Caltrops - Dwarf Fortress - I played some more

Forum Overview :: Dwarf Fortress

by Bananadine 12/07/2010, 7:11pm PST

The unit list is good. Dwarf Therapist is surprisingly easy to use, and is good--although I don't really understand why the game wants you to exert such fine control over what jobs each dwarf is willing to perform. It would make more sense to me to assign priorities to the tasks I've created for my dwarves. If I place a trade depot, then obviously I want somebody to work as an architect, at least briefly, and as far as I can tell, any dwarf can do any job, so it shouldn't matter much which one takes care of that task. So why do I have to explicitly give the dwarves permission to do something that I've already said I want them to do? Maybe I'm missing something. So far, my answer is: Because the design of that system is half-baked.

Anyway, I started my new small-as-possible colony and dug out a nice little fortress inside a sandy mountain. All the mining and building went fine and now the dwarves have a nice dining room and a nice well and a semi-decent dormitory. I picked a room right inside the entrance to be my farm. But then I realized that that farm would be several stories above the level of the map's stream. Since I like water, I immediately resolved to drive a new stream branch right up the side of the mountain. This was my main project for the session. I built a farm outside so my dwarves would have something to eat while I worked on their real farm, and then I set to work.

After a lot of infrastructure development, I managed to place a water wheel and a pump on the edge of the stream. But they didn't work. It turned out that the stream's walls were too high for the wheel to reach the water. So then I built a limestone patio out from the side of the bank, one level down, and extended it into a channel running beneath the wheel. Then I put another wheel and pump down there, to flood the channel and drive the upper wheel, causing more water to be pumped from the channel up onto the grass of the mountainside, where I assumed it could do no harm and therefore needn't be contained in any way (until the time came to build the next pump in the series). What a surprise when this finally actually worked! The only hitch was that some silly dwarf got herself trapped on the lowest level somehow, causing me to receive messages for the next twenty minutes about how she had cancelled her increasingly desperate "drink" and "hunt small creature" tasks due to dangerous terrain. I wanted to save her, because I hadn't lost anybody yet, but these dwarves who can cut down and then rebuild a whole mountain between meals are strangely unable to do any work that requires them to stop even a small flow of water. They can't build walls to block a filled channel; as far as I know, they can't even drop a rock from the next level up to break an axle that runs a pump. So I lost my dwarf. It shut her up though, and at this stage in my game one dwarf is as good as another, so I was satisfied.

The greater trouble was that the last pump in the chain was actually managing to take over its section of the mountain. The flood that it produced mostly just ran back into the stream, as I'd assumed it would, but to progress I needed to confine it to a channel, and the water was just deep enough right around the pump that I couldn't build anything there. I told some dwarves to remove that pump's axle, but they didn't. I guess the water was too deep for that as well. So then I told them to remove its gear mechanisms--and then the pump itself, and finally, the water wheel. They wouldn't do any of it. So the flood grew broader and broader.

During all this time, every dwarf had had the farming job enabled, and my expedition leader (and maybe a few others) was set to do nothing else. But nobody seemed to want to farm. I thought this might be because they didn't have enough seeds or something, so I periodically told them to gather plants, which they did. But for some reason that the game didn't see fit to explain to me, nobody would plant any seeds. I had plenty of food on my wagon, so I wasn't too worried about this. I figured I'd get serious about farming when my pump system was done.

Eventually, somebody removed one of those pump bits, and after that I guess the water subsided and there was a rush on the rest. I didn't see any of that--I just scrolled over and saw a pile of logs where my mechanisms had been. Well, that was fine. I was nicely set up to replace them, anyway. Only two or three more pumps to go! That's about when the food ran out, and almost everybody gave up working in favor of hunting vermin.

The dwarves still wouldn't farm, and I still couldn't see why. So I dug another slope down to the stream and told some dudes to fish. One or two did, but then they interrupted their fishing so they could hunt vermin. A few dwarves just starved. A few others lost the will to live. That's where I was when I stopped. I figure these dwarves are a loss--the next wave of migrants can finish my pump system. The great work must go on!

I never saw any speed problems. This fortress isn't as complex as my last one was, so that might not mean much. But I have high hopes!