Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bishop36]

Hello everyone! I just wanted to share the story of my brothers transformation into a dwarf. It started about a year and a half ago ,a little while after I started playing DF. Me and my brother get together every few months to play videogames and catch up and every time for about a year I had tried to tell my brother about Dwarf Fortress because I was sure he would like it. I never could catch his attention with it though because of how hard it is to put how awesome it is into words, and the one time he wanted to see it I made the mistake of running vanila. I forgot how little sense ASCII makes to untrained eyes.

    Anyways after about a year of that nonsense I decided to force him into a crash course on DF, it was for his own good. I made him watch (and collaborate) as I played a fortress,  this time with Genesis (praise be to Deon!), for 5 years while I explained everything starting with a 15 minute tutorial on what he was looking at. After the first 5 minutes of gameplay (I had already explained material properties and combat) he was hooked.

    This is the part that gets me all teary eyed. After a few months I went to visit him again, I had totaly forgotten about showing him the game. The first thing he says is "come look at my fort!". I was expecting something akin to my first forts. What I saw amazed me, it was a dwaven metropolis second only to the dwarfiest of mega projects. Now he has the benefit of having a $2300 liquid cooled demon to run this on. His population was just under 400 and it had been running for 230 years. It was his first fort. He had 150 masterpiece steel (everything except engravings and random crap was master) clad *weapon*masters.

[Yoink]

Wow, 230 years? Awesome... Can just imagine the number of stories that would've formed in that time.
But how did he manage this on his very first fort? Has he just walled up and ignored the world, or has he experienced true Fun?

[Bishop36]

(my phone sucks so I have to split this up) His embark was 6x6 and his fort was massive. It had a massive obsidian caster for crafts and was carved out of a dwarf made obsidian mountain with a wall around it.  Notable features include a second walled in section seperate from the main fort. It was self sufficient and was a cast obsidian ziggurat with a red steel altar (just a construct square of red steel with a red steel altar of war on it) crowning it. The 50 chosen had all the artifact armor/weapons and the rest master red steel. They lived inside the ziggurat and every one was a tried and true hero of the most badass sort (and they had to be steel dwarves). Underneath was a massive catacomb to all the fallen chosen. They made their own food/armor/weapons and the weapons to make the red steel. Every soldier gets burried with his gear.

    The size and scope of his obsidian casting ability (lots of infrastructure) was rival to many mega project alone, (he later told me my description of pumps sucked and he absorbed everything on the wiki)

[Karakzon]

lol.
congrats, now introduce him to the fourms.

[MarcAFK]

Pics or it didn't happen!
Also i totally have to steel that redsteel ziggurat, for my next fort, it sounds very nice.

[Bishop36]

(sorry there is just so much to tell about, I'll try to keep this as organized and ramble-free as I can)

    To explain a bit about how he knows so much, that five year fort I made him sit through took us 4 days and I explained everything. Also he tore apart the wiki shortly after starting. My most pressing advice was to "be very carefull when you start to get deep" I told him about the magma sea but not about the carnival at all. He is scared to death of whats down there so he only has a 8X8 shaft for pumps and magma. He has indeed had near fort ending experiences, and the dead dwarves list is so absudly long. He is at war with everything.

    The story of why he is at war with the elves is of particular note. The thing that made him build a trading post (I don't know how far into the fort, my guess is no more than a few years) was a legendary metalcrafter from a mood. So he quickly made gold into bars and bars into crafts. The first caravan to arive was the (I forget the name) df like ones. He wanted to make a good impression on the elves so he just plain tried to give them bins of high quality gold crafts. Well after some rude remarks about the wooden bins he decided elves would be killed on sight in every fort he makes (I had forgoten to warn him about elves... Oh well he figured it out)

[Bishop36]

I will try to get SC of it, and a save (if you dare try and load it). The best I can do for now is describe (sorry I can't prove it, but I can't really picture someone pathetic enough to make this up.)

Here is some more detail though, the fort he is in now is the 5th fort. I tried to explain how you build a temporary work camp to keep your dwarves safe and happy while you built your main fort but he turned it into build a different fort every time you realize how much better it can be (and need more space, think hermit crab shells). So I guess his obsidian fort isn't really his first.

    I wish I could have seen his first few but the obsidian factory (mostly magma storage) is where they used to be. The obsidian one looks like half a beehive sticking from the ground. It was either 12 or 15 z above ground. It is stacked octagons (he playes a lot of civ 5) the top is the Kings quarters it has a very un-dwarfy 12 clear glass windows (3 on every major wall, it isn't a perfect octogon) and 5 of the levels is a solid sungold spire.

    Surounding the main "hive" between it and the wall is a cast obsidian hospital ( 3 z levels each floor like 6x10 excluding stairwell, top floor is a few medical training buildings) It is pressed right up against the side. There is a main entrance into the hive and 2 smaller outside leading from the  gates. Ground floor is storage, second is beds and tables. I am really not doing any of this justice. Oh also my brother is an engineer.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Wow. That is incredible.

He's and engineer? I hope he's using RL to inspire DF and not the other way around...


(Oh, and "polymorf" is spelled with a ph, in case that wasn't a spelling pun.)

[MarcAFK]

Pholymorf dwarph? :ph

[Eoganachta]

lol.
congrats, now introduce him to the fourms.

He'll hit the ground running.
One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! etc

[Karakzon]

lol.
congrats, now introduce him to the fourms.

He'll hit the ground running.
One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! One of us! etc

Our name is Dwarf legion, for we are many.