Dwarf Fortress AAR - Day "Two"
By Mmmslash 23 Comments
Hello, and Welcome to Day 2 of our After-Action Report of Dwarf Fortress, on the Giant Bomb settlement of Abbeyvoices,
Say hello to you burgeoning metal industry, Giant Bomb!
1. These are Stonecrafts, being made by our stonecrafter. He makes various trinkets, things from dolls, to scepters, to bracelets, and he makes them entirely out of stone. I decided to make them out of stone for a few reasons. For one, stone is abundant as all hell. Almost every time we dig one tile, we get a piece of stone. There is ostensibly unlimited stone for us, and none of our Dorfs have to travel outside of the fort in order to gather it.
This also means when (see: If, since we have a MAJOR problem I will talk about in a moment) the Elves come to trade, I can trade my crafts with them, without them forcing me to limit my woodcutting. So long as they never see anything wooden created by me, they'll leave me be. The issue with them making demands is sometimes they'll give me something ridiculous like "Only cut down 11 trees this year.", which is crazy talk. I need wood for beds and barrels and bins! If I accept, and break it, they'll come try to kill us in our sleep. If I decline, then they'll come try to kill us in our sleep anyway.
Fucking elves, man.
2. This is armor being prepared for our newly formed 5 man militia. What you see here are 5 iron Breastplates, and 5 Iron leggings. I need to create a full set of iron armor for each of them along with a sword and shield, and this requires a lot of iron, which requires a lot of smelting, which requires a lot of trees and coal. This is going to be slow production, and I don't think there is any real way I can expedite it. Hopefully my war dogs and future traps will be able to defend us properly for the next year. If not, our dwarves will be murdered by Goblins or Dragons or Kobolds or something.
Dwarf Fortress, it ain't pretty and it ain't easy.
3. These are our actual workshops needed to make our metal industry possible. In order of usage, as well as appearance, from left to right we have:
- A Wood Burner, this turns logs into charcoal, which is a prerequisite for:
- A Smelter. This serves a dual function. It can use one charcoal, along with one iron-bareing ore in order to make an iron bar. Alternatively, I can use one charcoal from the wood smelter along with one piece of actual coal I have mined in order to make three pieces of refined coal. Refined coal works exactly the same as charcoal, but it gives me an additional two fuel regents for every one tree. So, instead of using one entire tree every time I need an iron bar, I get three for every tree. This is important, since it can take years for trees to grow back, and they're a finite supply.
- A metalsmith's forge. This is where my armorer and weaponsmith Dwarves come to turn those iron bars into glorious proof of our superior metalsmithing abilities. The Elves have their nature, Humans have their cities, but the Dwarves are second to none in the art of making weaponry out of metal. Some day, they are going to make some invaders very, very unhappy.
Hopefully.
4. This is just the stockpile for anything smelted, and blocks. So all of my charcoal, refined coal, iron bars, and blocks of stone go here. Blocks of stone will be used in the future to make the Pump Stack a mentioned before, which is looking to be significantly more complex than I anticipate. I'm going to have to construct an actual tower, building the walls, floors, channels, and access stairs myself, probably out of stone. This is dangerous since invaders will be able to break these things, and turn off all water access to my Fort during a siege. I may have to try to get creative, we'll see. Perhaps I will dig a trench around the entire thing, on ever floor. That should protect it from everything that isn't a Goblin riding a giant flying bat of death.
The key bit of information here are the words you see at the bottom. "Dumed Sebirvabok has begun a mysterious construction!".
Basically, what has happened here is my armorer / weaponsmith was sitting in his bedroom, enjoying the decadence that Dorfs in the settlement of Abbeyvoices enjoy, when suddenly he had an idea. He jumped up, and ran around the fort, gathering iron and thread and all kinds of things. I was excited, it's rare that I actually have the materials on hand, and I only brought the thread on a whim on my embark, so this was all very lucky. And here is what we got:
Huh. Wow. So, my armorer just made the nicest iron shoe in the entire world. Across the entire realm, between Dwarves, Elves, Humans, Goblins, everyone and everywhere, there is no iron shoe that can compete.
That is about as disappointing as things can get. Not only is it completely useless, it's only one shoe. It's not as if he made a set I could give one of our nobles or something, he just made a single, useless shoe.
The bigger issue is I cannot trade this shoe, despite it being worth a small fortune. Dumed here would have a nervous breakdown, and probably break something / kill or hurt someone / kill or hurt himself, if I did. So.. there's that.
But, that is the least of our worries, because THIS had me absolutely stumped:
What you see here is the front door of our Fort, with an overlay showing if we have trade access. I built the tunnel / Front door / Trade Depot the same as I always do, so this is disconcerting, I have absolutely no idea why this is happening. The best I can do is widen this tunnel and see if it helps. If not, I can also try deconstructing the Trade Depot and moving it outside, which I am loathe to do. That means I have to leave any future caravans to fend for themselves out there, and any deaths near our Fortress are ALWAYS pinned on us.
So, say some Humans come to trade with us, and a Dragon shows up. I lock down my Fort to protect my Dwarves, which leaves the Human caravan locked outside. They are incinerated almost immediately.
Then, two seasons later, our Dorfs wake up to the entire Imperial Legion or whatever banner Humans rally under, outside our front door, tell us they are going to murder every last Dorf for the death of their friends and family.
Dragons, man. Dragons.
And that concludes our Dwarf Fortress AAR for today!