Did you post to the diary thread?
Maus Magill
Spectator
I can hardly wait for your update, Autolycus. It’s very brave of you to take on managing an established fortress. This thread actually inspired me to try playing DF myself, and so far my management has been a complete disaster. I flooded my own fortress in late spring, my expedition leader and favorite dwarf went crazy and his head exploded, leaving a rotting corpse in the middle of my dining hall, enemies are approaching and I have no defense, etc.
Perhaps it is actually easier to take over a well-established fortress from someone else? Any thoughts on the subject? Perhaps I should find a decent save game somewhere and continue from there…
I’ve got to say, the worst thing that’s happened to me in any of my abandoned fortresses has been a bunch of fish lying around exuding miasma. Mainly I’ve quit them because I wanted to go back and start over with a better understanding of the interface (and once because I accidentally gave all my valuable trade goods to a merchant without asking for anything in return).
I did that once when I was starting out. It says ‘offer goods’ - how was I to know that the character I was offering them to was the king of their civilisation, and not the trader standing in front of me, right?
I did the exact same thing, i.e. “offered” my goods. Things are not going well at Fort Panurgion!
The save file is up! I repeat, the save file is up!
I also posted my journal and some pics. I apologize for the scrubby quality of the journal. I was in a rush to get things ready for FluidDruid so I pretty much just copypasta-ed straight from the notes I took down during real-time gameplay. At least it should capture the trepidation and cluelessness of my reign. With that said, I think things are going pretty darn well actually.
I hope y’all enjoy, and I hope our glorious home lasts long enough for another rotation or three 
Yayyy! I’ll roll up my sleeves and strike the earth shortly. I can’t guarantee success, I can’t guarantee happiness, I can’t guarantee survival, but I can guarantee mumble grumble hrmmmm hrmmamrmrmmmm
Well, I got to 17th Granite and the game crashed. It was a pretty awesome 17 days though - we got made a barony, and we had several deaths to a forgotten beast which looked like a four-horned eyeless crocodile.
Oh well. I’ll start over again later. Funny, I don’t normally get crashes like that.
Shit dude, we’ve got a forgotten beast? Lucky that didn’t happen eighteen days earlier. 
The barony worked out huh? Well blow me down. Long live Baron Autolycus the Clueless
I am assuming the forgotten beast was found in the huge underground cave system? Pretty [del]foolhardy[/del] brave of you to go down there!
Well, there’s already several routes into the caves - I didn’t open anything new at all.
It’s really interesting to see the design of the fortress - it’s just so different from how I operate my fortresses. Especially the military, which made me go WTF in a huge way. We have like six half-full military units on various rotations. Also, for some reason, every dwarf in the fortress has mining turned on and we have like 15 engravers but no coke or fuel and our army is wearing bone armor and goblin scraps. Wood is critically low as well - about 5 logs - and we only have about 100 servings of booze left.
No worries of course, I’m happy to have something to do - I was worried when I read that the fortress was largely self-sufficient!
Of course, I plan to make sweeping changes during my short time to try to optimize things my way. We’ll see how well that works out - I’m guessing if we’ve hit the criteria for a Forgotten Beast, it’ll happen again shortly after I restart my year. I think it has to do with wealth or population or something.
Pretty sure we can handle one again unless it’s one of those horrible polluting ones… give me poisonous bite any day over ‘deadly dust’ or something.
A somewhat unrelated DF thing that I had to share: I’ve just started work on my first above-ground fortress. Building on an aquifer is the main challenge I haven’t really attempted yet - I made everything else easy on myself, so there aren’t lots of monsters around, for instance. Still, it’s pretty heavy going - you need a lot of trees to build one of these things.
Maybe we should have a challenge succession game some time in the future? 
So far my year has been very eventful so I’ve gone and ahead posted the first update.
That’s my tomb. Trap releases whatever monster is in the cage, lever buries me. I asked that it be pulled 1 year after I am buried.
Is it? I didn’t see a coffin in there, it’s a statue garden as far as I could see. I thought your tomb was a different one.
Alright. My turn is coming up soon, so I have a question.
The rules say that we aren’t allowed to use drawbridges to crush enemies. I have no problem with that. I’ve never used mere bridge crushing as a trap.
I do have an idea worked out for an automated drowning trap, that if it works would be theoretically capable of wiping out entire sieges. Or, it could backfire and drown half the fortress. I should be able to get it built in under a year. Would this be against the rules as a too-effective way of fighting sieges, or would you all be OK with this?
Damn, fluiddruid, shit’s getting real over there. The events of your turn are what I was fervently hoping wouldn’t hit directly after mine during what was to be Autolycus’ turn. But that goblin ambush that I copped right at the end was a sign of things to come after all, it seems.
As for the drowning trap, AndrewL… I’m not sure exactly what you have in mind, but I feel like our priorities for rule-invention should be:
- Stop the fortress from dying completely.
- Write an interesting story.
- Stop the fortress from being damaged severely (without total destruction).
This list is entirely selfish, of course. I think as the fortress ages, 1 and 2 here should gradually swap places, but I don’t know if it’s at that stage yet… Still, the possibility of the trap messing up and flooding the whole fortress sounds like fun, especially if it means you’d be inclined to pull the drown lever only in dire conditions, and regular gobbo incursions still get dealt with using traditional means. So I guess I’m cautiously in favour of the drowning pit.
What kind of setup do you have in mind? Are there windmill-powered screw pumps involved?
Unrelated note: Do I get to make a state of the fortress address from beyond the grave?
It’ll depend on the local geology. From a glance at the map it looks like you have a brook, so windmills and pumps probably won’t be needed for what I have in mind, but it will depend on what the rock layers are like and how many rock layers I have to work with before hitting the top cavern layer. Also, how much labor I can actually dedicate to working on it. Do we have any mechanics yet?
Wow, I have no idea how you hard-cores handle fortresses with >100 people. I’m up to 75 or so in my game (ridiculously awesome zone with huge veins of iron ore and coal; I found limestone by the winter of year 2) and having a very hard time keeping the food and drinks in stock. I have about 5 4 x 4 farm plots going, but that barely seems to keep the brewers going and I’m perpetually short on food. Should I be more ruthless about butchering all the donkeys/horses/mules/cows that are hanging around?
ETA: hope it’s okay to use this thread as a generic Dwarf Fortress thread.
I do a few things:
- I always have one or two herbalists around if climate permits - all qualifying plants are restricted to booze use only.
- Put breeding livestock on leashes (they won’t breed in cages) and milk/cheese 'em regularly
- Ruthlessly kill offspring of animals (except some puppies for wardogs). Baby donkeys, cows, elephants, etc. all age too slowly to be viable. Get adults through trade.
- Kill mules on sight, they don’t reproduce and are largely useless
- Use cage traps. Wherever you see packs of wild animals on the map, drop a few cage traps now and then. Sooner or later you’ll get one of the popular routes through the map and will start bringing in live animals. Make a kill room and use your military to kill them (you’ll need to build the cage and associate it with a lever to release them, using mechanics). Make sure to lock (forbid) the door into the kill room so they don’t escape!
- Slaughter all non-pet cats and kittens after the first year. You will be crawling with cats no matter what you do and you can’t slaughter pets for food.
- Have sufficient capacity butchers/tanners shops for large influxes of meat at once (e.g. goblin squads riding tasty elk birds). A mature fortress should have 3 of each near an appropriate refuse pile.
- Don’t forget above-ground farms. I like to have a small outdoor plot (especially if I can get my hands on sunberry seeds). Make sure it’s walled in.
I am swimming with food in my personal fortress. At 3,000 lavish meals in storage, I leave meat and fat to rot, and only use the leather and bones (the latter for bolts, which you can never have enough of).