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DWARF FORTRESS
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beige
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Joined: 28 Nov 2006
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 7:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That large concavity at the entrance is intended to (eventually) be a large pool of water. I just didn't bother finishing it, and I want to use higher quality materials as supports later, so I figured just letting it cave in was a more expedient solution than throwing some dwarves on support duty.

The bedrooms are awesome - they're not my design, of course Razz I made a few modifications to work it around the "great hall," like the diagonal halls and a food storage pantry. As you noted, the hall is taken up with workshops and stuff - figured I'd use what I'd completed as my pocket fortress.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how to get an effective water defense system up.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 1:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Be forewarned that one of the final changes made to DF before Tarn began the big turnover is that steam was made basically harmless, so there's no real point in channeling magma to the front of the mountain (aside from style points). You probably knew this already.

Post more pictures as you go along if you can, it's always interesting to see what other people are doing.
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beige
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 10:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

A steam defense isn't quite what I had in mind.

http://x0r.us/images/megabeigeland.jpg

This is version four of the fortress. This time the defense plan is much better organized. An entry hall will be filled with pools of flowing water and statues. A lever will overflow the water and turn this entry hall into an aquarium. Another one will turn it into a hot molten sauna.

The large half-oval you see is the "war room" and will be the primary feature of the northern barracks. It will eventually house my siege workshops, weapons, armor, etc. A small control room is situated along the southern corridor, to the left. Right now it's serving as a warehouse while I get myself situated.

I intend to have a smaller southern barracks in order to provide some versatility as to where I can deploy the military - in this shot they're just stationed at the front gate, but this way I can flank an enemy attacking force from either side. One barracks will be a service access entrance for woodcutters, trade depot, etc. and the other will be a murder corridor.

Bordering the main entry hall you can see several alcoves. These will contain siege weapons stationed at point-blank range on the hallway. Since arrows pass through statues, statues will be placed in front of the fortifications to conceal them. I don't know how well this will work in practice - but I can always place marksdwarves there instead.

The lone catapult is my stone disposal system.
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beige
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is version five of the fortress and the one I've gotten farthest on.

http://x0r.us/images/df5.1.jpg

I've made the hidden fortifications along the hallway smaller, to accomodate marksdwarves instead of large siege weapons - that didn't seem as good an idea as I thought at first :p
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 05, 2007 5:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

No, siege engines, to be effective, really need to be facing out towards where enemies are going to be coming from and to have a bunch of well-trained siege operators. The problem with the latter is that since siege engines take so long to fire, that it's difficult to get dwarves to build up their skill in this area.

Add onto this that with ballistae you'd be wasting tons of wood/metal and I don't really see the point of building them. Catapults, on the other hand, can be used to chuck your extra rock out into the wilderness and if you set up all your Peasants with the Siege Operator job and set the catapults to continously fire from fairly on in the fort's history, you should be able to get some dwarves capable of manning them during an actual siege. Plus I think siege operators, along with animal trainers, get stat boosts to Agility, which is tremendously helpful across the board.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 1:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

***MOAR ENDGAME SPOILARZ, OH NOES***

I decided to go with the foolhardly frontal attack option. I figured that with a full complement of Legendary Miners, who are all Strong, Tough and Agile, not to mention about 32 military dwarves, including a Champion, 3 Swordmasters, a Mace Lord, an Elite Wrestler and about 10 Agile Marksdwarves, that I'd be able to take out the demons in a "fair" fight.

The plan got off to a bad start as the Champion, who I had set to be the leader of the squad, decided he needed to eat. And then to sleep. And then to drink. So there was this giant band of military dwarves following him all over the fort and sitting around outside his room, going back into the kitchen, etc. before they all filed into the little room I'd built on the far side of the magma and settled down to watch the miners carve into the wall.



In the above picture you can see that the miners have managed to get to the firey pits fairly easily and are in fact starting to excavate beyond them while I wondered where the heck the demons were. The more astute of you may notice a Dwarven Child who has tagged along with the miners. This was not a particularly good move on his part.



Because the demons shortly jumped out of the pits and started wailing on the miners (and the child) while the military dwarves jumped to react -- I think that by this point the marksdwarves were already pelting targets with bolts, I just don't think they show up in the exported BMPs.

For those wondering:

Solid Green Dwarves: Marksdwarves
Solid Baby Blue Dwarves: Swordsdwarves
Solid Slightly Darker Baby Blue Dwarves: Swordmasters
Solid Blue Dwarf: Axedwarf
Solid Red Dwarf: Mace Lord
Solid Grey Dwarf: Some Poor Sonaofabitch of a Basic Recruit
Solid White Dwarf: Champion

It should be noted that while I do have a lot of steel equipment, I have not really figured out how to get the dwarves to actually put it on, so they're mostly armed with basic iron gear.

Now, several things happened in short sequence here:

1. All the civilians ran for their lives (including the child, who miraculously survived with only relatively minor wounds).
2. The military dwarves bravely charged the demons and engaged them in a brutal fight, in which most of the casualties came from a well-placed burst of flame from one of the demons.
3. A singular demon did manage in fact to cross over the bridge into the main part of the fortress, only to be cut down just shortly after clearing the traps. The rest were slaughtered before leaving the room, with a rough list of casualties looking like about 1:1 dead dwarves per dead demon, with a very large number of dwarves suffering from major wounds.
4. One of the marksdwarves goes mad and destroys the bridge over the magma, sending himself and a swordsdwarf falling to a fiery doom, as well as trapping his wounded comrades on the wrong side of the magma. Considering that it takes months of dwarf time to make enough steel to make another bridge, they're totally boned.
5. I get so excited that I forget to stop and take screenshots.

Good times! Now I need to decide whether I want to deal with trying to clean up this mess or reloading an old data folder and seeing if trying to equip my military with steel weapons and building a backup bridge makes things a little less fucked-up.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2007 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't played at all since my ill-fated assault on the demons that just about totally destroyed my standing military. I'm still keeping track of the progress of the next DF update, which is rolling along at a steady pace. It seems like it's stalled out because there was just so much on his plate; however, if you look at his "to be implemented/fixed" list, it's being reduced fairly quickly -- it used to take up three screens of text on the web page and now you barely have to scroll down to see it all, which makes me optimistic that he might actually finish sometime this summer.

With that in mind, I'll try and play through some post-demon portions of the old version and "finish" the game, maybe even play a bit of the roguelike portion of the game and of course, put up some screenshots here.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 1:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't done crap with DF lately. However, the "recent development" list of to-dos on the DF site is down to maybe 20 things and fits entirely on a single browser screen meaning that just maybe the new release might happen relatively soon.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 22, 2007 8:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's nearing less than double-digits, although there's still all sorts of associated clean-up and testing issues that still have to be dealt with. On top of that, Toady's gotten a kidney infection, so we'll see how that winds up affecting progress.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 12:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The To-Do list is down to 4 entries.

He's going to release a new version while I'm in Finland, I know it.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 12:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've just gone and taken a look at some of the movies that have been posted recently and now I'm keenly anticipating the new release.

The latest movie is one that shows blood in a river, which then flows the proper direction and separates and diffuses as it moves downstream. Which is pretty neat!

However, the real treat was the one before that which features the dwarves being horrible to a mule. The main thing that it's showing off is rewalling, which is the ability to take rock you've mined and build walls out of it. Combined with the z-axis, this has insane potential, because the movie opens with a dwarf mining some rock, then building a tower out of it, which is done by making a room, then building a ramp/stairs next to the room, and this allows you to put walls on top of the walls that you've already built, another stair/ramp and you've got a hollow tower.

Into which the dwarves are instructed to throw one of their mules, which lies stunned at the bottom of the tower. Then, the inside of the tower is designated as a pond and after a water source is designated, the dwarves use buckets to pour water into the tower, drowning the mule.

The dwarves then mine out one side of the bottom part of the tower, causing the water to spill out (in a realistic fashion) over the surrounding ground and allowing the dwarves to take the corpse of the mule and put it in the refuse stockpile.
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Shapermc
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 12:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Any chance you can link to these movies? I'd be much more interested in watching it than playing it.

Also, are they working on the RL side of it any more?
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 3:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

They are still doing work on the RL, although most of it is going into the Fortress mode right now.

As for the movies, they're files that you need to load in DF itself. What you need to do is download the files and put them in the DF\data\movies folder. Then, you load the game and hit ';' on the main title screen, then 'l' to load the movie, select the movie you want and then 'p' to play the movie. (They're not really movies, they're just records of a play session that you can't interact with as it plays out.)

Mule

Blood
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Shapermc
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 3:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

;_;

Let me know when someone youtubes them.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 3:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you have it installed, it's really easy...doesn't appear that anybody's YouTubed them yet. I'd do it, except I have no idea how to go about recording them and I don't have any video editing software either.
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Intentionally Wrong
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2007 2:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

At one of my other forums, we're in the middle of our annual Olympic challenge, wherein we participate in a series of competitions for fun and glory. Karaoke contests, MSPaint contests, chess tournaments, Starcraft--pretty inane stuff, for the most part, but we have fun with it. This year included a Dwarf Fortress competition:

O. Hakubi wrote:

THE RULES

The save file starts in spring of 1051 outside of a sheer cliff face with the following:

2 miners
1 mason
1 fisherdwarf
1 craftsdwarf/mechanic
1 farmer
1 carpenter
2 dogs
1 cat
3 horses
3 mules
20 turtles
30 plump helmets
30 dwarven beer
20 plump helmet spawn
20 pig tail seeds
2 picks
1 axe

Your mission, if you choose to accept it (and you will, if you know what's good for you), will be to take all that and make the most valuable fortress (the highest net worth) you can in the span of five years. That's from 1 Granite, 1051 to 1 Granite, 1056. A metalsmith appears with an anvil during the summer of your first year and you've got someone who can chop down trees from the get-go, so there's no excuse for anyone to not make a forge so they can turn out five stacks of copper coins and get the bookkeeper to show up ASAP. Really, that point can't be emphasized enough: If the bookkeeper's not there, there's no way to tell how much your fortress is worth and thus, no way to tell if you've won.

Once 1056 rolls around and the announcement of spring comes up, stop whatever you're doing and save your game. I repeat: Once 1 Granite comes up, the fortress battle is ovah.

Aside from that, though, the sky's the limit!


THE JUDGING CRITERIA

1) Total wealth. How rich are your dwarves?
2) Clever narratives. It's not a game, it's a journey. So make sure the travelogue is totally awesome.
3) Style. What's the point of having money if it don't look good? Make a fortress worthy of the name "Deathhatchet!"


Now start digging, assholes!


Anyway. My teammate Zaratustra just finished our team's submission, with 2873707 zorkmids (or whatever the legal tender of DF is): story - map - related video - save file.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 10:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So no new release so far -- instead, there's loads of testing going on, which led to this quote:

Quote:
I added the birth thoughts (and some thoughts for fathers and siblings) that were requested today. When I was testing them, I just had the first dwarf on the list become very pregnant with a keypress. The thoughts worked out, but the new parent did not seek to pick up the infant. That's strange, I thought, so I hunted around for the bug. It turns out it only bothers to run the infant seeking code if the dwarf that gave birth is female.
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Shapermc
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 5:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

New release tonight! Hope this will make you feel a little better Scratchmonkey. Take care man.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 6:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Play Liberal Crime Squad until then!
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 6:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, the new version should show up sometime tomorrow morning. It should be uh, pretty epic. Basically an entirely new game.

One of the more recent updates he mentioned that you can create a water wheel, attach it to an axle, use a mechanism to attach another axle to right-angles to the original axle, then keep on attaching stuff to drive something like a pump or another wheel, all with proper physics and conservation of motion/energy. He's totally insane.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 10:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

New version is up!

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
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bleak
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 9:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't played this game since last year, and I wasn't very good at it, only barely surviving thef irst winter at times. I was competent at using the interface anyway, which isn't needlessly complicated, but it is very complicated at that. Anyway, looking at these new changes makes me very excited to give it another shot. So, is anyone here still not playing it, aside from Shaper, who has technical difficulties?
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 11:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm not playing Dwarf Fortress, although I'm really enjoying reading about those who are.
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The Soviet Onion
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 12:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm stuck in a goddam hole in adventurer mode, my mission of bloody vengeance thwarted. Three-dimensional movement is going to take more getting used to than I thought. Some day I will determine if it's possible to kill an enemy by throwing yourself on them from a great height, but for now I just hope a bowman puts me out of my misery before I starve.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2007 3:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My continuing to be wretchedly sick has severely hampered my exploration of the new version. I've only just barely embarked and am contemplating options in terms of where exactly to start the new outpost.

Outpust Urvadinod or "Sealgates", is situated in a canyon with a brook running through it and some small pools of various depths. The center of the canyon is covered in black sand, which might be the remnants of a volcanic explosion; however, there's plenty of plants and bare rock in other areas.

My starting group:

Mason
Mechanic
Logger/Carpenter
Miner
Grower
Grower/Herbalist
Metalsmith

The Metalsmith was probably a poor choice over a second miner; however, since you no longer get the "free" metalsmith and anvil at the end of the first year, I wanted to have somebody ready to start working metal without having to rely on making enough crafts to trade for an anvil if/when merchants start showing up. Until then he can do random tasks along with the other dwarves who aren't the Miner, who will be digging and digging only and the Grower/Herbalist, who will be gathering plants as a way to generate food until I figure out farming in this version.

I didn't take a Fisherdwarf because of a bug in this new version where aquatic wildlife are both incredibly strong and incredibly aggressive. I've seen enough screenshots where a carp has completely eviscerated a dwarf to know that I don't want the dwarves to be anywhere near water if I can help it.

I'm stalling mainly on finding a place to build my fort, which is a little silly because with the new generated landscapes, there's plenty of room to start over and I'm sure that something silly will happen to abort this game at some point anyway.

There's also been an update posted, so anybody who's playing should check it out as it has a bunch of fixes.
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2007 4:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

scratchmonkey, come to our party.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 01, 2007 4:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Is it a party in the statue garden?

The area that I have chosen for my outpost appears to be infested with wolves. This could get bad quickly.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 4:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So I think the new choke point for DF is drink. I could be really off on this one, considering that I've never played past the wave of first migrants; it does seem like it's going to be a major issue depending on what kind of region you pick to start off with.

Which then brings up the whole issue of choosing regions -- since you can pick to start on pretty much any part of the world that you want to, this is actually an extremely important part of the process, since each region is unique and you're no longer guaranteed to get any particular feature/stone/ore/etc. at each site. For example, which ties into drink being a resource chokepoint, underground rivers seem to be extremely rare.

Similarly to the old version, difficulty is basically tied to where you start, in terms of alignment (there's a two attribute system for regions, where you can have an alignment of Good, Neutral or Evil cross-referenced with a rating in terms of how "wild" your region is) and in terms of biome (which can actually overlap each other). For instance, the fort that I'm working on at home is situated in an almost entirely flat forest, such that my "fort" is a collection of small buildings (including a 4-level tower) situated over/around a staircase dug into loam that eventually opens up into rock warrens sprawling over several z-levels.

This winds up being pretty "low" difficulty because farming is incredibly easy (I have a plot dug out in the loamy clay that overlies the rock and I can grow plump helmets there year-round without ever having to deal with irrigation) and there's trees everywhere, meaning that I'm rolling in food and wood pretty much immediately. The drawbacks are that I probably won't find much in terms of ore (the only metal that I've found so far is silver) and that there won't be any interesting features underground (cave river, chasms, magma). If I wanted something interesting and difficult, I could start in a named area, which is more likely to have interesting features and inhabitants (legends have been told of towers stretching higher than the mountains, filled with the undead).

So then, about the drink. My problem, even on my 'easy' map, is that there's no river, aboveground or otherwise. Meaning that my only option in terms of drink are standing pools of water (which I think may make my dwarves sick) that freeze solid during the winter. So the only source of liquid for my dwarves is whatever alcohol I can bring/brew. If I somehow am unable to create alcohol, I believe that this would lead to my dwarves dying of thirst. I imagine this becomes even more difficult on the high-altitude maps full of solid rock, where you must figure out some sort of irrigation or lose the whole colony.

There's also the issue of the new migrants having a lot of weird and mostly unusable skills. I've received a Milker and a Butcher, who have no skills outside of their specialties. They have been introduced to the wonderful world of hauling.
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 4:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some people on another forum badgered me into playing a rotating game with them, so I decided I should make some attempt to actually learn how all this works ahead of time. I'm sure I'm making rookie mistakes left and right--nobody thought to bring any axes, for example, meaning I can't cut wood and consequently have a bunch of dwarves standing around looking at each other most of the time. Scratchmonkey's talk about the importance of drink meant I set up right on top of an aquifer, which is great for drowning my hunters but not so great for finding stone. After boring my way half a mile into the earth I finally hit granite, so my stonemason should begin functioning pretty soon. I hope that's useful!
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 5:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, aquifiers make things difficult because getting below them is a little tricky. Apparently the trick with them is to wait until winter, where, if you're in a colder climate, the aquifier will freeze, enabling you to mine it out as ice and nothing flows into your excavation. Then, using the ability to build walls, you can then block off your shaft from the rest of the aquifier (you may have done this already) -- there's a tutorial on how to do this on the Wiki, which has been entirely moved over to the new version:

http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 7:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So is Dwarf Fortress officially the most complex videogame ever made yet?
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beige
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 3:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dwarf Fortress really isn't that complex to understand. The interface is just difficult to learn... once you get past that, the rest comes easily.
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 6:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've played some more of this game, and I've quite gotten the hang of it. I just hit the 50 population mark, and I've survived 3 winters thus far. Picking a location that is missing some sort of vital resource is very easy. Myself, for example, stuck in the middle of a marble mountain. There's rivers, lakes, loam/clay, but there's hardly any ore to be found. This is a problem when attempting to outfit my army. Wood and herbs are both plentiful, so I have everything covered except for metal. Out of all the things to miss though, stone I think is the worst.
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Shapermc
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 3:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

beige wrote:
Dwarf Fortress really isn't that complex to understand. The interface is just difficult to learn... once you get past that, the rest comes easily.

This is why reading other people's stories is fun, but playing it is frustrating.
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PostPosted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 4:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Missing stone is made a tiny bit easier now that you can rewall and build floors and walls out of wood. Are there maps where you wouldn't have stone at all? It seems like if you dig straight down long enough, you'll find some eventually (considering of course that aquifiers add a bit of difficulty to that).

My home fort is pretty much entirely without metal. The only metals that I've found are Native Silver and Bismuthintine -- the latter can be turned into a more valuable bronze by alloying it with tin and aluminum, the former makes things worth a lot; however, I believe that it's also soft, meaning that weapons and armor made out of it are less effective. I've sent a shaft all the way to the bottom of the region and haven't found anything else yet. I do have a near-endless supply of wood, so that does mean that at least I can crank out the silver items, which should aid in buying out caravans.

Of course, it remains to be seen what will happen with the dwarven caravan since the liason went insane (due to a bug where he won't leave with the caravan if he's meeting with your broker underground) and was beaten to death by my Administrator.
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bleak
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 6:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I've gotten quite adept at this game. I'm running a dwarf fortress which is nearly sans metal, my fortress is situated directly in the metamorphic layer which means the only metals I can get my hands on are copper and gold. Neither are very common. Anyway, if anyone wants to send me an IM about learning how to play the game, feel free. I'm also looking at you Dess.
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sad_genius
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 10:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shapermc wrote:
beige wrote:
Dwarf Fortress really isn't that complex to understand. The interface is just difficult to learn... once you get past that, the rest comes easily.

This is why reading other people's stories is fun, but playing it is frustrating.


One wonders if there might be a way for a more UI minded designer to skin Dwarf Fortress for friendlier usability.
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Bulkor
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 7:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Recently I heard there are zombie whales out there, and have been trying to start forts on "terrifying" or "haunted" beaches to find one. Unfortunately, that always means dealing with an aquifer as well, so I've gotten sidetracked trying to set up a system to pump out the aquifer. It turns out that you can set up a whole bunch of screw pumps on the level above the aquifer and pump out the water out of a small area quickly enough to allow mining or building. Of course there are plenty of ways this can go wrong, like: dwarves falling into channels and drowning, getting attacked during the long pump set-up process, or me not checking to see if the aquifer is multiple layers.

Meanwhile, I haven't even seen a whale yet, zombie or no, but I saw a lot of foul blendecs, whatever those are.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 12:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I got a report from Bulkor the other day that his fort had been wiped out by zombie whales. So watch out for those bastards, guys.

Also, Tarn Adams posted today that he'd ordered a Mac in preparations for porting DF over, which might make some people happy.

I took some pictures of my fort, which I will now share with you. It is somewhat regrettable that the new z-axis levels make showing off your constructions far more difficult. Keep in mind, we're going from surface down and luckily, my chosen region is pretty much entirely flat, so that makes it relatively easy to follow along.

Please note that I do change resolutions from level to level in order to show you what's going on. The first two levels, as well as the storage level, are examples of what the game looks like when you're playing it, the others are more zoomed-out.

Surface Level:



As you can see, I've handily labeled the screenshots for you guys. Here, we have a shot of a stream of dwarves coming in and out of the fort in order to deliver items/take items away from the trade depot, which is in the upper left corner. The depot is much "busier" visually than it normally is because it's currently occupied by a human trading caravan, dropping off various items (including a number of metal items that will be immediately melted down) in exchange for my rock crafts.

Immediately to the right of the depot is a small entrance to the fort, intended to reduce traffic on the 'main' entrance, something that wound up failing entirely because as you can see, all of the dwarves are still using the main entrance anyway. I'm going to have to take the door out of that small building and re-wall it at some point. The bottom right complex is a room built around the main staircase(s) down, then a larger retaining wall surrounding the outside farms, which are new to this version. I have four different crops running out there right now, all of which are being distilled into booze. The room around the entrance is actually a tower that extends 6 z-levels above the surface, I didn't include any of those shots because it's really kind of boring.

Second Level:



The first level down is all clay loam, which isn't so great for building -- perfect for farming though! At the bottom of the picture we have the stairs down ([X] denotes a staircase that goes both up and down) from the main entrance, which is right next to the underground farms, where you grow your plump helmets (and if you were smart and brought some unlike me, your quarry bushes). At the upper left, you have the stairs down from the trade depot entrance and a fairly weird hallway that goes over to some downward stairs.

Now, the blue wavy things are pools of water that extend down from surface level -- if you go to the surface picture, you can see how they line up. The area that I chose to settle in has one major issue -- there's no real permanent source of water. These pools freeze up during the winter, which means that if my dwarves want to drink, I better have made enough alcohol, otherwise they'll die of thirst. So, my plan is to build a vertical shaft that opens up into a larger underground area, then drain some or all of the pools into this area to create a cistern, which won't freeze during the winter. The next part of the plan involves digging the cistern itself, then I can start producing the pumps and pipes necessary to move the water from the pools.

Third Level:



This is the level where most of the dwarven workshops are, along the right-hand side. There's also a collection of clothing- and armor-related workshops next to the stairs from the trade depot entrance. Other main features of this floor include: the refuse storage (double-doored to prevent leakage of miasma), which is contained underground in order to retain bone and shell refuse, which is often required by dwarves who enter into moods; as well as the food storage, which is largely taken up by mined rock at this point, although I'm working on making the space usage more efficient by cooking loose food into meals, which take up less space, freeing barrels for the ever-important booze supply.

Fourth Level:



This is the level where most items are stored. Going clockwise from the upper left, we have cloth/clothing, finished items, more cloth, furniture, wood, bar/block (stone and wood) and silver ore (currently the only ore that exists in this fort). In the lower left, we have the kitchen and still. There are actually three separate up/down staircases on this level, allowing freer movement between the workshops, storage and the quarters.

Apparently somebody has left a plump helmet (the purple spade looking thing) in the furniture storeroom.

Fifth Level:



This is the level where most of the dwarves live. The common dwarves live in the warren of rooms that makes up the right/bottom right of this level. The blue stone is microcline, which aside from being blue, adds a small amount of value to any item that's made out of it and otherwise acts exactly like other stone types. I suspect that the rooms with microcline as part of their construction may be worth more once the economy starts and the dwarves start having to pay rent for their rooms; I don't have any solid evidence for this though.

The nobles (all two of them) live in the large complexes above the common warrens, right next to the jail, which is full of (silver) cages for any potential lawbreakers. To the left on this level is the meeting hall, which is constantly full of partying dwarves. No, seriously, those little bastards love to party and roughly 5-10% of your population is going to be in there whooping it up and generally shirking at any given time.

Below this there isn't much behind some mining corridors (mainly looking to see if there's anything other than silver on this map), although I am hoping to get the cistern built before next winter, since my booze supply rapidly fluctuates. In the long-term, I'd like to get a barracks built so that my fledgling military can start training and more importantly, I need to build some sort of citadel-type arrangement on the surface, walling off my original entrances so that there's only a single way to access the fort, around which I plan to build plenty of traps, as well as four towers, each with a siege engine at the top as well as ample space for crossbowdwarves to rain down pointy death on anybody who might try and invade.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2007 1:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So today a hydra showed up and totally ruined my shit. It spent a lot of time chasing dwarves around in circles outside the fort and then got inside, where the carnage was incredible, especially since it wandered straight to the meeting hall and started munching on the dwarves that are constantly partying there. Eventually I had the bright idea of drafting the entire fort into a single squad of recruits that then gang-tackled the thing. Luckily by that point it was "Over-Exerted" and was relatively easily smothered to death by a giant mass of rampaging dwarves.

Now the fort is full of blood and chunks, with the loss of about a dozen dwarves and a comparable number of animals. I did have a batch of migrants show up right after I'd dispatched the hydra, which at least means that I have somebody to do work while the rest of the fortress throws tantrums. However, their tantrum-throwing is spamming the hell out of the Announcements and I'm going to run into trouble during winter because I'll have a ton of caged dwarves (jailed for destroying items during their tantrums) and a ton of injured dwarves, all of which will die from thirst because all the water on the map freezes during the winter and apparently resting/caged dwarves can only be brought water, not alcohol. My cistern plan would have helped here, except the hydra attacked right as I was getting it set up.

The choice is whether to give this up as a lost cause or try and muddle through the next couple years of rampaging dwarves tearing their own fort apart in their grief and dozens of the little bastards dying of thirst.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 1:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I eventually abandoned the fort because I wasn't really looking forward to dealing with dozens of dwarves dying of dehydration because for some reason you can't feed them alcohol.

So, the new fort will be on a map with a river. And a volcano. And antmen. We'll see how long it lasts.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 11:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Oh man, right next to where my dwarves brought the wagon, the wall is made out of limestone, behind which? Magnetite. Next to that? Platinum.

And I can see some Hematite veins near the bottom of the map. Sweeeeeet.
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Bulkor
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey Scratch, was your previous fort near an "evil" area or some kind of named landmark? Or do hydras and other giant monsters just show up wherever they please?

My fort did indeed get mauled by zombie whales. Zombie fish tend to beach themselves in small packs and sort of flop around for a while; sometimes they'll wander down the shore and sometimes they'll just head back out to sea again. A school of five zombie whales washed ashore in the first winter, and then flopped all the way down to my fort. I'd unfortunately dug my fort right into the cliff at sea level (my wagon started out in the surf), so my dwarves were all running around screaming "job aborted" messages whenever they saw a whale, too freaked to even eat, drink or sleep.

I'd already lost my only combat-skilled dwarf and most of my war dogs to a zombie bluefin tuna invasion the month before, but I tried drafting the remaining six dwarves and giving some of them crappy wooden crossbows and iron bolts I'd bought off the first caravan, but apparently untrained marksdwarves like to shoot from a distance of two or three spaces. They got a bolt or two off apiece before whales wrestled them down and killed them. One whale did get downed by a stone-fall trap, though.

In bold defiance of that horrible lesson, though I'm on another terrifying ocean spot. I had the good fortune to start up on the cliff rather than the beach, so now the only path to the ocean is a squiggle covered in traps. There are zombie fish in the ocean, but they haven't really come up to harass me yet. I've tried building bridges over the ocean (it seems like there's no limit to how far you can build bridges out over the ocean) to agitate the evil marine life, but nothing so far. I'm tempted to send some marksdwarves out to snipe at the small school swimming at the map fringe, but I'm holding off because the military AI is so awful and nobody knows how to swim.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stuff like hydras/colossi/other horrible things will just show up at the drop of a hat, which taught me that I shouldn't be so nonchalant about developing a military fairly early on in the game (or not developing one, as the case might have been).

My new fort is just ridiculous in terms of riches. Limestone, magnetite, platinum, hematite and maybe best of all, malachite. I say best of all because if there's large deposits of largely useless metal, I can use that to make mundane items and save the good stuff for trade goods/arming my dwarves. I'm just hoping that I'll find some coal or lignite veins, add onto that that there's magma in them thar hills and if I don't fuck it up, I should be swimming in steel with enough leftovers to churn out bins and barrels galore. Of course, I will probably fuck it up and die from monsters from the volcano. Ah, these things happen.

It was pointed out on the wiki that sand/loam/soil is not only useful because you can build farms without agriculture; you can also use it to dig out storage rooms since digging through these substances doesn't create any random boulders, which is fantastic for when you want to be able to throw some stuff in a room and don't want to have to haul stone to a dump/stockpile in order to free up more space.

In my other fort, things have juddered to a horrible state of lag after a kobold thief made off with a steel shield worth 3000 dwarven monies when I stupidly left it in the trade depot rather than building an armor stockpile. We'll see if it lasts.
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Bulkor
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 1:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Had my first siege recently. It was the usual size for your first one, 15 or so goblins. I'd heard that there was a bug that stopped sieges from actually, yaknow, sieging, and that said bug got fixed in the latest patch, but these guys still just loitered around the map edge. They killed a hauler when he went out to get some logs near them I'd forgotten to "forbid", or mark to be ignored, and then shot down one of the elven merchants on his way out of the map. (that time I'd learned my lesson and quickly marked his corpse, his clothes and all his unsold rope reed cloth as "forbidden" the moment he died) Other than that, nothing.

My military at this point was limited to my required allotment of fortress guards and three marksdwarves. The goblins didn't have great stats, but half of them had crossbows, so I didn't really want to chance taking them head-on. Instead, I set up two catapults about 20 squares south of them, with a small stockpile of stone, and started lobbing rocks. I'd been using catapults along with screw pumps as busy work for migrants with useless skills for half a year or so, but even with "very agile", trained siege operators it takes around a minute to load a catapult. On top of that, the goblins had a little Brownian motion going on and frequently fidgeted out of the way of rocks. Eventually, though, I was able to kill about half of them with rocks, at which point they called off the siege and went home.

Having never actually hit a damn thing with a catapult before, I found it to be very satisfying. The victim immediately gets crippled and thrown a bunch of squares back. If they don't take a shot directly to the head or body and die immediately, they usually die from blood loss a few minutes later. The flying body of a catapult victim also has enough force to break a few limbs and cause heavy bleeding, so a few times I lucked out and killed two goblins with one stone, hyuck hyuck.

It turns out I polished them off just in time for the human caravan to come rolling in over their bodies, which is good both because that caravan won't get wiped out now, and I can utterly clean it out with all the goods I'm now looting off the goblin corpses. Goblins sure love expensive silk clothing, for whatever reason.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 2:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, no, sieges are still hella bugged. I think the release schedule has been changed from Friday to Saturday, so I'm expected a new release today, although I haven't seen the siege bug get addressed in Tarn's notes yet, so I don't think that'll be resolved anytime soon.

Which is okay because getting a military up and running is kind of rough. I haven't even made it to the first wave of immigrants in my new fort, meaning that for right now it's just infrastructure time. I am being a little more careful in terms of defending my fort, which means that I'm limiting entrances and covering that entrance with traps. Most of my rooms have been dug out of loam, which allows me to dig much more rapidly as well as not have to deal with lots of stone lying around taking up space in storage areas.

My next task is going to be to create enough steel to create a steel grate and the workshops necessary to start magma-related metal production. I've scoured the outside of the rock cliffs pretty throughly and unfortunately I haven't found any fuel, either coal or lignite. There's the chance that it's just further down; however, no veins show up in the chasm area which runs all the way through the map and digging deep has risks associated with it, so I might just have to get by with what I can log and trade for.
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Bulkor
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 5:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A military really is a hassle to get running. It takes a lot of metal and leather to make equipment, and a whole mess of bone or wood to get your marksdwarves trained. I guess the early sieges are the replacement for underground monsters, though, since not every fort has to deal with river or chasm or lava critters now. In retrospect I probably should've been getting dwarves pumping themselves up and sparring since the first immigrant wave, but what can you do.

The vile forces of darkness are back, in two squads totaling around 30-ish gobs. Of course, they're still bugged and just wandering around. Catapulting them has been harder this time; one group's down on the beach, and I can't figure out how siege engines and altitude work. The other group wandered close enough to a catapult to notice and kill the operator. I've only taken out five of them so far.

In other news, my mayor had my legendary armorsmith crippled for not making electrum items, when there is no gold to be found anywhere. Two fortress guards have had babies and carry their children with them while sparring. I've almost built a bridge out to a solitary zombie basking shark, but am going to put zombie sealife harassment on hold until the current siege has passed.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 3:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I thought I was smart by digging a channel system to create a nice indoor water source, rewalling along the original tunnel so as to keep anything non-swimming out, giving my dwarves something that they can use to give water to injured dwarves, etc.

Except then one of my original miners fell in and just paddled around in the pool for a season or so while the rest of my dwarves dithered instead of building the bridges/staircases that I wanted them to. Finally, they got around to building a staircase out of the pool and he clambered out.

Only to die of starvation one step away from the food stockpile.
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Scratchmonkey
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 3:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also, there's a pretty big bug with 33e (the latest version at time of writing) -- if you're using silt or sand as your underground farms, they are suddenly being converted to "Above Ground" and "Light", meaning that it will be much more difficult to grow underground crops in this version.
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Bulkor
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's a huge bug, although I seem to have lucked out of it by putting my farm plots two levels below ground.

I've been running DF in the background lately, since I can't really do anything ambitious with the gobs around and catapults are a slow operation. However, I have noticed some things about catapults. First, they're actually targeted. Although the stone doesn't actually arc through the Z-levels on the display, it won't hit anything until the end of its flight, unlike a ballista arrow. I also figured out how catapults work on different Z-levels: they don't. You can never ever hit anything below you. All in all, catapults kind of stink. (a catapult one level above the ground with no targets available will always huck a stone 30 squares away, though, and can sort of be used as a rock delivery system for building roads)

At some point the gobs took off, although it looks like I only managed to kill eight or nine of them total. Aaand they'll probably be back soon.

Scratch, how much swimming experience did your miner get before he starved? And how did the other workers ignore the job for a whole season? Were they partying? I ask about the swimming because my current dumb idea is to develop an amphibious fighting force by semi-flooding a room (with water at a height of 2 or 3) and then stationing my military in it for weeks at a time.
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