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.

• 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

I was kind of leaning toward forgotten beast, because I hate them and washing bodies with them sounds like good revenge. I also like the idea of cat soap because I remain amused by the semi-famous story of the fortress built completely from bars of cat tallow soap in 40d. And I like the idea of alpaca and reindeer soap because they sound vaguely cute and somehow environmentally friendly (although I'm not sure that's realistic). And honey badger soap for the "wtf?" factor. I bet my soldiers would like it.

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.

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.)

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

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?

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.
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