We’ve got 43 dwarfs and a sprawling fortress. Since the last many-picture update two big halls have been created in the south central compound - one for dining and one for sleeping. In the north the pit has been part-filled with water and there’s a lot of other ice and open space. It’s a bit confusing actually!
Never mind, I’ll work it out I guess!
I’m pleased to see my central pit has been covered and has a stairwell running through its center. It’s half full of water… but I know there should be some lava down there as well, right? Lets just do that right away for fun!
Or not… seems like the mechanisms were never properly built or put into use. Arg. We have two bauxite left, possibly. I might have to try and work something out the hard way with them.
…oh wow, spring has come, the ice melts and the game slows down a lot. Heck. I need to remove it I think!.. and it’s back up to speed. Lots of unmelting to do I guess.
And by the way, DocVego, child, has created Shriekbends, an Andesite Earing! It’s rather pretty and relates to Tulon becoming leader of the Livid Sack, but otherwise unremarkable.
Ok, I’ve worked out why we’re currently trying really hard to flood the world. There’s a rather artfully constructed set of screw pumps and a windmill that’s trying to drain the aquifer. Damn, I’m going to have to turn it off or the water will spread further (it’s starting to do that now)… the point of the draining is to get to some bauxite (which it really seems we don’t have any of)… but I don’t quite no how we can both drain the water and prevent the world from flooding… hmm.
I think the problem is there’s a pump bottleneck, essentially, only one pump is pulling water out of the aquifer. Regardless, the water is slowly flooding the area around the river so I think that perhaps it’s time to dismantle the windmills and let someone else fix it some other time. Sadly, it doesn’t look like there’s any mechanism to disable the windmills so the old brute-force rip’em down method will have to do.
Work on the new housing block continues. And I find another windmill (up a level) and disable it. I’m not sure this will actually reduce the flooding that’s there, I hope so!
I finish part of the project I started years ago and hook the top lever up to the three floodgates holding the river back from the pit. I flip the lever and start to flood it. This, and the off windmills is starting to dry out the flooded land around the river to the north.
We’ve had some elves come visit and we’re still filling the pit. And for the life of me I can’t remember how to find out the date! Anyway, game is running slow with all our drying water. Hopefully once the water spillage is clear things will pick up a bit more.
With only 43 dwarfs we’re quite short handed for the size of the fortress. Worse, production, storage and living quarters are scattered asshole to breakfast. Not sure I want to try and fix that right now. But I might give a bit of it a go as well as continuing to cover everything with floors. Hmmm. So much to do!
Eep. Turns out the pit was leaking into the lower mining halls. Thankfully there’s no one trapped down there, but the water is going to take a while to dry out. Damn. We’re still quite short on rock though. I would love to get the damn magma pit working… arg, but we can’t reach the bauxite right now, nuts!
The Z screen that shows stocks & wealth shows the date in the top right.
How are you doing your screenshots, I know my method wasn’t very efficient at all.
Glad to hear we finally got some immigrants. Getting the ‘Everyone is too scared to migrate to your fortress’ 4 seasons in a row was very worrying.
I also had no idea what the hell was going on with that pit area. What the hell is going on with that pit area? Is that going to be an obsidian factory?
I ran across a claim on the Dwarf Fortress wiki that smoothing stone will seal off an aquifer. I think the best bet at getting at the bauxite is to turn the pumps on to drain the aquifer level down to something that a dwarf can stand in and send some miners down there to smooth the walls of the mine.
If that doesn’t work and the pumps need to be left on for a long time, you could construct a cannel to route the outflow to the stream. That should avoid the world-flooding problems. (Even if the flooded plain did lead to Quatoria’s epic battle on the ice, which was 100% awesome!)
And hooray for immigrants. I was starting to worry!
I am actually wondering if the bauxite is under the aquifer. I an going to try and come at it from below. The pumps might work but I would need to clear out the bottleneck and add more pumps. It’s quite a bit of engineering work and so I think I will try to get at the good stuff from underneath.
I am going to have to try and speed things up some how. Perhaps by using traffic zones. Also, we’ve got dwarfs trecking miles across the fortress to eat, work and sleep. It’s annoying. What is underground already I think I will dig out into one vast storage chamber. At ground level, more storage, next floor up, workshops.
The small central building should be taken down I reckon. It’s messy and isn’t doing a good job. I will start a new, larger set of offices for existing and further nobles.
I will dig under to see if we can get to the bauxite from below.
I will try and get 3 sets of pumps going to clear the aquifer, although I wonder if the brook simply can’t take the overflow. Thoughts?
You can probably just wall in a small area around the pump output end. I think water doesn’t flow up Z levels ever unless pressurized at a higher Z level so it will fill that little pool area up with water up to level 7 and then any more water will just disappear, I think.
I very much doubt that brook can take any more water anyway, I don’t think you can even add water to a brook unless you dig it out can you? I dunno, but it’ll likely fill up any small levels that aren’t full up and then overflow the banks. I dunno though I’ve never dumped water onto brooks before though, major rivers yes in which case the water level does rise but not brooks.
I’ve definitely dumped water into a brook and not had it overflow. It wasn’t a huge amount of water, though. I don’t remember if I dug out the brook first or not; I think I did.
Well, we’ve had weeks of doing lots of building. We’ve floored the central area and we’re adding another floor above. I’ve torn down stray workshops and built them on the 2nd floor (1st floor for us Brits/etc). The basement level is being cleared out and prepared for mass storage.
At the same time the elfs have been demanding we not log. In fact, an elf diplomat has been following Mrs. Gallant around since spring. Here’s a shot of her being followed while she inspects the newly re-opened pump works! Three pumps on all levels now!
The brook squares act like floors unless you dig them out. I had a debacle in another fortres. I think if you dig them out they may take the extra water. Otherwise pouring water on them just makes them “muddy”.
Only if you experienced low FPS while paused or on the menu screen. So if you have a low powered computer or laptop, or possibly a horrible graphics card. For me it made absolutely no difference.
There is one other change with the new graphics system, effects! You can add things like transparency effects to a tile.
