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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 6:16:54 GMT -5
So far, I've reached two cavern layers. The deep layer, the one I found first by digging a long stairway down, is rather small. A little less than 10 floors. Maybe even five floors only. Lots of small maze-like tunnels, so it was rather easy to set up cage traps near the entry points that lead outside the map.
On the other hand, the first layer is a whole lot larger. It ends a floor or so before the deep layer, and is several times larger. More open caverns, and a lot more levels to cover, plus several underground water pools and a river. Much harder to set up cage traps near the map entry points due to the size of the area. On the bright side, cave dragons could only be found in the deep layer, at least so far. I kind of want cave crocodiles, but I'll settle for the dragons.
The third layer I haven't breached yet, but most likely it's the magma sea.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 8:54:46 GMT -5
Lions ain't breeding so they're out of the breeding program. On the other hand, caught a pair of giant toads in the bigger cavern layer. Gonna try them out. On the other hand, they're born as adults, so they might not be tameable. Meat returns are not huge, so I might just have one breeding pair. Caught some bugbats which haven't been wiped out from hunting as I had thought. Bit annoying, that, as they can fly, and they're quite dangerous against unarmed dwarves.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 13:54:09 GMT -5
Got three five dwarf squads now. Squad 1 is a mix of weapons, sword, axe, hammer, spear, and the only artifact weapon, a dagger. Normal daggers can't be made on a forge; it's either from kobold thieves, or artifact creation - and only if the dwarf with a strange mood likes daggers. They function like spears, but with better penetration, so it's all good. Squad 2 is blunt weapons, two maces and three hammers. Squad 3 got trained in swords, but as they're all legendary miners they're armed with pickaxes.
Anyway, now I'm busy hauling back the cavern haul. Usually I do this once per year. Two squads patrolling the various trap areas while haulers take the cages into the deep cavern (and recently large cavern) animal stockpile, where trainers are stationed via burrows to train animals while more dwarves haul the trained animals back to the living area. At this point, with so many traps, I'm stopping several workshops and assigning them hauling jobs to drag animals back to the base. Furthermore, it gets completely insane as creatures from the caverns will constantly enter the map, which can lead to more cage traps being hauled, or corpses, or much more annoyingly body parts. It's a time when there's a ton of micromanagement going on and that's pretty much the reason why I do this only once per in-game year. At this point I might stretch out the time even further to two years.
Five cave dragons got caged this time. Lots of creeping eyes, cave blobs, blind cave ogres, and one troll. One particularly interesting new creature I got is a giant cave ogre, and a female giant olm. Got a male one so I might breed them.
Of course, this became more chaotic when 20 crundle eggs hatched.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 14:02:10 GMT -5
Anyways, I might retire this fort. Thinking of trying out advanced world creation - make a world filled with megabeasts, and semi-megabeasts. Set the population cap for them to show to be low. They show up at population 80 so I think I want them to show up at population 50. More goblins, too.
I'll stick to mixed biomes as well. Much more fun to have mixed to provide more varied animals above-ground. As far as I know, underground animals are universal and show up on any biome with caverns.
With regards to a new world, anyone interested in getting a dwarf nicknamed after them? Wanna be a military dwarf who might get maimed, and killed, horribly? Or a noble who might give unreasonable mandates and get killed, and maimed, horribly?
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 17:49:27 GMT -5
Testing out advanced world creation. Generally, I use a small size world to lower FPS slowdown. On the otherhand, it seems to generate only a small amount of megabeasts (around 3 or 4) which isn't really fun to wait for them. Advanced world generation can increase the amount. So I tried 500. On the other hand, this also impacts civilizations, as 500 rampaging megabeasts isn't too healthy for most races.
Embarking anywhere I get a message that dwarven civilization is either dead/dying due to that. That certainly does add some challenge to things, so I'll try that later.
First fort on the new world parameters I kinda gave up on since it's most common stone is olivine. Nothing wrong with the rock... but it's a nice shade of green that reminds me too much of dwarf vomit.
For now, sticking to the cave dragon fort. Seems like the drop rate for forgotten beasts is a bit different, so I may still have some luck on that front.
edit: bargh, never mind on the cave dragon fort. I made a copy of the world, retired the fort, then checked the area where I embarked on.
As it turned out, my cave dragon fort was located in an island. The only civilizations around were dwarves and humans. That explained the lack of elves, and that pretty much sealed the deal that there would be no goblin attacks. Fail.
Lesson learned. Always check the surroundings to make sure there's fun stuff that will happen.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 18:47:49 GMT -5
Also, a nice little trick I learned for easier aboveground farming without requiring the use of screw pumps and watering above ground soil.
So, you can channel the surface to expose underground tiles to sunlight. From then on, even if you seal the channeled area with blocks, the exposed tiles will still count as above ground, and farmers won't need to rotate between going above and below to farm different crops. You have to channel first. Channeling while the floor below is mined out has a very high chance of cave ins.
Current map shows promise. I lowered the megabeast amount; still super high, but enough for civilizations to still thrive. Embark location is savage tropical grassland, and savage good desert. Very few trees, so I embarked with some for later use. Exploratory mining reveals tons of native copper as well as native gold. No iron, no flux, but a challenge would be good. Besides, I already managed last fort with little to no iron anyway.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 18:58:03 GMT -5
Scratch that. Game crashed, but I found a better biome. Same general region; tropical grassland/desert, savage neutral/savage good as well. Better stones. Hematite, tetrahedrite, and obsidian.
Iron armor, and obsidian swords which are as good as steel. Reading the wiki, this layer won't have flux, but one can hope (or trade) at the very least. This place shows promise. Last time was a marble fort, this time it's obsidian.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 25, 2015 20:21:49 GMT -5
More exploratory mining. Hematite, and obsidian for the first several layers, then tetrahedrite at 10 levels down. And a cavern there, which is quite an early find. The area that the cavern reveals shows marble - but I'll have to dig around the caverns. I sealed the entry point that led to the cavern - not prepared yet for what lurks there.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 26, 2015 6:08:34 GMT -5
Hematite veins seem to be quite plentiful. So far, I got about 100 ore dug out, and that's around 400 iron bars. With the marble layer around the cavern area I should have plenty of flux to convert the iron bars to steel bars. Tetrahedrite seems to be as plentiful as hematite, so I can get some copper with a small chance of silver as well.
Main problem is fuel. Being in a mixed biome (tropical savage savana, tropical savage grassland, savage good desert) there's barely any trees in the surface. I've managed to cut down most trees and there's about 1.5k logs in the map. In general, that's not a whole lot for the long term. Aside from fuel, I need beds... which won't really need a lot, to be honest. I need a few wheelbarrows for hauling, but the main competitor for charcoal is bins. I can make pots from stone, which function the same as barrels, but for item storage of several types of items I require bins for storage. Otherwise I'll have hundreds of rock crafts that'll take forever to be hauled to the depot due to the sheer number of them. I also require wood for wood cages, as using anything other than wood for cages will take hauling said cages forever to a cage trap.
On the other hand, cavern layer starts at 10 floors down the surface (last fort started 50 floors below). There's a number of trees down there than can be farmed for logs, which could solve my problems.
As for other industries, I got stone workers making craft from obsidian. I got a few obsidian swords ready for use, and they will be used once I start exploring the caverns. For farming from gathering plants in the surface I got a plant that only grows in good biomes which produces the highest value liquor. Nothing too important, really, as dwarves don't care about value in drinks. They only get a positive thought if the drink is their favorite.
I want to try a glassmaking industry. Build a fort using obsidian and clear glass, but glassmaking will require a number of things, such as bags, a potash maker so pearlash could be made, and for potash to be made ash is required so I'll have to wait on that due to lack of wood. I could make green glass, which doesn't require pearlash, but I want clear glass.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 26, 2015 6:49:55 GMT -5
Oh man oh man. Summer migrants only had two, but autumn gave me 9... and several of them have jobs that my fort needs. I have enough to set up a basic clothmaking industry. The current clothier is a high master dyer, so when I have an actual dwarf with clothmaking skills, I can get around to providing some high value cloth for trade.
Long story short, I got enough dwarves to set up a cloth industry (farmer, thresher, weaver, clothmaker, with a dyer as an extra). There's also enough for a miller, and several aboveground crops I can farm can provide both flour and booze.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 26, 2015 7:18:29 GMT -5
I'll make some copper bins for storage. I suppose one way to pretty much prevent a high need for bins is to sell only the contents of the bins, which is a lot more time consuming, but at the very least the bins will still be owned by the fort and be reused.
And while I'm going on about a clothing industry, it's still gonna take a lot of work since I don't have a lot of the crop that can be processed into thread.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 26, 2015 12:36:44 GMT -5
Again... AGAIN. Once again while creating a reservoir I ended up causing a cave in. This time by accident as I didn't properly map out where I was channeling, which led to a pretty bad injury for one dwarf. Left leg mangled beyond recognition, requires a crutch to walk. Problem is that since I haven't set up a soap making industry yet, he's been sutured and cleaned with water from a river, so there might be a risk of infection. Worse, that miner was gonna be a marksdwarf as he had some good crossbow skills.
He'll still be one, but it'll be a matter of him avoiding a fatal infection.
Well design is slightly different. Instead of opening up a river, the reservoir instead is in an isolated area where the well is located right at the living area. Water is brought to the reservoir by all dwarves and a ton of buckets.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 26, 2015 12:54:55 GMT -5
Ostriches. One moment the cage traps are empty, the next moment I got a whole flock of ostriches in cages. They lay a very good amount of eggs, so I'll get them breeding for meat.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 27, 2015 4:08:26 GMT -5
Some interesting things to note:
-Second cavern layer is not very deep. First layer is at 10-30 floors below surface, and second layer starts just a floor or two below that. No underground rivers, which means there's only one type of tree that has a distinct red color. I chopped a few of them since I need more charcoal. I managed to scrounge up enough steel to make 10 sets of armor and weapons. Managed to set up traps on the second layer, and I've already caught some rutherers.
-Ostritch explosion. The first set of eggs that are laid are usually not fertilized. One season later only one of the four ostriches had fertilized eggs, so one season later I get 15 ostrich chicks. Then all four laid fertilized eggs and now I got over 70 ostrich chicks. A long training session later the chicks are tame and stuffed in a cage. Two rutherers have also given birth, one male and twin females.
-Cloth industry took longer than expected. I had no aboveground seeds that could grow in the biome, so I had to wait for the human caravan to bring some. Well, still waiting, as the fort hasn't elected a mayor or have a baron appointed, so guild representatives for humans aren't showing up yet so I can't request for specific items. I'm relying on the dwarven underground crop that can be processed to thread, and that only grows during summer and autumn. Thankfully they're one of two crops that grow faster than the others.
-Second layer has magma. Caught a magma crab, but unfortunately they can't be tamed or butchered.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 27, 2015 4:50:01 GMT -5
Man. How lame. First titan attack. Three years since the fort was founded, and a forest titan shows up. It's a massive shelled blob... made of fire, and it shows up at the northeast... close to the entrance of the base. Military was already waiting, a five man squad of varying skills, but skilled at the lowest.
They one shot kill it. Beings composed of material like fire are pretty flimsy. I mean, it's fire. If it was made of iron it would have taken a ton of work to kill, but it's fire and it pretty much went down in one hit.
Worse, being a blob, and made of fire, it doesn't leave behind a corpse to butcher. It left behind a shell, and that's it.
Hoping for a cooler titan to show up next time, one that's at least organic.
It didn't even get an attack in. The hammerdwarf hit it, breaking the tissue and killing it instantly. It released a burst of flame upon death, but all the dwarves blocked it with their shields.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 27, 2015 6:41:28 GMT -5
Hmmm. Among the rocks of cavern layer 2, there's some veins of cobaltite. It's not an ore, but the rock has a rare dark blue color. I'll make a few buildings and floors made from blocks of it.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 27, 2015 9:44:05 GMT -5
I adjusted the population cap where megabeasts/titans show up to be much lower. That way I can have a smaller fort to run.
Due to that, the medical dwarves that migrated, since they don't really do much, have extra jobs. Diagnoser is a milker, and cheese maker, while the surgeon mills plants. Suturer makes soap. Don't have a bone doctor, so the surgeon does that as well.
As for milking, it's all pig cheese. Pigs don't require a pasture, so I can stick a ton of them in cages next to the workshop where they get milked, and aside from the brief freedom during milking they'll stay there until the end of their lives. I might consider breeding them, but what's the point when they can be requested in caravan trades?
Also, dwarves eat cheese, but they'll never touch milk even if they're dying of thirst.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 27, 2015 10:36:51 GMT -5
Tame ostrich chicks have become adults. Time for the butcher and tanner to work 24/7 for a while. Parents have been butchered as well. Next season the rest will become adults and another round of slaughter will begin.
The five survivors, one male and four females, were chosen on account of their size. They have descriptions that's a combination of gigantic/super fat/enormous. I considered picking the muscular ones but decided to just go with big and fat. Not like I'm gonna use them for war. Once they've laid fertilized eggs I'll see if the children they bring in are equally large.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 28, 2015 9:02:47 GMT -5
Instead of making a 16 floor execution tower that reached the highest point of ground, it's more dwarfy to make a execution pit. 25 floors deep, and waiting at the bottom is a floor made of native platinum ore, the densest material in the game - not counting an end game material.
The result - instead of body parts splitting open into a gory mess bodies just straight up break apart. Half the time the separated body parts are the right kind of destroyed that leaves strange mood workable bones to be produced after decomposition.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 28, 2015 12:34:05 GMT -5
Ostriches. So many ostriches. It goes like this, one year one ostrich lays 10-15 eggs. I got four females, due to their growth two lay fertilized eggs on one season, and the other two on another. So for example on spring there'd be around 20+ fertilized eggs, then one season later they hatch, and immediately the two ostriches who hatched the eggs lay another batch of fertilized eggs, and the other two egg layers lay their own.
There's a pet cap per species which is around 50, or sometimes the cap is in effect if the child population of that species is bigger. If the cap is reached then animals won't get pregnant, or lay fertilized eggs, or something like that. For egg layers it seems that only the former happens, and fertilized eggs don't count to the pet cap it seems, so by the time the third season hits I now have around a hundred ostriches.
They take a year to reach adulthood and even if I butcher them immediately once they hit one year they give a fair amount of meat per bird, and due to the numbers if I butcher all of them it becomes quite chaotic.
At this point... yeah. I think I'll just have my dwarves collect eggs for now instead of having them hatch. Maybe in a year or three I'll make another swarm of ostriches hatch. For now, I'll have my dwarves feast on lavish meals made of ostrich meat, and various other ostrich organs. Even the hospital is loaded with ostrich soap.
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