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[TheFlame52]

I reread the thread and it's just as amazing the second time. Also, I noticed one of your newlyweds is a militia captain. Are they in the military? In 0.40+ active military dwarves won't have kids, I don't know if it's like that in 0.34.

[Hetairos]

Keep in mind, in 0.34 the world does not progress in the background as you do. If your fortress is 100 years old, it's possible that the rest of dwarvenkind sort of... stopped breeding new dudes and died of old age.

I don't really know how does 0.34 behave in respect to that, but I thought the game would just keep spawning dwarves at least for the caravan, as long as the civ was alive at embark. Did anyone run a 0.34 fortress that long? Any community ones? Archcrystal uses the new version, unfortunately.

I reread the thread and it's just as amazing the second time. Also, I noticed one of your newlyweds is a militia captain. Are they in the military? In 0.40+ active military dwarves won't have kids, I don't know if it's like that in 0.34.

Thanks. Fath does not belong to the actual military, just the fort's crossbow militia. Every civilian who isn't a miner or a woodcutter has a crossbow and a shield and some of them are technically squad leaders, but don't regularly spend time on duty. Sometimes they shoot kobolds, or I call upon them to train by shooting crundles or to provide fire support for the soldiers.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Anyway, that clearly isn't a problem, as Fath and Libash have had two babies already! I'll need to arrange a few more marriages to call the project a full success, but now it's most likely just a matter of time. The youngest adult dwarfs are 20, so the gap between generations isn't terribly huge, although enough to prevent them from intermarrying.

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Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've been having trouble keeping the dwarfs together and stocking the room with food and drink, in spite of any burrows and linked stockpiles. I need to sort this out before the next couple can start bonding. Burrowed dwarfs seem to idle in the general area of the burrow, but will leave it if starving or dehydrated. They won't die if simply left alone, but I'd rather avoid that for a number of reasons.

I had to find something else to do for the rest of the fort, so I began work on displacing the Forgotten Beasts occupying one of the adamantine spires. A few chained animals, an artifact armour stand and drawbridges should draw them out. I want the dwarves to ride minecarts past the containment area and shoot at them to train. It would be so much easier if I could get the speed calculator to run. The track is ready, it just needs adjustments so carts speed to the target area, then pass by slowly so the dwarves can fire as many shots as possible and return without wasting time.

[speciesunkn0wn]

I've finished reading this awesomeness just now. H-O-L-Y CARP. And Armok's Beard. This was epic! It absolutely deserves a TVtropes page. 100+ Year FIRST EVER FORTRESS???!!! CMOA for DF indeed. Also deserves a Hall of Legends (or whatever the proper title of that place is) post/mention/placing/whatever.

I do have a question. How did you get every civvie armed with a shield and crossbow?

[darokindefender]

This is an awesome fort! 

Truly a testament to just what can be accomplished in the game (if you're lucky and skilled, that is).

PTW

[Hetairos]

Thanks everyone. I'm glad you're enjoying this.

I do have a question. How did you get every civvie armed with a shield and crossbow?

The key part is making a custom uniform (n → c) which consists only of a shield and a crossbow. Then you just put them all into squads and assign the uniform (e → U → Shift+Enter).

[speciesunkn0wn]

Thanks everyone. I'm glad you're enjoying this.

I do have a question. How did you get every civvie armed with a shield and crossbow?

The key part is making a custom uniform (n → c) which consists only of a shield and a crossbow. Then you just put them all into squads and assign the uniform (e → U → Shift+Enter).

Ooooooh. Ok. :3

[Loud Whispers]

Thanks everyone. I'm glad you're enjoying this.

Just can't get enough. I do find it hilarious that at the end of the day, administrative issues in the Ministry of Romance can be just as existentially deadly to a Fortress as Eldritch beings inimical to all life.

[Hetairos]

I have good and bad news.

The good ones - there is a workaround for the bug that keeps migrants and caravans from coming from the mountainhomes.

The bad news are that it requires a script unavailable for my version of the game/DFHack. The regular matrimonial arrangements will therefore proceed as usual.

So far that resulted in 11 kids born. Still, deaths caused by various factors brought the fort down to a dangerously low level of 119 citizens. Among others, I lost my last dedicated mechanic to old age. And I accidentally dropped a furnace operator into an eerie glowing pit. Anyway, the last couple to enter the honeymoon suite is Cog Talktongs and Datan Boltsflights, and they've been there for a while now, apparently not quite in a hurry to seal the deal. I can with all confidence say I'm getting close to matching the natural population loss.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should move the suite somewhere there is a well. Keeping it supplied with booze has been a problem no matter how much I fiddle with stockpile and workshop links. Lack of bonus happiness from drinks might be a problem, but a nice enough well could offset that.

Minotaurs visited Wirejade a few times. I have five captive now, and put four of them in a room to see if they can breed in fortress mode. Nothing has come out of this so far and I doubt anything will, not that I was expecting much.

Iden Armorkeys, a hammerlord, got the title of the Dour Deep of Problems out of killing kobold thieves. On the opposite side, kobold thief Griris killed a named war lion and became Griris Risewalks, at least for the short while before the military showed up and he took a hammer to the skull.

I continued the work on the training facility in hell described in the last update. Once I calibrated the minecart route (which involved a bunch of carts ending up forever lost in the depths of the glowing pits), it was time for testing. Fath Dentedcoal got in the minecart and rode it all the way around the loop and again, and again, until I had to forbid it and force her to get off. With that confirmed as working, I moved on to get the Forgotten Beasts out of the spire and in the prepared area.

The plan was simple. Put a few war animals in the way to lure them in, and a piece of artifact furniture at the end. Once the beasts get there, retract the drawbridge to shut them inside. The thing is, I had used an artifact table to make them stay in the spire to begin with, and they were unwilling to leave. Taking out the table with a cave-in was the only way.

This backfired spectacularly.

As many of you know, cave-ins work in strange and often unpredictable ways. Still, I thought dropping a single wall tile down several floors won't end in anything too disastrous. I was wrong.

The dwarf who mined out the last supporting floor was caught in the dust cloud and fell straight onto the slade floor of hell. Needless to say, he did not survive. RIP Ushrir Glazeddoors. His main profession was actually animal training, and that in Wirejade means being constantly followed by a large herd of war animals. Take note - this will prove important later on.



These are the creatures stuck in the spire back when I had first sealed it. At the point of the cave-in only two were left alive and uncaptured: Slevina Deathmenace the Ruthless Curses, a web-spinning porcelain humanoid with three tails and and Emura Lobstermenaced the Washed Poisons, a steel cockroach with poisonous vapours. And instead of slamming them into the walls, the knockback somehow sucked them in through the hole in the floor and into hell, on the wrong side of the walls of the containment area.

They destroyed a bunch of doors and then headed straight for the forges. The recently built garbage disposal railway wasn't sealed off in time and I was forced to order everyone to quickly evacuate, leaving a few soldiers behind in case capturing the beasts was no longer feasible. Emura and Slevina broke some more doors and at that exact moment the animals which used to follow Ushrir around began to arrive at the entrance to the forges on their way back to the fort.

Slevina broke off to fight them, covering everything in webs. Already damaged by all the animals I had previously dropped into the spire as web bait for the cage traps there, it lost most limbs and was almost destroyed, yet found a corner right outside the entrance where it just pinned everything down by spamming webs faster then its foes could untangle themselves.

Since apparently that wasn't enough trouble, a minotauress paid Wirejade a visit. She promptly fell into a cage trap, much to my relief.

Meanwhile, Emura stayed behind to break some furniture, then slowly followed in Slevina's footsteps. But he only way there led through a narrow corridor filled with traps, a single tile in width. This wouldn't have been a factor had Slevina not thoroughly covered the whole thing in webbing. For a web-spinner, it's still not a concern, but all Emura had was a poisonous bite. The weapon trap had been jammed by the corpse of an unfortunate giant jaguar, which lost all its limbs to the serrated blades before death, and couldn't trigger. And with its next step, Emura walked straight into a cage trap.



With the nearly 79 tons of angry metal monster contained, I set about defeating Slevina. A frontal attack would have likely ended with my entire military suck in webs, so the situation called for clever tactics. Fortunately, there is more than one way to leave the forges, creating an opportunity for a flanking manoeuvrer. The soldiers marched out of and over and around the metalworks. Even though most of them threw themselves into webs, all I needed was at least one dwarf in the right place. The beast didn't last very long.

Cleanup took a while due to all the webs. The spire in particular was filled with webbed cage traps, some of them still armed. I had to wait for weavers finish their job before hauling out all the cages, mechanisms and skeletons. In the end, I got a nice mountain of meat, bones, tallow and other products from the butchered beasts. The soap makers are still busy with it, and I (literally) burned through a decent chunk of the wood stockpile. The whole setup meant to lure the FBs into the containment area was no longer needed as I can just release them straight from the cages, so I pulled it down too. Punched a way from the ore stockpile to the spire too, as there's no need to take a detour through the cavern.

Emura will be used as an eternal practice target for marksdwarves together with two vomit blobs I happened to capture. I don't even remember if projectiles can kill them. Two more FBs and an ape devil are in my cages, but I don't have any plans for them yet.

[TheFlame52]

AWESOME

[Sarrak]

Agreed, this is marvelous.

I remember weak-material blobs happily dying to the first projectile that hits main body. But you still have Emura for training.

[Hetairos]

That happens with nearly intangible materials like smoke or fire. Vomit is a fair bit more durable than that. One of the blobs is already fractured.

EDIT: Cog and Datan are finally married.

[Fleeting Frames]

You could also install steel FB into main dining room, in case of gremlins.

But yeah, that's a lot of FBs.

Never used eerie glowing pits for disposal, doesn't it have some bug with infinitely falling water killing FPS? (I mean, more than usual with water flowing off the map.)

I take the relocation was attempted because you wanted to build a silk industry and marksdwarf training setup?

Though, I hope in the latter the marksdwarves wont get hit by poisonous vapours.

As for the operation idea....I guess another way would have been to use obsidianizing from above.

Still, that is hell of an amazing outcome for releasing a steel FB OR a webber FB into central stairway, let alone both!

[Hetairos]

There was some bug with the pits, yeah. Wasn't it related to digging into SMR from below? I'm too lazy to look that up. If you toss items into a pit, they just disappear. Same with creatures, but they get a little animation of falling in. You can set up a clever trap with a narrow walkway right over a pit and some marksdwarves - any hostiles that dodge the bolts will be likely to fall into the pit, including fliers like demons.

The training facility is up and running now. An untrained dwarf will fire twice during a single run. Slevina was a problem because I couldn't cage it. I wasn't really expecting web farming, I can just lure in a demon.

Obsidianisation would've carried a risk of killing the beasts. Not a one I was willing to take.

Really, if you read between the lines I was more lucky than clever. The contingency plan was to unleash the soldiers and hope adamantine will cut up steel fast enough.

[Hetairos]

Due to save corruption I had to revert progress to before the events of this post. Most, but not all of it, is no longer relevant.

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This is shameful display and I have to apologise for it, but it didn't happen without a reason. The framerate reached the point when I can no longer just leave DF running in the background for an extensive amount of time without everyone running out of things to do, but at the same time it's not quite high enough for regular screen-staring not to get boring. My efforts to speed up progress paradoxically slowed it down, at least until I can boost performance even more. Secondly, with other projects either complete or at a satisfying enough stage, I felt it's high time I got to setting up the magma hellcannons I was probably talking about a long while ago. The thing is, I didn't have a design ready, and it's not something I can just eyeball, slap together and adjust as necessary. Huge volumes of magma and trial-and-error don't go well together. I wanted to examine and possibly incorporate Larix's findings, but couldn't really find time to sit down and do it properly.

Anyway, I have a basic design to work with now. Very much a work in progress, nothing to show just yet. I might even end up using one cart for multiple shots, rollers may or may not be included, either way should be fun. I can't just copy the watercannon design since I'm building on the lowest z-level and can't dig. Magma will be behind the tracks and the carts will dip into it for a moment, taking advantage of the lack of pressure. I didn't want to exploit that in the beginning, but there doesn't seem to be another way to do it and minecart engineering is made of exploits, so I might as well embrace it.

One thing I finished before that was the surface minecart cannons. All the batteries on the same level as the river are at last online. The lever linking interface is incredibly clunky even by DF standards. The damage they can deal depends heavily on the size of the target: creatures no bigger than an elk bird will suffer multiple broken bones, but a Forgotten Beast will be barely bruised.

There was a problem with the drainage - the channel in one place near the hospital is only 1 z-level deep, and that's apparently not enough. A water reservoir I was going to use for a hospital well is right beneath. I had remembered pressure is a thing in time and hadn't flooded the whole hospital, but it was still connected to the main cistern and the river. I closed the floodgates and shut the river off, then drained the cistern into the caverns. The exact area had been connected to the old shaft previously used to dump trash into the magma sea. There was (and still is) a huge pile of magma-safe furniture at the bottom I had wanted to reclaim, and this seemed like a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Once I had a nice 4x7 column of water 7 z's tall, I pulled the lever. You can probably see where this is going. It was quite impressive really, the water reached the bottom in mere moments. I was afraid for a moment it would flood the forges, because a lot of it went sideways into the corridor between them and the trash shaft. Took ages to dry up and now I have trees popping up and blocking the way. At least the cistern has a nice stone floor now.

I see the last update had the for at 119 inhabitants. This number has since gone up to 136, and the first children born thanks to my matrimonial program are reaching adulthood. The first two will be a brewer and a dyer, they're tasked with using up my arrow stockpile as well. I have a few elven bows with ammo old enough to suffer from wear. They'll get some archer skill out of it. One of the kids was the first one to be born in hell as the mother, Uvash Dashportal, was dragging a gorilla to a cage at the moment. Oddly enough, it didn't make her cancel the job.



I don't know how many new couples did I set up until now. The last two candidates have been sitting in their suite long enough for their clothes to become threadbare. Maybe they will get to it once they're both naked. I'm building an experimental suite with a well buckets. Losing legendaries is still painful, especially that it's often hard to train the replacements up to a decent level. I lost a macelord, Stakud Netdabble, and my last skilled jeweler. I could try to train a new one through bedazzling random crap with green glass, but even then putting it on things that might end up melted down feels like a waste. All I use jewelry skill for is occasionally decorating furniture. Mostly coffins.

I keep both cut and rough gems and leather around in case of moods, but they never occur. Most likely I ran out of eligible dwarves at some point, but that should've changed with the wave of new births. Is there some sort of an artifact hard cap?

I'm melting individual unstacked bolts to reduce item count. Any that aren't masterworks, don't have forgotten beast poison on them and don't have a kill list attached are treated as scrap metal. I don't even care much about the metal, but I'd rather get a few bars and convert them to bolt stacks. Much of my ammo stock is bone and suffers from wear. Unfortunately, dwarves prioritise the undamaged bolts and there's no way to change that. All I can do is avoid making new ammunition for now. With over 22k bolts there is little need for it. The military dwarves have just picked up their assigned metal ammo, which is nice.

Minotaurs don't seem to breed. That's a shame, but look what blundered into my cage!



This one is female, and I already have a male. I'll have to mod them a little if I want them to breed, as dragons don't have a [CHILD] tag. Hopefully the fort doesn't burn down. I have a few legendary animal trainers, time to put them to a good use...

The vomit blob FBs apparently can't be shot to death. As far as crossbow training goes they're as good as a steel creature. Who would've thought it would be so redundant?

[TheFlame52]

Never feel bad about necroing this topic. Wirejade is awesome.