Bay 12 Games Forum

Are you excavating:
1) the edges of the embark and a few z levels at the very bottom?
or
2) everything except a few flat z levels at the surface?

I am caving in every single level all the way down to the top of the magma sea, at least. (Caverns will be complicated but not impossible...) The idea is to leave one solid floor one z-level above the highest Z in the magma sea and everything will collapse to that. I will leave nothing standing but the unmineable tiles on the edge of the map. Once I get down to the magma sea, then we'll see. I'm open to suggestions and advice.

I'd simply mine out the very edges of the map and let loose with a map-size lava piston. And then you can create a fortress over a lava lake. Bonus points if you manage to set up system to refill the lake.

There's an idea. Unfortunately, I don't really want to bite off quite that much for now.

Status update later tonight after I finish hauling and do the first collapse.

Quote from: Desgeretjin on November 11, 2013, 09:27:46 pm

And how do you intend to deal with the cavern lakes with their infinite refill?

Like all problems in life, this one can be solved with magma.

Exactly. I shall cast my way to victory, even though I have no experience with pump stacks or magma obsidian casting. (Really, though, what better way to learn?)

Brief status update. I'm too lazy to post pictures right now, that'll come later.

I arrived at the embark site with thirteen picks and seven dwarves, only two of which (the dwarves, not the picks) had no mining experience at all. (They're ground support, as it were.) My immediate goal was to get the channel started around the outer edge, so I ordered the five of them to get moving. After some burrow issues (dwarves don't like to channel in burrows...?), things got rolling and the two ground support guys fixed up a temporary shelter in the center of what will eventually be the world's largest hole in the ground. A good six months passed before we were totally safe from intruders, but nothing really catastrophic happened. After the first migrant wave, I'd already finished the trench, so I decided to start tearing down the mountains and leveling out the plain on which we had arrived. Less a plain, more a slope. Ah well. One cave-in accident occurred, smashing poor Urist - I mean Catten - I mean, oh, what was his name? into oblivion. Doesn't matter. We press on. The second migrant wave showed up and had to wait on the other side of the trench before a mason could build a bridge to them. Farms are getting going underground, the still is bubbling away happily, and all's going fine when suddenly a werebeast appeared. It massacred a piglet that the migrants had brought before transforming back into a dwarf, marveling at all the !!SCIENCE!!, and leaving. I'm pretty happy it didn't kill anyone. Getting migrants into the fort from here on out without goblins and the like coming along for the ride will be quite a chore. I'm thinking of giving up on the whole "caravan" thing... it's kind of overrated anyway, what with the wagons and depots and squishy bodies needing protection from marauding goblins. One final cave-in happened which never should have happened, but it was one square of floor above a spot I hadn't noticed, so give me a break. It didn't kill the miner anyhow. She fell a few floors and walked away with a bruised heart and lung. No biggie except she's pissed now for having received major injuries, and drinking the same old booze (plump helmet wine). She can suck my pick.

We're almost ready to collapse the mountains and level this plain down to nothing, but there is one issue to clear up first: all the valuable materials lying around. Mining out an entire mountain left something like three thousand stones behind, and I don't like to let all that go to waste. I hope to salvage it all but the operation is taking longer than my patience is likely to bear. Even at maximum speed, all eighteen or nineteen dwarves dumping stone, it's taking months to make even the slightest dent. Which makes sense, honestly. Eighteen dwarves divided by three thousand stones is a lot of weary Urists. Minus breaks, sleeping, eating, and drinking, and the dwarven child who arrived yesterday will die of old age before this is done. I suppose more migrants could make the process more efficient, but with migrants might come goblin raids, and a crossbow gobbo raid right now would finish me. Or any raid, for that matter, with the bridge down. We already saw one kobold thief show up around the same time as the caravan.

The main trench is only one z deep, but it's enough to keep out ninety per cent of what this world will throw at me for the first five or six years. I can ignore migrants and caravans safely, although I haven't decided for sure that I'll do it. Maybe the caverns will change things a bit. It would be nice to get caravans in through the caverns while sieges arrived up top. But securing caverns doesn't sound like much more fun than securing topside... hm. More suggestions are necessary for the ongoing ideafication of this embark!

And yes, I'll post pictures next time. Documentation shall proceed according to some semblance of reality and regularity. It's past three AM. I'm going to bed.

This + flooding the entire map with magma + stationing crossbowdwarves on tall towers EVERYWHERE over the new magma sea filled with HFS = there is no better way to tell the world to go fuck itself than rubbing it into it's face.
Bonus points for making a giant "CAN'T TOUCH THIS" sign over your fortress.

No, there is a better way. Did I tell you about my plans to cave in the world?

Question answered: he's my mayor now.

Anyway, I just had an interesting encounter with a forgotten beast (beware its deadly dust). Apparently it had the power to exhale clouds of frozen dust which instantly boiled and blasted all over everything, rotting the flesh of every dwarf that it came into contact with (although, praise Armok, not fatally).

I need soap now. And one of these days this will come back to haunt me, I swear. Hopefully none of my six legendary swordsdwarves will die from it. The militia commander seems to think she doesn't need treatment...

Just use DT to enforce child labour. Child labour is this best labour. You should use child labour. Why don't you use child labor? I use child labour.

To quote myself from another thread on the topic:

I'll do that when I get past playing vanilla. For now, I want to take DF on its own terms, not mine.

Thanks though. I'll keep it in mind for future forts where I want other challenges to deal with besides crummy overpopulation of useless mouths.

The Great Horse Slaughter proceeds apace. Their numbers are down to fourteen now (one of whom is unreachable but of no consequence, since he's male and will never reproduce). The five marksdwarves I recruited from the ranks of my haulers have all excelled in their training and all of them have been awarded titles for playing their part in raising my FPS.

Several children were killed by scared horses running through the fortress. Praise Armok!

And the majority of the children are now moving towards being useful members of the fort instead of useless mouths. At least twenty of them should grow old enough to work in the coming year or two.

Redwall is explicitly sandstone, color notwithstanding.

Which doesn't make a whole ton of sense, to be honest. Sandstone tends to be pretty crappy as a building material.