Gird your nerdly loins: Dwarf Fortress

[FridgeMagnet]

I was helping my dad move a load of stuff from one shed to another shed, which is then going to have to be moved to a third place later on, and I said "you know this is just like Dwarf Fortress".

It _is_ based on the idea that everything is basically in the wrong place, though, and if it's ever in the right place it will be in the wrong place very shortly. At any one time over 50% of my dwarves are hauling shit from one place to another, and they do this all the time.

Anyway I'm not playing it any more. After the demons wiped the whole place out I started a new one and spent something like 16 hours in a day on it and had a moment of clarity. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can recover.

 

[Crispy]

If I could be bothered to photoshop a "one day clean" medal with an ASCII dwarf in the middle, I would.

 

[Crispy]

Had a nice little fortress going. Just hit magma, was smelting gold like nobody's business. Got some jobs interrupted by an Elk Bird. That sounds harmless enough, soon have it dead. Fucker and its two mates have killed half my dwarves and half of the survivors can't walk. Nobody's collecting the wounded. Doom.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

This thread is better then Eastenders.

 

[Crispy]

Oh god and here comes the rest of the flock.
I liked this fortress. I'm going back to an earlier save. (so sue me)

 

[Crispy]

My jeweler died somewhere and I couldn't find his body. So because I couldn't bury him, he came back as a ghost. But he doesn't fly around the fortress going whoooo! like most ghosts, he just sits in his old workshop all day and night. I've walled up the door so he doesn't scare the other dwarves.

So. Much. Gold. I think I might build a tower out of it.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

To get rid of ghosts you build a slab and then engrave it, to make a memorial, then put the memorial somewhere.

 

[Crispy]

Which is what I would usually do. But this guy appears to be no trouble, so I'm letting him haunt himself

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Which is what I would usually do. But this guy appears to be no trouble, so I'm letting him haunt himself

Why do I get the feeling these words will come back to, errrrr, haunt you?

 

[rubbershoes]

You know dragons are attracted by the smell of ghosts

 

[Crispy]

My immigration policy is working out well. In a typical wave of around 25 immigrants, I choose the 5 or so with no personality flaws, then assign the rest to a deathlist, whose members I constrain 5x5 room with a drawbridge in it. Once they're all in there, I assign a repeating Pull Lever job in the meeting room, which makes the drawbridge slam up and down, eradicating the weaklings.

As a result, employment is high with very few idlers, and those that do work are better at it. Also, the risk of tantrum spirals is reduced.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

My immigration policy is working out well. In a typical wave of around 25 immigrants, I choose the 5 or so with no personality flaws, then assign the rest to a deathlist, whose members I constrain 5x5 room with a drawbridge in it. Once they're all in there, I assign a repeating Pull Lever job in the meeting room, which makes the drawbridge slam up and down, eradicating the weaklings.

As a result, employment is high with very few idlers, and those that do work are better at it. Also, the risk of tantrum spirals is reduced.

David Cameron: The Dungeons & Dragons years.

 

[tommers]

David Cameron: The Dungeons & Dragons years.

I'm just praying Iain Duncan smith isn't reading this.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I found it more effective to retrain immigrants in more useful professions than "Beekeeper" and "Soapmaker", as well as build up the manufacturing infrastructure, so as to increase my economic output and level of growth. Or, er, I put them in the army.

 

[Crispy]

It's just a pain to administer that many dwarves tbh. And I'm sitting on so much gold I don't really need other industries

 

[Citizen66]

I have 60 idle dwarves, so to keep them busy I have designated a massive stone stockpile to forbid stone and made an equally massive empty stone stockpile next to it. When they're done moving all the stone from one to the other, I'll swap the designations.

I got made to do that when I was an aporentice (but with scaffolding)

 

[Crispy]

If Dwarf Fortress interests you for its complexity and emergent story possibilities, then keep an eye on Clockwork Empires, which is explicitly inspired by DF, but with graphics and UI and things. Individual AI actors with personalities and moods, task-oriented controls, stockpiles and workflows, staving off doom rather than aiming for a goal etc.

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/clo...games-lovecraft-laden-steampunk-city-builder/

I posted this in a SimCity thread, but I suspect the readerships of that thread and this don't overlap entirely.

 

[tommers]

I liked that on the other thread crispy, not liking it again. Nice try though.

 

[Citizen66]

It was a different link though. So you're not that sharp-eyed.

 

[Crispy]

Should have posted it here first, on reflection

 

[tommers]

It's very ambitious and I'm a bit concerned cos Dredmor, as great a roguelike as it is, does have a bit of a rubbish sense of humour running through it... but I am really excited about it. If they pull it off then it could be epic.

 

[Crispy]

I'd just built the foot-shaped foundations of my golden dwarf statue standing astride the trading depot on the surface, and enlarged my magma smelting operation to churn out gold blocks by the dozen for said statue, when I forgot to roof over said magma smelting area enlargement, leaving the fortress wide open to invasion by a forgotten beast, who immediately went about slaughtering my dwarfs until only 6 were left, all stuck in its webs. Then it fucked off back to the caverns. It took 10 minutes of background running for them to starve/bleed to death. Ah well.

Next time, NEXT TIME.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I found a vampire in the fortress - I actually noticed that it called them "Somebody Somebody, Vampire Fish Dissector" and showed them as having large teeth, presumably because they'd just been doing something vampirey - so I thought it was best to get rid of them. I'd read that vampires were quite tough so I made them into a squad of one and sent them down into the caverns to attack stuff until they died.

She killed a couple of troglodytes pretty easily, but I then spotted a herd of eight or so elk birds, and thought "right well that's going to finish her off surely" and set her to try to kill all of them. It was carnage - unarmed and unarmoured, as well as untrained, this vampire was chasing elk birds around the map and ripping them to bits. Vampires are apparently really fast, absurdly strong (they can punch limbs off and shatter bones with their fists) and can also tear targets open with their teeth. So, I decided not to try to kill this one after all but have instead given them armour and weapons and set them training. What's a few drained corpses every now and then?

 

[Crispy]

How hard is it to set up a NOT gate?


Specifically:
I want to have something step on a pressure plate, which causes bridge A to open and bridge B to close.
And then another pressure plate which causes bridge A to close and bridge B to open.

 

[rich!]

There's a whole section on the df wiki about logic gates. Bonus points if you do it with minecarts.

 

[rich!]

Across three laptops, I have about 10 worlds with various fortresses of various ages. Makes for an interesting random pick.

I tend to use fresh meat either to stock up my armies, or as additional smelters and web gatherers. You can't have too many dwarves wandering the caverns in search of GCS silk in my mind...

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Fuck's sake. About seventy goblins and trolls, all with metal weapons and armour, suddenly turn up, and what do my military decide to do? All run out of the entrance routes trying to pickup equipment from dead people. There's literally no way of stopping them apart from shutting all the doors, which I'd rather not do because that means goblins can't chase people inside and get caged/sliced up by my traps.

Eventually managed to cage and slice enough of them so that I could finish off the few that were left on foot, and as I'm clearing up, another fucking seventy come along. And the fucking military do the same thing. Plus the bloody goblins can shoot through my own fortifications now. I just closed all the gates and got on with mining adamantine this time - I've got wells, underground farms, all that sort of thing. The goblins fucked off eventually.

and where is the fucking coal

seriously though where the fuck is it, I have an easier time finding an imaginary mineral than coal

 

[rich!]

Grow trees underground, make charcoal with woodburners: no need for coal.

Also, you can use the area commands to forbid everything you can find outside, that works.

Finally, if your armies don't already have their weapons, you aren't training them often enough. 2 months on, 2 off is good...

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Well, they do now. I have no idea why they were looking for steel goblin greaves etc but they shouldn't any more.

Also I built a danger room. Apart from one health and safety nightmare where one of them brought a baby into it (wtf) the thing is stupidly effective - people go up to Axe Lord etc while you watch. If only I could get the station command to actually station all the dwarves in the squad rather than whichever ones could be arsed, it would be even more effective.

And a mass pitting zone for target practice - dump all the goblins in the cage traps into a pit behind fortifications and have marksdwarves - again, the ones who can be arsed turning up at all - shoot them slowly to death.

(For people reading this who aren't familiar with the DF combat system, it's horribly detailed. Every injury is described down to the level of which organ has been damaged and how much.)

 

[Crispy]

DF players - how about a succession game? We take turns to run a fortress for a year and write up/illustrate our experiences in a thread, for entertainment of an audience, and for spicing up the gameplay by inhheriting other peoples' madness grand designs.