Yeah, it’s really bad. I’ve never encountered so much pain in a single year. I think our wealth must have shot up very fast due to having so many engravers. We also have a friggin’ pile of (largely useless) artifacts.
AndrewL, yes we have mechanics. The problem is getting breathing room to even start. All of the mechanics have been assigned to traps just to keep us alive at this point. Even building new traps has been difficult - just keeping them loaded is my primary goal. A drowning trap sounds great but at this point I’m just trying to stabilize the patient. Hopefully I can do that sufficiently to put you in a better position for your plans.
Yeah, I really need to figure out how traps/mechanisms work. Might end up having to restart and make a more defensible fortress; just having 2 squads all decked out in steel isn’t much help if the goblins can show up anywhere.
ETA - that’s a response to 2 posts earlier, and not a comment on the current game.
This isn’t strictly related to the succession game or anything, but: There’s a new DF version out! Bunch of new animals, animal farming, pottery, beekeeping, and some other stuff probably. Something to do with trading during world-gen that we apparently won’t see yet. Maybe even some bug fixes…? My fingers are crossed for functional hospitals. Excitement! Also there is a new corresponding version of Dwarf Therapist up. I’m downloading both now. I was going to get some work done tomorrow, too… ah well, so it goes. I’ll report back with my findings tomorrow.
Back on topic: That sucks about the game crashing, fluiddruid. I hope it’s not causing you ongoing problems. What was the goblin situation like in the crashed-out timeline that you just had?
The latest revision (31.19) didn’t include many bugfixes. The only actual bugfixes I know of are that underground farms on soil no longer need to be irrigated, and fat is now processed into tallow a stack at a time instead of one unit at a time. The new version is mostly a new-content release. There are dozens of new domestic animals, and several new industries including clay-based pottery, beekeeping, shearing of wooly animals for wool cloth, farming egg-laying creatures for eggs, and the ability to make vegetable-based oil and soap. As with every new-feature release, there are a handful of new, amusing bugs. Wild egg-laying creatures, including giant eagles, elk birds, and kobolds, will claim the nesting boxes you intended for your chickens, lay eggs in them, and then defend those eggs from your dwarves. Zombie chickens lay perfectly edible eggs. Beekeeping is very buggy, if two dwarves try to harvest the same wild beehive the second one will freeze up and stand in place forever when he gets to the hive and finds it already harvested. Many domestic animals needs to graze and will starve if not pastured on grass, but they aren’t smart enough to seek out grass on their own if you forget to assign them to a pasture. Clay pots hold far, far too much food, leading to situations where an entire fortress’s food supply can be stored in a single pot. Food supply limits are applied during world generation now, often leading to worlds where the kobolds and goblins have been wiped out by famines because they don’t know how to farm.
The biggest change, and one that is probably not a bug, is that metal is much, much rarer now. Metal was ludicrously common in all the 31.xx variants so far. In 31.19 it’s gone to being ludicrously scarce, such that you can mine out entire layers of stone and not find a single ore vein. I’m hoping that this is just a temporary setting and that in the next version it’ll go to being more common, even if it’s not as common as it was.
The next release (31.20) will probably include a lot more bugfixes. Toady seems to be alternating between releasing a version that introduces a lot more content with associated bugs, and versions that have relatively little new content but are mostly bugfixes.
When setting up your location, use Tab to show what neighbors are nearby. Bit difficult for goblins to invade if there aren’t any in your neighborhood.
I’m up to midsummer on my save. I had some rough moments at the start with that giant siege, but they’re gone now. Multiple quite interesting construction and mechanics projects are underway at this point.
My grand dining room is a glorified warehouse, and now you are saying my beautiful paved silver roads leading to the glory that is Joinglazed have also been wrecked?! I pull my beard in exasperation. I will get my revenge in-game by issuing crazy edicts and throwing tantrums… mwahaha.
All in all though, I am very glad we survived. The 3 day silence after your last post AndrewL was a real nail-biter!
Bit of an eyeopener to see that one goblin swordmaster somehow get past the soldiers, get to the drawbridge control levers, and then stand there like he was guarding them. I’d swear it was on purpose, but I don’t think the DF AI is that sophisticated.
I didn’t actually get a chance to play for a few days, so I didn’t quite know what was going to happen either.
Sorry about the roads, but then tend not to survive sieges with trolls. Hey, someone else might finish the dining room. I didn’t wreck it, just stuck some surplus furniture there for now.
Andrew, Autolycus, thanks for reminding me. I’ve had a hellish semester so far, and I completely forgot about this game. That being said, I won’t have time to play my turn until Wednesday evening. Really sorry about the delay, especially since I told myself at the beginning I wouldn’t make everyone wait the full week.
I agree - the last couple of years have been top reading, especially the cliffhanger with the goblins getting past the guards.
Dammit, I just noticed that I spelt ‘reins’ wrong in one of my posts. I’ll just pretend it was a pun.
In other DF-related news, I’ve had a bit of a crack at the new version now. Damn, metal is scarce. I get that not all sites should have everything, especially for the new trade system, but there needs to be some kind of terrain-specific resource of value besides metal for the decision to go somewhere without metal to be anything besides a challenge option. Maybe there needs to be different wood types and some are more valuable, or certain areas are really good for farming, or something, cos at it stands clay and glass don’t really stand up against metal in terms of where you want to embark. They seem to have also made adamantine more common - the game I played recently, I was literally at the stage of making furniture out of the stuff because there weren’t enough non-adamantine metals around. Then I decided to explore some hidden fun stuff (my first time doing so). Dear GOD those guys are hardcore. My military, which up until that point had dispatched several forgotten beasts, quite a few gnarly underground things including a giant cave spider, and an ettin, with zero injuries to any of them, all died almost immediately without a single kill to their names. And they were all fully armed/armoured with adamantine equipment. Damn. I know what my next challenge game will be.
So, as detailed in the other thread, digging through the (probably third) cavern, I found a raw adamantine spire. For those following along at home who don’t understand the implications, adamantine is the motherlode. It’s DF’s version of mithril. Ten times more valuable than gold, ten times stronger and sharper and lighter than steel. It’s very rare, with only a couple spires jutting up through the magma per map, and mining these spires has its own special difficulty. First, they usually only go to the top of the magma sea at the bottom of each map, and things submerged in magma are difficult to mine. That doesn’t apply as much in this case, as this is one of the rare spires that penetrates the caverns. Secondly, Adamantine spires are literally the gates of hell. In the middle of each one, reaching not quite all the way to the top, is a hollow tube. A dwarf breaching that tube is exactly like a Nazi opening the Ark of the Covenant, in that his face is going to be totally melted off by demons. This obviously is something we want to avoid, at least for now.
That being said, since the tube is always a fully enclosed 2x2 square, any chunk of adamantine on a given level that does not form part of a solid 4x4 block is perfectly safe. There are several such chunks visible in our spire. So, voting time. Can I go for it or not?
Yeah, I think you should go for it too. You sound like you know what you’re doing.
I never noticed that about the safety of non 4x4 blocks. That’s good to know. It would also be true of 4x4xn blocks, wouldn’t it? Because my understanding is that the tube goes straight down - so any square that has, say, magma or magma-edge beneath it also couldn’t be part of the pipe? Or did I just dream that…
By the way, I just had a great idea. Someone should, instead of building themselves an epic tomb, build no tomb and just throw their dwarf into some magma or somewhere similarly irretrievable. Then they can come back and haunt their successors! I kind of wish my spirit was doing this right now.
Hopefully I can do that sufficiently to put you in a better position for your plans.
But we’re hanging in there. The leader of their civilization is now dead.
