Hiho! After lurking about, gasping in awe at megaprojects, giggling at what Urist did or didn't, attempting to emulate what certain players created and ending up with tons of (usually wet, drowny / hot, burny) fun, I decided to hop on and say hello.
What better way to say hi than to barge in with a little project.
I'll start with what got me into this.
The last few days were spent with no internet connection. It bit the dust and it took a while to fix the issue. (Aye, it took us three days to figure out what happened and replace a modem.) During this downtime I decided to fire up DF and see what happens.
Right, first fortress died due to a Werechameleon, wonderful. Still, I'd rather have that than a tantrum spiral. No matter, wasn't going that well anyway. The second fortress though is probably my best one yet, at least in certain aspects.
I am not really the best player out there. I still haven't wrapped my head around trading, nor the military stuff (This will bite me in the backdoor and I know it. I am aware of the dangers that come with high value rooms/objects), but I know how to do the essentials, or at least the rest of them. Anyway, the thing that makes me proud at the moment is the meeting hall/dining room and dwarf accommodations. I don't try to be the most efficient. I like things to look nice (In a way or another, usually symmetry. I won't bother with trying to match colors.) either from my perspective, or from a dwarf's perspective. My dwarves enjoy ample personal space, each with his or her own bedroom,smoothed walls and floors, bed, chest and cabinet, most of the furniture being of high quality. Then there's the dining room/meeting hall. 21x21, smoothed floors, smoothed-then-engraved walls, 11 golden statues, solid gold well that draws from a cistern, neatly spaced tables and chairs and the two doors that lead into it are also of solid gold, one being an artifact from a moody dwarf. (It menaces with spikes of gold!)
So I thought to myself, what would this look like if one would enter such a massive room? I know there's utilities to render Dwarf Fortress in three dimensions, some even outputting the stuff to Minecraft, but I wasn't satisfied. I wanted it to look proper, to be true to the fort (Mostly, you'll see the differences) and to be fun to explore.
So I fired up Minecraft (Vanilla, except for some shader stuff) and got to work. Not using any fancy commands, I wanted this to be made by hand. Yes, it is in creative mode, but I will openly admit that I am not dwarfy enough to do this in survival mode. That would be insane.
I figured out that if I wanted this to look somewhat neat, but to be manageable in creation and feel good in exploration, a single Dwarf Fortress "block" (Or unit or whatever) inside its Z plane would translate into a 2x2 Minecraft block format. Like this, a 2 block tall player would sort of be the size of a hobbit, a dwarf being at around 3 blocks tall, a human about 4. Z height was the hardest to figure out, so I decided that it would be like this: The floor plane (1 block), empty volume (4 blocks), the ceiling (1 block) and on top of that the next floor plane (1 block). The next problem was light. I didn't like the idea of torches, so instead I added glowstone blocks here and there, trying to make the fort look a bit gloomy, moody. This comes from the shader, with smoothed out colored lights. Some are sunk into the ceiling, some aren't, depending on where they are.
The fortress will be recreated block by block, the exceptions being small changes that don't mess with the layout: Window in the floodgate control room, pleasant layout for stockpiles. The outside world will have its more important features rendered properly, by hand: The river; the channel from the river, to the water-room (pre-cistern room that features two floodgates), down to the cistern itself; the main road. Trees will be massive, as they should be, since you are technically hobbit sized. Though these things will come later on.
So, I am ten hours in and have finished some things. The road, the entrance with the trade depot, the food creation/processing area (farms and workshops), the food and booze stockpiles and the meeting hall. I will need some help on designing some things, such as how to represent the well and if there are any better ideas for the statues. (Think that's the best you can do on 2x2x3)
The Fortress as it is in DFThe Surface: Access to the fortress, road is still being worked on, channel from river on the right.
Farm and food workshops: Here you can see the farm and relevant workshops: still, farmer's workshop, butcher's Shop (With separate room for carcasses) and the kitchen.
Floodgate Control: Floodgate Control Room (FCR). Yes, I know it's flawed due to lack of pressure, but with two or three cycles you can fill the Cistern.
Meeting Hall/Dining Room. Dwarf bedrooms. Food/Booze stockpiles. Future Barracks: Golden Well is missing due to fear of flooding. Will be placed back again.
The Fortress as it is in MinecraftInside the tunnel: A bit dark since it's night outside.
Trade Depot: Currently a work in progress. Water for animals that tug the caravans to drink, chests for obvious reasons.
Farm and workshops.
Better look at the workshops.
Floodgate Control Room.
Meeting Hall/Dining Room: 42x42x4 in volume. I had to figure out how to make tables and thrones in a 2x2 format, this is the best I could come up with.
Meeting Hall/Dining Room 2: Gold statues had to be on a 2x2 format. Best thing I could come up with was this sorta blocky double helix thing.
Booze Stockpile.
Food Stockpile.
The Well: Surrounded by four golden statues, the well is made of gold as well, to be nice and consistent.
So, what do you think? Aye, the fortress itself isn't something to write home about. There are many like it, most in way better shape, but this one is mine. Still, after finishing the stuff I have done so far and walking around inside, it made me think of DF differently, how impressive things that are considered mundane can be... It made DF a lot more fun for me.
Once this is done, which will probably take a good while, I'll try and put up the MC world and the DF save so people can futz around in them as they please. I will work on it alone and the only Minecraft utility I'll ever use is something to change the biome the fort is in. A good few hours into the project I went outside and found that it's snowing, which isn't happening in the DF area. (And even if it did, I'd still change it.)
[EDIT]
Here's the images in an imgur album format, if people prefer that.
[EDIT]
With the help of fellow dwarf Silverthrone, the well has been completed. The statues around it were removed, both in MC and DF as it did look a bit crowded, but the well now... Looks like a well! Huzah!
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Topic: Certainly one way to introduce oneself. (Read 3384 times)