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[Hans Lemurson]

Non-Magma  proof droppings: I wasn't sure they'd go through 2 Z-levels worth of magma before they burnt up, so I went with magma proof.  I'll get it out of there sometime in the year 4000 or so.

As far as I know, things don't start to burn in Magma until they touch the ground.  Miners who fall into volcanoes will explore much of the magma sea for you before they burn up.  In fact if you read the combat logs, sometimes it's the fall alone that kills them, the magma merely disposing of the corpse.

Be VERY careful of using the undead for target practice.  Fighting the undead or attacked by the undead is an amazingly negative hit on happiness.  I don't know if it triggers because of the target or because they were attacked by them.  If you find out, please let me know, but I'd recommend using a single squad as a test subject first.

My macedwarves handily dispatch zombies with a single hit, and when they do they receive no bad thoughts.  Neither did the marksdwarves who maintained a proper distance from the undead, unlike their companion who got gut-punched through armor by a zombie were-bull ("seriously injured recently" and "attacked by the undead").  I think even dodging might be happiness-safe.  The problem is when they touch you.

Anyway, I was wondering why you go through the bother of setting up water reactors when you have a nearby aquifer. Wouldn't it be just as easy to drain from the aquifer to the map edge, so the water gets 'flow', and put wheels over them? Or do reactors have some advantage that I don't understand?

I've done this numerous times, but the Side-wheel Dwarven Water Reactor has two main advantages:
-Safety (no chance of flood should something ever go wrong)
-Self-contained (requires no additional infrastructure like feeder canals and drainage pipes, and thus can easily be placed anywhere that power is required with minimal hassle and no interference with nearby constructions)

I've been following this thread with some interest, and have decided to take a stab at this challenge myself, but I had a question for you regarding choice of embark site.  Tundra makes things difficult due to the lack of vegetation, but I have to wonder if it's not possible to find an even more challenging biome.  Because tundra is frozen year round, this makes aquifer pierce via frozen mining a relatively quick (if risky) task.  Thus, it strikes me that the difficulty could be increased further if one could find a no trees / no vegetation biome in a hot climate with a multi-layer aquifer (and no rock veins piercing it).  Do these exist?

Earlier somebody mentioned that a Red Sand Desert seems not to have any vegetation, so that's a candidate.

[vanatteveldt]

I get the feeling that in a lot of situations he's brute-forcing stuff to get done ASAP by using mass labor assignments. Sure, it can be done more efficiently by first hauling blocks to the site, making burrows etc., but that's more fiddly (and the burrows for masons wouldn't help as much as having everyone build, anyway).

Well what I mean is do both. Mass assign the right labourer, but make sure that they and the materials they need are at hand when the breach occurs. If you only have very limited dwarfs and the ever present risk of moods, I guess you need to be quite careful to prevent unfortunate accidents, especially if they can turn into zombie-spirals...

[Stochasty]

Earlier somebody mentioned that a Red Sand Desert seems not to have any vegetation, so that's a candidate.

I almost managed to generate the perfect biome: terrifying rocky wasteland (no trees, no vegetation), very deep soil, multi-layer aquifer, completely flat.  Only one problem: it doesn't raise the dead. 

[Snaake]

Earlier somebody mentioned that a Red Sand Desert seems not to have any vegetation, so that's a candidate.

I almost managed to generate the perfect biome: terrifying rocky wasteland (no trees, no vegetation), very deep soil, multi-layer aquifer, completely flat.  Only one problem: it doesn't raise the dead. 

Ah yea, badlands should work, too, but I think they more often have some rock at the surface too. Good for you for almost finding a "perfect" spot.

[Patchy]

Rocky wastelands, badlands, and sand deserts all have a chance of being barren like a tundra and aren't frozen year round though they can have freezing periods. You can, however, still surface farm on them once you acquire some seeds from a caravan unlike a tundra. If you find all these biomes in a flat area, there will be no rocks for you to exploit above the aquifiers if present.

[Stochasty]

Rocky wastelands, badlands, and sand deserts all have a chance of being barren like a tundra and aren't frozen year round though they can have freezing periods. You can, however, still surface farm on them once you acquire some seeds from a caravan unlike a tundra. If you find all these biomes in a flat area, there will be no rocks for you to exploit above the aquifiers if present.

I think that by the time surface farming becomes an issue, the "one pick" nature of this challenge will have been mostly overcome; thus, the inability to freeze the aquifer presents a bigger challenge, I think.

I've managed to gen a world with a good selection of rocky wastelands, so I'm testing it out.  Just lost my first fort to a dumb mental error: used the three wood off of my cart to build a pump, intending to double-slit the aquifer, only to realize that the second aquifer layer was unsmoothable and I had no material with which to build walls.  D'oh!  That put me late on the timing for the pierce, and I had to butcher for food without a pot, barrel, or good hidey hole to stuff the corpses, leading to !!FUN!!.

[WanderingKid]

Appreciate the time you took for this Merendel.  I'll try to be as equally thorough.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Right off the start to get your men inside. set that initial pasture as a meeting area. your dwarves will attempt to move inside for the most part.

I've seen them ignore a meeting area for far too long and wanted some way to get the animals indoors even faster.  Anything that surface lingered was going to die...

Instead of using military order, setup a burrow that only contains your underground area and use a civilian alert to force them inside, this helps avoid the draft badthought and is just as quick.  If you also set the burrow so it does not include the tile on the far side of the wall(but includes the wall tile) it should help prevent some moron from going and standing on the far side just as your carpenter gets to work.

(facepalm)  Quite true.

To the pierce itself I kinda prefer diging over closer to a map edge or corner when possible to help avoid flyers.  If you start in the center wherevery the flyers path they can end up geting close to you very quicly and you have to wait till they leave the map.  Near the edge however you can try and get some work done while they are on the far side and use a civ alert to call your workers back inside if they get close.   However this tactic is somewhat riskier with deadly dust/smoke as that is more likely to flow into your tunnles if it happens to spawn close to your chosen edge.

Actually, my concern was having fliers spawn up on the edge I was working on, though the dust was a consideration, I was afraid of having no warning about inbound death.  There's pros and cons to both sides.

dispite what you mentioned during the aquifer pierce claystone cant suport an aquifer just FYI.

Yeah, I couldn't remember at the time and I believe I put in an annotation on the YouTube video to that effect as a retcon to the voiceover.  It was a 'crap, I don't remember' moment and I didn't want to go digging around in the wiki right then.

I'm curious why you made a dump pit down in the stone layers instead of useing that one you made up in the soil layers for your first butchering.  It would have saved you some time with the dwarves being hungry and that one up top would have made an exelent one use dump pit.  pick a spot dig 1 square and 1 downstair, dig an upstair below the down and dig out below the slot the level above, back up top channle out both squares.  This is a single use dump pit.  Once you butcher the first animal all reanimating parts go in the pit and then you seal the area off at a later date (cause your dwarves wont approach it otherwise due to the undead inside.

Partially because I wanted to test out the multi-Z dump pit.  I'd used a shorter one on IvyLashes and that short 2Z one started a cascade of problems, so I was loathe to have an 'accident' in regards to the butchering in any way.  I didn't want to use up one of my precious logs to seal off a one-use and once I hit stone it was easy enough to dig out the multi-Z.

If you butcher the first animal before they get hungry they wont stop to eat before doing the dumping, also dont designate the food stockpile till after the dumping happens so they prioritize dumping over hauling food back so you dont risk a reanimation any longer than needed. alternitively turn off food hauling on a dwarf not assigned to other tasks so he does the dumping first. food wont rot in a stockpile even without pots although you'll start loosing food to vermin without pots.  its a judgment call on if that is worth it to you.

Good call, hadn't thought of that.

When that titan arived you probably should have tried to trap him right away.  I would have pulled the miner off room diging imediatly although you probably could have used your initial cubby hole as the trap in a pinch.  To trap a building destroyer you need  a 1x5 hallway.  At the far end you need a raising bridge, at the near end you want a door and a wall(dont build the wall till the last step). final setup should be something like bridge openspace openspace door wall.  Once the bridge is ready have the miner channle up to the surface just past the bridge.  as soon as he breaches get him back inside, forbid the door, and get that wall built.  the titan will path to destroy the door.  while he's breaking that close the bridge. the titan will finish breaking the door and then be stuck between the wall and the bridge and unable to leave.   you can make a longer coridor with more doors in it to make this procedure a bit safer but this is the minimum.

My titan/FB traps tend to end up a rediculous amount more elaborate than that... and you're right.  I most likely could have pretty easily gotten him down to somewhere.  Not sure how well the surface would fare either way at that point but that's an excellent emergency titan trap.

Asumeing you hadnt traped the titan before the migrant wave arived I would have assigned a burro to the meeting area in that first room with the lever, set citizen alert to that burrow and then opend the bridge.  Any of your dwarves above ground that got out of sight range of the titan would have belined inside imediatly.  the reason for useing a civ alert over military station is with a civ alert they will try to keep runing away vs trying to fight like you had with that station order.  Some might run off in the wrong direction but they may lead the threat away from the others so some can make it inside. You probably could have goten the majority of that first migrant wave in if you'd done this.

Agreed.  I just HATE the burrow system with a passion.  I need to get more friendly with it.

I also personaly would have goten at least 1 dwarf choping wood and or harvesting plants ASAP after breaching the caverns. even before going off and exploring for a caravan accessable edge.  the thought behind this is you really want some wood for beds if no other reason and at least a few plants to start makeing booze and to get a farm going.

I wanted more visibility before I started leaving dwarves to their own devices to collect things down there.  I had water and food, I wasn't in a rush.  Rushing had taken out a previous fort in this series and I wanted to have a very controlled pace towards doing anything.  You're right, I could have sped things up, but I was erring deeply on the side of caution at this point since I wanted to get the walls up for the caravan... which was useless in the long run but that was my thinking at the time.

I'm going through the videos at the moment, at episode 8. They're really great, it is fantastic to see the amount of thought and planning that goes into a design, and the patience of a small group of dwarfs working on a megaproject with the world burning (freezing) around them, eating their little plump helmets and drinking their dwarven wine. The surface can wait, no?

Thanks for that!

Anyway, I was wondering why you go through the bother of setting up water reactors when you have a nearby aquifer. Wouldn't it be just as easy to drain from the aquifer to the map edge, so the water gets 'flow', and put wheels over them? Or do reactors have some advantage that I don't understand?

The reactors were contained in a single location and required the least infrastructure to build.  For example, down at the magma sea layer running a pipe that long would have taken forever.  The other thing is even an aquifer drain never hits 7/7 at the drain edge, so you still end up with FPS loss from flow.  I went with the most contained systems I could reach.  You'll notice when I fill the DWRs for the OMG I use aquifer water to fill it.

Another thing I don't fully understand is why you go through the bother of creating a holding pattern loop and the use 1 lever per two torpedoes, when you might as well use one lever per torpedo and control the release rate with the levers?

Partially because you can't control when your dwarves will pull the second lever... partially for the thrill. 

EDIT2: but I do have another question: you are very concerned with blocking up the cavern part of the route, assigning everybody to masonry etc. In such a case, I would set up a block stockpile nearby and make sure the masons are around with a burrow. Why did you do it as you did?

Foolishness and a hatred for the current burrow system, mostly.  There are so many annoying bugs associated with burrows that I disdain them with a passion usually left for five day old roadkill.

I've been following this thread with some interest, and have decided to take a stab at this challenge myself,

Woo hoo!  We got another one!

but I had a question for you regarding choice of embark site.  Tundra makes things difficult due to the lack of vegetation, but I have to wonder if it's not possible to find an even more challenging biome.  Because tundra is frozen year round, this makes aquifer pierce via frozen mining a relatively quick (if risky) task.  Thus, it strikes me that the difficulty could be increased further if one could find a no trees / no vegetation biome in a hot climate with a multi-layer aquifer (and no rock veins piercing it).  Do these exist?

Red Sand desert with an aquifer.  Let me know if you can find an undead raising one, that could be fun too.  Be aware you're not going through the aquifer until you get a trade caravan in though, you will have nothing to make the walls from.  You CAN make a pump ( Build carp shop, make block, disassemble make from block, build pipe/corkscrew, disasssemble and get block back) but there's nothing to use to seal the sides of the double slit up with.

I get the feeling that in a lot of situations he's brute-forcing stuff to get done ASAP by using mass labor assignments. Sure, it can be done more efficiently by first hauling blocks to the site, making burrows etc., but that's more fiddly (and the burrows for masons wouldn't help as much as having everyone build, anyway).

Well what I mean is do both. Mass assign the right labourer, but make sure that they and the materials they need are at hand when the breach occurs. If you only have very limited dwarfs and the ever present risk of moods, I guess you need to be quite careful to prevent unfortunate accidents, especially if they can turn into zombie-spirals...

Partially right Snaake. Some of that was instead of hauling twice (once to stockpile, once to wall) one guy just dragged his own block down the first time.  If I have time I'll setup a 'safe' area where the blocks are hauled, THEN punch in and start building up walls.  Considering I had a titan on the surface though I wasn't willing to wait to infrastructure it.  However, you can't get moods until you're past a certain # of dwarves (20 I think), so that wasn't a concern for a while.

[Merendel]

I wanted more visibility before I started leaving dwarves to their own devices to collect things down there.  I had water and food, I wasn't in a rush.  Rushing had taken out a previous fort in this series and I wanted to have a very controlled pace towards doing anything.  You're right, I could have sped things up, but I was erring deeply on the side of caution at this point since I wanted to get the walls up for the caravan... which was useless in the long run but that was my thinking at the time.

Well I didnt mean try to harvest the whole area in one go.  Even designating the 5 or 6 trees very close to the breach point and whatever herbs are withen easy reach will get you a few more logs to play with and the start of an emergency booze stockpile and could have had 1 dwarf doing that while you were trying to explore without significantly increasing the risk.

I really do think you need to at least get used to seting up a civilian alert burrow.   Frankly I dont use burrows for much beyond that myself but they are amazing for geting your civies out of an area in a hurry.   All you really need for that is setup a burrow over a dining hall or some other meeting area, dont asign anybody to it.  Then on the militar screen go to alerts, make a new one, select your new alert and move over and select the burrow.   After that any time you want your dwarves to drop anything they are doing and activate that alert.  Prety much any job outside that burrow will abort instantly and the only new jobs they can take are ones related to that meeting hall so they all report there ASAP.   you just have to remember to turn it off as soon as you've delt with whatever problem caused you to turn it on.   Myself I tend to make one big one that covers my entire fort with the surface and any hazerdous areas excluded so I can turn it on while trying to get migrants inside while still geting most of the work done (miners tend to get a break during migrant waves because of that alert )

[Stochasty]

Red Sand desert with an aquifer.  Let me know if you can find an undead raising one, that could be fun too.  Be aware you're not going through the aquifer until you get a trade caravan in though, you will have nothing to make the walls from.  You CAN make a pump ( Build carp shop, make block, disassemble make from block, build pipe/corkscrew, disasssemble and get block back) but there's nothing to use to seal the sides of the double slit up with.

Found one that is truly nasty: rocky wasteland, zero plants/trees, very deep soil, multilayer aquifer, undead, plus a profane smoke that instantly turns into profane husks any creatures unfortunate enough to be caught in it.  I've lost three forts so far, and have yet to puncture the aquifer.  Whew!  This one is going to take work.

I think I can manage an aquifer pierce without waiting for the caravan, but it's risky.

[Merendel]

Red Sand desert with an aquifer.  Let me know if you can find an undead raising one, that could be fun too.  Be aware you're not going through the aquifer until you get a trade caravan in though, you will have nothing to make the walls from.  You CAN make a pump ( Build carp shop, make block, disassemble make from block, build pipe/corkscrew, disasssemble and get block back) but there's nothing to use to seal the sides of the double slit up with.

Found one that is truly nasty: rocky wasteland, zero plants/trees, very deep soil, multilayer aquifer, undead, plus a profane smoke that instantly turns into profane husks any creatures unfortunate enough to be caught in it.  I've lost three forts so far, and have yet to puncture the aquifer.  Whew!  This one is going to take work.

I think I can manage an aquifer pierce without waiting for the caravan, but it's risky.

ick that sounds like a truely nasty one. particularly if the world has never had the caverns breached so you cant just hollow out the first underground layer into a tree/plant farm.  If I had to do that I'd make the fort entrance by diging down 2 levels, back up 1 with stairs, get the dwarves inside then chanel back out the stairs so no nonflyer could get in and then use the wood to make a pump.  I have a prety good idea how to make a modified double slit that instead of walling off you use the pump just enough to channle out the next layer down so the aquifer drains into the next layer down.  for the last layer though you prety much have to run the pump non stop while your miner goes down and tryes to clear out enough rocks for your other dwarves to haul back out so you can make enough blocks to properly seal the walls. well either that or send 6 dwarves in and hope your lone pump operator can make it down before the flooding makes the area unpathable.   Either way the bigest issue I see is that you will have no way to make an axe to chop trees once you get to cavern level.  your prety much stuck with nothing till the first caravan arives and gets wiped out and hopefuly dies in a place where you can retrieve what they brought.

you know now that I think about it I'm going to go test out that technique on a more forgiving embark just to see if its feasable.

Er... well I think I invented a new form of drowning chamber for my pump operators trying to figure out if I can find a dig order that does not result in mass drownings.

[edgefigaro]

Yah, I dunno how to do a single pick on a non freezing aquifered soiled biome.  You can't get the first caravan without a depot, and you need your first three woods to be unconsumed. Bone crossbows/bolts are available, as are two quivers. Cave-in may have potential.  I've never had any success with the chicken run technique mentioned in the wiki, though I can imagine getting your miner a crash course in swimming somehow and giving it a shot.

[Merendel]

well so far I've managed to find a rather effective way to train simming in the aquifer at a later date although that was hardly the point of this exercise.  Part of the problem is I've found the aquifer does not absorb quite enough when you've got both the pump runing and the Zlvl above dumping water into one spot.  this causes a back flood that knocks the pump operator off the pump before the miner can get down to channle out a square.

IF the aquifer was no more than 3 thick before a stone layer and there were no flying undead to contend with I could probably do the cavein drop method.  Any more than 3 thick however and you wont have the needed construction materials to bridge the gaps to make it work

[Stochasty]

I have two ideas for the pierce, revolving around a modified cavein plan, depending on what the second layer looks like.  If the second layer consists of a smoothable stone, then the idea is to cavein a 6x8 region and dig a double slit down from the second layer.  Otherwise, go with a concentric series of caveins.

I'll need to use my wood for a pump either way, which means I'm going to have to move quickly.  I'm trying to come up with a pumpless method, to let me use my wood for a food barrel and walls, but I don't think it's possible.

EDIT:

IF the aquifer was no more than 3 thick before a stone layer and there were no flying undead to contend with I could probably do the cavein drop method.  Any more than 3 thick however and you wont have the needed construction materials to bridge the gaps to make it work

With some work, I think it should be possible to manage a concentric cavein using natural floors.  The idea is to leave the inner rings supported by a central pillar, and to not channel out the square that will become the floor of the bridge.  Once you drop the outer ring, you'll need to pump out the aquifer as you mine underneath the inner rings, but this should be feasible for an arbitrarily large aquifer.

However, given that you'll need all your wood for a pump, the lack of food storage gives you a hard time limit of only a couple of months, so a 3+ layer aquifer is probably out of the question just based on dig time.

EDIT2:
Oh, forgot to mention: there's flying undead to contend with during all of this. 

The only saving grace of this biome - undead are not immune to the profane cloud.  They become profane husk corpses, which are still undead but now move very slowly.  This gives me time to run away when they come near.

[Patchy]

Well there is a way to tell if you have a stone layer aquifer or not. Look over the surface and find a boulder or pebbles on the ground. If the boulder or pebbles are conglomerate or sandstone then you potentially have a stone layer aquifer. If it is anything else, you only have soil layer aquifers and soil aquifers are rarely more than 2 z-lvls deep.

[Merendel]

Well there is a way to tell if you have a stone layer aquifer or not. Look over the surface and find a boulder or pebbles on the ground. If the boulder or pebbles are conglomerate or sandstone then you potentially have a stone layer aquifer. If it is anything else, you only have soil layer aquifers and soil aquifers are rarely more than 2 z-lvls deep.

Intresting bit of information unfortunatly it does not make all that much of a difference in this case.  If we really wanted to we could use a reveal or a prospectall in dfhack to find out the depth.  The issue is more trying to get through the thing with nothing more than a pick and a screwpump.  I've been trying out various approaches in a bit more of a lenient embark.  AKA I brought enough food and booze so I dont have to worry about that while I figure things out.  Turns out its really a pain to punch an aquifer with no building materials at all when you have limited access to the surface.   Even with no time presure its been takeing me to late summer to punch through 2 layers without the option to freeze my way through.  thats way to slow for survival unless we cheese things by embarking on a world with caverns already open which kinda defeats 90% of the difficulty of the challange.

To be honest I dont think this challange could be done in a non freezing biom with a 2+ layer aquifer with reanimating terrifying with no surface resorces.   you could try embarking accros bioms and try to scout out a way to sneak past the aquifer but a strait up punch will either take longer than your resorces will last or be quick but likely to get your miners eaten by undead.