11.11.07
Posted in gaming at 12:01 by swong
Digging along in my new volcano fortress, I uncovered something special in the depths.
A (my) king showed up in a wave of migrants, dressed as a peasant. I’m not making this up. A pop-up message actually appeared on my screen: “Your king has arrived dressed as a peasant!” I’m still scrambling to put together some proper royal quarters and a tomb for him.
In the meantime, he’s just this kind of guy:
In the last version, the king arrived when your fortress was near its maximum population. Work mandates would flow from him, and dwarves who failed to meet his mandates would be punished with imprisonment or hammering. Eventually, he would demand that you dig into the deep layer of (see the link above), triggering the end-game sequence. Every bit of (see the link above) that you mined out increased the chances of a giant demon rising from the depths to devour your dwarves.
That end game was removed from this version, though, so the strand of (see the link way above) should be fairly safe to dig out.
Actually, I might be wrong about that. I was probing around the edge of said strand when, well… look at this excerpt from my in-game message log.
This chain of events led to a game crash, so I didn’t feel too bad about restoring from the save file and… choosing different actions. Challenges certainly lie ahead.
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11.07.07
Posted in did you know at 22:13 by swong
I had no idea. You learn something every day.
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Posted in gaming at 22:11 by swong
My new fortress is built near a magma vent, on some rolling hills bordering a woodland and a black sand desert. Also, there’s a warren full of hostile kobolds to the south. This was a surprise, since they didn’t show up on the overland view when I picked the site (or maybe I wasn’t paying attention).
I’m still digging out the site and prospecting for minerals. The magma is pretty important, since it lets me set up forges that don’t need a big fuel infrastructure to run. The sand lets me make glass, which is neat. I think I grazed an aquifer in one of my exploratory shafts, which might give me a safe water source for future expansion.
The kobolds attack my citizens on sight, but they haven’t mounted an outright assault. Our engagements are limited to small border skirmishes… at least they will be until I can train and equip a military. I walled off the nearest exit from their caves, and sabotaged some of their overland routes, so if they do decide to attack, they’ll be forced to come from one direction.
Every so often, a dwarf in this game will fall into a strange mood. They will seek out a specific workshop and begin gathering items from all over your fortress. When they gather all of the items they require, they will begin a mysterious construction. When finished, they will produce an item of unsurpassed quality, and your dwarves will hail its creation. If it’s the right kind of mood, your dwarf will advance to legendary status in the skill required to make that item.
Often, though, your obsessed dwarf can’t find a specific item that they crave, and they’ll eventually go mad. This is a huge incentive to develop your infrastructure; there’s no telling when a dwarf will suddenly take over a forge and demand uncut tourmalines and bat leather.
Usually, madness means that the dwarf is grief stricken or becomes a babbling wreck, wandering your halls until he or she dies of thirst or decides to leap from the nearest convenient cliff. Occasionally, though, a stricken dwarf will go on a berserk rampage through your fortress, attacking animals, dwarves, and buildings until your dogs and soldiers manage to put them down.
This being the case, I was alarmed when my highly talented miner decided to commandeer my mason’s workshop. She hauled many large stones to the shop, then stopped, demanding some sort of glass to work with. My furnace infrastructure still isn’t set up… in fact, she abandoned her job carving channels for the magma to take on this new project. I rushed to get a temporary furnace set up, but alas, I don’t think it will be ready in time to satisfy her needs.
Here’s the hitch: here is the screen for her skills and stats-
An ultra-mighty, agile, very tough miner armed with a steel pickaxe can be dangerous indeed. Here is the stats screen for one of my recruits:
Yeah… they’re a little green.
So a thought struck me: how would a more clever person hedge his bets against his star miner going on a berserk rampage through his fortress with a steel pickaxe?
Wall off the workshop, of course:
I left a door in place, of course. It’s locked, but in the unlikely event that I produce acceptable glass in time, I won’t be totally boned.
In the meantime, I have my mechanic working on a cage trap to put just outside the door. I’m thinking that she’ll burst through the door, be snatched up in the cage trap, and I can place her just inside my main entrance, with the cage door attached to a pressure plate. As a theft deterrent.
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11.05.07
Posted in gaming at 17:01 by swong
I had a siege in Dwarf Fortress a little while ago. A marauding gang of goblins arrived at my borders, ready to raise hell. I sounded a red alert, ordering all of my dwarves to get indoors right away, barring the gate behind them. These goblins weren’t really equipped to break down doors, so they just sort of milled around at the border for a while. On the other hand, my entire military consisted of:
- A sheriff.
- Two untrained deputies.
My fortress was pretty self-contained as far as supplies go. The reservoir supplied plenty of water for drinking and irrigation. I only really lacked a good lumber supply; every order with the caravans included a big request for logs. I figured I could wait out the goblins, then resume trade the next year.
Then this guy landed in the wastelands south of my fortress. That’s a capital “D” which rhymes with “T” which stands for trouble. A dragon! I never saw one in the last version of the game. Fortunately, this one couldn’t fly, so I was safe, or so I thought.
Turns out, dragons *can* break down certain structures, like, say, barred doors that have been sealed against invaders. This one milled around for several months of game time before an unlucky caravan arrived from the north. Swooping north (this thing moved like greased lightning), it razed my trade depot, obliterated some poor merchants and their mules with a spectacular fireworks show, and found a weak spot in my defenses.
It was my pump system, the one I had set up to draw water from the valley floor. I installed a service stairwell through the entire structure when it was built; the dwarves used it as kind of a back door. This dragon couldn’t fly, but it could definitely climb. I drafted a squad of hunters and miners and set them to take up station at the top of the stairs, with a pack of war dogs in tow. I sent another miner to the top of the reservoir to cut a hole in the retaining wall… maybe I could flush the dragon out (heh heh).
I was nearly routed. Brave dwarves poured into the hole, smoke and flame came out. In the end, the war dogs had taken enough pieces out of the dragon for my sheriff to finish it off. Maybe 12 or 13 dwarves and around 15 war dogs were sacrificed to the dragon’s wrath. I didn’t have many wounded to tend to, but fires were raging in the stairwell and in the ravaged valley below.
I might have recovered from the carnage if not for this guy. Look closely near the bottom center of that screen and you’ll see a cyan ‘T’. “T” stands for “Titan,” and he rushed up the stairs in the wake of the dragon’s devastation before I even had the fires extinguished. As he breached my farm level and began hurling dogs and peasants to their gruesome deaths on the distant rocks below, I sounded a general retreat. I might revisit this site someday, preferably with a squad of archers.
Ed. note: it wasn’t so much the impending defeat that caused me to quit the field so much as the performance hit from calculating all the smoke. This game is still technically in alpha, and rendering smoke plumes was causing the game to freeze for a minute every ten seconds.
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11.03.07
Posted in gaming at 13:54 by swong
Been playing a little Dwarf Fortress. The new version is out, with improvements like a z-axis and fluid dynamics among dozens, if not hundreds, of new features.
I started a neat little fortress way up on a mountain ledge, sheltered by a few peaks. The ledge is sort of like the palm of a cupped mitten, with a cliff on one side and few low rises on the other, adjacent to a deep valley with a brook at the bottom.
Aha, thinks me, wouldn’t it be nice to have a reservoir up here, so my dwarves can farm and fish and drink without having to climb all these stairs and risk nasty goblin attacks at the bottom.
So, I dug a cascade of holding ponds in the living rock. Installed screw pumps, powered by waterwheels run by the brook itself. Two in-game years later, I had most of the system set up, a holding tank carved into the rock at the top of a spire, with a nice little overflow system running into a pond on the ledge itself. Channels toward my farm, some overflow channels, and plans for a drainage system. Floodgates and hatches to regulate flow throughout the system. Overall, a nice little setup; not bad for my first try at this thing.
I finished the linkages and threw the master lever to engage the pumps. Success! Water gurgled up through the pond cascade, and my holding tank began filling. Feeling fancy, I threw the lever to open the channel to my overflow pond, as having a big empty pit was aesthetically displeasing.
I neglected one little detail in my plans.
Water finds its level, see, and my pond was two levels below my tank. The contents of my entire reservoir tank immediately gushed from my pond like a dorm toilet full of weed. Water spread across the entire ledge, inundating everything in a slow tidal wave.
The lowest level of my fortress is filled with knee-deep water that’s slowly draining wherever it can find an outlet. I only have one mining pick, and my miner is working overtime to cut relief channels wherever he can. I had a close call with that guy earlier- when I threw the lever, he was digging a downward shaft that immediately began filling with water. Good thing the dude can swim.
My main staircase to the valley floor filled, all 9 stories of it, in a big column of water. I had to send a worker to cut open the door at the bottom. Water is gradually slopping off of the cliff to the north, muddying the valley floor as it makes its way back to the brook. The ground down there is a mess right now; hope I can rebuild the road before the caravans come in.
In short: distilled awesomeness.
Update: Not 3 minutes after I posted this, a hunter shot and killed a wild horse in the flood zone. A big ascii bloodstain formed, slowly drifting toward the edge of the cliff while staining everything in its path red.
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