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[Nil Eyeglazed]

Tired of your dwarves wandering outside during your sieges?  Burrows never seem good enough with so many idlers?  Don't want to keep track of your children?  Try the Pied Piper!

Code: [Select]

 
#####
^hhC#
#####

^ is pressure plate linked to first left hatch, citizens trigger; h is hatch (right hatch is connected to lever for turning it off); C is a constructed wall designated for removal

Build a few of these, throw the lever to give your dwarves a path, and watch them come tumbling in!

Features include:

Attracts children and other worthless citizens! (Warning: does not attract animals or the handless)
Easily toggleable!
High priority job!
Never needs winding!
Easily expandable!
So small, you can store it in the closet!
Can be used to guide movement to any part of your fortress, at the flick of a switch!

Once you've tried one Pied Piper, you won't be satisfied until you have two hundred!

[Girlinhat]

This doesn't work: hatches activate instantly.  The dwarf will step onto the plate, and the hatch opens immediately.  Without a path, the dwarf will cancel the job and wander off.  Replace the two hatches with a drawbridge that raises towards the plate.  This will cause the dwarf to step on the plate, and walk forward.  100 ticks later, the bridge will raise, forming a wall, and negating any "fling" from the bridge, due to the 1x1 space.  With an empty space there now, the dwarf falls straight down, and the bridge resets.

Good luck doing this in time to get all your dwarves inside during a siege.

[Frogwarrior]

Good luck doing this in time to get all your dwarves inside during a siege.

Well sure, if you only have ONE....

[acetech09]

... so either he didn't test it, unlikely - or Professor !!SCIENCE!! is wrong, near impossible - or Nil's game is somehow screwed up so that it works for him - unlikely.


If it works - I can see possibilities in the field of fortress mass suicide... will kill everybody down to the last child, except a active military.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

This doesn't work: hatches activate instantly.  The dwarf will step onto the plate, and the hatch opens immediately.  Without a path, the dwarf will cancel the job and wander off.  Replace the two hatches with a drawbridge that raises towards the plate.  This will cause the dwarf to step on the plate, and walk forward.  100 ticks later, the bridge will raise, forming a wall, and negating any "fling" from the bridge, due to the 1x1 space.  With an empty space there now, the dwarf falls straight down, and the bridge resets.

Good luck doing this in time to get all your dwarves inside during a siege.

The point's not to drop them-- it's to summon them.  (You're right, though, that a bridge based construction similar to this could be used for dropping dwarves, if that's your thing.  I'm pretty sure you'd need to reload it every once in a while though.  Still, it would be more useful for most people than my device.)

What you do is build several of these deep in your fortress.  Depending on population, you might need a lot, but they're simple so you can do that.  The dwarf gets there, cancels the job; 100 ticks later, the path opens up again, and some dwarf-- maybe the same dwarf-- takes the job.  You need a number of these proportional to your population, but every idler will get grabbed.  The further you place these from where you don't want your dwarves, the better.

The dwarves might wander off when they lose path, but the job is high enough priority that as long as one of these is unclaimed, they won't wander far, and you've already done your job by bringing them to a certain location.

It'll work nearly instantly-- almost as fast as you can pull a lever (and consider a high-speed creature-based switch if that's not happening fast enough for you).  Remove construction is a super high priority job.

I envision using this to control year-long flow through a fortress.  With slightly more than your population, you can bring your entire population to any particular point in your fortress just by flicking a switch.  As soon as you want them to return to work, you close the hatches.

EDIT: If you're not so hot on the idea of idler/child summoning, maybe you'll see the value in a small variation-- I call it the Undump.  They're gonna be big one of these days.  One day, you'll say things like, "Yeah, I used to play DF, before undumps came along and ruined stockpiling."

Code: [Select]

 
#####
^shs#
#####
h is hatch; ^ is pressure plate, citizens trigger, linked to hatch; # is wall; s is stockpile (same type)

Single tile stockpile while preserving dump functionality, without having to mark anything as dump.  Tested.  Works.  No bins necessary, etc.  Works great for mechanisms, doors, bags, corpses, hair, skulls, ammo, even stone should you feel the urge for a clean fortress.

[Frogwarrior]

That....

The undump is, actually, super awesome.

Oh, and by the way, the Pied Piper, bridge variation, COULD be used as an emergency entrance as well. (Which is what I thought it was for, to get people inside if they're outside when the siege shows up.) IF you close your gates, put out an alert, and then activate the entrances, then everyone outside will march to the nearest emergency entrance, step on the pressure plate, march up to the wall, and fall a safe 1Z into a corridor below.

And yeah, now that I see what it's for, the original is a neat idea too.

[acetech09]

I've been using something similar to that for a while for stone - your little undump contraption is about twice as small as mine. Brilliant.

[Girlinhat]

Actually, undumping looks like a delicious cluster of hax and creamy caramel.  I might instal one of those for stone, simply to clean out places very quickly without having to assign dump commands.

For anyone who doesn't know how it works:
1: The dwarf picks up the stone and brings it to the left-most stockpile, the safe one.
2: The dwarf picks up another stone and brings it to the right-most stockpile, the unsafe one.
3: As they walk to the stockpile, the hatch opens and their path is removed, causing them to spam job cancel and drop their stone where they're standing.  Because they're already standing on a stockpile, then the dropped stone is already stockpiled.
4: The dwarf will pick up a DIFFERENT stone, because the one he dropped is already on a stockpile, and repeat until finished.

Utilizing this, mass-dumping can become automated.  Stone can be piled up, and sorted, to this 3x5 location, allowing for masons to grab useless stone (or a specific color stone), forges to have their charcoal and ore right beside them, kitchens to have their tallow and sugar available...

In fact, Nil, if you'll make a new thread for undumping, I'll add it to my Dwarven Relativity thread.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

the Pied Piper, bridge variation, COULD be used as an emergency entrance as well. (Which is what I thought it was for, to get people inside if they're outside when the siege shows up.) IF you close your gates, put out an alert, and then activate the entrances, then everyone outside will march to the nearest emergency entrance, step on the pressure plate, march up to the wall, and fall a safe 1Z into a corridor below.

There's two problems with using pressure plates/hatches for emergency fort access:

1) Building destroyers

2) No way to make a pressure plate triggerable by only citizens and not invaders

Here's what I would start with for an emergency entrance:

Code: [Select]

######
h^hhC#
######

h is hatch: middle is over a down stairs leading to your fort, first and third are over channels; ^ is pressure plate (citizens trigger) linked to all hatches and the door;
C is construction designated for removal; best to link leftmost hatch to lever so you can turn it off when desired

Now, outside dwarves path to the construction, find no path when they get there, and no path to anything outside, but now there's a staircase going down into your fortress.  The hatches form a sort of airlock, so there's never a path into your fortress at the same time as there's a path into the device.  Very close invaders still have a remote possibility of making it in along with your dwarf, but it's only a small chance, and there shouldn't be many of them.  Dwarves shouldn't path up while the hatches are open, because it's not a path to anything interesting or anything that needs doing, but if they do, they won't be able to leave the device.

To protect against building destroyers, you need something like:

Code: [Select]

 
######################
^bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbh^hhC#
######################

Right section is as above; b is bridge over channel; left ^ is pressure plate (only invaders trigger) linked to bridge

It's ugly, but it'll keep out trolls.  Won't work against titans.

If what you want to do is drop all of your dwarves into a deep, deep pit, you build:

Code: [Select]

 
###################
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb^hC#
###################

Pressure plate is citizens trigger, linked to both bridge and pressure plate

It's not very pretty.  Not good for emergency access, because you drop near-by invaders as well, and invaders may wander onto the pressure plate themselves (if pursuing a path to a dropped dwarf, maybe?)

Longer bridge is better; fastest possible dwarves will escape this one.  If you don't want to drop all of your dwarves, it's easy to filter by assigned jobs or specific (adult) dwarf-- replace the construction with profiled lever, or with a workshop.  If you want to filter out adults and only grab children, you build pressure-plate controlled access onto the left like so:

Code: [Select]

 
##
^h
##

You just set the pressure plate to only trigger at certain weights-- 35k+ should keep out even small adults, although it might keep out some large adolescents as well.    Build it with a lower value (15k+?  Needs testing) and leave it open to institute an "Only huge children survive to age 3" eugenics program-- they won't accept the job as a baby.  As with all of these designs, you'll want to be able to block access with a door/bridge to prevent job spam.

[0x517A5D]

(This post moved to the new Undump thread.)

[Frogwarrior]

Actually, the bridge version could be done MUCH more easily without any fear of buildingdestroyers, if you're OK with replacing the pull-lever-to-activate with designating the constructions every time you want to use it:

Code: [Select]

#####
^<=C#
#####The bridge (<=) raises towards the arrow. The square next to the construction is over an 1-Z drop into the fortress.
So it works like this:
Seal the gates, designate all the constructions.
Dwarf wanders up, activates the plate starting the 100 tick delay before the bridge raises.
Dwarf walks up to the construction, starting the 100 tick delay before the bridge gets the Off signal.
Bridge raises; dwarf falls into fortress.
Bridge gets the Off signal from the pressure plate, 100 ticks later it closes.
After everyone's inside, undesignate all of the constructions and do whatever.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

That's definitely simpler and more beautiful

[Urist Da Vinci]

It also has a chance of atomsmashing any kids/pets that are following the deconstructing dwarf. Though their chance of survival is better than staying outside.

[Di]

You know, you could make regular entrance that keeps goblins out without that much complications like deconstruction designation. Simply make plate triggered by invaders and place some traps to keep trolls away. Dwarves won't give a shit about performing jobs if they see goblins so you'll need to activate burrow anyway and they'll run for it even without bait.
The basic concept however is quite good and with minor modifications it can be used to do various things to (against  ) children.
And as for undump, man, you probably should reconsider your priorities 

[Frogwarrior]

Uh... you've never had a score of laborers get chased around in circles by goblins outside, have you.