Dwarf Fortress: Very Ambitious Roguelike

The problem has been that they have running battles with this herd of elephants, and I end up finding forbidden bolts all over the place. I didn’t think to use to the stocks menu, which should be easy to do. Thanks.

Caves look pretty neat in the steam version.

And oops. I quickly built a wall and door where we broke through. Then we saw some red diamonds nearby, and thought they would good to grab. Then it came. I shall call it the green terror. Our wet behind the ears squad was called to action, and raced down the stairs to meet it. Apparently so did a good portion of the fortress, or they were heading to grab things out of the massive cave system. We stopped it in the stairwell, half the squad dead outright along with 15 others. There likely will be another 10 or more dead soon, as they lie, broken and bleeding at the scene of the fight. Also lost in the battle was the fort’s baron. At first I thought maybe we lost our barony due to the catastrophe, but the baron was ripped apart in the fight. We still have 3 legendary miners, but I expect the trauma will do a lot more damage before we recover, if at all.

So it looks like Oade will be leading a party of six anonymous dwarfs into the wild. That’s ok, I’m sure the rest of you will clamor to be in the migrant waves once we strike riches.

My fort continues to hang on making it into winter of 5th year. It has been an eventful year. A number of attempts by greedy humans trying to sneak off with artifacts has led to a number of dead humans, and sadly a couple of dead citizens. The main source of festivities though continued to be opening access to the caverns. Having faced 3 creatures in rather quick succession thinned out our numbers a bit. Luckily 2 other creatures got into a fight with each other before making to the fort, resulting in one dying and the other having a broken neck, just laying in the caverns waiting for death. Yet another was finished off by a visiting monster slayer. At least it gave me an opportunity to learn about hospitals, and kicked off a booming coffin and slab production industry. I think we are currently around 120 dwarfs, and luckily avoided running out of booze when our brewers were recovering from the attacks.

How do you stop them? I just seem to get notifications that the artifact was missing, and then like 20 witnesses pointing at whodunit because they did it in the middle of the tavern, but they still run to the edge of the map, and even when I do manage to interrogate and convict them, the artifact is gone.

I’ve been, ummm, pro-active in dealing with them? I’d get an alert about someone sneaking around and them saying they can’t be kept from whatever. So I would send my squad out to kill them. Then inevitably they have an accomplice or friend in the tavern who starts a fight when the other is attacked so some bloodshed in there as well. I guess I should create another squad so I can send one to the tavern when I send the other after the would-be thief.

If my blabber mouth dwarfs would shut up about the artifacts in the tavern there probably wouldn’t be an issue.

Right now trying to decide when I should go for an artifact I can see in the caverns. Some shield just sitting there tempting us to go get ambushed.

I’m just starting to get back into this, but would war dogs be an effective tool for base defense and chasing down thieves?

I don’t have much experience with them yet. A human spearman killed the 2 I had at the time.

Maybe trained tigers would be better.

If my hunters haven’t killed off all the elephants, maybe I could try to tame them.

Huh, I never got that alert. Maybe I need better scouting or something? After someone steals the thing and I get the alert, I can send the captain of the guard to “interrogate” them, but even if I can see the thing in their inventory, I can’t target them with a squad. After they hand off the thing to their accomplice they’ll get a beating (when I convict them), but that doesn’t do much. The mission to recover the artifact doesn’t do anything. (One of them was a human bard that kept requesting citizenship even after I convicted and beat him. Eventually I said yes because, well, keep your enemies close, or something.)

I have some humans in my population, and I can’t expel them because they are nobles? They aren’t nobles at my fortress. I was able to kick out all but 4 humans that it says are nobles, plus the group of them visiting.

Apparently they added it to te base builder sale on Steam with 10% off.

Here is how the gods created our world, Sil Minbaz, "The Plane of Enchantments":

World Creation Options

The gods took a peek into the “Detailed mode”, saw things like this:


And noped back out into basic mode.

The history of our Age of Myth recedes into the distant past of a hundred years ago. But the land is still vibrant with creation and destruction.

We hail from the mighty Crystal of Clouts, a Dwarven realm led by King Rigoth Rampartfastened. We are but seven of their 1800-strong population. We will found the Crystal of Clouts’ 24th settlement, in the northern reaches of the Spine of Entrances, the mountain range our people call home.

World Map


The Spine of Entrances are the gray mountains running from the southeast to the northeast on this map; the blue boxes are the settlements of our civilization (the southern part of the mountain range). The major river in the southwest is Glitterflooded the T… (illegible), and it is dotted with human (tan hut) and goblin (brown pit) settlements. The Giltterflooded flows into The Ocean of Panting on the west side of the map. To the north of the Glitterflooded, just east and north of the Ocean of Panting, is the Forest of Gallows, home to many elven settlements.

The green boxes are the locations picked by the site selector. We will found our fortress on the mountain just to the northeast of the northeastern green boxes.

Our site will span two biomes: mountain and forest.



Yes, the world is big, and we are small. But we are stout of heart (and body), and we have the latest in (light) aquifer management technology.

Eager to strike the earth, we
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Prepare for the journey carefully is, no doubt, the prudent option, but time and tide wait for no dwarf.

(Note: “Enemies” and “Economy” are set to hard, but otherwise the difficulty is default.)

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I haven’t played in a long time but the way to deal with Kobold thieves was to chain one dog to the entrance. They reveal invisible beings. Then the dog can kill them, or a crossbowman standing by

Strike the earth!

My fort that I was experimenting with, and learning while waiting for death to arrive made it through another year. Perhaps using normal instead of hard was a mistake. We are almost back to pre-cavern opening population levels, with very few humans. An overzealous butcher thinned out our cat and dog populations a bit (dfhack autobutcher). A couple more attacks from the deep were repulsed at a loss of one child and one legendary miner. He was the lover of my other legendary miner, and she either isn’t upset about it or doesn’t realize it yet. Shukarid, Tall Rock, has been elevated from a barony to a county even though the Baron perished in the attack of the green terror in 103.

Our seven brave dwarves, led by Oade, who thinks, “Everything’s alright.”

“Loner” is not, perhaps, the first trait to look for in a leader but all in all, not so bad:

Certainly nice for a leader: “a sharp intellect and a way with words”. Orderly, moderated, consults with others, open to changing his mind, assertive, ambitious… all fitting traits of our brave leader. The most immediately relevant trait is “adequate organizer”, which will rapidly be improved as we make him our manager and he spends his days cataloguing inventories and issuing work orders. Perhaps, though, we can aim to provide him some of his beloved music, of which he has a fair knowledge already:

Specifically, let’s see about that old favorite, “Weasel and Nothing More”:

Ah yes, an inspired composition, the classic example of the Aquamarine of Cherishing form. Personally, the (traditional) flattened fifth in the first theme always gets me.

[Holy crap, they have really redone some stuff since I last played this game…]

ahem

Back to business. Our wagon finally gave out just as we followed the river out of the forest and into the mountains.


Ideally, we’d have made it further up the mountains to a more defensible spot before settling, but the gods have placed us here, here we shall delve, by Armok.

Stukos is already fishing, and we will set Vabok to mine out the entrance to our fortress. Now, a true dwarven hold should have an imposing gate carved out of a sheer cliff, but we’ll just have to dig down through the soil by the edge of the forest and hope we don’t have to deal with an aquifer immediately.

Nish will start felling trees, and the rest will gather plants until Vabok carves storerooms and workshops in the earth.

And of course we make it mere seconds before ALERT: Something has collapsed on the surface! Nish managed to bring a tree down–not just on himself, but on two other dwarves as well.


Hardly an auspicious start…

1st Hematite, 100

The first summer of Listenwound begins.

Vabok has carved stairs directly into the earth. Aboveground, we designate a collection spot for the logs felled by Nish, and establish a trade depot (built of carved limestone blocks, more on that later). Our broken-down wagon remains, still holding much of what we brought with us. Nearer the river is our dump, already being filled with the refuse of Stukos’ fishing. (And, to our shame, some fish and mussels we have allowed to rot.) To the south, in the forest, we have designated a gathering zone for fruits and plants, and just north of our lumber stockpile is our animals’ grazing area. [These zones are not pictured.]


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This is the entrance to Listenwound (elevation 45, just below the surface). Nothing much, yet, just some stonefall traps as a likely-inadequate defense, some limestone doors, and stairs down to the first level. A lobby, if you will.


Our first level. On the left is the dining room, still under construction and filled with the chunks of the limestone it was carved out of. The middle room is our dormitory, with a spare eighth bed (just in case). The top room on the right is Fikod’s office (our bookkeeper), and the bottom is Oade’s office, where he assigns work and (someday soon, no doubt) listens to the grumblings of his people.


The next level down has our work area. The central bottom room is the kitchen–clockwise from the top right is the fishery, butcher, tanner, and unconstructed still and kitchen. The left room is the pantry (food stockpile), complete with stairs back up to the dining hall. On the right, our hospital is being mined out.


The top half of the work floor has, clockwise from bottom left, the carpenter, stonemason, craftdwarf’s shop, and mechanic. It also has steps back up to…


Our storage depot! (Yes, I hid this from you earlier). Clockwise from top-right, stockpiles for “finished goods”, furniture, stone, wood, and blocks. The stockpiles are intended to be close to the workshops. (The interior lumber stockpile pulls from the outer one.) They will likely need to be much enlarged.


Perhaps you noticed the bright-white stairs next to the mason’s workshop. Those are constructed out of limestone blocks, instead of carved from the limestone directly. (This is because I decided after mining out the rooms to add more stairs, and needed to “construct” them instead of “mine” them.) The thing with blocks is that they require carving from the raw mined stone, but one piece of mined stone gives four blocks. But when used as construction material (either for stairs or walls, or for buildings like workshops) they count the same as rough stone–so by carving blocks you effectively multiply your stone by four. Of course, you are not likely to ever run out of stone, in this game. The smooth blocks are also nicer than rough stone, in that walls built of them are “smooth” and more valuable than walls built of rough stone. (Naturally-hewn walls can be “smoothed” for the same effect.)


So far, we have found malachite (copper ore), limonite (iron ore), and lignite (coal); limestone, which provides carbon for steel, and quicklime, as well as being a building material; kaolinite, which can be made into clay; and bauxite, which is “just” a regular stone, but is magma safe, as well as a nice deep red color. Given the plentiful trees on the surface, we could already set up a steel industry! But first we must establish the basics…