Nutscaves went on to do a few assorted other projects. The population grew some more, and the fortress began Project Beloved Creatures (as well as Project Beloved Objects in Beloved Materials).
Nutscaves was used to test weaponization of 12,600-degree iron arrows, and some other facts about weaponizing heat and magma. (It was established that 12,600-degree iron arrows were not any more useful than any other temperature of iron arrows against goblins.)
Because of the wide array of knowledge I gained while overseeing Nutscaves, I was proudly able to help other players for a long time to come.
The most interesting thing about the fortress, to me, was the way that every time there was a terrible wave of death, the survivors were mostly of two types: the murderers who went on a rampage, but didn't go all the way off the deep end—and the dwarves who didn't care. Dwarves who cracked died. Dwarves who ran screaming from a tantrummer with a battle axe almost always died. The kindest dwarves who helped the others and tried to rescue them, usually died to whatever hurt their buddy. And the next wave of migrants never knew what they were getting into until/unless word got out.
Don't get me wrong. I was horrified. Traumatized. At a loss for words. I needed to know what would happen next, though. So I kept going.
No single survivor at Nutscaves survived for more than about ten years there. The toughest murderers nearly all died eventually to plague, and in one or two cases they got murdered themselves during future tantrum spirals.
Nutscaves went on for several more dwarven years, but its quarantine procedures, defenses, and my own skills as a player had become so strong that nothing interesting ever seemed like it would happen there again. We also seemed to have captured all the wildlife outside the fortress, and the goblins soon feared to invade us. I am sure it was only a matter of time before some more !!fun!!, but soon I grew bored waiting for it. Months after I stopped playing Nutscaves, I realized I should pop open the door to hell at the bottom of the fortress, but by then DF2012 was out, and I decided to move on. My next fortress, in DF2012, was Earthsplatter, where the world was destroyed by vampires.
Showing posts with label Story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Story. Show all posts
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Why to use fire-safe materials when sealing caverns
Well, we had some more accidents at Nutscaves. (...) One of the dwarves whose spouse was killed by the recent bout of plague tantrummed a bunch of times. His name is Ezum Fedtome. He was assigned a royal dining room and bedroom, and had been comforted by the lovely waterfall, but it wasn't enough.
Ezum Fedtome knew exactly what he wanted to do during his final tantrum, too. He stomped out of his royal bedroom, marched past the roast stockpiles in a rage, headed up the main stairway, past the forges and the dining hall and the hospital, and proceeded all the way through the fort, past the farms, past the trade depot...and then he was outside under a starry winter sky. He stood in the center of the vomit-covered drawbridge which makes the sole entrance to Nutscaves, and he did the unthinkable.
He destroyed it.
He fell crashing down, along with the bridge, onto the upright spears underneath, where he was merely injured. I had deliberately left the spears upright instead of retracting them when I saw what he was up to, because dwarves who destroy the entrance drawbridge are not welcome in Nutscaves.
Ezum pulled himself off the spears, calmed down, and went about his business. I may execute him for his terrible crime later. I'm still considering it. His four children are all ecstatic despite the dead mother. He's the only one who insists on continuing to have a problem.
(I am sorry Armok's heart probably seems to have grown so hard.)
We had to spend the rest of the winter frantically rebuilding the drawbridge and reconnecting it to its lever. The bridge is long and because of its size, it takes a very long time for the architects to design and build. This is extremely time consuming work and Armok was very, very displeased. Without the drawbridge we are completely disconnected from the outside world, and if a siege came we would be trapped underground forever.
As the masons finished reconstructing the bridge and the mechanics got to work linking the lever, the fortress was attacked by a very terrible forgotten beast. Of course the beast waited to attack until a dwarf had trapped himself in the spear corridor in the deepest cavern. Mechanisms were still not connected from the last beast attack--the dwarves had been too busy with the drawbridge over the winter. The trapped dwarf was unable to get himself out before the beast destroyed the floodgate separating them.
The beast is the most terrifying (to me) one I've seen yet. "Nokgol Sodkun", a gigantic hairy lacewing, with an enormous shell and a bloated body. Its russet hair is long and wavy. Beware its fire!
Its fire.
Its fire.
Its FIRE.
Why didn't I use fire-safe materials to construct the entrances to the caverns??? What was I thinking???
When the mighty lacewing tore down the "warning" floodgate, it blew a wave of fire at the helpless dwarf. The wave of fire lit up all the wooden spears in the traps and some clothing a stupid, sloppy dwarven child, in need of a stern talking-to, had left behind. Then the marble floodgate connecting the spear corridor to the designated combat area caught fire.
Yes, the marble floodgate. Flux materials are "considered fire-safe", but apparently only when they're used in the production of steel. @#*$!! Put them in front of an angry fire-breathing lacewing and nothing good will happen!
The !!*Marble Floodgate*!! was holding up for the time being, despite running with flames on both sides. The fire spread rapidly to engulf all the plant life and soil in the fighting room. I hadn't had time to floor it properly yet. I had considered that task low priority, since I had been keeping it clear of trees, and trees were the only previous reason I knew why I ought to floor it. (That and plague contaminants, but we hadn't had any yet in this cavern.) Some soldiers had been waiting in that room to fight the beast when it came in, but that was before I realized how I ought to
BEWARE ITS FIRE.
The nearest soldiers' clothes caught fire and smoke filled the room. I realized the trapped dwarf was good and dead, and the beast was standing on the spikes now as it worked on destroying the flaming marble floodgate between it and the soldiers. So I commanded the dwarves in the dining hall to man the spikes. And I commanded the soldiers to run out of the area through the bathtub.
Who knew--dwarven bathtubs are great for more than one reason! The bathtub doused their !!clothes!!, and is preventing the fire from spreading into the fortress.
I am a little bit annoyed at this beast. And at Ezum Fedtome. If our hairy lacewing manages to kill anybody else, I'm going to stick Ezum in a cage. I'm not sure for how long.
Back to conquering it...
Ezum Fedtome knew exactly what he wanted to do during his final tantrum, too. He stomped out of his royal bedroom, marched past the roast stockpiles in a rage, headed up the main stairway, past the forges and the dining hall and the hospital, and proceeded all the way through the fort, past the farms, past the trade depot...and then he was outside under a starry winter sky. He stood in the center of the vomit-covered drawbridge which makes the sole entrance to Nutscaves, and he did the unthinkable.
He destroyed it.
He fell crashing down, along with the bridge, onto the upright spears underneath, where he was merely injured. I had deliberately left the spears upright instead of retracting them when I saw what he was up to, because dwarves who destroy the entrance drawbridge are not welcome in Nutscaves.
Ezum pulled himself off the spears, calmed down, and went about his business. I may execute him for his terrible crime later. I'm still considering it. His four children are all ecstatic despite the dead mother. He's the only one who insists on continuing to have a problem.
(I am sorry Armok's heart probably seems to have grown so hard.)
We had to spend the rest of the winter frantically rebuilding the drawbridge and reconnecting it to its lever. The bridge is long and because of its size, it takes a very long time for the architects to design and build. This is extremely time consuming work and Armok was very, very displeased. Without the drawbridge we are completely disconnected from the outside world, and if a siege came we would be trapped underground forever.
As the masons finished reconstructing the bridge and the mechanics got to work linking the lever, the fortress was attacked by a very terrible forgotten beast. Of course the beast waited to attack until a dwarf had trapped himself in the spear corridor in the deepest cavern. Mechanisms were still not connected from the last beast attack--the dwarves had been too busy with the drawbridge over the winter. The trapped dwarf was unable to get himself out before the beast destroyed the floodgate separating them.
The beast is the most terrifying (to me) one I've seen yet. "Nokgol Sodkun", a gigantic hairy lacewing, with an enormous shell and a bloated body. Its russet hair is long and wavy. Beware its fire!
Its fire.
Its fire.
Its FIRE.
Why didn't I use fire-safe materials to construct the entrances to the caverns??? What was I thinking???
When the mighty lacewing tore down the "warning" floodgate, it blew a wave of fire at the helpless dwarf. The wave of fire lit up all the wooden spears in the traps and some clothing a stupid, sloppy dwarven child, in need of a stern talking-to, had left behind. Then the marble floodgate connecting the spear corridor to the designated combat area caught fire.
Yes, the marble floodgate. Flux materials are "considered fire-safe", but apparently only when they're used in the production of steel. @#*$!! Put them in front of an angry fire-breathing lacewing and nothing good will happen!
The !!*Marble Floodgate*!! was holding up for the time being, despite running with flames on both sides. The fire spread rapidly to engulf all the plant life and soil in the fighting room. I hadn't had time to floor it properly yet. I had considered that task low priority, since I had been keeping it clear of trees, and trees were the only previous reason I knew why I ought to floor it. (That and plague contaminants, but we hadn't had any yet in this cavern.) Some soldiers had been waiting in that room to fight the beast when it came in, but that was before I realized how I ought to
BEWARE ITS FIRE.
The nearest soldiers' clothes caught fire and smoke filled the room. I realized the trapped dwarf was good and dead, and the beast was standing on the spikes now as it worked on destroying the flaming marble floodgate between it and the soldiers. So I commanded the dwarves in the dining hall to man the spikes. And I commanded the soldiers to run out of the area through the bathtub.
Who knew--dwarven bathtubs are great for more than one reason! The bathtub doused their !!clothes!!, and is preventing the fire from spreading into the fortress.
I am a little bit annoyed at this beast. And at Ezum Fedtome. If our hairy lacewing manages to kill anybody else, I'm going to stick Ezum in a cage. I'm not sure for how long.
Back to conquering it...
Food fight
So one of the doctors at Nutscaves is finally fed up with the flies and being nauseated by the sun. She is throwing a tantrum in a food stockpile, hurling roasts at anyone who comes near. She started by fracturing the mayor's head with a sheep tripe roast, and she's still on a rampage.
I'm trying to build a mist generator.
I'm trying to build a mist generator.
Too many goblins!
So Nutscaves pulled through the recent tragedies, though we still have over a dozen dwarves wandering around slowly with fever and extreme swelling. Ticking time bomb or totally safe? Hard to tell.
With the autumn siege of 267, combined with hauling all the previous goblin crap to the trade depot to buy all the iron the human traders brought--Armok has realized there is a problem.
The problem is that the goblins and their buddies (trolls, namely) just bring too much crap to the fortress. The particular goblin civilization that attacks Nutscaves, The Tame Disloyalty, does not have good access even to the weakest of metals. Most of their troops arrive wearing a low quality, emblemmed copper breastplate and helm, with low quality troll fur or spider silk clothing to fill in the rest of their "armor". Their weapons are usually copper. Their veteran goblins wear the same, but sometimes have a silver weapon. The masters and captains usually wear a few pieces of iron or steel.
I've seen other goblin civilizations, such as the one at my last fortress, that can afford to outfit every last goblin in full steel. So I know it could happen. But at Nutscaves it doesn't.
Armok added the masterwork copper and bismuth bronze menacing spikes that Sarvesh, our now-legendary weaponsmith, skilled up on, to the entrance spikes. (I couldn't melt the darn things..she'd tantrum.) This beefed up the spikes a great deal, especially considering that even our best-armored foes are usually wearing mere cloth over most of their bodies. (And the traps I beefed up had been just small sets of wooden training spears, before.)
As a result of the upgrade, we're getting a lot more corpses a lot faster during sieges as a result, and the resulting heap of bloody cloth outside the fortress is becoming...mountainous. It's getting difficult to drag it just the thirty paces indoors, to the stockpile next to the trade depot, in any reasonable amount of time. Then the junky goblin armor consumes a lot of bins, and the spider silk stuff is annoyingly valuable, making it hard to trade it all away.
Hauling it down to the magma has become a bit problematic, because Armok is sometimes having to use dumps to store other unwieldy things Armok accidentally overstocked, like magma-safe hatches and pump components. So I have to make sure nothing else in the fortress that I want to keep, is marked for dumping when I send items down to the sea. I'm a little overwhelmed with the level of micromanagement needed to get rid of all this junk.
There is enough of it that the trade depot filter screen is getting a little slow--something I had proudly prevented until recently. I enjoy keeping my fortress interface running smoothly and at a good framerate, and having the filters respond quickly to keystrokes. There's way too much crap in the fortress now.
There are several possible solutions I've considered:
1. Don't let the goblins enter the map. But Armok likes the goblins. The goblins give us purpose, meaning, and most importantly, entertainment in several forms.
2. Who cares about the items I might accidentally destroy...I can always dig up more quartzite and replace them. There's at least one whole rock level of it under us that hasn't been dug out. But Armok hates digging and (s)he hates the possibility of dumping some masterwork item while the fort is currently at its unhappiest since the Tantrum Spirals of Wiping. Armok can take this solution but Armok would like something better.
3. Armok was thinking to him-/herself: "If only I could set up a trap that sorted out the steel and iron items from the goblins, and dumped the others into the magma--"
And then it dawned on Armok. A substance in the fortress exists that can do just what Armok desires! It is the preferred substance of the best and mightiest builders: the magma itself! And Armok finally understands why the great builders would go to such lengths to utilize this substance!
Magma kills goblins and trolls, and all their other buddies that sometimes come along. It burns up everything they wear except iron and steel. When drained, it leaves nearly-molten-hot iron and steel items--but they can be cooled by being dunked in water.
Armok has theoretically infinite access to magma. Armok has infinite access to water. Does Armok dare build the deadliest trap Armok has ever seriously conceived of?
Previously the spikes were the deadliest trap Armok had ever dared employ. Just a few months ago, a veteran dwarf soldier in full fortress-forged, high-quality steel plate was accidentally killed by one in a single hit. (Oops.) But other than that, Armok has successfully kept the dwarves quite safe from the spikes. Can Armok keep the dwarves safe from the magma?
There is the question of what type of trap to design.
Trap Design 1. Some builders bring their magma to the surface and flood their entry bridge with it, then atom-smash the magma to drain. Armok could do that, but in Nutscaves it would be very tough. The holes in our aquifer aren't big enough to fit more plumbing (the current "surface" magma rests two layers below the aquifer, powering the forges), and Armok's magma piston isn't currently reusable either, after the Great Collapse of 263. Making the magma piston reusable once more isn't a huge deal, because it just involves some building, and extending water plumbing that was designed with this type of extension in mind. But, Armok would have to deconstruct an awful lot of stuff and tear massive holes in the top of the fortress, to freeze large enough openings in the aquifer to fit plumbing. This would probably take several tense winters of carefully-planned building.
Or I would have to painstakingly open the aquifer the "normal" way, with pumps, after carefully deciphering a diagram with lots of ASCII symbols, and which wasn't drawn with readability or order of operations particularly in mind... Haha, yeah right!
Armok has not particularly enjoyed freezing through this particular aquifer--Armok has done it twice now, once to make a path and the second time to widen it. (It's annoying because the aquifer is two layers tall, and it's several layers below the surface, and it has to be frozen-through in a funnel shape. The "funnel" I had to dig just to wind up with a 3x3 stairway in it was massive and very disruptive to fortress traffic.)
Trap Design 2. I could build or remodel a room below the aquifer, capable of being filled with magma, and drained, and then cooled with water. (Alternately, I also have a "room" in the fortress that is full of magma, and conveniently placed at the bottom of a hundred-ish-story air shaft. It could be easily modified to be drainable and refillable.) Then, all prisoners that behave themselves (non-thieves) could be melted in there--and I wouldn't have to bother stripping equipment from those types of prisoners anymore either. Unfortunately my current trap system (due to being very lethal) only allows me to pick up about a dozen prisoners from each siege, though, and I like to use prisoners for soldier practice. (It's the non-prisoners I want to melt.) During sieges, another two dozen goblins-and-co. tend to die to one of the two strips of spikes, or weapon traps, and the rest run away.
Trap Design 3. I could simply kill less goblins. I could remove high-quality metal components from traps, and stop spilling so many of the attackers into the spike room below the drawbridge. This would reduce the amount of clothing and other general crap I wind up with. However, my common sense tells me that decreasing defenses in order to potentially allow more or stronger attackers to get into the fortress, is not the smartest way to deal with our little trash problem.
Trap Design 4. I think what I'd really like, is to be able to flood the spike room under the drawbridge with magma at will. (While also retaining the ability to decide whether or not to use the magma, such as if I want to keep a special corpse for butchering, or some piece of treasure.) This would mean removing any weapon components in there that are not magma-safe (not a problem--hello Sarvesh!).
Getting water in there to cool it afterward would be a real pita, though, because the area is considered "Above Ground", and water will freeze as it enters the room at frozen times of year, which sometimes happen to correspond with sieges. The freezing water will create an ice plug, jamming the whole system.
The tiles of my spike room are considered "Above Ground" because the natural rock above them has been removed (when the drawbridge was built). (Even if something is built above "Above Ground" tiles, they can never become Subterranean again. It's similar to being infected with dreaded Light.)
So what I need to be able to do, I think, if I want to be able to melt the prisoners that get dropped under the bridge--is to find a way to lure them into a Subterranean area that can then be sealed (and then flooded with magma, drained, and cooled with water). Luring them (such as with a chained rabbit) would need to take into account that they may have long-range weapons, and one shot can potentially kill the lure, stopping it from working.
I've thought about using a locked door to protect my, say, chained rabbit from real harm--since that's what I use to get my giant cave spider to shoot silk at that poor dog in the weavers' area. I believe the goblins can either unlock doors (because they're sentient), or that they just won't bother trying to path through one (and so won't be interested in the rabbit), though. (In 40d it was the latter, but I've read on the magmawiki that it's the former, and magmawiki has been wrong so many times--so I don't know this for certain until I test it myself.) Well, I don't think a locked door will be right for this.
I remember a trap design I saw in 40d where a goat was tied up at the center of a long spiral path. As invaders entered the path, a floodgate went up to protect the goat, and the invaders got doused in magma. This is effective against goblin archers, and I use a design based on it for my trade depot entrance. It does have some problems, though, like it's kind of slow. (Goblins don't just charge in.) And in 31.25, unlike 40d, pathing is blocked by 1/7 depth evaporating magma. Magma takes a really long time to evaporate.
Well. I'll think about it some more.
With the autumn siege of 267, combined with hauling all the previous goblin crap to the trade depot to buy all the iron the human traders brought--Armok has realized there is a problem.
The problem is that the goblins and their buddies (trolls, namely) just bring too much crap to the fortress. The particular goblin civilization that attacks Nutscaves, The Tame Disloyalty, does not have good access even to the weakest of metals. Most of their troops arrive wearing a low quality, emblemmed copper breastplate and helm, with low quality troll fur or spider silk clothing to fill in the rest of their "armor". Their weapons are usually copper. Their veteran goblins wear the same, but sometimes have a silver weapon. The masters and captains usually wear a few pieces of iron or steel.
I've seen other goblin civilizations, such as the one at my last fortress, that can afford to outfit every last goblin in full steel. So I know it could happen. But at Nutscaves it doesn't.
Armok added the masterwork copper and bismuth bronze menacing spikes that Sarvesh, our now-legendary weaponsmith, skilled up on, to the entrance spikes. (I couldn't melt the darn things..she'd tantrum.) This beefed up the spikes a great deal, especially considering that even our best-armored foes are usually wearing mere cloth over most of their bodies. (And the traps I beefed up had been just small sets of wooden training spears, before.)
As a result of the upgrade, we're getting a lot more corpses a lot faster during sieges as a result, and the resulting heap of bloody cloth outside the fortress is becoming...mountainous. It's getting difficult to drag it just the thirty paces indoors, to the stockpile next to the trade depot, in any reasonable amount of time. Then the junky goblin armor consumes a lot of bins, and the spider silk stuff is annoyingly valuable, making it hard to trade it all away.
Hauling it down to the magma has become a bit problematic, because Armok is sometimes having to use dumps to store other unwieldy things Armok accidentally overstocked, like magma-safe hatches and pump components. So I have to make sure nothing else in the fortress that I want to keep, is marked for dumping when I send items down to the sea. I'm a little overwhelmed with the level of micromanagement needed to get rid of all this junk.
There is enough of it that the trade depot filter screen is getting a little slow--something I had proudly prevented until recently. I enjoy keeping my fortress interface running smoothly and at a good framerate, and having the filters respond quickly to keystrokes. There's way too much crap in the fortress now.
There are several possible solutions I've considered:
1. Don't let the goblins enter the map. But Armok likes the goblins. The goblins give us purpose, meaning, and most importantly, entertainment in several forms.
2. Who cares about the items I might accidentally destroy...I can always dig up more quartzite and replace them. There's at least one whole rock level of it under us that hasn't been dug out. But Armok hates digging and (s)he hates the possibility of dumping some masterwork item while the fort is currently at its unhappiest since the Tantrum Spirals of Wiping. Armok can take this solution but Armok would like something better.
3. Armok was thinking to him-/herself: "If only I could set up a trap that sorted out the steel and iron items from the goblins, and dumped the others into the magma--"
And then it dawned on Armok. A substance in the fortress exists that can do just what Armok desires! It is the preferred substance of the best and mightiest builders: the magma itself! And Armok finally understands why the great builders would go to such lengths to utilize this substance!
Magma kills goblins and trolls, and all their other buddies that sometimes come along. It burns up everything they wear except iron and steel. When drained, it leaves nearly-molten-hot iron and steel items--but they can be cooled by being dunked in water.
Armok has theoretically infinite access to magma. Armok has infinite access to water. Does Armok dare build the deadliest trap Armok has ever seriously conceived of?
Previously the spikes were the deadliest trap Armok had ever dared employ. Just a few months ago, a veteran dwarf soldier in full fortress-forged, high-quality steel plate was accidentally killed by one in a single hit. (Oops.) But other than that, Armok has successfully kept the dwarves quite safe from the spikes. Can Armok keep the dwarves safe from the magma?
There is the question of what type of trap to design.
Trap Design 1. Some builders bring their magma to the surface and flood their entry bridge with it, then atom-smash the magma to drain. Armok could do that, but in Nutscaves it would be very tough. The holes in our aquifer aren't big enough to fit more plumbing (the current "surface" magma rests two layers below the aquifer, powering the forges), and Armok's magma piston isn't currently reusable either, after the Great Collapse of 263. Making the magma piston reusable once more isn't a huge deal, because it just involves some building, and extending water plumbing that was designed with this type of extension in mind. But, Armok would have to deconstruct an awful lot of stuff and tear massive holes in the top of the fortress, to freeze large enough openings in the aquifer to fit plumbing. This would probably take several tense winters of carefully-planned building.
Or I would have to painstakingly open the aquifer the "normal" way, with pumps, after carefully deciphering a diagram with lots of ASCII symbols, and which wasn't drawn with readability or order of operations particularly in mind... Haha, yeah right!
Armok has not particularly enjoyed freezing through this particular aquifer--Armok has done it twice now, once to make a path and the second time to widen it. (It's annoying because the aquifer is two layers tall, and it's several layers below the surface, and it has to be frozen-through in a funnel shape. The "funnel" I had to dig just to wind up with a 3x3 stairway in it was massive and very disruptive to fortress traffic.)
Trap Design 2. I could build or remodel a room below the aquifer, capable of being filled with magma, and drained, and then cooled with water. (Alternately, I also have a "room" in the fortress that is full of magma, and conveniently placed at the bottom of a hundred-ish-story air shaft. It could be easily modified to be drainable and refillable.) Then, all prisoners that behave themselves (non-thieves) could be melted in there--and I wouldn't have to bother stripping equipment from those types of prisoners anymore either. Unfortunately my current trap system (due to being very lethal) only allows me to pick up about a dozen prisoners from each siege, though, and I like to use prisoners for soldier practice. (It's the non-prisoners I want to melt.) During sieges, another two dozen goblins-and-co. tend to die to one of the two strips of spikes, or weapon traps, and the rest run away.
Trap Design 3. I could simply kill less goblins. I could remove high-quality metal components from traps, and stop spilling so many of the attackers into the spike room below the drawbridge. This would reduce the amount of clothing and other general crap I wind up with. However, my common sense tells me that decreasing defenses in order to potentially allow more or stronger attackers to get into the fortress, is not the smartest way to deal with our little trash problem.
Trap Design 4. I think what I'd really like, is to be able to flood the spike room under the drawbridge with magma at will. (While also retaining the ability to decide whether or not to use the magma, such as if I want to keep a special corpse for butchering, or some piece of treasure.) This would mean removing any weapon components in there that are not magma-safe (not a problem--hello Sarvesh!).
Getting water in there to cool it afterward would be a real pita, though, because the area is considered "Above Ground", and water will freeze as it enters the room at frozen times of year, which sometimes happen to correspond with sieges. The freezing water will create an ice plug, jamming the whole system.
The tiles of my spike room are considered "Above Ground" because the natural rock above them has been removed (when the drawbridge was built). (Even if something is built above "Above Ground" tiles, they can never become Subterranean again. It's similar to being infected with dreaded Light.)
So what I need to be able to do, I think, if I want to be able to melt the prisoners that get dropped under the bridge--is to find a way to lure them into a Subterranean area that can then be sealed (and then flooded with magma, drained, and cooled with water). Luring them (such as with a chained rabbit) would need to take into account that they may have long-range weapons, and one shot can potentially kill the lure, stopping it from working.
I've thought about using a locked door to protect my, say, chained rabbit from real harm--since that's what I use to get my giant cave spider to shoot silk at that poor dog in the weavers' area. I believe the goblins can either unlock doors (because they're sentient), or that they just won't bother trying to path through one (and so won't be interested in the rabbit), though. (In 40d it was the latter, but I've read on the magmawiki that it's the former, and magmawiki has been wrong so many times--so I don't know this for certain until I test it myself.) Well, I don't think a locked door will be right for this.
I remember a trap design I saw in 40d where a goat was tied up at the center of a long spiral path. As invaders entered the path, a floodgate went up to protect the goat, and the invaders got doused in magma. This is effective against goblin archers, and I use a design based on it for my trade depot entrance. It does have some problems, though, like it's kind of slow. (Goblins don't just charge in.) And in 31.25, unlike 40d, pathing is blocked by 1/7 depth evaporating magma. Magma takes a really long time to evaporate.
Well. I'll think about it some more.
Winter 266, Nutscaves
So the winter of 266 didn't go well at Nutscaves. We've had another series of terrible accidents. I hope the worst is past now, but there's still a forgotten beast composed of undulating snow flying around in one of the caverns, and we need to get in there quite desperately (...facepalm). So maybe it's not over yet.
I suppose the trouble began with Armok saying in the early autumn, "Hmm, things are getting a little dull at Nutscaves. Let's spice it up by quickly cleaning up some garbage outside the fortress, before the usual siege time arrives."
266 was certainly a pretty dull year until winter. Spring through mid-autumn consisted of mostly-normal trading, one siege, a handful of routine prisoner executions, the long-awaited full coverage of the military in high quality steel plate, a very minor plague incident, and the bricking-up of most of the remaining soil floor. (Soil is always just begging to get contaminated.) A lot of stockpiles were moved or rearranged for construction purposes, but not much other serious work occurred during the year. We also had to temporarily shut down the farms at the start of winter because our food and booze stockpiles were overflowing and the fortress was getting increasingly full of rats. A lot of dwarves were mad about the rats, but it was nothing serious.
So in early autumn Armok designated some junk to pick up from the far corner of the great outdoors, and the haulers cheerfully proceeded out of the fortress in a line. They were just glad to have some work to do. Armok hoped nothing would go wrong.
The haulers tidied the mess quickly. But after the dwarfstorm converged on the junk pile and headed back to the fortress, there was one item left on the ground to pick up. It was a low quality cedar training spear.
(Of course it had to be that. Something totally useless, and worth about four dwarfbucks.)
The haulers dumped the items in the designated area just inside the fort entrance. One particularly quick hauler, a skinny eighty-nine year old woman who was so quick partly because she was wearing absolutely nothing but gloves and shoes--volunteered to rush back outside and get the spear. She was called Shorast Tiredgild, and there was nothing tired about her. She was quick and agile and strong, and has amazing willpower and self-discipline. No wonder she volunteered to go pick up the last item. And so the other haulers cheered at her offering, and gladly went down to the new stoneware brick bar, to start celebrating a job well done.
And so, the sprightly and mostly-naked Shorast Tiredgild ventured back outside, alone, to pick up the near-worthless cedar training spear in the far corner of Nutscaves' small corner of The Tufted Desert.
And so tragedy began to strike. Let's take a look at what happened at the magma furnaces in the meanwhile:
In recent times, Nutscaves had been training a very promising potter. We currently employ a total of only three potters: two came to the fortress very skilled, and our third one, Kumil Glorieshammer, was selected to be trained from a low skill level simply for her very impressively high potting potential. Kumil Glorieshammer is a 57-year-old woman, fat and with silver eyes, cinnamon skin, and a clean-shaven head. (She is probably fat because she has a great love of most of Nutscaves' most commonly-produced dishes, especially the Longland flour.) She started out making crappy, hard-to-identify stoneware statues I had to offload on the traders--but she moved up to High Master Potter very quickly and was well on her way to Grand Master, like the other potters.
And so, as sprightly Shorast the hauler left the fortress, Kumil Glorieshammer was suddenly possessed by the desire to create an artifact! Armok was overjoyed because it would mean that Kumil would beat the other two potters to Legendary status, and Armok was quite excited to possibly get a stoneware artifact for Nutscaves!
But no. It was not to be. Anything Armok wants so much, Armok may not have.
Armok was very puzzled as (s)he watched Kumil Glorieshammer abandon her station at the kiln. Then Armok realized Kumil was probably heading to the regular, non-magma-powered kiln. Armok shrugged. Armok felt anticipation. Armok made some designations around the fortress while Kumil made her way downstairs.
Then Kumil kept going down the stairs, right past the wood shop and its non-magma-powered kiln. "Kumil! Wrong way!" cried Armok.
Kumil stopped at the bone room and claimed a crafter's workshop.
Armok's blood pressure rose and Armok checked Kumil to make sure she hadn't been studying crafting in her spare time. Kumil had no skills besides fighting and potting. What was she doing in the crappy crafting workshop? That was for making junk out of bones, and engraving slabs, and refilling on wooden bolts every few years. "Get out of there, Kumil!" cried Armok.
Armok froze time, and consulted the current of knowledge that flows through the magma of all the worlds, and learned a fact:
Potters can't make pottery artifacts.
Armok cried a little, got over it, and un-froze time. But after claiming the workshop, Kumil Glorieshammer would not move. "What are you doing now, Kumil?" inquired Armok.
When Kumil continued to stay stubbornly still instead of gathering materials for her crappy crafts artifact, Armok went closer and listened to her mutterings. Kumil was listing many demands for materials.
"Oh, silly Kumil! You want stone blocks and I forgot to un-forbid the 27 rainbow-colorful ones that we're not using right now. Let me fix that," said Armok. Armok did as Armok promised.
But Armok had also heard something much worse than "stone blocks" come out of Kumil Glorieshammer's mouth. Armok tried to ignore it. Armok felt afraid. Armok prayed Kumil would move after unforbidding the blocks.
Kumil did not move.
"Uh oh," said Armok.
"a shell... a shell... a shell..." whispered Kumil.
Armok froze time and panicked a little.
It is Nutscaves' one weakness (besides just being Nutscaves). Our kryptonite: shells. We have dozens of artifacts and we've been lucky that no one has ever demanded one until now. (The demands were made rare because of a persistent unaddressed game bug.) But now it has happened.
Shells come from four sources: raw turtles, mussels, and oysters that are caught and prepared on-site; and snail men. We have access to none of those at Nutscaves. We're in badlands, the wrong biome for all four. (Shells should also come from cave lobsters, or from shelled creatures brought by the caravan, but there is a terrible bug about that, and our caverns have always had no amphibious life anyway.) ((Unfortunately I knew nothing about the bug or lack of life in our caverns at the time.))
At first Armok made the mistake of thinking Armok could get the dwarves to catch a cave lobster and remove its shell. (This was before Armok consulted the great flow of magma knowledge and learned that cave lobsters are currently shell-less.)
And so Armok opened the second cavern and told all forty of the reserves that they were now fishermen. Armok designated the shore of the great cavern lake for fishing, and hoped they'd catch and prepare enough lobsters before Kumil lost her mind.
Forty fishers marched down into the cavern and went to work with their beards.
A great beast of undulating snow promptly found its way into the third cavern. Not the cavern we were fishing in--but the one below it. Armok checked the seals and set the proper spears to repeat, and hoped the great beast of undulating snow wouldn't find some way into the fortress Armok hadn't thought of. The first and second caverns have well-planned entrances, but there's a hole in the ceiling in the third one that Armok hasn't gotten around to fixing. Armok hoped the beast couldn't fly.
Undulating snow doesn't fly, right?
While checking that all the machinery was ready to stave off the beast in the third cavern, Armok considered that if a beast entered the cavern where the dwarves were fishing, they would be trapped.
Utes Stestrakzom, an enormous, slavering, winged and feathered earthworm with long, broad cinnamon feathers knew its cue when it heard it. Armok didn't have to think it twice. The great current of magma that carries knowledge through the world is powerful indeed. Utes Strestrakzom entered the second cavern very near where the dwarves were fishing. Beware its poisonous gas.
"UHOH," said Armok. Armok knew not to mess with poisonous gas. Just what was Armok thinking, letting these dwarves fish here without building a proper, safe fishing station? Armok had gotten into a panic about the shells and Armok doesn't do the cleverest things when Armok panics.
The fortress went on alert (all dwarves report to safe areas!) and as a result, the dwarves stopped upgrading upright spears they'd been working on beefing up at the entrance. It wasn't a big deal--we only replace one square urist of spears at a time because we might need to use the spears at any moment. But it left us in a more poorly defended position than usual.
Immediately after issuing the alert, a vile force of darkness arrived! Large squads of goblins and trolls appeared in every direction. It must have taken them days to surround Nutscaves so thoroughly.
"Oh, crud, Shorast!" cried Armok, helplessly. Sprightly Shorast Tiredgild, the hauler, had the cedar training spear in hand and was hurrying toward the fortress, but several squads of goblins were closer to Nutscaves proper than she was, and some of them had bows.
Armok decided not to start up the mechanical spears until Shorast's fate was decided. This would mean some goblins might get into the fortress fairly uninjured, if they moved fast and as a group.
Armok realized all Armok's soldiers were struggling to get away from the fishing area in the second cavern. Forty disorganized soldiers on civilian duty don't move well in single file. They have to walk in single file to get to the muddy shore, and the entrance to the fortress via the cavern is single file as well. When they get an alert they hurry, and they don't care about stepping on people. The stampede down there was getting out of hand. A lot of dwarves were lying on the ground. Meanwhile, Utes Strestrakzom, the slavering winged earthworm, beware its poisonous gas, was practically on top of them.
Armok did some facepalming.
"Just kill it," said Armok in defeat, when Armok was done facepalming.
At least they were already wearing all their steel plate. It isn't good to expose that many dwarves to poisonous gas and boiling extract at once, though. Armok knows!
There was one fortunate incident in the whole thing. Because of Shorast Tiredgild's nudity, and the light weight of the cedar training spear she carried, she was able to sprint to the fortress like a shooting star. She easily beat the closest group of goblins and arrived safely and unscathed. She reported to the safe area immediately and hastened to put away the spear. Armok could barely believe it. She had been surrounded and it had looked very grim, but Shorast didn't even get within shooting range of the goblins.
Armok started the mechanical spears and began raising and lowering the drawbridge at intervals, dumping the goblins one serving at a time into the maw of Armok's masterful goblin grinding traps, and taking joy in slaughter as Armok went. Fortunately Armok wouldn't need the soldiers this time. If Armok gets overwhelmed, Armok can just raise the bridge until the civilians un-jam enough weapon traps and reload enough cages.
Good thing, because the forty would-be fisherman-soldiers were having the fight of their lives.
Utes Strestrakzom, the slavering winged earthworm, beware its poisonous gas--could not hurt the dwarves through their steel plate via normal means, but Utes was a clever (perhaps the cleverest?) giant winged and feathered earthworm. Utes lashed out and grabbed at wrists and hands, trying to relieve the soldiers of their shields, while releasing clouds of poison and boiling extract. Many dwarves dropped their shields or were unable to raise them, and became stricken immediately with nausea and fever, and became stunned and vulnerable as a result. Fortunately the still-healthy dwarves' ferocious attacks kept Utes on the move, and Utes could not hang around to prey upon the sickened dwarves.
The dwarves fought Utes for a week while Armok and his/her civilian lever operators took care of the siege together. Because of the surprise start while fishing in an unsafe area, the fight did not take place in the proper part of the cavern, and pools of forgotten beast extract and deadly blood went everywhere. Many dwarves stepped in them while fighting and did not have their protective water coating to save themselves.
Utes took very little damage while the dwarves attempted to attack him. He darted around the soldiers and dodged and rolled and flew with amazing alacrity. Hundreds of attacks failed to connect. Someone with a spear managed to stab him in the mouth early on, and he received a few small scratches to the body, but for most of the week the soldiers just chased him around and protected each other without doing any real damage.
Finally the dwarf with the spear who'd stabbed Utes in the mouth, managed to get behind Utes. He'd been unconscious back there, but recovered and moved slowly toward Utes, nauseated and disoriented. Utes was distracted by dodging dozens of soldiers' attacks, and didn't see him coming in time. The dwarf took one good stab and jammed his spear into Utes' brain from behind, and promptly fell unconscious again. Utes fell dead to the ground.
Most of the dwarves that weren't already unconscious promptly fainted, or dragged themselves slowly toward the hospital through pools of forgotten beast extract. That is, to be clear, pools of plague. Most of the dwarves were nauseated, half were fevered (a frightening condition I've never seen before), and several were necrotic and exuding clouds of miasma. All of them except a few lucky ones had severe swelling. Necrotic, fevered blood plague.
"Oh no!" said Armok. "What have I done?!" The hospital has only fourteen beds.
The long line of weary soldiers left a trail of vomit from the second cavern all the way up to the hospital. Some decided they felt sort of better along the way, and went back down to fish in a safer area Armok had located for them. (Eventually they interrupted their fishing to report to the hospital.) By the time the first wave reached the hospital, there were just enough beds.
But things weren't looking good for them.
The doctors told the fevered ones, "Yes, you have a fever. It will make you feel unfocused and slow. It may last forever or you may just die at some point. There's nothing we can do for you. Good luck and enjoy the rest of your life while you still cling to it." And they discharged them from the hospital. Now those dwarves are going around slowly, with increasing swelling. It's only a matter of time for them.
The surgeons went to work on the necrotic cases. They're still working on the worst one. It isn't looking good. They've done the same surgical procedure three times in a row on poor Urist Chanceclasped, who has only one kill to his name. The rot keeps spreading and returning, and the swelling has kept increasing. The surgeon had to cut him open to release the pressure of the swelling, and now the whole room is spattered with blood. The patients usually don't live long after that happens.
The worst thing is, this botched fight with Utes Strestrakzom and the fishing in the cavern was all for nothing. We have no shells. There was no life in the water of the second cavern, and unless we happen to find any in the tiny unexplored portion of the third cavern (currently guarded by a forgotten beast of undulating snow oh crud, it flew through the hole and is in the stairwell now!), there will never be any shells. Kumil Glorieshammer, our most promising potter, is almost definitely going to die, along with all the people with the fever.
As a "bonus", between them, they have friendships with everyone in the fortress.
At least we didn't bring the plague contaminant into the fortress. The quarantining worked. A maximum of forty people can die. The fighting was all on the proper side of the bathtub, even though it wasn't in the designated combat area, and even though way too many dwarves were involved. At least we have that: a hundred and twenty dwarves will not get the plague.
I suppose the trouble began with Armok saying in the early autumn, "Hmm, things are getting a little dull at Nutscaves. Let's spice it up by quickly cleaning up some garbage outside the fortress, before the usual siege time arrives."
266 was certainly a pretty dull year until winter. Spring through mid-autumn consisted of mostly-normal trading, one siege, a handful of routine prisoner executions, the long-awaited full coverage of the military in high quality steel plate, a very minor plague incident, and the bricking-up of most of the remaining soil floor. (Soil is always just begging to get contaminated.) A lot of stockpiles were moved or rearranged for construction purposes, but not much other serious work occurred during the year. We also had to temporarily shut down the farms at the start of winter because our food and booze stockpiles were overflowing and the fortress was getting increasingly full of rats. A lot of dwarves were mad about the rats, but it was nothing serious.
So in early autumn Armok designated some junk to pick up from the far corner of the great outdoors, and the haulers cheerfully proceeded out of the fortress in a line. They were just glad to have some work to do. Armok hoped nothing would go wrong.
The haulers tidied the mess quickly. But after the dwarfstorm converged on the junk pile and headed back to the fortress, there was one item left on the ground to pick up. It was a low quality cedar training spear.
(Of course it had to be that. Something totally useless, and worth about four dwarfbucks.)
The haulers dumped the items in the designated area just inside the fort entrance. One particularly quick hauler, a skinny eighty-nine year old woman who was so quick partly because she was wearing absolutely nothing but gloves and shoes--volunteered to rush back outside and get the spear. She was called Shorast Tiredgild, and there was nothing tired about her. She was quick and agile and strong, and has amazing willpower and self-discipline. No wonder she volunteered to go pick up the last item. And so the other haulers cheered at her offering, and gladly went down to the new stoneware brick bar, to start celebrating a job well done.
And so, the sprightly and mostly-naked Shorast Tiredgild ventured back outside, alone, to pick up the near-worthless cedar training spear in the far corner of Nutscaves' small corner of The Tufted Desert.
And so tragedy began to strike. Let's take a look at what happened at the magma furnaces in the meanwhile:
In recent times, Nutscaves had been training a very promising potter. We currently employ a total of only three potters: two came to the fortress very skilled, and our third one, Kumil Glorieshammer, was selected to be trained from a low skill level simply for her very impressively high potting potential. Kumil Glorieshammer is a 57-year-old woman, fat and with silver eyes, cinnamon skin, and a clean-shaven head. (She is probably fat because she has a great love of most of Nutscaves' most commonly-produced dishes, especially the Longland flour.) She started out making crappy, hard-to-identify stoneware statues I had to offload on the traders--but she moved up to High Master Potter very quickly and was well on her way to Grand Master, like the other potters.
And so, as sprightly Shorast the hauler left the fortress, Kumil Glorieshammer was suddenly possessed by the desire to create an artifact! Armok was overjoyed because it would mean that Kumil would beat the other two potters to Legendary status, and Armok was quite excited to possibly get a stoneware artifact for Nutscaves!
But no. It was not to be. Anything Armok wants so much, Armok may not have.
Armok was very puzzled as (s)he watched Kumil Glorieshammer abandon her station at the kiln. Then Armok realized Kumil was probably heading to the regular, non-magma-powered kiln. Armok shrugged. Armok felt anticipation. Armok made some designations around the fortress while Kumil made her way downstairs.
Then Kumil kept going down the stairs, right past the wood shop and its non-magma-powered kiln. "Kumil! Wrong way!" cried Armok.
Kumil stopped at the bone room and claimed a crafter's workshop.
Armok's blood pressure rose and Armok checked Kumil to make sure she hadn't been studying crafting in her spare time. Kumil had no skills besides fighting and potting. What was she doing in the crappy crafting workshop? That was for making junk out of bones, and engraving slabs, and refilling on wooden bolts every few years. "Get out of there, Kumil!" cried Armok.
Armok froze time, and consulted the current of knowledge that flows through the magma of all the worlds, and learned a fact:
Potters can't make pottery artifacts.
Armok cried a little, got over it, and un-froze time. But after claiming the workshop, Kumil Glorieshammer would not move. "What are you doing now, Kumil?" inquired Armok.
When Kumil continued to stay stubbornly still instead of gathering materials for her crappy crafts artifact, Armok went closer and listened to her mutterings. Kumil was listing many demands for materials.
"Oh, silly Kumil! You want stone blocks and I forgot to un-forbid the 27 rainbow-colorful ones that we're not using right now. Let me fix that," said Armok. Armok did as Armok promised.
But Armok had also heard something much worse than "stone blocks" come out of Kumil Glorieshammer's mouth. Armok tried to ignore it. Armok felt afraid. Armok prayed Kumil would move after unforbidding the blocks.
Kumil did not move.
"Uh oh," said Armok.
"a shell... a shell... a shell..." whispered Kumil.
Armok froze time and panicked a little.
It is Nutscaves' one weakness (besides just being Nutscaves). Our kryptonite: shells. We have dozens of artifacts and we've been lucky that no one has ever demanded one until now. (The demands were made rare because of a persistent unaddressed game bug.) But now it has happened.
Shells come from four sources: raw turtles, mussels, and oysters that are caught and prepared on-site; and snail men. We have access to none of those at Nutscaves. We're in badlands, the wrong biome for all four. (Shells should also come from cave lobsters, or from shelled creatures brought by the caravan, but there is a terrible bug about that, and our caverns have always had no amphibious life anyway.) ((Unfortunately I knew nothing about the bug or lack of life in our caverns at the time.))
At first Armok made the mistake of thinking Armok could get the dwarves to catch a cave lobster and remove its shell. (This was before Armok consulted the great flow of magma knowledge and learned that cave lobsters are currently shell-less.)
And so Armok opened the second cavern and told all forty of the reserves that they were now fishermen. Armok designated the shore of the great cavern lake for fishing, and hoped they'd catch and prepare enough lobsters before Kumil lost her mind.
Forty fishers marched down into the cavern and went to work with their beards.
A great beast of undulating snow promptly found its way into the third cavern. Not the cavern we were fishing in--but the one below it. Armok checked the seals and set the proper spears to repeat, and hoped the great beast of undulating snow wouldn't find some way into the fortress Armok hadn't thought of. The first and second caverns have well-planned entrances, but there's a hole in the ceiling in the third one that Armok hasn't gotten around to fixing. Armok hoped the beast couldn't fly.
Undulating snow doesn't fly, right?
While checking that all the machinery was ready to stave off the beast in the third cavern, Armok considered that if a beast entered the cavern where the dwarves were fishing, they would be trapped.
Utes Stestrakzom, an enormous, slavering, winged and feathered earthworm with long, broad cinnamon feathers knew its cue when it heard it. Armok didn't have to think it twice. The great current of magma that carries knowledge through the world is powerful indeed. Utes Strestrakzom entered the second cavern very near where the dwarves were fishing. Beware its poisonous gas.
"UHOH," said Armok. Armok knew not to mess with poisonous gas. Just what was Armok thinking, letting these dwarves fish here without building a proper, safe fishing station? Armok had gotten into a panic about the shells and Armok doesn't do the cleverest things when Armok panics.
The fortress went on alert (all dwarves report to safe areas!) and as a result, the dwarves stopped upgrading upright spears they'd been working on beefing up at the entrance. It wasn't a big deal--we only replace one square urist of spears at a time because we might need to use the spears at any moment. But it left us in a more poorly defended position than usual.
Immediately after issuing the alert, a vile force of darkness arrived! Large squads of goblins and trolls appeared in every direction. It must have taken them days to surround Nutscaves so thoroughly.
"Oh, crud, Shorast!" cried Armok, helplessly. Sprightly Shorast Tiredgild, the hauler, had the cedar training spear in hand and was hurrying toward the fortress, but several squads of goblins were closer to Nutscaves proper than she was, and some of them had bows.
Armok decided not to start up the mechanical spears until Shorast's fate was decided. This would mean some goblins might get into the fortress fairly uninjured, if they moved fast and as a group.
Armok realized all Armok's soldiers were struggling to get away from the fishing area in the second cavern. Forty disorganized soldiers on civilian duty don't move well in single file. They have to walk in single file to get to the muddy shore, and the entrance to the fortress via the cavern is single file as well. When they get an alert they hurry, and they don't care about stepping on people. The stampede down there was getting out of hand. A lot of dwarves were lying on the ground. Meanwhile, Utes Strestrakzom, the slavering winged earthworm, beware its poisonous gas, was practically on top of them.
Armok did some facepalming.
"Just kill it," said Armok in defeat, when Armok was done facepalming.
At least they were already wearing all their steel plate. It isn't good to expose that many dwarves to poisonous gas and boiling extract at once, though. Armok knows!
There was one fortunate incident in the whole thing. Because of Shorast Tiredgild's nudity, and the light weight of the cedar training spear she carried, she was able to sprint to the fortress like a shooting star. She easily beat the closest group of goblins and arrived safely and unscathed. She reported to the safe area immediately and hastened to put away the spear. Armok could barely believe it. She had been surrounded and it had looked very grim, but Shorast didn't even get within shooting range of the goblins.
Armok started the mechanical spears and began raising and lowering the drawbridge at intervals, dumping the goblins one serving at a time into the maw of Armok's masterful goblin grinding traps, and taking joy in slaughter as Armok went. Fortunately Armok wouldn't need the soldiers this time. If Armok gets overwhelmed, Armok can just raise the bridge until the civilians un-jam enough weapon traps and reload enough cages.
Good thing, because the forty would-be fisherman-soldiers were having the fight of their lives.
Utes Strestrakzom, the slavering winged earthworm, beware its poisonous gas--could not hurt the dwarves through their steel plate via normal means, but Utes was a clever (perhaps the cleverest?) giant winged and feathered earthworm. Utes lashed out and grabbed at wrists and hands, trying to relieve the soldiers of their shields, while releasing clouds of poison and boiling extract. Many dwarves dropped their shields or were unable to raise them, and became stricken immediately with nausea and fever, and became stunned and vulnerable as a result. Fortunately the still-healthy dwarves' ferocious attacks kept Utes on the move, and Utes could not hang around to prey upon the sickened dwarves.
The dwarves fought Utes for a week while Armok and his/her civilian lever operators took care of the siege together. Because of the surprise start while fishing in an unsafe area, the fight did not take place in the proper part of the cavern, and pools of forgotten beast extract and deadly blood went everywhere. Many dwarves stepped in them while fighting and did not have their protective water coating to save themselves.
Utes took very little damage while the dwarves attempted to attack him. He darted around the soldiers and dodged and rolled and flew with amazing alacrity. Hundreds of attacks failed to connect. Someone with a spear managed to stab him in the mouth early on, and he received a few small scratches to the body, but for most of the week the soldiers just chased him around and protected each other without doing any real damage.
Finally the dwarf with the spear who'd stabbed Utes in the mouth, managed to get behind Utes. He'd been unconscious back there, but recovered and moved slowly toward Utes, nauseated and disoriented. Utes was distracted by dodging dozens of soldiers' attacks, and didn't see him coming in time. The dwarf took one good stab and jammed his spear into Utes' brain from behind, and promptly fell unconscious again. Utes fell dead to the ground.
Most of the dwarves that weren't already unconscious promptly fainted, or dragged themselves slowly toward the hospital through pools of forgotten beast extract. That is, to be clear, pools of plague. Most of the dwarves were nauseated, half were fevered (a frightening condition I've never seen before), and several were necrotic and exuding clouds of miasma. All of them except a few lucky ones had severe swelling. Necrotic, fevered blood plague.
"Oh no!" said Armok. "What have I done?!" The hospital has only fourteen beds.
The long line of weary soldiers left a trail of vomit from the second cavern all the way up to the hospital. Some decided they felt sort of better along the way, and went back down to fish in a safer area Armok had located for them. (Eventually they interrupted their fishing to report to the hospital.) By the time the first wave reached the hospital, there were just enough beds.
But things weren't looking good for them.
The doctors told the fevered ones, "Yes, you have a fever. It will make you feel unfocused and slow. It may last forever or you may just die at some point. There's nothing we can do for you. Good luck and enjoy the rest of your life while you still cling to it." And they discharged them from the hospital. Now those dwarves are going around slowly, with increasing swelling. It's only a matter of time for them.
The surgeons went to work on the necrotic cases. They're still working on the worst one. It isn't looking good. They've done the same surgical procedure three times in a row on poor Urist Chanceclasped, who has only one kill to his name. The rot keeps spreading and returning, and the swelling has kept increasing. The surgeon had to cut him open to release the pressure of the swelling, and now the whole room is spattered with blood. The patients usually don't live long after that happens.
The worst thing is, this botched fight with Utes Strestrakzom and the fishing in the cavern was all for nothing. We have no shells. There was no life in the water of the second cavern, and unless we happen to find any in the tiny unexplored portion of the third cavern (
As a "bonus", between them, they have friendships with everyone in the fortress.
At least we didn't bring the plague contaminant into the fortress. The quarantining worked. A maximum of forty people can die. The fighting was all on the proper side of the bathtub, even though it wasn't in the designated combat area, and even though way too many dwarves were involved. At least we have that: a hundred and twenty dwarves will not get the plague.
Plague prevention measures: the 7-step program
So we had (yet) another dwarf contract the plague at Nutscaves. A learning experience ensued: he'd been assigned new shoes within the last two years, but his shoes had just rotted off, apparently moments before the illness kicked in. He contracted the blood plague, but the case was mild and he survived.
Previously I hadn't thought shoes would rot off so quickly. Perhaps it happened because we'd been doing a lot of long-range hauling recently--or he'd been assigned some slightly worn shoes to begin with. Each year I had been assigning ten new dwarves to wear shoes, assuming this would keep up with wear and not aggravate too many dwarves with "Enforced Dressing" (wherein I draft them into the military and make them stand around until their whole "squad" manages to get dressed. There are a lot of bumblers in my fortress and this takes a long time. There are tons of whines and complaints about hunger and thirst to accompany the process.) Each year I also check the condition of all currently assigned shoes, and decide whether to replace them.
After that dwarf contracted the plague, I did an extra check for glove-and-shoe wear, six months before the next one was due. I discovered a lot of other shoes had rotted off of other dwarves as well, much faster than expected! And so Nutscaves spent the late summer/early autumn of the year 266 doing nothing but reassigning shoes and gloves, to prevent more plague. It was a painstaking task on the part of Armok, and had to be done sloppily for speed (to prevent more plague contraction). Many dwarves are now walking around very upset as a result. We're in a precarious situation because of it. If anybody comes down with the plague and dies, or if there's a construction accident soon, we're already sitting on the precipice of a tantrum spiral.
Nutscaves is an unusual fortress. It has survived multiple strains and outbreaks of the worst type of highly contagious, deadly necrotic blood plague. It also has highly contaminated living and work spaces that can't be cleaned up safely. Many citizens also became infected with plague in less well-quarantined times, and they occasionally fall ill with recurrences of it. And yet, we have a population of about 155 dwarves, with 30 of them buck-naked children and infants. We have had only one plague death, and one other dwarf falling ill with plague and recovering, in the last few years.
Potentially, at any moment, if Armok stopped employing our strict quarantine procedures, then most of the population could fall ill and die. This fort has survived sixteen years so far, and Armok's procedures have evolved over time to prevent infection as much as possible within reason. Armok is currently using a set of procedures which seem quite effective in preventing the spread of plague. They're not 100% effective, but this quarantine procedure shows that a badly contaminated fort is not necessarily doomed. If I had started out with these procedures, the fort might never have become infected at all.
Following are Armok's current quarantine procedures, evolved over 16 years at Nutscaves.
Previously I hadn't thought shoes would rot off so quickly. Perhaps it happened because we'd been doing a lot of long-range hauling recently--or he'd been assigned some slightly worn shoes to begin with. Each year I had been assigning ten new dwarves to wear shoes, assuming this would keep up with wear and not aggravate too many dwarves with "Enforced Dressing" (wherein I draft them into the military and make them stand around until their whole "squad" manages to get dressed. There are a lot of bumblers in my fortress and this takes a long time. There are tons of whines and complaints about hunger and thirst to accompany the process.) Each year I also check the condition of all currently assigned shoes, and decide whether to replace them.
After that dwarf contracted the plague, I did an extra check for glove-and-shoe wear, six months before the next one was due. I discovered a lot of other shoes had rotted off of other dwarves as well, much faster than expected! And so Nutscaves spent the late summer/early autumn of the year 266 doing nothing but reassigning shoes and gloves, to prevent more plague. It was a painstaking task on the part of Armok, and had to be done sloppily for speed (to prevent more plague contraction). Many dwarves are now walking around very upset as a result. We're in a precarious situation because of it. If anybody comes down with the plague and dies, or if there's a construction accident soon, we're already sitting on the precipice of a tantrum spiral.
Nutscaves is an unusual fortress. It has survived multiple strains and outbreaks of the worst type of highly contagious, deadly necrotic blood plague. It also has highly contaminated living and work spaces that can't be cleaned up safely. Many citizens also became infected with plague in less well-quarantined times, and they occasionally fall ill with recurrences of it. And yet, we have a population of about 155 dwarves, with 30 of them buck-naked children and infants. We have had only one plague death, and one other dwarf falling ill with plague and recovering, in the last few years.
Potentially, at any moment, if Armok stopped employing our strict quarantine procedures, then most of the population could fall ill and die. This fort has survived sixteen years so far, and Armok's procedures have evolved over time to prevent infection as much as possible within reason. Armok is currently using a set of procedures which seem quite effective in preventing the spread of plague. They're not 100% effective, but this quarantine procedure shows that a badly contaminated fort is not necessarily doomed. If I had started out with these procedures, the fort might never have become infected at all.
Following are Armok's current quarantine procedures, evolved over 16 years at Nutscaves.
The curse of Nutscaves strikes again! Rampaging cave crocodile and plague!
In proper Nutscaves fashion, a cave crocodile escaped a cavern construction area unnoticed on this otherwise-fine autumn day. The cave crocodile silently raced up a vacant part of the stairwell and prowled around the fort's quietest beer stockpile, where a miner soon came along to enjoy a drink.
The cave crocodile charged into the oblivious miner. It knocked the miner over, and bit his foot right off and ate it. Then it got to work gnawing on the remaining intact portion of the miner's leg. Once he overcame his surprise, the miner managed to hit the cave crocodile in the leg once with his pick and chip the bone. The cave crocodile would become unsteady from bone pain within seconds, but it was already too late. The miner's open femoral artery was a serious obstacle to remaining alive, and he bled to death on the spot.
A soldier with an iron whip arrived seconds after the attack started, and brained the crocodile on his first swing, right after the miner died.
The miner's family is now tantrumming. Of course he was married with children. The wife is currently standing in the magma shaft (a relatively unsafe, non-OSHA-compliant 40-story air shaft which sometimes has magma at the bottom...or the top...or both). She is holding her infant and making threats.
How did they get so unhappy so quickly? Normally the dwarves don't tantrum at just one death, of one family member. Well, I'll tell you why! Because, right before the rogue cave crocodile attack, we had the plague. Again. Not any of the nice plagues. The blood plague. The one where people step in something bad and ten steps later, they die from gushing blood out their feet. None of them even make it to the hospital with that one. They go ten steps, faint if they're lucky, and die. Have lots of coffins at the ready at all times if you have that shit in your fort!
Preventing the blood plague is easy. Everyone has to wear shoes. That is all. Shoes. Shoes. Shoes! You'd think it would be easy, but no. Ordering them to put on shoes is an exercise in frustration as it usually results in dwarves-already-wearing-shoes taking them off, and walking through the contaminants and dying of the blood plague. Damn it! It also involves lots of otherwise-shoeless dwarves deciding to put on exactly one shoe, and then giving up, and walking through the contaminants in one shoe. One shoe is just as good as no shoes when it comes to blood plague. ARRGGHH! These dwarves! Don't they want to live?
The cave crocodile charged into the oblivious miner. It knocked the miner over, and bit his foot right off and ate it. Then it got to work gnawing on the remaining intact portion of the miner's leg. Once he overcame his surprise, the miner managed to hit the cave crocodile in the leg once with his pick and chip the bone. The cave crocodile would become unsteady from bone pain within seconds, but it was already too late. The miner's open femoral artery was a serious obstacle to remaining alive, and he bled to death on the spot.
A soldier with an iron whip arrived seconds after the attack started, and brained the crocodile on his first swing, right after the miner died.
The miner's family is now tantrumming. Of course he was married with children. The wife is currently standing in the magma shaft (a relatively unsafe, non-OSHA-compliant 40-story air shaft which sometimes has magma at the bottom...or the top...or both). She is holding her infant and making threats.
How did they get so unhappy so quickly? Normally the dwarves don't tantrum at just one death, of one family member. Well, I'll tell you why! Because, right before the rogue cave crocodile attack, we had the plague. Again. Not any of the nice plagues. The blood plague. The one where people step in something bad and ten steps later, they die from gushing blood out their feet. None of them even make it to the hospital with that one. They go ten steps, faint if they're lucky, and die. Have lots of coffins at the ready at all times if you have that shit in your fort!
Preventing the blood plague is easy. Everyone has to wear shoes. That is all. Shoes. Shoes. Shoes! You'd think it would be easy, but no. Ordering them to put on shoes is an exercise in frustration as it usually results in dwarves-already-wearing-shoes taking them off, and walking through the contaminants and dying of the blood plague. Damn it! It also involves lots of otherwise-shoeless dwarves deciding to put on exactly one shoe, and then giving up, and walking through the contaminants in one shoe. One shoe is just as good as no shoes when it comes to blood plague. ARRGGHH! These dwarves! Don't they want to live?
Nutscaves, the deathtrap, risen again
Nutscaves had become almost boring with its almost total lack of accidents and plagues in the year 262.
For the first three seasons in the year 262, we got a wave of migrants "despite the danger". Then in winter, we got a wave of migrants. Not "despite the danger". Just a plain old wave of migrants. "Uh oh!" cried Armok. Armok knew something bad was about to happen. The fortress' 13th year anniversary was just about to dawn.
So fortunately for Nutscaves' reputation as a deathtrap, the year 263 rolled in.
I suppose it all began with the giant hairy alligator and its poisonous secretions. At the very end of the year 262, the alligator finally found a floodgate to knock down in the cavern. This was a trap to alert Armok. Armok directed the soldiers to gather up and prepare to fight the giant hairy alligator and its poisonous secretions, while it knocked down the next layer of traps. The alligator's name was Quazi. Quazi Siga Bora.
Armok also ordered the upright spears in the second trap layer for that cavern to repeat. This is where it all began to go wrong. Dwarves pulled and pulled the lever, but nothing happened. Had Armok simply labeled this lever, and then forgotten to link it up? It certainly wasn't impossible. Armok tries to build too many things at once, and sometimes forgets things like this.
A quota of soldiers had gathered, so Armok ordered the inner floodgate opened, and the brave men and women to charge Quazi Siga Bora. They ran out into the cavern, through the quarantine bathtub, and assaulted Quazi with all manner of weaponry. Two mothers even carried their infants into battle, to show them how it's done.
Quazi Siga Bora, giant hairy alligator, beware its poisonous secretions, was a very powerful opponent. He picked up dwarves in his jaws and threw them left and right, like rag dolls. But the dwarves were determined, and most of them were also slightly seasoned in "battle" (against buck-naked goblin prisoners and the like) by this point. They kept coming back. They kept attacking.
A week later, most of Quazi's body parts were broken, including his spine and skull and all his extremities. One lung was pierced, and about half his organs, and an artery or two were open in his heart. But he felt no pain and fought on, ferociously. Only one dwarf was too wounded to continue fighting--the militia commander himself. He lay in the bottom of the dwarven bathtub, where Quazi had thrown him, miserable and with many broken bones.
Crafters heard about the cavern battle raging on beneath them, and some brave souls tried to come and rescue the wounded militia commander. But they had to approach too close to Quazi, and they ran scared.
Finally, just as Armok feared the soldiers would surely become too tired, hungry, and thirsty to continue, some lucky soul drove their iron morning star into Quazi's brain. Quazi had been doubled over in pain and not able to attack for about a full day by then, but he was darn difficult to kill. Armok quickly released the soldiers from duty, and the wounded commander was promptly carried to the hospital by a fellow soldier.
(And both infants survived unscathed. I hope they learned something about fighting. And, who knew they could go a week without alcohol or food, and no ill effects*?)
((* I later learned this is because dwarven infants draw all sustenance from their mothers, of course.))
Armok felt like celebrating, and the peasant Monom promptly started a fresh party at the statue garden. (Which of course is now pristine and shows no evidence of past carnage.) Armok sent his/her blessings.
Armok dispatched men and women to fix the broken floodgate and the defunct mechanical upright spears trap, and to construct some improvements to the cavern entrance to make it easier to fight the next forgotten beast. Then Armok turned Armok's attention to the magma pumps, the new sub-aquifer plumbing system, and the silk farm.
Armok made some designations and became distracted with working on three projects at once while also proudly monitoring the doctors' work in the hospital. And so Armok designated something incorrectly in the magma pump area. Armok still doesn't know what it was. Armok made an awful lot of designations, and due to the cleanup after the easily-defeated goblin siege from last night, and the soldiers' need for food, drink, and rest--the dwarves didn't get right on the new orders right away. Armok fired-and-forgot so many designations.
And so the year 263 dawned. The fortress turned 13 years old, and the dwarves started up a fresh party to celebrate the new year. The militia commander was still in the hospital, but the doctors were working on him very busily.
At the start of the year 263 Armok concluded that there was a problem at the silk farm, but Armok wasn't sure how to fix it. Weavers kept trying to walk over the hatches and go right into the giant cave spider's side of the room to collect webs, even though there were plenty of webs on their side of the room. Armok feared for both the spider's life, and theirs. (Giant cave spiders have a very poisonous, instantly paralyzing bite, and they're about 2/3 the size of a fully-grown horse, with a lot of legs for kicking.)
Armok was also having some FPS issues and pinpointed pathfinding as the root cause. Armok began distracting Armok, by making long-overdue traffic designations, which helped with the FPS problem immediately. Armok sat and gloated proudly, admiring the masterful traffic designations.
And so the dominoes began to fall.
A few weeks into spring, while Armok was puzzling over the silk farm issue (and foolishly still letting the weavers collect silk, despite the problem), everything came to a sharp standstill and Armok received a puzzling, frightening message.
"Some mason cancels Build Wall: Dangerous Terrain"
Then Armok saw frightfully large clouds of dust in the magma pump area, where dozens of dwarves were working. The mason and subject of the message had fallen into the deep cavern lake several stories below the work area. Apparently he'd gone off a ledge the builders had been sealing off.
Then Armok received another message. "A section of the cavern has collapsed!"
Armok's eyes grew large. Armok gasped. Armok couldn't think of any reason why there would be a collapse. And. What was collapsing?
Armok looked at the moment frozen in time. Dozens of workers were standing in the dust clouds of a truly massive collapse. Oh deities. Had the great magma piston somehow collapsed without Armok designating the lever to be pulled? The fully correctly supported magma piston?
The workers had been constructing a wall to seal off the magma pumps from the open air of the second cavern. The second cavern is mostly open air with a lake at the bottom, and the workers were up above the water level, on a ledge.
"Oh no!" cried Armok. Their fate was already sealed.
It wasn't the piston itself that was collapsing. It was most of the piston's support structure. I don't know how Armok messed that up so badly. It was truly...unmasterful?
And so most of the magma pump stack and supporting walls and floors went crashing into the deep cavern lake, taking dozens of dwarves down with it. This was a large number of stories collapsing.
Most of the builders...dozens of them... were hurled into the cavern lake. Most broke a lot of bones in the fall. Some of them mercifully died on impact with the rocky lake bottom. Others were unconscious when they fell, or unconscious from the impact with the water, and they drowned quickly. Two of the miners who'd been heading down the shaft had fallen a shorter distance to the water, and managed to swim to a safe ledge. But they were stranded. The entire support structure above them was gone.
The miners who had been working below this area were thrown dozens of stories down the shaft, into the magma tank. Luckily (?) there wasn't any magma in it at the time. None of them lived; they got hit by too many other falling objects, and the fall was too far anyway. Their severed limbs and heads and other body parts rained down in a heap, all over the bottom of the magma tank, painting it red with blood. Armok was horrified.
A builder was also hurled down the shaft with the force of the collapse, and he somehow managed to land on the piston support bridge. His legs were broken and his arms severed by falling objects, and he could not move. He lay on the bridge, praying someone would come for him. Unfortunately, that whole lower section of the piston was separated from the rest of the fort by the massive collapse.
When Armok was done being horrified and sorting out how to possibly save the three survivors (the two miners who swam to safety, and the broken builder lying on the bridge halfway down the shaft), Armok made designations for rescue.
When Armok was done, not a single dwarf sprang to build Armok's designations.
Armok realized this was because all the builders were either a) dead, or b) the armless dying builder on the bridge.
"You're all builders now!" Armok called out through the fortress, to the living dwarves.
The other dwarves didn't know how to build, and went about their tasks very slowly. Most of the dwarves panicked at the thought of trying something new, and went on break, hiding in the backs of their bedrooms, as far away from the building designations as possible. Armok sighed. The stranded miners and the dying builder began to dehydrate and starve. Armok told the miners to drink cavern water, and prayed it would be safe and that cave fish would not bite (or eat) them. Armok told the miners to start hacking out stones and building a makeshift bridge from their end.
A week later the miners were rescued, and a few days after that the low-quality scaffold extension was completed, to rescue the armless builder on the bridge. He must have made himself an awesome tourniquet with his legs somehow.
And so Armok thought the crisis was averted. Armok made further designations to seal the shaft away from the cavern. During the rescue, Armok had been noticing a lot of messages from the silk farm and the almost-complete well reservoir. Armok had been ignoring them. Who cares about the silk farm or the new water supply when dwarves need rescued?
Now Armok had a look at the silk farm.
A grisly scene had unfolded.
Armok's legendary weaver, who doubled as Armok's best suturer, was lying paralyzed on one of the giant cave spider's pressure plates. The giant cave spider was standing over her. It had injected its deadly paralytic poison into her blood four times, and was working on a fifth. It had her head in its mouth, and was shaking her around by it. So far, it had managed to break some tissue in her neck.
Apparently the weaver had greedily crossed a hatch for no reason, and then been caught by the spider as expected. It had injected her with its toxin to paralyze her immediately. Four other dwarves were in the room, trying to pick up the piece of silk thread she had gathered, and to rescue her. They kept approaching and then running away, frightened by the spider gobbling her head.
Armok put Armok's head in Armok's hands. This was all because of Armok's deficiency in learning ASCII symbols. If Armok understood all the symbols used in the drawing of the Completely Safe(tm) Wild Giant Cave Spider Silk Farm Design, then Armok would have built a safe silk farm instead of a risky one. The risky one is good, and had earned us an absurd amount of the world's best thread, and it had taken months for a real accident to happen--but it's not safe. Now the legendary weaver and creator of our artifact cloth short skirt, menacing with spikes of pig iron and named The Temptation of Monks, was paying the price.
Armok considered how to get the dwarves out of this situation.
Armok could send in soldiers to take out the spider, but the giant cave spiders are legendarily hard to catch and Nutscaves was very, very lucky to have won the lottery by catching this one. And this weaver was already dead--a single injection of the toxin is not survivable. Adding a dead spider to a dead weaver would not help.
Armok ordered the failsafe lever to be pulled. It would open a floodgate leading to a cage trap, to recapture the spider. Armok considered that the lever should also open all the hatches to speed the process, but Armok hadn't done that in the construction. The spider wasn't going anywhere until it was done devouring the weaver, anyway. Armok mourned the loss of the weaver.
Armok forbade the thread and stopped the silk collection process. And then Armok set about learning more ASCII symbols so that Armok could modify the silk farm to be Completely Safe(tm).
Armok now has the knowledge of some more ASCII symbols and knows how to add safety measures to the farm.
But the dwarves are mourning. Many dwarves are miserable. Armok had killed off 1/3 of the population with Armok's mistakes.
So then Armok finally noticed the trapped dwarves in the water reservoir they'd been building. They'd been starving there for weeks while all of this was going on, and Armok hadn't noticed during the chaos. They were all miserable and angry with Armok for leaving them walled up in the reservoir. Armok sighed and let them out. Luckily Armok had forgotten to start the pumps, or they would have drowned.
A few migrants arrived "despite the danger". We can't even blame the plague this time. Nobody got it in 262, and nobody got it in 263 yet either.
At least Armok learned a few things. And once Armok recaptures the spider, Armok is going to have to send some dwarves to the web room for Caging Therapy. The mayor will have to join them--he's getting less and less ecstatic about his delayed punishment for murder as time goes by. He's been making a lot of mandates recently.
For the first three seasons in the year 262, we got a wave of migrants "despite the danger". Then in winter, we got a wave of migrants. Not "despite the danger". Just a plain old wave of migrants. "Uh oh!" cried Armok. Armok knew something bad was about to happen. The fortress' 13th year anniversary was just about to dawn.
So fortunately for Nutscaves' reputation as a deathtrap, the year 263 rolled in.
I suppose it all began with the giant hairy alligator and its poisonous secretions. At the very end of the year 262, the alligator finally found a floodgate to knock down in the cavern. This was a trap to alert Armok. Armok directed the soldiers to gather up and prepare to fight the giant hairy alligator and its poisonous secretions, while it knocked down the next layer of traps. The alligator's name was Quazi. Quazi Siga Bora.
Armok also ordered the upright spears in the second trap layer for that cavern to repeat. This is where it all began to go wrong. Dwarves pulled and pulled the lever, but nothing happened. Had Armok simply labeled this lever, and then forgotten to link it up? It certainly wasn't impossible. Armok tries to build too many things at once, and sometimes forgets things like this.
A quota of soldiers had gathered, so Armok ordered the inner floodgate opened, and the brave men and women to charge Quazi Siga Bora. They ran out into the cavern, through the quarantine bathtub, and assaulted Quazi with all manner of weaponry. Two mothers even carried their infants into battle, to show them how it's done.
Quazi Siga Bora, giant hairy alligator, beware its poisonous secretions, was a very powerful opponent. He picked up dwarves in his jaws and threw them left and right, like rag dolls. But the dwarves were determined, and most of them were also slightly seasoned in "battle" (against buck-naked goblin prisoners and the like) by this point. They kept coming back. They kept attacking.
A week later, most of Quazi's body parts were broken, including his spine and skull and all his extremities. One lung was pierced, and about half his organs, and an artery or two were open in his heart. But he felt no pain and fought on, ferociously. Only one dwarf was too wounded to continue fighting--the militia commander himself. He lay in the bottom of the dwarven bathtub, where Quazi had thrown him, miserable and with many broken bones.
Crafters heard about the cavern battle raging on beneath them, and some brave souls tried to come and rescue the wounded militia commander. But they had to approach too close to Quazi, and they ran scared.
Finally, just as Armok feared the soldiers would surely become too tired, hungry, and thirsty to continue, some lucky soul drove their iron morning star into Quazi's brain. Quazi had been doubled over in pain and not able to attack for about a full day by then, but he was darn difficult to kill. Armok quickly released the soldiers from duty, and the wounded commander was promptly carried to the hospital by a fellow soldier.
(And both infants survived unscathed. I hope they learned something about fighting. And, who knew they could go a week without alcohol or food, and no ill effects*?)
((* I later learned this is because dwarven infants draw all sustenance from their mothers, of course.))
Armok felt like celebrating, and the peasant Monom promptly started a fresh party at the statue garden. (Which of course is now pristine and shows no evidence of past carnage.) Armok sent his/her blessings.
Armok dispatched men and women to fix the broken floodgate and the defunct mechanical upright spears trap, and to construct some improvements to the cavern entrance to make it easier to fight the next forgotten beast. Then Armok turned Armok's attention to the magma pumps, the new sub-aquifer plumbing system, and the silk farm.
Armok made some designations and became distracted with working on three projects at once while also proudly monitoring the doctors' work in the hospital. And so Armok designated something incorrectly in the magma pump area. Armok still doesn't know what it was. Armok made an awful lot of designations, and due to the cleanup after the easily-defeated goblin siege from last night, and the soldiers' need for food, drink, and rest--the dwarves didn't get right on the new orders right away. Armok fired-and-forgot so many designations.
And so the year 263 dawned. The fortress turned 13 years old, and the dwarves started up a fresh party to celebrate the new year. The militia commander was still in the hospital, but the doctors were working on him very busily.
At the start of the year 263 Armok concluded that there was a problem at the silk farm, but Armok wasn't sure how to fix it. Weavers kept trying to walk over the hatches and go right into the giant cave spider's side of the room to collect webs, even though there were plenty of webs on their side of the room. Armok feared for both the spider's life, and theirs. (Giant cave spiders have a very poisonous, instantly paralyzing bite, and they're about 2/3 the size of a fully-grown horse, with a lot of legs for kicking.)
Armok was also having some FPS issues and pinpointed pathfinding as the root cause. Armok began distracting Armok, by making long-overdue traffic designations, which helped with the FPS problem immediately. Armok sat and gloated proudly, admiring the masterful traffic designations.
And so the dominoes began to fall.
A few weeks into spring, while Armok was puzzling over the silk farm issue (and foolishly still letting the weavers collect silk, despite the problem), everything came to a sharp standstill and Armok received a puzzling, frightening message.
"Some mason cancels Build Wall: Dangerous Terrain"
Then Armok saw frightfully large clouds of dust in the magma pump area, where dozens of dwarves were working. The mason and subject of the message had fallen into the deep cavern lake several stories below the work area. Apparently he'd gone off a ledge the builders had been sealing off.
Then Armok received another message. "A section of the cavern has collapsed!"
Armok's eyes grew large. Armok gasped. Armok couldn't think of any reason why there would be a collapse. And. What was collapsing?
Armok looked at the moment frozen in time. Dozens of workers were standing in the dust clouds of a truly massive collapse. Oh deities. Had the great magma piston somehow collapsed without Armok designating the lever to be pulled? The fully correctly supported magma piston?
The workers had been constructing a wall to seal off the magma pumps from the open air of the second cavern. The second cavern is mostly open air with a lake at the bottom, and the workers were up above the water level, on a ledge.
"Oh no!" cried Armok. Their fate was already sealed.
It wasn't the piston itself that was collapsing. It was most of the piston's support structure. I don't know how Armok messed that up so badly. It was truly...unmasterful?
And so most of the magma pump stack and supporting walls and floors went crashing into the deep cavern lake, taking dozens of dwarves down with it. This was a large number of stories collapsing.
Most of the builders...dozens of them... were hurled into the cavern lake. Most broke a lot of bones in the fall. Some of them mercifully died on impact with the rocky lake bottom. Others were unconscious when they fell, or unconscious from the impact with the water, and they drowned quickly. Two of the miners who'd been heading down the shaft had fallen a shorter distance to the water, and managed to swim to a safe ledge. But they were stranded. The entire support structure above them was gone.
The miners who had been working below this area were thrown dozens of stories down the shaft, into the magma tank. Luckily (?) there wasn't any magma in it at the time. None of them lived; they got hit by too many other falling objects, and the fall was too far anyway. Their severed limbs and heads and other body parts rained down in a heap, all over the bottom of the magma tank, painting it red with blood. Armok was horrified.
A builder was also hurled down the shaft with the force of the collapse, and he somehow managed to land on the piston support bridge. His legs were broken and his arms severed by falling objects, and he could not move. He lay on the bridge, praying someone would come for him. Unfortunately, that whole lower section of the piston was separated from the rest of the fort by the massive collapse.
When Armok was done being horrified and sorting out how to possibly save the three survivors (the two miners who swam to safety, and the broken builder lying on the bridge halfway down the shaft), Armok made designations for rescue.
When Armok was done, not a single dwarf sprang to build Armok's designations.
Armok realized this was because all the builders were either a) dead, or b) the armless dying builder on the bridge.
"You're all builders now!" Armok called out through the fortress, to the living dwarves.
The other dwarves didn't know how to build, and went about their tasks very slowly. Most of the dwarves panicked at the thought of trying something new, and went on break, hiding in the backs of their bedrooms, as far away from the building designations as possible. Armok sighed. The stranded miners and the dying builder began to dehydrate and starve. Armok told the miners to drink cavern water, and prayed it would be safe and that cave fish would not bite (or eat) them. Armok told the miners to start hacking out stones and building a makeshift bridge from their end.
A week later the miners were rescued, and a few days after that the low-quality scaffold extension was completed, to rescue the armless builder on the bridge. He must have made himself an awesome tourniquet with his legs somehow.
And so Armok thought the crisis was averted. Armok made further designations to seal the shaft away from the cavern. During the rescue, Armok had been noticing a lot of messages from the silk farm and the almost-complete well reservoir. Armok had been ignoring them. Who cares about the silk farm or the new water supply when dwarves need rescued?
Now Armok had a look at the silk farm.
A grisly scene had unfolded.
Armok's legendary weaver, who doubled as Armok's best suturer, was lying paralyzed on one of the giant cave spider's pressure plates. The giant cave spider was standing over her. It had injected its deadly paralytic poison into her blood four times, and was working on a fifth. It had her head in its mouth, and was shaking her around by it. So far, it had managed to break some tissue in her neck.
Apparently the weaver had greedily crossed a hatch for no reason, and then been caught by the spider as expected. It had injected her with its toxin to paralyze her immediately. Four other dwarves were in the room, trying to pick up the piece of silk thread she had gathered, and to rescue her. They kept approaching and then running away, frightened by the spider gobbling her head.
Armok put Armok's head in Armok's hands. This was all because of Armok's deficiency in learning ASCII symbols. If Armok understood all the symbols used in the drawing of the Completely Safe(tm) Wild Giant Cave Spider Silk Farm Design, then Armok would have built a safe silk farm instead of a risky one. The risky one is good, and had earned us an absurd amount of the world's best thread, and it had taken months for a real accident to happen--but it's not safe. Now the legendary weaver and creator of our artifact cloth short skirt, menacing with spikes of pig iron and named The Temptation of Monks, was paying the price.
Armok considered how to get the dwarves out of this situation.
Armok could send in soldiers to take out the spider, but the giant cave spiders are legendarily hard to catch and Nutscaves was very, very lucky to have won the lottery by catching this one. And this weaver was already dead--a single injection of the toxin is not survivable. Adding a dead spider to a dead weaver would not help.
Armok ordered the failsafe lever to be pulled. It would open a floodgate leading to a cage trap, to recapture the spider. Armok considered that the lever should also open all the hatches to speed the process, but Armok hadn't done that in the construction. The spider wasn't going anywhere until it was done devouring the weaver, anyway. Armok mourned the loss of the weaver.
Armok forbade the thread and stopped the silk collection process. And then Armok set about learning more ASCII symbols so that Armok could modify the silk farm to be Completely Safe(tm).
Armok now has the knowledge of some more ASCII symbols and knows how to add safety measures to the farm.
But the dwarves are mourning. Many dwarves are miserable. Armok had killed off 1/3 of the population with Armok's mistakes.
So then Armok finally noticed the trapped dwarves in the water reservoir they'd been building. They'd been starving there for weeks while all of this was going on, and Armok hadn't noticed during the chaos. They were all miserable and angry with Armok for leaving them walled up in the reservoir. Armok sighed and let them out. Luckily Armok had forgotten to start the pumps, or they would have drowned.
A few migrants arrived "despite the danger". We can't even blame the plague this time. Nobody got it in 262, and nobody got it in 263 yet either.
At least Armok learned a few things. And once Armok recaptures the spider, Armok is going to have to send some dwarves to the web room for Caging Therapy. The mayor will have to join them--he's getting less and less ecstatic about his delayed punishment for murder as time goes by. He's been making a lot of mandates recently.
The shortest siege ever
So the goblins decided to send a siege to Nutscaves. (What goblin wouldn't want the plague! And we have a second plague now, thanks to a beast with a puking/nerve plague getting into the stairwell, while Armok was being forgetful about some cavern construction!)
The goblins realized that their last set of ambushes wasn't very effective, what with everybody standing on mechanical spikes or getting thrown onto spikes as the fiendish Stern Handles raised and lowered the drawbridge. This time the goblins had a new plan!
The typical sort-of-green (in more ways than one!) goblin lashers were led by a goblin spearman of middling skill. Spearmen are fairly new for these goblins.
And they brought along a new secret weapon.
A CAVE CROCODILE!
The spearman was riding it. Clearly if everyone could see him on the battlefield, the same slaughter by the mechanical upright spears would not happen a second time!
So the goblins cautiously approached the fort as a group, as they do in sieges. (Oh, how I wish I could order my dwarves to move like that--slow and orderly, a march.)
The goblins studied the mechanical spears. A few lashers were sent forward to stand on the first row of raising-and-lowering spears, to see what would happen.
For whatever reason, the current first row of spears are all wooden training spears. The goblins were unharmed.
The goblin spearman and leader, Zom Ghoulnightmares, became satisfied that it was safe. He guided his cave crocodile mount forward as well, and showed the group that the spears were completely harmless. His mount dodged them easily.
"Today we shall take this disgusting, orderly fortress, men!" he called out from atop his noble cave crocodile steed. "I will lead the way! CHARGE!!" he shouted, and when the spears next went down, he spurred his mount forward toward the bridge.
His mount was uneager. In the end it followed his command, but it balked left and right, and moved slowly, diagonally toward the bridge.
"Damn you, Azstrog!" cried Zom at his noble steed. He regained control of Azstrog just before the bridge and aimed him straight again, but it was a split second too late.
A menacing bismuth bronze spike of low production quality rose up out of the ground, tearing straight through Azstrog's stomach and into Zom Ghoulnightmares' heart, piercing a major artery.
Zom would have screamed in indignance, but he was gurgling blood. "Forward!" he tried to cry. "Forward!" But it sounded more like "fwghhghhh".
Azstrog's forward momentum carried them into the middle of the bridge, and in his dying moments Zom could almost see down the ramp into Nutscaves, the fortress he should have been set to plunder and rule over that day.
Azstrog the cave crocodile knew what was best for him. He threw Zom off his back, turned around, and raced over the spikes next time they went down, and into the horizon. The greenest lasher in the bunch took off running too. Zom lay on the bridge, staring up at the cold sky for a moment. And then he died.
The rest of the goblin lashers looked on in horror.
"Is it over?" asked a newer recruit.
Another lasher shrugged.
"It's not over!" cried the new recruit in reply. "Zom said the spikes were safe! Let's finish this!" And then, "And look--the spikes are gone now."
Meanwhile, in the dining room of Nutscaves, the lever puller's arm had gotten tired and she was swapping duty with another dwarf nearby.
"Hmm," said one of the more seasoned goblins, debating.
"CHARGE!" cried the goblin recruit.
The recruit stepped forward toward the bridge, and the same bismuth bronze menacing spike suddenly came up out of the ground and went straight through his stomach.
All the other goblins turned around and ran.
"Wait!" cried the recruit, hacking and leaning over. Between puking he cried, "I'm not dead!"
Nobody waited.
The dwarves would've gone out to finish off the recruit, but Armok decided to leave them working on trading for more spears. The recruit passed out and bled a lot, but he finally made it to the border of Nutscaves with the wilderness, and will never be seen or heard from again.
The goblins realized that their last set of ambushes wasn't very effective, what with everybody standing on mechanical spikes or getting thrown onto spikes as the fiendish Stern Handles raised and lowered the drawbridge. This time the goblins had a new plan!
The typical sort-of-green (in more ways than one!) goblin lashers were led by a goblin spearman of middling skill. Spearmen are fairly new for these goblins.
And they brought along a new secret weapon.
A CAVE CROCODILE!
The spearman was riding it. Clearly if everyone could see him on the battlefield, the same slaughter by the mechanical upright spears would not happen a second time!
So the goblins cautiously approached the fort as a group, as they do in sieges. (Oh, how I wish I could order my dwarves to move like that--slow and orderly, a march.)
The goblins studied the mechanical spears. A few lashers were sent forward to stand on the first row of raising-and-lowering spears, to see what would happen.
For whatever reason, the current first row of spears are all wooden training spears. The goblins were unharmed.
The goblin spearman and leader, Zom Ghoulnightmares, became satisfied that it was safe. He guided his cave crocodile mount forward as well, and showed the group that the spears were completely harmless. His mount dodged them easily.
"Today we shall take this disgusting, orderly fortress, men!" he called out from atop his noble cave crocodile steed. "I will lead the way! CHARGE!!" he shouted, and when the spears next went down, he spurred his mount forward toward the bridge.
His mount was uneager. In the end it followed his command, but it balked left and right, and moved slowly, diagonally toward the bridge.
"Damn you, Azstrog!" cried Zom at his noble steed. He regained control of Azstrog just before the bridge and aimed him straight again, but it was a split second too late.
A menacing bismuth bronze spike of low production quality rose up out of the ground, tearing straight through Azstrog's stomach and into Zom Ghoulnightmares' heart, piercing a major artery.
Zom would have screamed in indignance, but he was gurgling blood. "Forward!" he tried to cry. "Forward!" But it sounded more like "fwghhghhh".
Azstrog's forward momentum carried them into the middle of the bridge, and in his dying moments Zom could almost see down the ramp into Nutscaves, the fortress he should have been set to plunder and rule over that day.
Azstrog the cave crocodile knew what was best for him. He threw Zom off his back, turned around, and raced over the spikes next time they went down, and into the horizon. The greenest lasher in the bunch took off running too. Zom lay on the bridge, staring up at the cold sky for a moment. And then he died.
The rest of the goblin lashers looked on in horror.
"Is it over?" asked a newer recruit.
Another lasher shrugged.
"It's not over!" cried the new recruit in reply. "Zom said the spikes were safe! Let's finish this!" And then, "And look--the spikes are gone now."
Meanwhile, in the dining room of Nutscaves, the lever puller's arm had gotten tired and she was swapping duty with another dwarf nearby.
"Hmm," said one of the more seasoned goblins, debating.
"CHARGE!" cried the goblin recruit.
The recruit stepped forward toward the bridge, and the same bismuth bronze menacing spike suddenly came up out of the ground and went straight through his stomach.
All the other goblins turned around and ran.
"Wait!" cried the recruit, hacking and leaning over. Between puking he cried, "I'm not dead!"
Nobody waited.
The dwarves would've gone out to finish off the recruit, but Armok decided to leave them working on trading for more spears. The recruit passed out and bled a lot, but he finally made it to the border of Nutscaves with the wilderness, and will never be seen or heard from again.
And then the goblin what?
So, Nutscaves has been testing out various machines and constructions before the inevitable-looking future shutdown*. I had a bunch of migrants, so I made some new "Reserves" (soldiers) for the veterans to train. A bunch of naked mole dogs and those leftover goblins from the overly hilarious spiking incident last night** were slated to assist in "training" the new soldiers.
((* The fortress had seemed to stabilize at this point. Ha ha.))
((** Unfortunately this event was told orally and everyone who heard it tragically died of laughter, including me, somehow. If I find the record of it, I will post it.))
So I sent a military squad to the execution chamber. The squad consisted of one strong veteran, two fairly fresh recruits who at least vaguely know where the pointy ends of their weapons were (but could use quite a bit of practice), and two true newbie soldiers.
There were the usual complaints from the two total newbies. "Oh no, I've been drafted, WHY?! WHY ME?! Can't you pick someone else??? Someone else would definitely be better! /cry" I knew as soon as they got their blades really good and wet in the blood of about a dozen opponents, that they'd stop complaining.
Unfortunately their veteran captain was a little too veteran, and quickly finished off just about every prisoner the "Animal handlers" dropped into the room, in one strike of his beloved steel blade. The newbies didn't get much good practice. But they got a little.
As I train a squad I like to start with easy enemies, and work up to harder ones until the dwarves are too tired to continue (or until the dozens of corpses in the room are too close to rotting, as happens with veteran soldiers who don't get tired easily). So the naked mole dogs got thrown into the room, then the wild camels, then the (naked) goblin bowmen and crossbowmen. At that point the newbies were really griping a lot and on the verge of tantrumming, and the room was full of flies and going to generate miasma soon. The soldiers were hungry and thirsty, too. So I dropped in one final goblin, a naked lasher (they use whips normally). I figured the soldiers would finish it off fairly quickly, although it was the toughest opponent they'd meet today. And I decided I would let the dwarves have a recess after that.
Unarmored melee goblins tend to dodge around a lot and give a lot of valuable experience to my soldiers, as the soldiers try and fail to strike, and as the goblin punches hopelessly at the steel plate mail. Unfortunately, I sort of forgot that I'd never had many steel-plated soldiers in my military in this fort, and so there wasn't quite enough steel to go around. One of the newbies was wearing some alderwood high boots (as in, wooden boots) I'd bought from the elves, instead of metal ones.
The naked goblin lasher rolled and hopped nimbly around the room as the dwarves whiffed away at it. The captain soon hacked a hand off it, and promptly stabbed it through the stomach in one smooth motion before it danced away. This made its fate quite inevitable, but for a few seconds the goblin would still be going strong. (They start puking or doubling over from nausea shortly after any type of gut wound, and then they become easy to hit.)
So in his last few moments of free movement before the pain and nausea would kick in, the naked goblin lasher jumped across the room, probably did some kind of parkour on the wall, and then charged straight into one of the really irritated total newbies, Tobul Deepcraft. Tobul caught her steel axe blade in the goblin's elbow on the way down, but they slammed into the floor together in a tangle. The goblin promptly locked his jaws onto Tobul's right boot. She tried to shake the goblin off, but being inexperienced in combat, she failed at first. The goblin responded by jerking Tobul around by the foot, and she flailed wildly in a panic, trying to get away--
And then the goblin lasher bit her foot clean off. Alder wooden high boot and all. Quite violently.
The captain was swinging his steel blade down at that moment, and saved poor Tobul from further harm by immediately beheading the prone goblin, but the damage was done.
Armok, in quite a panic (and sort of amusedly horrified, in a way...), released the soldiers from their station and threw the switch to open the execution room door. Armok had never before seen a fully armored (admittedly her feet weren't in metal but...) soldier get so badly harmed by a naked goblin, when the odds were this much in the dwarves' favor--even with total newbie dwarves. (Five armored soldiers vs. one naked goblin?!) The goblin lasher wasn't even anything special--he was nearly as green a combatant as Tobul.
Tobul was immediately so relieved to finally be off duty, that she forgot about her bleeding stump and immediately went on what she felt was an overdue break, right in the heap of corpses in the execution chamber. She refused to let anyone rescue her. She said, "This is my time and I'm trying to calm down here. I've had a very bad day. You will have to wait," as various helpful pump operators and miners walked in, inquiring if they might escort her to the hospital for treatment.
After a few hours went by, Tobul managed to calm herself down, probably by getting weaker from all the blood loss. At last she relented and let one of the still-living murderers in charge of the fort, pick her up and carry her to the hospital. She left some pretty big pools of blood in the execution chamber behind her. Now her stump is being cleaned and dressed in the hospital, and she's being given a crutch as we speak.
I wonder if Tobul considers herself lucky, in a way, for losing her foot at this particular time. Word has certainly spread to the hospital that we currently have a forgotten beast breaking into the top cavern, and all military squads are being activated to deal with it.
((* The fortress had seemed to stabilize at this point. Ha ha.))
((** Unfortunately this event was told orally and everyone who heard it tragically died of laughter, including me, somehow. If I find the record of it, I will post it.))
So I sent a military squad to the execution chamber. The squad consisted of one strong veteran, two fairly fresh recruits who at least vaguely know where the pointy ends of their weapons were (but could use quite a bit of practice), and two true newbie soldiers.
There were the usual complaints from the two total newbies. "Oh no, I've been drafted, WHY?! WHY ME?! Can't you pick someone else??? Someone else would definitely be better! /cry" I knew as soon as they got their blades really good and wet in the blood of about a dozen opponents, that they'd stop complaining.
Unfortunately their veteran captain was a little too veteran, and quickly finished off just about every prisoner the "Animal handlers" dropped into the room, in one strike of his beloved steel blade. The newbies didn't get much good practice. But they got a little.
As I train a squad I like to start with easy enemies, and work up to harder ones until the dwarves are too tired to continue (or until the dozens of corpses in the room are too close to rotting, as happens with veteran soldiers who don't get tired easily). So the naked mole dogs got thrown into the room, then the wild camels, then the (naked) goblin bowmen and crossbowmen. At that point the newbies were really griping a lot and on the verge of tantrumming, and the room was full of flies and going to generate miasma soon. The soldiers were hungry and thirsty, too. So I dropped in one final goblin, a naked lasher (they use whips normally). I figured the soldiers would finish it off fairly quickly, although it was the toughest opponent they'd meet today. And I decided I would let the dwarves have a recess after that.
Unarmored melee goblins tend to dodge around a lot and give a lot of valuable experience to my soldiers, as the soldiers try and fail to strike, and as the goblin punches hopelessly at the steel plate mail. Unfortunately, I sort of forgot that I'd never had many steel-plated soldiers in my military in this fort, and so there wasn't quite enough steel to go around. One of the newbies was wearing some alderwood high boots (as in, wooden boots) I'd bought from the elves, instead of metal ones.
The naked goblin lasher rolled and hopped nimbly around the room as the dwarves whiffed away at it. The captain soon hacked a hand off it, and promptly stabbed it through the stomach in one smooth motion before it danced away. This made its fate quite inevitable, but for a few seconds the goblin would still be going strong. (They start puking or doubling over from nausea shortly after any type of gut wound, and then they become easy to hit.)
So in his last few moments of free movement before the pain and nausea would kick in, the naked goblin lasher jumped across the room, probably did some kind of parkour on the wall, and then charged straight into one of the really irritated total newbies, Tobul Deepcraft. Tobul caught her steel axe blade in the goblin's elbow on the way down, but they slammed into the floor together in a tangle. The goblin promptly locked his jaws onto Tobul's right boot. She tried to shake the goblin off, but being inexperienced in combat, she failed at first. The goblin responded by jerking Tobul around by the foot, and she flailed wildly in a panic, trying to get away--
And then the goblin lasher bit her foot clean off. Alder wooden high boot and all. Quite violently.
The captain was swinging his steel blade down at that moment, and saved poor Tobul from further harm by immediately beheading the prone goblin, but the damage was done.
Armok, in quite a panic (and sort of amusedly horrified, in a way...), released the soldiers from their station and threw the switch to open the execution room door. Armok had never before seen a fully armored (admittedly her feet weren't in metal but...) soldier get so badly harmed by a naked goblin, when the odds were this much in the dwarves' favor--even with total newbie dwarves. (Five armored soldiers vs. one naked goblin?!) The goblin lasher wasn't even anything special--he was nearly as green a combatant as Tobul.
Tobul was immediately so relieved to finally be off duty, that she forgot about her bleeding stump and immediately went on what she felt was an overdue break, right in the heap of corpses in the execution chamber. She refused to let anyone rescue her. She said, "This is my time and I'm trying to calm down here. I've had a very bad day. You will have to wait," as various helpful pump operators and miners walked in, inquiring if they might escort her to the hospital for treatment.
After a few hours went by, Tobul managed to calm herself down, probably by getting weaker from all the blood loss. At last she relented and let one of the still-living murderers in charge of the fort, pick her up and carry her to the hospital. She left some pretty big pools of blood in the execution chamber behind her. Now her stump is being cleaned and dressed in the hospital, and she's being given a crutch as we speak.
I wonder if Tobul considers herself lucky, in a way, for losing her foot at this particular time. Word has certainly spread to the hospital that we currently have a forgotten beast breaking into the top cavern, and all military squads are being activated to deal with it.
Which ones shall make sudsy baths for the next year...?
So I've got a bunch of tallow from slaughtering all the animals , and I realized I could pick which type of soap I want to see next when we run low again. Currently we are using dog soap and yak soap, for no reason other than we had their tallow available last time we made soap.
Which of these shall I wash the dwarves with, given the choice...? Multiple choices, "all of the above", and "indifferent" are all equally good options.
If only I could get some troglodyte soap. That would definitely be my favorite. The troglodytes are skilling up my doctors by giving civilians broken fingers and toes occasionally, and I'd love to see them turn into soap...But alas, troglodytes are inedible, so no butchering, no tallow, and no soap.
Well. All tallow that is not selected for soap will be made into roasts.
My migrant cook, Sodel Deepblockades, is up to Master level now, and is starting to make Meng-like masterwork meals. Let's see if he flips out when people eat them. Meng is still turning over in his grave each time a roast he made gets eaten, even though he is dead. Poor Meng.
As part of his initiation, Sodel Deepblockades checked out the statues, several of which are of Meng.
Which of these shall I wash the dwarves with, given the choice...? Multiple choices, "all of the above", and "indifferent" are all equally good options.
- forgotten beast soap
- dog soap
- cat soap
- mule soap
- horse soap
- sheep soap
- reindeer soap
- yak soap
- llama soap
- alpaca soap
- groundhog soap
- one-humped camel soap
- honey badger soap
If only I could get some troglodyte soap. That would definitely be my favorite. The troglodytes are skilling up my doctors by giving civilians broken fingers and toes occasionally, and I'd love to see them turn into soap...But alas, troglodytes are inedible, so no butchering, no tallow, and no soap.
Well. All tallow that is not selected for soap will be made into roasts.
My migrant cook, Sodel Deepblockades, is up to Master level now, and is starting to make Meng-like masterwork meals. Let's see if he flips out when people eat them. Meng is still turning over in his grave each time a roast he made gets eaten, even though he is dead. Poor Meng.
As part of his initiation, Sodel Deepblockades checked out the statues, several of which are of Meng.
Building up to the next tantrum spiral, Part 2
Eighteen units of forgotten beast intestines (edible), and its chitin (not). Yummy.
Building up to the next tantrum spiral, Part 1
So, I had all these migrants.
They've been dropping to the plague one by one. One dies about every month. Are they getting it by moving sick animals to quarantine? Is there a poisonous object still in the fort? I don't know.
Most of my beloved hardened individuals, the murderers and criminals who could stay ecstatic just by knowing they'd lived another month unpunished--have died. The new migrants didn't know the guys very well (other than the couple of super-charismatic ones), but they don't care for the deaths of fortress members at all. They don't know the remaining criminals for what they are, and are unaware of their past crimes, fortunately--but we seem to just be working up to the next tantrum spiral.
It also must seem odd that Urist McEcstatic (secret criminal) is so damn ecstatic and secretive all the time.
I'm fighting to keep all the new people so busy that they can't talk to each other. I'm making them put the finishing touches on my megaconstruction. It's just delaying the inevitable, but at least when these guys get wiped out by the plague, the next ones will have a working magma forge at the level right below the aquifer.
My small squad of newly well-trained soldiers suffered their first death as well. A forgotten beast entered the cavern and sped straight toward the work area. I didn't seem to have a choice other than to send them to meet it. It was a giant tick with three long horns, a wrinkly blue exoskeleton, and a poisonous bite. It didn't need the poison to brain one of my soldiers. Its first kick broke his arm through his masterwork gauntlet, and he doubled over in pain and got his head broken for that, right through the steel helmet, in a breath. Scary.
Luckily I have made the soldiers work so hard that Urist McBrained didn't have any good friends. (I feel a bit sorry for them, for how hard I've pushed them.) But the other three soldiers were traumatized at seeing somebody die, just the same.
The butcher is currently butchering the wicked giant tick's corpse. I wonder what he'll get out of it. Will it be edible? Eeeeeewwww.
They've been dropping to the plague one by one. One dies about every month. Are they getting it by moving sick animals to quarantine? Is there a poisonous object still in the fort? I don't know.
Most of my beloved hardened individuals, the murderers and criminals who could stay ecstatic just by knowing they'd lived another month unpunished--have died. The new migrants didn't know the guys very well (other than the couple of super-charismatic ones), but they don't care for the deaths of fortress members at all. They don't know the remaining criminals for what they are, and are unaware of their past crimes, fortunately--but we seem to just be working up to the next tantrum spiral.
It also must seem odd that Urist McEcstatic (secret criminal) is so damn ecstatic and secretive all the time.
I'm fighting to keep all the new people so busy that they can't talk to each other. I'm making them put the finishing touches on my megaconstruction. It's just delaying the inevitable, but at least when these guys get wiped out by the plague, the next ones will have a working magma forge at the level right below the aquifer.
My small squad of newly well-trained soldiers suffered their first death as well. A forgotten beast entered the cavern and sped straight toward the work area. I didn't seem to have a choice other than to send them to meet it. It was a giant tick with three long horns, a wrinkly blue exoskeleton, and a poisonous bite. It didn't need the poison to brain one of my soldiers. Its first kick broke his arm through his masterwork gauntlet, and he doubled over in pain and got his head broken for that, right through the steel helmet, in a breath. Scary.
Luckily I have made the soldiers work so hard that Urist McBrained didn't have any good friends. (I feel a bit sorry for them, for how hard I've pushed them.) But the other three soldiers were traumatized at seeing somebody die, just the same.
The butcher is currently butchering the wicked giant tick's corpse. I wonder what he'll get out of it. Will it be edible? Eeeeeewwww.
Running in steel plate mail
My soldiers pretty well can't be harmed at this point, in their steel armor, and they're pretty good with their short swords, spear, and axe. But they still have a fairly serious problem in a certain combat environment.
I'm building a magma pump stack in one of the caverns. I also had to go in there to chop some wood for charcoal, so that I could make enough magma-safe parts for the pumps. (I'd sort of been squandering my wood supply in anticipation of having magma, and didn't save enough for the pumps. Oops.)
My woodcutter and his hauling team are constantly harassed by enemies in the cavern. The enemies aren't serious. We have troglodytes, who try to single out one worker and then punch him, but they aren't very good at it. And we have naked mole dogs, who smell liquor and scavenge around the place hoping to get some. The naked mole dogs aren't often interested in attacking anyone, but the dwarves see them and freak out, and interrupt their work to run around screaming. Kind of like me when I see a bee.
So, enter my brave soldiers. They're happy to guard the place. They love participating in a good bloodbath. They have steel plate and steel weapons and steel shields, and they're all right at using all of the above. Just one problem.
The steel armor is so heavy, it makes them run slow. And their opponents are basically unarmored rogues who only live to hit and run. The troglodytes and mole dogs run in, perform some harassment, and run out before they get in range of harm. I don't blame them; it's clever.
My soldiers are reasonably good athletes, but they can't catch the little bastards with all the steel weighing them down. They chase the enemies around, all over the cavern, in wide loops. But the enemy will just loop back and keep interrupting work while easily outrunning the soldiers who are strung out behind.
It's funny because I've found that the steel plate normally has a particularly good advantage in narrow corridors. A dwarf equipped with such is a great defender. He can go toe-to-toe with quite fierce monsters, and hold a corridor by himself for quite a while, while the weaker dwarves escape, for example. I guess steel is great for holding ground in narrow spaces, but awful at fighting opponents who don't want to get hit. (I guess we need some horses. But dwarves don't do mounted combat. That's for goblins.)
I considered reforming my squad in some way to be more effective in this type of combat, but I haven't come up with a way. I know you've* fought with swords and armor before and know a lot about medieval-style warfare, so maybe you know a tactic for busting up rogues when you're a knight? Here are the ideas I've come up with, but each one seems even more flawed than my current setup when I think very hard about it:
((* The story's original audience was a swordsman and expert in medieval combat.))
1. I could employ a more lightly-armored wrestler to chase down enemies and grapple them, catching them for their steel-plated buddies. I've found this is very dangerous, though, because the wrestler runs ahead even when he shouldn't, and ends up taking all the punishment. If he's going to "tank" in light armor, I may as well put lighter armor on everybody else too so they can keep up and save him. This seems like a really bad idea if something actually dangerous comes along, since people will almost certainly get killed.
2. I could try to use bows/crossbows somehow. I could station the archers on the pump tower a floor above the cavern bottom, for example, and let them shoot stuff below. Archers are certainly good at pinning down enemies while the armored melee soldiers cross to melee range--when the archers are actually working right, that is. A bolt through the leg or an organ will slow down a rogue like nothing else.
However, my experience with crossbows in this version is that the dwarves have all kinds of ammo problems, and usually just melee if they can path to the enemy. I have crap-tons of ammo (for melting, after I bring the magma to the top, but I don't mind using it up). However, I do not trust the dwarves to reload after they use their first stack. It's very buggy. And the crossbows are very ineffective as melee weapons.
And I just realized the likely answer. I need to give the soldiers some war dogs. The dogs are fast and for grappling, like the wrestler in #1, but expendable.
I think that's what to do here. And my soldiers get to keep their plate. They won't get as many kills, but that's fine. They all have four names at this point from slaughtering all the stored-up early-plague goblins**.
((** A very violent and well-designed trap system at the outdoor entrance killed or caught all of the goblins besieging the fortress from the outside, while I dealt with the plague inside. During the plague I stored a hundred or so goblins in cages, stripped naked, to release for military practice when times were better.))
Let me know* ((*see original note)) if you have any other thoughts about knights chasing rogues. This particular cavern's characteristics are a little different from my previous ones--it's about 60% smooth, open rolling hills, and 40% small areas of narrow corridors that only fit one or two dwarves shoulder-to-shoulder.
(Of course, I can wall off the tree-chopping area or something, but mushrooms take years to grow. I'll be done chopping and building in here, long before the wall is done. And next time I come down here for wood, it'll be in a different section while this section of mushrooms is allowed to regrow.)
I'm building a magma pump stack in one of the caverns. I also had to go in there to chop some wood for charcoal, so that I could make enough magma-safe parts for the pumps. (I'd sort of been squandering my wood supply in anticipation of having magma, and didn't save enough for the pumps. Oops.)
My woodcutter and his hauling team are constantly harassed by enemies in the cavern. The enemies aren't serious. We have troglodytes, who try to single out one worker and then punch him, but they aren't very good at it. And we have naked mole dogs, who smell liquor and scavenge around the place hoping to get some. The naked mole dogs aren't often interested in attacking anyone, but the dwarves see them and freak out, and interrupt their work to run around screaming. Kind of like me when I see a bee.
So, enter my brave soldiers. They're happy to guard the place. They love participating in a good bloodbath. They have steel plate and steel weapons and steel shields, and they're all right at using all of the above. Just one problem.
The steel armor is so heavy, it makes them run slow. And their opponents are basically unarmored rogues who only live to hit and run. The troglodytes and mole dogs run in, perform some harassment, and run out before they get in range of harm. I don't blame them; it's clever.
My soldiers are reasonably good athletes, but they can't catch the little bastards with all the steel weighing them down. They chase the enemies around, all over the cavern, in wide loops. But the enemy will just loop back and keep interrupting work while easily outrunning the soldiers who are strung out behind.
It's funny because I've found that the steel plate normally has a particularly good advantage in narrow corridors. A dwarf equipped with such is a great defender. He can go toe-to-toe with quite fierce monsters, and hold a corridor by himself for quite a while, while the weaker dwarves escape, for example. I guess steel is great for holding ground in narrow spaces, but awful at fighting opponents who don't want to get hit. (I guess we need some horses. But dwarves don't do mounted combat. That's for goblins.)
I considered reforming my squad in some way to be more effective in this type of combat, but I haven't come up with a way. I know you've* fought with swords and armor before and know a lot about medieval-style warfare, so maybe you know a tactic for busting up rogues when you're a knight? Here are the ideas I've come up with, but each one seems even more flawed than my current setup when I think very hard about it:
((* The story's original audience was a swordsman and expert in medieval combat.))
1. I could employ a more lightly-armored wrestler to chase down enemies and grapple them, catching them for their steel-plated buddies. I've found this is very dangerous, though, because the wrestler runs ahead even when he shouldn't, and ends up taking all the punishment. If he's going to "tank" in light armor, I may as well put lighter armor on everybody else too so they can keep up and save him. This seems like a really bad idea if something actually dangerous comes along, since people will almost certainly get killed.
2. I could try to use bows/crossbows somehow. I could station the archers on the pump tower a floor above the cavern bottom, for example, and let them shoot stuff below. Archers are certainly good at pinning down enemies while the armored melee soldiers cross to melee range--when the archers are actually working right, that is. A bolt through the leg or an organ will slow down a rogue like nothing else.
However, my experience with crossbows in this version is that the dwarves have all kinds of ammo problems, and usually just melee if they can path to the enemy. I have crap-tons of ammo (for melting, after I bring the magma to the top, but I don't mind using it up). However, I do not trust the dwarves to reload after they use their first stack. It's very buggy. And the crossbows are very ineffective as melee weapons.
And I just realized the likely answer. I need to give the soldiers some war dogs. The dogs are fast and for grappling, like the wrestler in #1, but expendable.
I think that's what to do here. And my soldiers get to keep their plate. They won't get as many kills, but that's fine. They all have four names at this point from slaughtering all the stored-up early-plague goblins**.
((** A very violent and well-designed trap system at the outdoor entrance killed or caught all of the goblins besieging the fortress from the outside, while I dealt with the plague inside. During the plague I stored a hundred or so goblins in cages, stripped naked, to release for military practice when times were better.))
Let me know* ((*see original note)) if you have any other thoughts about knights chasing rogues. This particular cavern's characteristics are a little different from my previous ones--it's about 60% smooth, open rolling hills, and 40% small areas of narrow corridors that only fit one or two dwarves shoulder-to-shoulder.
(Of course, I can wall off the tree-chopping area or something, but mushrooms take years to grow. I'll be done chopping and building in here, long before the wall is done. And next time I come down here for wood, it'll be in a different section while this section of mushrooms is allowed to regrow.)
Nutscaves is proud to announce- (Part 3)
With 16 dwarves left, Armok finally discovered the correct method to clean blood from a stairway.
You construct a floor on it. The floor goes right over the blood and removes it from existence. The first three guys died trying to build the floor over the contaminated spot, but the fourth one finished it before he got the rot.
I spent a good dozen lives trying to follow the magmawiki's cleaning instructions. "Make a janitor! Make a meeting area! Enable cleaning! They'll clean it! Everything will be fine! This bug is very minor!" NO THEY WILL NOT. DWARVES WILL NEVER CLEAN STAIRS IN THIS VERSION!! Naughty magmawiki!
I should probably back up a little and mention I found a pool that was infecting everyone. I'm a little out of order here.
Armok is displeased. Blood is meant to adorn the fortress, not kill everyone in it. We cannot make more blood if we keep losing too much of it. Losing some blood is fine. Losing all of it is useless.
Now there's just the infected blood in the hospital from all the people dying, that I know of. The dwarven washing machine/incinerator I built has taken care of the contaminated clothing. I hope.
It might go without saying, but everyone has been forced to roam around stark naked, except the single remaining soldier and the janitor, who are still wearing their armor. I checked it item by item to make sure it was not contaminated.
Some clothiers had better show up to my fort if anyone lives. And I mean dwarves with good stats to become clothiers. Not dwarves professing to be clothiers.
Meng would appreciate the difference.
I'll build statues and toss them into magma until I get one of Meng's likeness, if Nutscaves pulls through this.
I don't think Nutscaves is going to pull through this, though.
At least, Armok sure did learn something about building cavern entrances from this whole insane incident.
"Thou shalt not build a cavern entrance that does not force the dwarves through a bathtub." Letting forgotten beast liquids into the fortress proper is just BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD
You construct a floor on it. The floor goes right over the blood and removes it from existence. The first three guys died trying to build the floor over the contaminated spot, but the fourth one finished it before he got the rot.
I spent a good dozen lives trying to follow the magmawiki's cleaning instructions. "Make a janitor! Make a meeting area! Enable cleaning! They'll clean it! Everything will be fine! This bug is very minor!" NO THEY WILL NOT. DWARVES WILL NEVER CLEAN STAIRS IN THIS VERSION!! Naughty magmawiki!
I should probably back up a little and mention I found a pool that was infecting everyone. I'm a little out of order here.
Armok is displeased. Blood is meant to adorn the fortress, not kill everyone in it. We cannot make more blood if we keep losing too much of it. Losing some blood is fine. Losing all of it is useless.
Now there's just the infected blood in the hospital from all the people dying, that I know of. The dwarven washing machine/incinerator I built has taken care of the contaminated clothing. I hope.
It might go without saying, but everyone has been forced to roam around stark naked, except the single remaining soldier and the janitor, who are still wearing their armor. I checked it item by item to make sure it was not contaminated.
Some clothiers had better show up to my fort if anyone lives. And I mean dwarves with good stats to become clothiers. Not dwarves professing to be clothiers.
Meng would appreciate the difference.
I'll build statues and toss them into magma until I get one of Meng's likeness, if Nutscaves pulls through this.
I don't think Nutscaves is going to pull through this, though.
At least, Armok sure did learn something about building cavern entrances from this whole insane incident.
"Thou shalt not build a cavern entrance that does not force the dwarves through a bathtub." Letting forgotten beast liquids into the fortress proper is just BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD
Nutscaves is proud to announce- (Part 2)
I spoke too soon. We were clean for about a month and then half the remaining 35 dwarves were killed by the rotting plague. I have no idea what's spreading it or where it's coming from. Everything looks clean. Not fun.
I expect that everyone except that dude in traction at the hospital, are going to die to the illness before it's over.
And then that dude in traction will die too, when his caregivers stop bringing him food.
Congrats, fortress-wiping shitty forgotten beast?
I expect that everyone except that dude in traction at the hospital, are going to die to the illness before it's over.
And then that dude in traction will die too, when his caregivers stop bringing him food.
Congrats, fortress-wiping shitty forgotten beast?
Nutscaves is proud to announce- (Part 1)
-that eight and a half years after the fact, we have completed the excavation of the flooded main stairwell, and recovered and buried all of the bodies! For the first time since Spring of the year 250--the year seven dwarves set out on an expedition and four were encased in ice--our fortress is clear of ghosts!
We have also constructed a proper dwarven bathtub, and assigned our brave janitor to keep it clean. He seems immune to the forgotten beast stuff, and if he's not, I believe our newly redesigned cleaning system will only allow one dwarf to catch it at a time. (Unless another forgotten beast comes.) In that event, there should be adequate reaction time to force all doctors out of the hospital while the patient wastes away.
Out of a maximum population of 173 dwarves, and with over 300 filled coffins, only 35 dwarves remain. All of them are happy except for a few rigidly upright citizens, who are increasingly upset about the delayed punishment of the criminals currently occupying all positions of power in the fortress. They didn't sign up to become a critical part of a murderous criminal operation when they decided to migrate to Nutscaves years ago, apparently.
"Adapt!" Armok shouted down to them. "It's not going to change! If I get rid of all these murderers, there would only be about seven of you left!"
I hope they heed his/her words.
In community news, our particularly murderous (eight dwarven kills with a Bronze Short Sword) chief medical dwarf, Asen, has fallen in love with a fellow murderer. I expect they'll get married in our statue garden soon.
Speaking of the statue garden, it's my new Tantrum Control Chamber. I have built a huge room full of statues, all with one tile of space between them in each direction, throughout the entire room. Statues block passage so the dwarves have to move through them in single file, and a dwarf is always adjacent to at least one statue. I have also built a convenient (lever-operated) cage of war animals near the middle of the room in the place of one statue, where the dwarves seem to prefer to cluster a bit more (though clustering isn't really possible with the statues getting in the way). I believe the Tantrum Control Chamber has a healthy share of responsibility for stopping the tantrum spiral earlier. Here is how it works.
When dwarves tantrum, they like to bust up anything they can reach . My crowded dining room helped increase the scale of the recent disaster, because as dwarves started tantrumming, the only things in close reach were other dwarves, children, and beloved pets. As the dwarves started dying, the tantrummers moved on to the heavy stone chairs and tables, picking them up and hurling them at each other across the open room, and breaking many bones in the process. This sent more people to the hospital, which was still contaminated with plague at the time. And so the contamination spread even more rapidly, and more and more people died, and more and more people tantrummed.
Next they started breaking the glass windows behind the tables in the dining room, and the control room levers. The glass windows were keeping The Stern Handles' artifacts visible but not touchable in the dining room. Artifacts were starting to get within tantrummers' reach. Armok felt very worried. Potentially losing an artifact of our group is very bad!
As Armok realized what was going on, (s)he quickly undesignated the dining room as a meeting hall, which sort of helped stop people from clumping up in there, and spread out the damage more toward the farms (where gentle wooly farm animals absorbed a lot of the violence. Sorry, gentle wooly farm animals.) Then Armok had the few remaining miners dig out a huge room for the statue garden, and set one mason to make rock statues (while all the others still obedient to Armok built coffins). Builders set up the statues in the Tantrum Control Chamber and Armok designated it as a statue garden. Dwarves began to flock in there and do three things a bit differently:
1. Topple the fortress' crappiest statues instead of "toppling" other dwarves
2. Slam into statues at high speed while trying to charge other dwarves, knocking themselves unconscious in the process, and buying time to calm down while the target escaped (if the target wasn't tantrumming too...but Asen, a.k.a. Captain Murder, still killed a few guys in the statue garden).
3. While not tantrumming, they'd get happy thoughts from gazing at all the low-quality statues. There are so many statues in there that it's quite likely any dwarf can find one of something he likes. (When a dwarf likes a subject, the statue's perceived quality is much higher than its true quality.)
And so as our lowest-quality statues were toppled or pounded to dust, Armok casually replaced them. Armok should have built this room much sooner.
Don't get me wrong--it didn't stop the tantrums. Armok is still tearing down statues in there that are completely covered in blood or have severed limbs and stuff up on top of them, out of reach. And the janitor is still mopping up the blood pools. And we're still herding war animals back into the blasted cage. The Tantrum Control Chamber just seemed to be a reasonably good damage soak, and it got some of the tantrummers out of the nearby bedrooms, where the bloodshed was second only to the dining hall.
Armok would have built a mist generator too, but Armok was worried (s)he might make a mistake under pressure, and drown some of the remaining highly-disciplined soldiers who were maintaining order as well as they could.
Anyway, I don't think anybody else is going to go down to the plague, and I doubt another tantrum spiral will start. (Unless something else unexpected and awful happens, of course.) But there is still a huge mess to clean up. 138 dead dwarves makes a lot of clothes lying around. And the tantrummers threw food and all kinds of other objects all over the place, and broke a lot of furniture and most of the control room levers. (Thank Armok their locations were all labeled.) The 33 adult survivors are mostly quite new to a lot of the jobs they're doing now, too. They spend more time on a task to do less, with much lower quality results.
But at least there aren't as many people to feed, and to prevent from getting sober. (Before the disaster we were shaving it a little closer than I'd have liked on food and beer--we were only ahead by 1-2 seasons instead of what I prefer, which is a full year.) We still have about 400 of Meng's masterwork roasts to feast upon (about 1.3 years of dining at the current population level, if I don't need to trade any of them away). And Meng doesn't care anymore that we're eating them. He's too dead.
Anyway we finally got rid of those dratted ghosts, and the future looks brighter too. I just hope we get some migrants, because I'm not very comfortable with labor at a population of only 33 adults. I can't spare anywhere near as many masons, soldiers, mechanics, carpenters, or haulers as I'd like for various big jobs, for example.
Definition:
Dwarven bathtub: This is a design where a ramp leads down into shallow water, and another ramp leads back up. The walls surrounding the entire thing are engraved with high-quality engravings, causing janitors to prioritize keeping the area clean.
A DF2010 fortress should be designed so that dwarves walk through these "bathtubs" whenever they may be crossing from contaminated areas (soil layers, caverns, hospital) into the fortress proper. Walking through the shallow water removes contaminants from the dwarf and anything (s)he is wearing or carrying, replacing the contaminants with a water coating.
This is the shape of the dwarven bathtub from the side view. The shallow water goes in the trench.
_ _
\_/
We have also constructed a proper dwarven bathtub, and assigned our brave janitor to keep it clean. He seems immune to the forgotten beast stuff, and if he's not, I believe our newly redesigned cleaning system will only allow one dwarf to catch it at a time. (Unless another forgotten beast comes.) In that event, there should be adequate reaction time to force all doctors out of the hospital while the patient wastes away.
Out of a maximum population of 173 dwarves, and with over 300 filled coffins, only 35 dwarves remain. All of them are happy except for a few rigidly upright citizens, who are increasingly upset about the delayed punishment of the criminals currently occupying all positions of power in the fortress. They didn't sign up to become a critical part of a murderous criminal operation when they decided to migrate to Nutscaves years ago, apparently.
"Adapt!" Armok shouted down to them. "It's not going to change! If I get rid of all these murderers, there would only be about seven of you left!"
I hope they heed his/her words.
In community news, our particularly murderous (eight dwarven kills with a Bronze Short Sword) chief medical dwarf, Asen, has fallen in love with a fellow murderer. I expect they'll get married in our statue garden soon.
Speaking of the statue garden, it's my new Tantrum Control Chamber. I have built a huge room full of statues, all with one tile of space between them in each direction, throughout the entire room. Statues block passage so the dwarves have to move through them in single file, and a dwarf is always adjacent to at least one statue. I have also built a convenient (lever-operated) cage of war animals near the middle of the room in the place of one statue, where the dwarves seem to prefer to cluster a bit more (though clustering isn't really possible with the statues getting in the way). I believe the Tantrum Control Chamber has a healthy share of responsibility for stopping the tantrum spiral earlier. Here is how it works.
When dwarves tantrum, they like to bust up anything they can reach . My crowded dining room helped increase the scale of the recent disaster, because as dwarves started tantrumming, the only things in close reach were other dwarves, children, and beloved pets. As the dwarves started dying, the tantrummers moved on to the heavy stone chairs and tables, picking them up and hurling them at each other across the open room, and breaking many bones in the process. This sent more people to the hospital, which was still contaminated with plague at the time. And so the contamination spread even more rapidly, and more and more people died, and more and more people tantrummed.
Next they started breaking the glass windows behind the tables in the dining room, and the control room levers. The glass windows were keeping The Stern Handles' artifacts visible but not touchable in the dining room. Artifacts were starting to get within tantrummers' reach. Armok felt very worried. Potentially losing an artifact of our group is very bad!
As Armok realized what was going on, (s)he quickly undesignated the dining room as a meeting hall, which sort of helped stop people from clumping up in there, and spread out the damage more toward the farms (where gentle wooly farm animals absorbed a lot of the violence. Sorry, gentle wooly farm animals.) Then Armok had the few remaining miners dig out a huge room for the statue garden, and set one mason to make rock statues (while all the others still obedient to Armok built coffins). Builders set up the statues in the Tantrum Control Chamber and Armok designated it as a statue garden. Dwarves began to flock in there and do three things a bit differently:
1. Topple the fortress' crappiest statues instead of "toppling" other dwarves
2. Slam into statues at high speed while trying to charge other dwarves, knocking themselves unconscious in the process, and buying time to calm down while the target escaped (if the target wasn't tantrumming too...but Asen, a.k.a. Captain Murder, still killed a few guys in the statue garden).
3. While not tantrumming, they'd get happy thoughts from gazing at all the low-quality statues. There are so many statues in there that it's quite likely any dwarf can find one of something he likes. (When a dwarf likes a subject, the statue's perceived quality is much higher than its true quality.)
And so as our lowest-quality statues were toppled or pounded to dust, Armok casually replaced them. Armok should have built this room much sooner.
Don't get me wrong--it didn't stop the tantrums. Armok is still tearing down statues in there that are completely covered in blood or have severed limbs and stuff up on top of them, out of reach. And the janitor is still mopping up the blood pools. And we're still herding war animals back into the blasted cage. The Tantrum Control Chamber just seemed to be a reasonably good damage soak, and it got some of the tantrummers out of the nearby bedrooms, where the bloodshed was second only to the dining hall.
Armok would have built a mist generator too, but Armok was worried (s)he might make a mistake under pressure, and drown some of the remaining highly-disciplined soldiers who were maintaining order as well as they could.
Anyway, I don't think anybody else is going to go down to the plague, and I doubt another tantrum spiral will start. (Unless something else unexpected and awful happens, of course.) But there is still a huge mess to clean up. 138 dead dwarves makes a lot of clothes lying around. And the tantrummers threw food and all kinds of other objects all over the place, and broke a lot of furniture and most of the control room levers. (Thank Armok their locations were all labeled.) The 33 adult survivors are mostly quite new to a lot of the jobs they're doing now, too. They spend more time on a task to do less, with much lower quality results.
But at least there aren't as many people to feed, and to prevent from getting sober. (Before the disaster we were shaving it a little closer than I'd have liked on food and beer--we were only ahead by 1-2 seasons instead of what I prefer, which is a full year.) We still have about 400 of Meng's masterwork roasts to feast upon (about 1.3 years of dining at the current population level, if I don't need to trade any of them away). And Meng doesn't care anymore that we're eating them. He's too dead.
Anyway we finally got rid of those dratted ghosts, and the future looks brighter too. I just hope we get some migrants, because I'm not very comfortable with labor at a population of only 33 adults. I can't spare anywhere near as many masons, soldiers, mechanics, carpenters, or haulers as I'd like for various big jobs, for example.
Definition:
Dwarven bathtub: This is a design where a ramp leads down into shallow water, and another ramp leads back up. The walls surrounding the entire thing are engraved with high-quality engravings, causing janitors to prioritize keeping the area clean.
A DF2010 fortress should be designed so that dwarves walk through these "bathtubs" whenever they may be crossing from contaminated areas (soil layers, caverns, hospital) into the fortress proper. Walking through the shallow water removes contaminants from the dwarf and anything (s)he is wearing or carrying, replacing the contaminants with a water coating.
This is the shape of the dwarven bathtub from the side view. The shallow water goes in the trench.
_ _
\_/
Going down to tantrum spiral, Part 2
Well, this is getting really frustrating.
The dwarves are destroying all kinds of random things in the fortress. The one that really irks me is, a toddler smashed the huge cage full of dozens of animals in the dining room (yeah right), grinding my framerate down with all the pathing and fighting the animals are doing. If I rebuild another cage to put the animals away, whoever constructs it will probably tantrum in the next few seconds and destroy it again.
Other tantrum-throwers destroyed the workshops, and I can't get them rebuilt because the tantrum-throwers are camping the sites and attacking anyone who comes near. I could rebuild the workshops somewhere else, but the guys throwing tantrums will gravitate to the new site, as they're marauding around looking for things to destroy.
I have lost 30 more dwarves since I last wrote, about half to the syndrome and the other half to bloody murder, and I am at a loss for what to do now. Nobody's responding to orders. What happens next? It's starting to irritate me. I've lost nearly every legendary crafter and Meng Berdakas, my legendary chef, who I wrote about before. Meng was kind of eccentric but he didn't deserve getting all his limbs hacked off one by one before he died, by a crazy dwarf with a bronze short sword. I'm also irritated because some bugs are showing up and I can't seem to do anything about them. For example:
Our armless ex-mayor got re-elected when the normal mayor died trying to save an injured patient. The armless mayor then tantrummed and has been magically grasping people with his arms and killing them, even though his arms don't exist and he can't actually grasp anything to do normal fortress work. How can he grab people and choke them with his left and right arms when he can't even take his clothes off or clean himself? How exactly did he tear the wings and head off of our tame buzzard with his "left hand" and "right hand"? I always knew he was a bloody liar about his missing arms. That lazy bastard!
I drafted the few still-responsive dwarves and sent them to take down the armless berserk mayor, and now they're tantrumming too, naturally, since the mayor was great friends with everyone in the fortress. If any migrants show up, I'm tempted to build them a completely separate fort and start over, but that's really irritating because I'm already suffering the FPS problems of an older fort. (Probably mostly due to the broken animal cage, but...)
We also ran nearly out of food and booze. People have been destroying it and the brewer and farmers can't work, as people are tracking poison blood or bloody murder all over the farmable ground (take your pick). People who try to farm get the syndrome and die in the field, and leave another pool of poison blood behind for the next would-be farmer (if the farm isn't being camped by some berserk expert soldier in plate mail with a shiny steel axe at that moment). I could rebuild the farm somewhere else on the site, but more blood will just get tracked in and it'll happen again.
I can see I've made some potential mistakes (though I'm not sure), like perhaps letting dwarves train in martial skills and carry weapons at all. When they started tantrumming out of control, I immediately made everyone who was still responding take off their weapons. But with everyone having some martial skills, their fists are pretty deadly too. I also don't know how I was meant to deal with that giant slate winged humanoid that died and left the blood on the ground that caused this disaster. The dwarves can't clean up the blood or help anyone who has the blood on them, and the blood pools just spread all over and multiply. Dwarves refuse to clean the stairways, and it's all over their clothes, so there's no stopping the blood now. It feels more like a bug than a believable scenario.
Should I see it through to the bitter end...?
Definition:
Berserk: A form of insanity (incurable). The sufferer violently attacks everything to the death.
The dwarves are destroying all kinds of random things in the fortress. The one that really irks me is, a toddler smashed the huge cage full of dozens of animals in the dining room (yeah right), grinding my framerate down with all the pathing and fighting the animals are doing. If I rebuild another cage to put the animals away, whoever constructs it will probably tantrum in the next few seconds and destroy it again.
Other tantrum-throwers destroyed the workshops, and I can't get them rebuilt because the tantrum-throwers are camping the sites and attacking anyone who comes near. I could rebuild the workshops somewhere else, but the guys throwing tantrums will gravitate to the new site, as they're marauding around looking for things to destroy.
I have lost 30 more dwarves since I last wrote, about half to the syndrome and the other half to bloody murder, and I am at a loss for what to do now. Nobody's responding to orders. What happens next? It's starting to irritate me. I've lost nearly every legendary crafter and Meng Berdakas, my legendary chef, who I wrote about before. Meng was kind of eccentric but he didn't deserve getting all his limbs hacked off one by one before he died, by a crazy dwarf with a bronze short sword. I'm also irritated because some bugs are showing up and I can't seem to do anything about them. For example:
Our armless ex-mayor got re-elected when the normal mayor died trying to save an injured patient. The armless mayor then tantrummed and has been magically grasping people with his arms and killing them, even though his arms don't exist and he can't actually grasp anything to do normal fortress work. How can he grab people and choke them with his left and right arms when he can't even take his clothes off or clean himself? How exactly did he tear the wings and head off of our tame buzzard with his "left hand" and "right hand"? I always knew he was a bloody liar about his missing arms. That lazy bastard!
I drafted the few still-responsive dwarves and sent them to take down the armless berserk mayor, and now they're tantrumming too, naturally, since the mayor was great friends with everyone in the fortress. If any migrants show up, I'm tempted to build them a completely separate fort and start over, but that's really irritating because I'm already suffering the FPS problems of an older fort. (Probably mostly due to the broken animal cage, but...)
We also ran nearly out of food and booze. People have been destroying it and the brewer and farmers can't work, as people are tracking poison blood or bloody murder all over the farmable ground (take your pick). People who try to farm get the syndrome and die in the field, and leave another pool of poison blood behind for the next would-be farmer (if the farm isn't being camped by some berserk expert soldier in plate mail with a shiny steel axe at that moment). I could rebuild the farm somewhere else on the site, but more blood will just get tracked in and it'll happen again.
I can see I've made some potential mistakes (though I'm not sure), like perhaps letting dwarves train in martial skills and carry weapons at all. When they started tantrumming out of control, I immediately made everyone who was still responding take off their weapons. But with everyone having some martial skills, their fists are pretty deadly too. I also don't know how I was meant to deal with that giant slate winged humanoid that died and left the blood on the ground that caused this disaster. The dwarves can't clean up the blood or help anyone who has the blood on them, and the blood pools just spread all over and multiply. Dwarves refuse to clean the stairways, and it's all over their clothes, so there's no stopping the blood now. It feels more like a bug than a believable scenario.
Should I see it through to the bitter end...?
Definition:
Berserk: A form of insanity (incurable). The sufferer violently attacks everything to the death.
Going down to tantrum spiral, Part 1
So, I decided my top-level cavern was a little too full of forgotten beasts for a few reasons. I sent the 63 soldiers to deal with them.
The eyeless dimetrodon went down without much trouble.
The clear salamander knocked a dwarf unconscious, but he went down too.
The hairless three-tailed giant lemur gave a dwarf a broken bone, and the three-eyed giant salamander strangled one to death on its way down. No big deal yet. That's what the red shirts are for.
Finally we fought the giant slate winged humanoid. Beware his poison blood.
I would never have fought the giant slate winged humanoid, if I knew what the poison blood would do.
He killed two dwarves who were too eager to engage before the rest of the soldiers caught up. This is a loss I could accept.
An injured dwarf--shall we call him Urist McVictim--lay unconscious in a pool of the beast's blood after we killed it.
Some idiot went to rescue that dwarf.
Urist McVictim's body swelled up and he bled all over the stairway while being rescued, and continued to bleed out in the hospital. He succumbed to the strange illness soon after. So did his rescuer.
Then four children who'd been wandering around in the stairway all died at once of the strange swelling illness. They died on contact, on the spot.
Then two more children.
Six adults who'd walked through the main stairway caught it too, and lay in the hospital. A few lived long enough for the surgeons to try and remove the rot and ease the swelling. This wasn't a good thing.
The surgeons cancelled surgery as they fell ill as well.
Then the wound dressers and suturers caught it when they tried to patch up the bleeding patients. And everybody who tried to clean up pools of infected blood in the hospital succumbed to it as well. I had to disable the cleaning labor for all the dwarves. I wish I had realized all the sources that were spreading it, sooner.
And then the diagnosticians who came to look at the dwarves stepped in puddles of illness and caught it.
So far about 25 dwarves have fallen to the swelling blood-sickness, and 15 others have been murdered by well-armed, tantrumming dwarves. Children die almost instantly when they catch it. Almost everyone in the fortress is either insane, having a tantrum, or Miserable.
That is, everyone but the duke. He sits calmly in the mason's shop, making coffins. He's not worried at all.
I decided not to let any more dwarves use doctor skills, since that just causes them to catch the illness and die. If I can keep everybody who doesn't have the sickness yet out of the hospital, maybe I can close it off and stop the spread. I'm not sure what to do about the stairway at all, though. If I use any constructions to seal off small areas, the builders will touch the blood and catch the sickness.
I think I have to seal off the entire stairway to make the fortress safe again, but I'm not sure how. I'm very low on workers because most of them have gone nuts, and when they work they come in contact with dwarves who've gone nuts and have swords and morning stars and such. Also, how many people are tracking the bad blood around? I can't tell. There's a lot of blood around the place because nearly everyone is going around murdering each other and our livestock.
This is bad. Back to trying to salvage it.
The eyeless dimetrodon went down without much trouble.
The clear salamander knocked a dwarf unconscious, but he went down too.
The hairless three-tailed giant lemur gave a dwarf a broken bone, and the three-eyed giant salamander strangled one to death on its way down. No big deal yet. That's what the red shirts are for.
Finally we fought the giant slate winged humanoid. Beware his poison blood.
I would never have fought the giant slate winged humanoid, if I knew what the poison blood would do.
He killed two dwarves who were too eager to engage before the rest of the soldiers caught up. This is a loss I could accept.
An injured dwarf--shall we call him Urist McVictim--lay unconscious in a pool of the beast's blood after we killed it.
Some idiot went to rescue that dwarf.
Urist McVictim's body swelled up and he bled all over the stairway while being rescued, and continued to bleed out in the hospital. He succumbed to the strange illness soon after. So did his rescuer.
Then four children who'd been wandering around in the stairway all died at once of the strange swelling illness. They died on contact, on the spot.
Then two more children.
Six adults who'd walked through the main stairway caught it too, and lay in the hospital. A few lived long enough for the surgeons to try and remove the rot and ease the swelling. This wasn't a good thing.
The surgeons cancelled surgery as they fell ill as well.
Then the wound dressers and suturers caught it when they tried to patch up the bleeding patients. And everybody who tried to clean up pools of infected blood in the hospital succumbed to it as well. I had to disable the cleaning labor for all the dwarves. I wish I had realized all the sources that were spreading it, sooner.
And then the diagnosticians who came to look at the dwarves stepped in puddles of illness and caught it.
So far about 25 dwarves have fallen to the swelling blood-sickness, and 15 others have been murdered by well-armed, tantrumming dwarves. Children die almost instantly when they catch it. Almost everyone in the fortress is either insane, having a tantrum, or Miserable.
That is, everyone but the duke. He sits calmly in the mason's shop, making coffins. He's not worried at all.
I decided not to let any more dwarves use doctor skills, since that just causes them to catch the illness and die. If I can keep everybody who doesn't have the sickness yet out of the hospital, maybe I can close it off and stop the spread. I'm not sure what to do about the stairway at all, though. If I use any constructions to seal off small areas, the builders will touch the blood and catch the sickness.
I think I have to seal off the entire stairway to make the fortress safe again, but I'm not sure how. I'm very low on workers because most of them have gone nuts, and when they work they come in contact with dwarves who've gone nuts and have swords and morning stars and such. Also, how many people are tracking the bad blood around? I can't tell. There's a lot of blood around the place because nearly everyone is going around murdering each other and our livestock.
This is bad. Back to trying to salvage it.
Dressing up the doctors
So Nutscaves' population has been getting out of hand (last I checked we were at 174 dwarves) because of the population cap bug. I might have to round up some of the more useless citizens for magma treatment or spike trap testing soon. Until then, I've found the need to specialize their duties a bit further.
I already had the following two "castes" :
3. "On Call". These skilled laborers have time-sensitive jobs that require their immediate attention, whenever Armok needs it done. They are assigned special bedrooms nearer the main stairwell. They are disallowed from doing any hauling, military practice, or even rescuing of other dwarves. Dwarves in this "caste" are:
Being at a Novice level in a fighting skill seems to be a whole lot better than no training at all:
In summary, Nutscaves is not going to go down easily to anything but a tantrum spiral!
So, here is the most vital question I am currently pondering (...). Since my doctors and other "On Call"'s aren't allowed outside or near any unsafe areas of the fortress, and since they're in separate "military squads" which are not allowed to train (titled The Bent Boats for non-doctors, and The Constructs of Healing for doctors)--I can set their "uniforms" to anything I want. In addition to the usual pieces of clothing:
Definition:
Tantrum spiral: Dwarves throwing tantrums sometimes kill (or injure) other dwarves or beloved pets. Death causes great unhappiness for family members, friends, witnesses, and/or pet owners. Great unhappiness leads to more tantrums. Thus, tantrums lead to more tantrums--a tantrum spiral. Tantrum spirals are a common way to lose a fortress.
I already had the following two "castes" :
- "Reserves". The red shirts. They do all the dangerous (or physically intense) jobs except mining and architecture. They also walk around in the best armor and weapons I can give them. If something attacks the fort, they'll either kill it, or hope to die before the more skilled laborers.
- "Explorers". The most promising miners and woodcutters in the fortress. Their jobs are sometimes more dangerous than the reserves. They are guarded by the reserves where necessary, but they can't wear armor due to the conflict with wearing their mining pick or axe at the same time. They tend to be naked as their clothing rots off of them.
3. "On Call". These skilled laborers have time-sensitive jobs that require their immediate attention, whenever Armok needs it done. They are assigned special bedrooms nearer the main stairwell. They are disallowed from doing any hauling, military practice, or even rescuing of other dwarves. Dwarves in this "caste" are:
- The baron, for his meetings with diplomats. Diplomats risk getting killed, the longer they hang around in my fort looking at stuff. I had a diplomat go down into the tunnel where I was removing floodwater today, and get sucked into a whirlpool my pump was making, and nearly drown himself. A pool of blood remains there to shame the baron, for not giving this guy a meeting sooner.
- The chief medical dwarf, because hospital jobs don't get queued up properly without his attention, even if the jobs are for other doctors.
- All the other doctors, because a patient who's bleeding out or has a broken bone just cannot wait for anything. Including Urist McDoctor, storing that toy boat in a bin.
- The broker, because I don't want him messing around when I need to do a last-minute almost-slipped-my-mind trade before the caravan leaves.
- The architects, because architecture is a very time-consuming job, and it can potentially grind the function of an entire project to a halt if it's not prioritized. When I want a pump or bridge built, I want it built right now, not next year when the architect stops hauling seeds around the mill.
- The tanners, because no animal skins (or any other products of butchery) are allowed to rot in my fortress. We respect our animals and we find all their parts useful and delicious. Except cartilage.
- The manager, because when I make a big work order, I want it to go out to the shops within the next couple of weeks. Not the next couple of months.
- The doctors additionally make up a separate sub-caste to make them easily identifiable, so that I can quickly assign them to the hospital burrow if it gets flooded with patients. (Hasn't happened yet in recent times, but it's best to always be prepared for emergencies.)
Being at a Novice level in a fighting skill seems to be a whole lot better than no training at all:
- It greatly increases a dwarf's chances that (s)he'll live when attacked
- If I have to draft a Novice or better dwarf to get him/her to move, or to fight something when cornered, then (s)he won't get unhappy about it.
- Dwarves with some martial skill will take joy in slaughter, if it comes down to it.
In summary, Nutscaves is not going to go down easily to anything but a tantrum spiral!
So, here is the most vital question I am currently pondering (...). Since my doctors and other "On Call"'s aren't allowed outside or near any unsafe areas of the fortress, and since they're in separate "military squads" which are not allowed to train (titled The Bent Boats for non-doctors, and The Constructs of Healing for doctors)--I can set their "uniforms" to anything I want. In addition to the usual pieces of clothing:
- dresses
- shirts
- trousers
- vests
- loincloths
- hoods
- cloaks
- turbans
- capes
- skirts
- coats (my civilization can make them!)
Definition:
Tantrum spiral: Dwarves throwing tantrums sometimes kill (or injure) other dwarves or beloved pets. Death causes great unhappiness for family members, friends, witnesses, and/or pet owners. Great unhappiness leads to more tantrums. Thus, tantrums lead to more tantrums--a tantrum spiral. Tantrum spirals are a common way to lose a fortress.
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