Because only elves live in cities -- Let's Play Dwarf Fortress!

I too hugely appreciate the existence of this LP, and your dedication in putting it together for our enjoyment.

Meanwhile, KILL IT WITH FIRE
(or that adamantine method or whatever works to kill it. I looked it up - a loris is apparently an adorable looking monkey-ish creature that will viciously bite chunks out of you if you go anywhere near it. It makes for a remarkably appropriate demon.)

Domesticate it.

It is relevant that Ustru has a poisonous BITE, not poisonous SPIT. Now, if he manages to bite me from behind fortifications, we have some serious problems, but target practice is definitely possible.

I'm not 100% convinced I want to outright execute him. Yet, at least. But for killing him, the options I have are:

Encase in lava and water simultaneously, forming obsidian (requires hauling lava up from below in greater quantities than I have the infrastructure to support immediately)
Flood his area and expose it to the surface--being frozen in ice is also instantly fatal.
Death by crossbow bolt
Death by ballista bolt
Death by garbage dump
Death by cave-in
Eternal imprisonment
Caging and public display (Really fucking risky, as unless I surround him with constructed walls (which I suppose I could make out of glass, to support the illusion), any building destroyers that get in could wreck his cage and we'd have a demon running around)
Death by Eternal-Flame-In-A-Box (May not actually work, as he might be fireproof)

While you can't "strictly" domesticate demons (or train them at all, for that matter), I do like the idea of building an arena and having him fight dudes for my amusement. I do know that sometimes they just don't fight dudes, though, which is unfortunate.

I vote for imprisonment/display until you can do the obsidian thing. Keeping a giant chunk of obsidian with a demon inside around your fortress is about as badass as you can get, I would think.

Also, slow lorises (and possibly other kinds, there haven't been a lot of dedicated loris studies) have poison elbows which they lick to poison their bite. And from there spread the poison all over its and it babies' fur. And they hunt by slowly sneaking up on sleeping animals and then slowly strangling them.

Lorises make very good demons.

Come to think of it, is it programmed to kill anything besides dwarves? That could be useful. Maybe. Or not.

I also wonder whether the miasma would kill it, but that's probably a bit dangerous.

For what it's worth, "miasma" is no more than the smell of rotting flesh. It's disgusting, but completely harmless. Unless you're a dwarf, in which case, it impacts your mood--which on a bad day, CAN be fatal. Hasn't happened yet though, cross your fingers!

And now for something completely different:

__________________________________________________

It is rumored that a fell creature lurks deep within the bowels of the dwarven fortress Mothramkez. One from beyond time and space itself. One that comes from a place darker than any cave ever mined by dwarven picks. A creature so fearsome, that on its own, it subjugated an entire population of goblins. And while they could not slay it, they could contain it.

For now.

[/creepypasta]

There are 53 creatures on the map that are not dwarven citizens or pets thereof, not including the creature known as The Hellsquirrel (who we will soon be vanquishing.) Of those, six are ravens, who I could not give less of a shit about; two are elites, a swordsman and a maceman; twelve are archers and require special care for elimination; two are cave crocodiles, which are mounts but also have the ability to destroy some buildings (though I think they might be "minor" destroyers, which restricts what they can even target); and one remaining is Ustru himself. The rest are just melee troops and assorted non-interesting mounts. So while the siege may have broken and the leader may be imprisoned, we're not done here, and we're still under lockdown.

It's also notable that all but three axemen and their mounts, and the 9 trolls, are trapped in the grinder, at least. While they might not be being ground up, necessarily, they're sitting ducks. Their presence, however, prevents us from going in and collecting the delicious goblinite, and from performing maintenance. Especially the trolls. They need to die first.

Ugh. It took more fiddling than I wanted, because the archers didn't want to stand next to the fortifications and shoot (I'm just going to replace them with channels next, because I don't expect there to be archers in the way, AND I expect to have drawbridge powers in the future), but the trolls are finally down. Well, half of them. The ones that were actually lured. The other half need to be dealt with a bit more carefully.

By which I definitely mean, wait until they smash all the grates they can reach, then wait for them to go for the bait and pincushion them safely.

Huh. An axeman that wasn't trapped showed up and got MURDERIZED by some conveniently placed archers. Little bitch doesn't stand a chance.

All of the remaining roamers are now lured successfully by the shiny artifact, save for one more goblin (who got dissected) and his cave crawler (who is running away from us like a chicken).

God damn this asshole runs like the Immortal Chef. STAB HIM ALREADY YOU FOOLS!

I've literally got the entire military chasing him to little avail. He's dodging like six or seven guys. Ate a couple bolts but it doesn't seem to slow him down at all.

OH SHIT SOMEONE BIT HIM ON THE HEAD. THIS MIGHT BE FATAL IF HE DOES IT RIGHT.

Nope, it broke away and tackled the miner who took apart the goblin from earlier.

Ugh. Finally it passed out. Now someone will spear him in the skull, break his brain open, and we can get on with our lives.

Yeah, next frame he got speared for the kill. Good riddance. Now we go perforate the rest of the assholes who are gathered for our amusement.

Migrants. Just in time for the slaughter. Come on in boys, glad you could make it, mind the dead trolls and watch your step.

GOD DAMMIT. Our armorsmith got a mood... and it's another possession. No legendary armorsmith for you! That's a disappointment and a half.

Ugh he's passed out already just go for the headshot you can even kick him to death stop wasting bolts!

I take it back. They're all out of bolts now. Stupid. At least it was just bone and not metal. I've got them using up the bone bolts before we break into the metal stuff, so their aim is increased by that time.

Bah. Forget it. These guys can't finish them off. I'm bringing the melee squads in to clean this mess up.

And just like that, the mess is clean. Time to haul the corpses, boys.

Armorsmith finished his masterpiece.... a brass breastplate. Not necessarily the best metal, but not the worst, from what I recall. I mean, he could've made it out of fish bone or something equally useless.

HOWEVER. I had an epiphany.

I know how to stop the trolls permanently.

If a building destroyer has the choice between a juicy building and a juicy potash maker, they'll usually go for the maker. They'll wreck stuff on the way, mind you, but they won't go out of their way. This is why Ustru bypassed the lure. If I set up a bridge that blocks their pathfinding, however, all the trolls will fail to see anything, except for the indestructible artifact. (Goblins won't move, though.) Then, once the trolls are sufficiently enraptured, we pull the lever, let the goblins into the grinder, and all is well.

I literally cannot tell you how many fucking rocs are living on this mountain. There are enough engravings of rocs, almost ALL of them different names, that I'm worried we might get a steady influx of those, too. At least they're easy enough, with the power of biological weaponry.

Huh. I was going around, cleaning up the trap hall and all the assorted garbage. One of the archers stopped to shoot the mace lord. Not only did I not anticipate this, I didn't anticipate him HITTING. He blocked a lot of bolts, but he took one to the upper lip (lodging, OUCH), one to the pancreas, and another to his middle finger.

We now have a giant tiger who is trained for war. Fear me, Goblins. Fear me.

now if only we had a breeding pair....

Haha. The mace lord dodged into the same pit that the demon is squatting in. He's out of the picture, too. All we got left are the three tunnels on the right, which are full of archers.

Well. The dwarves are here to trade. Here's hoping things go well. We've got an obscene amount of trading trash. I didn't even bother bringing everything. We won't need it. Gonna have loads stockpiled for the next few caravans, and we may have to start atom-smashing if we get more sieges than caravans. It's funny--they're attracted to my wealth, but they only contribute to it.

I'm also feeling like we might settle into a pattern of "play until something interesting happens, then stop, then next update is the resolution of that interesting thing." Because holy SHIT running at 20fps is obnoxious when you're looking for things to document and also waiting for the stupid dwarves to haul crap. And waiting for miners to mine out a death hall for the hellsquirrel.

Oh THAT'S fucking fantastic. Two seconds after I say that, we get ambushed by some goblins. "An ambush! Curse them!"

Granted, I only SEE a single goblin, but that's still a goblin with a bow. Fortunately, dwarves bring their own militia in case stupid things like this happen. Assembling the militia now, just in case.

Oh hey, there's more than one goblin. There are, in fact, five. Four archers and a maceman.

Two goblins dismantled already. There was a miner and an archer already on the field, hauling crap to the depot, so we got to at least start on them.

Ouch. One of our guys shot an archer, and one of the caravan guards came up and started wailing on him when he fell over. This is not a good day for Goblinkind.

There are no longer goblins. All is as it should be.

Scratch that. Found a second goblin squad. I SHOULD have anticipated that, but, eh. Everyone's still close enough. LET THERE BE DEATH!

Axeman was nearby, he's going to TOWN on one goblin, but the others are converging. Hoping our boys get there in time...

First spearman down, but the other guy tackled the axedwarf. There's another one nearby and four more closing in. Reinforcements are on the way though. Aaaaaaand the spearman just threw up all over our axeman. Eew. Well that's what you get for trudging through the filth for an ambush. Dumbass.

Axeman dodged two attacks and is back on his feet, and now a spearman is backin him up. I like where this is going. Well, aside from the axeman having three goblins surrounding him...



Speardwarf stabbed his guy through the leg, and axedwarf took apart another guy's arm, so no shield for him. He then followed it up with a nasty shot to the foot. Three speargobbos on the ground. Soon to be three corpses on the ground.

Ooh, now that one's passed out. He's a gonner. Axe to the brain.

First hit took his spine apart, so even if he doesn't die right now, he's basically dead because he can't breathe anymore.

Wow. So apparently you can stab someone hard enough to SEVER THEIR HAND. How's that work exactly? Like.... wow. Okay. Dwarf Fortress, man.

Axe lodged in his brain. -1 goblin.

Now free of his foe, axedwarf strides over to the goblin who's getting stabbed, and takes half his leg off.

And after a few more shots, he gets a spear to the brain. -1 goblin, and the miner is here too. This is over.

Miner brings a goblin to his knees with one swing of his pickaxe. Then, the spearman jumps over that goblin, rushing another one and tackling him down, stabbing him in the foot. Meanwhile, more men just keep showing up to seal the deal. They won't ever see combat.

Many severed limbs and brutal stabbings later, he passes out. Taking bets as to who finishes him off: axe, spear, or miner. Nobody really actually got a finishing blow, because they couldn't get through his helmet. The game gave credit to the miner since he got the last "blow" in.

An entirely different goblin gets his lungs mined. Ouch.

Yeah, no, I'm just gonna unpause instead of taking this frame by frame. They stand no chance. It was a slaughterfest. I'm gonna spread the military out a bit, though, in case there are more waiting in the wings.

Aaaargh. Stupid asshole doesn't want my crap. It got to the point where the trader was "rapidly losing patience" before I decided not to risk it and bring in extra goods to butter him up. But I WILL have my metal. Mark my words!

Ugh. They took too long bringing the stuff, so I had to settle for cutting the silver, gold, and some of the iron. I'll remember this!

Well. This is momentous.



Needless to say, I accepted. We are now the Barony of Mothramkez.

Ugh.... watching the bowmen march up and down the tunnel bothers me. That's it. We're ending their existences right now. It's cage trap time. Might be a while, since I've still got the miners working on the hellsquirrel's tomb, but.... when it's done, this'll be fun~

actually wait, what am I thinking? Can just link the tunnel they're in, to the tunnel that has weapon traps. RIP guys.

Meanwhile, the godsdamned Tomb of the Hellsquirrel is nearly completed. Nearly. Still need to finish a couple tasks, but then we'll be ready to drop a mountain on this asshole, and then go to the magma sea and claim our prize.

I also remembered that the baroness needs baron's quarters. Whoops~ yeah, we're getting on that right now.

Oh man! Been a while since we had kobolds. GET HIM, MEN!

Ahh. Once again, Mothramkez is safe from thieves.

So. The military sub-menus are widely considered the most complex part of the interface. You can have a number (not sure what the max is or if there is one) of squads, each with a maximum of 10 soldiers. Each squad is set to an alert, which has a schedule tied to it. A schedule holds 12 sets of orders, one for each month, and the same schedule can have different orders for each month, or different orders for different squads within the same month.

What I didn't know, is that you can give multiple orders at once. So, for the month of Felsite, I can have a single squad send one guy to point A, and another guy to point B, and a third guy patrolling a route of my choosing.

This is... this is mind-blowing, honestly. I never even TRIED to do that. I've never messed around with the military schedules much--or a military, period. I only recently figured out the basics, and have had a chance to use them. And even then, I mostly micromanage the military, using the rudimentary 'squads' menu to just have them all go to a spot, or to gang-pile some enemies. Hooray for learning, though!

And knowledge was gained just as the new year rolled in.

And lo! At long last, my fell machinations have been completed!

Jesus. It feels like forever since I started, I don't even know how much time in-world has passed, but it is now the 24th of Granite, 107 (1st month, Early Spring) and I am ready to slay the last of our foes.

First, the goblin archers:



I'll have that tile dug out, the miner will run for his life, we'll pull the lever once he's clear, give him some breathing room, and then the lever will be pulled again. Goblins will hopefully choose to use the other path that I've helpfully opened for them, and then get murdered as a result. Meanwhile, far below the earth...






THIS is why I couldn't show screenshots until it was finished. Just look at that baby! Behold, the Tomb of the Hellsquirrel. That tower in the middle is actually 100% solid, and it's entirely disconnected from the rest of the earth, supported only by that single pillar down there. Hmm, where have we seen this before?

But wait! How are we to crush the hellsquirrel beneath it? Simple. When I send a miner down to that corner, he'll dig a staircase that'll provide a path between the hellsquirrel and our juicy little dwarves. Blinded by his hunger for dwarven flesh, the beast will eventually make a beeline for the fort. As long as everybody stays the fuck out of the way, this'll go off without a hitch. When he's running through my little windy, twisty maze that I've dug for him, I'll pull the lever, and that giant tower will come crashing down, and it'll actually punch through all the floors and flatten him.

I hope.

Just to be safe, I'm putting a bridge down there that I can seal, BEFORE I try this. Not taking any goddamn chances. Although I suppose if it doesn't work, he'll at least choke on cave-in dust, and we can have the military on standby to take his brain apart. I'd prefer it didn't come to that, though. There's no loot to be gained from this, merely the ability to retake the caves.

Anyway, while we wait on the safety measure, I'm gonna go ahead and release the goblins. After I put one last wall in to block their path, so that they don't continue to try the futile, fruitless path that doesn't lead to death.

Ah. I was afraid of that. oh well. Sometimes, it happens. The miner who opened the floodgates got into a scuffle with the gobbos. He lopped one of their arms off, but then he ate an arrow to the knee and passed out. Oddly, though, they left him alone after that and proceeded to get mutilated by the traps. I'm sending some guys down to recover him, since he was on the other side of the bridge, so I could seal him away before they got to him.

Okay, all but a handful of goblins are dead (enough that I feel comfortable archering them to death), the miner is being taken to the hospital, and the emergency lever is ready to go in case of an emergency. I think this is a good place to call it, so see you guys next time on Let's Play Dwarf Fortress And Kill A Whole Bunch Of Innocent Creatures Because They Look Different Than Us.

Okay, so sometimes they try to kidnap our children too. But it's mostly because they look weird. That kid-stealing-thing is overplayed for propaganda purposes.

Between now and the end of the last update, I actually created an additional "save file" to do a bit of cave-in science, to make sure that what I theorized about cave-in physics was, indeed, the truth. I will use the introductary portion of this update to educate you on the exact mechanics of cave-ins, ending with a summary of my findings.

A cave-in occurs when a landmass is no longer supported. In Dwarf Fortress, "support" is a rather simple concept: any tile attached to the very edge of the map is supported, as is any tile that is orthogonally adjacent to another supported tile, along either the X, Y, or Z axis. Considering that a single pillar can hold up literally the entire map if you go to the lengths to eliminate all other sources of support, it's safe to say that cave-ins are fairly rare unless you're intending to cause one. The most common source of accidental cave-ins are when you're channeling out floor tiles for one reason or another, and you designate a large mass, causing the dwarves to choose an order that leaves one tile floating, disconnected. Fairly easy to avoid, by simply ensuring you always work from one side to the other, and never dig out two adjacent tiles simultaneously unless there's a solid wall next to them.

Not all structures provide support. Any natural earth can provide support, as can any "construction." This consists of dwarf-constructed walls, floors, ramps, stairs, and fortifications. Additionally, "support" buildings can provide support along the Z-axis in both directions. As such, there are very few ways actions that can cause a cave-in, by removal of support:

Digging or channeling the last tile holding up a landmass
Deconstructing a constructed wall/staircase/ramp/floor/fortification when there are no other tiles granting support
Deconstructing a support building that is holding up a free-floating landmass
Pulling a lever linked to a support building that is holding up a free-floating landmass
Allowing a building-destroying creature to destroy the support holding up a free-floating landmass

The only "safe" method is the lever-linked support, as cave-ins are very dangerous to anyone around it. A landmass caving in will plummet to the ground, stopped only when it reaches another unmined, solid tile. If there are mined tiles that consist of floors or ceilings only, the falling land will punch through and continue. If there are any loose items beneath, they will be annihilated, with the exception of stone/ore dropped from mining. If there are any buildings or constructions beneath, they will be destroyed, unless it is a constructed wall. If the falling landmass contains any constructions, they will deconstruct upon impact. If the falling landmass lands on a fluid (water or magma), it will be teleported to the top of the landmass.

Now for the bits that I tested. I was afraid that, when I pulled the lever, the falling chunk of mountain would hit the walls on the topmost layer of the tomb, and the entire thing would stop. This is not the case--a tile that lands on a wall will be stopped, but any adjacent tiles that do not have walls underneath will continue to plummet. Also, it turns out that stairs aren't destroyed, but tend to be pushed downwards while remaining intact. So it's TECHNICALLY possible for the beast to survive, but if he does, he'll be trapped in a 1-tile space where he cannot possibly escape unless I free him--and it would be trivial to execute him without ever exposing any dwarves to his teeth.

All this boils down to me pulling the lever and releasing his sorry butt from the mortal coil.

Oh goodie. Migrants show up almost as soon as I unpause. (I say almost, because, lol frame rate.) And they showed up in the filth. Uggin fuggin. REALLY need to do something about that.... I'm gonna complain every damn time until I have the boredom required to go and fix it. Oh well. It won't be a problem once we hit 200 dwarves, as migrants will come no more. Y'know, until we start losing guys left and right for whatever reason.

Haha. I was about to say, did they seriously only send 3 guys? Because only 3 guys came out and there wasn't even a migrant plug (those damn Purple @ signs that bug up the game and need to be fixed via memory hacking.) Well, the @ came to town. Grumble grumble.

The only remaining invaders on the map are the mace lord and the demon, both in the pit. I will leave them exactly where they are for some time, but now we can clean out all of the trap tunnels, and administer some proper traps.

Squirrelly McDemonPants is reluctant to come over to my lovely little trap. I wonder if he doesn't have a path? Well, I'm ordering that to be fixed.

Okay. Right now, the squirrel isn't even on the visible map, and the elves are unloading at the depot. I've got everyone bringing garbage to trade with, so I'm REALLY hoping he doesn't figure out how to get in while nobody's guarding the lever of death. In fact, I could (and should) just pull the lever that keeps him out, while I ready the surefire path that ABSOLUTELY will ensure he comes after our juicy, juicy dwarves.

I brought a fraction of the garbage we had accumulated from slaughtering sieges, and had 22,000 dwarfbucks worth of goods. The elves did not have 22,000 dwarfbucks worth of stuff I wanted. I bought ALL of their barrels (some with booze, some with golden salve and gnomeblight), crutches, buckets, splints, and sand bags, just so that I could get something of value, and then have the expensive barrels as trade fodder for the other caravans, who DO bring useful things. Hell, I even let him get like, 7,000 in profit, just because I didn't see anything I wanted at all. See you later, elves.

AT LAST! HE COMES TO HIS TOMB!



Finally got him to be on the right side of the caves to charge up the staircase of death. Now we wait and watch for the right time, and we slaughter him!



Sayonara, Nist Nisunduz.

.....

.....

FUCK MY LIFE.

So apparently, I forgot to mine out the topmost layer. The giant pillar that was supposed to crush the hellsquirrel? Still attached to the ceiling. God. Dammit. SO FUCKING GLAD I PUT THAT EMERGENCY BRIDGE IN!

All right. It's now the 15th of Malachite (5th month, Mid-summer) and we're trying this again. Just gotta wait for Nist Nisunduz, aka the Hellsquirrel, to come back for a second try. And this time, none of that "Lol the giant pillar isn't actually falling" bullshit. This time, he dies.



And there you have it, folks. The hellsquirrel is no more. He doesn't even leave a corpse. Sucker is obliterated from this earth. Now I feel comfortable going diving for magma....

Mmm. Well, I haven't gotten nearly deep enough for magma yet, but we hit a couple layers of marble! Marble is exciting because it makes up entire layers of stone, and is usable as "flux" in the production of steel. The sciency part involves the addition and reduction of carbon in the alloying process, but at the end of the day, it just means that you need to alloy iron and some kind of flux stone to make pig iron, and then alloy that with more flux, some charcoal, and raw iron to make steel.

Oh hey. We also have gold further down. That's nice. Time to mine some of that out for electrum to satisfy our mayor. Ugh.

God damn but there's a lot of gold down here. A LOT of gold. We're gonna have ourselves quite a mining industry. I might even have to use minecarts. Ah well.

Jesus. We're down to Z-level 10, and it's still diorite. No granite or basalt yet...




Well. There's the caverns again. There are technically three different layers of caverns, and it looks like we skipped the second. Nothing TOO interesting there that isn't in the third, but there are some swell things down here. Like that nether-cap. It's a wood that has a fixed temperature--the freezing point of water. You can have a dragon breathe on it and it won't even get lukewarm. Spooky.

(For reference, dragonbreath is about 40,000 degrees celsius. That's about as hot as some stars can get.)

AHAH! FOUND IT!!



This is too perfect. This is image number ninety nine, too. So that means the next pic will be image number one hundred. And that, my friends, is the sign of magma. One of the tiles adjacent to that one is filled with magma. I can't tell which one--it might be underneath, in which case the tile is safe to dig, or it might be on the same z-level, in which case it would be a death sentence to the poor miner.

Okay. So I was able to dig out a 7x7 square on the level directly above the warm stone (z=-10). That means the magma is not directly above the warm stone (which I have had happen before, and it's terrible!) That means it's time to dig a channel and see what happens.

Okey doke. Z=-11 is safe. Which means z=-12 is probably where my bounty is located. Let's go find out for ourselves!

Gad dangit. Humans showed up. Which is normally fantastic, as they have metal and other useful goods for sale, but I'm kind of busy thousands of feet below the earth!



And great, it truly is. I think I'll finish up trading and end it here. A good stopping point, and a good way to break into the triple digits. Join me next time, when we figure out how the bloody hell we're going to bring the magma up a hundred and fifty z-levels.

I'm anticipating the goblins to show up shortly. It's been a little bit too long since they've paid us a visit, and since I have nothing to do outside, I'm sealing up pre-emptively, so we can get the trap tunnel a bit more outfitted.



So the red ^ symbols represent weapon traps that have already been installed. The black and white ^ symbols represent weapon traps that I have designated for installation, but have not yet been installed yet as a result of me not having unpaused the game, despite having been running off and on for about two hours. Turns out I had enough garbage to buy out a zillion crappy weapons off the human traders, and I was intending to melt them down for scrap metal, but this is a much better use. There's a row of bone crossbows that are packed four to a tile, but all the others are packed two weapons to a trap. I used up all the wooden weapons I had in addition to the other assorted metal stuff I bought, but we packed these traps in tight. 77 traps total, including the six we already had. Those goblins won't know what hit them.

Now once the peasants get to work on that, we can start on the magma recovery. This is going to be a project and a half no matter how I go about it. Between when I stopped the last update and now, I started digging a giant shaft down to the magma so that I have a straight path, but I can't remember EXACTLY what my plan was. There are a handful of different ways I could bring ore, magma, and labor all together.

The two schools of thought are to either bring the dwarves to the magma, or to bring the magma to the dwarves. I could simply have the forges down there, send some dwarves down to do work, and have a minecart rail transport the raw materials down, and the finished products up. This would still require the dwarves to move up and down when they need to eat, drink, sleep, or whatever. Alternatively, we could split the fortress into two, set up burrows that restrict where dwarves may go, and use minecarts to transport goods between the two forts. This would eliminate movement between the hundred or so Z-levels, but would require a lot of micromanagement and is definitely more work than it's worth. We could, of course, just bring the entire fort down, but that requires building an entire fortress from scratch and render our existing infrastructure obsolete.

This means that, if I don't decide to just build the forges down there, that we're going to be bringing the magma to the surface. Only a single tile per workshop is required, and I'm in no rush. Just gotta get one smelter going, then one forge, then we're good to go and everything else is just gravy.

There are three methods to bring magma to the surface. The traditional method is through a "pump stack." This is the first method discovered and used, and has been refined over the years. A dwarf can construct a machine called a screw pump, also known as an Archimedes' Screw, which is a large screw encased within a tube. The screw is turned, either by mechanical power or dwarven labor, and it scoops the water up from the bottom and brings it to the top. Well... Water, or magma, if it's built with the proper materials. These machines can transport any liquid (of which there exist only those two) up a single Z-level... however, by building a gigantic tower of many screw pumps, the liquid can be brought up as far as you have the resources. However, these require an immense amount of infrastructure, and fluid motion is one of the major contributors to game lag. There exist ways to make magma pump stacks less expensive computationally, by reducing the number of temperature checks that need to be made (another major framesink), but it's still a massive resource drain when in use.

The second discovered method abuses the cave-in physics. When a chunk of solid rock lands in a pool, the fluid teleports directly up to the top, without loss. (Well, until the fluid starts to spread out, as physics dictate.) If a gigantic, 140 z-level tall pillar with ridged edges drops into the magma sea, that will cause the magma to move upwards 140 z-levels. It can be made to work infinitely by abusing obsidian casting (if magma and water ever enter the same tile, it creates a full block of solid obsidian stone) and does not have the frame loss problems, but requires much more infrasturcture to support.

The third method is the slowest, but the most precise. If a minecart (which must be made from iron, steel, or nickel) passes through magma, or if magma is pumped into a tile that contains a minecart, it will be filled with magma. It can then be dumped onto another tile--say, one that's closer to the surface, to power magma smelters and forges. After finding a suitably compact design, I've decided on this method, as the infrastructure required is utterly minimal.

It does render the shaft useless, but that's fine. I'm sure I'll find a use for it in the future, and until then, we don't need to dig it out. In fact, this setup requires little more than a single screw pump, a conveyor belt (called "rollers"), some small safety features, and as many minecarts as I can get my hands on. So the miners need to dig out a small apparatus, and it needs to be smoothed and minecart tracks need to be engraved in it. While that's happening, I'll be using some of the leftover fuel we have to smelt some of the garnierite we picked up from various caravans, and to forge the required components.

To do that, though, I'm gonna have to suck it up and unpause this thing, and pray that nothing goes wrong.

Ah fuck it. It's Dwarf Fortress. Something WILL go wrong eventually. This game goes until you lose, so I guess I'll just take the skills I learn here into my next game. Let's go, men!

Ugh. Interrupted by migrants... and by me seeing a guy sleeping in a staircase, and deciding to excavate more bedrooms. Both of these are being addressed, but we shouldn't be having any issues with more stupid delays. The only delays I foresee are really catastrophic ones. Which, of course, means we will be fighting off another demon-led siege.

Wow. We've gotten an animal for every dwarf in the migrant wave. I'm ordering them all butchered as they show up so nobody starves and becomes unbutcherable, denying me my meat and bones. I'm also, in addition to all the weapon traps, ordering all the walls in the trap tunnel to be smoothed and engraved into fortifications. I'll then dig out the interiors so we can station dwarves up there if need be.

Well THIS is unexpected.





So. You can't really see much, since we only saw the very edge, but that was enough to get a message about it. A magma pool is a gigantic tube that fills up with magma, up to a certain level. They tend to be pretty large, and will be an asset when I tap the magma for a more permanent flow (if I ever feel like doing it for reasons), but we don't really care about it right now.

THAT LITTLE BITCH. Our mayor forgot about his demand for electrum furniture. He will no longer care if we get him some. After we finally had the ability to make some! THAT PIECE OF SHIT IS GETTING FLOGGED LATER. If he wasn't a legendary broker I'd have him play with a suicide pump. (If you build a screw pump out of wood and have it pump magma, it will burst into flames the minute you turn it on. This is a hilarious way to execute dwarves who have sinned.)

Oogh. Someone stopped installing a trap because they saw our friendly neighborhood trapped demon and shit themselves. I need to get him relocated in the near future. I have a plan that could work, but would require my attention split between that and the magma recovery project. I don't expect the demon problem to resolve itself, though, so I really should clean him out of there sometime. Ah well. I have a plan that'll move him out of anyone's line of sight, and put him in a new little cell, and then we can do stuff with him later.

Man. Getting all this stuff together has been quite an odyssey. And we're not even close to operational yet. Here's a look at what we have so far:




On Z-level negative six, we have the launching point. Dwarves will store magma-safe minecarts, and NOTHING ELSE, in the provided stockpile. Then, they will be pushed along the visible minecart track. The weird jagged segments are the fabled "impulse ramps", which will derail the minecart in such a way that it cheats gravity and the conservation of energy, and actually picks up speed. Quite a lot, in fact. It's entirely unnecessary, though, as it'll just drop down a chute. I might actually take it out if it borks up. Z=-7 is entirely devoid of anything, save for a hole that the carts will fall through, so let's move on to...



Nothing terribly exciting, there's an open space for the carts to fall, but you can also see the designations for a gear assembly (the asterisk) and a horizontal axle (the long tubey thing). These transfer power (not REALLY electric energy, but mechanical kinetic energy) to another machine for it to do work. Like magma pumping. Not pictured is another gear assembly that needs to be designated to the north of the axle.



Another hole, and area provided for a vertical axle (the blue o) as well as, to the north, the top level of our waterwheel farm. In Dwarf Fortress, it is possible to generate energy, because a water wheel can produce more energy than a screw pump consumes, and they can power each other and provide surplus energy. Please don't question it. It just works. Also pictured is the bloody wanker who got trapped in the hole and couldn't get out because he's a bloody wanker.

Also, the axle is made out of nether-cap, just in case magma leaks happen. I don't ANTICIPATE anything, but, better safe than sorry, and nether-cap won't melt for ANYTHING. Unless you drop raw wood in magma, because lol bugs.



This is the level right above where the magic happens. The isolated area to the north will be filled with water, to power the wheels, and below you can see another axle, as well as a track for the minecart as it leaves the loading zone. The tracks will stop at the area near the stairs (and I'll be adding a track stop to apply friction if need be) and be carried up to the forges for magma loading. Also pictured is another wanker who got stuck down there because the guy above him is a bloody wanker.



And THIS is where the magic happens. The green divisor symbols are a glass screw pump, and just north of it is a nickel grate. HOW a screw pump works with a grate in the way, I don't quite know, but it will pull the magma up through the grate, and keep nasty magma crabs from spitting molten basalt at us. Believe me, it sucks getting hit by that stuff. To the south is where the minecarts will drop in, be propelled by a roller (yet to be built) up the wall, with the magma inside. Just beyond that is a bridge that will usually be raised, but can lower in case for SOME reason, I need to drain the magma trench. I shouldn't have to, but it's always good practice to have emergency shutoffs in case when accidents happen. Also pictured is Wanker III of Wellington tearing down a wall that's actually supposed to be there, but if it's there, we can't put another safety grate in. The ramp on the left is where the carts will fall, and then gravity will take them to the right, up that ramp via roller. From there, it will follow the track on the floor above and (hopefully) come to a stop, full of magma, where we will take it upstairs.

We've been having hilarious difficulties. For starters, this isn't the first time I've trapped someone in the "dwarven reactor." Dwarves have gotten locked out of the room on z=-11 because you can't just walk over the pump.

Ugh. Not only am I micromanaging the demon-relocation project and the magma loading project, the dwarves showed up to trade. I'm ordering a buncha crap to the depot but I'm also gonna send militia down to guard the depot. I'm also hoping stupid things don't start happening.



It's a really good thing merchants are super-immune to traps. Or this would be really friggin embarrassing.

So while everybody's running around and doing their things, one of the bone doctor migrants went fey. He's got mason skill, so he might make some useful bait for trolls and uninvited guests. Let's see what he does...

Our newly indoctrinated and legendary mason is on break, after creating Ducimarosh, coffers made from gabbro and decorated with assorted junk. The image is of a bronze colossus settling on our mountain. Nothing interesting lore-wise, but we can use it as bait and for that, I am happy.

Meanwhile, the FUCKING MERCHANTS aren't ready yet cause they went the long way around and also insisted on crawling the entire way. Aaaaargh. FML. I've also ordered new farms, and the plump helmets will flow like the wine... because we're OUT of wine. How did that happen? Dwarves drinking WATER? UNACCEPTABLE!

Finally. All right, let's get some commerce underway!

Wow. Bought all their booze, all the metal I cared about, all their sand and plaster, and a few raw plump helmets to jump-start our alcohol production, and had about 30K dwarfbucks left over. So I bought up a bunch more weapons for traps. Because why the hell not? It's not like I WANT any of the garbage I'm trading them, no reason to sit on it.

On your merry way, caravan of dwarves. I've got MAD SCIENCE to do.

Okay. It's clear that we won't get magma today, but we'll be ridiculously close. I have a couple walls I need to seal up before we can start filling the reactor with water, and if they're not built in a specific order then the dwarves will get themselves stuck and I'll just have to take them down and start over. Further, we're installing a shutoff to the reactor itself--if you attach too much machinery, say, a whole bunch of gears that don't actually do anything but suck up power, then EVERYTHING connected will shut down, including the pump and the wheels that are generating the power. Again, I don't foresee a reason I might need to do this, but it's always good practice to have a shutoff just in case, because there is probably something that can go wrong, and it WILL.

It also seems like I won't strictly NEED to perform Operation: Demon Relocation, but it's still a good idea anyways, and it has the bonus of allowing me to strip the goblin mace lord that's down there with him, and then throw him into the magma, for no reason other than I really want to throw a goblin into the magma sea. The weapon traps are all fully loaded, and so we are primed and ready for the next siege. Which hasn't come yet, oddly, but it HAS only been four or five months in-game. 30FPS is no fun when you're waiting for large-scale projects to be completed and, as such, have nothing interesting to write about. Unless you guys wanna hear how I've been reorganizing the kitchen to make alcohol more efficiently.

Yeah, I didn't think you did. So instead, we get to play chicken with a demon.

Here's how it'll work:



I've ordered a miner to, when I unpause, go dig that tile out. It'll open a path between him and the uninvited guests that are chilling out in the guest room. From there, I've got a lever on the level above, linked to that bridge you see. I'll wait to see which miner specifically decides to pull the lever, and then I'll add him to a custom burrow that includes ONLY that tile, the appropriate lever, and a path between them. I'll then forbid any other dwarf from pulling the lever. Hopefully, this will result in him opening the breach, and then making a BEELINE up to safety, and throwing the lever that'll keep the demon away from our organs.

This should cause him to choose the other path, which leads downstairs to....



The idea is, both the goblin and the demon will run for the duck that I've set up in the dead-end as bait. The goblin will get caged by our cage trap, but the demon will not. However, once he mauls the duck, the lever is pulled and a pillar will drop from above. It'll block the way out, and also probably knock him out with the cave-in dust, which removes his immunity to traps... letting us put him in a cage and bury him somewhere until we decide what to do.

Wow. This is taking so long that we finished all the walls required to start filling the reactor. So I've ordered that to start, as it'll also take an age, but once that's ready, and we have the shutoff lever readied (which should happen before the reactor is full), we'll be ready to engage the system. Though I do think I want a couple track stops to apply friction, just in case.

God dammit.



This tool got herself wedged in between those fortifications and nobody bothered to let me know. AAAAGH. IDIOT. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? And she's a legendary mason, too, instead of one of the fuckalls with no job that I tell to build walls occasionally. They never do, of course. Well let's hope she can get herself fed and watered. I will need to watch that one very closely when it's reconsructed.

OH COCKS. THEY'RE HERE.

Freakin' goblins showed up on 16th Obsidian, 107 (12th month, Late Winter) just as I was doing the last minute checks to see if all systems were go for the demon relocation. A quick cursory glance indicates we should be ready to operate... the problem is that the levers and the actual relocation all happen down in the trap tunnel itself, so we have to wait the goblins out. Fortunately, I have many more weapons, so this should be much, much bloodier. I look forward to seeing what kind of presents Goblin Claus leaves us this year!

.......Next time, on Let's Play: Dwarf Fortress!

Okay. I count myself incredibly lucky that I had the foresight to, between pausing the game and saving/quitting the game at the end of last session, I ordered all the lockdown procedures to be initiated. They will begin as soon as I unpause, and we will lock down and the goblins will be ground up. Then we can pray to Armok that everything goes better than the last time I operated the grinder (all security holes SHOULD be patched this time around!) and we recover our delicious loot. And then relocate the demon into a little pen.

ADVANCE, TROOPS!

crap. Well, we have exactly one security hole: a construction shortcut that allows goblins to bypass the (horribly undertooled) dodge-me trap was built with a RETRACTING bridge, instead of a drawbridge. So it doesn't actually seal up during goblin time. Fortunately, they can't actually get there unless the grinder fails, and it shouldn't do that. I have enough redundancies that we shouldn't have any trouble. I look forward to seeing how the goblins get shredded. But first, we wait for the trolls to be smashed to smithereens.

No mounts this time (that I can see), but they brought no less than twenty trolls. Fortunately, they'll be neutralized almost immediately, as the troll lure is, in fact, working as designed: the bridge that blocks pathing to the goblin grinder did work, so the only thing the trolls can smash is the booby-trapped, indestructible grate. Other than that, there's a squad of 14 hammermen, lead by a master spearman; a squad of eleven pikemen, lead by another master spearman; and a squad of fifteen macemen, lead by a master lasher. Whips in DF are hilariously broken, due to the implications of a pure metal with ludicrous force behind a tiny contact area, concentrating all that force. Even COPPER whips can break through most armor and cripple anybody. So it's a damn good thing this guy will end up in the grinder.

I suppose since I won't be able to relocate the demon until after the goblins are dealt with, I'll put the workforce towards magma retrieval. As far as I know, without going in and checking, the infrastructure SHOULD all be completed. Let me go check...

Yeah, it looks like we're just waiting for dwarves to haul buckets of water down to the battery and get it full of water, so we can start the wheel and the pump will activate. From there, I have to tell them how to work the minecarts, and... okay whew. For a second, I thought "crap, I didn't hook the rollers up to any power", but the rollers are adjacent to the magma pump, so as long as the pump is powered (which it is), it will transfer power to the rollers. So that's good. We just have to wait a bit and this should work as planned.

Ooh. An extra four trolls have shown up on the map since I last counted the units. One of them is officially trapped, though, and others are on their way. The goblins have nothing to do and so are just milling about. They won't be for long, though.

Okay. A squad of 8 trolls got smashed by the death bridge, but the other trolls weren't moving. So we opened the gates into the grinder, but I'm gonna shut it down again once the trolls get close enough. I might crush a couple goblins too. Hell, I probably could've just put a whole bunch of bridges in the long hall, linked them to a single lever, and made a giant atom smasher and not even needed the grinder.

It wouldn't be as fun though.



Oh yeah. This is definitely more fun. We're down to 13 trolls, one of which is on death's doorstep.

Wait WHAT?



No clue why. His corpse is just lying in his bed. That should not be happening. We don't have any ghosts...

Ack. I was running around fixing stuff up and I forgot that I left the troll lure down. Oh well. Exactly one troll made it past, and he can be executed. The goblins are already streaming into the trap hall and getting torn up.

Well the siege is broken, as of 13th Granite (1st month, Early Spring). I'm not sure if we killed everyone (unlikely) or they ran away because they took too many losses, but everyone's dead, save for the trolls and master lasher, because the lasher dodged a bolt and fell in a hole. We're good for cleanup now. First order of business, assassinate the one troll that's milling around.

He's dead, and now the other trolls are going to die soon. Getting bolted by the archers, and I got lazy and sent the melee guys after them, to mop up and get some XP.

Ooh that was a mistake. The trolls aren't entirely incapacitated. One of them gored a speardwarf in the gut. It didn't cut him open but his spleen got bruised. There are only seven trolls remaining, though.

Ooh. Yeah. Scratch that. There are less than seven trolls. There are now three trolls.

OH SHIT. SOME GUYS FELL OFF THE LEDGE AND THE LASHER TOOK THEM APART. Two spearmen and an axeman are getting wrecked. At least all the trolls are dead. WOW that was fantastically dumb on my part.

One spearman is dead and one is bruised up, and the axeman has a broken spine so he's a goner. I'm gonna see how this goes and if he's still alive, I'm putting him in a cage.

Ugh. He's just leaving them alone. Yeah, it's cage time. Well one bled out and he's just ignoring the other guy.

Well son of a bitch. I was getting ready to infrastructure him to death, but the bruised spearman won the day somehow when I wasn't looking! Props to this guy, he gets a title. And freedom. I think the new plan is just gonna be copious channeling. 15 or so z-levels, and if anybody falls off the ledge in the future, they'll fall to their death, guaranteed.

Oh boy! A nameless ex-hunter (I say "ex-hunter" because I disallow hunting, as it gets guys killed really easily and is unnecessary) had just enough skill in mechanics that he'll probably make a legendary mechanism and get legendary skill. This should be fun!

Sure enough, he took over the Mechanic's shop. I may as well just name him right now. Welcome to the workforce.

Ugh. The dumb bitch who survived the lasher attack, who has a broken left hand and left leg, is on break. As she starves and dehydrates, while nobody brings her to the hospital. COME ON YOU FUCKHEADS!

Finally, someone came to rescue her. Another member of the squad, as it turns out. Well, I'll let the peasantry haul away all the garbage from the siege. Like the dead bodies, hurr hurr. Anyway, since I'm still waiting on the dwarves to finish filling the water battery, I'm gonna do the stupid thing and try to relocate the demon. Wish me luck in the past!

The hell?

Okay, so my plan to get the miner to safety didn't quite work out. But here's where things get weird:

The goblin dodged the miner, and the cage trap set up for him, and went straight for the exit, to try and run away. (Of course, this means he'll end up in the grinder.)

The miner, however, went down to the bottom of the trap, then turned around and zerg rushed the demon! He's trying to take him down with his mining pick, though he's only bruising. I don't expect him to do much more than dent him, but if he can hold him off until SOME ASSHOLE can pull the lever, his ass is getting a king's burial.

Huh. He managed to break his left hand before the demon pushed past.

That's great you made an artifact mechanism I'M CURRENTLY SHITTING MY PANTS OVER HERE

Crap. The son of a bitch got out of the trap. We'll have to take him down in man-to-man combat. This will not go well with civvies in the area. I'm ordering the entire military down there, though I don't expect much. FUCK.

Haha. The mace lord, since his skills are so high, kept parrying and dodging all the weapon traps. He did this until he collapsed from overexertion, and then got chopped up.

And so it begins. Speardwarf gets five shots off and misses them all, and the first attack from the demon shatters his knee apart just from one punch. Told you guys, demons suck.

Wow. He SCRATCHED him in the head and it shattered his skull, stabbing the brain for an insta-kill. It also hit him so hard that it propelled him backwards. We're calling this off.

Woah. Maybe, maybe not. Just as I was ordering retreat, a miner who showed up attacked the demon, and got two attacks off. One missed, but another broke his hand. So he's got TWO broken hands now. We may have a shot at this.

Ah crud. He can still kick. And he punted our poor miner. Kicked him in the gut, sent him flying, and he hit his head on the way down. Yeah, we're cutting this off.

Looks like we lucked out. The demon, while ridiculously powerful, is also ridiculously slow. Like, orders of magnitude slower. He can hang out down in the pit and be trapped until we figure out yet another way to get him into the tunnel of trapping. Craaaaap.

So. That could've gone better. Until we get the demon dealt with, the goblin grinder is out of commission. We can't get the stuff out, letting goblins in isn't gonna happen.... ugh. Fuck. My life. Now, theoretically, I can send a miner to link a path between the demon-trap and the goblin grinder, then use him as bait to get him in position, but I don't really wanna mess with all that right now. I may end up saying "fuck it" and dropping a cave-in on his ass. Maybe it kills him, maybe it doesn't.

Okay. My plan is to adapt the strategy I used to kill the hell-squirrel and modify it slightly. The ground directly above Ustru is off-limits because I've mined some of it out already--that's where the dodge-me is. HOWEVER. If I drop part of the mountain above that, it'll punch all the way through, and land on Ustru's head, killing him. So I need to do some preparations first, but bottom line is that Ustru should be dying here pretty soon.



This is what I was hoping for. He's destroyed both the grates, and as such, he can't leave that little area. Which happens to be exactly the size of the mountain I'm dropping on his head. Furthermore, it allows me to utilize the grinder again, and I can free an engraver who got trapped on the other side and I have NO idea how he even got over there in the first place. Additionally, the battery is primed, and all I have to do is finish up some quick finalization work down there and we're ready to see how we can screw up the magma retrieval.

I take that back, it's already pumping. So THAT system works as intended, good. Now we find out if I can properly guide the dwarves in the pushing of the minecart in the proper ways. Oh, and Ustru is almost ready to be executed so that's good.

*facepalm* I watched a chef run all the way down the stairs to push the minecart... only it didn't go anywhere because I had him "guide" the cart instead of pushing it. And since there's only the one stop (since there's a derail when it falls off the cliff, it won't let me have multiple stops on the same route), he just didn't take it anywhere, and ran back upstairs. Needless to say, that is being remedied and we will see an ACTUAL push in the near future.

Aww. I wasn't watching when it happened because I was watching the cave-in construction, but...




Technically, as long as it's in a minecart, magma (or water) isn't actually a liquid, but has the itemtype "boulder", same as rocks. This is exploited for use in a cannon that uses minecarts to fling "boulders" of water. Interestingly, this was discovered rather early in the existence of minecarts, even before impulse ramps. On the thread where I got my designs for magma minecart retrieval, the guy who posted the design said, regarding impulse ramps, that "It's possible to make water cannons about half the size and at least 75% faster, but that thing is already monstrous enough to stop a clown rush and make sieges into a comedy show." We will probably not be building one, but know that they exist and are ludicrously powerful.

We're also ready to execute the demon... I'm just waiting until the dwarves clear the area so we don't have MORE casualties.

Elves are here. They came from the right side at least. Let's unload just enough trash to get some booze and other assorted goodies.

Oh dear, we have kobolds. That's not okay.

The kobold ran off without incident and I spent a couple months watching stuff happen. We finally got to trade, and I traded for all of their booze, and all of their fruit to brew INTO booze. Oh, and their sand. I could've taken their golden salve barrels, but I didn't bring enough and I really don't want it. There's enough trash to go around, and there will always be more.

3 out of the four minecarts are full of magma, and the other one is queued up for a filling. One of them even made it up to the top of the map to sit in storage. Once I get another, I'm gonna dump them into a pit and build a smelter over it, and start melting the goblinite down into raw materials. Industry is now in high gear. Hell, after I let the farming go wild for a bit, we've stabilized and now have approximately enough booze to go around. I hope. It might just be the stuff I bought from the caravan.

And now, it is execution time.




It wasn't possible to get a good screenshot that showed both Ustru and his impending doom, even implied, but trust me when I say that he's directly under the mountain. Also, this gives a vague idea of how twisty fortresses can get. I mean, that was a pretty small cut-out.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?



I don't know HOW but he managed to survive that cave-in. You do NOT survive a cave-in. Ever. It's not supposed to be possible... I wonder if he was right underneath some stairs that collapsed? But... ARGH!

It's fine. We can seal that tunnel off, and just never speak of it again. Ustru is entombed alive. He can never escape. And we will not release him again.

Yeah. Here's the problem.





So what happened was the same principle that let me end the squirrel's life, also saved Ustru's. The staircase caused the disconnected chunk of dirt to catch, being held up. And Ustru just happened to be standing underneath. God. Dammit. I did NOT think of that. Oh well. At least, like I said, he's trapped. He can't get out. And if I ever want to kill him, I can just drop the chunk of dirt down from above the staircase.

Alright. It's the 9th of Hemanite (4th month, Early summer, year 108) and I'm gonna call it here. Just gotta wait for the minecarts to be hauled up the stairs, and then we can start smelting. Until then, I think my next project, after I seal up any breaches we have, is going to be digging out and designating an official barracks, with training facilities, military provisions, the works. I told myself I wanted to do that a while ago, and then all of the things started happening and I had bigger fish to fry. Now that I'm literally waiting around for stuff to get done, I can start on that too. Until then, peace out y'all!

Everything is going according to plan.

...My plan, anyway. All of yours are falling apart.

Okey doke. My PLANS are for this to be a calm, casual, building stuff and interior decorating kind of update. Of course, nothing ever goes your way when dwarf fortress is involved. My plans are to finish hauling the magma minecarts upstairs (I've altered the settings to allow this to happen more quickly now) and to carve out and furnish a barracks for the military, complete with dining and sleeping quarters, dwarf-only access to the front lines, and training facilities for both melee fighters and archers. I'm also making sure that the problem we had with that master lasher never happens again. While I can't dig an insta-death tunnel because the grinder is in between the required minimum death for guaranteed lethality and the point of potential drop, I'm sure a 4 or 5 z-level drop will cripple any dodging gobbos to the point where we can just send the miners down to finish things off. Hell, I could just put cage traps down there--since they'll be KO'd on impact, it'll work on trapimmune creatures (like demons and titans) that happen to be in the area. We can then throw them into the actual pit of death, or just pincushion them in front of the diplomats as a show of dominance. (Sadly, this does not yet influence persuasion or haggling. YET.)

I was also reminded that, due to a bug in the current version, elves do not send diplomats, and as a result, will never go to war with you. (I THINK.) So this means we're going to butcher and rob the caravans yearly, in the pursuit of commerce.

Hey, if they weren't such pansies, I'd be willing to trade. As it is, though, they're going to feed my lust for metal. With the magma coming to the forges, I no longer need fuel. As such, I can take advantage of a powerful function of the smelters. Any metal item can be designated for melting, and when the "Melt a metal object" job is queued up in a smelter, the dwarf who takes the job will go find the nearest object designated for melting, and throw it into the smelter to return it to raw material. A percentage of the metal used to make the item will be returned in the form of bars, rounded to the nearest tenth. Leftover fractions are tracked on a per-workshop basis, and you will be rewarded with a whole bar once it is accumulated at that workshop. Deconstructing a smelter will deny you any fractional bars you may otherwise have been saving up for.

Needless to say, my plan is now to melt down all the metal garbage from the sieges and make sweet things out of them. Additionally, I will trade all the leftovers to the humans and dwarves, as well as anything I rob from the elves, in exchange for literally anything made of metal, no matter the cost. Trap components, metal crafts, oversized armor that we can't wear, minecarts, arrows, you name it, it all goes in the smelter. Furthermore, as you should be expecting from this game, the returns on melting can be... erratic. Since any item, no matter how small, returns at least 0.1 bars, if one were to separate stacks of arrows/bolts into their constituent parts, either by firing and retrieving or via manipulation of the trade interface, more metal can be returned than was used to create the stack of arrows, allowing one to farm metal. Furthermore, there are a handful of items that simply return more metal than was used to forge them.

Now, since I in no way actually need that much metal, I will not be doing any farming, but it definitely suits me to turn all the garbage I have into raw materials I can use, and then train up our armorsmiths that way. Better equipment is never a bad thing to have, and the bone and leather armor our dwarves are wearing is getting a little long in the tooth.

Our baroness forbids us from exporting bucklers, and our mayor forbids us from exporting shields. Mission accomplished, you two.

Well that's freakin' fantastic.



The odds of that happening? Not very high. Ugh. Yeah, this animal is getting put down now.

Oh. Wait. I just re-read that.... Lol. So I thought the wolverine killed the stonecrafter. Turns out, it's the other way around. When the wolverine bit him in the leg, he punched him in the head, killing him instantly. Good on you, buddy! We drink to you tonight, and henceforth, you shall be known as Granite Fist.

OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK



That used to be the hospital. I decided to top off the cistern. That was a mistake, apparently. Ugh. Well, this is why I installed a backup shutoff. Never thought I'd have to use it, but obviously I have to fuck SOMETHING up every single update. Ugh. That was fantastic. I did not think that would happen. Now we know. I need to build something into the system to keep it from flooding. I THINK what happened is the cistern overflowed, and since wells have to have open space, there was enough pressure for the water to flow upwards. I will be installing diagonals and U-bends to divert pressure so that it doesn't happen again, but I fear I may simply have to watch that thing like a hawk. Fortunately, I designed it so it has to be refilled VERY rarely, and I was just topping it off for my benefit. It is unnecessary, and we have now discovered a safety flaw with it that needs addressing. So we shall.

Freaking hospital is taking its sweet time to drain out.... ugh. Human caravan showed up, and we were just sending the elves on their way when I started up. Ah well. Time to dump garbage and put idlers to work!

Haha. A kobold thought it was a good time to try some thievery. He got pincushioned by a couple of our archers who were just hauling stuff, and then the SEVEN human guards just dogpiled on him. He didn't stand a chance.



Typical day in Dwarf Fortress, really. Fortress is flooding and this dumbass is too inspired by his art to go to sleep like he was planning. Herp derp.

Wow. We've long finished trading, and I'm partway done with the barracks (I had to interrupt the miners because they INSISTED on doing the whole barracks, which is huge, before they'd channel the tile I need them to channel out for magma storage and smelter operations), and the asshole just decided he was done gathering stuff. He took two rocks, a rough gem, silk cloth (asshole, we have limited quantities of that stuff), two metal bars, two units of leather, and some wood logs. And it's a craftsdwarf workshop, so it's probably gonna end up being a useless craft. Ugh. And that's if he doesn't die from tiredness first! Seriously, he's been flashing with the tired arrow since the mood started.

YUP. HE MADE A FUCKING HARP. IT DOES ME NO GOOD AND HE JUST WENT LEGENDARY IN A USELESS SKILL. TYPICAL DWARF FORTRESS, REALLY.

Well. It is now the 5th of Sandstone, 108 (8th month, mid-autumn) and today shall forever be known as a national holiday.



Feast your eyes, ladies and gentlemen. I will now order every crappy metal object in this fortress to be sacrificed to Armok, and he will bless us with raw materials with which to forge weapons of war.

Okay I got fed up with how long the hospital was taking to drain, so I went and relocated a screw pump to pump water over the walls into a hollowed-out and sealed up metal vein. This is getting a little bit silly.

We just got the last migrant wave we'll get for a long time. That's because we've got 207 dwarves, which is more than 200. Once the dwarven caravan comes to update the mountainhomes on our situation, we won't be getting any more migrants. Which is nice, because it means we won't have any more idiots trudging through the filth.

Except the elves, of course. Hurr hurr hurr.

And dwarves are finally here. Excellent. Also, we've solved a mystery.



Doren Wheelsteel is the dwarf who had two images engraved on a possession artifact and who I couldn't figure out who he was. He is/was our general. So there you go. Also, apparently there is a dragon simply named Sad. Uh... Okay then.

So I'm hauling more than 1500 items to the depot. This... is going to take a while. Oh boy. Well, while that's happening, let's go see what else we can do.

Wow. For a few seconds while unpaused, we were literally getting 3 FPS. Back up to 20 now, but... jesus hell.

Haha. We got the notice that the traders were about to pack up and not even close to all the goods were at the depot. I guess we'll have extras for next caravan. Works for me. In fact, I think I might just call it here. Tune in next week for a less wet episode of Dwarf Fortress: Cursenegated!

Okey doke. Today's order of business is going to be to do the things we didn't get done yesterday. Namely, the equipping of many dwarves, the furnishing of a barracks, and if we get all that done, I might go take the fight to the foul creatures, instead of waiting for them to come to us. Hey, we've got more than enough dwarves, I really don't care if I lose a few in battle now. And so it's time to go have us a battle, once they're properly trained up. My goal is going to be to seal off the caverns so that I can farm them to my hearts content, both for the vegetation and to capture some of the uglies that are worth capturing. In particular, I'd love a giant cave spider, so that I can set up a silk farm and give zero shits if someone demands it in a mood. Plus, GCS silk is crazy expensive, a result of the limited supply. It's tough to get without anyone getting murdered, after all!

They're also great fun to use in Death Arenas. Lock the spider in a pit, add one goblin, watch him get massacred. Repeat until number of goblins = zero. Yeah, I think once I get everything squared away, I'm gonna load up and go cavern hunting. The goal is gonna be to send a bunch of clay down there, probably via minecart, then have some masons run down and use the clay to strategically build walls and seal off parts of the caves, under guard from the military. Then we slowly take the walls down and expand our reach until we've taken over the whole cave, rinse, and repeat with the next layer. Once we've done that, I can go send the miners down to dig ALL of the goddamn metal that we're sitting on, and we can have a goddamn smelting party.

Well, first highlight already. Most of the furniture is installed in the barracks, just waiting on a set of walls to go up so that the dining quarters don't overlap the sleeping area (whoops~), and the goddamn CAPTAIN of the miners decided he was gonna go make an artifact. Let's see what the hell he makes, considering he's a legendary miner already....

Okay, so he took over a mason's shop... one of the non-magma stockpiled ones, so he should use up useless claystone and the ilk. I'm fine with that.

Hm. Well, he took a little of everything... claystone, rough rock crystals (You asshole, I was saving those), cut smoky quartz, pig bone, iron bars, cave spider silk cloth, dog leather, and some nether-cap. Of course. It HAD to be the useful stuff. Couldn't take ANY other kinda wood, you jerk. Bah. Let's see what happens at least.

Okay, he made a quern. This is a strange item required to construct a specific workshop, also called a quern. The workshop is functionally equivalent to a millstone, except the millstone is larger, requires power instead of dwarven labor, and is faster. They're both useless, however, as you never need to mill plants for any reason, and you shouldn't, because there are enough bugs with the job to drive you batty. For challenge forts, I guess? Ah well. It IS still useful, though, as it is technically furniture, and can be used as artifact bait.

It appears to have not actually affected his (nonexistant) masonry skill, though. Which is interesting... According to Dwarf Therapist, he used his mining skill for the labor instead. This is intriguing, as it allows miners to become instantly legendary, AND create a useful item out of it, as long as you're willing to train them up and leave them idle until they turn moody.

Also of note. Dwarves who complete a non-possession mood always gain exactly 20,000 experience points. This is technically enough to jump them to legendary +1, because the game uses a non-linear experience curve. However, for our already legendary miner... The game will only TELL you that a dwarf is Legendary +5 in a skill (meaning his raw EXP level is at 20). However, Dwarf Therapist reveals that the curve keeps on going. GobboMiner 2-1 is now a legendary +11 miner. I don't think I need to say much, other than JESUS CHRIST HE IS NOW A FUCKING BEAST. Remember that the same skill is used to determine mining speed and combat prowess with a mining pick, already a potent weapon before you put it in the hands of a level 26 miner. I mean, this guy was kicking ass and taking names before I had good equipment AND when he was only level 15 or so. (Although, "only" level 15 is kind of misleading in this context, but still.) On this day, I dub him the Hand of Shiva, as he truly is the destroyer of worlds. And when he gets a masterwork steel pick and full steel armor, he'll only be deadlier.

Ahh. I love the sounds and sights of dwarves training.

Oh my. I just got a message that some nobody who used to be a purple @ is tantruming. That's a ticking time bomb waiting to happen. I'm nipping this potential tantrum spiral in the bud right now. I'm sacrificing him to Armok.

I mentioned mood a few times in the past. Well, if a dwarf takes too many hits to his mood (like wandering around naked because I ordered all the garbage clothing to get dumped and didn't have enough goblinite to go around), he will eventually throw tantrums, and if that continues, he'll go capital-I insane. This will result in him dying. If a loved one, friend, or whatever, sees someone die, or finds their corpse, or hears about it from someone else, they take a massive hit to their mood--which can lead to more tantrums, exploding exponentially in a crippling wave of insanity that causes the downfall of the fortress. HOWEVER. If you catch potential spiral starters early, and, say, drop them into the magma sea, it solves the problem before it starts. And when it comes to tantrum spirals, prevention is the ONLY cure.

Also I wanted to try out a suicide pump because it's fucking hilarious. So, time to go build a few. I'm thinking I may make a small magma trench for such executions, once I'm done with setting up all the forges I'll ever need. Until then, I'll just drop them into the sea itself. This has the advantage of incinerating them so that nobody will ever know they died. Just that they disappeared, and are partying with Elvis on the moon.

Ooh. I could use my lignite blocks for the suicide pump, then forge the other components out of iron so they don't melt. I was just gonna use wood, but then I'd have to build the components again each time I executed someone and that's no fun.

You know, it's been a while since I've promoted new miners. Welcome to the military, GobboMiners 2-4, 2-6, and 2-7. One of the migrants had two ranks in mining, so he was assigned to full-time duty... I should go find a couple more peasants to promote to miners, since I've got lots of mining that needs happenning. I was excavating an area to use as the execution quarters, for dwarves that need to be culled, and wouldn't you know it, I found ALL the goddamn metal. So I had everyone work on that, then I'll seal it up after we get it mined out so that I don't have to build around it. But that means we need more than 3 miners, none of which are legends. So I just promoted 4 useless peasants to unskilled miners and will be giving them on-the-job training. I don't know how many picks I have, but I GUARANTEE I have enough, considering how we use them as weapons too. Any that I've deemed of too low quality to give to the elites, are used for civilian labor.

While I was in the military screen, I also filled out a hole in the spearman ranks. Someone appears to have died and not been replaced. Well, that's getting dealt with. Welcome to the military, Useless Peasant #492.

Haha. I never would've noticed if I hadn't been extremely lucky and looking for another job cancel notice, but one of my sacrifices to Armok went stark raving mad, before I could get him sacrificed properly. And the notice was buried under a flood of plump helmet spam. See, when a dwarf plants a seed, he doesn't just grab that seed. He grabs the entire barrel of seeds. If all the seeds are in that barrel, no other dwarf can use any of those seeds as long as he's hauling them around. And this causes you to get FLOODED with messages about them cancelling the job. The only real workaround is very fiddly stockpile management that I can't be arsed to do.

Oh my god the emotional situation is worse than I thought. We're at the 25th of Opal (11th Month, Mid-Winter) and 7 dwarves are Miserable (Zero mood), 4 are Very Unhappy (Mood less than 20) and 5 are Unhappy (50 or less). I'm hoping to get this situation under control asap, because I don't want to have to sacrifice all these guys to Armok. That would be an outright tantrum spiral and probably game over.

Wow. Somehow, when dumping magma, the Lord of the Forge got mauled by a minecart and broke one of his legs. Shit. I hope that gets fixed up properly. At least the hospital ISN'T FUCKING FLOODED ANYMORE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THAT.

Ugh, another asshole went Insane. I know I mentioned we had too many dwarves, but come on, I wanted their deaths to actually MEAN something. This is just stupid.

Freaking Mason is tantrumming, running around and punching people at random. He's heading up to the beds now... I'm worried, because when someone is asleep/unconscious, attacks ALWAYS target the head. And skulls in DF are made of paper.

Oh thank god he calmed down before getting to the mayor's room. I thought he was gonna punch his skull in.

Well shit. I screwed up the channeling, and one of the miners is taking a lava bath. At least it was one of the new recruits, so he was a useless peasant before, but... ouch. He outright disintegrated, there was nothing left. No corpse, no clothes. Even the pick is gone.

Oh hell. We have a berserker.



Cool, and there's a second insane (non-berserk) dwarf chilling in the dining hall, too. Jesus christmas. We got ourselves a tantrum spiral, ladies and gentlemen. Mother. Fucker.

Okay. Time for a desperation move. We're unforbidding all the goblinite. People can wear that shit until I get a good stockpile of clothes built up. Rotting clothes are better than no clothes, and not having clothes is what's killing everyone's mood.

The berserker heads straight for a dog and punches the christmas out of it. Fortunately, an axeman was standing right next to her when she berserked, and a couple archers.

Ow. Dog's dead.



Haha! After a couple misses, the axeman struck the berserking trader in the head, shattering her spine. If nothing else, she'll suffocate. Though I do want her put down before anything else happens.

Ooh, yeah. She dead, gaiz. The axeman proceeded to lop her arm off, and she passed out, eating a bolt to the leg and an axe to the brain. We're safe again. For now. But we're still on emergency mode. I have to engrave two slabs now, and deal with the fallout still. Not to mention every naked dwarf is a potential casualty.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME RIGHT NOW?




So. Not sure how, but somebody missed when they were unloading the magma into the site of another smelter. This caused my LEGENDARY PLUS SEVENTEEN BONECARVER TO FUCKING BURN TO DEATH. And of course, the only notification at all you get, is that someone died. Hell, if I didn't notice the exclamation marks around the corpse, and the smoke, I wouldn't know it was fire that did it--DF simulates fire damage by burning fat and making you bleed that way, which IS usually fatal, but I remember there used to be ways to make fireproof dwarves and I think it's still possible.

WHAT? REALLY? NOW OF ALL TIMES?



And that's a legendary weaver getting his arm cut open by that thief. ARGHHHHH. OKAY, NOW WE SHUT THE FORT DOWN. GET SOMEONE UP HERE TO KILL THIS ASSHOLE, TOO. I AM VERY UPSET NOW.

Haha. I tried to slam the gate on the goblin, and he was JUST fast enough to avoid getting crushed. HOWEVER. He did get tossed through the air, and broke his left hand, making him pass out occasionally. I'm sending the miners up to take him down, but then we're locking up again.

OH ARE YOU KIDDING. WEAPONSMITH PRIME IS TANTRUMMING NOW. THAT ISN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!

Ugh. I've decided not to sacrifice the previously marked dwarves, now that we're already losing them naturally. I think it's best to just see how this plays out, now that I've got guys on clothing duty, AND we've sealed the fort off, AND I've unforbidden the garbage so people can go put stuff on until better stuff is available. Jesus hell, I did not expect that to happen. Of all things. God. That was just awful. I think I'm gonna call it here, on the new year, 1st of Granite, 109.

Oh, and someone be sure to remind me that another asshole trader went berserk just before I was about to save. AAAAAAAAAAGH. FUCK MY LIIIIIIIIIIIFE.

So how much of that could have been avoided by just letting the dwarves wear their nasty old clothing until you had something new for them?

If I had to guess? All of it. Except for the Burning of the Bonecarver, that was probably gonna happen either way.

When we last left off, Sakzul Uzolvod was wrestling with a goose.

Goddammit.

(There was supposed to be a fancy title-screen ASCII art here, but TT ate it. Sad face.)

So there are two plans today. The first of which involves reigning in the chaos and putting an end to the tantrum spiral. I've reclaimed all the clothing I'd tossed, and will refrain from mass dumps in the future until we have outfits for everybody, and then a couple extras.

The second plan involves taking over the caverns. I don't expect to make headway on the actual conquering, given the current riots that are going on, but I can at least get some of the more sane workers to start on the preparations. I'm going to need an assload of clay, and the workers are going to need to stay down in the caverns for a long time. So for this purpose, I'm going to be constructing a dump chute, complete with safeguards against dwarves standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting hit in the head with a boulder of clay that just fell 40 z-levels. I'm also going to be reinstituting the Gulags, where we have several kilns set up for the sole purpose of mining clay. This will be used as raw building material down in the caverns, to seal it off from ungainly beasts. Of course, I'm not a total killjoy, and will be building a path that allows guys to spawn, and to enter the dwarf zone. But only on MY terms. We're doing this my way, no highway option.

However. Before we can make ANY progress towards my imperialistic desires, we have to restore order on the home front. And there's only one cure for a berserking dwarf: acute steel poisoning.

Thankfully, there was a miner nearby, and the berserker just kept choking the goose to death. It'll die, but the miner took a hand and a leg off Sakzul with two attacks, ripped apart her stomach with the third, took off her other hand with the fourth, and her other leg with the fifth. Needless to say, she did not survive. It looks like the mood situation is mostly under control now that we've got clothes--the only people at dangerously low moods are the Lord of the Forge (who should be chilling out in the hospital right now) and the Mayor (who I could give less of a crap about with his damn toy hammers and his electrum and rrrrgh. We have enough traders, we can replace him.)

By the 10th of Granite (1st month, early spring), we've seen the Lord of the Forge climb out of the lowest mood category (zero/negative, though I don't think the game actually cares about negative mood scores) and most of the unhappy dwarves return to at least acceptance of their current situation. A lesson has been learned, and it looks like we won't have to deal with TOO much cascading fallout from this latest error of mine, letting me focus on the excavations underground. I've got two projects going simultaneously: the living quarters for the masons who will be performing the necessary civilian labors to seal off the caverns, and the long hole that will serve to supply them with food, drink, and raw materials. Meanwhile, the smelter continues to run hot as every unnecessary metal craft is melted down for scrap metal, and the tailors continue churning out masterwork clothing to replace the tattered rags I intend to dispose of later, when it is SAFE to do so.

Haha, fuck me. As soon as I unpaused after writing that, I got a message saying we were out of plant cloth. Well, we're not. I just have a stockpile set up that has some issues. There's a bug in the game that prevents a player from having stockpiles only accept certain kinds of cloth or thread. It's all or nothing. Well, if you have your workshops set up to only take from a small stockpile that itself is fed from a larger pile, the workshops will ONLY draw from that pile. And if it fills up with cloth you have forbidden the dwarves from using... they won't go get the proper material. So I have to fix THAT. Ugh.

Of course, looking at the stocks, we also have like, not very much plant cloth. So I need to start processing more plant thread.

Similarly, if you have a job that requires two different materials, and you have a stockpile containing one of those materials linked to the workshop, but no pile that contains the other that is also linked, the job will never actually complete because the dwarf can't find the other material. This is why I haven't been able to get any of my buckets properly filled with lye. I'm solving THAT problem right now.

At least I think that's the problem. It might just be the bug where sometimes buckets don't dry out properly, but I don't think so. Have I mentioned this game needs a couple decades more work before it's really polished? Because it totally does.

Nothing too interesting has happened up until now--the 16th of Felsite (3rd month, late spring.) Elves are here (and so I will be murdering and robbing them), and we're still working on getting the cave base operational. The drop chute is channeled and we're handling the mechanical portions now, and I'm working on some mudproofing that has to happen before I can designate stockpiles. We had a possession create a mostly-useless artifact dress (won't wear out like other clothes), but thankfully, things have been nice and easy for now. Of course, once my preparations are complete, I plan on doing some Very Stupid Things, so we'll see how long that lasts.



You know, this actually marks a milestone for me. Normally, I don't go out of my way to kill the elves. Admittedly, this has a lot to do with the fact that my fortresses usually fall to boredom before I'm in a position to slaughter elves. However, the fact that this fortress has a reason to continue, combined with the fact that I was reminded that there's literally no consequence to killing the elves (as their diplomacy is borked and they can't fight back), and I have no reason to trade with them (as they offer shitty goods I don't need), it's actually in my best interest to butcher them and trade their goods to the humans and dwarves in exchange for metal I can smelt. The fact that I'm still salty over the fact that they went and got themselves killed by kobolds as a result of being stupid and trudging through the toxic sludge certainly helps fuel my righteous dwarven fury.

I sent the axemen and spearmen to do combat because I want them to get more EXP, as they're the ones most in need of it. The archers have been training nonstop, and the miners are already gods of war, so that just leaves them. As you can see, though, no amount of combat deficiency really hinders the dwarf's natural talent in killing elves.

Haha. Only one axeman made it up to the main merchant congregation, and there's six pages of him slaughtering dudes. Only one creature launched an attack on him, one of the pack animals. And he missed, ran into the wall, and fell over. This is hilarious to watch, though sadly, combat in DF isn't very screenshot friendly. With all the different items and creatures in the same space, overlapping, you don't get a good picture of what's going on from screenshots usually, and when the combat logs are this one-sided, there's not a lot of point in detailing just how many times Urist McAxedwarf lops off Prissy McElvenshit's limbs.

Yeah. One of the spearmen made it on the scene in time to get a couple stabs in, but it was the one axeman who killed everyone else. He shall henceforth be known as Elvenbane.

I think this is a good place to call it, actually. It's getting late IRL, and we're still just finishing up the last few touches before I'm ready to commit dwarves to the caves. Next time, though. Next time, will be a great day for dwarven imperialism.

All hail Impericus Dwarfus!

(Now just you wait for all the Latin purists to show up to correct my horrible abuse of that language )

The fortress does not fall today!

Hurrah!

*sigh*

It'll probably be a couple more days until the next update. I'd been playing for a few hours, mostly just running around and doing final preparations with the game paused, and I dropped the laptop, and it came unplugged AND the battery fell out, losing all the update progress. I'd played maybe two days in-game, so it's not a huge loss, but it damaged my morale rather severely. Sorry about that guys.

Ouch. At least the laptop still works and you're unharmed. As far as accidents go this could have been worse.

I know losing progress like this can be hugely frustrating but you shouldn't let it get to you. I rather wait a little to read something I enjoy than see the author lose interest because of update frustration.

Why haven't I been reading this LP before now? I gotta catch up on this thing!

Alright. We're gonna try this again. Hopefully with less time-space shenanigans related to dropping my laptop. On the "plus" side, it's no longer recharging consistently (read: I got it to recharge ONCE after plugging it in literally hundreds of times), so it won't be moving around, reducing the odds of droppage to near zero. Unfortunately, I still have to do all the maintenance stuff that takes an hour of my life that you guys won't ever see.

The game plan consists of waiting for the last few jobs to complete, and then we have lots of zero-time jobs to get done. Last time, I drafted 25 worthless peasants into the Imperialist Army, painted a burrow for them to work in, assigned them all to it (forbidding them from going elsewhere), then painted a second burrow for the army to guard. I'd gotten about that far in the hour or so I was playing before The Event That Shall Not Be Named occurred, so at least there won't be much that I just gloss over as a result of frustration at having to play and write about it a second time. Of course, there's still not much I can write about meticulously scanning the list of 200 dwarves, deciding which ones are useless, and assigning them to masonry duty in the tunnels.

Hmmm. This is an interesting situation I've found myself in.

I might just be terrible at reading, but I'm fairly certain that one of the Imperialists isn't having her nickname properly displayed, since I can't find IMPERIALIST 07 in the list of dudebros to assign to the workzone burrow. Dwarf Therapist confirms that the nickname was properly applied... Therapist ALSO lists her in her own migration wave: summer of 109. It is currently the 14th of Hemanite, 109. Early Summer. I DON'T recall there being a migration wave in the past 14 days. I'm getting concerned, as the only other thing I could think of is that either I managed to pick, by sheer coincidence, the mysterious Phantom Dwarf that shows up in Therapist but not in-game, or that I named a migrant plug by mistake. No migrant plug was found... so it's either the Phantom Dwarf or a Vampire.

Dwarf Fortress has vampires. Vampires do not age, breathe, drink, eat, or sleep, can disguise themselves as ordinary dwarves (even going so far as to evade detection by nicknaming, at least usually), and will occasionally murder another dwarf by sucking their blood. They have various esoteric uses (ranging from rendering a fortress immortal to all but ghostly assassins, to a specialized undead execution squad, to a dedicated lever-puller or bookkeeper), but if not properly identified and segregated, they will rip through your important dwarves faster than you can say "tantrum spiral."

Well. We'll have to see how this trainwreck develops in the future, because I can't find this asshole and if it turns out to be the Phantom Dwarf, oh well, and if it somebody gets vamp-ified, I'll just have to go over everyone with a fine-tooth comb. We have WORK to do now, though. Glorious work in the name of Manifest Destiny!

ugh. And already someone ended up beaten to death by the drop-chute. I will be fixing this problem immediately.

Make that TWO deaths. Yeah. I'm not dumping anything more until I fix the problem. I think the issue is dwarves going up and down the stairs, which are adjacent to the landing tile, and if too many dwarves try to use it at the same time, one of them will stand in the death zone and become dead. I can fix it by widening the stairs to go around the chute, which I will be doing immediately. Ugh.

And there we go. It should no longer be physically possible for dwarves to beat other dwarves to death by dropping stone pots filled with food on their heads en masse. (Though now I'm seriously tempted to start a garbage pile and then murderize the Clowns with it and montage it up to "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley. Maybe later.) I just need to fiddle with levers a bit and reassign the Imperialists to the burrows and we should be good to go.

Oh man, another one of those updates spread out over several play-sessions. And hot damn, my head is spinning so hard I'll be impressed if I actually post this write-up instead of accidentally uploading my terrible hentai fanfiction waityouguysarentsupposedtoknowaboutthat UHHHH I MEAN, OH SHIT DWARVES ARE DYING. AND STUFF.

no they aren't. Not yet at least. Seriously though, between my state of mind and state of body, the most exciting things that have happened in the past hour are the engraving of a headstone for one of the dead guys (second one is in the queue) and remembering to set the trainee miners to also live in the imperial base. Then I remembered, it's fucking Dwarf Fortress and I should really stop giving so much of a shit. I'm aware I should probably be playing this safer and more meticulously, setting up a healthy stockpile of food before I start the work, but I really don't care enough, and if I cock things up it'll be funnier anyways. So now we start the process of sealing the cave.

The tricky part is that you can't build walls within five tiles of the edge of the map. (That, and the fact that the ceilings in the caverns are stupidly high, so I gotta build up as well as out to keep flying things at bay.) As the wiki is quick to point out, though, "[that] rule has more loopholes than the U.S. tax code," and there are plenty of ways I can keep the ugly things in Uglything Country. Problems for the future, though. Mo money mo problems, as they say.



Well, it's officially YOLO O'clock. No turning back now. So the first thing that has to happen is I have to have a dwarf, any dwarf, run all over the map so that it actually reveals everything, so I can see the terrain and know what I have to work with. That'll be the first order of business. The second order of business is to go get some ass cream, because my butt is so fucking clenched over here as I sit around anticipating giant cave spiders to roll on up and eat everyone. I mean, yeah, I have the military down here, but, we all know how that'll end.

Ah. As long as I religiously check the units list, it'll let me know if there's anything aside from ravens on the map, so I shouldn't be ambushed and end up with 80 dead guys for no good reason.

Oh boy. That didn't take long.



A "downward passage" is a tunnel that connects one distinct cavern layer with another. The different layers are separated not only by depth, but by biology, and sometimes geology. The trouble is that it's hard to figure just where everything is, especially in the caverns where everything is 3-D, but you can only view one slice at a time. Time to load up Stonesense I suppose.



Some quick poking around in Stonesense has lead me to this area. There's a labyrinth-esque section up to the northwest that goes on for a ways, and a few z-levels in both directions, but the area of interest is to the south. That hole goes down a couple z-levels, but it goes upwards as far as I can see, and so I'm gonna have a miner dig a staircase up the middle of that column in the northeast of the screen, to get a better vantage point.



Meanwhile, over here, there's a hugeass pit that serves no purpose other than letting awful flying things up. It goes down for MANY z-levels and I don't think I can do much exploring, so I'm paving over it just to be safe. And give the imperialists something to do productively. Functionally, all it does though is block line-of-sight and force flying creatures to use the ground path; there's a tiny path that leads down the edge of a cliff that is passable, but it doesn't lead anywhere interesting as far as I can see. Just down into the lake if you go down far enough.

I think this game is slowly curing my OCD. Currently, a bug in the game causes burrows to generate massive amounts of spam messages. Burrows work by defining an area of the map, and then restricting dwarves from all other areas. If the burrow contains a stockpile, and there exist items of an eligible type, a job will be generated to store the item in the stockpile--but when a dwarf in the burrow takes the job, it will immediately cancel it (and tell you about it) if the item is outside the burrow, because the dwarf cannot go there. This will then repeat endlessly and if you want to have the stockpile at all, there's no good way to turn it off. So I just have to ignore it as best I can, despite how much it irrationally stresses me out. Argh. This game, guys. This fuckin' game.

Just focus on the dwarves moving around. Just focus on watching the dwarves. Ignore the red text. It doesn't mean anything.

There's a way to turn job cancellation notices off, but it's extremely hit or miss, and it usually misses. You can disable notifications for "none, some, most, or all" job cancellations, but the jobs that cause spam are always considered high-enough priority by the game that you'd have to turn them all off if you wanted to turn off the spam, and that can be dangerous. Of course, if it's PISSING YOU OFF as much as it is me, you might do it anyways. Probably a mistake, but I give no fucks anymore.

*sigh* And of course, the real problems don't actually come with notices, anyways. LIKE THIS ASSHOLE.



This asshole built a floor above all the ramps, and now he can't get out. Dumbass. Stop being an asshole. Ugh. Someone come rescue him I guess. Le groan.

Oh my god. One of these assholes is ON BREAK and he's standing in just the right spot to keep the door from shutting. You know, the one I put up to keep the dwarves from getting FUCKING CLOBBERED. And she's been standing there for who knows how long! GOD DAMMIT AND ONE OF THE ARCHERS DIED AS A RESULT. MOTHER FUCKER. He got clobbered so hard he got dismembered. I am very upset now. aaaaagh

Sweetness. It is the 14th of Galena (6th month, late summer) and the humans are here. I'm also starting to make progress in one area... we're almost done sealing off one side of one z-level. This... this is going to be a project that goes on and on. And on top of that, the goddamn loggers are slacking like professional slackers. Arrrrrgh D:



It almost feels like it's been too long since we've had any combat.

Almost.




Almost.

Haha, I go to gloat and literally as soon as I unpaused, they found a second 'bold. This one was a bit more fleet of feet than the first one, though, and got a fair distance away before a pikeman caught her and stabbed the shit out of her. However... our cavern exploration has yielded a Giant Toad. I'm ordering it to be slain before we have another repeat of the Goddamn Batman incident.

Wow. Toadman already charged one of the Imperialist scouts. Fortunately, they dodged, and I've got the spearmen on the way to put this thing down. From now on, though, I think I will use the militia to reveal the map, in case I run into something worse than a toad. At least toads are really slow.

And the score is Dwarves 1, Toads 0. But now a pair of Troglodytes are on the map. And they usually come in groups larger than two. I'm sending the miners to deal with them, because while a competent military can put them down without breaking a sweat, letting them get their hands on civvies is like sticking your arm in a blender. And they happen to be near where I'm actively working.



Crud, I was afraid of this. We're in the far south of the map, and if I want to finish mapping out the west, I'll need to build a bridge or dig a tunnel over/under the lake. I do eventually want to seal the lake completely so that I can own it and harness its power for myself, but that's an even longer term project. And right now, my focus needs to be on those trogs.

Oh boy. So the trogs hadn't started moving, and so I sent the archers to actually make the first contact. Well, that caused them to start moving, and that spawned more onto the map. This could get messy, and so I'm ordering the archers to fall back (though I doubt they will) and the miners to move up closer. Nobody's gotten wounded on our side yet, and the two trogs that spawned at first have gotten bolted like crazy, but there are now four trogs onscreen, and I suspect there may be more yet.

Crud. The wounded trogs are swinging at the archers. One of them dodged backwards and fell down a slope, merely getting her hand scraped up, and then dodged a second swing, this time without self-inflicted damage. I'm sending two of the seven miners in to finish these guys off so that bad things don't happen. Archers aren't meant to fight in melee, obviously.

Haha. One of them got shot in the heart. (And the miners were too late.) Unfortunately, a third trog is coming down the slope for backup.





The closest miner is six z-levels down from the third shot, and seven or eight down from where the trogs are fighting. Granted, there's a transition every couple steps, but there's still quite a bit of distance and this might not go well for the archers. I wish there was a way to order dwarves to flee from battle, but sadly, no such tactic is known to Dwarfkind.

Well. One trog is down (not the one that got shot in the heart), but there's still a fresh one going to town on dwarves. No severe damage yet, though one took a punch to the lungs (should recover fine as long as no further damage is done), and the miner is still lagging behind.

Whew. That was close. Specifically ordering them to kill the fresh trog got them to redirect their fury, and he got shot in the ribs, passing out. The other one is passed out and, thanks to a broken heart, should be dead soon. There's still one more trog upstairs though, so I'm not calling this a victory yet.

Couple seconds of unpause caused the heartbroken trog to bleed out, and the other one to get shot in several vital areas, including the spinal cord. So, functionally, that one is dead too. Still hoping we don't get awful luck with the last trog, though. I'm ordering it dead before I bother bringing in the imperialists to seal this off.

Haha. Yeah, the miner showed up at last, lopped the trog's head off with one shot, and that was that. Still got the last fresh trog though. I sent just the miners, letting the archers go back and guard the homestead as well as just get a break.

Oh christmas there's more than one... oh christmas there's THREE. Fortunately, they're pinned between a tree and the miners, so we should have the advantage of being able to chop them up one at a time, even though one of them lost a bunch of teeth.

God dammit. One of them got a lucky shot, and GobboMiner 2-7 now has broken chunks of his skull lodged in his brain. RIP good sir. You served your nation well.

What the hell? FINE FUCKING TIME TO FIND OUT THAT TWO OF THE MINERS DON'T HAVE WEAPONS AND ONE OF THEM IS FIGHTING THREE TROGLODYTES BAREHANDED! PIECE OF SHIT! Alright, it's time to do this carefully now.

Oh god there are more trogs than I had anticipated.... like, we killed 4 so far and there are still six more on the map. The unarmed miner is still alive, but heavily wounded. That's it. This is no longer just a battle. I'm declaring war on these trogs. One of them even earned a name for killing the miner.

And there's another one, as the unarmed miner just got ganked. Shit. That's two legendary miners I just lost, one of which died because he ran out with no weapon. What a shitbutt. He has disgraced his ancestors. Here's hoping the rest of the military can avenge him!

Well here's fucking hoping indeed... because the first dwarf on the scene was the Hand of Shiva himself, the captain of the miner's squad. And he lives up to his name again... Both of them missed their first attacks, but the Hand of Shiva rushed the named trog, knocked it over, and shattered her spine with that deadly pick. Of course... since he TACKLED the trog, they ended up falling down two Z-levels. However, since the Hand of Shiva was wearing a pair of artifact bone greaves, he came out of it unharmed. The trog landed on a leg and bruised it. No death though. I've seen dwarves die from 2 Z-level falls before...

The stupid trog is trying to run away! Not on my watch, and not if the Hand of Shiva has anything to say about it! And, as a matter of fact, he does. He says, "I'm gonna take your left hand. No, I mean, I'm TAKING it, as in, I'm fucking chopping it off your arm and putting it in my mystical invisible hammerspace dwarven pockets." He then took the trog's entire right leg, as she continued to flee in futility, until she bled out. Fuck you, trogs. Fuck you.

Oh, that's what I needed. A fucking possession-artifact. At least it's a nameless peasant...

The other named trog opened the battle with getting stabbed in the leg by a spearman, breaking the bone, severing an artery and nerves. Hopefully it'll pass out soon and just get murderized. Haha, well he DID get stabbed again in the arm, breaking the bone again, and in the next frame another got shot in the spine. RIP fucking trogs. Also #getrekt.

Haha. No contest this time. The two trogs didn't even land a shot, and the Hand of Shiva came over to mess one of them up after the spears crippled it. I'm feeling lucky enough to send them after the two that are chilling on the spawn point. Probably a bad idea, but, fuck it.

WOW. FIRST ATTACK. TROG KICKS ARCHER IN HEAD. ARCHER DIES. At least the same trog ate a bolt in the spine right after, but jesus hell. Trogs are gone... three casualties, though.

After trading 50,000 dwarfbucks worth of garbage for booze, sand, and an assload of metal crap to melt down, I think I'm ready to call this one. See you all on the next installment of Dwarven Imperialism. Oh, and be sure to remind me about the giant olm that's squatting off to the east. It's way closer to the Imperial Base than I'm comfortable with, and I just sent a bunch of dwarves out to go do stuff, and various dwarves are still upset because loved ones/close friends died recently. I've also got three slabs queued up for the dead, and I need to remember to install them when they're done, or else we might get another Death By Ghost.

Those kobolds. Those crazy, wacky kobolds. They never learn, do they?



They just never learn.



Huh. An ambush squad. That's kind of terrible, considering I haven't finished sealing this place down yet. Um. Shit butts. At least it's just pikes and a swordsman, so I'm calling in anyone who's not on guard duty to put these suckers down. Here's hoping the legendary stonecrafter can run faster than goblins.



Spoilers: he did not.

Haha. Goblins chose poorly. They decided to rush the depot, and the humans brought a bunch of archers along. The swordsman took an arrow to the gut and to the lungs, disabling him. He's got plate mail, but blunt damage goes through armor and breaks bones pretty well, even if it takes a bit longer to kill sometimes. Of course, when your lungs have an arrow in them, it doesn't really matter too much.

And the swordsman takes an arrow to the brain. One down, five to go, and the dwarven milita hasn't even shown up yet.

Haha, with their apparent leader down for the count, they seem to be running away all. Sucks to be you, dickweeds! Final score: two dead, four escaped, 1 dwarven casualty.

Well that was unexpected. The artifact is done...



So it's a statue of one of the imperialists. BUT. It turns out that this guy is also a former outpost liaison. How intriguing... I think I'm going to have the statue placed down in the Imperial Base. It is, after all, a statue of an Imperialist.

Huh. First one of these.



So these are goblins who come with the intent of kidnapping Dwarven youths and brainwashing them into their army. They have the mysterious power to stuff dwarves into a sack, but other than that, they're just goblins and should be terminated with the same viciousness as all other greenskins. Fortunately, there's a bunch of humans still hanging out in the depot, so he gonna get rekt.

Oooooor he could run away like a chicken. Cue the benny hill music. And the humans catch him and get a stab off before he slips away again. However, they soon catch up again and stab him in the foot, disabling him. Dead goblin is dead.

SHIT ON A BRISCUIT.

A Giant Cave Swallow is flying around the area I'm planning to work, up where the trogs were. There's only one, but those things are fucking huge and they fly. One of the more dangerous things that can spawn in the first cavern layer.

UGH. FUCKING SLACKING GUARDS. It's been a month or so since I first mentioned the swallow, and I forgot about it altogether, until I got a notice that an imperialist bled to death. THE SWALLOW IS RAMPAGING THROUGH THE IMPERIAL BASE AND THE GUARDS ARE DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT. WHAT IS THIS SHIT? She's already killed one and is ripping a second apart.

Whew. We got a crossbow bolt to blast the swallow in the leg, making it fall over. This'll slow it enough that we should be able to take it down. Especially because the Hand of Shiva is the first one to get up in his grill!

Haha. I had to check to see if he even had a weapon, cause he just scratched the giant bird instead of mining it, but a scratch to the eye caused her to pass out. Get rekt, son!

I almost feel a little bit bad, because this is one of those updates where 90% of the gameplay is invisible to you guys. I've been hard at work in the underground, walling off various passages to create choke-points that allow me to control the land more effectively, paving over areas I've secured so that trees don't grow and block paths in the tight tunnels, and fiddling with stockpiles and the like to make things flow more smoothly. And none of that is anything I can even be arsed to write about, much less make interesting to read. The dwarven caravan just showed up, so there's a highlight, and it's time to haul an asston of crap down there. Probably crafts, cause I've built up a lot of that and don't have TOO much garbage, as far as I know. I did unload 50K worth of garbage on the last caravan, after all.

I take it back. We apparently have every sock ever made, so those will be liquidated instead. Jesus hell that was a lot of garbage to go through, I will be glad to see that stuff gone.

Huh. So apparently it's a bad idea to deconstruct a staircase while you're standing on it. Woodcutter's got some busted bones, he'll need to go to the hospital.

So I totally ate dinner in between now and the last time I wrote a sentence, but I also finished trading. Holy shit. 65K worth of trash and we didn't even get everything to the depot in time for trading. I've ordered all the metal stuff to get melted for raw material, and a bunch of clay to get dumped down the chute. In the meantime, some metalcrafter went fey and claimed a forge, so that's cool, I guess. He'll get EXP for this one, too.

Huzzah! The outpost liaison has informed us that we are no longer a barony. We have been elevated to a county, and our baroness is now the Countess of Mothramkez.

Hah! One of my cage traps nabbed a troll. Yeah, the north map exit is getting sealed asap now. Was already on the docket, but now it's a priority.



Oooooh boy. Well, I was going to wait until I was finished up with my current mini-project in the caverns (more imperialism), but then this guy showed up and interrupted things. So I think this is a good place to stop for now, because even if I don't have a lot to show for it, I've been playing for hours and hours. More than usual, even.

I guess I can show off what I've been doing before I sign it out, though.



This is one of the map edges I've completely sealed off. I don't care what your name is, you're not using this entrance. Find another route, or you can chill in the corner for all eternity. Those are your choices.



You can barely see it down there, but the bigass lake is down below this huge, gaping pit. So I've been slowly building up that wall you can see. It's ALMOST done.



More of a choke point than a map edge, this area just had a bunch of superfluous garbage I needed to fill in. I do need to roof over that hole, however, to finish sealing off the eastern edge of the map.

So next time, we get to play with an Ettin. Oh boy.

Two heads means two brains to excavate, that's all there is to it.

Okay. The first thing we do is shut the gates, because as much as I want to rumble with that Ettin, I do NOT want to do so right now.

And thus, with the shutting of the gates, Cenath Sculptbold the Umber Controller is forced to reevaluate his life decisions. I don't want him running off, though, so I suppose I could at least trap him in the--

NO! No. No. We're not going down that road. I'm fairly certain megabeasts don't flee the map like invaders, so we have nothing to lose by forcing him to sit and wait. The only reason we didn't have to deal with the roc is because it was a flying creature that flew through the bitter filth and passed out and fell and broke its spine because gravity is a bitch. Ettins don't fly, so if it DOES go swimming in the yellow snow, it'll just fall over and snooze instead of suffocating. This leaves me free to finish locking down the parts of the underground I was working on most recently.

This is honestly more a note for myself than anything else:



Those walls are designated to be built with gold bars. I'm not going to actually do that, but I want to remember that I'm going to be putting walls in exactly those spots, and don't want to reserve building materials I won't be using. Of note is that the cursor is actually purple, not red, to designate that I can't build as there's no available material. The message is misleading; the true problem is that the area is blocked by trees, and so there's not any way to get a dwarf to be in that tile anyways. I edited the cursor in post to be red, so that it stuck out like a sore thumb and I didn't gloss over it later.

Huh. So when we got upgraded to a county, the ex-baroness decided that she needed more furniture than she had. I'll get right on that, I guess. Also exporting scepters is no longer kosher. Good thing it won't be trading time for a while. It IS the 5th of Obsidian (12th month, late winter) after all.

Oh no, terrible things are happening to the ravens! Yeah, this happens any time a bird spawns on the map. It does so often. It's not worth noting, really. Any time I see the red C icon show up, though, I'll have a mini heart attack cause I'll think it might be the Etting getting into trouble.

Oh goodie. So this'll teach me to look away from the game without pausing it. I tab back in to see the message that indicates Goblin Christmas: "A vile force of darkness has arrived!"

And Cenath is still squatting near the southwest corner of the mountain, though she's closer to the east edge than the south by quite a wide margin. The goblins are up north, so they'll probably pass out in the gunk, and we might get to see Cenath fight some of them. I'm not sure. I'll be a little disappointed if it happens, because I wanted to take them on myself, but as stated previously, I'm not ready yet.

Ahah, they do fight each other! Just when I was wondering if Cenath was just gonna sit around, she took off like a bat out of hell... running to the southeast. I was confused at first, until I saw that there was a squad of trolls down there, no doubt looking for something to break. Well, all they found was some broken bones, cause Cenath just rushed one and took it to the mat. One of his buddies came to his aid, goring Cenath in the leg, but it barely broke the skin on the massive creature. What proceeded was an awful lot of stalemate, as Cenath kept trying to execute wrestling holds and failing (the AI is not that smart, thank goodness) while the trolls kept trying to punch the massive giantess to death and failing.

Oh boy. So, wrestling has the problem that you can grab people by their clothing. This can cause you to remove their clothing (somehow.) Creatures that wrestle will then start using this clothing as if it were a weapon, very ineffectually. This renders them much, much less deadly. I'd chalk this one up to the trolls, eventually, over many days of fighting.

Yeah. After some work underground I decided to check on Cenath out of curiosity. She dead. Granted, it took long enough for an entire regiment of goblins to come over and beat on her in addition to trolls, but she died without inflicting any casualties on their number. RIP Cenath. Cause of death: thinking she was badass enough to bludgeon someone to death with their own loincloth.

Ugh. 2nd of Granite, 110 (1st month, Early Spring) and we celebrate our 10-year anniversary at this hellhole with a Giant Olm showing up at a cave entrance I was unaware of, have done nothing to attempt to seal, and has direct and multi-tiered access to many of the areas I'm working (meaning there are tasty Dwarven snacks in range of his wrath.) Archers and the miners are being deployed to deal with this buttface.

Olms, by the way, are small, white, amphibious critters who kind of resemble two-legged salamanders. They're supposed to be blind, but hunting by scent/sound doesn't work in this version.



I'm not sure how this escaped my notice for so long, and I'm not sure exactly what transpired to cause me to think to check it. That bridge wasn't linked to anything, and would've allowed goblins to walk RIGHT past the grinder. Needless to say, this is not desired behavior. I discovered it as I was linking a cave-bridge to a cave-lever to keep cave-nasties out of my cave, and thought "Huh, I don't remember that bridge. Wonder what it's for?" Popped open notes, saw nothing. Popped open the building-items menu, and found it had no mechanisms--meaning nothing at all was linked to it. That's bad. Thankfully, it is being fixed. Also, and I'm not sure how, the magma retriever stopped working because the reactor ran out of water. That's not really supposed to happen, and is more of a problem because we have a really slow method of getting water down there. One of these days I'd like to just build a giantass tanker full of water down in the magma layer, but that's just a pipe dream for now. It will be refilled via bucket brigade and restarted. Fortunately, most of the recovery is actually done, but it bugs me to leave it unfinished.

We've got an archer and about half of the miners on the scene, and I think that should be enough to take a giant olm. I think. I'm probably wrong, but at least I didn't just rush with the first guy to show up. Now we hope and pray things don't go terribly.

Heh. Well, one of the miners charged him and actually missed, falling over onto the ground. The olm tried to bite him, but he was wearing goblinite, so it just bounced off harmlessly. Then it went for a followup, but the miner dodged and the olm ran face-first into a rock wall before getting a foot chopped off. And then another. Yeah, this is gonna be a massacre.

Yeah, the olm got beheaded before getting another attack. Get rekt, son.

Shit! A troll came in behind the olm and I had looked away to go check out other areas of the workzone. Fortunately, the Hand of Shiva intercepted it, and while he took a few attacks, they just bruised, and the troll lost an arm for its transgressions.

Ugh you're supposed to shoot him with the crossbow, not beat him with it! what are you doing you asshole!?

He got off a gore attack on the archer, but it didn't break the skin (luckily). He's lost both arms and a tusk, though--and then he bled out shortly after I unpaused. Two down and no casualties yet.

BALLS



One of those things just showed up. They're freaking HUGE, basically birds the size of elephants that chill out underground. Fortunately, the asshole is across the lake, so she shouldn't be able to bug us, but I'm still concerned.

WOW THERE ARE NOW NO LESS THAN THREE DRALTHA ON THE MAP AND THOSE ARE JUST THE ONES IN THE AREA I HAVE REVEALED AND CAN SEE. WE ARE NOT GOING ANYWHERE NEAR THAT PART OF THE MAP UNTIL THEY LEAVE. NO THANK YOU SIR.

Well shit. This asshole imperialist was deconstructing a staircase above him, and when he did, the log came down, hit him in the chest, broke his ribs, and jammed the rib through one of his lungs. God dammit. What a moron.

Okay. I've still got like, one wall that needs to go up, and I haven't finished exploring the southwest area past the lake (due to the fact that it's past the lake, and also freaking dralthas), but other than that, the first cave is secured. So I think it's time to mix things up by inviting the goblins in to have some fun. And by fun, I mean I'm going to give them the business.

As is tradition, we start by activating the troll lure, to take care of those nasty trolls. I hate when trolls wreck my beautiful goblin grinder.

Ughhhh. The stupid trolls are really taking their sweet time. It's almost like they know what grisly fate is awaiting them. I know this is untrue, but it sure feels that way!

Hah. On a hunch, I checked to see if there was actually still a path to the dwarves, and sure enough, there was a wall in the way, so the trolls couldn't sense their bait. I will be fixing that.

And there they go, taking off like bats out of hell!

Wow. Okay. So just as the trolls start falling for the lure, the siege breaks as the commanders give the order that it's taking too long and nobody's home. And right then, the elves show up. They gonna get murderized and I don't even have to do the killing! (Of course, they showed up in the filth, so I do kinda hope they at least come far enough down that it's worth it to bother retrieving their crap.)

They won't, though. They don't have wagons, so they won't be moving, as the way into the depot is sealed. Though I suppose I could use the airlock... Nah, too many dwarves hanging out up there drinking the booze.

Haha, it looks like they ran off without even harrassing the elves. Score, I guess, if I get to kill them myself.



*clap clap clap* Well, the siege is gone, but now this guy is here. Fortunately, not only can he not fly, but he's trapped across the lake. Good thing I spent all that time walling things off, eh?

Actually, I may capture this one, too, instead of slaying him. Why? He spits webs. Forgotten beast silk is usually expensive, I think (I've never ACTUALLY farmed it), and at the very least, having Sesta locked up somewhere would allow me to operate a silk farm without having to go find a cave spider. It is a little more difficult to capture him, but I shouldn't have too much difficulty. I can prepare a trap, carefully open a path between it and him, then seal him inside and then begin the process of caging him. And since he showed up underground, I don't have to worry about him running away or getting killed by a siege.

Oh yeah. They stood no chance. It took them a while before they even started running away, let alone throwing punches back. Of course, none of them got any damage in--I think ONE elf punched ONE miner, ONCE--and they were slaughtered, earning titles for several of the military. And with the elves dead, I think I'll sign it out here, and deal with Sesta next time. Sayonara!

After doing a bit of research, I have found that not only are forgotten beast webs given no value multiplier at all (which is really weird if you ask me), but they can't be trapped in the way I was planning. I'm sure I could pull it off through tedious micromanagement of cave-ins and obsidian casting, but the bottom line is that there is no way to get a web-spitting forgotten beast inside of a cage, since the cave-in dust won't knock them out, and as it spits webs, it is also immune to webs. So I'll probably just lock him in a box, and if I find a spider I'll execute the FB and trap the spider, but otherwise, it's not looking like we're going to have a silk farm. Which is disappointing.

wat



So we've experienced enough casualties that our population has dipped below 200, causing the Mountainhomes to send us more migrants. Uh. Okay, I guess. Bring them on! Also they spawned in the filth, which sucks.

Okay, so I've been getting a lot of messages about some dude named Stodir making masterpieces. Well, that wouldn't be any cause for notice, much less concern, if it werent' for the fact that I can't find this guy in the fortress. Anywhere. And I nicknamed the Phantom Dwarf, so it can't be him. (Also they have different last names, which you can't change.)

Oh that's fucking fantastic.



They won't survive, but I'm sending an archery squad up to go punish them. And the gobbo miners, just to be careful, as there are a total of five goblins. I'm also sending the military out to go mop up a wolverine running around and some dark gnomes, just because fuck gnomes.

Wow. The guy who got surrounded in that pic SOMEHOW managed to dodge out and outrun the gobbos.

Ouch, a trader just got piked in the face! Somehow, though, it didn't kill him, merely tearing the muscle and a tendon in the skull. It did stun him, though, allowing him to get piked in the foot. It's taking guys way too long to get down there and wreck face, though.

Yeah, he passed out and got piked in the skull. One dwarf down, and also a sheep and a pig. The Hand of Shiva is at least kind of getting close to a gobbo, though.

Ugh. He's still not up there yet, and the other trader passed out from the Bitter Filth, and got his brain bashed in. The good news, though, is that the goblins should be having that problem soon as well.

Yeah, the maceman leader passed out and the gobbo behind him is nauseated and in extreme pain. Gonna start cutting some fools down.

Ugh. The Hand of Shiva is having an off day... just could NOT cut through the goblin's hood. His pet tiger came up to mess up another goblin, and the archers are on the field now.

So the goblins are all mopped up... they killed at least three civvies, though. I need to seriously consider, if not the Oberdach, then walling off the map edges to force units to spawn at the south. Or at least cover the map edges and then dig tunnels that lead to the south without allowing continued exposure to filth.

To vent my anger a bit, I'm going to execute Udast.












You're next, fuckface.

Traders are here. Gonna unload all the elven garbage on them in exchange for meltable stuff, most likely. Also, I have discovered some important information. 'Activity Zones' can be designated on the very edge of the map. This has important rammifications involving security and obsidian casting. Though if I do any casting at the edge, it'll probably just be sealing the river--which I don't need to do, and shouldn't do. If I had a more reliable source of water, as well as gave enough shits to build a pump stack or a piston (probably a piston, as the hundred and fifty screw pumps I'd need to build would be terrible) then I might play around with map-edge casting, as well as obsidian casting in general, but right now I just don't care enough. I can easily just build a bridge across the lake and problem solved.

OH SHIT, SON!



I'm very glad I walled everything off. Because that is about seventeen kinds of FUCKING HELL NO. On the other hand, I do desperately desire to cage that sucker...

AAAAAAGH ANOTHER GOBLIN AMBUSH PIECES OF SHIT. I need to remind myself that I haven't sealed off the surface the way I have the caves. Of course, I COULD do that... Until then, I'll need to have a squad on the surface, minimum, if I'm doing any work out there.

Okay. Six out of the seven goblins, a mix of halbrediers and axemen (how the fuck a puny goblin can wield a greataxe is beyond me) went after the one trader that ran into them, and he's a lost cause but he's not important. The other one ran to the left, towards an axedwarf and a speardwarf.

Hah! The goblin kept dodging and slipping just out of attack range, even dodging the arrows from a human archer, but then he ENRAGED and did a 180 to run right into the dwarves. He then proceeded to eat a spear to the hand from the Survivor of the Lasher, and dropped his axe, followed by an arrow to the kidney that lodged.

Hah, he tried to punch the Survivor but got parried. Not dodged or blocked, but parried. I like this. This girl is a fighter.

I'm going to spare you all the axe puns and just say that the Axedwarf captain lopped off half of the goblin's arm with one strike.

JESUS HELL THE SURVIVOR JUST BIT THE GOBLIN IN THE EAR AND TORE IT OFF, MIKE TYSON STYLE. HOLY FUCK.

And the Survivor gets credit for the kill, spearing the gobbo in the skull. One down, six to go.

This is gonna be a little bit harrier. The Hand of Shiva is on his way to back these two up, but they've got all six of the other gobbos kinda clustered. Dodging went back and forth for a few times, but the first strike goes to the Survivor, who stabbed an axeman in the "guts" and made him vomit.



More dodges, and the axecaptain bashed a goblin in the toe witht he side of his axe. No delimbing, but it broke a nail, which is a hilariously silly wound. In adventure mode (which I probably won't be demonstrating), there is no way to cure infections, and if your nail gets broken and infected, it's a slow, inevitable death. Of course, in fort mode, you can still pass out from a broken nail, so this might still be fatal in time.

Haha. Same goblin just lost his entire right leg. No damage to our guys--the survivor finally failed to block an attack, but her CLOAK kept her from losing a finger.

HAHA. AND THIS WHOLE TIME, OUR GUYS HAVE BEEN STUNNED. THEY ARE NO LONGER STUNNED AND CAN NOW FIGHT MORE EFFECTIVELY.

One of the unwounded axemen finally got a hit off... and it was just punching the axecaptain in the cheek. Such brutality, very murder, wow.

Hah. The Survivor stabbed the nauseated goblin in the right arm, and he will probably be dropping his weapon. YUP, he dropped his halberd two frames later.

OH SHIT. Two frames after THAT, the Survivor got cut in the foot and fell over.

AAAAAARGH ANOTHER AMBUSH CAME AT US FROM THE LEFT! FUUUUUUUUCK!!!

The Survivor continues to live up to her name. She might have to be retired from duty if she can't walk after hospital treatments, but she's parried at least 10 shots so far and backup STILL hasn't arrived. There was an archer coming on the scene but he stepped in the second ambush and is now occupied with that. At least the Hand of Shiva is within arm's reach now. Let's hope he can mop this up.

ELEVEN. ELEVEN SHOTS NOW.

Hah, suck it! The goblin that wounded the Survivor just lost an arm courtesy of Captain Axe (who will now receive this as a custom title). I choose to interpret this as an act of vengeance and comradery towards the Survivor. Sadly, they're only listed as passing acquaintances, and not as anything more solid. (She's married to some clod offsite, and he's unmarried.

Ah crap. Now Captain Axe is on the floor cause his foot got cut. Hand of Shiva is only a few tiles away, but it's far enough that they have to hang on for some time. Especially if they KEEP MOVING FARTHER AWAY.

Another parry by the Survivor. And a dodge, actually!

Oh gods dammit the archer is fighting in MELEE with the pikemen! WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU FUCKHEAD

More parries by Captain Axe.

FINALLY. THE HAND OF SHIVA IS IN MELEE RANGE. LET'S GET THIS PARTY STARTED AND ENDED.

Ugh. He keeps ending up one tile away from the goblins and not actually being able to hit them. Come on, we're counting on you to end this!

OH ARE YOU KIDDING HE LEFT THE GOBLIN THAT WAS BEATING ON THE SURVIVOR AND THE THREE FUCKING GOBLINS BEATING ON CAPTAIN AXE TO GO FOR THE TWO WAY TO THE SOUTH. NO, YOU GET BACK UP THERE AND DO YOUR DUTY.

Ugh, now the dumbass archer got stabbed in the lower arm. No motor nerve damage, thankfully.

HAH! CAPTAIN AXE PULLING THROUGH, LOPPING OFF A GOBLIN'S HAND EVEN WHILE WOUNDED AND BEING DESERTED ON THE BATTLEFIELD! THIS MAN IS A FUCKING HERO.

Agh, the Hand of Shiva is STILL going after the wrong goblins! YOU ARE DESERTING YOUR MEN, YOU FUCKING COWARD!

At least they keep parrying like crazy. Meanwhile, the Hand of Shiva finally caught up to his first goblin (WHO WAS CRAWLING AROUND LIKE A WOUNDED BABY AND STILL FUCKIGN OUTRUNNING HIM) and took off an arm and a leg. After hacking him in the guts, he bled out at last. Hopefully, Shiva's Hand will go slap the right goblin this time. Meanwhile, that archer finally had the good sense to RUN THE FUCK AWAY, like a smart person.

Haha! After twenty or so parries, Captain Axe took off another goblin's leg. Suck it, Slim!

OH MY GOD THE LAST GOBLIN THAT ISN'T HARRASSING ANYONE IS ACTUALLY RUNNING AWAY AND SHIVA'S HAND IS STILL FUCKING CHASING HIM TO THE EDGE OF THE MAP. THANKFULLY IT'S NOT TOO FAR BUT IT'S FAR ENOUGH THAT I'M ABSOLUTELY LIVID.

Ugh. He caught the gobbo and lopped his arm off. Oh, and it was the one that got speared in the guts, too.

Hah. Shiva's Hand (who I'm renaming to Deserter, the little prick) took off a foot, and then Captain Axe lodged his axe in a goblin's thigh.

UGH, YOU HAVE A MASTERWORK PICKAXE, STOP PUNCHING HIM!

Thank you for taking his other arm, dipshit.

Huh. I think either someone ran away or I managed to misplace a goblin corpse (and kill him without it showing up on the logs.) I see the one corpse way off to the side, away from the main battle, then the one harrassing the Survivor, two of the three harrassing Captain Axe, and the two killed by the Deserter. That adds up to six, out of seven.

Hah, Captain Axe lopped off the other leg of the gobbo who's leg he took off earlier. (The suck it slim one.) He has no legs at all and will bleed out soon.

I sped the battle up a bit as nobody was in immediate dire straits (any more than before, I mean), and a couple gobbos got punked. Someon stabbed Captain Axe in the right lower leg, but it just bruised the muscle, instead of causing nerve damage. However, a different gobbo then got him in the arm. Still no visible nerve damage, thankfully, but it's looking dicey.

Ah, there we go, back to parrying. They're leaving the Survivor alone, at least, focusing on Captain Axe and the Deserter.

Oh balls, he got stabbed in the foot and it broke many bones. This looks bad.

Oh god he got stabbed in the hand and it got severed!

Stabbed again in the same foot. Same wounds as last time.

Stabbed in the chest, ripping through his ribs. I think we can say goodbye to Captain Axe.

Okay. New battle plan. I'm giving the order to have everyone station at the merchant's airlock. We'll build up our forces there and instead of sending guys in piecemeal, we'll meet their forces with our own superior numbers. Captain Axe will die for sure, though, and I don't know how the Deserter will last. The Survivor's fate is also questionable, as she isn't in range of anyone yet, but she's crippled in the legs.

Captain Axe has finally been struck down. He will be properly memorialized.

Yeah, they really are starting to flee. Buggers! At least they're gone, but I'm PISSED that I didn't kill every one of them for taking down Captain Axe.

Oh man, another spearman got in on the goblin killing, tackling a goblin who was previously uninvolved in combat, and stabbed his ass in the lower arm, breaking several bones. He then stabbed him in the thigh, crippling him permanently. Meanwhile, one of the gobbos who tried to flee had got intercepted by the Deserter, and bled out. The hammerman leading the squad tackled him, missing with his hammer but knocking both of them to the ground.

Now it's time for the Deserter to parry parry parry for days, while the Spearman just keeps skewering his goblin like a steak kebab.

Ruh-roh, now the Deserter is back up. I think I'll rename him back to Hand of Shiva, but I'll take him off active duty for a while. We need more melee troops anyways.

Crap. That idiot archer who picked a fight in melee with the gobbos? Well, they caught up to him, and he got stabbed in the spine. It didn't say it broke the nervous tissue, just a tendon and bruising, so it's either fatal or irrelevant and I don't know which. Probably fatal though.

Ugh. It looks like he ran through the bitter filth. So if the spine injury doesn't kill him, passing out with goblins stabbing at you will.

Huh. The goblins actually left him alone, probably to run off. Oh well. They can get stabbed.

HAH. FUCKING FIGURES. Most of the goblins are dead or fled, except the three that were chasing the archer. Well, the Hand of Shiva, aka the Deserter, got punched in the middle finger, and broke his bone. He just passed out from the pain of that. Well, I've got the spearmen to handle the remaining gobbos, so I'll just have someone carry him back to the hospital. Hopefully someone takes the Survivor, too.

Goblins are routed. I usually don't build coffins, for reasons outlined early on, but I'm having a rose gold coffin forged for Captain Axe. He liked nickel, so I'll have it decorated with nickel, too. He deserves a lavish burial, and if the countess gets pissy that his tomb is grander than hers, she can go fuck herself. What has SHE ever done for this fort? Huh? Has SHE sacrificed her life in the name of Dwarfdom? Has SHE held off six goblins at once, with a leg wound? I didn't fucking think so.

People are still hauling goods to the depot, but I don't feel like waiting around for that and doing any trading today. I'm gonna call it here, guys.

Rest in peace, and long live Captain Axe.

Ambushes are a bit of a problem. You can get them at any time once they trigger, and they usually show up right *next* to whatever dwarf they ambush so having people outside unescorted is asking for trouble.

Sealing off the edges sounds like it's possible but it will expose your masons to attack for a long time. Plus, I suspect it won't do a thing against ambushes until you make sure there is no path going from any map edge to behind the wall without going through your fortress first.
.. And even *then* I'm not even sure how this stealth thing they have works.

Is it possible to take this in stages? First built some archery towers or something to provide the workers with fire support, then start building larger sections? Or would building the towers already take longer than just building a huge-ass wall?

Of course that wall wouldn't keep flyers out, but that's not the point is it?

Ambushes technically have to wander onto the map the same way any other creature does. They're just invisible until "discovered", meaning either they set off a trap, or a creature passes an observation check within a very close proximity of them--one or two tiles. So they don't TECHNICALLY spawn right next to anyone, but you can't see them until they get up in someone's grill.

And yes, I absolutely can seal the edges off. I've already done that down in the caverns. No creature can access our dwarves if it spawned in the caves. And I'm sure a single archery tower a couple levels high (just high enough to get out of melee range, since climbing doesn't exist YET) wouldn't take long, and I could have several going at once. But that's not the point. If I lock down the edges (which I could very easily do by just doing a wall around the non-filthy area and then just have a corridor loaded with a zillion cage traps), it's not truly for security. It's because I'm angry.

And we've seen what happens when I get angry.

Trading's done, nonmetal crap is exchanged for metal crap.

I don't even feel like bothering to do stuff. Also, we didn't have enough rose gold to make a coffin, so he's getting platinum instead. (Yeah I know, what the fuck ever, right?) I dunno. I'm just upset. We lost a hero today.

If I'm being entirely honest, I actually put DF on the shelf for a week or so after playing long enough to write that one little mini-paragraph and see the coffin made. I just couldn't get in the mood. But now I'm not so mopey. Now? Now I want revenge. I want fucking VENGEANCE. I'm expanding the barracks, doubling the size of the military, installing training facilities, and building a wall to keep assholes outside. The kid gloves are coming off now. I'm gonna break this game over my knee and beat it with a clue-by-four.

We now have about fifty dwarves in active duty. I need to equip the ever loving shit out of them, though, and that will be a while. Right now, I have my armorsmith pooping out a whole bunch of really shitty armor that'll give him EXP, and then melt it back down so I can make higher quality stuff. However, I now need about fifty full suits of armor.

Haha, we mined out Ustru's graveyard and found a corpse of someone he'd butchered a long time ago. For a moment I was mortified that someone had died while I was looking away, but it was just someone who died before and whose corpse was found.

Urgh. Man, I was getting NINE frames per second. For reference, by default the game caps the UPPER FPS bound at 100. I think it's time for another mid-update break. Le groan. All the things you don't want to hear about. Basically I got tired waiting for armor to get forged and walls to get mined.

The dilemma here is that I simply don't have the infrastructure to get all these things done immediately. I need a couple hundred pieces of armor forged, and I have one armorsmith who is trained high enough to make semi-good quality pieces. Anything that is of subpar quality is going to eventually get tossed back into the smelters, so I don't want to waste time making shitty pieces. I do, however, want everyone suited up as soon as we can manage. I suppose I can just let those run in the background while I work on Captain Axe's tomb.

This is the update that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friend. I think this is what killed the last DF Let's Play on here. I just can't stay focused on the game long enough for anything to get done. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if I wasn't documenting it all for your viewing pleasure, but since I am, I feel frustrated because I have to play for longer in real-time to get the same number of frames, and on top of that I need to play for more frames to get the same number of words. It's been two weeks since I started this update and we still don't have any pictures. And not because I haven't been diligent in taking them, like has happened in the past, but because there hasn't fucking been anything interesting happening at all. I mean, this is the story of this game, but not only do I have to play the game, I have to convey the gameplay experience in a way that's exciting, and nobody wants to hear about the minute details of watching dwarves dig out a cave while I wait for armor to be forged and other such tasks.

Ugh. At last. The armorsmith is making the occasional Masterwork. Now we can have him create the first round of armor, and I might have him reforge until we get a full set of masterwork once I have more time to kill. (No, that's probably never going to happen.) Meanwhile, still kinda working on sealing out the upstairs, and I need to check on the downstairs too.

OH HEY LOOK, WE GOT A MIGRANT PLUG. THAT'S FANTASTIC. ugh I hate migrant plugs I really hope Toady squashed that bug for DF2014.

God fucking dammit. As soon as I tell the archers to take a break since it seems like the goblin menace had been routed, a goblin babysnatcher shows up. FIGURES. At least he ran in the opposite direction when we found him. Grrrrh.



So it turns out that "being crushed by a drawbridge" is a unique event that you can engrave about. I did not know this. This is a discovery made while ordering Captain Axe's tomb to be engraved over. Also, The Onslaught of Splattering is a great name for a siege in which the attackers were crushed under bridges repeatedly. IT'S LIKE THE GAME IS SELF-AWARE.

Fuck my life. It's siege time again. RIGHT after I got finished designating a crapton of roads at the edge of the map, to block trees.

OH, AND OF COURSE THE MOTHER COCKERS WOULD SHOW UP AT THE SOUTH MAP EDGE. OF FUCKING COURSE. AAAAAAARGH

I kinda had this coming after complaining about how I had to slog through the boring game. Well, I would've preferred to be done outside before the Fun came to town, but of course, that would make it much less Fun.

Oh. Goodie. Not only are they like, fifteen steps away from our exposed trade depot, but they brought CROSSBOWS. Fuck my life. At least there's only one guy outside I kind of care about, and it's a mason. The FIFTH named mason. I'm fine with losing him if it comes down to it, but right now it looks like we're just shutting the doors and saying "sayonara" to the unnamed peasants out there. Hell, I might draft them into a suicide squad and have them berserk against the gobbos. They won't dent them, as they're unarmed, unarmored, and up against crossbows and superior numbers. But it's better than letting them run around before getting picked off.

Looks like the new tomb is gonna have another nine slabs. Know that even in your deaths, every goblin you kill is a great service to your motherland.

So I think I can turn off farming for a while. We have enough food.



How much food do we have? IT'S OVER EIGHT THOU--*shot*

I think I'm gonna call this one for now, considering I've been at it for two weeks. It's also late at night, I need to get up early tomorrow, and my brain is hitting that "oh god what do I do what do I do what do I do" stage that happens when I play for too long and then get hit with goblins. I need to put this off for a day or two, so that I can return to the game freshly renewed with vigor and the spirit of YOLO.

And when we do, Captain Axe will be fucking avenged.

9 FPS? God, that's terrible.

Any idea what's eating your cycles?

By the way, I've taken over a DF succession game, if you're interested in just reading about the game for a while rather than feeling forced to play it ;-)

Yeah, having run the fort for 10+ years and having a zillion items and jobs in the queue and etc etc etc. Pretty much normal wear and tear. We got back up to 20-30 average, but during activity spikes, yeah it drops down that low.