Dwarf Fortress

Many z-levels and another layer of caverns later, I've decided to give up on my magma plan for now. I don't seem to be getting much luck finding the pools I need, and I'm feeling nervous about digging much deeper with my military looking rather under-equipped. It's going to be a wood and metal starved game going forward.

At least the second layer of caverns had underground trees and cave moss. I moved my pastures underground after an irrigation job, and built a nice little cistern for my hospital while I was at it. This fully eliminated any need for surface work, freeing me to move my entire operation deeper down if it came to it.

I also turned my fort's only entrance into a drowning trap. Two drawbridges, a flood gate, some levers and two screw pumps. Simple but effective. Haven't had any kind of siege yet, and there don't seem to be any evil strongholds close by, so it's probably unnecessary. Still, I made my entrance into a drowning trap, and that's never a waste of time and effort.

Should probably carve out a big cistern for it, though, since the river I use to feed the trap dries up during winter. No doubt that's gonna screw me over the first time I have to actually use it.

the deeper cavern layers should have a higher chance of magma, especially once you breach the roof of the magma sea. Once there you might be able to set yourself up with a Magma Piston To push it closer to the surface without a monumental pumpstack

I'm having a problem with Dwarves going catatonic as they continually attempt to start carrying an item to a stockpile outside of their burrow, and then immediately cancel the job, dozens of times per second. Is there any fix for this?

Yeah, I learned as much from trawling the DF wiki, but I'm still feeling nervous about going down that deep with a rather shabby military.

Said military got a lot more shabby after a visit from a forgotten beast. I had already beaten two by that point, and my militia commander practically solo'd the second, so I was feeling pretty confident that I'd be able to take this one as well. Turns out that this particular FB had a webbing special attack, which made it practically invincible in melee. Since I hadn't bothered yet to include ranged attacks into my military, my entire elite squad got massacred.

Which was bad enough, but then a f*ckton of civilian dorfs came pouring out of the tunnels to loot the corpses. Dumbfounded, it took me a couple of seconds to react and pull up the drawbridge I put in front of the cavern entrance for this specific reason. End result: over forty dead dwarves, including my well-drilled melee squad, a legendary carpenter, a legendary leatherworker, and my mayor. Also, the first layer of caverns is now owned by a flying, webspewing leech. And I can forget about gaining back the squad's equipment, such as it was.

Thankfully it was just the first layer, which was rather useless to me aside from catching exotic pets. If it were the much more important second layer where I get most of my wood these days, I'd be thoroughly f*cked. Now I gotta train and equip two entire new squads, one melee and one ranged, equip them, and take a shot at revenge.

Fun!

EDIT: aaaaaaaand just as I typed up that epic tale, my game crashed right before the autosave would kick in, losing me nearly a year of "progress", including the flying leech attack.

Goddammit.

Edited by Kayeka on Dec 29th 2022 at 4:05:17 PM

On the bright side, your army's back.

Funny, nearly everything in this paragraph describes my own experience with my first three Forgotten Beasts as well. The first one, Ushmal AKA "The Pulpy" got beaten until its name fit by my fully equipped military. The second one, Pob Leaderlowness the Fin of Lords got beaten by even fewer dwarves with no casualties, though it did have a trick up its sleeve of spewing flesh-rot gas.

My medical staff actually managed to clean out the full body flesh rot with a 100% success rate... for dwarves. The soldiers' pet chickens and peafowl on the other hand, were never treated and continued to walk around public spaces while the flesh slowly rotted off of their body, generating continuous plumes of miasma for months before they finally died. The Fowl Stench of 120 was perhaps the single biggest drop in overall happiness since that year everyone had to walk around naked because it took me too long to realize that clothes wear out over time. But we were still retching from the odour of the rotting-alive chickens when along came...

Sut. An enormous skunk with lidless eyes. It has a knobby shell and it undulates rhythmically. Beware its webs! The skunk entered my cavern as just "Sut" and by the time the battle ended it was "Sut Ashenhate the Hellish". Mr. Ashenhate the Hellish didn't fuck my fort up as much as your leech did to yours though, my (at the time all melee) military did somehow manage to kill it with only 15 deaths. I think the trick was they backed up into a space so narrow that they could get into melee range to get hits in before they got webbed.

I fortunately still have an full elite squad of 10 legendary fighters, and I've since expanded my military to include two marksdwarf squads (who have fortifications to shoot into the cavern from a safe stairwell) and four rookie melee squads who will hopefully in a few years time become a complete elite military. At the moment the rookies are on rotating surface patrol duty, which, due to nearly all Goblin civilizations on the Continent of Talking being conquered by Dwarves, Humans, and Elves decades ago, is basically just "scare away the Gray Langurs and Kobolds before they get inside the fortress because I'm tired of their corpses clogging up the halls and no one cleaning them up" duty. Of course if a surface mega-beast comes by, the elite squad will be sent up there ASAP.

Subsequent Forgotten Beasts have gone down even easier than Pulpy though. And by that I mean I literally haven't sent anyone to kill a Forgotten Beast since Sut, and yet they've still all died. Beast number 4 was Gened. Gened was wittled down just by fighting wildlife

Looking it up in Legends, Gened wasn't even made of any sort of fragile material (it was a mite, made of forgotten beast chitin), so I'm not sure what gave it those injuries in the first place, but one thing Legends is telling me is that "Gened was associated with suicide", which I guess explains why it kept picking fights even after all of its limbs were mangled beyond recognition. In the end, Gened was killed by the giant bat now known as Loxsnosmur.

Loxsnosmur flew out of my map a few weeks later and her current whereabouts are unknown, but she's a named historical figure now, so the game is tracking her.

I described Gened as the lamest Forgotten Beast in existence, until I saw Beast number 5. Kul, an enormous stonefly composed of vomit. I didn't even see this one fight, it just entered the map and died. Up until I made a backup save to look through Legends, I thought its vomit body had just collapsed from like, landing too hard or something, but apparently it was killed by a queen ant woman, and before that happened it managed to kill one (1) soldier ant woman. Okay, Kul has a kill:death ratio of 1:1, and did not simply collapse under its own weight. You've managed to surpass my unimaginably bad first impression of you Kul, but you're still weaker than Gened.

Beast number 6, Phantomdeaths the Cyst of Pulps, was another web spinner, so I was actually scared of it at first, but it was made of ice, which while not nearly as weak as vomit, is still a problem when you're fighting an entire army of ant women armed with bronze. Beast number 7 was Isa, a fire-breathing harrier (side note, why do avian Forgotten Beasts just look like blobs?), not made of anything particularly fragile, but made of oh so flammable flesh. Like Phantomdeaths, Isa got a lot of ant people killed, but it melted all of the fat off of its own body, which left it vulnerable.

The ant women that are getting the kills are also succumbing to their wounds shortly after, so it's not like they're amassing an army of Forgotten Beast killers down there, it's just that they're so numerous the Beasts only make small dents in their ranks. Really, with the Forgotten Beasts dying so quickly, "there are too many ant people" is the biggest problem the thriving Dwarven Captial of Quakeromance is facing right now. I mined a lot of precious metals from the walls of that cavern, but there are too many ant people to go in and collect them. I'll send my elite squad down to kill some ant people but then surprise! There are actually 4 times as many ant people hiding in the cavern as I thought, and the soldier that got there first will kill maybe 10 of them fine but then get tired because there are too many ant people for one dwarf to fight and hopefully the rest of the squad catches up to the first soldier quickly enough to save them. I've set up cage traps, but there are too many ant people and once the cages are full the remaining majority of the ant person army will walk over them just fine. When I set the elite squad to guard just the entryway to the cavern, they will kill the ant people that approach alright, but then there are too many ant people corpse stinking up the place and the guards have to hold their posts in the center of a giant cloud of miasma until I'm done whatever task needed doing down there. For a while the ant people were actually halting my downward progress because the door to the cavern was jammed open by ant person corpses and the only way to seal it off was to lock the stairwell entirely. The floor around the well is regularly stained with antman ichor, because ichor-coated soldiers are too frequently creating new pools there when they wash their bodies, and the "clean floor" tasks aren't being done fast enough to keep up.

Man, this game is really fun to recap, I can see why succession games are so popular.

Well, i had the same story as you guys. After easily handling the two/three first huge beasts (a cyclop, a giant ,a giant bird, a giant snake) i got visited by another forgotten beast
A flying Forgotten Beast that appeared in the cavern layer.
It bypasses my normal safety measures (traps and a military squad garrisonned around the stairway) by flying up the chimney i used for my wells, allowing it to appear smack-dab in my fort. It killed easily three-fourth of my military (damned its webbed attack) and slaughtered easily a dozen civilian dwarves that had come to loot/bury the bodies.
At least now it's dead and i'll be putting floor hatches around my wells, but i had to re-recruit basically my entire military, my manager, my captain of the guard, and my chief medical dwarf.
On the bright side i finally expanded my territory by sending my very best soldiers to attack and occupy a ~15 goblins settlment, so i'll see how that pans out.

A Draltha sneaked into my lair, and despite their skittishness managed to make it all the way to the top of my fortress, where I trapped it in the channel I used to irrigate my farm. I was going to leave them there until I figured out what to do with it. And then she had triplets.

Fortunately, Draltha make pretty good herd animals. No milk or wool, but over twice as much meat and bones than you'd get from a water buffalo. So I guess I have a Draltha herd now. I better start getting rid of the animals I already have, though. The population of cats and dogs have gotten way out of hand, and aside from pest control I have nothing that I actually want to do with any of them. So it's Fido hats for everyone!

I've also found my favourite manner of getting rid of unwanted prisoners: restrain them with some rope, and have my marksdwarves use them as life target practice. Took some effort to set it up, because my dorfs kept running at the prisoners like a bunch of blithering morons, but the skill gains have been great.

I think it's about time I got a little bolder, though. I've got a little over two hundred citizens, and the fuel shortage has gone from "interesting challenge" straight past "persistent nuisance" into the pits of "limiting factor". So it's high time I dug deeper, and see if I can finally hit some magma. And once I do, I will be paving my hallways with electrum. Or we're going to die horribly, but that's okay too, 'cause I was getting bored with this fort anyway.

But first, I'll engineer some drowning traps along the cavern entrances. Forgotten Beast have been getting annoyingly frequent, and I'd like to actually send my squads on missions one of these days. EDIT: actually, a cave-in trap is probably going to be easier to engineer at those depths, and more effective against a wider range of enemies. Hmm, I wonder if building destroyers are attracted to support beams?

Edited by Kayeka on Dec 29th 2022 at 12:24:37 PM

Are those cats neutered? You don't want a Catsplosion on your hands.

Heh, before I installed traps at my cavern entrance, I once had an Elk Bird manage to sneak all the way up through my fortress and then get caught in the cage trap at my surface entrance. That particular Elk Bird had sustained serious injuries from fighting the rookie surface patrol before the trap was sprung though, so I never got the chance to tame it, but I have gotten a few pets from the cage traps in the caverns. Though again, it's been mostly ant people springing the traps due to the ludicrous number of ant people in the caverns. I should really figure out something to do with those caged ant people shouldn't I?

For a while I was not keeping any cats, due to fear of catsplosion, but I let my population of milkable and shearable livestock grow to an unmanageable degree anyway. The (fairly large) pasture grew so crowded that it seemed to break dwarven pathfinding and result in dwarves dying of dehydration due to how long it took them to get back into the fort (note: my fortress has enough drinks stockpiled that we could fully stop our breweries for a year and a half and my population of 200 would be fine, and these dwarves dying of dehydration were never ones I had been notified of going insane, so it took me a while to figure out why it was happening). I built 9 an additional butcher shops to speed up the clearing of those animals (I built the shops on the surface because I knew I wouldn't be able to haul that much meat into the stockpiles fast enough) and now I'm starting over with just a few sheep and pigs and intend to not let them get out of hand.

EDIT: An eighth Forgotten Beast showed up, a dimetrodon by the name of Arani Caveecho the Fated Dust of Night, but it entered the map right on top of a squad of ant people... This was what happened after the first second:

And this happened after the second second:

And then this happened after the third second:

I looked through the combat record and couldn't even find any mention of Arani successfully striking down an ant person. They all died purely from the dust, which means that The Fated Dust of the Night actually killed those 30 something ant people just by walking up to them. Had the ant people not been such an overwhelming force as to literally kill it in the 2 seconds it took for the dust to kill them, Arani Garethosanene Aquiyaarani Lithéme would have been an absolute nightmare for me to deal with... so, uh... thanks, ant people?

Edited by BOOXMOWO on Dec 30th 2022 at 9:32:03 AM

So, after two or three "only-midly deadly" Forgotten beasts, i got a third one today: some kind of three-eyed toad that didn't seem too deadly (it had some troubles killing a single cave crocodile) so i figure it's going to be a piece of cake, right?
Well, this beast kicked up a storm
Literally.
It had some kind of "kick up a cloud of dust" effect around it, plus some kind of "frozen extract" it emitted around it.
The final result? Only one of my soldiers died in the actual fight (a Recruit, not a big loss).
And all the other seven ones started emitting miasma, vomitting, and (once a diagnostician got to them) seemingly every single one of their body parts needed cleaning AND surgery because they were rotting.
Their fates lie in the hands of my doctors, now.

Edited by dArtagnanMusic on Dec 30th 2022 at 4:22:18 AM

So I've finally breached the third cavern layer. At z -107, over eighty levels down from the second layer. Even if I do find magma down here, bringing it closer to my fort is going to be a massive pain.

Funny thing is I could walk most of the way there. Though they weren't quite connected, I only needed to dig a couple of levels before I hit some passage leading all the way to the third cavern. Didn't even need to explore it myself, since several visiting nobles decided this looked like the shortest route home. Suckers. I could take a ton of red zircons from the walls along the way too.

Not much in the way of forgotten beasts and the like. Had a giantess that came knocking above ground, though. I figured I might as well let let her blunder through my front gate and actually get some action out of my drowning trap, but then she picked a fight with one of my herbalists. The giantess threw my poor herbalist down the hill, but apparently all that masterwork silk clothing I've been mass producing paid off, and the herbalist suffered only minor injuries. Then she took the fight to the giantess, biting and scratching at her legs, drawing serious blood. Eventually the herbalist scampered off, and I just had my military put the bleeding giantess out of her misery.

Also, my king showed up and decided my colony was now his capital. Great honour and all that, though having to carve out a bunch of additional noble's quarters was an annoyance.

Arani's dust got described as "frozen" as well. I assume that's just a quirk of the way the descriptions are generated. "Forgotten Beast Extract" seems to be the generic term for the unique harmful substances emitted by the Beasts that don't spray something easily describable like silk or fire, and I guess the combat descriptors consider "Forgotten Beast Extract" as something that is liquid in its neutral state, so any clouds of solid Forgotten Beast Extract particles (i.e. dust) are described as being frozen. I'm guessing.

His Majesty, Muthkat Morullecad, King of The Ageless Mine created an Artifact Tunic worth 43750☼ today, which skyrocketed his Clothesmaking skill all the way up to legendary, and thereby fulfilled his dream of finally mastering a skill. As much as I find his monthly bracelet quotas annoying and pointless, I feel proud of him. His own creation is now his Symbol of Office. He said something interesting though, in the moments after finishing his masterpiece, he "claimed it as an heirloom in the name of the family ancestor Kel Bowlrope", which made me curious enough to do some digging.

Kel Bowlrope, Muthkat's maternal grandmother, was not royalty, rather she was the very first General of The Ageless Mine. Kel has a long history of winning wrestling competitions at the annual Earthen Festival in Virtuelanterns (capital of our neighbouring Dwarven civilization, The Speechless Urns) but surprisingly few named kills for someone who spent so long as the highest ranked member of the Ageless Mine's military, she killed a few goblins and a mercenary who was hired to fight for the goblins. She had four different lovers throughout her life and a total of five children, the most relevant child is Fath Yawnedboulders, her daughter with the Diplomat Ineth Paddlehandle.

I was already familiar with Fath because she followed in her mother's footsteps and by present day has herself become the General of the Ageless Mine. As Quakeromance is the capital, she visits regularly. But early in her career she was a scout, visiting Virtuelanterns under false identities for espionage. Amusingly she once formed a false friendship with The Speechless Urns' General, Kel Steeldaub, who was already a genuine friend of Kel Bowlrope (the two General Kels were sort of wrestling rivals at the aforementioned Earthen Festival). Also early in her career is when she fell in love with the miller Kulet Ringedflames, the second son of Queen Bembul Diecastle with her then husband, Chief Medical Dwarf Tholtig Stokedchanneled.

Side note on Bembul is that she was not the original Monarch of The Ageless Mine, in fact she has no described relationship to the original King As Roompillar. The reason she was fit to inherit the title is that all dwarves are equally unrelated to As Roompillar. As Roompillar died in early spring of 1. The very first historical event in The Age of Myth (that wasn't a site being founded) was the Bronze Colossus Okgush Wrungclouts the Furious attacking the Dwarven Mountainhome of Chamberwing, and while Okgush has in the 100 years since racked up a decent kill count, at that time As Roompillar wound up being the only casualty. This incident abstracts the monarchy in an interesting way, because while As Roompillar was the Monarch handed to us at the world's creation, no one has any connections to him that they could use as a means to claim legitimacy to the throne. Bembul is unambiguously the start of her own dynasty, that was handed to her for some unspecified reason. There's a musical instrument in The Ageless Mine's culture called a Bembul though, so I like to assume that she invented it and that's why they made her Queen.

Moving forward, Fath and Kulet were much more committed to their relationship with each other than Fath's mother Kel was to any of her myriad lovers. They did briefly get divorced in 40, but they remarried by 42. From the years 24 to 46 Fath and Kulet had six children, all boys, and their second son, born 25, Muthkat Morullecad AKA "Muthkat Pagecleaned" became the man we now call King (and even more recently call "Legendary Clothier").

In 58 Chamberwing was attacked by the Forgotten Beast Zolak Seducedcaves the Shaft of Evil, a great humanoid composed of snow. Zolak killed both of Muthkat's grandmothers, General Kel and Queen Bembul, as well as his paternal grandfather Tholtig, and actually all of Kel Bowlrope's past lovers except for Muthkat's grandfather Ineth (we'll circle back to what happened to Grandpa Ineth Paddlehandle later), it also killed the only lover Muthkat's ever had, but this wasn't a targeted attack on Muthkat's family or anything, the Beast killed 34 dwarves and I'm sure every survivor in Chamberwing lost many family members to that thing. The dwarf that finally killed it went unnamed, which I find odd since during gameplay everything from Drone Ant Men to Giant Bats will become named from killing a Forgotten Beast.

Upon Bembul's death Kulet inherited the title of King (his older brother, Lokum Lucktraded, was passed over, as far as I can tell this is solely because he was travelling at the time), and the position of General did not yet go to Fath, but rather her and Kulet's eldest son, Kib Crylash. I'm not sure if Kib being the General would have made him automatically get passed over for King, but we never get the chance to find out, because Kulet and Kib coincidentally died in the same season of the same year in unrelated battles against different Goblin civilizations. Kib was killed in an attack on Chamberwing by The Spider of Seals, while Kulet was one of the many, many, many, many, many casualties of The Battle of Blades. It was following these two deaths that Muthkat inherited the title of King, and Fath picked up the role of General, bringing the Ageless Mine to the status it has today (except that Quakeromance hadn't been founded yet of course). But now that I've brought it up I want to step aside from the family history and talk about the Battle of Blades:

The reason for the massive amount of Dwarven casualties in the Battle of Blades in spite of their obvious numbers advantage can probably be attributed to, oh I don't know, maybe it was the 94 DEMONS on the attacking side? 94!

Why does The Doom of Oak's army have 94 demons? Well I think it should be clarified what exactly The Doom of Oak is. I said a few days ago that nearly all Goblin civilizations on the Continent of Talking had been conquered decades ago, and arguably that's an understatement. In year 1, three Goblin civilizations had formed on the Continent of Talking, these were called The Short Ghoul, The Seduction of Voice, and The Spider of Seals; by spring of 100 when The Competitive Chamber struck the earth at Quakeromance, none of these civilizations had any remaining controlled sites, and all surviving members/descendants of their populations had become participating members of the Dwarf/Elf/Human governments that conquered them. Over across the Blowing Water on the Continent of Slaughter two more Goblin civilizations called The Unthinkable Spiders and The Trampled Plagues exist, and in fact have conquered quite a few of the Human and Dwarven sites there, but crossing the ocean isn't possible so the affairs of MurderYouToDeathVille don't affect us here in Discussionburg. So it would be fair to say that all of the Continent of Talking's original Goblin population has been conquered.

And yet, The Doom of Oak, one of the only two entities we're officially at war with, is a Goblin civilization, and it didn't split off of from any of the originals. The truth is The Doom of Oak spontaneously formed in 54 due to the excessive amount of !!FUN!! occurring in one of The Speechless Urns' sites.

I did not know this could happen. I mean, I knew that breaching the Underworld could happen, and I knew that Goblin civilizations were founded by Demons at the start of history. But I had no idea that non player civilizations could breach the Underworld and I never would have guessed that that would result in a new Goblin civilization being formed in the middle of history. The original Goblin civilizations weren't completely gone when The Doom of Oak first sprang up, but they didn't last much longer. When reading reports of Doom of Oak attacks it's not unusual for the defending forces of Dwarven and Elven sites to be led by Goblins from the original 3 Goblin groups.

This point of origin neatly explains why The Doom of Oak has such a high Demon population, but actually makes me question why it has so many Goblins. 373 in the initial invading force? Are there really that many Goblins hanging out down there that they outnumber the Demons 7:1? Or was there some behind the scenes math that determined what The Doom of Oak's population should be and it just used Goblins to fill the gaps?

As for the other entity we're at war with, since I mentioned there were two, that would be The Barricaded Wheels, a "Dwarven group", but not a nation. The Barricaded Wheels consists of the Diplomat-turned-Necromancer Ineth Paddlehandle, his army of Grim Corpses, his three apprentices, the various horrific abominations created through his apprentices' twisted experiments, his apprentices' apprentices, his apprentices' apprentices' experiments, etc.

Ineth Paddlehandle has become one of the most prolific villains on the Continent of Talking, and the majority of the continent's necromancers are at least indirect disciples of him. Although at the moment The Barricaded Wheels' only site is Ineth's tower Vabokamas, there was a period of history where they had control of 11 sites at once. I think he used the mass death in the Battle of Blades as a means to bolster his army; at the very least I know that 11 of his Grim Corpses were casualties of The Battle of Blades, so I assume a proportional number of unintelligent undead were also created there. A lot of the credit for conquering the original Goblin civilizations actually falls on The Barricaded Wheels. Ineth and his flunkies would take over the Goblin's pits and then the Dwarves, Elves, and Humans all collectively agreed they hated necromancy more than they hated Goblins and each other combined so they teamed up to kick Ineth out and the Dark Pits basically just went to whoever had called dibs.

Mmm, chocolate monster.

Oh yeah, the The Doom of Oak's original Master being literally made of chocolate was a surprise to me as well. Her full description says "She was one of the only ones of her kind. A gigantic three-eyed lizard twisted into humanoid form. It undulates rhythmically. Its chocolate scales are jagged and overlapping. Beware its deadly blood!"

What's really funny though is that chocolate isn't even a craftable substance, and cocoa isn't even a plant that's coded in the game in the first place, so The Toady One must have coded in chocolate as a material for the sole purpose of letting procedurally generated creatures be made of it.

Had the human caravan arrive with a diplomat, their civilization's "Head Treasurer."

The diplomat was a kobold with a human name.

This somehow did not disrupt the negotiation process.

Legends mode has offered no explanation for this anomaly, but did reveal that he's a criminal who is using his position to embezzle funds. Which... checks out, admittedly.

EDIT: To explain the extent of this absurdity to newcomers to the game, Kobolds in DF cannot speak intelligible language. Their race has the unique "[UTTERANCES]" trait that makes it impossible for other races to understand their language (which - unlike Dwarven, Goblinese, Elvish, and the Human Tongue - is randomly generated gibberish) and vice versa. By all accounts they should be incapable of coexisting with the other races by virtue of the game mechanics. I have no idea how the local humans managed to integrate them. I didn't think it was mechanically possible.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Dec 30th 2022 at 10:10:06 AM

Sign language maybe? Talking with Signs ?

Never underestimate the willpower of… anyone in Dwarf Fortress, haha.

As for the chocolate monster, I'm guessing it's probably meant to be this kind.
Which, honestly, would be sad because actually having things made out of chocolate would be fudging awesome.

Imagine the chocolate statues and towers you could build! XD

...Oh. Yep, I looked it up and CHOCOLATE is one of the 115 "color descriptor tokens" in the game. Fecici's scales are not a sweet product made from roasted cacao seeds, they're just a shade of brown that would theoretically be displayed as #DC691E. That's disappointing.

Kobold diplomat? Yeah, while I've met a number of peacefully integrated Goblins (one Goblin bard eventually moved into my fortress (I'm currently building him a doomsday bunker to exploit his immortality for my benefit (but it's going to be a really comfy doomsday bunker, he'll be fine))), I was also under the impression that their inability to speak completely prevented Kobolds from peaceful contact with other races, and even setting aside how he joined the civilization in the first place, Diplomat is a role that he's distinctly incapable of performing.

EDIT: I looked up a bit more and cacao trees totally are a thing in this game and the only reason I didn't find them is that I first searched for "cocoa tree" instead. Their seeds are even cookable, so while the meal descriptors aren't detailed enough to say anything but "roast made with minced cacao beans", dwarves can eat a food that is inferred to be chocolate!

Edited by BOOXMOWO on Dec 31st 2022 at 9:54:35 AM

Encountered a Game-Breaking Bug where whenever I attempt to save the game after 15th Malachite 124 it crashes right when the "Offloading Units" part of the save starts. Through trial and error I have pinpointed the exact last frame where I'm able to save the game, but that doesn't do me any good since I can't fix it.

Is there any fix for this? I've grown attached to Quakeromance by now and this is very much not the fun kind of losing.

EDIT: Did some googling and learned that this can be fixed by going into the save files folder and manually deleting everything except for "world.sav". Not sure what all those files were that I just deleted, but it worked. Quakeromance lives another day! And more good news, I've achieved Zero Miserable Dwarves, something I haven't had since my population was in the low double digits.

Edited by BOOXMOWO on Dec 31st 2022 at 11:11:23 AM

Well=p, some of dwarves returned to work in their guard position... while still emitting miasma and havign some body parts rotting off.

Latest fortress basically died in the spring they arrived. Dismantled the wagon, sent the miner to hollow out a hill on the opposite side of the stream; then the fucking DRAGON ate everyone and incinerated the savanna.

He's all alone carving out a shelter for himself. All of the supplies were destroyed. The dragon is just hanging out near where they first arrived; failing to notice when he runs to drink from the stream.

This is Dwarf Fortress.

Well my "Zero Miserable Dwarves" thing didn't last long.

I'll admit, I got greedy. I thought if I stationed my elite squad in the part of the cavern I wanted to get things done, while ordering my second best squad to guard the doorway, and putting both of my ranged teams in the fortifications that overlook the doorway, that would be enough security to have my mechanics go down and arm a few more traps to slightly whittle down the ant peoples' numbers. There were too many ant people.

Honestly the main problem is that the ant people are a breadcrumb trail. The soldiers will see an ant person, run up to kill them, in the process getting close enough to see more ant people, run up to kill them, and keep getting farther away from their actual post and aggro-ing more and more ant people until

(That's not even all of them.)

And they have no understanding of their own limits or how many other soldiers would be available to help them if they just retreated back to the zone they're supposed to be defending. I'll see the tired/winded/over-exerted message, but the dwarves can never stop running into the crowd and they'll just keep gaining more skill debuffs from their exhaustion until their legendary skills effectively stop existing and then they die. I've lost 14 dwarves today, many of them my best soldiers (including my Milita Commander, Zutthan Mirrorbrushes the Lucid Shred of Hatchets), as well as several civilians because I got greedy again and thought I would be able to collect the bodies for burial without further incident so long as I still had my entire militia on hand in the caverns.

On the bright side, the traps did get built.

I thought everythig nwould be fine, i had repelled a goblin ivnasion to only one or two losses, things ahd settled into a routine, just standard expaning/making more rooms/keeping things running...
And then a Forgotten beast made of charcoal appeared. That could spit webs.
Of course my marksdwarves basically trickled in one-by one like morons (and only two or three actually tried to shoot their crossbows), so did the rest of my military squads.
Result is that a 130-full fort now has around 90 people.
At least the beast is dead.

Ouch. Yeah Sometimes your dwarves get extra derpy in responding to a crisis. It's sometimes a good idea to handhold the military when something nasty shows up.