"You have been struck down." - Dwarf Fortress Adventure stories

[mostly_harmless]

Death by elephant?

Or Jkaen's baby died of thirst?

mh

[uberfish]

Once the aquifer was sealed off again I decided to extend our 2x2 staircase all the way down into the depths of the earth. The > < keys can be used with designate in order to make the stair-carving process easier. The miners dug through many different types of stone and ore and interrupted the game to deliver the following announcement:



We were passing through a marble layer and hit a gold vein. I decided that this would be a promising place to go digging for more minerals so this was hotkeyed to F3.

Back on the surface, masons continue to build the tower above the Grand Staircase. I also got rid of all the old wooden stairs and replaced them with stone ones. Because the amount of blood and mud that dwarves refused to clean up (even the ones with no job refused to clean it up) was annoying and the blood behaviour was clearly bugged, I used the DFhack "clean map" command to get rid of it. Then I got rid of our well in the corner of the tower building because it's no longer functional anyway due to the aquifer there being sealed off.



Further improvements to the main F2 level. A room behind the kitchen contains a farmer's workshop which we can use for plant processing, when we have suitable plants, the quern is also in the corner there. Travel corridors extended to 2 wide. Built a second jewelry shop and a proper gem storage room behind that.



now we have proper furniture stockpiles it's easier to see when we run short on anything. I decided to get rid of the stone and ore stockpiles here as there's stone all over the place after the latest round of excavation and I don't want the dwarves to waste time hauling it. There's no point pulling ore in here anyway, the smelter isn't here.



A second forgotten beast showed up in the caverns. A poisonous crab. Not going in there!



In the meantime Tatan entered a strange mood! He just stood around for a while until I realised that he was a Weaver and probably wanted a clothes workshop which we didn't have. I ordered someone to build one and he promptly claimed it, producing this:



Yeah, he insisted on adding an image of gems instead of just adding more gems when we had plenty. but I can see this being an actually cool looking item. We now have a legendary weaver so I went ahead and added a loom, farmer's workshop (this one for shearing animals and milking) and leatherworks in our ground-level burrow. Meanwhile I asked the dwarf liaison to bring us some more alpacas.

The Grand Staircase hit the second cavern level. We can actually explore this one as there are no forgotten beasts here, but what I don't want to do is just to give creatures easy access to the main staircase. So I wall it off for now and we can reopen a properly secured entrance to the caverns later. The place looks like a horrendous maze anyway. This level is designated as F4.



Eventually the miners refuse to go any further because we hit warm stone indicating the presence of magma, 117 levels below ground. I dig out a side shaft and go searching for the magma sea so we have an idea of its shape:



In the process we discover a couple of adamantine spires! Which we probably shouldn't be messing with.

now that I know the shape of the magma sea though, I can plan out our forge level (F6)

Top level (storage):



Middle level (smelters and forges)



Bottom level (magma channels to heat and power the forges)



Now you COULD just build the forges right above the magma sea level, but it's a bit safer to isolate the magma channels from the main sea due to fire creatures. So the setup I designed will have the magma flowing in on the middle level, through a grate made from the magma-resistant yellow Orthoclase stone found down here, and then into these channels. This isn't foolproof because some things might be able to smash the grate but it's better than nothing. I stuck some stonefall traps along the forge access corridor as a precaution.

[uberfish]

after the miners had dug everything out they breached the wall to the magma sea. I didn't think this would be dangerous since they were two tiles from the stairs to safety and magma flows slowly compared to water... but:



Bigger turns out to be rather slow (or dawdled around on this level rather than going to the stairs, not sure which) and the magma reaches his tile and promptly sets him on !!fire!!, creating a smoke cloud. soon all that's left of him is:



A pick sitting on the floor grate which will slowly melt down

Fortunately the dwarves are sensible enough not to try and retrieve it.

In the meantime the magma flows through the grate into the channels without further incident - fortunately no one else was stupid enough to be down there. The masons wall off the access passage Bigger used to breach the magma and the exploratory tunnel from earlier, leaving the only connection between the fort and the magma sea through that floor grate.



here's what it looks like in stonesense



yeah I actually made another mistake when laying things out and dug the holes in the floor one tile off from where they needed to be for a neat alignment, but this was fortunately a harmless error and could be fixed easily and safely by rebuilding the floor and digging new holes

So we have 4 magma smelters and 2 magma forges down here which don't require charcoal as fuel any more. The dwarves celebrate by ordering up 6 new shields for the new militia and a bunch of ore smelting jobs.



speaking of militia:



We had way too many superfluous fisherdwarves so I drafted some of them into a militia led by Brackard. I designated a barracks/training area in the courtyard by building a weapon/armour stand there and kicking the kennel/animal training area out of the castle (Yeah, I know our entire animal husbandry operation is now completely insecure apart from birds, but this seems appropriate and the animals can detect sneaking thieves sometimes. We've already caught 2 goblins in the cages by the bridge after they were detected.)

A view of the top level



There's the main tower, made entirely of granite and granite blocks. The forge and smelter here are now redundant and were removed. Militia are training in the corner there... they're trying to teach each other how to dodge, although it's the blind leading the blind at the moment because they're all totally incompetent. I suppose we could draft Sareln, who is a great dodger, to train them.

In the meantime dwarves continue to make ridiculous statues:



And the newly arrived jeweller, Qgqqqqq, went into a mood and built this



Yeah, another piece of art depicting dragons killing people. And necro books. Sigh. Also who on earth makes an artifact out of gemstones and decorates it with common rock??

Despite the poor taste of the artisan, we can make a legendary well or jail cell with this thing though!

The elf caravan arrives at the end of spring and since I'm on a zoo kick, I buy some random animals from including a giant wren since giant birds are cool. Also a barrel of something called gnomeblight, I'm not sure what it is but it sells for 1010 so it must be good... right?

It's been slightly less than a year, now that most industry has been reorganized this looks like a good handover point.

[uberfish]

The save

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19168036/d/region3.zip


Notes

- We have a LOT of food and drink, feel free to raise the population cap above the 50 I was running with as we could probably use more dwarves now; due to industrial expansion and a militia being formed the efficiency of things like hauling has noticably decreased, because the existing dwarves are quite busy now.
- Please buy alpacas from the next dwarf caravan.
- I forgot to build a new well
- The 6 militia have weapons and shields, but no armour yet.
- There should now be animals available for shearing, plants that can be processed etc if you want to play with those industries. If it's all too much to deal with, neglecting them won't hurt us much.
- We have too many dogs now. I ordered a couple of them to be dumped into the second cavern layer hoping that they'll explore for us.
- I dug around quite a bit on the marble level. There's plenty of gold and marble there but I didn't find iron.

[Sian]

out of interest ... whats my character running around doing atm?

[uberfish]

out of interest ... whats my character running around doing atm?

Shearing and milking. You're also some sort of novice doctor but we don't have a hospital yet as so far no one gets injured anyway, they just die.

[Adbekunkus]

Glad to see my dwarfself has made it into the militia. May I volunteer as an explorer of sorts (dyer may be seen as a job for the feint of heart, not the uberbrave axewielding amazon!)? Maybe in the depths she can find the love that 40 or so dwarves didn't have the heart to give.

[Jkaen]

Nice to see the magma forge all set up.

Would be interested in seeing the next person set up a hospital, thats something I have never quite got my head around doing yet.

[spellman]

I also haven't gotten hospitals going in an interesting way. Mostly resorted to a bunch of beds, some basic supplies, and a nearby well.

Then wars happen and the stupid dwarves sit there injured forever while the Doctors fuss about.

[sunrise089]

A few questions:

1) The DF wiki talked about several scripted encounters, but I forget whether that's still current in your version of the game. One was the "lava river" or similar, is that the same as your magma level you dug down to?

2) Are those adamantine spires the same ones that can open a pathway to 'too deep?'

3) What does this new industry do? I continue to be amazed with the breadth of content in this game, but a lot seems to be based around acquiring money without much purpose. Are all of these industries necessary?