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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 28, 2015 14:29:34 GMT -5
Two new underground creatures caught. Technically I caught these much earlier, but it's only now I caught one of each gender for breeding.
First is the helmet snake. No giant version, but apparently their poison will cause instant necrosis on whatever body part it hits. I could have my very own snake pit!
The other is the giant cave spider. Poison can paralyze, and the webs it creates can catch pretty much anything - titans included. The webs can also be spun into thread that makes the highest value cloth, not counting adamantine. On the other hand, the trained ones doesn't seem to produce webs, so if I want a silk farm I'll have to keep an untame one, which is risky, even if I chain them up.
Plus, both creatures are adults upon birth, so I have some doubts whether they can be fully tamed.
As for keeping an untame one... a cage trap with giant cave spider web can catch nearly anything... so I could in theory make a second entrance, chain a giant cave spider there, then surround the area with cages. In theory, a powerful titan that can't normally be caged appears. First entrance is sealed, opening up the second where the spider is waiting. Spider shoots web, hopefully on a tile with a cage trap, and titan is captured.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 28, 2015 14:39:21 GMT -5
Well, holy crap. Just as I posted the previous message, I check back on the game a sand titan appears - once again way too close to the entrance due to me making said entrance on one edge of the map because it's close to the water.
It says sand titan, but in reality it's some sort of quadruped with antenna that shoots poison and also made of green glass. I'm like, green glass? So it'll shatter right away? Wrong. Several attacks just glanced away, and pretty much all the shots from the marksdwarf did nothing. Some attacks did connect, particularly the pick and a hammer.
In general, if I had lacked steel equipment, or my squad was less trained, this would have been the doom of my fort. Due to their skills the poison spit and attacks were dodged or blocked. Took a long time to kill, and the military was exhausted after, but in the end it was my fort's victory.
Now to see if it can be butchered, as it left a corpse.
Funnily enough, the one who landed the killing blow was also the one who killed the first titan who showed up.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 29, 2015 0:48:51 GMT -5
Alas, green glass titan couldn't be butchered. It's just a shiny corpse lying in the refuse pile. I probably should dispose of it. If ever a necromancer shows up I don't want that thing to come back to life.
On embark, the place was mostly a desert with at most 30 trees above ground. However, a ton of saplings have grown, and now the area is filled with trees. It's still a desert, but full of trees.
Trying out a glassmaking industry. So far, it's been a little tricky as it requires quite a few steps. For one, sand is required. Any sand will do, and one benefit of it is that sand is infinite. On the other hand, bags are required to contain sand. No bags, no sand gathered.
When there's sand in bags, glass can be made. All glass requires fuel, and green glass only requires sand and fuel. Because of this, elves accept them as trade goods because they're not sure whether the glass tree-friendly, as while charcoal made from trees is fuel, so is coke made from coal and lignite. Plus magma.
Clear glass and crystal glass requires more things. Crystal glass needs rock crystal, which can be mined depending on the biome. Both clear and crystal also requires pearlash, which takes several steps to make. Pearlash is made at a kiln using potash and fuel, while potash is made using lye or ash. Lye requires ash to be made, and a bucket, while ash requires only trees. Because of the process required for pearlash, elves refuse to trade clear or crystal glass because they're damn tree huggers.
So work on glass is slow, because I'm not making elf friendly green glass except for a small amount that might be used for strange moods.
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Post by Ash Kingston on Oct 29, 2015 0:57:35 GMT -5
It makes sense for why dwarves will eat cheese, but not drink milk.
Beer and cheese parties.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 29, 2015 1:10:53 GMT -5
It makes sense for why dwarves will eat cheese, but not drink milk. Beer and cheese parties. True. Plus cheese is more or less fermented milk, making it brothers in a sense to booze being fermented fruits and vegetables. Also just realized that obsidian short swords are not as potent as I thought. No wonder the swordsdwarves attacks glanced off the glass titan while the ones using steel warhammers and picks did damage.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 29, 2015 2:57:19 GMT -5
Helmet snakes are booming. One snake laid 19 fertilized eggs, and once those eggs hatched all the hatchlings, being adults on birth, quickly went to several empty nest boxes and began to lay eggs of their own. A helmet snake can lay up to 10-30 eggs, so now I got hundreds of them.
So, instead of breeding hatchlings it would be far more profitable to have an egg industry off them. For one thing, they can't be fully tamed and I'd rather not risk my trainer not having enough time for training maintenance on hundreds of snakes that'll cause necrosis upon bite. Furthermore, they have very low meat returns when butchered. A big adult only gives four units of meat at most, and newborns only give skulls - so it would be more profitable to get a hundred eggs minimum to cook from ten females in sealed rooms every three months.
Also caught a pack of giant dingos. The life of the fort would have been a short one if these showed up early on. Now, I got a strong military and tons of cage traps. They can't be war-trained, but they are aggressive and will attack hostiles.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 29, 2015 10:42:11 GMT -5
Ohhh man. On the first year a flock of ostriches blundered into my cage traps and became the first breeding program in this fort.
Nearly a decade later, a flock of giant ostriches have been caught. They have the same lifespan, and egg laying amount as their smaller brethren, but give more meat products due to their size.
Now I'm wondering if I should butcher the normal ostriches and use the giant ones for breeding. I suppose having the normal ones would still provide eggs.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 29, 2015 11:09:25 GMT -5
Huh... So a trio of giant lions showed up on the northeast corner of the map. Just a tiny bit south is the entrance to my fort, but there's a river blocking the northeast end of the map to my base, so some in-game years back I made a small bridge and laid down some traps in case animals enter from that point - though the traps are on the entrance side because traps can't be placed too close to map edge.
Anyways, one lion does cross and ends up caged. Now I got a male. I was hoping for the female one to get caged... and somehow, my trainer crosses to the other side and fights the female.
Even more surprisingly, the trainer has the upper hand. Hell, she pretty much dominated against the giant lion. In the end, both were passed out; the lion from damage and the trainer for overexertion. And this trainer never had military training or is even armed. She kept punching the lion, and when she regained consciousness she did one last punch that the lion dodged... and due to that the lion fell into a river. It managed to swim back to ground... into entrance side and got caged.
So now I got a breeding pair of giant lions.
On the injuries count; trainer has none, giant lion has one broken toe, another toe smashed open, another toe dented, yet another toe mangled beyond recognition. Lower body cut and dented. Right front leg is also cut open and dented. One toe is just gone.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 1:36:39 GMT -5
Good lord.
Found four cavern layers. First one started at around 10 levels below surface - nothing special. Somewhat large cavern with lots of open space, no trees. Currently no cage traps set in the area.
Cavern layer 2 was at around floor 20-30 below surface. Thought that this was connected to the layer above, but I was wrong. Still slightly wide tunnels, but more or less like cavern 1. Some cage traps are here.
Layer three is at 31 levels below ground. Some wide rooms, but mostly narrow tunnels. Lots of cage traps set where the stairs are extending towards nearby map entry points. Some trees, but due to the lack of water sources, it's all the deep red blood thorn trees. There's also a couple of pools of magma.
Digging down, at exactly 41 levels below surface, I'm doing some exploratory mining. Lots of warm stone - meaning if I try to somehow dig those warm stones I open up a flood of magma for my miners to bathe in. So I dig carefully - I get a message that I found the magma sea.
And then I found it, a small vein of the legendary candy. First time finding one, too. Praise the miners!
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 1:41:51 GMT -5
Like seriously. Last time I dug out 100 floors below surface and never struck candy. I'm halfway deep this time and I found some already.
This is gonna be interesting.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 3:10:56 GMT -5
So far, found two candy towers. Digging real carefully - the area around the towers is pretty much submerged in magma. With just a tiny bit of river on the map, I have a slight idea to make a sort of pipe line through the fort and down to send the contents of the river to cool down the magma for safer mining.
Dug a few floors in that candy tower. Most of them are pretty thin as I'm getting job cancellations due to warm stone - which generally means there'll be magma waiting if I try digging through those stones. Nonetheless, work is going fine. Already up to 200-plus raw candy. I can make super sharp weapons first, and once I get my military set on that, then I'll reserve the rest for artifact ingredients and whatnot.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 8:18:00 GMT -5
Making use of the candy is slow work. Up to 400 pieces of the raw candy, as the second tower proved more profitable. First one was at the very middle of the magma sea, which lead to several veins of candy becoming impossible to mine due to it holding back the magma. Tower two had slightly more solid rock around it, which gives a lot more room to dig.
After that is making use of the 400 raw candy. Unlike regular metals, there's one extra step for the candy to be usable. The job itself takes a ton of time to do, as it's more or less a rare skill for a migrant to have, making the process more slow. Once that step is complete, the candy is now in strand for, which can either be smelted or turned into cloth, each taking one strand to make. Both types of items is fast enough, just like making regular metal bars or cloth.
The metal bars are called wafers, and one strand producing one wafer - unlike regular metal bars where one ore will become four bars. Furthermore, forging anything out of the material costs more wafers. Like an iron sword will be one bar, while a candy sword takes three candy wafers.
A strange mood happened during processing some strands into wafers. Rocks and bars were requested, so out of curiosity I forbade all the other rocks and bars and used raw candy and its wafers.
The result; a useless harp... but one that cost 2 million in value, several times more expensive than any other artifact that I produced.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 10:58:25 GMT -5
Ahhhh. So beautiful. I upgraded my pit of death. I dug it down deeper, and channeled a hole which led to the magma sea on the floor below.
Then I build a bridge on the hole using native platinum, then linked it to a lever. So now I got two methods of disposal. One is I pit the creatures in the hole; for most part creatures won't fight back as they're being led to a pit/cage/chain, even a hostile giant - if they were caged before the command to move them has been given. So they drop into the pit and hit native platinum 40-ish floors down. Platinum is the densest metal in the game, and the body that hits the bridge pretty much explodes into parts upon impact.
If I don't want to collect body parts, I pull the lever and send the creature into the pit, where instead of hitting platinum they take a magma bath instead.
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Push R Truth
Patti Mayonnaise
Unique and Special Snowflake, and a pants-less heathen.
Perpetually Constipated
Posts: 39,293
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Post by Push R Truth on Oct 30, 2015 13:37:07 GMT -5
Will you ever run into problems with miasma from using the magma-garbage-disposal?
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 14:17:22 GMT -5
Will you ever run into problems with miasma from using the magma-garbage-disposal? Nope. I drop them alive. If the bridge is open, they fall into a magma pool and dissolve when they die. If somehow they end up rotting, there's at least five levels of open space between the bridge drop point and the magma flow. If the bridge is closed during a drop, the refuse haulers come and get the pieces and put them on an outdoors refuse pile.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 30, 2015 14:25:10 GMT -5
Also, what a bother. The strand extractor for the raw candy is a dwarven child. He became an adult around the time my fort discovered the candy towers, so I gave him the job because no one else had experience in strand extraction, and the new adult has no other skills in labor.
On the other thing, dwarven children can be pretty good at socializing. So he ends up becoming mayor at the tender age of 13, and he likes shields and ballista arrows. He already has quite a bit of skill in extracting the candy, so I can't really set up an unfortunate accident to happen.
Maybe when I run out of strands to extract.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 31, 2015 1:26:11 GMT -5
Probably due to the underground biome and its lack of water, I'm not seeing any cave blobs and flesh balls, which is nice. Due to the lack of water there's no cave crocodiles either. On the other hand, I'm getting a ton of crundles.
Out of spite, instead of training them then butchering them, I just send them to the pit for a magma bath.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 31, 2015 8:56:08 GMT -5
Surprisingly, since the founding of the fort, only one herd of three rhinos visited this fort. I managed to cage them via clever use of having the militia spook them into running into the cage traps. Took a long while for a pair to give birth, so I might have a tame rhino population. Despite being a desert, there's enough flat and fertile areas for pasture.
There's a ton of rutherers underground though. Butchered tons of them, and I already have a few tame children in the future. Giant ostriches finally produced some fertilized eggs, so that's another meat industry for me. Helmet snakes are still producing eggs like crazy, and they have a fairly long lifespan, so it'll be a while before I replace the current egg-layers. Got several giant cave spider offspring marinating in cages. Since they can't be fully tame, I'll keep them stuck in cages. Trainer will only train caged animals if they're wild, and it's safe since most wild creatures don't do anything while caged.
Butchered all the sows I had. Seems more profitable to trade for milk to make into cheese. I can't set milking to repeat as I have to wait 17 days per animal before they're milkable again, so it's more easier to just buy a lot of milk to be made into cheese.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 31, 2015 9:19:06 GMT -5
Caught a giant bark scorpion. Alas, only one entered the map, so I'll need a female one to breed some. Plus, they're not the giant desert scorpion, which is perhaps a blessing. According to the wiki, giant bark scorpion venom causes severe pain. Giant desert scorpion venom causes necrosis in the brain.
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Post by aka Cthulhu on Oct 31, 2015 10:34:59 GMT -5
I really need to figure out how minecarts work. I think that's the last item in the game I don't quite understand. Aside from playing adventure mode, though I can probably use roguelike experience for that.
In general, I prefer wheelbarrows. It has less carrying capacity than a minecart - a wheelbarrow can only get one type of item, but that's any type of item. A stack of dragon meat, or an actual dragon corpse, and more importantly, caged animals. Wheelbarrows can carry one item per trip, but no matter how heavy they are, if a wheelbarrow is used the dwarf will move at their top speed no matter what.
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