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Voting closed: May 25, 2020, 03:39:38 am


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Author Topic: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]  (Read 58291 times)

StrikaAmaru

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts [47.04]
« Reply #315 on: August 05, 2020, 10:39:23 am »

I've never seen a macabre mood!

I did have a fell mood once, which resulted in a dwarf bone coffin, of all things. Two burials for the price of one!

As for the adamantine: I did know before that it existed. After my first turn ended, I ran "reveal hell + prospect" to check if the map has sand, of all things (it doesn't). That's how I noticed the ridiculous number of addie rocks on the map, and saw what's in the third cavern. This immediately pushed SmithSoldier to one of the best embark sites ever, and I PM'd Quantum Drop to ask if he had any pre-embark copies to upload to DFFD (he doesn't T_T). It was also one of the reasons I finally went for a smithy in the magma pipe - it gave me a reason to punch into the third cavern.
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StrikaAmaru

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts [47.04]
« Reply #316 on: August 07, 2020, 01:19:56 am »

Part 5: Winter. Blessed by Armok.

1st Moonstone. A vile force of darkness blah blah blah. We are unconcerned, our business is deep beneath the ground, and the surface has been locked tightly for two months, since we traded with the mountainhome, and have begun this project.

7th Moonstone. The curse-bearing full moon has risen over the world, which allows a goblin hammerer to die at the hands of yet another were-chameleon:




Down in the third cavern, we’re traipsing about like we own the place. Nothing hostile has appeared in this cavern yet. The smithy is nearly sealed... and I suppose I should explain what I’ve been doing in proper detail.


The spot with the blue nether-cap log is the output of the former drop chute from the crafting level. At the moment, there’s a dump zone in it for gathering all the logs from the inconveniently-placed cavern trees that we’ve cut down. In due time, it’s a good idea to enclose access, so that when items are dumped, nobody walks over it and gets their brains splattered by a chunk of hematite that fell nearly 40 levels, from 133 to 96.

This corner of the magma pipe was enclosed in 6 levels of walls, all the way up to the cavern’s roof. There is, at this moment, a small passage to the south, where dwarves can go into the larger cavern. We’re using that now to gather a few logs, and to secure the adamantine spire - we’ve already cut up the trees surrounding it, now we’re going to dig internal access stairways, and protective outer walls (again to the cavern roof, which for the spire is only 3 levels away).
I can only hope nothing comes to interrupt us.

21st Moonstone


A second cavern-punching spire was located, to the north-east this time. I believe we can ignore this one until we exploit the safe portions of the other two spires we know of.


The first spire is where the stair was carved; the second spire is barely visible, off to the east of that unrevealed zone.

 
 
23rd of Moonstone

 
There are no battle reports involving this one; I can only presume he’s somehow fallen in the magma pipe.

26th of Moonstone


Good thing there’s already a room available; when they’ll inevitably ask for a guildhall, it will be the work of a minute.

4th Opal. The mystery of Zotho has been unraveled - he was the human locked in jail and staring off into space.


6th Opal. After two months, the Spire is fully sealed, though so far unconnected to the fortress. We have not been bothered by anything, excluding the forgotten beast that was already present in the cavern. That was some spectacular good fortune, and we should certainly thank the gods about it!

   
14th Opal. Sure enough, the guild requests have been brought out.



22nd The year’s almost done, so I might as well focus on my new smithy.


Up on level 133, the old smithy has been decommissioned; the bars nearest are dumped down the hole. The real test here is if they’ll fall in the designated spot, or scatter in flight.



The bar stockpiles on the upper level are, left to right: unused, steel, gold, lead. The lead one is making lead blocks non-stop, I still have a highly-specific tavern to complete.


Off to the right of the smelter line, I’ve designated the ‘melting’ smelter. This is where all the sub-par garbage will meet its doom. I made an 11x11 stockpile which takes all the low-quality armor, weapons, crafts and furniture; I’ll leave it to someone better acquainted with minecarts to add a QSP right next to it. On the right, there’s a stockpile accepting only empty metal cages; all the loose ones in the fort have already been melted, except for 2 which are decorated and don’t technically qualify for this stockpile.

24th Obsidian I might as well assign the two guild halls that were asked of me. The farmer’s guildhall is placed in the unused room by the Beak of Crevices, the guildhall of the miners. The grand guildhall for the weavers is seated right south of the trade depot, and gets some furniture to bump the value:



To sufficient numbers, apparently. Nothing like building an artifact weapon rack in a room to wow a bunch of bureaucrats, eh?

This still leaves the farmer’s guildhall, mind; I’m in the process of smoothing it out, then some furniture can be built in here as well. At least they only ask for a guildhall, not a grand guildhall.


(ooc: yeh, so apparently the quality levels actually matter… oops? That does explain some of the announcements/accusations that I abandoned agreements).

One of the stranger results of working in the third cavern is a refuse stockpile well-garnished with corpses. Most of them are crundles, as expected, but there are also a few jabberers and rutherers; we also found the skeletal remains of a bat people tribe, slain who knows when by who knows who; sufficient time had passed that there was no indication of what has ended them.


If the over-abundance of crundles puzzles you, I can only presume you’re human; to make a long story short, crundles in the caverns have roughly the same ecological niche as rabbits on the surface: everybody loves to eat them. So by sheer population dynamics, there’s a lot of them at any given point.

28th Obsidian. My term officially ends tomorrow; unofficially, it ended today, because I have taken the position of captain of the guard from Monom. He is good, but I am sure I’m better.


With this occasion, I’m reminded our feeble-minded mayor has ordered us to make bracelets; the very same trade goods he ordered us to not export in the summer, after traders had already packed. I chain up some random ivory & horn goods in a craft shop, we have plenty of raw materials and while we could line up actual bracelets, I’m sure somebody will get around to making them anyway.
------------

The year is done, and the save is here. There will be a sort-of-a-part-6 after all, with OOC remarks and fort summary that I won’t/can’t put in my proper play-through.
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LeftHandofGod

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #317 on: August 07, 2020, 11:08:28 pm »

Well! That's certainly something. I think I'll leave the mining of the adamantine to some other overseer and focus on just keeping the damned sprawling mess we call Smithsoldier running for my turn. Maybe tidy things up a bit and do some smoothing and such.
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StrikaAmaru

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #318 on: August 08, 2020, 04:09:17 am »

Part 6: Closing notes.

Well, this year went side-ways, several times. The fort’s not that strong, imo; our military is tiny just 13 dudes, the tower (where all the military should be training so they don’t get cave-adapted) is unused, happiness is dropping, slowly but all across the board, and the clothing situation has somehow gone both better and worse, in the same time.

The tower
. It’s fully sealed now; somebody had started building a door on the roof, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, and I built a cage trap before the hatch. Right now, that hatch is locked.


 
The archery floor is under deconstruction and reorganization. The ‘external’ hall-way should be extended with another vertical section off to the right; a wall should be moved, old archery targets should be deconstructed to allow for engravers to carve fortifications, and internal doors should be set up. This is some very low-priority work, because our military is kind of in the pits. We have three real squads, of which only the Ochre Bolts are marksdwarves; with 7 members, they constitute more than half of our military:


Below in the melee floor, some minor floor reorganization is done as well. But our melee squads have, respectively, 3, 3, and 0 members. At this point it’s pretty much not possible for them to train.


Below that, the outdoor farms were restarted; I dimly recall somebody complaining about the vast number of thread-producing plants that we have (or was that in SmallHands? I mix them up). But do keep in mind that clothing eats up multiple bolts of cloth, so when I see “1,000 cloth”, what I think is “almost enough clothing for ~70 dwarves”. I don’t have the accurate math for this, and I suppose I should make some. For my sake, if not everybody else’s :D.

 
Level 144 is the start of the enemy dumping pit. So close, and yet so far…

All available hostiles were piled in one single dumping zone. There should be about 200 cages there, all with goblins, trolls, and the remaining four beak dogs that are not being tamed or slaughtered (despite tamers constantly trying; I think they killed dwarves, so the game marks them as enemies 4 eva). The truly bad news is on the bottom, to my one failed project for the year:

 
The spikes genuinely don’t work T_T. I tried dumping prisoners on top of them, and all survived; I had to wipe them out with military intervention. What in tarnation? The empty floor did more damage than the spikes, and all of them are full of masterwork- or excellent-quality spikes and spears!

I leave it to my successor to either move the enemies to the Temple of Armok, or attach a lever to the spikes then assign that lever to be pulled infinitely. That at least couldn’t possibly fail, retracting spikes are known for killing forgotten beasts and demons; naked goblins should stand no chance. I recommend against a marksdwarf tunnel in the walls, because the targets can climb...

And with that carefully deployed segue, there’s these two things:

 
Enemies can climb out of the pit, and have made it up these two ways out. Military dwarves had to hunt them down individually. I’ve sealed one of them, but I ran out of time on the other; wall tiles have to be placed one at a time, or dwarves won’t have where to stand, so yes this is a very frustrating thing to do.

143: I made a stockpile above the tavern for prepared meals, and I separated the animals from the goblins. With this occasion, I re-re-learned that we have a bunch of crow people in the cages, who can’t be dumped any drop chutes ‘cause they fly. Personally, I’d just release them outside, it’s not like they’ve done us any harm.


142. There are 10+ empty coffins, a giant booze pile that will last you the whole next year (I ordered more anyway), a tavern that needs lead flooring and furniture here and there, a pasture for future war dogs that will hopefully be superseded by WAR GRIZZLY BEARS, and the new underground farm - now with almost no risk of enemy goblins (the plots aren’t set to be planted all in all seasons; we’re neck deep in plants already).


Below that is the animal corpse pile, and our butchers are slowly making their way through crundles. Next to it, I put the people-corpses pile, because really where else do you expect it to be?


There’s another failure here - I tried to set up a minecart to take from the corpse pile in the right, and didn’t read the wiki article until the end; so I failed miserably to set this up. At this time, the garbage minecart also services the corpse pile too.

Frankly, I’m not so sure about auto-dumping these - animal corpses can usually be butchered, dwarven and pet corpses need to be buried properly, or you get ghosts, and tattered clothing doesn’t need to be dumped in an atom-smasher because it decays on its own, plus any masterworks that get smashed will make their creators pissed off. And it’s not like adding a minecart spares the dwarves from seeing corpses, because they’re still the ones loading them from stockpile to minecart...

139. Cloth and yarn derived from plants are all here. We have almost no leather, but luckily we also don’t need a lot of leather.


The clothing situation was addressed, but by no means resolved. There are some stockpiles of plant-based cloth in their proper place, and spider silk still sits uncollected in the cave. I did manage to, uh, confiscate some clothes from prisoners, and to make some of the clothes that goblins don’t bring - pants, gloves and caps primarily. In addition, plant processing was left on repeat for plants, and weaving was left on repeat for plant cloth. We now have ~1000 hemp thread, which seems like a lot, but is not going to be enough for even a fraction of our needs.


Related, we also have a giant cave spider sitting in a cage, which I have ignored, once again.

In 133, the crafting level, we already know what I did :D

The New Temple of Armok, in all its convoluted glory, has been left untouched.

126. In the first cavern, Ib is acting very oddly: it’s been hanging off that rock face since early spring, if not sooner.


And speaking of the first cavern, why did you do this?


Why did you tear down. A. Perfectly. Unassailable. Cavern seal. And replaced it with a wall??? Now how am I supposed to lure the forgotten beast in a position where it can be shot to death, with no risk to our people? Do you WANT to go engage a horror beyond time in melee combat?

Because really, before this, all I had to do was to carve out a marksdwarves tunnel off to the north, then unlock a hatch long enough for the FB to path & travel here. Then I could lock the hatch again, and laugh while the stupid FB with the useless poisonous bite was getting pincushioned.

Now we’re gonna have to fight fair, and we all know that’s for suckers.

Actually. Between this and the door on the roof, I’m thinking somebody doesn’t know how hatches-above-stairs work: they’re impossible to tear down from below, because they never get included in pathing calculations. DF does paths in 2 stages: in stage 1, it calculates which tiles/blocks are available as path plocks. In stage 2 and based on the results of stage 1, it actually calcs a route. A ramp or stair is only a valid target for pathing if there is a block above where a potential creature can sit after going up; if you put a hatch on top of it, there won’t be one, and the stair is marked as unusable.
What’s not totally clear to me is why fliers still fall for this crap, they could in theory sit/fly on the stair, then attack the hatch from below.

That’s enough DF mechanics, back to your scheduled fortress tour.

110. This is the best place for a new risk-free marble quarry, so I already started one around the dump zone. One level below, we have the old quarry, and below that there’s the second cavern, so that’s my reasoning, basically.

 
Btw, before digging these out, we had 28 lumps of marble in the entire fort.

On level 97, I just noticed a stupid-ass fisher-dwarf walled outside; let the fool in, will ya?


He wasn’t supposed to be there, the cavern is outside the emergency burrow.

And lastly, level 96 with the smithy and the addie Spires. I feel justified in using the capital letter.

Of note here: I left lead blocks on repeat, in order to finish the tavern floor; I think we need about 50 more, so judging on previous performance the dorf should reach that number around the 15th of Granite. I rarely use manager orders, as opposed to workshop orders on repeat, because I always thought workshop orders are done a lot faster; I also had a 50-gold-blocks order put in through the manager interface, and it took nearly 2 months. Then I got 50+ lead blocks from the workshop, in about two WEEKS.

 
The addie spire was, as I said, completely sealed from the cavern. It wasn’t yet connected to the fort, largely because adamantine requires a lot of crafts-dwarves shops to process (or more accurately, extracting strands takes a lot of time; most people ‘fix’ that by using a lot of ‘shops); whoever starts exploiting this seriously is probably best served in carving a new room above the smithy, where the dedicated strand extractors can work in peace.

In older editions, adamantine threads / strands were a prime target for all sorts of stupid behavior, especially doctors using them for stitches (thus destroying them from wafer making).



Population-wise, there have been losses, let me put it that way. We also gained 3 new citizens via immigration, but even so numbers have gone down. We count 136 full citizens, 2 were-chameleons, 3 children, and 3 humans guests who’re loitering around. Two of them have elected to go loitering in the third cavern; those are too dumb to live, and they can do what they want until something eats them. Compared to the start of the year, we’re down 14 adults and one child, and somehow gained one guest.

Start of year:

[...] 158 inhabitants (including the two were-chameleons); Dwarf Therapist reports 147 adult citizens, 4 children, 2 were-chameleons because it’s a full moon, & the remaining 5 are ‘guests’ - not controlled directly, but still part of the fort.


What really cheeses me off is that happiness has been dropping across the board, and that the clothing situation appears to have gone worse, not better, looking just on the surface of it. I’ll see how a bout of ‘cleanowned X’ will go in the fort; I don’t think we can afford a full ‘cleanowned x’, because of time if not replacement clothes, and anyway only the badly tattered clothes cause bad thoughts.

(Update: "cleanowned X" works wonderfully; "cleanowned scattered X" is evil, and doesn't care about wear levels at all; don't use it, just let the beards haul unclaimed crap to the refuse pile).

I haven’t used the mist generator because I had made some bad assumptions; I thought there was a hole in it, but no, I was just wrong about pumping direction. Ooops. The tank is completely dry at this moment, and it’s just waiting for a bunch of dwarves with Pump Operatin’ to get to it.

The named dwarves:


---
To my successor:

Plz buy grizzlies! You wouldn’t believe how much I wanted dwarves with war grizzly bears beating the snot out of goblins. Buy them when they come. PLEASE.

Plz force-dump very tattered clothing; dwarves are exactly stupid enough to never drop a piece of clothing, and then complain about wearing tattered clothes; just put a garbage dump area on top of a refuse pile, then let the rags decay naturally. You can even use the refuse pile in the animal pasture, so nobody has to see corpses!

The fort has no active manager orders. There are several jobs left on repeat in workshops: the lead blocks one, which should be shut down ~15th-20th; ‘melt metal object’ is best left alone, we have stupid-huge amounts of goblin crap. Plant processing and cloth weaving are self-explanatory; though actual clothing can wait after most dumping, so you know what to make...

I thought I left no active dump zones, but I was wrong - there's a one-tile garbage dump, sending everything down the former magma chute, current ore & bars chute. The area is to the south of the hole, under the 3x3 area that I made. (if you don't know how to delete it, you can navigate between overlapping areas with {v}, then delete it with {x}-{X}).

This concludes my year, in which I wrote & posted ~9,500 words, including prologue & epilogue. I'm also signing up for another turn.

EDIT: the bracelet crap the mayor wanted? We have no active bone carvers, so nobody's going to make them. I recommend Cog Ulzest-something, who's a level 18 bonecarver and pretty unhappy; we can solve 2 problems in one action, and we should.

(edit, 25th Aug: fixed an image - the one with the first cavern entry. That one of you ruined).
« Last Edit: August 25, 2020, 09:03:40 am by StrikaAmaru »
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DwarvenLord

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #319 on: August 08, 2020, 05:42:36 pm »

Well, if they do abandon my pit, my turn will of had absolutely no effect other than a degradation from a lack of maintenance. Oh well. Better luck next time...
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And thus was the dwarven meatshield invented.
the child should serve well in the infantry (that is a horrible pun, and I already regret saying it).

DwarvenLord

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #320 on: August 13, 2020, 12:30:38 pm »

Hey Left, how's the turn going?
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And thus was the dwarven meatshield invented.
the child should serve well in the infantry (that is a horrible pun, and I already regret saying it).

LeftHandofGod

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #321 on: August 14, 2020, 04:16:05 pm »

Hey Left, how's the turn going?

Nervous sweating intensifies...

Nah, legit though, I've gotten distracted playing another game. Probably do my turn here over my three day weekend in a bit.
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DwarvenLord

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #322 on: August 24, 2020, 03:04:44 pm »

Alright Lefty, should we skip you?
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And thus was the dwarven meatshield invented.
the child should serve well in the infantry (that is a horrible pun, and I already regret saying it).

Zalthor

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #323 on: August 25, 2020, 12:30:55 pm »

Are you fine gentledwarves still accepting petitions for new overseers?
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DwarvenLord

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #324 on: August 25, 2020, 02:31:07 pm »

Are you fine gentledwarves still accepting petitions for new overseers?
Sure.
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And thus was the dwarven meatshield invented.
the child should serve well in the infantry (that is a horrible pun, and I already regret saying it).

Zalthor

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #325 on: August 25, 2020, 04:15:35 pm »

Are you fine gentledwarves still accepting petitions for new overseers?
Sure.
Excellent! I would love to be a part of this, then.
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Quantum Drop

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #326 on: August 25, 2020, 06:03:01 pm »

I'll get you signed up, then. Apologies for my inactivity - a mix of IRL stuff and other commitments have had me rather distracted.
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I am ambushed by humans, and for a change, they do not drop dead immediately. I bash the master with my ladle, and he is propelled away. While in mid-air, he dies of old age.

DwarvenLord

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #327 on: August 26, 2020, 06:15:44 pm »

I contacted Left on Discord, he said we can skip his turn. It's Recon's turn now.
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And thus was the dwarven meatshield invented.
the child should serve well in the infantry (that is a horrible pun, and I already regret saying it).

Manofthehour234

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #328 on: August 27, 2020, 11:28:31 am »

You guys need another overseer?
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recon1o6

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Re: Smithsoldier, Year 12: Clothes, Madness, and Beasts (And Candy) [47.04]
« Reply #329 on: August 27, 2020, 11:53:21 am »

for now, gonna have to skip me, im in the middle of Smallhands, sure im just finishing up my turn but i don't have much free time atm

thought i mentioned this earlier, huh
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Urist McRecon cancels make exploding booze: Interrupted by bad idea
Urist McRecon cancels bad idea: missing raw files
Urist McRecon cancels add raw files: Interrupted by fortress mode
Urist McRecon cancels play fortress mode: Needs exploding booze
Urist McRecon cancels acquire exploding booze: No materials
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