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[jsnlxndrlv]

Excellent.

What tileset are you using? I've been sort of debating getting one for a while, but I could never be bothered to choose.

[Esperath]

I am using an old version of the Mayday tileset.

[Esperath]

Too many puppies running around your fort? 
 
Esperath Buttfranklin has a solution for that.

[Esperath]

This is me on an off-day.  God, I'm good.  I'm so good that I'm going to forbid anyone touching this food until we can swap it for an entire caravan-load of goods.

Then everyone will know the true power of the Iron Chef.

ALLEZ CUISINE!

[Esperath]

ah jesus christ the fire imp got out

[Esperath]

With a bit of quick thinking, our mason punched the fire imp to death, dodging fireballs while leaving spatters of blood and fire imp goo all across the tunnel.

No one would touch the corpse, so as our glorious leader, I hauled the smoldering corpse of the imp out of the fortress and dumped it in a pond.

And as far as I can tell, no one is on fire.  Thank Idrath Canyonwheel for that.

[Esperath]

Well, no one is on fire, but it looks like we didn't escape without damage.

Our fortress blacksmith lost an eye and suffered from a broken head (!?).  We can't tell if there's any nervous system damage, so he may or may not recover.

[Esperath]

Macaques decided to crash the party while we were attempting to tend for our wounded.

Don't fuck with us.

[Esperath]

Spring has arrived without further disruptions.  Before I retire to the kitchens, I wanted to pass on some general information about the fortress.


This is the main layout of the fortress, with the entrance and depot to the right, workshops in the middle, and the kitchens to the left. 

Farms are up the stairs by the kitchens.  Food stockpile is directly down from the kitchens, right next to the dining hall (still pretty spartan). 

Goodies stockpile is up the stairs near the workshops. 

Dormitories are toward the bottom of the screen, down a few levels. 

The refuse stockpile is set to only allow bones, shells, and skulls.  The other refuse goes outside.  Keep some shells around for strange moods.

Stones are still strewn about everywhere, but with only 16 dwarfs, pleb hauling is at a premium. 



These are the workshops our dwarfs fought and bled for.  Make good use of them!



Extra storage space up from the workshops.



The primary farm area, near the kitchens and food stores.  There is a zoo/puppy containment field established up here.



The blessed food stockpile.  Keep in mind that I have forbidden dwarfs from eating roasts from stacks worth more than 2500 monies.



There is probably at least 75,000 cash worth of food down there, so unforbid them and mark them for trade when the big caravans come along!



The dorms are all 2x2 with plenty of room for expansion.  All current dwarfs have their own rooms, but no extra furniture besides a bed yet.  The dorms are positioned far down and away from the workshops to minimize noise.

[Esperath]

I now return to the kitchens in order to uncover long-forgotten secrets of flavor.  To my successor, enjoy the delicious meals and delve into the richest depths of the earth!



To Newbie: [Dwarf Fortress program with Lancerblameless Spring 202 save folder] 
I tried just copying the save folder and running it from a fresh install, but I got fatal errors, so I'm just copying over the entire thing.  You can probably replace the init file with whatever you like.  You can also just try copying the region1 save file over to your DF save folder, but it may not work.

[Smiler]

I can't wait to make this fort not look pretty and dysfunctional.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Downloading. We'll see what happens soon!

[jsnlxndrlv]

I got picked as the annual Fortress Planning Supervisor! What an honor. Dwarven succession traditions demand that I disregard our former leader's meticulous planning in favor of my own terrible and short-sighted designs, culminating in our inevitable slaughter at the appendages of goblins, carp, and insane craftsdwarves. As a butcher, I have considerable experience with making a big bloody mess of things:


(For simplicity, I renamed Esperath's init file and am using my own. Trying to work with an unfamiliar tileset in a resolution I'm not used to is too much change, too quickly.)

It's all fine and good to make a functional, wealthy, and self-sufficient fortress, but a single lucky fire imp can bring all that to an end--and one nearly did. The accumulation of material wealth is a fallacy, albeit a thoroughly dwarven one. While I reign over this settlement, the dwarves under my command shall turn their hammers to the glorification of dwarven spirit, as well as our god, Udib Tuftwaxes the Fresh Mucus. A glorification that shall outlast our meager time on this earth: a megaproject. And what better a project than the subjugation of that element which dwarves favor least? I shall bind up the water to use as we see fit. I shall build a water-works.

My first priority is the redistribution of labor. As our Iron Chef and former ruler, Esperath is the only dwarf who won't be getting a custom profession and labor set. However, I am assigning him all miscellaneous kitchen duties; aside from a small booze factory, the rest of the fortress is going to prepare for the construction efforts ahead. I'm going to need a lot of mechanisms, pipes, and corkscrews, which is probably easiest to get with wood. Just to be safe, I start making a couple more iron axes.

As a warm up for the miners, I dig a chimney over the underground refuse pile and surround it with a wall, with the intention to eventually make it a statue garden to enable sunlight adaptation.

Meanwhile, the traders have arrived; I unforbid the quality food and have it sent to the trading post, but not before Esperath decides to indulge in a lavish meal. The elves didn't have much of use, but I still traded pretty much everything they had for two stacks of food. I probably could have gotten it for less, but giving the elves excellent bargains is just another way of showing our dwarvish disdain for them.

Some migrants arrived just in time for one of my woodsmen to be taken by a secretive mood. It'll be good to have guards on hand to pummel the madman should I be unable to satisfy his requests. With the influx of fresh blood, I can now assign a sheriff, and I take the opportunity to fire Esperath from some of his redundant positions in management and reassign those duties to new dwarves. One dwarf alone should not hold that much power.

As I'm in the process of setting up the "military" of three untrained wrestlers, the woodcutter completes his artifact.


It would seem that we "named" dwarves are at risk of being eaten by naked mole dogs and hoary marmots. Or perhaps at risk of being turned into shoes. I'm not sure what he's trying to say, here.

More as it develops.

[jsnlxndrlv]

In early summer, we're ambushed by goblins; they immediately take out a woodcutter. I sound the alarm and herd everybody indoors, activate my squad, and station them near the entrance.

Suddenly, the human caravan arrives!



The traders' escorts successfully drive off two goblin raiding parties.

I'm afraid that with my expanded workforce, I became increasingly cavalier with my workers' lives. It's all well and good to say you're willing to sacrifice for the cause of progress, but the real measure of dedication is shown by how many times you'll let your masons wall themselves in during the construction of a vast underground reservoir. Now, I'll admit that I only managed to do that twice, but I tried to make up for it by not forbidding bodies fast enough when one of my porters drowned right next to a pike.

(Actually, I wound up getting the workers out, again.)

Near the end of summer, another goblin ambush coincided with a major caravan arrival. Unfortunately, I've got a bunch of holes punched in our defenses in order to finish the reservoir, which has had unfortunate setbacks since I wasted a bunch of time trying to build higher than necessary. Once again, the merchants saved me the trouble of actually defending myself; they also suffered more casualties than I did. The dwarves had nothing I was interested in, though, so we traded a couple rocks back and forth and they went on their way with 50G profit.

One of the soldiers decided he didn't want to go to work in the mines today, on account of a "fey mood". He winds up making Nebelisul, "The Admired Faith", a Limestone hatch cover encircled with bands of turtle bone. I'm glad to see he has faith in the coming water-works, but there's barely a season and a half left in my term, and we don't even have all the tunnels dug, yet. This project is seriously behind schedule.

It's time for drastic action. Observe the interior of the reservoir:



The reservoir is shaped like an elongated torus. I'd mined out each layer individually, and I've been gradually channelling out the floors on each level, but it's taking too long. Instead of doing this the lengthy, safe way, I'm going to cause a cave-in on the top floor with the intention of wrecking all the layers below it. This has a high potential for death and hilarity.

While I'm getting everything ready there, the merchants finalize their trade agreement for the next year.



Seven migrants arrived as we moved toward winter. They mostly got jobs as haulers, who keep getting killed by carp. Not sure what they're going after; I've been forbidding things left and right, and STILL they get eaten.

Anyway. The moment of truth!



After the dust cloud arises, I find that I have been completely successful! The miners are free to focus on the tunnel to the river, I finally forbade all the items my haulers kept trying to fish out of the carp pond, and my tower of screw pumps was coming together magnificently.

And then there was another goblin invasion. Called everybody in and set my fledgling soldiers up in the entryway, just around the corner so the marksgoblins couldn't pick 'em off. As the goblins poured into the entrance, hitting a couple traps, our soldiers charged, killing most and driving the rest off, but not without losing one of our own.

Probably only have one more update before I pass it off. It's the final push!

[Saturn]

the idiots are probably going to the river to drink.

GRATE OVER THE RIVER, ITS THE ONLY WAY TO BE SAFE.

[jsnlxndrlv]

It turns out that one of the goblins got knocked into the pond, and its equipment wasn't forbidden after all. I fixed it, though.

I'm uploading the level now. More in a moment.

[jsnlxndrlv]

We had to hustle through the winter to actually finish the project. It is now, er, semi-functional. Here are screenshots using Esperath's init settings.



Here's the entrance at ground level. See those two doors hanging out at the bottom of the screen? I was in the middle of removing those when spring snuck up on me. I got one of 'em walled up in time, but the other one is just sitting on top of the staircase up; I was going to put a floodgate in front of it and connect in to a lever in a secured area, but I ran out of time. You'll want to do something to plug this hole, though, or enemies will run right past our defenses.



And here those defenses are, in an admittedly embryonic stage. The three untrapped squares by the stairs are opened floodgates. In the event of an invasion, you can close the gates to divert invaders down the long, twisty hallway. The next step is to fill it with traps so that it's actually disadvantageous for them to do so. If the reservoir system were actually working correctly, it'd also be possible to flood the whole area, but that's probably a season or two off.



Here's the base of the waterworks. It's supposed to be self-refilling, but there's one part that needs to be finished. That little branch in the stream that leads down a level provides both the power and the water for the reservoir, but never dug the branch all the way through properly, which is why the water wheels can't get enough power; the water beneath them isn't flowing. I tried to fix this with a designated tunnel just above this area, but it was a rush job and I didn't design it properly, plus the miners aren't going to be able to get to it in time. Dig a tunnel from the very edge of the map and connect it to the end of the branch to get the water moving again.



Next to the residential area are the levers controlling everything.  I've added Notes in the fortress to document what each does, but I'll duplicate that here. Going from right to left:

1. The lever next to the stairs controls the floodgates immediately below. If you flip it, you're going to flood the residential area. Don't do that.
2. The lever in the top-right corner of the main control room shuts floodgates where I've diverted water from the river. Useful if somebody flips the previous lever.
3. The lever closest to the entrance is Step One of the anti-invasion plan; it diverts enemies down the long and winding tunnel.
4. Step Two: when you've got as many of 'em in the tunnels as you can, flip this to keep them out of the fortress proper.
5. Step Three: theoretically, this should flood the entry way if there's ever enough water in the reservoir. I kind of doubt that it's tall enough, yet.

Here's the level, Shinra. Good luck!

[Shinra]

I don't know how dwarven mechanics work, or waterworks, or waterwheels, or windmills, so this megaproject will probably remain unfinished. I'll try and figure it out when I get home tonight.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Actually, all it requires is the ability to tunnel, construct doors, and set them "tightly closed" and "forbidden". Check out my pictorial guide:

[Shinra]

Also why is there so much visible stone on the floor >:( jesus christ guys