231 - 237I’d love to fork over a detailed report, except this was a cleanup turn; nothing interesting happened, by design. I spent all this time just hauling corpses, dumping old clothes, and trying to improve the mood of the 8 dwarves found in varying states of unhappiness.
Part of my brilliant plan for dwarven survival in these cursed lands is to let everybody off work, around Obsidian. Dwarves finish with all their social and religious needs in one month, month and a half at most. Then they can go back to work.
Of those 8 unhappy dwarves, all but one have recovered, via a combination of crafting and rest. It’s worth noting that at first this method doesn’t seem to give results; for a year and a half, the (un)happiness bar started with the same 3-2-3 for miserable, very unhappy, and unhappy. And then, as if a switch got flipped, stress started just draining off of dwarves, until they were in the clear; the two going from ‘miserable’ to ‘fine’ required maybe half a year, everybody else was much faster.
The exception to this rule is the fort’s only metalcrafter; he was given the same treatment, but several details sabotaged the hell out of the poor dwarf:
Firstly, he’s wounded so he walks very slowly. Secondly, he keeps having breakdowns, which slow him down even further. Thirdly, metal crafting itself is pretty slow going. All of this combined so that in 2 years, he barely went up one level (16 to 17), and made, at a guess, less than 100 items (goblets, pedestals, and altars, all from gold). He’s still miserable, keeping at around 62,000 stress. He’s also peaceful enough, seldom tantruming, and when he attacks another dwarf he’s sufficiently wounded to not cause damage.
Onwards. Gathering and processing the corpses took the most time; between the killing corridor and the second cavern, there were some ridiculous numbers of them. It wasn’t kept on all the time, but we only ran out of them in the autumn of 234. Internally, that is; outside the fort, there’s still a fuck-ton of corpses scattered about.
A nice good cleanup of clothes was done as well, about once every two years. There’s a dump zone in the living quarters, made on top of a refuse stockpile. I occasionally enable it then run cleanowned; the discarded clothes rot on their own.
Year 231At the end of 231, FriendlyTreason was inhabited by 42 adult dwarves, 4 children, and 8 aging cats.
We’re nearly out of booze, and more won’t be made because some fool has toppled the still (and everything else) in the plant processing area.
We’re also out of empty barrels, but that’s easy to fix; too bad the replacements will be crap, our legendary carpenter is dead, along with just about every other skilled dwarf in this fort.
The nobles’ ranks got hit hard; I reinstated a new broker, a captain of the guard, and a militia commander. This was then used to boot the captain of the second squad, one of those unhappy dwarves I mentioned. He immediately gets locked in the clink, for breaking a production order; some of the mayor’s precious figurines, no doubt. Two other dwarves join him for various tantrum-related crimes.
Many a dwarf has perished without being memorialized; this many, in fact:
The cats have been allowed to roam the entire fort; they would be much better served in the food stockpiles, hunting down vermin. In the long term, I’ll have to get some new ones; all but one are over 10 years old, and cats don’t live much longer beyond that…
After the fuzzballs are pastured, I swear the FPS improves from 35-ish all the way to my local maximum of 50 FPS… there might have been some locked doors somewhere around the fort.
Year 232The year we haul corpses.
One of our cats has died of old age, thus winning Dwarf Fortress:
Another died in the same conditions, but nobody has seen it, so no congratulatory message was generated; we only find out when its body reanimates, and attacks another cat. The trainee squad deals with it. The attacked cat dies at the start of summer from its injuries.
And so we’re down to 5 cats.
Really need to buy some more fuzzballs; too bad neither caravan carried any this year. Our outpost liaison was asked for male cats only; the last thing FriendlyTreason needs is a catsplosion. He was also asked for yarn cloth; I expect next year’s caravan to bring 12 bins of woolen cloth, which should be enough for all moods that will ever happen in this fort.
Towards the end of the year, a dwarf is killed in the subsidiary tavern from the first cave. The fort’s two ‘jail cells’ have been built inside it so prisoners would have access to food and drink, but this design also allowed a chained dwarf to reach out and grab one of their fellows, then beat them to death. Ooops. The jail has been moved to the housing complex, into the most distant row of rooms; it’s not occupied anymore, what with the massive numbers of dead dwarves.
Year 233 The year unhappy dwarves fix themselves.
I’ve taken a break from shifting corpses to tidy up around the fort a bit. Pedestals were built everywhere where dwarves would regularly see them (mostly in the center of the staircase, but also in the corridor ) and the fort’s unused artifacts were placed upon them. Temples have been moved from the dingy 2x3 and 3x3 rooms where they used to lie into the temple complex started… I think 20-odd years ago? Anyway, I’m talking about his massive construction:
It now looks like this:
The central space was removed from the library’s purview, and was sectioned off into 8 temples for all the 8 gods worshiped by dwarven kind; including the ones that have no active worshippers in this fortress. The middle room that connects all rooms is now the ‘unspecified deity’ temple, while the other three are home to 3 recognized cults: the top one worships Kikrost, god of fortresses; the bottom one belongs to The Umber Coal, god of Minerals, and the left one, with all the slabs, is dedicated to Oce, the human god of death and suicide who nonetheless has 4 worshippers in FriendlyTreason.
The vast majority of dwarves (as in, over 2/3rds) worship Kikrost. Next are minerals, metals and death, while jewels, wealth, and family aren’t terribly well-liked. The dwarven god of death, Godum has 3 worshippers, while Oce has 4, organized in a little cult named The Ashen Sect.
233-05-21 The day a miracle happened:
I was sure this fort no longer receives any migrants! But no, here are 6 adult dwarves ready to join. At this point I seriously considered killing off the eight unhappy dwarves who seemed to not get any better; but I decided to be patient; lucky them.
Speaking of improvement, there’s one strange case here that defies everything I know about dwarven justice and how dwarves react to it:
Sibrek MerchantNames, Legendary+5 Hammerdwarf, Legendary+5 bone carver, and the mayor’s scapegoat whenever one of his idiotic mandates for figurines gets missed. He was imprisoned when my turn started, which naturally cratered his already flagging mood; he dropped all the way to miserable, and spent nearly two years in that state. He did tantrum a few times, beat a few dwarves, and toppled some furniture, but I deferred his punishment hoping he’ll improve. Nope.
Then after the migrants arrived, I decided I had no more patience. Sibrek was condemned for his crimes, imprisoned in a jail cell… where instead of breaking completely, he felt all very
contrite about it, and improved his mood all the way to fine. In jail. What.
(This was all unmade when another missed mandate sees poor Sibrek tossed in jail for half a year. His stress skyrockets, reaching all the way to 100,000, and he’s really not getting better).
Year 234A spring siege arrives, and is summarily ignored. It left behind two squads of goblins, in a faulted state; they should have left when the season changed, but instead they're just sitting in a single spot, completely immobile even if the gates into the fort are opened. I only notice their presence around late autumn, when one of their number can’t stand the boredom anymore and goes berserk (theoretically at least, because s/he doesn’t attack anyone). Three of its fellows soon follow, while three others go melancholic. Oh well.
Obsidian begins with a nearly save-breaking bug: the game crashes without any warning messages on the second day. It’s not the first time something like this happens in the history of FriendlyTreason; the game tries to spawn a were-chameleon on the map’s edge, and for some reason it fails miserably. In an attempt to minimize any interference, I disabled DFHack, and returned Dwarf Fortress to its natural state; it still crashed some 4-5 times before finally spawning one of these idiots. It’s not a DFHack issue, or some other interaction; Dwarf Fortress itself is to blame.
The were-chameleon, by the way, immediately engaged the bugged goblins, and finally jolted their AI into leaving the map; at least they killed the were-creature before shoving off.
Year 235Begins with the unluckiest goblin siege in history: immediately after their arrival, the western forest is engulfed in a massive cloud of eerie mist.
The invaders… fare poorly:
As they’re being converted, most of them leave the map; only around 20 remain, clustered in that one point on the former forest floor, which also entrapped goblins last year.
Then a corpse rises and attacks them, which causes the group to break. Only 8 goblin eerie mist zombies are now sitting around, immobile and definitely bugged. It’s likely that their AI would fix itself if somebody would attack them, just like the living goblins did, but I’m not all that keen to risk dwarves. Their fellow goblins can check that for me, when they inevitably attack me next.
And attack they do, in autumn. About 60 decently trained goblins, likely from the small civ, the Ghoul of Grips. They head directly for our eight unexpected guests. The goblin zombies are proven to be tougher than living goblins; even through the onslaught of sustained bow fire, the mist zombies annihilate the siege, at the cost of five of their own.
By the 7th, the siege is broken. Most of the living invaders have been killed, and the three surviving mist zombies have left. A good page and a half of corpses have proceeded to rise from the annihilated siege; if the dwarven caravan will still arrive this autumn, I don’t envy the poor outpost liaison.
The caravan and the liaison arrive one week later, on the 14th. Luckily, the liaison arrives on the eastern edge, while the zombies are located on the western edge. I can work with this. I station the hammer-dwarves in the central entry, and open both the hatch sealing it, and the hatch from the base of the Slaughter Tower. The plan is that zombies will head for the central entry, while the liaison will head for the Tower; those are the closest entries to each of them.
It… mostly works. Zombies aren’t fully cooperating; most do head through the cage corridor and into the open arms of 30-odd hammerers, but a few stragglers get into the tower too. The least-trained squad is sent to intercept them, and the liaison finally makes it inside. And that’s the end of that.
I should probably take a step back, and point out that this year’s spring the fort received its last two migrants. The population reached 75 dwarves, the maximum specified for FriendlyTreason since around the year 208-9 when I started playing it.
This upswell in population resulted in the creation of 5 squads: 2 hammer-lord squads, one marksdwarf squad composed of 5 skilled crossbow dwarves and 5 unskilled recruits, one axe squad composed entirely of neophytes (intended primarily for attacking other locations on the map; legendary axe dwarves are doing a lot better in raids than legendary hammerers for some reason), and lastly one hammerer trainees squad. Another squad could be formed, but there’s no armor for them.
All were sent training to their abilities; except the crossbow-dwarves, who need special accommodations. And until those accommodations are done, they can go bully our one trapped forgotten beast zombie:
The zombified forgotten beast is tough, but eventually the unavoidable happens: the beast dies.
This concludes the training exercise, with notable improvement in dwarven ranks:
Then the corridor was opened and cleaned, the traps were moved to their stockpile and all non-FB beasts were executed by the military, which incidentally resulted in the shortest ‘Others’ list this fort has seen since its first year:
It also resulted in the fort’s only available shells:
(Technically, more shells can be obtained by fishing in the single pond found on the map, in the mist-generating biome. I decided I’m not all that keen for shells after all).
And now, because I’m a glutton for punishment, I’ll try to clean the surface. What could possibly go wrong?
Year 236The year I (begin to) clean the surface.
Dwarves have been sent out to clean the surface in 2 batches: one in spring and one in winter. Before being sent out, most hauling jobs (minus food and refuse) should be suspended, the squads should be inactivated and the barracks freed, and soap should be forbidden, or the little prissies will go clean themselves after setting a single toe outside in the muck. Learned that the hard way.
Frankly, I barely put a dent in all the detritus scattered outside. Eventually, I give up because this stuff is boring.
There was a slight interruption in autumn, when about 70 decently-trained goblins attacked. At around the same time, the game tried and failed to spawn another were-chameleon, and proceed to crash a few times; thankfully, a lot less than the last time in 234. Goblins were mostly inside the corridor by the time Strodno the were-chameleon reached their rear-guard; being decently trained, they just turned around and speared the crazed beast.
Then they shuffled inside the slightly-redesigned killing corridor, where they were quietly annihilated by 30 hammer-dwarves, and their corpses dumped next door:
I’ve ditched the fortifications in favor of walls, and widened the corridors from one to two tiles. Given how crossbow-dwarves are, I’ve given up on them completely, and will use them only in raids and for covering haulers when it’s time to bring stuff from outside.
The recommended cleanup procedure is to temporarily deconstruct 2 tiles of wall near the door, across all 3 walls. That should allow a short path to haul corpses directly to the atom smasher. Do not, for the love of dwarves, let the poor sods walk all the way around via the main stairway, it’s like 300 tiles, that’s just nuts.
A strange mood picks that one stack of shells as its primary component; the entire stack has been consumed, so the next guy who wants shells will have to be walled off to die:
The dwarf made a forgotten beast shell figurine, referencing our killing of another forgotten beast in 211:
Year 237At some point while playing this fort, I had delusions of completely cleaning the surface. It’s very clear that is not going to happen. Other than that, I’ve pretty much reached all of my goals, and even a bit more on top. It’s time to wrap things up, and leave the fort to someone else.
There is now an archery range in the slaughter tower; four shooting lanes, and they’re even used for training. In the same image, you can see the corpse of that were-chameleon that struggled to spawn last summer; nobody hauled it away.
The slaughter corridor has another surprise for unpleasant visitors: the four cages with forgotten beasts (undead or alive) that have been trapped in the first cavern airlock.
Each of them is connected to its own dedicated lever; I’d seriously recommend you only ‘launch’ one at a time so they don’t start fighting among themselves, and that you keep them as an emergency measure, because… well… let’s just say some goblins in this world have backup of an otherworldly origin. I found that out while plotting out the demise of the smaller of the two goblin civilizations, the Ghoul of Grips. TL;DR, they acquired our civ’s former mountainhome, and for some reason 76 demons live there now.
And you didn’t hear this from me, but I did play this fort on my own when I thought the thread withered: they can and will bring these demonic fucks in invasions. That was a season of unashamed turtling…
I’ve trained a new weaponsmith and a new armorer; try not to kill these ones too.
The animal situation changed a bit: a breeding pair of cats was acquired from caravans, and left to frolic for a while. Then the adults were slaughtered, and the three resulting female kittens were placed in a cage. When you’ll need to restart the population, just pasture them somewhere and let them go ham. The same process was repeated with some hens and roosters. I doubt we’ll ever need more meat in the entire history of FriendlyTreason, but it’s nice to have the option.
The farms have been suspended; the booze plants stockpile is overflowing, and we have enough plants for around a decade of boozing (and 3,000 units of booze ready-made):
And as much booze as there is, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to buy from the humans when they come; without any kind of outdoor farming, the caravan is the only source of variety in alcohol for our poor dwarves.
Other than that, autumn sees another goblin siege, composed entirely of humans. Most of them glitch out and loiter on That One Spot, while about 30 make their way inside the slaughter corridor. As always, the hammerers are on point, with the crossbow-dwarves and the axe-trainees getting stationed just to keep the newly-risen corpses out of the fort proper.
Once the attackers in the corridor are dealt with, I take a chance and charge at the bugged troops; yes of course the hammerers win, without losses even:
Then it’s all over but the cleanup. With an entire turn dedicated to cleanup, it would be the height of irony if I left a corpse-clogged corridor, wouldn’t it?
The save, on 237-12-05; there are some 25 human zombies outside, if a siege spawns in spring they’ll have a proper welcome.
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Topic: The Fortress Of Friendlytreason | OVERSEERS WE NEED YOU (Read 39313 times)