Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm playing on my project fort (Caving in the world) and a mood finishes, creating a bone axe. Okay, whatever. I was busy with other things at the time, namely preventing my fort from dehydrating to death, so I didn't bother checking its description.

A while later, another mood happened. This time it was an acacia crossbow. I usually check every description for interesting details of history and such, so this time I opened the artifacts tab, remembered I hadn't looked at the battle axe, and selected it first.

It had an image of the crossbow on it.

What. The. HELL?

I can think of two explanations: 1) Dwarves occasionally see the future; or 2) the axe's description wasn't created until the first time I looked at it, ergo it had an image of the crossbow on it.

If it's the second reason, I'm far less freaked out, but if I were in this room alone I'd have shouted aloud when I read the axe's description. It flipped me for a loop.

Don't feel any pressure on this one particular request; just, whenever you get around to it.

This child would have been something else had she lived.

I'm going to assume that titans and forgotten beasts made of steam are procedurally generated when they enter your embark area, otherwise they'd never survive the world long enough to be notable. That said, it doesn't make much sense that some legendary creature could be composed of such a weak substance. There are a billion examples of one tiny pinch being enough to dissipate an entire FB made of steam or water. Dwarven children apparently do it all the time when pushed for a counterstrike. Toady should probably fix that and make sure nothing so ridiculous could be created, but if he doesn't want to lose the hilarious one-shot-kill-on-a-monster-of-legend stories, then maybe not.

I don't know why the goblins insist on sending ambushes to my fort. They all die to massive bleeding of every body part whenever one of the nasty purple clouds drifts by...

!!THUNDERDOME!! would have to include magma and flames, otherwise it's just a THUNDERDOME.

Creating 100z + waterfall would be bad for FPS, if the actual cave-in doesn't crash said computer first.

With all this hauling, are minecarts being used?  Or at least wheel barrows?

Unfortunately, neither. I don't have a metal industry yet, and IIRC dwarves don't use wheelbarrows for dumping operations. Besides, I can't spare the wood right now.

The above two comments sound most likely to be true. That would fall under #1. Ignore the rest of my post and make sure the guy can actually get to the logs.

A migrant wave has brought thirty four new faces to the fortress of Hameskull. Unfortunately, sixteen of those are children. Still, though, I can't really complain; the hauling work will go much faster now, even if I have to pull some miners out to excavate some new living spaces. I'm not entirely sure if booze production will keep up - the farms have been barely keeping everyone watered even with only twenty dwarves, so I'm understandably worried.


I may have to pierce the first cavern layer for water. I can get a well and a cistern filled without much risk of invasion from forgotten beasts or giant toads. The real problem is that I don't want five million forgotten beasts showing up before I'm ready to open the caverns and drain the lakes.

An elven caravan arrived at the end of the second spring.


Checking the civ page informs me that we also have (at best) some snatchers hanging out on the lip of the (soon to be) crater as well, so I'm not lowering the bridge any time soon. Any migrants that show up will have to deal with mad elves and goblins; !!SCIENCE!! waits for no one.

Uzol, one of our legendary miners, just went into a fey mood, grabbed one stone, and went to work. She's thirsty because of the booze situation - I hope she doesn't dehydrate to death. Another legendary mason would be worth having. ...ah, good, a rock salt armor stand!


I can add that to my collection of useless shit: rock salt grate, acacia animal trap. At least I have a legendary carpenter and two legend masons.


My concerns about booze have proved to be completely unfounded, thank Armok. I think I checked the stocks at the wrong moment or something. My brewer is keeping up and the farms are doing just fine, so that's not an issue any longer.

The elves have left. I don't know (and don't care) whether the goblins have left. I'm sitting at a comfortable population of thirty-seven adult working dwarves and eighteen children, so opening up the outer barrier isn't a priority, even for a human or dwarven caravan. The mountainhome can go screw itself for all I care; as soon as I finish the first collapse, I can start work on an entrance that will survive future collapses. I think a 100-z-level staircase to the lip of a giant crater sounds pretty badass.

How my dwarves manage to do this without the wine tasting horrible is beyond me:

And more migrants have arrived. I'll lower the drawbridge just this once. If I die to a goblin ambush, I swear to Armok I'll... well, I dunno. We'll see. ...twenty-one more migrants; ten of them were children.


Spores! I swear... I may just let all the children die in the first collapse. That seems like a good option to me. They won't be useful for years anyway. Their parents, on the other hand, have just handed me eleven more haulers on a silver platter.


The first collapse will probably take place within the next four or five months. (There's still a lot of hauling to do.)

In other news, some random dwarf has been elected mayor.


I expect to see unfulfillable mandates for short swords and gauntlets soon. (A metal industry is the last thing on my mind.) She'll just have to deal with it. One unhappy mayor is unlikely to cause a fully fledged tantrum spiral. The worst she could do would be to pull the support lever before all the dwarves are underground, or pull the drawbridge lever when a siege was going on, and I can use a burrow restriction to stop her from doing that if I need to. She won't even start fist fights if I restrict her job options to her own room.

Did I say her own room? Sorry, I meant her own tiny corner of the fortress. I have no individual rooms yet.


We're about halfway through the hauling work. It's accelerated significantly but there are still over fifteen hundred objects to haul. I'm having everything moved to a retractable bridge over a channeled square, so eventually I'll be able to drop the stone straight down (depending on caverns and such) to the bottom level for use in industries that will support the massive cave-in project.


Three thousand stones should hold me over for ten or fifteen years, especially since I have no plans to accept caravans and therefore need no crafts.

Two more children have been born, which is weird since I have my child cap set to 25. That makes thirty total. Useless mouths... *sigh*

I'm rethinking my plans to proceed at maximum speed with the cave-in. Perhaps I should attempt to set up a functioning fortress before just rampaging ahead with such a massive project. At any rate, ignoring migrants and caravans may not be the best idea. Besides, I can build a fortress in the top ten or fifteen layers, then move down to the magma sea area when I'm ready to cave in the rest of the world. Thoughts? Ideas?

In other news, the human caravan arrived. I wasn't on the lookout for it, so I didn't have the drawbridge down. Even so, I'm pretty damn certain some goblin raiders came with it. I'd like to have the dwarven caravan arrive and leave safely to carry back the news of "No, we don't need any more migrants," (pop cap at 50) but the danger may be too great. I've had too much fun to not know better. I can ignore migrants and caravans from here until I get a proper entrance set up.

Final statement for this report: I'm not going to work on a caravan-friendly, enemy-unfriendly entrance in the remaining two months before the second dwarven caravan arrives. It's not worth it to me. The hauling is still going strong. We're completely out of plump helmets, which worries me; harvest can't come soon enough... running out of booze is probably the current biggest threat to the fort's safety.

Hope you don't have a river/stream, because won't it just eventually fill up the giant hole?

No river or stream. I embarked to a location specifically without one. I could do the collapse anyway, but it'd look a bit funnier.