The last hurrah, if anybody still cares: the report for year 6 of Number Curse. Apparently, if there’s building done, there’s also writing done.
A small note, I swapped from standard Phoebus to diagonal Phoebus; I think it makes my builds look better:
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The plan for this year was to limit myself to just one savescum (or two playthroughs, if you prefer): a ‘draft’ one where I test all the things I never did, and a ‘real’ one, where I apply all the lessons. That decision wasn’t taken for NumberCurse itself; I want to continue my demon mobility experiment in the doomed world of Sil Kodor.
It also didn’t work, at all. I ended up doing
four playthroughs.
In the draft playthrough, the point was to experiment with all the frankly very basic things that I never did before: a quantum stockpile, a drowning chamber, you get my drift. All was met with great success; and yeah, QSPs are finicky, but really simple after all. You just need to remember setting the same stockpile designation
in three freaking places.
The QSP was initially intended for the forge area; it’s about time we sort the crap from the masterworks. It went well enough that I made two more - one for above-ground wood, and another for cavern loot. With this occasion, I found out there’s already a QSP created for empty barrels; it was accidentally disabled when I removed its input stockpile. I have no plans to re-enable it, at least not in this location:
In the first run, I was really unhappy with the results - I didn’t breach the caverns until autumn, for crying out loud. So I took advantage of the generous time limit, and replayed the year again. And I ended up doing it even worse - the elf ‘diplomat’ I murdered refused to rise, and so did his human bodyguard; I forgot to remove pets from the graveyard, so when the drowning completed, exactly none of them went to the resurrection room. Combined with the caverns being far less terrible than I expected, I went for a fourth replay.
No, I won’t regret it. It was still awesome.
Preparations: - The children’s burrow is responsible for a spectacular amount of cancellation spam;
unassign children and leave the rest intact. That was too much of an annoyance; I deleted the burrow. What kind of name is Zwembad, anyway?
- Disable civilian alert, we need wood from the surface (was it really left on for the entire past year?!?).
- 3 applets are in danger of unhappiness; the mainstay solution of assigning them to jobs they’re good at isn’t going to work, ‘cause none of them have jobs that produce masterworks. I eventually make all of them mechanics, because we’ll need a lot of cage traps constructed anyway.
- Mass-reclaim.
- Deconstruct last turn’s necessities, and any other random workshops. Among the latter, deconstruct all but 4 of the old smelters, and the extra forges (plus, above the forge, create a storage area for the spare anvils & mica blocks). Most of these require masonry, so for a few days everybody gets to be a mason.
- Re-enable trade - deconstruct the constructed wall, dig the remaining strip of wall blocking access (which made the constructed wall superfluous, btw), build a depot. Correctly, this time, if at all possible.
- Create a new cashew wood stockpile for cages.
- Nobles’ rooms and requirements have all been neglected. Spriggans was never assigned a bedroom, dining room, or tomb,
and she mandated 3 gauntlets… yeah, we can do that. Hey, armorer!
- Make guild halls for any guilds I find; I don’t think I can afford the unhappiness penalty from missed guild agreements. It doesn’t really matter where they end up, I just don’t want the timer to expire, and I’ll plonk artifacts and masterworks to up the value anyway.
- Enlist the military. We need an undead elf, and a volunteer will arrive soon… no, not the traders; I’m talking about the so-called-diplomat. Btw: where is our human guest? Did she die without anyone noticing, or did she just leave? I’m asking because… reasons. (I think she did leave after all; no biggie, the elf brought a hyper-competent human bodyguard, sufficiently competent in fact that I gave up on military operations, and resorted to just drowning both of them. Spoilers…)
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Digging: * Cloth room. I need to get all that leather out of my way.
* Multiple trap corridors. Of note, on the surface I intend to duplicate the one I made in last year’s challenge, and there will be two new ones in the caverns.
* A drowning chamber, where some pets will meet their end. I have my eye on you, Fath Kubukmeng, pet goose of Spriggans! And Fath Oltarildom, pet dog of a random bow-dwarf, possessed of some amazingly shitty stats)
* A ‘resurrection’ chamber. For varying values of resurrection.
- After all this is done, go look for the first cavern.
- Mass hauling tasks:
* Tattered clothing; needs a new garbage dump.
* Melt items. After cleanowned and QSP, I think.
- Critical jobs for the first period (they’ll be removed from hauling, except garbage because of cleanowned X:
* The armorer can be left to train.
* 4-5 furnace operators. I want to empty the ore stockpile, so I can make new and more specific ones. Also, melting. Dear Vesh, so much melting.
* Miners and woodcutters.
* Carpenters and mechanics, for traps.
* Masons. Besides blocks, which are always needed, they should also carve out some floodgates and floor hatches. And a few coffins, I guess.
Spring1st Granite. The sacrificial elf has arrived.
Spring has mostly passed with random hauling and digging. The caravan has left unmolested, after exchanging some of the fort’s rags for all its animals and two bows. Pickings were decent by elven standards.
Apropos of nothing, one of the traders is named Cacame; that kicked me straight in the nostalgia.
At the start of summer, the progress was:
1. A series of surface walls, limiting pathing and funneling animals into cage traps. These will be annoying in a siege, but that’s a problem for later. There was some hemming and hawing about the ponds, before I decided to say screw it and just build the wall after them, and some 20+ tiles from the map edge. In retrospect, there’s a pattern of placing these walls where it’s most convenient instead of where it’s aesthetic or consistent.
2. A trap corridor and resurrection chamber right next to it. The resurrection chamber is used via dumping from above; there was an attempt of placing refuse and corpse stockpiles between the traps, before I realized that’s a stupid way to go about it. The dumping channel was surrounded by cage traps; I learned in the previous play-through that fliers can sometimes hover in place, until some dwarf approaches; this way, there’s at least a chance they’ll stop in a cage when they climb out.
The small 3x3 pit on the lower level was made because zombies can reach 1 tile up, and attack dwarves dumping more stuff.
3. Drowning chamber. It’s locked by the fort’s proud artifact door, and has two screw pumps above: one pumping east-to-west to fill it, and another pumping south-to-north to empty it back into the reservoir. Given our limited amounts of surface water, it would be unwise to waste it.
The chamber itself was made into a meeting area, to lure in the elf ‘diplomat’, Lora Emaigife, and his far-too-good human bodyguard, Bengel Kirosukor. This decision was made after an attempt to kill them directly ended in some 5 dead dwarves. Drowning them, on the other hand, went without a hitch:
(note: I don't seem to have any new pics of the new drowning room, and I already deleted my copy of the save; these are from one of the older runs)
4. (and 5.) Trap corridors towards Cave2 & Cave3. The second and third caves are connected by an upwards passage, easily my least favorite natural structure in DF. This means that when I crack it open, I stand to face not only whatever is in the second cave, but also the critters from the third cave: at least two undead forgotten beasts, plus the blind cave ogre, Remkegeth, who killed one of them and caused so much grief to other players, plus a few other assorted undead.
Both of my corridors are connected to the rest of the fort by a single up-stair, covered by a hatch. The corridor for the second cavern is also bracketed by two sniper corridors, where our woefully inadequate ranged squad can try and get some shots in (they failed whenever it was tried). Below, there’s a room where the archers can assemble, and where eventually I’ll make a food and drink stockpile… if I feel like it. I never did.
For the third cave, the plan has shifted between play-throughs: the initial plan was comparable to the one above, but that has turned out to be overkill for normal zombies, and insufficient for the fort’s two forgotten beasts.
So in the final play-though, it was discarded in favor of a simple dog-leg corridor:
For the second cave, it was too late for simplifications: the outline was already dug out by the point of replay (the 6th of Slate, after trade with the elves has concluded), and on top of that it turns out I was blind: there’s already a bridge sealing out the second cavern, complete with fully connected lever:
The bridges are controlled by a set of dedicated levers, back up on level 145; this includes a lever for the first cave, which wasn’t breached until winter, and never got its own bridge seal:
On the dead things front, the surface traps are paying off already - a cougar made its way into a wall trap, and is now loitering in the animal stockpile. There have been two bilou corpses, but they ran into military dwarves first; they’ve been mangled beyond resurrection.
Another thing I’ve done in the spring is sort out the guilds; in the previous play-though, a guild agreement expired on the 8th of Hematite; the many pump operators in the fort have created themselves a guild, and predictably asked for a guildhall. This time, all guilds got a room during spring. For the sake of record keeping, this is the state of them:
The old guilds:
- The Rock of Silver, for a metalsmith’s guild called The Company of Turquoise
- The Attack of Influencing, for a weaponsmith’s guild (Company of Roars)
- The Earthen Harvester of Raptors, for a farmer’s guild (The Hall of Glens)
- The Foggy Hooves, for a planter’s guild (Company of Hailing)
The new guilds:
- The Barricaded Blanket, pump operators (The Guild of Armor)
- The Helmed Shells, Engineer (The Blockaded Company)
- The Lavender Room, Carpenters (The Company of Glaze)
- The Rosy Sun, Woodworkers (The Hall of Stockades)
These 4 are in the hall leading to the smiths’ rooms. They’re all 6x6 rooms, and share the pedestal with the artifact axe; as a result, all 4 are in the neighborhood of 1.65 million dwarf bucks, despite the overlap. Why do we even have more than one guild room?
And with this, I’ll temporarily turn on the civilian alert; if a siege comes, they can entertain themselves with the wild undeath.
Summer6th of Hematite. There is absolutely nothing happening on the surface, so I might as well build a few more walls.
It’s at about this time I noticed I screwed up the wood QSP: I made it one tile off to the north. There are no plans to fix it.
1st of Malachite. With trading concluded, it’s time to punch through the caverns. Somehow, I still manage to feck about for an entire month.
On the
6th of Galena, I'm finally ready. The two known caverns, everything from level 17 to 4, are removed from the burrow; then, the stairwell is re-added in the underground burrow. Both melee squads are stationed above the corridor on level 5, and the miner is asked to dig the last tile.
The forgotten beast, Loslal, rushes in; it’s killed without casualties, and the army is moved
en masse to explore the cavern.
The blind cave ogre is located immediately, alongside an undead reacher arm; they’re both to the south, so the army gets moved to the north. The hope is that they’ll go to the fortress and get stuck in cages, as opposed to getting intercepted by the military and mangled. This proceeds to fail, because the fucking idiots keep going back and forth into the fort. Eventually, three dwarves are killed by the ogre, while the two forgotten beasts were both annihilated without incident; that’s what happens when you travel alone in insecure caverns! At long last, the ogre got caged:
The reacher is then immediately one-shotted by an arrow; with the perils of the cavern either caged or killed, the civilians can be left inside. A mass of corpse hauling ensues. And while I’m here, might as well wall up the passage:
While all this was going down and the other dwarves were locked away, a new zombification operation is being prepared near the surface. A single butcher’s workshop was built, and the only active rawhide stockpile is the one right next to the resurrection dump zone. The plan is to zombify as many skins as possible (and a few fleeces, too), while also not wasting any of the butchering products. This was planned for summer, but put on hold due to the cavern becoming accessible a lot sooner than expected.
Autumn.
13th of Limestone. The caravan has arrived, just as we got 15 idlers.
23rd of Limestone. The saddest of sad sacks has fallen to dwarven justice. The little whiner has been tantrumming and starting fights the whole year, so good riddance. He has pissed me off enough that I dump his corpse in the resurrection chamber, instead of burying him. Note to self, make some slabs.
Around the same time, the cave goes under scrutiny. Against all odds, it has been cleared of all corpses; this means it’s time to start clearing wood, before something unpleasant shows up. The stockpile for corpses gets expanded for wood, the stop with stockpile designations is recreated, and the track stop is inverted - instead of dumping to the right, it now goes to the left. That works mostly fine, excluding some unfortunate miasma events.
The third cavern may be safe from spawns, actually; there are two elk birds stuck in a tree, and going by unit order, they’ve been there since around the start of the year. That would be good for hauling wood, but bad for spamming zombies, so I’ll have to deal with them.
Meanwhile, the second cavern remains completely ignored. There are no visible corpses on it, and no visible wildlife either. Instead, butchering gets my attention. The animals that still live, for now: innumerable dogs, cats and turkeys (ok, not really innumerable but it sure feels like it: 66, 25, and 31); an alpaca, a boar, a cavy sow, two donkeys, one duck and two drakes, four ewes and 3 rams, two geese and two ganders, a groundhog, a guineacock, a hen (no roosters), two horses, a kakapo, two llamas, a nanny goat, three peregrines (for some baffling reason males are called tiercel peregrines and females are peregrine falcons), and one wolverine.
The male tiercel peregrine and the wolverine are wild animals, caught in cage traps. Both will be tamed, but for slightly different reasons - the wolverine will get slaughtered as soon as it's even slightly tame, but for the peregrine I have other plans: I want to try breeding him with the two females; they’re vermin hunters just like cats, but without the danger of catsplosion. Eventually one of them will have to be drowned, because peregrines are too small and don't drop leather.
Meanwhile, the slaughter begins: a donkey, a drake, the groundhog, hen, guineacock, kakapo and nanny goat, plus the male horse (actually, I forgot to mark the male horse; didn’t notice until mid-winter). These are slaughtered first, and their hides are thrown down the resurrection hole to rise once more. The wolverine soon follows. In addition, the sheep, alpacas and llamas are sheared; the first attempt is to raise their fleeces, and if that won’t work they can always be butchered.
With the resurrections done, more standard slaughtering can begin. We have, at this point, 109 animals, 66 of which are dogs. Some culling is in order, and the tanner’s workshop will be rebuilt in its old location:
The caves aren’t being neglected either; the cut wood has all been hauled. This leaves about 20 idle dwarves, and we can’t have that. It’s time to expand operations.
In the third level, I’m going to finally slaughter the two elk birds; but first I have to cut down the trees they’re stuck in. It’s likely wise to dig some of the stone columns, to ease military operations.
The two elk birds are killed, and a jabberer immediately spawns. The third cave is now banned to dwarves.
The second cavern still has no signs of life, normal or otherwise; seriously, not even corpses. I’ll punch through to my trap corridor, half because it’s better guarded and half because I don’t want it to be wasted. Then I’ll pick some silk; might as well get that much out of it.
As for the first cavern, in a previous playthrough I dug a bunch of exploratory tunnels to the west of the staircase; one of them hit wet stone at 90, so it’s a good bet the first cavern is around there somewhere. Some more digging two levels higher reveals the cavern, and it doesn’t look at all well: at least half of it is a lake, with land on the east and west. On the plus side, there’s already a giant rat in it.
Winter… has come, it is the
14th of Moonstone, and not a trace of goblin invasion is present. I’m kinda disappointed, to be honest. It was my only chance of getting a beak dog; or a troll, since the troll corpses I have are both mangled and refuse to rise. Oh well.
The exploration of the first cavern has concluded, barring a small area off to the west; that part is absolutely carpeted in spider webs. There are, still, no animals to be found here. The giant rat has left, and a few naked mole dogs spawn to the west; they’re swiftly killed and resurrected.
In the last month of winter, I also find out the reason for the absence of beasts in the first cavern: another batch of damn elk birds stuck up a damn tree.
It’s at this point that I give up and release the military from duty. This ends up paying strange dividends, because the surface is occupied by five mountain goats. I try to kill them, and succeed in getting three. I dump a corpse, and the rest are butchered; one hide is dumped as well. Unfortunately, there are mere days left in the year, and neither rise by the time Granite begins.
Final Score: 35.
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Topic: Numbercurse - Competitive - The Curse has been Lifted (Read 29519 times)