Howdy folks, Welcome to Day One of my Dwarf Fortress After Action Report. You can think of this as a a textual Let's Play, with screenshots and stories of things that are happening to my various Dwarven Fortresses over the next month. This is my sort of swan song to Giant Bomb, so I hope it's as good for you as it is for me.
As a forewarning, Dwarf Fortress is a game you cannot win. Much like life, no matter how long it is, the life expectancy eventually reaches zero, and it probably won't even be your fault. I am by no means the best Dwarf Fortress player around, and I'm probably going to make a lot of mistakes. Here's hoping it's entertaining.
Probably.
So let us begin!
It is the year 1052, and the settlement of Abbeyvoices has been founded under the Kuletokol banner.
We arrive partially up the side of a mountain, on a plateau. Only 7 of us have survived the journey, along with two cats, two war dogs, and some equipment and rations. Morale is very high, and things get set under way immediately. We have our expedition leader, two miners, a carpenter/mechanic, a farmer, and a simple peasant. Things start as normal, some basic scouting, some mining, and things carry on as normal. As the third season in these mountains approaches, we are greeted by immigrants and a trade liaison from our Mountainhomes. After some discussion of future goods prices the caravan leaves, our work on establishing our new home continues.
An uneventful year passes, and this is where we find ourselves.
1. This is the outward entrance to our fort, and presuming that nothing weird/unforeseen happens (but it will, of course, because this is Dwarf Fortress), all friends and foe will be arriving and departing by this entrance. It is carved into a wall made of chert and some sort of mineral. The purple symbols you see there are corpses of lizards and goats and those sorts of things, that wandered too close to the Fortress, and our cats and dogs dispatched with haste.
2. This preposterously large hatch pattern is actually a refuse pile, which is just a colossal garbage dump. Corpses are what primarily go in here.
3. This long tunnel you see actually extends a good deal to the North, where we dug into the underside of a pond, hoping to drain it out and use the muddy soil for glorious farming. This didn't quite work out, and the project was scrapped after the pond turned out to be significantly smaller than anticipated. Fortunately, we came across large veins of gold and coal, and even some iron-bearing ore. With any luck, we will be filthy rich and fabulously armored by the end of our third year, if Goblins don't do awful, depraved things to our corpses first.
4. These are a set of stairs that descend into the inner workings of our Fort, and will be our last line of defense for our workers and civilians, should something come knocking.
5. This hollowed out area is where our Trade Depot will stand, once we actually have something worth trading.
1. This is our much more elaborate and functional series of underground farms. We dug into the side of a much larger underground lake, after placing a floodgate attached to a nearby lever. Using this, we were able to control the flooding provided by this absolutely astoundingly large body of water, and harness the forces of nature to grow crops. Underground. Like a real Dorf.
2. This is the bedroom and office of our esteemed Expedition Leader/Trade Broker. His name is Ushirr Eribstigaz, and we will undoubtedly one day become a colossal pain in the ass, making demands and trade mandates and overall being a huge prick. Three cheers for Dwarven Nobility, folks.
3. This large, cavernous room will one day soon be the heart and soul of this Fort. Inside is a wood furnace, for creating charcoal, a smelter, for using that charcoal and iron-bearing ore to make iron bars, and a metalsmith, for making fantastic iron armor to protect our military from the inevitable hordes seeking or wonderful golden trinkets. We unfortunately don't have any magma present for the foreseeable future, so we'll be using wood or coal in order to smelt our bars. In Dwarf Fortress, you seldom get what you want, but in return receive an abundance of the unexpected, both good and bad.
4. This is our workshop area. Here our trade dwarves use their masonry, woodworking, mechanics, crafting and booze brewing abilities to make our Fortress runs wonderfully. Let's hear it for the Dwarven Epsilon class, huh?
1. This is our Dwarven Dining Hall, where idle dwarves come to hang out and have parties. It is made entirely out of Peat with a small section of Chert, which means we will never be able to engrave it with fantastic images of our greatest successes and failures. We will, of course, have to move to a new one in a future in order to do so, but for the time being it's more than satisfactory.
2. These are our Dwarven Dormitories, with each dwarf receiving their own bedroom, an elaborate luxury in their eyes. Each bedroom is equipped with a hand-carved bed and a handcrafted stone door. A few of the doors are actually made of wood, before we came to our senses and realized were are Dwarves, not some kind of Elves.
And here is the reason to get excited about Fortress Abbeyvoices. Located 6 z-levels below (You can think of this as 6 stories) our home, is a river. It's actually more of a brook, but it will function for us just about the same.
1. This is a tunnel that leads from seven sets of staircases. It's only one unit wide because it will only even be used in order to set up our machinery, and from then on will be closed forever, to prevent future enemies crawling up the bowels of our fortress.
2. This is our mighty brook, the future source of all our water needs, and if I have any say in it, will also be our primarily line of defense. Who needs an army when you can lock your invaders in a tunnel and drown them?
3. This is a waterwheel, in theory this will provide power to a series of screw pumps (You can think of these as an Archimedes' Screw) which will bring water from this lower elevation up toward the modern era. Wish me luck, because I have never endeavored to create a pump stack before, and this could likely result in some serious flooding and/or Dwarven death, should something go awry.
And that ends our updates for today. If anyone has any questions or corrections or comments or suggestions about the future of our, the Giant Bomb community's, proud Fortress, I can't wait to hear them.
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