the light, and lightly armored sky-elves because they consider all races of the earth (except for maybe elves) to be impure, and not completely "good". The sieges will have the message "The Enemy is Upon us: A Radiant Force of Light has arrived".

The siege may arrive in the cloud layers, the layer of heaven, or maybe descend to earth first and then advance like a normal siege. At it's worst (funnest!) the siege will be composed entirely of fliers that will fly down to the earth levels but not "walk" to your fortress, and instead fly.

Enemies and creatures that naturally occur in the clouds might also possess the ability to transverse the solid clouds freely as if they were air, making defending and fighting in the cloud layers more dangerous (fun) unless you construct everything there out of materials of the earth (and not simply mining and walling off entrances with bridges).

Shields. Lots of shields. Preferably all in one hand, and while sneaking.

this too, the other super-cheap way; mass wooden shields in 1 hand salvaged from a previous fort in the same world; or elf bandits if you modded them in.

Mass metal shields might weigh you down too much.