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Author Topic: What is purpose of exploring caverns?  (Read 5889 times)

Oxidus

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What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« on: August 08, 2018, 08:59:32 am »

From the experience I know, they are just gateway for monsters to enter your fortress. Only use I know about is farming webs.
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Starver

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2018, 10:20:29 am »

They give you rapid views of the nature of the underground (ore veins, gem clusters, useful strata), give you a possible source of 'wood' and of water (including for fishing), often show you where magma is (one of the caverns is the magma sea).

If you feel like it, you can use the 'pre-dug' space for things (freeing up the miners for resource gathering instead of cavity-clearing) and there are less-than-deadly cavern creatures down there. Many's a surface-turtled fort that might have survived due to careful caverning below.

Depends on your play style. I tend to treat them more as a nuisance than others, but if I can't tap into some water or magma while I'm digging around I consider them too sterile...
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anewaname

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #2 on: August 08, 2018, 10:29:25 am »

Look at your fort's objectives... do you want to raise cave dragons or farm giant cave spider silk? Do you want to have underground pastures for livestock? Do you have an alternate source of water? If you do not need the caverns for any of your fort objectives, don't open them up.
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Saiko Kila

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #3 on: August 08, 2018, 11:53:54 am »

From the experience I know, they are just gateway for monsters to enter your fortress. Only use I know about is farming webs.

Exploring caverns is much less useful than discovering them. Discovering allows pasturing grazers underground, and cultivate mushroom trees. However, exploring has its pluses: it increases possible number of artefacts (which depends on number of discovered tiles), it allows to locate veins of interesting materials, and offers some of better animals for taming. Sometimes it is also necessary to obtain water.

I recommend cat explorers - drop the cat through locked hatch (not too high, because it may die prematurely), use several meeting zones, activate the zone you want the cat to target, once it discovers its surroundings deactivate the zone and create/activate the next one. I generally don't send dwarves to the caverns, unless for a very short time. Close them with bridges and hatches.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #4 on: August 08, 2018, 03:01:26 pm »

Wood, water, critters and resource exploration, as mentioned. The third cavern occasionally has a nice juicy spire top (can happen in the first and second cavern as well, but I've never gotten one in the first cavern naturally, only through hacking).
If you're into colors, cavern trees provide some variation.
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Leonidas

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #5 on: August 09, 2018, 03:30:34 am »

From the experience I know, they are just gateway for monsters to enter your fortress.
Don't think of them as monsters. Think of them as bundles of meat, bones, and combat experience waiting to be harvested.
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pamelrabo

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #6 on: August 10, 2018, 02:08:12 am »

Also: if your machine is not that good, they can hit your fps.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #7 on: August 10, 2018, 04:03:14 am »

Also: if your machine is not that good, they can hit your fps.
Cavern full of dead critter bits and webs will hit your FPS regardless of whether they're revealed or not, in particular in reanimating biomes, where a lot of the critter bits are pathing.
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Conor891

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #8 on: August 10, 2018, 11:21:30 am »

In one of the first fortresses I've ever built as soon as a I breached the caverns almost immediately after my fortress was swarmed by crundles and pretty much everyone died. I don't know how exactly this happened since crundles are such pushovers and usually run away with fear.

However this caused me to seal up the caverns everytime I found them and never touch them again after that.

However just recently I started leaving the caverns open to my fortress and it isn't reallyas bad as I remember.

What I did was add a long corridor lined with cage traps into the caverns to stop any wildlife from coming in. Added a drawbridge that I could close in case of a forgotten beast, and two chained war dogs to catch any gremlins that try to enter my fort.

It actually has been pretty useful. I have a lot of monster hunters in my fort so they are constantly killing things which has given me thousands of meat. I have lavish meals set to produce constantly and I trade all the excess to caravans which actually becomes quite value. A singke barrel for pot can be worth 10000-20000 dwarfbucks.

I also capture a lot of live wildlife in cage traps. You can line all the map edges with traps and pretty much anything that enters will be caught. I caught a GCS and set up silk farm and also use caged beasts to train my animal trainerm He's almost legendary and I sell any tamed beasts I don't need to caravans as well.

Sometimes dwarves wander down there and people get hurt but it does make things more interesting. On one of my fortress cheesemaker's strolls through the caverns he was ambushed by a cave crocodile and proceeded to beat the shit out of it unconscious without getting so much as a scratch on him and walk away all casually with happy thoughts.
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Bumber

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #9 on: August 11, 2018, 07:18:14 pm »

Nethercap. Getting rid of dead creature corpses to recover FPS.

I'm pretty sure throwing wildlife in a pit can prevent new ones from entering, at least for the rest of the season.
« Last Edit: August 11, 2018, 07:22:08 pm by Bumber »
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PatrikLundell

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #10 on: August 13, 2018, 01:53:53 pm »

Yes, camping critters prevent a new critter group from appearing, even if you made them campers by releasing them into a confined area. Now, savage biomes allow two critter groups to be present concurrently, and Titans, FBs, and (semi)Megabeasts are not subject to critter limit considerations (nor are enemies).
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Findulidas

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #11 on: August 14, 2018, 03:20:33 pm »

The underground caves offer much more interesting and fun wildlife. Honestly having openings into the fort from the caves and not having traps there is one of the main ways of keepin forts interesting.
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Civillain

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #12 on: August 14, 2018, 04:08:36 pm »

You could probably get along just fine without ever opening the caverns on the right embark, and if they aren't very fun for you then you don't really need to engage with them! If you're looking for the fun with them, then there are a few ways to make them more relevant to your fortress.

If you want some extra challenge, then leave your caverns open to your fortress, or only partially sealed off (without cage traps). You could use scheduling to station guards there, and have some kind of cute guard outpost to keep your fortress safe.

I think a lot of this has been mentioned, but if you want to make the caverns useful to you then you can put yourself in situations that make them useful or even necessary. For example, having moss and so on grow on dirt after you open the caverns is definitely useful, and if you embark somewhere without trees then opening the caverns is pretty much necessary. Caverns provide a fast way to uncover lots of ground, so they provide a fast way of mining lots of ore and gems (no time wasted in finding the ore and gems) which could be especially useful in a low metal embark. There's water underground, which I know I usually end up relying on! So there are lots of interesting embark situations that would make the caverns very useful.

In the end Dwarf Fortress is a game where you set your own goals, so you could always make those goals cavern related! Building in the caverns would be a fun one to start with.
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Mort Stroodle

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #13 on: August 14, 2018, 05:19:39 pm »

If you don't have any bitumous coal you're better off living near the lava layer. This means the caverns are a much faster source of water, grazer locations, and wood than the surface. Beyond that you can domesticate the cavern wildlife for war cave dragons, chain up the giant rats that wander into your cages for free target practice, get easier access to gems and metals, and trap forgotten beasts for later weaponization. There's also candy, which you'll want eventually. The sooner you dig down to the lower cavern layers, the less likely it is that your dwarves crack open the cavern to find and forgotten beast 2 feet away from your miners.
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Leonidas

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Re: What is purpose of exploring caverns?
« Reply #14 on: August 14, 2018, 11:42:49 pm »

If you don't have any bitumous coal you're better off living near the lava layer.
Or you could use a minecart to haul the magma up near the surface.
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