Stesokur Entry 5: Kumil Crosses Courses with a Kobold

One of our newest migrants was a Hammerdwarf named Kumil Idashurist. According to his in-game profile, his last name translate as "Moistnessdagger," which is equal parts unfortunate and hilarious. I might just see if I can convince my girlfriend to start calling my penis "Moistnessdagger."

(she will not)

More importantly than a name that must have made junior high particularly difficult for Kumil, though, was his skills with a weapon. He's no Solon Beridos, but he's the most well-trained of my soldiers so far, with the exception of Iton the Militia Commander. Remember, this time I embarked with a trained soldier. So I've got two warriors now, ready to fight!

Here they are, locked in mortal combat! Or a sparring session. Or a staring contest? The graphics don't make it easy.

So far none of the louse men or giant birds have bothered my fortress, so I haven't had much use for these warriors yet. Until a kobold thief came to steal from our rich stores of... something. We don't really have anything of value yet, so who knows what the fucking thing was doing. Trying to steal some of our lumber? It's just a kobold; as far as I'm concerned, they rank only slightly below the elves in terms of savagery.

Well, since I haven't gotten any manufacturing done yet, Iton had the only weapon in the fortress (a copper axe), poor Kumil had to make due with training weapons made out of wood. And, since I just traded all our training weapons to the caravans, Kumil didn't even have a club in his hands when he crossed paths with the kobold, armed with a silver dagger. So what did our intrepid dwarf do, unarmed, against an enemy of the state?

He grabs the kobold with one hand, and then beats it to death with the other. Look at that shit! Kumil grabbed the kobold's right hand and bent it backwards, shattering the wristbone, as he punches the kobold in the side and breaks its ribs. The poor creature never stood a chance. After murdering the surprised kobold with his bare hands, Kumil dropped it like Nick Cannon dropping a drumstick and went back to sparring.

Stesokur Entry 4: Cultivation Problems

Alright, so, remember the part where it was periodically raining blood?

Get it? Periodically? Get it??

That's contributed to somewhat of a food shortage. I mean, not directly. It's not like the bloody rain is destroying my food stockpiles or anything. And I still have my mushroom farms. But I'm at my second wave of migrants right now, and they're starting to eat up all the plump helmets that I've grown. Datanerith was in a rich field full of game, abutted by a river full of fish. My animals could be put out to feed on the vast, lush, green pastures. The grass is all soaked with blood, here, and Stesokur has those weird peach-faced lovebird things, and the occasional monster called a "louse man," which I guess is some kind of combination of lice and people? Yikes. I'm glad this game has such shitty graphics. Anyway, I give a couple of my dwarves some crossbows and tell them to go hunting anyway - hopefully we can eat all of this stuff. And, of course, I've got my standard go-to solution for hunger problems:

I'm super excited that cat had a litter of kittens! Because we're hungry.

We had a merchant caravan come in, too. The dwarves of Subetenolral wanted to trade, but quite frankly, Stesokur is really behind in its manufacturing. I think it's because I'm getting fancy with the tower thing. I didn't have much to offer - some training weapons and lumber - but I managed to get some food and booze out of it.

Lastly, one of the old ponds in the surrounding area, that I had drained in order to fill up my cistern, seemed like a good place to put my chickens and geese. That way they were still on grass (do they need to graze? I imagine they do, right?), and I could build a roof over top of them so the blood wouldn't rain down on my little egg factories.

Get it??

Stesokur Entry 3: Expansion

Some migrants have arrived, which means I need more food, more beds, and of course, more space.

I'm still mad I can't draw a circle.

In the Main Chamber, I've got a few workshops up and running, for my carpenter and mason to build the essentials of any up and coming fort. Beds, doors, wheelbarrows, whatever. I've also taken to moving all of my stockpiles inside. It's part of the measures to keep everyone out of that disgusting blood rain. It's not perfect - they still have to go outside every once in a while, especially the woodcutter - but it's something. You can see my farm plots to the right there. You guessed it! Mushrooms.

I know I said I was going to be doing it all as one large chamber, but I actually threw that idea aside pretty quickly. Things were getting needlessly cramped. So I expanded on a few of the old pipelines I had used for my cistern.

Which means, yes, those beds used to be part of the plumbing.

I give you the slums of Stesokur. Right now, unfortunately, they're the only source of beds my dwarves got. Once I start building the tower up, I'll be able to set aside nicer space for larger bedrooms. In the meantime, though, everybody gets to sleep in the same awful place. I also, needing more stone, just carved out a huge section in the southernmost part of the map. I guess that'll serve as a warehouse. That's what basements are for, right?

The grass isn't colored red or anything. The ground is just soggy with blood - like, all the time, now.

This is the first floor of the tower. Like with Datanerith, I wanted to keep open the idea of there only being one entrance to the fort. Stesokur is a lot smaller, which means easier to account for every potential entry way, and I've only got one gate open, to the east. You may have noticed that, also like Datanerith, I carved away the slopes behind the walls again. This time, I made sure that every slope turned into a cliff. Don't want any more sneaky elves coming in the back way. Even better, though: look! Those stairs go up! The tower is underway.

I guess nobody minds that the chairs, floor, and tables are covered in blood? Is goblin AIDS just not a thing?

This is the second floor, the Lower Dining Hall. I say lower because I plan on there being at least two rooms just like this; a few levels higher, I'll have nicer, larger dining rooms for the nobles and administrators who insist on having their own. Right now these dining rooms can comfortably fit forty-eight. I can easily squeeze another dozen or so tables and chairs (maybe more, if I redesign the whole room). This should last me then next several migrant waves, at least.

Stesokur Entry 2: Dwarven Plumbing

OK, so goblin blood is falling from the sky. Like... all the time. OK. At least it's not dwarf blood, right? It's just goblin blood. It's just a little creepy. That's no big deal.

Well, there is one problem. Ignoring the fact that my dwarves don't like being in the evil weather - and who can blame them? - it's gonna contaminate the water. The first thing I have my dwarves do is take everything into the chamber. My woodcutter is going to have to spend some time outdoors, there's no helping that, but hopefully I can keep everyone else out of that rain as much as possible. The second thing I do is create an underground cistern.

I went for a cool abstract shape. My girlfriend took one look at it and said "cute mushroom!" Can't unsee.

How did I create such a marvel, you may ask? It was a pain in the fucking ass.

The very first thing I did was carve out that shape you see above. That's several levels below even my basement. It has to be far down, because, duh, water flows downward. Without a complicated system of pumps and mechanics - which I'm just not set up for yet - I need to let gravity and water pressure do all the work for me.

There were about four or five little ponds in the area. I dug out a small room directly above my cistern, with a hole in the center of it. This is my central drain. Then I dug a bunch of small tunnels from the drain to every nearby pond on the map. Some were harder than others; I often had to take several z-levels into consideration, and wanted to make sure none of these stone pipes crossed paths. 

 Here's one level of what I'm talking about. This was, by far, the most complicated thing I've ever done in this game.

Once all of those tunnels were dug out, I had my dwarves (from a higher level, so they wouldn't get caught in the flood) dig out the final section of stone that separated pond from tunnel. I did this last because I wanted all the tunnels flooded at the same time. Had I done this process piecemeal, one-by-one, I ran the risk of the water of one small pond drying out before the rest of the water could join it. A small puddle of water dries up quickly; several streams joining together at the same time takes much longer to dry out. 

Gravity did the rest. All of the water drained from the ponds, through the stone pipes I had mined, and into the central drain. From the central drain, all of this water fell right into my underground reservoir. This didn't clean the water or anything, but keeping my water source underground meant that no further contamination could occur. The water was clean enough to drink now, and would remain so for as long as it lasted. Hopefully it'll last a very, very long time. If I'm lucky, it will last as long as Moltenhearths does. If not, by the time I need more, I'll be able to set up a system to draw water from an underground lake. In the meantime, after the lakes were fully drained, I plugged the stone tunnels with dwarf-built walls. This way, if the raining blood ever filled up one of the empty craters that had been a pond, the blood won't find its way into my cistern.

So there you have it! Cool, clean water; dwarven plumbing at its finest. That's one problem caused by the bloody rain I no longer have to suffer.

Stesokur Entry 1: Strike the Earth!

Ignoring warnings that the area is haunted, my dwarves have arrived! This area, just like Datanerith, is temperate, with plenty of trees and no aquifer. There's no river, though, but there's several small lakes. My settlers, who call themselves "The Polished Boots," have called this place Stesokur, or "Moltenhearths" in English.

These settlers include a woodworker, three miners, a farmer, an architect, and a doctor. Our architect is also our soldier - I made sure to include somebody with some combat skills this time - and the doctor has taken the responsibility of Expedition Leader.

Say hello!

There's a swarm of giant peach-faced lovebirds, which sounds totally adorable, but I'm worried they might start harassing the outpost. There's several of them, which might prove problematic even to my warrior, but so far they've just been ignoring my dwarves. Let's hope they keep it that way. Aside from them, there's no wild animals nearby, and no civilizations that I know of. 

One problem with the original tileset - that's supposed to be a perfect circle, not a lopsided oval. Oh, well. Imagination!

Instead of carving out a bunch of small rooms, I just make one large chamber. I'll put all my temporary stuff here - a dormitory on one side, some workshops on the other, maybe some tables and chairs in the middle. My plan is to make a tower, and this will be its basement. I want it to be something cool and imposing... we'll see what happens. I'm honestly a little worried about the "haunted" thing. I've never done an embark in an evil biosphere. There could be zombies or necromancers... I don't really know what to expect. The place seems nice, though.

Oh! That's not... too bad, I guess. Maybe it'll just go away by itself.

No, go away! Make it stop!

eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww

A Break Between Forts

The fortress has crumbled to an end, which means there will be no more tales of Datanerith, called Ironlabors, Outpost of the Excavated Boulders. But worry not! A new fortress will be up soon. I would like to spend a few days away from the blog to figure out how I want to proceed, and to build up a suitable backlog, but it shouldn't take long. You can expect this blog to start updating again Monday, April 14.

I'd also like to take this time to address some questions about the blog that I've been receiving (and some that I haven't). Let's talk boring administrative stuff for a moment:

Why not use a graphics pack or tile set? It would make the game look better and easier to understand for non-experienced readers!
I don't really like any of them. And, as much as I love the gameplay itself, a large part of the charm of Dwarf Fortress is, for me, the ASCII graphics. Plus, to be frank, it took me a while to figure out what the symbols mean. There's a certain pride that comes with seeing a screen full of colored gibberish and being able to translate it fluently.

 I don't even see the code anymore. All I see are blondbeard, brownbeard, redbeard.

What about Overseer or Stonesense, then?

Overseer is a great program that really paints an epic picture of a finished fortress; that's why I used it in my Surveying the Ruins post. I like using it at the end of a game, though; I want to show off the fortress in its entirety, not when it's halfway built. Stonesense, though, is an idea that I've been throwing back and forth in my head. Like I mentioned earlier, I don't want to stop using (or writing with) the default ASCII, but I might find away to include the occasional Stonesense screenshot. We'll see.

Do you use DFHack?

I've got Lazy Newb Pack downloaded, so DFHack comes up automatically. I've used it to export maps for Overseer, but otherwise, no. I never even really learned how to use it. I don't mind losing a fort, so cheating isn't that important to me.... yet. Maybe when I get bored I'll figure out how to use it for more interesting stuff!

Where did you learn to play?

Captnduck's videos. 

Why are you so bad at this game?

'Cause it's a hard game! Seriously, though, I'm still learning. Sometimes I'll make a post describing my learning process, and other times, I'll skip over the hour it took me to try and fail at something (though sharp-eyed readers will probably spot my mistakes easily!). However, tips are always welcome. I'm always learning something new, and it was a tip from a post on Reddit that finally got my worthless militia up and running.

Now that's what I'm talking about!

In that case, why don't you nickname your dwarves based on their profession, or (insert thing to make the game easier/more efficient)?

I am, for the most part, something of a roleplayer. I'd like to do things that make some sort of sense, in-universe. It's why I spend so much time looking at the dwarves' personalities and appearances, and finding ways to create narratives around the otherwise random happenings of the fort. Some things, like creating an impotent Hammerer, or killing off nobles who decree difficult mandates, suck a little bit of the life out of the fortress. Again, I don't mind losing, so I don't mind things like that making the game a little harder - as long as they're interesting. How else can you have fun if you don't lose?

Thanks for reading, in any case!

Datanerith Entry 37: Surveying the Ruins

Using the program Overseer, I managed to get some 3D rendered shots of Datanerith. I apologize that there are so few; I hadn't built my fortress with a 3D view in mind, so most of the interior is pretty much impossible to make out with Overseer. There isn't much to see there, anyway, that you haven't already seen from previous posts. Furthermore, my fortress is actually pretty boring, visually. Aside from the walls, there wasn't much I built to look at.

Here's my entrance:

It doesn't look like a throbbing cock from this angle at all!

Since Overseer doesn't render furniture, you can't see the bridge. You can see the road, though - that's why the ground past the moat isn't green. Note the two archery towers flanking the entrance. Overseer also doesn't seem to differentiate between walls and fortifications, either, which is a shame; the walls at the top of those towers had been designed for dwarves to shoot from. There should be crenelations, which look like this.

I took some shots of the inside of the fortress, but it was too big and empty to make anything out. All you'd be able to see was grass, palm trees, and the occasional wall in the distance. Even the Underpass was boring, visually. Here are some aerial shots though:

This isn't my best picture of the fortress (that one's next), but I like the way this one shows off change in elevation in the back. You can see how Datanerith sat at the bottom of a large hill, and how I sort of carved away the slopes to make room for my construction. You can make out the farms near the top of the fort there, those four squares, and my unfinished roads leading from the entrance into the Underpass and the trade depot. This shot's my favorite:

Don't forget to click it for a larger view!

I think I'll make my next fortress a little more varied from the outside. Maybe taller, and less wide. Anyway, I hope you guys liked reading about Datanerith!