Fortress 911Is your fort in trouble? Do you not know what you're doing? Who're you gonna call?
About Fortress 911What if there was a way to share !!FUN!! with other fellow dwarves? What if there was a way to save that fort you really liked, the one you've got sitting in its save folder, with the giant goblin army standing on the corpses of your militia? What if there were both of these things in the same place? That's what Fortress 911 is!
Fortress 911 is meant to exist for two reasons:
1. Help players solve their fortress-threatening problems.
2. Help other players get some !!FUN!! by inheriting forts that are figuratively (or literally, but fire isn't very common) on fire.
This is done by having dwarves who happen to be in trouble upload their falling fortresses here! If you're in trouble, toss your flailing fort into this thread and watch as people hunting for !!FUN!! solve your problems.
As a notice, it should not always be expected to receive help: this is less a "hey, fix my problems, I'll be back next week when the elves bring giant war grizzlies" than it is a "hey, check out how screwed I am, feel free to try to make me less screwed."
Try to avoid uploading problems that are obviously unsolvable, like "goblins murdered everybody except for three children and the injured planter who I was able to lock in the hospital, all without taking a single casualty."
Submitting a fortressA strict universal format is not needed at all, but there are a few elements you should try to have in your pleas for help:
1. A description of your fortress's problem. This might include some backstory to as of how you ended up in such a tight place, or it could just be "uhh yeah there's a werebeast infection running through my fort." Just make sure whoever is trying to solve your problems knows what they're getting into.
2. A save folder of your fort. Make sure the file is just the save folder and not the entire dwarf fortress game. I suggest uploading it to Dwarf Fortress File Depot, but other file sharing sites are entirely fine.
If your game is heavily modded (such as masterwork) you may wish to upload the entire game minus your other saves, but for minor mods that do not convoke DFhack or require anything other than the raws to work (mods such as making other animals trainable for war or adding a new metal) then simply uploading the save will work as the raws for your game are included within the save.
Submitting a solutionIf you are one of the !!FUN!! seekers, and you have successfully alleviated somebody's problem, upload the file in the same way as if you were seeking help. Instead of describing the problem, reference your comment to the user who first posted the ailing fort. How you choose to do so (either simply stating the OP's username, quoting them, or something else entirely) is up to you.
In addition, you may wish to describe how you solved the problem to help anybody having the problem in the future as well as letting the OP learn about managing said problem.
Example and first plea for helpAs a true dwarf, I prefer to lead by example! Behold my pleas.
The Fortress:My ailing fort is in harsh natural conditions. I chose it to be a challenge fort with the simple goal of making it as hard as possible for me to succeed in establishing myself. I, surprisingly, prevailed: with nothing but an anvil and a copper nugget, my brave founders forged a pickaxe, survived bruising evil rain, avoided the undead roaming the surface, and pierced the 5z deep aquifer, all before the food from the butchered pack animals ran out. In the following years peace reigned above and below: undeadsplosions took off at an absurdly slow pace thanks to natural wildlife getting stuck, and for the first two decades of the fort, there was nothing but peace and quiet. Military was established extremely late because of the lack of ore on the map combined with the lack of adult population to draft.
However, as is inevitable, the curse of reanimation finally took root in the caverns. Crundle hordes backed by misc. larger wildlife and huge jabberers make up the core of the zombie army, with the coke forgotten beast Shulmik as their general.
The Problem:In a rare case of battle misjudgement and hubris, I sent my four legendary soldiers to deal with the undeadsplosion rampaging through the southern half of the cavern layer. Despite traps and some semi-careful planning, my brave young warriors failed spectacularly, and undead overran the mostly abandoned upper fort in addition to the workings of the unfinished magma trap, which was intended to eliminate invaders should they come.
As an additional note, one of the few surviving founders, the fortress miner, was brutalized in the narrow corridors of the invader trap's access area after my ill-fated charge (by one of his own undead sons!), leaving a mere three out of seven founders left alive. The fortress mothers, Bim and Iteb, perished due to failed moods, with both moods needing unobtainable yarn cloth. Their losses have taken a toll on the fort, because, as founders, they held up numerous industries by themselves.
The lower fort is the only bastion of dwarves left in the entire world. It is self-sustaining and can be automated, yet it teeters on the perilous edge of destruction at the hands of the evil land it lays in.
With these issues, the fortress has dawned upon a new, dark age, where FPS dwindles as the legions of dead grow ever stronger and the loss of numerous important dwarves grinds industry to a halt.
Extra settings and Notes:I have been using DFhack's 'hermit enable' command to prevent migrants and caravans from showing up from nowhere. My population cap has also been set to 30 to save on FPS and keep me from losing track of any individual. The population cap should be nigh irrelevant, as migrants will not show up with hermit and all married, non-gay couples (as a cool note, two of the founders were gay, and they remain the only surviving couple) are dead.
Population stands at 18, 9 of which are adults. However, many of the children are close to coming of age.
The fortress has a queen (which used to be Bim but was passed to her third eldest daughter upon her passing), although meeting mandates is not fully necessary thanks to how happy everybody is. Just stay away from justice or everybody will be punished for three decades of crime.
I also wrote "hermit" all over the place in markers because I kept forgetting to turn it on, thus causing a caravan to come, which spawns dwarves from thin air, making me either have to savescum or murder the merchants with DFhack in order to prevent them from escaping into the world. Feel free to remove them, but they have served as useful reminders to me.
Levers are all named according to the things they trigger, so there should be no "what the heck does this lever do" problems. Bridges are also named similarly to the lever that operates them.
Oh yeah, and there are literally no plump helmets. There aren't. None have grown. I've survived off quarry bushes, sweet pods, and cave wheat along with a massive cloth industry that originates from Bim gathering webs non-stop for over a decade. Most of the cloth is unfortunately stuck in the old fort which is now overrun by undead, but the lower fortress is ready to be fully automated given proper work orders, which includes the entirety of my food/clothing industries.
Lastly, I have drained a small portion of the magma sea, both as a cool project and as a way to mine more candy. It's lost to the undead at the moment, unfortunately, but all candy is safe within the forges.
Download the fort:http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=14369
pls participate so I don't look stupid kthxbye