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| progress by Bananadine 12/01/2010, 9:10am PST | ||||
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| I got my farms going and my fortress began to thrive. New migrants continued to arrive, so the population quickly rose. Sure enough, the game became unplayably slow. It would frequently pause for a second or more at a time, sometimes even for as many as eight seconds. The most relevant-sounding advice the Dwarf Fortress wiki gave was to play on a smaller local map. But you choose your local area when you start a fortress, and I didn't want to start over.
I suspected that pathfinding was the main problem, so I built a wall around the entrance of my fortress, to keep most of my dwarves in the small indoor area and out of the huge outdoor area. This seemed to help, and I was able to resume expansion of my fortress. I wanted to dig a tunnel straight down until something interesting appeared. But there were still some recent arrivals outside the fortress, and more continued to come. Fearful for my framerate, I began construction of a population-limiting device. This was to be a large pit with vertical walls, placed next to the stream. The pit would have an entrance ramp accessible to dwarves and a drain leading to a series of pumps. There would be a trade depot and a bed at the bottom, to attract traders and tired dwarves. Any entering creature would step on a pressure plate that would close off the entrance and open a floodgate from the stream. When the water had filled the pit, it would trigger another pressure plate that would stop the incoming water and open the drain. Designing this system was the most fun thing I've done in Dwarf Fortress so far. The outdoor tribe had to build all its own workshops, so construction of the killatorium would take a long while. Meanwhile, the dwarves of the fortress delved deeper and deeper, and eventually pierced a cavern. At one point there was a bit of exciting drama beneath the long stairway to the bottom: A single miner had somehow dug herself past the lowest finished section of stairs in such a way as to leave no pathway back to the top. And, for some reason, she had brought her baby with her. The other dwarves had abandoned the shaft, possibly because its lower end had gotten too far from their living quarters. When I noticed the situation, the lone miner was still busy hollowing out the lowest room. But she was growing thirsty. I tried to get her to use the rocks she'd cut out of the walls to build a ramp upward, but she would not. I don't know why. Then I tried to get her to build some stairs for herself, but she wouldn't do that either. She just kept digging, baby in tow. Finally, in desperation, I told her to dig a diagonal path through the wall, straight out to the nearest part of the giant cave the dwarves had discovered. That part of the cave was joined to an upper floor of my shaft via some natural slopes, so it would have been a safe way out. The miner followed instructions, finally. She dug half the tunnel I'd designated, and then died of thirst in the middle of it. The game helpfully noted in the baby's description that it had witnessed the death of its mother, and that it was also thirsty. Soon it died as well. Later, the other dwarves began working in the shaft again. The game did not explain why. I gather you're just supposed to study until you understand these things. But I think the game already knows and I think it should just tell me. :( The other big event in the mine shaft was the incursion of a cave crocodile into the fortress. In preparation for this sort of problem, I'd set up a lever in the living area that would close a wide door near the top of the shaft. I figured I'd have somebody pull it if anything dangerous appeared in the lower levels. But the game never told me about this crocodile until it was already up in my farms. Even after I started to see messages about how Oddom so-and-so had to cancel his seed-planting task due to interruption by cave crocodile, I couldn't find the problem. I mean, I scrolled over to the fortress and scanned around, and I couldn't locate the giant monster that was trying to murder all my people. That is how bad this game's UI is at showing you what's happening. Dwarves began falling to the crocodile left and right, and I couldn't even find it until half of them were gone. Not that it helped to find it. By looking at its description, I discovered that it had smashed its first right front toe, and dented its leg, and bruised its liver. I was not able to learn how to stop it. After it had killed most of my dwarves and gone into somebody's bedroom to rest, I tried to block its possible exit paths with stonefall traps. But the dwarves would not build. My fortress seemed to be doomed, unless this crocodile could be killed. But you get endless waves of migrants, I guess, so how could I ever fail to kill it if I tried? I don't know how I could have lost, except by giving up due to framerate problems. Which were getting worse again for some reason. By the time this was happening, the outdoor dwarves had finally gotten far enough in the construction of the death pit for me to learn that doors and pressure plates didn't work the way I'd thought, and that my effort to kill every migrant and trader and delegate from the dwarven homeland would never succeed. And anyway, even if it had succeeded, I couldn't have relied on it to keep my framerate low, because here I was, running at something like 2 FPS with only about ten dwarves. So I just cut through the wall around the main floodgate and let the stream into the pit--I thought that at least I might drown whoever was sleeping in the bed at the time, and then afterward I could see my pumps empy the pit once, and that would be cool. But nobody was in the bed, and when the pit filled and caused the drain to open, the outgoing water stopped too early for the game to consider it to be "flowing"--which meant it couldn't turn my water wheels, which meant the pumps wouldn't have any power. But there had been one lazy dwarf hanging around in the first section of the drain, and that one drowned. I called this a victory and abandoned the fortress. Next I will try on the smallest possible piece of land. I think I don't care enough to set up a whole healthy dwarven society with complicated craft industries and trade agreements and such, but I at least want to dig all the way to the bottom of the world once, before I finally give up on this interesting yet horrible game. |
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