Dwarf Fortress

Keep digging until you hit a cavern. I usually hit one between 10 and -10 on the z levels.

Does "Z-10" means "the level where the right bar doesn't show sky anymore - 10"?

I think I just had my first "successful" fortress on my third try. Tropical wetlands, with a lot less hillside to work with than I thought, so I ended up digging a hole in the middle of the map. Eventually made the entrance a fort in itself, with walls, a moat and drawbridges in every cardinal direction.

I think I had a too easy embarking location. Very few "fun" things ended up happening. A few goblin sieges with no more than six dudes all getting stuck in my cage traps, one singular hydra that got a couple of kills but died once my military actually reached it, and a visitor that turned out to be a weregopher, but the the only people it bit were other visitors that naffed off on their own.

By the end of it, I was just kinda playing with water for the heck of it. First I built a room for drowning all those goblins clogging up my cages, and then a big aqueduct to pour water down my central stairway so that every dorf going up or down a level would get a nice helping of mist.

I got the idea for the latter when I accidentality breached my castle moat and I ended up wondering why mist started appearing around my stairway. That was a nice little panic moment, having to quickly build a screw pump to clear out my upper level enough to rebuild the wall.

Eventually I retired the fortress at a population of 300, because I felt completely untouchable with no need to actually exploit the caverns I had uncovered. What would be a good sort of embark for a more challenging game?

There's an actual output of the current elevation number, right under the minimap.

Also worth saying that I've heard the depth at which caverns appear depends on worldgen settings; I think the "island" presets have it deeper than "region" (or vice versa, I forget).

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Dec 25th 2022 at 10:07:41 AM

I know. I think i'm in a mountain biome (my wagon started at elevation 50), so far i've dug to 0 (albeit mostly just digging straight down in a single square), so now i'm making galleries trying to find underground water at various levels ((currently doign one at 15)

Aquifers are generally easy to spot; Dwarves will cancel digging due to "damp stone" with no adjacent lakes/ponds/rivers and if you break through, you'll hit stone that seeps out water. My general strategy for aquifer wells is to find the aquifer, then go up a level and dig a 3x3 pit/channel into it, maybe mine out a bigger area underneath to ensure it fills faster from more exposed seeping blocks, then cover up the entrance pit with floors except for the tile you're putting the well on.

Right under the minimap, it should say elevation. That is your Z level. Since you started so high you will have to dig down pretty deep to find water.

goddammnit. Well, will do! meanwhile i'm also digging a death pit to throw caged goblins off of.

Oh my god, so I was listening to the premium version's soundtrack, and there's this mournful sounding song that plays when your fort is wiped out or abandoned to ruin, and it has some lyrics in dwarfspeak (several songs do, actually). Two words repeated like a dirge.

So I looked it up, and—

Koganusân
Kogan (boat) Usân (murder/to murder)
Boatmurdered

EDIT: For those curious, here's a lyric video to the tavern song!

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Dec 25th 2022 at 5:33:55 AM

That is incredible.

Good news: I found the cavern at -4 (breached its ceiling, and made stairs to go to the top floor of it) and i'm going to send a visiting monster hunter to explore, so i should have water soon. From what i've seen the cavern is empty save for some troglodyte blood and small spiders, so i should not have many problems.
Bad news: All my installations at at elevation 42-47, so water haulign will still be a problem unless i relocate everything to lower levels.
Oh, and trglodyte blood means that 1) troglodytes are a thing 2) so is something able to kill them.

You can use a well to bring up water from as many level down as you'd like, much faster than if you used stairs and buckets. Find a spot on a level more to your liking that is directly above a source of water, and dig down from that spot using the "channel" option. Then build a well on that spot. Voilà, as much water as you'll ever need forever, right where you want it (which is probably a hospital).

Edited by Kayeka on Dec 26th 2022 at 5:05:00 PM

Did that, currently having a well on 40 drawing water from -4.
Also the odd monster hunter seems to be able to deal with the giant moles, serpents and blind bears that are down there.

Got the Steam release recently after hearing about this game off and on for years and reading about some of the famous playthroughs and oh boy does it really lock me in lol. Started using the tutorial and have gotten up to a population of a little over 100. I never seem to attract migrants but I get a lot of visiting bards and some soldiers that want to hang around and eventually upgrade to citizenship.

Speaking of not attracting migrants, the yearly caravan seems to have stopped as well. Not sure how normal that is, I think I may have accidentally ignored a diplomacy check at some point in the past and now, no more trading.

Aside from that though things are going pretty well. Now if only I can figure out how to get my militia to actually use the damn archery ranges...had to not use bins for the ammo stockpile to get them to grab bolts, but that seems to be the extent of my progress for now haha.

Dropping a Goblin Theif down 18 Z-level onto a lead floor wasn't enough to kill her. So I'm deepening the pit. Let's see how they like a 40 Z-level fall.

So what do you do when you're starved for fuel? I embarked on a more mountainous area than I usually do, with very little tree growth, and when I dug down, there is no lignite or coal to be found. Lots of obsidian and marble, which is nice, but nothing that can be used as fuel. Apparently, you can only find coal in a "sedimentary layer", and I don't think I'll be finding any if I just keep digging down. Which is concerning, because that makes it very difficult to equip my squads with decent armour.

I've been thinking about finding magma to eliminate my fuel needs since this seems to be the environment where that is a thing. Would that be a solution, and how would I go about it? I've already breached the first layer of caverns at z 21.

Edited by Kayeka on Dec 27th 2022 at 10:19:06 AM

Magma is an infinite fuel source from what I understand, and if you've hit caverns then it should be around there somewhere. I'd suggest looking at the wiki for how to find and wrangle it, the concept is too beyond me to be able to explain it myself atm I haven't dug that far down yet

Deepening my death pit has run into a few snags (like floor collapses, dead miners and weirdly shaped hole), but i should be able to fix it eventually.

Have you considered designating your death pit as a pond, and letting your dorfs fill it with water halfway? That way you can just drown any pesky goblin you throw into the hole.

Meanwhile, after a couple of human patsies monster hunters were so kind to map out the caverns for me, I was able to locate a some magma pools, or at the very least a couple of suspiciously warm obsidian walls. Now all I need to do is expose it, build a big pump stack to bring it towards a safer layer, and channel it into a room big enough for my industry to work out of. Preferably before anything nastier than a cave spider shows up.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Edited by Kayeka on Dec 27th 2022 at 11:21:31 AM

I never did, but i want to be able to nab their equipment to smelt/use it. Besides, i have a limited amount of water as is, so the idea doesn't really appeal to me.
uh, i've also found some strange obsidian walls, i should check that.

Whelp, that was a bust. The hot rocks did contain magma, but only a pocket of a single tile. Useless. Lost two miners to cave-ins digging it out.

It's not all bad. I found a large amount of gold, platinum and silver veins. Too bad I don't have any fuel to smelt it with.

Welp, my first venture ended in disaster last night. Had an attack from a wereweasel, and though my militia took care of it no problem there were two civilians caught in the crossfire so to speak that got bit. They ended up transforming at random spots throughout my Fort and infecting a lot more people in a terrible chain reaction. Retired the fort at a population of 7, down from about 125.

Hard to take something called a wereweasel seriously, but now I know better.

Yeah, my second fort had the same happen, except that was a werepanda. After a werebeast attack, the best thing you can do is carefully go over the combat log and expel anyone that got bitten.

Welp, things are going smoothly for the moment. the wandering monster hunters are enough to handle the occasional cavern beast, i have enough food and drink, soap, a (tiny) water source...
So everything should go horribly wrong any minute now.