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Author Topic: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas  (Read 7882 times)

Sabreur

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Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« on: March 13, 2012, 02:28:41 pm »

Newbie Dorf here.  I put off playing DF for ages because I just couldn't see what all the fuss is about, and I'm finally getting it.

I admit I was bored at first - walling yourself in with a bajillion traps is safe, but also boring as hell.  That fort fell due to a misunderstanding over how to transport caged prisoners resulting in an entire goblin siege force been released right next to the dining hall.  I could have savescummed, but at that point it felt more like a mercy killing.

My new fort has been much more fun.  First, it gets attacked by a dreaded Were-Tapir!  I panic, pull everyone inside and raise the drawbridge while I frantically try to train marksdorfs in hopes of killing it from a distance - at which point it turns back into an elf and sheepishly wanders off the map.

A little later, a dorf gets possessed.  He grabs a workshop and starts ranting about bones.  I don't know what his problem is, we have plenty of bones sitting in the refuse stockpile.  I give up on him and assign a pack of wardogs to eat him when he goes crazywatch over him.

Suddenly, a Werellama attacks!  There was a big group of human traders with swordsmen and pikemen guards in the depot at the time, so I left the drawbridge down.  Not my problem if a human ends up fuzzy on the full moon, and I wanted to see if my earlier panic was justified at all.

The werellama gets halfway to the depot, then turns back into a dwarf.  He begins the same sheepish retreat back to the edge of the map - and runs into my hunter, who promptly wrecks his shit.  Seriously, he emptied a dozen bronze bolts into the retreating Werellama and left a trail of blood and gore across twenty tiles.  On a related note, my hunter kinda scares me.  He totally ignores 'normal' prey like weasels and whatnot - he prefers alligators.  If it isn't capable of biting a dwarf in half, he doesn't bother hunting it unless everything else is already dead.  Despite being an excellent marksdorf, he never gets a quick kill - his victims always have multiple bleeding wounds before they die.  I think he aims for the legs on purpose.

Anyways, while I'm busy admiring the kill, my possessed dwarf comes screaming out of the fortress and drags the werellama's corpse back to the workshop.  Moments later, he begins construction and makes - an alligator bone chest.  The hell?  How the hell do you get an alligator bone chest out of dwarven werellama bones?  On second thought I don't want to know.

While all this is happening, a bunch of buzzards swoop down and try to steal from the supply depot.  On the way down, the pass over a couple weapon traps armed with iron spinning blades which detonate them like some kind of feathered hand grenade.  The resulting rain of gore completely covers the trading depot - and the now-traumatized human traders.  One piece of buzzard somehow ends up twenty tiles west inside the moat, but pretty much every other piece landed on or next to a human trader.  Seriously, there are maybe two tiles in the entire depot which aren't covered in blood and buzzard guts.  It was the bloodiest mess I've yet seen in dwarf fortress, and it still cracks me up thinking about it.

A little while later, my miners were interrupted by Crundles in the caverns.  Not knowing what a Crundle is, I panicked (again) and sent my military charging down the stairs to rescue my fleeing miners.  They covered four z-levels in gore, and my hospital is now stocked with soap made from Crundle tallow.

I love this game so much now.

olopi

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #1 on: March 13, 2012, 02:56:26 pm »

Maybe the Corpse was from an Alligator? Btw: Epic Story xD
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Dwarves use their beards to influence the adamantite to change form. A dwarves beard is specialized in his job, therefore a legendary miner has a much better mining beard then a legendary weaponsmith, who has a beard that influences metals to make armor much more.
This also explains why dwarves can have a city on just a soap pillar, the beard of the soapmaking dwarf causes the soap to become rigid.

slothen

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #2 on: March 13, 2012, 03:02:01 pm »

I was expecting your hunter to nail a buzzard and have it explode upon falling 10 z levels to the ground.
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Sabreur

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #3 on: March 13, 2012, 03:02:08 pm »

Maybe the Corpse was from an Alligator? Btw: Epic Story xD

The only thing I can think of is that maybe he grabbed Alligator bones when I wasn't looking and just needed Dwarf Werebeast bones to finish up.  Either way, I about died laughing when I saw Urist McBonecarver and his squad of doggie escorts go running across half the map to drag the body back to the workshop.

Sabreur

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #4 on: March 13, 2012, 03:11:37 pm »

I was expecting your hunter to nail a buzzard and have it explode upon falling 10 z levels to the ground.

Nope, they just flew too low.  There's an overhanging cliff that forced them to fly at ground level to reach the trade depot, which put them in weapon-trap range.  It took me a minute to figure out what happened - one moment everything's fine and I'm watching my possessed dorf dragging a corpse, then next moment there's a few 'interrupted by buzzard' messages followed by a fountain of blood.

My hunter mostly ignores buzzards - he's too busy committing genocide on the map's supply of large carnivores.

smeeprocket

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #5 on: March 13, 2012, 03:33:52 pm »

click 'l' (that's a lowercase L) and select the artifact to view it.

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Sabreur

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #6 on: March 13, 2012, 03:38:03 pm »

click 'l' (that's a lowercase L) and select the artifact to view it.

I did - it's an alligator bone chest with bands of alligator bone and a couple other materials.  No dorf bones, though.  I'll check again when I get home.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe he needed 3 bones for his project and only had two available at first (I think I might have made bone practice bolts out of the other usable skeletons before he could get to them).  So he grabbed the werebeast bones to 'finish' the project, but since he started with Alligator bone the werebeast bones don't show up in the description.

slothen

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #7 on: March 13, 2012, 03:50:16 pm »

if his third bone had been cat bones, they would have shown up.  Either he didn't use the were-corpse, or were-bones are bugged for artifacts.  Either is plausible.
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While adding magma to anything will make it dwarfy, adding the word "magma" to your post does not necessarily make it funny.
Thoughts on water
MILITARY: squad, uniform, training
"DF doesn't mold players into its image - DF merely selects those who were always ready for DF." -NW_Kohaku

Sabreur

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #8 on: March 13, 2012, 03:53:12 pm »

if his third bone had been cat bones, they would have shown up.  Either he didn't use the were-corpse, or were-bones are bugged for artifacts.  Either is plausible.

Good point.  Maybe he didn't use the corpse itself, but one of the corpse's possessions?  I thought I had all the materials he needed from the very start, but he didn't start gathering until the moment the werellama hit the ground.  Either way, it was hilarious.

Mitchewawa

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #9 on: March 13, 2012, 04:17:00 pm »

A little while later, my miners were interrupted by Crundles in the caverns.  Not knowing what a Crundle is, I panicked (again) and sent my military charging down the stairs to rescue my fleeing miners.  They covered four z-levels in gore, and my hospital is now stocked with soap made from Crundle tallow.

Google it  :P
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Nyxalinth

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #10 on: March 13, 2012, 07:12:14 pm »

A little while later, my miners were interrupted by Crundles in the caverns.  Not knowing what a Crundle is, I panicked (again) and sent my military charging down the stairs to rescue my fleeing miners.  They covered four z-levels in gore, and my hospital is now stocked with soap made from Crundle tallow.

Google it  :P

This...but make sure you specify Dwarf Fortress :P
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Leo and the Hairy Midgets

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #11 on: March 13, 2012, 07:25:52 pm »

This is what Dorf Fortress is meant for.

If you aren't having Fun, then something pretty damn interesting better be taking place.
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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #12 on: March 13, 2012, 08:14:08 pm »

Welcome to DF!  Don't read spoiler threads just yet, there is a lot of fun waiting for you :)
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Sabreur

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #13 on: March 14, 2012, 11:50:17 am »

Welcome to DF!  Don't read spoiler threads just yet, there is a lot of fun waiting for you :)

Unfortunately, I already spoilered pretty much everything by reading "Let's Play" accounts.

Fun has still happened anyway - long story short, goblins got inside and murdered a third of the population.  I got greedy with a big vein of natural gold, and coupled with a run of natural gold artifacts (none of which were actually useful for anything, of course) my fortress wealth shot up to the point where my 5-man squad of dabbling-to-competent hammerdorfs was trying to fight off multiple waves of ambushers every season.  I also made the mistake of sending them out ahead of the traps to save some human traders (Tip to future newbies - sometimes lone goblin ambushers have lots of friends).  That got a couple of them killed, and when the next ambush arrived they just got overwhelmed.  I'm pretty sure my lunatic hunter is the only reason anyone in the fort is alive at all.

I think I'm going to scrap this one and start over.  I made some mistakes setting up my industries and assigning jobs, which is partly why my military got slaughtered - only one or two of them was fully armored, the rest just had their hammers and maybe a breastplate and leggings.  My furnace workers spent way too much time idle due to lack of fuel, and it wasn't until late in my game that I figured out how to keep them constantly supplied with charcoal and lignite without screwing up my carpenters.  Next time, I'll put a much higher priority on getting my metal industry (especially weapons and armor) up and running.  I'm also going to have a bigger military.  I got lulled into a false sense of security during the first few years - seeing my military massacre Crundles convinced me that only having a handful of soldiers was acceptable, but it quickly became obvious they couldn't handle real opponents.

I also want to start playing with magma, but my current fort has none that's easily accessible.  Every time I sink an exploratory shaft, I run into multiple cavern layers, and after this last debacle I need every scrap of iron I've got to churn out steel weapons and armor.

On a somewhat related note, what do you all use for bolts?  I've been using wood and bone for training and bronze for combat because I didn't want to use iron or steel on ammunition.  Is the performance close enough that I can get away with that, or am I crippling my dwarves with inferior ammo?

miauw62

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Re: Exploding Buzzards and Werellamas
« Reply #14 on: March 14, 2012, 12:28:06 pm »

You dont WANT to know what a crudnle is.

Btw, i see you are becoming more dwarf, laughing at exploding buzzards.
Welcome into the house of !!fun!!!  ;D
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