Caltrops - Dwarf Fortress - Re: I played some more

Forum Overview :: Dwarf Fortress

by Bananadine 01/24/2011, 10:03am PST

Bananadine wrote:

anyway I pretty easily set up a fortress-wide fishing industry, and by the time the canal up the mountain finally reached the room whose floor I wanted to farm, I didn't even need more food. Still, farming seems to be more efficient than fishing so I flooded the room and shut off the flood and started a nice plump helmet crop! (Plump helmets are plants I guess.)

After I'd finally gotten the stream to flow up the mountain and flood the farm room, I had no further use for it--from then on it just flowed into a dead end blocked by a floodgate. The gate was opened during the flooding of the farm of course, but "contaminants" such as mud are so persistent that you only need to flood a room once, and for years or maybe an eternity thereafter it'll have enough mud in it for crops to grow. So there was my impossible pump-driven stream, just doing nothing.

I decided to use it to flood the trade depot. In my previous fortress, I'd tried and failed to do this automatically, but now that I understood how streams and mechanisms worked, I saw that it'd be much less tricky, and nearly as entertaining, to use manually operated levers. So I moved my depot from the entrance of the fortress to a specially dug pit next to the river, set up a series of channels from the dead-end height of my artificial stream to this pit, and built a trapdoor (for traders to walk across on their way in, only to see it drop open behind them), and another floodgate. I tested the system, and it filled the pit just fine, though the depot took a long time to dry out afterward.

Soon enough a delegation from the Mountainhomes arrived: the outpost liaison, and a group of dwarven traders. Once all the traders were in the pit, laying out their wares, I gave the order to pull the deadly lever. Unib Likotardes, Fisherdwarf answered the call; and so his hands were forever stained (albeit in a way not at all recognized by the game). The water slowly drifted down the channel toward the pit, piling and tumbling over itself as Dwarf Fortress water does. For a while the traders didn't seem to notice. When it got into the pit, a few dwarves there started flipping out--these were citizens of the fortress, who'd just been in to do some trading. An architect struggled hard to climb the water and escape, but eventually he gave up. The traders were pretty stoic about it though. After a time, most of them died, without any fanfare. A few dwarves escaped through means I could not identify. Dwarf Fortress water is simulated well enough that, through the pressure of its motion, three dwarves, a horse, and a mule were dragged through the open trapdoor and into the short tunnel below, and were even forced halfway down the tunnel by the flow. That I did not expect! It had no practical significance though.

At this point I was unable to tell what I'd accomplished. It appeared that I now owned everything the traders had brought, including everything they'd been wearing. It did not appear that anybody cared that they'd died. I'd seen no evidence that the liaison himself (who seems to be the only really important type of dwarven visitor you can receive) had died with them. I figured he hadn't--he was probably wandering around the fortress or something. Well, I figured I'd keep on killing traders. I couldn't see anything else to do with them. There are controls for trading, but they seemed inconvenient to use, and I already had everything I needed to survive.

I thought I did, anyway. But then the goblins started coming. The first wave destroyed many dwarves and some buildings. But then they seemed to disperse. My dwarves were very unhappy about this. The mayor threw a tantrum, and a child went berserk. An anguished miner tried to start a fist fight, but had to cancel because he was interrupted by the berserk child. But soon enough the child was struck down, and then an elven caravan arrived, and everybody had something else to think about: drowning some elves (and subsequently stealing all their stuff). As with the dwarven traders, the elves did not seem to mind being drowned. Encouraged by the mud, saplings began to grow in my drowning pit. And ghosts began to crowd, for some reason, around the one bridge across the river.

Meanwhile, much of my basement became flooded. The trouble turned out to be an aquifer--I had to read the wiki to find that out. The obvious sources of water are rivers, rain, and lakes. But apparently there are, in addition to these, special magic ground tiles that look like ordinary ground tiles but contain infinite amounts of water, which will spill out of them as soon as you happen to dig in the area, and will not stop spilling until all available space on or below that level is completely full. So even a single, dwarf-sized tile of "aquifer"-type loam or whatever can flood a cavern of any size, unless you manage to destroy it, or surround it with new walls, or smooth all its surfaces (which supposedly stops them from leaking). Anyway, this was what was in my basement, and I couldn't effectively deal with it because all the ways I knew how to block off the flow required dwarven workers to be able to enter the area, and workers couldn't enter because the room was full of water. I guess I might have been able to dig around it. But it seemed fun to try to beat the flood. So I built more pumps, and put up some windmills to drive them, and soon enough I had water exiting upward from the flooded rooms and spilling out onto the surface land, where it quickly found its way to the river. But the rooms did not empty--my two bottommost pumps only produced two stable "craters" in the water there; these holes in the water were continually being closed again from the sides, by some invisible water source (and that was when I went to the wiki and learned about the magical aquifers). So not much was accomplished here, except that I got to see the entire undeground pool of water suddenly change from its sitting-still state to a complex flow pattern, just because one pump was turned on--that was cool.

Upstairs, things got worse and worse, because of the goblins. They kept coming and coming, and my population kept dropping. Untended horses and cows wandered through my legendary dining room; the clothing of fallen dwarves littered the floor. Eight dwarves, seven, six... and my new pump system was spreading water a little too far, so I had to cripple it. I ended this play session in a state of terrible disaster, as always.