Dwarf Fortress

That would be awesome. Or something insane and evil:

• Castle is built with a roof that has many traps
• Goblins and kobolds appear
• Castle sinks into the ground
• Goblins and kobolds are unable to find a way in
• Goblins and kobolds are Too Dumb to Live and walk onto roof
• Dwarf pulls lever that activates the spike traps or opens a floodgate that floods the fortress roof with lava/magma.

... With great ideas come great chaos, I guess.

If you're going to play with lva on your roof, you need to make sure you can break the rock it dries into. Unless you're going to quickly resurface.

Son of a submariner!

This has a lot of great potential for entry control and channeling as well.

So I started playing this, using the Ironhand skins and Dwarven therapist to make the game more user friendly. I'm also following the quick start guide at the DF wiki which is really helpful.

It's currently summer and I still haven't gotten any trade caravans nor any immigrants is this normal? Also North East of my caravan point there a bunch of goblins with some items so far they haven't done any thing should I be worried about them? (I'm guessing that's going to be a yes)

Anyway the game is very overwhelming so far and I only have scratched the surface. :\

The first caravan arrives in autumn, next year you will have elves in spring and humans in summer normally.

Yup they arrived.

Anyway a year has passed, my small fortress is thriving found some gold and silver (no iron :\ ) those goblins I talked about in my previous post are in fact my protectors killing two kobold raids for me while I closed off my entrance.

I drained a small lake so that I could use it as a water source for my planned underground hospital. It was going well (except for the fact the water ended up being muddy :( ) when I received a message saying "Migrants have arrived"

Welcoming an handful new users won't be so bad, I finally be able to specialize some more dwarves. So I checked in Dwarf therapist how many Dwarves would be arriving. The population of my Fortress went from 17 to... 62. STOP OVERWHELMING ME! :(

and now you see why many players kill useless immigrants, only keeping the skilled ones.

I know I'm being a dopey individual, but given a fortress I'm working on, it's now summer of year 1, the workshops aren't 100% ready (at least 1 of every available workshop), but the farm plots underground are workin'. Currently working on some 3x3 bedrooms for the inevitable migrant swarm to 100 from 20 or so. (Finagle's Law dictates it might happen.)

A few dope questions I'm likely about to ask (to get to know some of the dwarven players)...

• Bedroom size you usually go for (As well as garnishings if any)?
• Preferred embark?
• Most hated obstacle?

To answer my own questions:

• 3x3 bedrooms with a chest, cabinet, table, chair, and statue of the dwarf if possible.
• Usually volcanoes, but anywhere where I could get flux and bituminous coal or flux and lava or something like that.
• Aquifers... the evilest things!

1x2 the way I was taught. Just a bed and a door, the spartan way. Nobles shall get 1x3. The third is a flood gate.

I look for clay and deep and shallow metals. Forests are prefered.

My own lack of skill currently.

Actually, about nobles, I think I'll do it the India way. Well, sorta. They built a hollow bed covering a hole, and someone hit a switch so the bed opened and dropped an "invited guest" into a pungee pit. I'll just drop the whole bed into an oubliet and be done with it. Preferably with an Untamed Cave Dragon inside.

edited 28th Dec '12 7:26:30 PM by Journeyman

Mine are as follows:

• 2x3 or 3x2, since squares are boring.
• Usually mountains with rivers and no aquifers. I prefer building my fortresses into natural curves of mountains, so I can wall off an area and have an external part to the fort.
• My own forgetfulness.

Aquifers are fucking BOSS.

they are, hands down, one of the most useful things ever. not having played in awhile, I didn't build my current fort on one, because I didn't want to start in an evil biome AND with an aquifer, hahaha.

Seriously, so handy for powerplants.

1x2 bedrooms with a bed and a door, or if I'm feeling fancy, a hatch such that the room is built into the ceiling/floor of the hallway.

I prefer volcanos for infinite magma to make traps. The free smelting is just a plus. Ideally I'd get a river, too, but I prefer easy magma immediately over all else.

As for obstacles, I hate deep aquifers. Shallow aquifers I find super useful, but they're never shallow.

Bonus answer: when I get a bajillion immigrants, I immediately mark anyone with useless skills with a "soldier" designation and turn everything off on them but hauling, detailing, and stone building for making walls/floors. Then I immediately get them to start polishing every square inch of my fortress, and every other month they take a break from that to go train in a danger room to become legendary warriors. Once they're legendary, they pretty much don't care about comforts.

edited 29th Dec '12 1:54:11 AM by ch00beh

How do you find a volcano site? Never figured it out.

they're represented as a red ^

OK, this is still confusing me: in the image macro the work page's image caption is based on, what does the "Can you dig? Hell no!" part mean?

edited 29th Dec '12 10:53:02 PM by thatother1dude

Can you dig?

Through solid rock, with nothing but a pickaxe?

If I recall correctly, it only does so in the "mid-level" picture in the center when scanning sites. And, of course, you'll see a mention off to the right if there's a volcano, although depending on where you set your colony, there may or may not be an actual lava flow there (especially if you have a "technically mountain, but mostly meadow" type of site).

I've learned today that you need to close the flood gates when your reservoir is full or else water will come trough the wells and flood your residential area. :(

Damn and that game was going so well too. The only bad thing that happened before the flooding was that I got under attack by a were mole man.

now I'm having memories of my best fort which died because clowns punched open my reservoir's flood gate, and that caused lag death. we'd even taken out half the circus by then :(

I kinda like aquifers, can't see what's wrong with them. Sure, they impede progress downwards, but it's possible to get around that. I always do. Somehow.

The first thing that I do when I get a new version of DF is go into the raws and remove all the aquifers.

I can't stand them, and there's always aquifers on 90% of available sites. Unless they're removed, of course.

And this is why you use the Embark Finder. You can actually check Aquifers to NO so you don't even run into them. Yes, it might disqualify a few entire worlds sometimes, but the wonderfully useful embarks you find are worth the deserted ones.

I still don't get the aquifer hate, man.

sure, it eats up your soil, but you know what? INFINITE WATER FOR MUD. it's so awesome, and after that, you can smooth and engrave in between your plots