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Author Topic: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?  (Read 8213 times)

thegoatgod_pan

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Re: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?
« Reply #15 on: September 23, 2014, 07:26:38 pm »

Necromancer fun: make adventurers, steal necromancy book, drop in your nearest castle and make a bunch of necromancers. Then watch them come to your fort.

Freezing traps: water freezes instantly when exposed to surface: build water holders just under the top soil and expose only trench wired with pressure traps in the middle, linking to doors holding back the water. Hallway of certain doom. Just send miners afterwards to clean up the solid ice.

Dodge traps: actually too easy to be interesting. Build two staircases: one on each side of your outside wall. Make them at least 15 z-levels tall. Connect them with a single tile wide pathway, 5-10 tiles long, and cover it in cheap weapon traps, making certain each trap contains the maximum number of weapons.  The better at dodging the invaders are, the more likely they are to dodge off the edge and plummet to their death, and of course, if they fail to dodge, they eat the trap.  This may or may not have changed with the new version.

Bolt recycling:  After designating a narrow hallway for archery, dig pits where the walls were: when bolts fall a z-level after a miss, they don't break

Forgotten beast pitting:  exploit an odd feature of cave-ins: the suction they produce to trap beasts without killing them.  Design traps by carving small adjacent 5x5 chambers, each outfitted with a piece of furniture in the center tile, like an armor stand.  On the z-level below this chain of chambers, dig out identically sized 3x3 rooms, after these are done, seal them, one by one, so they have no way out.  On the z-level above the furniture, wire a single block wired to cave-in in the middle of the 5x5 and 3x3, using levered supports and sealing each prepared room similarly, to avoid flying F.B.s getting in that way.   When the forgotten beast enters the room, it will stand two tiles away from the furniture, on the edge of the room and try to shatter it. This will give you ample time to pull the level and drop the block on the room. The block will destroy the furniture and blow a hole in the floor to the 3x3 chamber. Since the block isn't above the F.B. it will not kill it, however, the weird suction force created by the cave in in the sealed holding chamber will pull the F.B. down, into the sealed 3x3 room, from whence it will never leave (unless it can fly and its wings were not broken by the cave-in suction)

Puppy Jabberer bombs:  fill a cage with jabberers and link it to a lever, beaked death will spill into the next goblin ambush, without giving the poor invaders a chance to ready themselves or shoot.

My own favorite fort  technology combined the dwarven reactor with the waterfall. It was built into the ceiling of the royal throne room, which I made hollow and 7-z levels tall with engraved walls. The reactor was invisible, but the gears extended down into the royal pool, moving a single tile of water around the entire throne room and generating an obscene amount of happiness fog.  Everything but the actual reactor was wired to collapse violently into the throne room, ideally both killing everyone near it and sucking everyone alive through a hole torn in the pool and into the untapped third cavern full of terrible forgotten beasts with deadly dust. The relevant lever was hidden behind the artifact bone throne of the necromancer duke.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2014, 07:35:25 pm by thegoatgod_pan »
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Max™

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Re: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?
« Reply #16 on: September 23, 2014, 07:55:56 pm »


"Suffered injuries recently. Was comforted by a lovely waterfall recently."

:D

I did unlink the bridge so it is on a different lever now, because while it was awesome, and I giggled for half an hour every time I thought about it, I don't need a legendary hammerdorf killed by flying bodyparts during another bloodcano.

I needed this laugh.  Thank you.
:D That's why I'm here, comic relief... and horror-room atrocities.
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Urist Da Vinci

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Re: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?
« Reply #17 on: September 23, 2014, 09:03:22 pm »

...
Freezing traps: water freezes instantly when exposed to surface: build water holders just under the top soil and expose only trench wired with pressure traps in the middle, linking to doors holding back the water. Hallway of certain doom. Just send miners afterwards to clean up the solid ice.
...

Naturally carved down staircases won't expose the tiles below to sunlight/surface, so this can be used to form ice walls or squares of arbitrary size on the surface downhill from a higher underground reservoir. The tech is obscure and I haven't seen a fort built to use this effect yet.

Max™

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Re: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?
« Reply #18 on: September 23, 2014, 09:08:01 pm »

I accidentally did some of that sort of stuff while working at the border of a glacial and non-glacial biome underground, had some interesting arrangements of ice left over, and at one point I got
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
to show up, confusing the hell out of me.

I did eventually get it cleaned up and everything after using it to finish off the surprisingly helpful eyeless web-shooting pig titan that had killed most of the other goblins besides the ballista/catapult victims, and a couple of trolls got caught as well!
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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Bumber

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Re: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?
« Reply #19 on: September 23, 2014, 11:04:20 pm »

But wouldn't M. Carnot roll over in his grave because dwarfs can handle magma-filled carts without being affected by the heat?

You can also build an ordinary ramp track up and have dwarfs "guide" the cart, which is about 10 times as fast as hauling it and usually completely safe (some people have managed to get runaway carts and collisions with guided routes, but i've no idea how they did it).
Well, if the heat transfer gets fixed we could provide improperly insulated dwarves with a ‼fat‼ workout. Edit: Actually, the wiki says to use magma-safe wheelbarrows. There might be a reason for that.

Yeah, you could have the carts guided but you'd need to set up a hauling route for each cart. The other methods don't require this.
« Last Edit: October 04, 2014, 08:54:53 am by Bumber »
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THE xTROLL FUR SOCKx RUSE WAS A........... DISTACTION        the carp HAVE the wagon

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Max™

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Re: Favorite Dwarf Fortress Technology? Any technologies that aren't well known?
« Reply #20 on: September 26, 2014, 10:10:38 pm »

I still really like dwarven showers/decontamination zones in high traffic areas.  And death-towers still excite me.
Has anyone yet designed a "perfect" dwarven decontamination system that doesn't sometimes accumulate or spread contaminants, and is pet-safe? Don't contaminants stick to grates and float in air if the grates are opened? I ran into times where the mist from waterfalls would prematurely transfer contamination to the floor, or there was a risk of dwarves being flushed downward if the waterfall was over stairs (to allow contaminants to flush).
I present the Dwarven Power-Washer.
Z+0: v-- in between the walls by the yak soap ramp is a wall grate.

Z+1:


Just noticed I grabbed the screenshot while the water on the soap was flashing, but there is 3 water there as well.

:D

Get some pump training in as well.

Edit: can probably link the wall grate to something just in case an animal gets stuck in there somehow.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2014, 10:20:20 pm by Max™ »
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dwarf_reform

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Not sure if its ancient/discovered tech, but I used it last night to great effect and figured I'd tell the tale :> For the backstory I've got an above-ground area at my fort (smallish glass castle!) and I've been annoyed by how near the closest hills are to my perimeter walls.. Since the walls are at least four z-levels high coupled with my 100+ idle dwarves I decided to move the hills instead of the walls..

(crappy ascii-explanation diagram incoming)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Basically I'd choose how far I wanted to push the hill back and then mine out each layer in that area (you can just assign mining orders over multiple z-levels and they'll dig out all of it in that cube..). Anyway, all it leaves behind are thin layers of floors that needed channeled out and collapsed, which I had fun with for a while watching the miners fall with the cave-ins, but decided to speed up the whole process..

By building a "wooden razor" of magically floating floor tiles above the area two or three levels above your mined out area, and then removing the single tile connecting it to solid ground, the entire floating-bridge-of-floors simultaneously falls and severs everything perfectly away from the rest of the hill, creating an amazing dust cloud :> I know dropping things to cause collapses is well-known, this is basically just the potential to use it over really large areas (assuming you've got a fort full of rusty legendary carpenters and nothing better to do, of course).. Hrm, now I'm thinking about building some big suspended floors off the top level of the castle that I could remotely drop on invaders.. maybe even designate stone stockpiles on top of them..

http://imgur.com/a/71ugi Three screenshots, if they saved right.. One other thing to mention is that there might be a bug with the new trees holding detached layers in the air, but I'm not positive since I didn't do direct experiments on it and began clearing all trees before collapsing, just in case..
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Max™

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That's one of the ways to get a cleaned up moat, build a floor with a support over the last ramp out and you can get rid of the ramp without trying to figure out how to get a dorf back up out of there.

I THINK that is also part of the powermining methodology.

In related news, after embarking in a terrifying biome with putrid purple goop falling from the skies I think my dorfs are starting to appreciate the Dorfwash as much as I am glad I can just pump it clean after every few trips outside.
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SimRobert2001

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Indestructible walls. No, really, ANYTHING you build, no matter what material will be indestructible.  No one can burn it, destroy it, or take it down.
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Tacomagic

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Indestructible walls. No, really, ANYTHING you build, no matter what material will be indestructible.  No one can burn it, destroy it, or take it down.

I really do enjoy making magma cisterns out of ice.
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SlyStalker

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The problem for me is that a lot of these 'technologies' are kind of exploity. Therefore, I like mechanisms and the associated machinery because it's so cool to have stuff go automatically and it's not even an exploit. The Almighty Dwarven Calculator is pure awesome.
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gchristopher

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I present the Dwarven Power-Washer.
Z+0: v-- in between the walls by the yak soap ramp is a wall grate.

Z+1:


Just noticed I grabbed the screenshot while the water on the soap was flashing, but there is 3 water there as well.
I'm trying this in 40.24, and I'm not sure I interpreted the diagram correctly.

It looks to me like the plan is that intent of the design is that the dwarves enter on the center left on Z+1, path down the ramp to be showered, and then climb up and out diagonally up-right or down-right then exit up or down on Z+1.

I see how this works if you only power it when you want to flush contaminants to the right through the grate, but my attempt at building it keeps the ramp flooded with >3 levels of water when the pump is running, which prevents pathing.

Here's a diagram of what I built: (3/7 water on the bottom layer, but the problem persists with quite a bit less water in the system)
Code: [Select]
Z 0:   Z+1:
░░░░░░   ░░.░░░
░▲...░   .▼%% ░
░░░░░░   ░░.░░░

Did I misinterpret the design, or is the system designed to only be passable when the pump is off, and the pump run on-demand to clean up the ramp?
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Max™

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Top floor of the improved design I made after that post:

It isn't powered at all, you simply queue a pump job briefly to clean gunk out when it fills up.

Bottom floor:


If dorfs get stuck in the section where the pump output falls (had sparring military dorfs phase through the wall a couple times) you can just order a pumping job and it will flush them back through the fortifications to the proper side.
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Naryar

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Magma railguns.
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